Money, Reprise

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One of the basic lies is that there’s only a “fixed” amount of money available at any given time, and that the measure of this amount is based on how much of a particular metal you have. This metal has usually been gold. According to system lies, if more paper money is issued than is justified by the amount of gold the system holds, the result is inevitably destructive inflation.

 

The lies here are that money is a real thing in itself, that this real thing is naturally based on gold, and that inflation as such is a bad thing. The goldbuggers often add an element of moralizing, that money not based on gold would be immoral and reckless, and that inflation is the consequence of a moral failure.

 

(I’ll add that the banks always overstate the amount of gold which is actually available. If at any time, including today, everyone who has invested in gold were to demand physical redemption, they’d immediately discover that they’d been sold fraudulent paper backed by nothing. So even given the framework of the gold standard, the banksters were precisely the immoral inflationists they accused others of being, along with committing flat out fraud.)

 

The truth is that money is nothing in itself, but in a normal economy would merely reflect the real production of that economy. As one Populist put it, money is just the yardstick measuring the yarn. But the goldbug ideology claims that the yardstick itself is worth as much as the yarn it measures.

 

Money’s only constructive role would be to exist in sufficient form to represent the real economy’s production, and to represent its productive capacity. This latter means that there should always be somewhat more money in circulation than the value of what the real economy is producing at the moment, since this extra money is what greases the skids of new productive investment and innovation. (I’ll add that it also means that to have legitimacy, money must always be circulating. The “velocity of money”, in the jargon, must be high. Money’s legitimate functions are as a medium of exchange and, as Graeber emphasizes, a unit of account. But to hoard money, to use it as a “store of value”, is always illegitimate. Taking money out of active circulation renders it pointless and therefore malevolent, since it’s no longer reflecting real productivity.)

 

It follows from this that if you’re going to have a central government and centralized money, the government should directly issue money in a sufficient amount to lubricate the entire productive capacity of the economy. This is called greenbackerism, named after the “greenbacks” the Lincoln administration issued to finance the Civil War (which of course couldn’t be financed with the existing gold-constrained system). This would bring only mild, constructive inflation. This mild inflation is economically healthy and good for borrowers. Real production, wages, and quality of life would increase in tandem. In fact, it’s increasing productivity which ought to dictate the pace and amount of money issuance. But the goldbug straitjacket, dedicated as it is to the artificial scarcity of money and to a generally deflationary pressure (which favors creditors over debtors), constantly puts an artificial ceiling on productivity, resulting in frequent economic crises and depressions.

 

Goldbuggery is utterly incapable of dealing with the complexities and productive surge of a modern fossil fuel economy. To maintain bankster control of the money but render this control more flexible, the banks dictated the establishment of the Fed in 1913. The Fed is nominally a hybrid government-bank institution, but is 100% under the control of Wall Street. In this way Wall Street continues to issue the money, which the government borrows.

 

(Meanwhile the silver scam has twice been the system’s response, under duress, to an uncomfortable debate and confrontation between gold and greenbacks. Most famously, in 1896 the People’s Party, having heroically forced the greenbacker idea into the public discussion, committed ignoble suicide by selling out to silver and embracing the Democratic Party instead of fighting for itself and the Populist movement which extruded it in the first place. Sound familiar? In 1896, at the LATEST, history proved that the Democratic Party was a tar pit for all human aspiration. Yet to this day people rush in droves to entomb themselves in this pit.)

 

I can’t stress enough that the money belongs to the people. We create 100% of the real productivity and wealth, of which money is a reflection. It’s OUR MONEY. If there’s to be a central government at all, then directly issuing the money is indisputably one of the core functions of this government. The Constitution itself mandates this.

 

But under all systems of bank money, including the system centered on the Fed, the government abdicates this core role, the banks illicitly usurp it, and we the people now have to pay extortion rates to rent OUR MONEY back from the banks who stole it.

 

One of the infinite vilenesses of the liberals is how we the people had a golden opportunity (pardon the pun, and note the profound corruption of the vernacular itself) in 2009 to smash this system once and for all and take back our money. But instead the liberals presided over the aggressive bailout of Wall Street, using trillions in taxpayer money to bail out the robbers who intentionally crashed the economy. This example was at least as awesomely self-destructive as 1896, and far more malevolent. Will America learn a lesson this time?

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GMO Labeling Vis the True Food Sovereignty, GMO Abolition Movement

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Commenter Lidia posted an excellent report on her experience at an organizational meeting for Vermont Right to Know.

 

Here’s my somewhat negative review of the campaign, so far as I’ve learned about it from her and elsewhere. I’ll let this criticism of the Vermont effort stand in for my growing doubts about the whole “labeling” premise, which I see as, in general, a typical collaborationist “market solution” which by its nature cannot be any real solution; and in particular as part of the GMO ”co-existence” scam. This is the scam whose basic premise is that organic agriculture and humanity can live in the same world with GMOs and the corporations who purvey them.

