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Agent Orange is a weapon of war. In Vietnam it was used to destroy the environment, in order to help the aggressors better destroy the people. (Environmental domination is always intended to render social domination more effective.)
Now, in the guise of the USDA, the government and corporations are literally waging war on the American people, using the same iconic weapon.
The USDA is in the process of approving a GM corn variety resistant to Dow Chemical’s 2, 4-D herbicide, a poison derived from Agent Orange. This product is in response to the collapse of Monsanto’s Roundup as an effective herbicide. There are now dozens of superweeds which are resistant to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup.
This is proof of the Big Lie of GMOs. In the case of herbicide-resistant varieties, the promise was that use of Roundup Ready crops would simplify the application of herbicides and result in less overall use of them. This should have seemed suspicious from the start, since the business model of Monsanto and others was to sell as much herbicide as possible.
Regardless, this lie has been completely exposed. Everywhere the use of RR crops has led to increased Roundup use, as weeds have become more and more resistant to it. In recent years farmers have had to resort to other herbicides to control these superweeds. So, predictably, the result of using GMOs has been to place farmers in an even worse weed position than when they started, while they’ve added their self-enslavement to proprietary GMO seeds.
This is also proof of the malevolence of the government. If the government really believed what it’s said about GMOs, then the collapse of the RR model should have caused it to jettison GMO advocacy completely, at least where it comes to herbicide resistance. The failure of GMO-as-weed-control is empirically proven.
Instead they’re doubling down, escalating the assault. Since Roundup no longer works, it’s time to escalate to Agent Orange, and Vietnam-level attacks on the environment. We already know this won’t work, but will fail the same way Roundup did. This proves that the USDA doesn’t care about weed control (any more than it or the FDA care about food safety), but cares only about aggrandizing the GMO rackets.
So here, as everywhere else, we see that this government is nothing but a thug and bagman for big corporations.
(In this case for the immoral and unconstitutional “intellectual property” regime. We must always be conscious that IP itself is an assault on freedom and innovation, while patents on plants are particularly irrational and immoral.)
This sequence of events places the issue beyond any doubt at all – GMOs are a fraud and a weapon of control. They comprise war being waged upon the environment, farmers, and the people. It’s no longer possible to support GMOs as anything but an enemy of humanity.
But we see the seeds of the system’s destruction. As demonstrated by the failure of glyphosate, nature is fighting back ever more aggressively. Nowhere is it more true that for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. By now the sum of the 1%’s evil and destructive actions has become monumental, while the sum of potential reaction trembles on the verge of infinity. Soon it shall become fully kinetic.
This and every other corporate/government escalation is really just building the Tower of Babel ever higher. Soon it shall fall, once and for all.
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Volatility 
I think that you have pinpointed the problem with the word “escalation”.
“Escalation” is indeed related to the idea of a growing tower. (And Babel was a hubristic challenge to the supremacy of God. I don’t think it fell, though… that would be too convenient, and too predictable. No, the tower of Babel was abandoned because men could no longer communicate together (i.e…. FEDERATE) enough to pursue construction. They broke out into bloody quarrels, exit the tower of Babble…)
The escalation problem is behind our addict economy. Addiction is promoted everywhere as a modus operandi, but criminalized when it is deemed… excessive. Doctors push legalized amphetamines in their practices, and poor blacks get locked up for the same ? practice.
But if we need to be watchful of the actions of our corporations, and our government(s) in what has basically been a planned economy for a long time now, we also need to take a long, hard, look inside to see how we, as individuals contribute to the escalation problem, and have power to do something about it.
Just slowing down individually would help against escalation… GLOBALLY.
Comment by Debra — February 8, 2012 @ 3:17 pm
Addiction is promoted everywhere as a modus operandi, but criminalized when it is deemed… excessive. Doctors push legalized amphetamines in their practices, and poor blacks get locked up for the same ? practice.
Yes, addiction to corporate and government structures and products is generally encouraged. But where it comes to dangerous (to system power) groups who are to be kept down, certain kinds of behavior are arbitrarily criminalized. The Drug War was never about public health or social stability (on the contrary it undermines both), but always about domination and corporate welfare.
Comment by Russ — February 9, 2012 @ 3:03 am
Hey Russ! Good post. Just want to point out one thing about 2,4-D, which I briefly did some work on a long time ago. 2,4-D and Agent Orange aren’t synonymous, AO actually was a mixture of 2,4-D as well as 2,4,5-T, which is another auxin analogue. The toxicity of AO to humans was largely a result of dioxin contaminants which, IIRC, arose in Dow’s synthesis after they ignored their chemical engineers and went with a low-temperature synthesis method because it was cheaper. They knew the dioxins were there, they simply didn’t care. The 2,4-D that ends up being applied to American fields is likely to be clean in the short run but if their margins get squeezed I’m willing to bet we see some nasty batches coming out, which is just another reason to oppose this sort of thing.
Comment by paper mac — February 8, 2012 @ 10:42 pm
Thanks PM. I know they’re not identical, which is why I wrote “derived from”. (Perhaps “constituent of” would be even more accurate.)
I hope you’re right that this won’t immediately be an unusually vicious environmental poison in its own right. I wasn’t even thinking of that, but simply the doubling down on herbicide-slathered GMO monoculture itself as a thoroughgoing environmental and social assault, and how a war-grade defoliant seems perfectly apropos for this kind of agriculture. It’s a fitting successor to enclosure and Stalinism as an elites’ War on the Countryside (although by now they’ve temporarily succeeded in driving almost all the people off the land).
