Will the US Government Attempt to Extradite Julian Assange?

What’s the most libertarian-oriented network that broadcasts in the United States today? The answer is Russia Today. But the Russian regime is hardly any exemplar of libertarianism. Quite the opposite, actually. Indeed, the brute characteristics of the Russian regime has led some conservative commentators to denounce RT as an insidious propaganda tool against the US. But the propaganda directed against the US is actually true.

No doubt, if we had MSNBC-Russia or Fox-Russia, specifically broadcasting to a Russian audience, those network subsidiaries would be very libertarian-oriented. They would be continuously informing the Russian public about the hypocrisy and crimes of the Russian regime. Russian nationalists and patriots would accuse those networks as being agents of seditious propaganda. But the propaganda would be true, nonetheless.

But, of course, we know that MSNBC and Fox are slavish legitimizers of their own regimes. Likewise, we know RT is not in the business of de-legitimizing Putin.

So what we have is an example of hacking plutocracy. And we know it is hackable because the plutocrats are busy trying to hack it themselves. This political “hackability” of plutocracy is really the strategic basis of the whole document-sourced journalism concept. I discussed this dynamic in a whole series posts back in 2010. The intent of Julian Assange(who, of course, I don’t know personally, so I can only divine intent from his writings, statements, and actions) was to use document-source journalism as a means to put governments in a type of liberal political competition(Assange most definitely is a liberal in the philosophic sense). But any “liberal outcome” would be a consequence of a political dynamic and not a legal one. As I wrote in my old post, The Revolutionary as Entrepreneur :

The political hack is not so much cherry-picking laws from jurisdictions to create some sort of international tapestry of legal protection outside the jurisdiction of any one State, but rather more of a hack of playing competing legal jurisdictions off one another to protect itself from ex post legal interpretations or legal changes for prosecution by any one jurisdiction. This makes it more of a political hack than a legal hack.

Certainly, Assanges’s current appeal to Ecuador for political asylum is an example of this. Ecuador itself is hardly a liberal(legally speaking) paradigm.

But we do have to express some disappointment that “document-sourced journalism” has seemingly been stalled. Our friends at CNN are only glad to give us a synopsis why: See yourself as the next Assange? Good luck. I would offer up my own summary that in part dovetails with the CNN one.

(i) the US and The Western Global Financial System will cut off any legal avenue for the necessary financial means to support any viable document-sourced journalism operation

(ii) As a result of (i), the contextual expertise needed to sift through the (often massive) leaked documents largely can only be found with vertically integrated corporate structures subject to same problem of (i). That is, individual agents can execute a political hack sans a legal one, but vertically integrated global corporations cannot. Hence, our global corporate media agents now are dropping their planned entrance into this space.

(iii) individual agents can perhaps hack a political defense against “political charges” but the political hack may very dissipate if the charges are “sex crimes.” This, by the way, is hardly paranoia or conspiracy theory. George Orwell, who I consider the greatest political commentator of the 20th century, laid it out very clearly that accusation of sexual pathology was Standard Operating Procedure by the regime against “enemies of the State.”

The summary of the summary is this: politics may be hackable but capital is not. Politics is plutocratic but capital has become largely oligarchical. Simply, if someone like Assange cannot be charged legally with a “crime against the State,” but Wkileaks nonetheless can be cut off from the Global financial banking system, then this is exhibit A of a definition of oligarchy of capital. Not only is Capitalism been severed as a necessary condition for political freedom, but Assange and Wikileaks threaten to demonstrate that Capitalism is converging to a sufficient condition for a denial of political freedom. You doubt this? Well, simply read this recent editorial by the Washington Post that advocates a proper course of action if Ecuador grants Assange political asylum: revoke Ecuador’s “free trade” status.

Simply, if the oligarchy of capital is sufficient to stall out document-sourced journalism, then we shouldn’t expect an extradition of Assange by the US Government. Frankly, that would be stupid because it would be exactly that kind of outrageous politically motivated action that could spur DSJ back into major play. If the US was going to charge Assange with a “legal crime,” they could have already done so and extradited him directly from the UK.

For those who continue to put capitalism at the root of political legitimization, the case of Assange and Wikileaks should serve as a cautionary counter-factual of why that position may need to be re-evaluated.

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As a side note, I would like to extend my congratulations to Michael Moynihan for his current gig with the Washington Post. A “libertarian” writer I would most associate with de-legitimizing ” western dissidents,” and a media organization that perhaps best represents the “capitalist” version of the Kremlin is a very predictable thing to behold. Onward “golden age…”