 

But we know this is false. GMOs are totalitarian, politically and environmentally. Totalitarian means there is literally no limit to one’s aspired domination, and that one in fact has the potential power to aspire to total domination. We know that Monsanto, the rest of the GMO cartel, and their flunkey governments recognize no limits to agricultural enclosure and domination. We know that’s the one and only reason GMOs exist in the first place. (They have no redeeming qualities, don’t work even at the two things they’re “supposed” to do, be herbicide tolerant and produce their own insecticide, have no natural market among farmers or eaters, and are 100% dependent on corporate welfare, government lies and thuggery, and trapping farmers on an indenture treadmill. Their one and only purpose, as Monsanto has been quite frank in stating, is total domination of the world food supply.)

 

We also know that GMOs cannot be prevented from contaminating and polluting every possible part of the ecology. Organic canola is basically impossible in Canada. Same for sugar beets in Oregon. It’s less and less possible to find non-polluted corn and soy shipments. This isn’t even counting the cartel’s intentional planting so as to contaminate the entire agriculture in Brazil, India, and perhaps with alfalfa in the US. Here too, there can be no co-existence. 

 

Are the organizers of labeling campaigns sincere about Food Sovereignty and abolishing GMOs? The fact that the Vermont organizers are already flouting the boycott of the corporations who gave money to defeat Right to Know doesn’t bode well. Nor is their evident place as part of the industrial organic complex. I don’t doubt that they’ve internalized much of the system mindset. Thus they’ve unilaterally dumbed the bill down to comply with central government directives, voluntarily racing to the bottom. (In California they did the same thing, and then added stupidity to timidity by saying stuff about THEIR OWN BILL like “loopholes are good”! I’d almost have wanted to vote No just out of contempt for such a lame campaign.)

 

It’s Politics 101 that you demand far more than you really want to achieve, and that where you’re trying to get Better Elitism (begging the elites for labeling is certainly an elitist strategy; indeed, here it’s not even a ballot initiative, but trying to get a law passed), you supplement it with as much grassroots direct action as possible. Therefore anyone sincere and competent would encourage direct labeling in the supermarkets, as one example of the kind of things citizens of a real democracy can and will do, as their right and responsibility.

 

The strategic principles listed at the event contain one good point – they acknowledge that the central government won’t do anything. (I hope they acknowledge that anything the central government does would be a scam.) So they’re capable of digesting the evidence that far. Maybe it’s possible for them to do so about state governments as well.

 

There’s also several bad points:

 

“Common language among all the state bills will offer “as level a playing field as possible” for food companies to comply”

 

As I said, voluntary racing to the bottom. And why would the people want to “offer a level playing field” to criminal organizations that never offered it to us? That have done all they can to deprive us of any playing field at all, let alone a “level one”. And why should we want to “play” this game at all, and with such cheaters?

 

“They “didn’t want retailers to have to be responsible” under the law (instead, producers)”

 

Why not? Is there a tactical rationale for this, or is it some stupid moral misguidance? Retailers had their chance to strangle GMOs in the cradle and chose instead to join the conspiracy against humanity. They’re enemies, not bystanders. As for what’s good tactics, I haven’t thought it through completely, but my first thought is that targeting the weak link, the most publicly exposed and vulnerable link, is often a good tactic. Supermarket chains are far more vulnerable than Monsanto. (Not to mention all their other bad effects.) It’s worked well in keeping most GMOs out of Europe. Perhaps the winningest union going, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (one of the few that’s been winning at all), has based its strategy on targeting one retailer after another.

 

Most of all, it’s up to we the people to take matters into our own hands, not “the states”. But that truth may be frightening for some of these cadres, who by training and temperament may identify more with Monsanto than with small farmers, indigenous peoples, and true democracy activists (that is, active participatory citizens).

 

But here’s the core question to ask any advocate of system reformism, i.e. Better Elitism – When this fails, THEN what do you want to do? If the answer is vague, or boils down to, “keep doing what’s already failed, ad infinitum and ad nauseum”, we know we’re dealing with con artists whose only real agenda is to keep dissent firmly within system-endorsed bounds.

 

The right question would be, “If this doesn’t work, will you then convene a conference dedicated to enshrining abolition as the only goal, and working on strategy only toward this goal?”

 

We already have the fact that this was already tried in Vermont and already failed, for one reason and one reason only, because the state government doesn’t want to do it. So why would that same government change its mind? The same has been true in every other state where the legislative route has been tried. How much evidence will be needed? The fact is, where the propagators of the “co-existence” scam (of which labeling is a part) aren’t conscious liars (I think the likes of Whole Foods Market, Hirshfield, etc. certainly are), they’re still acting according to indelible system-compliant limitations. They’ve internalized the rules of the criminal system, and by now voluntarily collaborate with it. The real goal is to try to prevent a real anti-GMO and anti-corporate food movement from cohering and gathering force.