Comment by Russ — February 9, 2012 @ 3:13 am
totally off topic
an attempted comment at NC that appears to be lost in moderation:
Let’s press the rewind button:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/05/new-york-ag-schneiderman-investigating-goldman-morgan-stanley-bank-of-america-mortgage-operations.html
Yves said:
Note that this announcement effectively blows up the 50 state attorney general settlement talks.
I said:
Schneiderman is going to show the rest of the AGs how to play ball with the banksters. Just watch. He’s doing the opposite of blowing up the settlement talks: he’s going to make them a reality. He’s going to show how achieving the same results as what the broader set of talks are suggesting will be widely accepted by the voters of the state. The states need money, and the banksters are happy to pay them “fines” because they know they’ll get those fines back with a lot of interest.
Yves reassured us, saying:
Schneiderman is AG basically over the Democratic Party’s dead body. Cuomo and the NY Dem machine didn’t and haven’t supported him. And remember, there is more to financial services than big banks. Investors are mad as hell about what has happened (both the bailouts and continued abuses) and some are capable of writing large checks
I replied:
Party affiliation is irrelevant. Whether Schneiderman and Cuomo are friends is irrelevant. You don’t need to be associated with or like someobody to learn by watching how they succeed or fail.
No bankster is going to go to jail. No crimes will be found. Agreements will be struck that provide immunity to the banksters and money in the form of fines to New York State, and that money will be taken out of bank reserves created courtesy of the initial bailout, QE1 and QE2. Fines mean nothing when you’re paying with other people’s money.
And don’t forget to read what attempter and DownSouth wrote. While they no longer comment here, they have something to say.
While I didn’t get the details right, I was right in the macro sense. Schneiderman was not the “Great White Hope” that others (especially Yves) made him out to be.
So-called “progressivism” is a dead letter. You cannot expect to incrementally improve a fundamentally corrupt system for which progressives are as much to blame as so-called conservatives.
Societal evolution is no longer available as an option. Sorry.
Comment by Tao Jonesing — February 9, 2012 @ 1:41 am
So you’re still fighting the good fight at NC? I remember scoffing at Schneiderman as simply the next flavor of the month once the Warren cult wears out. (This was somewhat lost on the audience, many of whom were still fully immersed in that prior cult. They probably still are.)
It occurred to me just yesterday that the whole project of documenting the Land Scandal, while no doubt pulitzer-worthy journalism, is basically irrelevant in a civil war. No one’s going to be convinced to fight by learning about the intricacies of incomplete note transfers. That’s the same old Enlightenment myth. What’s needed is a far more elemental condemnation of the finance sector and REO itself, on a basic philosophical and moral level.
You cannot expect to incrementally improve a fundamentally corrupt system for which progressives are as much to blame as so-called conservatives.
I’ve written several times about how “progressives” are in fact another kind of conservative by now. Not just in the policies they end up supporting, but in their fundamentally fearful mentality. So-called “progressives” demonstrate that they in fact have no confidence in the future, and that their basic emotion is fear, in the way all their advocacy involves trying to cling to what little they have, rather than looking at all that can be won and running risks to win it. But that’s a truly conservative mentality. For example, given the theoretical correlation of forces in 2009 (that is, for the sake of argument pretending the Democratic Party really wanted to help the people), anyone with the slightest bit of confidence would have demanded Single Payer and refused to accept anything less. The fact that “progressives” accepted the vastly diminished “public option” in principle, and then let that as well be stripped from them in practice, proves their indelible cowardice. Their standard posture is to cringe.
Comment by Russ — February 9, 2012 @ 3:24 am
So… it looks like the fearful people are waiting for a… shepherd ? a Messiah to arrive on the scene ?
Perhaps… “the people” are always fearful… except when they’re federated into a lynching mob ? (France has a very long history of this. It is not pretty.)
That would be truly tragic..
Personally, I tend to stay away from crowds…
On the fear note, most of us have been raised in such a way that this fear will keep us… IN LINE.
I seem to remember, though (although I could be wrong on this one…) that even Voltaire called for mama on his deathbed.
“What a wonder is man.”
Comment by Debra — February 9, 2012 @ 3:38 am
I stopped trying at NC months ago. I broke down and commented once earlier this week. The attempted comment was my second try this week (the first got through). It is still in limbo . .
Comment by Tao Jonesing — February 9, 2012 @ 9:48 am
Totally irrelevant, but somehow striking to me: Debra’s comment on Voltaire’s supposed deathbed call to his mother is just bizarre, and strangely lacks empathy. Scary.
Comment by publius — February 9, 2012 @ 10:33 am
@publius,
Debra’s comments typically demonstrate a complete lack of empathy. This is nothing new.
I’ve never met a woman who lacks empathy, especially a woman who claims to have children. Lack of empathy is a predominantly male affliction. That’s why I’ve questioned the gender we assume of Debra. (What gender can you assign a Tao? A Debra aims you at female. But Tao’s and Debra’s arguments are both distinctly male, in my opinion.)
But that doesn’t matter. Debra often has something interesting to say. Just don’t take what Debra says at face value. Debra seeks to disturb the waters,not smooth them over. The value that Debra brings to the conversation is the magnitude and direction of the perturbance Debra seeks to create.
Comment by Tao Jonesing — February 10, 2012 @ 1:30 am
Unfortunately there’s plenty of women who lack empathy. We see them all over the place in government and corporate structures, and I’ve known one or two personally.
Comment by Russ — February 10, 2012 @ 6:08 am
Very much agree on the necessity of rehabilitating general philosophical, moral aspects of these larger questions, rather than sticking our noses to the page while working on the technical technicalities in order to avoid seeing the BIGGER PICTURE.
Comment by Debra — February 9, 2012 @ 3:40 am
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