 

What could cause me to change my mind about this tactic and goal? It’s tough, because I argue that these campaigns have unilaterally pre-failed by making their proposed legislation so lame. I think labels for GMO-fed meat and dairy are also necessary. (I’m well aware that the central government claims to have “pre-emptive” power over this. So what? To unilaterally cave in on account of such a bogus and tyrannical presumption is hardly in the Spirit of ’76. Why not go ahead and challenge these usurpers? We can at least agree upon and publicize the fact of this usurpation and this illegitimacy. Would that cost the state money from the central government? If so, that should be seen as a feature and not a bug. We’re never going to take back our political and economic sovereignty while we remain a dependent cog of the central money system. Everything is interrelated, and we must be organic and holistic about our philosophy and activism. To think anti-GMO activism can be a stand-alone campaign which doesn’t fundamentally challenge the entire structure is, ironically, a perfect example of the NPK mentality that’s destroying our agriculture, and which was the ideological fount of GMOs in the first place.

 

On that note, I’ve heard of an ongoing secession movement in Vermont. I don’t know its specific ideology, but perhaps there’s a ready-made ally, once people get serious about Food Sovereignty.)

 

Leaving aside the scope of the labeling, I’d have to see the thing passed and fully enforced. More importantly, I’d have to see the campaign organize itself as a permanent grassroots organization dedicated to enforcement of this measure, and to expanding the action as far as it can go, toward full abolition. This is a non-negotiable baseline for any democracy activism worthy of the name. Within-the-system reforms like getting a law passed are always to be seen as supplementary to directly democratic movement-building and direct action.

 

But more likely, the elite organizers of the campaign wouldn’t see grassroots action as even a supplement to the “legalistic” action. On the contrary, we’d have proof that the campaign had been a con job if, once the bill was passed, the Leaders were to turn to whatever grass roots had sprung up and say, “We won! Now you can disband and go home. We, Your Betters, will now confer with our fellow elites in government and at the corporations. We’ll try to keep you posted.”

 

I’d say that if we the people want to support a labeling campaign, we must do so as a parallel grassroots organization, built from day one to be a permanent, ever-growing movement. Under no circumstances should we let ourselves be “led” by elites, however well-meaning they may seem. We must lead ourselves.

 

I think the answer is that existing groups won’t be part of the true wellspring which shall one day surge to a purifying Flood.
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The Temporary Resumption of Petty Middle Class Faith

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1. Despite a brief surge of proto-revolutionary feeling in 2009-10, the “early adopters” have gone back to their idiocy. In spite of all they saw and all they supposedly learned, in the end they followed Bernanke, Geithner, and Obomney and learned to love and believe in the Bailout.

 

2. Meanwhile, in a spectacular example of cognitive dissonance and pseudo-religious fundamentalism, liberals have responded to the overwhelming evidence record by doubling down on their faith in the Obama cult. “I believe because it’s absurd.” They’ve also had second thoughts about their own dependency on organized crime. They still have their crumb for the moment. They have a cowardly, cringing mindset. Do they really want to gamble that crumb right now?

 

3. After a brief period of progress, truth-tellers like me are back in the position Hoffer described – “they won’t listen to him”.

 

4. Instead, as we see all over the blogosphere, presented with a clear structural critic and a troll, your aspiring do-gooder ignores the critic and tries to reason with the troll. Of course, this is ingrained in the do-gooder’s temperament. But for a little while there the do-gooders were starting to overcome that temperament. Now they’ve gratefully gone back to it. This is reinforced by how they’ve reaffirmed their psychological comfort in living off the fruits of crime.

 

5. This is part of why there’s no good Food Freedom discussions online. (Besides, the food movement never reached the consciousness of the anti-bank movement. Just like political blogs almost all suck, so food blogs almost all suck, while the only real action was at the econoblogs.)

 

6. For now it seems to me it’ll have more inflammatory than probative value to participate on sites like that. I’ll try to just read the posts but ignore the “discussions”. If I find this impossible, then I’ll drop those sites completely. I’ll continue looking for discussions, but be ready to abandon them as soon as I see how lame they are. For the time being a critic can’t, with any good return on investment, guide a basically conformist conversation onto a critical path.

 

7. So we have to head back to Geneva for now. The 1905 blossom has withered. It’s time to start over from the beginning and build, first a nucleus and then a movement, from scratch. My own blog is senescent. A blog’s not a great forum anyway. Just use the blog to advertise the forum. Start a real discussion, and moderate it just as relentlessly as these liberal petty bourgeois idiots do. (They’re especially idiots because, on account of their own SQ brainwashing, they don’t even realize their own aggressive ideology, nor how their selection of discussion emphasis comprises a vicious pro-system bias.)

 

8. It seems that philosophically it’s time for slow fermentation. We need to build the full basis for somnambulistic counterattack. We can start in the sweet spot, the good wedges of Community Food, anti-GMO and anti-corporatism, without primarily insisting on Food Sovereignty. (It’ll be better to do this where we can choose our own battlefield. It’s harder to stick with it at places where the liberal and petty bourgeois idiocy is jabbering right there in front of us.)

 

9. Part of this sweet spot is relentless counterattack on the government food police and how they’re preventing America’s economic resurgence. (But this too is for a core audience? In the period of system retrenchment, won’t most people including system NGO types disregard the real need for Food Relocalization? Their actions show that they do.) But every attack on the government has to include at least some anti-corporate element, and some teaching that government and corporation are the same thing, the same enemy.

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“Libertarians” Are For Big Government

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They want government to continue to artificially generate “corporations”, as extensions of itself, and then function exclusively as bagman and thug for these corporations. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a corporation in the wild, nor have any been found in the fossil record. They don’t exist, other than as typical fabrications of big government. They’re part of government.

 

The only meaningful definition of “government”: Any concentrated power hierarchy which imposes rule. Especially one alien to the geographical region. What difference could it possibly make whether the nominal form of this hierarchy is “public” or “private”? Public vs. private is a scam which has no meaning in human relations, but is claimed to exist only where concentrated power assaults human beings. This concentrated power and its assault are the only things which actually exist. “Public” and “private” are the same in essence and have the same origin – might makes right. By now the corporate state is one monolith, and it’s idiotic to try to disentangle the government from its corporatist intent and capture, or the corporations from the government which created them and which is the only support of their ability to exist (no big corporation could subsist for a day without massive corporate welfare and government thuggery). If you’re against tyranny, against organized crime, you want to dissolve the monolith itself. If you support these, you continue to pretend it’s not a monolith.

 

What’s a natural market (to replace the terminally distorted and Orwell-ized term “free market”)? My neighbor and I deal mano a mano, as human beings. If he were to proclaim, “I’m a corporation!”, I’d wonder if he’d been out in the sun too long. I sure wouldn’t know what he was talking about, other than that he wanted to swindle or enslave me.

 

Vote for humanity! Abolish the corporations! This starts by absolutely rejecting their legitimacy and right to exist, let alone any other so-called “right”.

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The Obama Poll Tax

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I’ve said my piece about the health racket bailout and Stamp mandate. I don’t have anything to add, except that I’m pleased to see how the SCOTUS punted on the most totalitarian interpretation of the commerce clause, instead choosing to validate the mandate as a constitutionally allowed poll tax.

 

(This was a slightly less bad de jure corporatist enshrinement, since politicians have a harder time defending corporatism via a tax than they do where they can use subterfuges like “the commerce power”. Not that it makes a big difference as far as what’s actually done, but it does provide more opportunities for political wedges. Plus, the joke’s on the liberals as they have to keep flip-flopping to follow their Fuehrer’s party line on this – It’s not a tax! (Political/legislative stage); Yes it is a tax! (Judicial stage.) It’s always amusing to see liberals having to defend increasingly regressive taxation while out of the other side of their mouths they beg for more progressive taxes. It’s also good to get lessons in how, for the 99%, all taxation is regressive and will remain so, until we abolish it completely.)

 

For the occasion, I’ll repost my essay on the Stamp mandate as a poll tax, and how in the past mass civil disobedience has defeated similar assaults. One thing which is beyond any doubt is that this mandate is not only a mechanism for propping up the health insurance rackets, but to force people trying to withdraw from the cash economy back into it. That’s always the purpose of any poll tax, the most radically regressive tax of all.

 

Some basic talking points. I elaborate on these in the posts linked above.

 

1. The Obama Tax is a bailout for the health insurance rackets, which are purely parasitic and could not continue to function without a government mandate for their “services”.

 

2. “Private health insurance” makes no sense even in principle. Normal health care isn’t about catastrophic accidents, but about regular maintenance. Does auto insurance cover oil changes and tuneups? Imagine how much those would cost if that were the model. But that’s the model government has imposed upon us with health care. That’s why it’s so insanely expensive. Obamacare is intended to further entrench and intensify this insanity.

 

3. The Obama Tax is an austerity program designed to help employers liquidate employer-provided health plans and drive us as atomized individuals into the individual market. This individual market (where groups can’t negotiate better deals for themselves) is far more expensive and provides far worse services. Compare this to the ongoing liquidation of union pensions (even as Social Security and Medicare are slated to be gutted) and their replacement by individual responsibility for “retirement”. (AKA, if you’re not rich, then freeze and starve.)

 

4. As part of Obama Austerity, Obamacare is also a union-busting measure. Obama gleefully demonized the relatively good health plans negotiated by some unions as “Cadillac Plans”, and Obamacare has special provisions to penalize workers who benefit from such plans. He took this term directly from his proclaimed hero Reagan, with his “Cadillac (welfare) Queens”. This affinity has also been rampant in the implicitly racist propaganda about “free riders” in the emergency rooms, which white liberals have repeated with gusto. We know what race those free riders are.

 

5. Obamacare, by Obama’s own proud admission, is a Republican plan. The basic idea goes back to Republican think tanks in the 70s, it was fully formulated by the Heritage Foundation in 1994 as a corporatist plan to compete with Hillarycare corporatism. A modified version was enacted in Massachusetts as Romneycare, and Obamacare is in turn a modification of Romneycare.

 

6. In Massachusetts, medical-related bankruptcies have continued to increase since Romneycare was imposed, and in general people are paying more for worse “policies”. In 2010 non-binding ballot measures directing state legislators to fight for single payer in Massachusetts won by large margins in every district where they were on the ballot. The people of Massachusetts hate Romneycare.

 

(This will be some election – you can vote for either Obamaromneycare or for Obamaromneycare.) 

 

7. Single Payer would provide vastly better care at vastly lower cost. Everyone in America would greatly benefit, except for the insurance and drug rackets and their political flunkeys.

 

8. The health insurance model is not intended to provide health care. It’s intended to maximize profits. Any insurance CEO who actually wanted to provide good insurance would be fired and sued by the shareholders, and rightly so. That’s what corporatism is in principle. It’s a fundamental contradiction to want health care, but want corporations to be involved in its provision. This kind of policy is a form of insanity.

 

It all boils down to: If you’re not rich, don’t get sick. If you get sick, then die.

 

History will spit on Obama, the Democratic Party, liberal NGOs, and “progressives” in general, for this infinitely vile reactionary sellout. 

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British GMO Corporatism

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Just as Britain previously served as US corporatism’s poodle in Iraq, so it’s increasingly acting as GMO flunkey. I previously mentioned Britain’s domestic GMO-based “sustainable intensification” scam, a variation on the same old “sustainable growth” oxymoron.

 

The government has now announced a major pro-GMO spending escalation. The equivalent of $250 million in corporate welfare will be spent mostly on propaganda for a “second Green Revolution” in Africa, and to promote GMOs amid the resistant people at home.

 

When you read the blog post at the link, written by a leading GMO lackey, you’ll see how by now GM proponents are reduced to straight Goebbels-type Big Lies repeated ad nauseum – “feed the world”, ”second green revolution”, “sustainable growth”, all of it without a single fact or piece of logic to back it up. That’s because by now GMOs, which science and reason always viewed suspiciously, have been empirically proven to fail in every way except in extracting profit for a handful of corporate rackets, and have been empirically proven to be a disaster for human and environmental health.

 

GMOs have already lost all the reality-based battles, and still maintain their political position solely on account of Might Makes Right. Only massive corporate welfare, media lies, and government thuggery keep them in existence at all. The Earth already rejects them, and the people everywhere want to reject them. Our immediate task is to counter the demoralizing effect of the propaganda (people don’t believe it, but are numbed into passivity by the volume and omnipresence of it) by giving the facts and moral truths of GMOs. The more people understand, not just in a vague way but with precision and clarity, the failure and evil of GMOs, and how simple and pragmatic the organic alternative is for truly feeding the world and redeeming the environment, the more self-confident they’ll be about taking action to reject GMOs and the corporate system itself. 

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Elections, Money, Government

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I hope no one mistook my remark in yesterday’s post about “big money” to be another lament over Citizens United or another cry for campaign finance reform. On the contrary, my point was that electoralism as such is necessarily under the control of money, wherever this money is imposed from the top down, as a command economy policy.

 

The goal is not to reform money in elections, since the goal is not to reform command money as such, but to abolish and transcend it.

 

1. Why do we need money?

 

The fact is we don’t. Historically, naturally, we didn’t use money as a dominant medium of exchange. Nothing during the ahistorical fossil-fueled blip called “modernity” has changed this vastly longer arc. But those who want to use money and other reifications to impose enclosure and tyranny, the 1% and their flunkeys, tell that lie.

 

2. Those who impose, from the top-down, the use of money (corporations and government) do so in the following way. They ”print”/computerize/reify vast amounts of it; they force every part of the real economy to function according to the exchange of it; they subordinate the real economy to fictive economic features like finance, property, intellectual property, the stock market; and this then hands effective control of all real things and relations to those who possess vast amounts of it.

 

All this printing is done for the corporate benefit, corporate welfare. In theory it’s possible that government could print for the benefit of the people, handing the money itself over to the people as part of our rightful money sovereignty. This is how greenbackers like the MMTers would have it.

 

But this theoretical possibility is a practical fable, since the corporate state would never actually do this. History’s record is clear.

 

To think this reform could happen in reality is the same as thinking government itself could actually exist to serve the 99% rather than the 1%. (Which would mean abolishing much of the wealth inequality spectrum.) We know government will never do that.

 

3. So we need to abolish and transcend money itself. Just as we need to do with centralized government itself.

 

Given those democratic imperatives, it’s obvious that the more picayune goal of reforming electoralism rather than overcoming it is also unworthy of us.

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African Wannsee Conference; Or, Bono Parties With Monsanto

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The history of corporate agriculture and its “Green Revolution” is a perfect example of the unfulfilled promises, and therefore proven lies, of corporatism.

 

What was the Green Revolution? With a huge one-off injection of fossil fuels, and building upon ten thousand years of agronomy, corporate agriculture temporarily increased yields within the monoculture framework.

 

(This shouldn’t be confused with being more productive than holistic organic agriculture. Agronomy has proven that organic yields, in calories and nutrition, are comparable and often superior to those of industrial agriculture. But this assumes a natural human agricultural economy, not a corporatized one, for naturally local/regional markets, not for artificially commodified and globalized ones. It assumes diversified smallholder agroecology, which is inherently resistant to tyranny, instead of monocropping, which was designed to be dominated by hierarchies, and is inherently hierarchical.)

 

The “green revolution” (literally the first bogus corporate “color revolution”) increased commodification monoculture yields only by building a Tower of Babel. The soil is stripped of all nutrition and zombified by ever-increasing applications of synthetic fertilizer. Monoculture is ever more dependent on the increasing application of ever more toxic herbicides and pesticides. Deployment of GMOs escalates these vulnerabilities. Factory farms can exist only with ever increasing use of antibiotics. All these systems are extremely tenuous, vulnerable, not robust, not resilient. They’re all guaranteed to collapse. Hermetic monoculture, and industrial agriculture as such, is one big hothouse flower which requires perfect conditions to survive.

 

And all that’s before taking Peak Oil into account. The Green Revolution has been the massive one-off application of fossil fuels to agriculture (in the fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides, fuel to run the machinery and globalized distribution networks). With Peak Oil and energy descent, agriculture shall return to its pre-fossil energy baseline. We have the option to apply the right political and economic dispensation, along with the agronomic knowledge we’ve accumulated in the modern era, to produce sufficient food post-oil (through relocalized organic agriculture), and to do so in such a socially and culturally more fruitful way that we end up making a virtue of necessity. This is the Food Sovereignty movement.

 

Meanwhile, given the industrial monoculture framework (but see here for the truly productive and sustainable agroecological alternative), the Green Revolution did temporarily increase yields. The world produces far more than enough food for everyone – over 4.3 pounds per day of a diverse diet for everyone. But this potential food bounty was never used to “feed the world” and was never intended to do so. In reality this alleged increase in the globe’s “carrying capacity” really meant a great increase in the population of the food insecure, while the West temporarily benefited from lower food prices. This was just another aspect of the West’s temporary debt economy which was meant to misdirect middle class attention away from how their ultimate liquidation was being structurally prepared. Today’s food stagflation is a sign that the party’s over.

 

So the Green Revolution was a scam to use cheap fossil fuels to increase monocrop yield, drive tens of millions off the land, and use the stolen land and food to render food temporarily artificially cheap for Western consumerism.

 

This puts in perspective the new GMO colonialism planned for Africa. Africa has so far been relatively unpenetrated by GMOs, except for cotton in South Africa which has already proven a socioeconomic and declining-yield disaster. For some years now Monsanto, its flunkey Bill Gates (via his Association for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)), and the US government via its political aggression arm USAID, have been scheming to launch a full scale GMO invasion, replicating the 19th century colonial onslaught which submerged and devastated the continent. The people of Africa, subject to every kind of political and economic assault, kept as weak and divided as possible, considered culturally and racially inferior by Western elites and elitists, will always be a prime target.

 

So it is with the GMO Master Plan (the “New Alliance for Food and Nutrition Security”) unveiled at the recent G8 “Global Agricultural Development” forum at Camp David (after it was chased out of Chicago), held at the same time as the NATO summit. (Why does NATO still exist? If the system doesn’t disband the army when the external threat ceases to exist, that can only mean it’s meant to be turned within, as an instrument of internal aggression and domination. Meanwhile to this day “national security” types struggle to come up with a pseudo-plausible “mission” explaining why NATO still exists.) This elite conclave basically validated the agenda already presented by its host, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

 

In March, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs released a white paper calling on the U.S. government to make global agricultural development and food security a priority agenda item at the G8 Summit. The white paper, developed by a bi-partisan working group, recommends G8 members spur innovation and engage the private sector by reducing regulatory barriers, building capacity, strengthening intellectual property protections and adopting and implementing policies to increase trade in commodities and food.

 

They basically set out to list every policy which is evil in intent and a proven failure in practice, and call for doubling down on it. This kind of Food Austerity is parallel to finance austerity. Every crime must be continued, escalated, accelerated, intensified. Everything proven to fail must be continued. Everything proven to humanly work must be suppressed.

 

The plan calls for billions in “public-private” investment from GMO rackets Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta, along with affiliated assaults like a massive synthetic fertilizer factory to be built in Africa. Of course, the money for all this will come directly or indirectly from governments, i.e. the people. That’s the “public” part of the public-private scam, while what’s left “private” is all the profit and power. The people of Africa will be left to suffer the main physical and socioeconomic devastation.

 

The basic Big Lie is perfectly summed up by Obama hack Rajiv Shah, head of USAID:

 

We are never going to end hunger in Africa without private investment. There are things that only companies can do, like building silos for storage and developing seeds and fertilizers.

 

We know that this is a proven lie in every sector. There is no sector, including food, where corporatization doesn’t bring deteriorating results (and ever more frequent disaster) while our prosperity, freedom, democracy, and happiness are destroyed. In this case, we know that organic production and distribution bring better practical results than the corporate system, we know that only it can sustain the environment, we know that ALL innovation in agriculture throughout history has been the result of cooperative action in the public domain, while corporate enclosure like the intellectual property regime has functioned only to smother innovation, we know that the industrial system in unsustainable in terms of energy consumption, we know that even in the West it’s no longer keeping prices down, and we know that at every point it diminishes our freedom, autonomy, and community.

 

(Needless to say, cooperative and autonomous farmers have developed seeds and fertilizers for ten thousand years with no help from “companies”, although in recent decades companies have been great at stealing this heritage. We’ve also been building our own silos for awhile now.)

 

Meanwhile the real plan for African agriculture, prosperity, and democracy, based on agroecology and Food Sovereignty, is already functioning. Here’s just two proven examples, part of what could be a vast beneficial revolution:

 

19. Sometimes, seemingly minor innovations can provide high returns. In Kenya, researchers and farmers developed the “push-pull” strategy to control parasitic weeds and insects that damage the crops. The strategy consists in “pushing” away pests from corn by inter-planting corn with insect-repellent crops like Desmodium, while “pulling” them towards small plots of Napier grass, a plant that excretes a sticky gum which both attracts and traps pests. The system not only controls pests but has other benefits as well, because Desmodium can be used as fodder for livestock. The push-pull strategy doubles maize yields and milk production while, at the same time, improves the soil. The system has already spread to more than 10,000 households in East Africa by means of town meetings, national radio broadcasts and farmer field schools.

20. Agroecology is also gaining ground in Malawi, a country that has been at the centre of attention in recent years. Malawi successfully launched a fertilizer subsidy programme in 2005-2006, following the dramatic food crisis due to drought in 2004-2005. However, it is now implementing agroforestry systems, using nitrogen-fixing trees, to ensure sustained growth in maize production…By mid-2009, over 120,000 Malawian farmers had received training and tree materials from the programme, and support from Ireland has now enabled extension of the programme to 40 per cent of Malawi’s districts, benefiting 1.3 million of the poorest people. Research shows that this results in increased yields from 1 t/ha to 2–3 t/ha, even if farmers cannot afford commercial nitrogen fertilizers…An optimal solution that could be an exit strategy from fertilizer subsidy schemes would be to link fertilizer subsidies directly to agroforestry investments on the farm in order to provide for long-term sustainability in nutrient supply, and to build up soil health as the basis for sustained yields and improved efficiency of fertilizer response. Malawi is reportedly exploring this “subsidy to sustainability” approach.

21…One key reason why agroecology helps to support incomes in rural areas is because it promotes on-farm fertility generation. Indeed, supplying nutrients to the soil does not necessarily require adding mineral fertilizers. It can be done by applying livestock manure or by growing green manures. Farmers can also
establish a “fertilizer factory in the fields” by planting trees that take nitrogen out of the air and “fix” it in their leaves, which are subsequently incorporated into the soil. That, in essence, is the result of planting Faidherbia albida, a nitrogen-fixing acacia species indigenous to Africa and widespread throughout the continent. Since this tree goes dormant and sheds its foliage during the early rainy season at the time when field crops are being established, it does not compete significantly with them for light, nutrients or water during the growing season; yet it allows a significant increase in yields of the maize with which it is combined, particularly in conditions of low soil fertility. In Zambia, unfertilized maize yields in the vicinity of Faidherbia trees averaged 4.1 t/ha, compared to 1.3 t/ha nearby, but beyond the tree canopy. Similar results were observed in Malawi, where this tree was also widely used. The use of such nitrogen-fixing trees avoids dependence on synthetic fertilizers, the price of which has been increasingly high and volatile over the past few years, exceeding food commodity prices, even when the latter reached a peak in July 2008. In this way, whatever financial assets the household has can be used on other essentials, such as education or medicine.

 

These demonstrate what organic agriculture can accomplish in Africa. (The Malawi fertilizer subsidy also demonstrates, for any “sincere” supporters of industrial ag, that if one wanted to continue with food industrialization, the way to do it is with the old public-interest agricultural investment model, which worked well, given industrial premises. That’s why the IMF set out to eradicate all such programs. But Malawi proves that if elites wanted to preside over it, they could reinstate the old public investment model. So even given the industrial premise, there’s definitely no need for corporatism and the “public-private” scam.)

 

They also demonstrate how the method of propagating this knowledge and political consciousness must be decentralized, through truly democratic networks which involve small farmers as full participants. The most glaring symbol of the bad faith of this elite gala is how, even as it mouths platitudes about improving the condition of Africa’s small farmers, particularly women (that part’s a sop to Western liberal feminists), it included exactly zero legitimate representatives of these groups. On the contrary, the list of participants – corporate rackets, government elites including Obama, corporate liberal front groups, and useful-idiot celebrity tinsel – reads like a Tom Friedman dream guest list. it includes every illegitimate elite alien to the Earth, and excludes every part of humanity. Just like corporatism in general, and GMO imperialism in particular.   

 

The fact is that there’s no yield issue as far as feeding the world. We produce far more than enough food. The only problem is with the corporate distribution system. Anyone who truly wants to feed people has to want to change the distribution of the food we have, not struggle to produce “more” within a framework which has already proven it won’t distribute that food to humanity.

 

Anyone who truly wants to feed the world must want to abolish food corporatism, abolish food commodification, restore natural food markets (local/regional), and build the Food Sovereignty movement based upon truly organic agriculture.

 

Meanwhile anyone, like these elites in Chicago, who claims to want to “feed the world” but wants to do so by doubling down on the proven failure of a ”Green Revolution”, is really a liar and a criminal.

 

***

 

I won’t waste space writing here about my subtitle, but anyone who wants a rundown on how our liberal “celebrity” scum have been operating under Obama fascism, check it out here.

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The Health Racket Mandate, Toward Other Corporate Mandates

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A few thoughts on the health racket mandate, for anyone who supports or knows someone who supports it, constitutionally and/or on policy grounds.

 

(This is also for anyone who’s wondering about my rage vs. liberals, as I expressed in this post earlier today, for example. Look at this mandate as a prime example of the incoherency and malevolence I describe.)

 

Let’s recap the history.

 

1. In the mid-20th century Congress granted antitrust exemptions to the health insurance racketeers, giving them monopolies or oligopolies in every state. This is a command economy, a forced market. The only alternative for most people is non-participation.

 

2. On account of this growing non-participation, as well as the desperate financial straits of many insurance rackets, especially post-2008, the government instituted a bailout of the sector, in the form of Obamacare. (It’s also an austerity policy and a union-busting measure.) This is Obama’s core policy. The funds for this bailout are to be extorted in the form of a poll tax imposed on human beings, as the price of their physical existence. (The mandated ”policies” themselves will be worthless, and subsidies to purchase them will never materialize.)

 

3. Supporters of this policy now argue that it’s constitutional, thanks to totalitarian commerce clause jurisprudence. I’ve extensively covered this here, here, and here. (For the health racket bailout and Stamp mandate in general, see my posts catalogued here.)

 

For anyone who supports this, please explain:

 

1. Does this mean that if Congress decides that proprietary GMOs are to be normative in the same way it has dictated for private health insurance, it can mandate purchase of these seeds by all growers? Impose penalties on heirloom seeds, or ban them? What about other agricultural inputs?

 

(See here for the shaky financial position of Monsanto. Pro-GMO Obama policy, tangibly accelerated right around the time Monsanto’s travails hit the papers, can already be seen as a Monsanto bailout. I’ll write more on this soon.)

 

2. Does this mean that if Congress decides that big box retailing is to be normative in the same way it has dictated for private health insurance, it can mandate shopping at Walmart and similar boxes (say, by having the IRS require receipts)? Can it penalize or ban independent retailers?

 

(See here for Walmart’s increasing market difficulties.)

 

Not for a moment do I mean for either of these examples to be taken as hyperbole or in any Swiftian sense. If the health racket mandate can be enacted, then both of these, and any number of comparable policies, would be enactable by the same logic. I have no doubt about the system’s will to enact any such policy, limited only by whatever political fears it may have.

 

 

Notes on Strategy and Tactics (1 of 2)

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We’ve long agonized over the right mix of loyalty to principle and what works in practice. Let me stress that in revolutionary times, which these are, as a rule the right practice is the right (radical) principle.

 

(When we say radical, we must always keep in mind that we mean radical only from the point of view of the status quo. Objectively, it’s today’s status quo which is radical, extreme, unnatural, inefficient and impractical from the point of view of helping people live more happily, anti-human. Positive democracy, rebuilding community, anti-corporatism and anti-statism, as radical as these are from the system point of view, in fact comprise a far more moderate, common sense, rational, practical way of life. This is “radical” only from the perspective of the Status Quo Lie, which seeks to turn reality upside down.)

 

Under today’s extreme conditions, where the criminals are becoming more and more aggressive, while their techniques of corruption and co-optation become more and more refined, the issue of principle and tactics becomes ever more fraught. It’s a difficult tightrope.

 

The Occupy movement has starkly presented the dilemma.. This is especially difficult because what it really means – shall it ultimately be transformational or merely reformist – is still up for grabs. It’s within this environment that we confront easy questions like supporting the Democratic Party (No), and relatively easy ones like alliances with unions and liberal NGOs (perhaps, but never surrender physical power or dictation of the agenda, always have a Plan B ready to go in the event of an attempted hijacking, and always make a truly democratic appeal to their rank and file), as well as difficult ones like how to maximize democracy within a functioning executive structure. (How democratic the OWS structure really is has been contested.)

 

Meanwhile we have the mournful spectacle of movement activists temporizing with the corporate system and even selling out completely. This example may be a good opportunity for me to suggest a basic ethical rule. While this system forces us into innumerable distasteful “compromises” (since we’re forced they’re not really compromises, but coerced actions), no one’s ever entitled to become an active criminal. We may be forced to shop at Walmart, we may even have to take a normal ”job” working for it, but no one’s entitled to take the job of aggressively propagating its lies, as Allen has voluntarily done here. That’s the same thing as becoming a riot cop or private thug.

 

(This issue will come up for me personally if, as expected, we move our farmers’ market to the parking lot of a TBTF Wall Street bank. We believe this move to a much more centrally located, more highly visible location is necessary if the market is to survive at all. As I see my position so far, I’ll work there, within reason bite my lip, but under no circumstances will I participate in any active pro-bank PR. I don’t regard that as a good position by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it’s the best I can do under the circumstances. If the move required active propaganda collaboration, I’d prefer to take our chances at the old site. In their essence Wall Street and farmers’ markets are fundamental enemies. In the end one or the other must perish completely.)

 

With that introduction, I’ll offer a few more suggestions, ways to look at ethical dilemmas.

 

One criterion I’ve often written about is the question of whether or not a proposed reform action is on a vector toward real democracy, or whether it would keep us mired in the criminal system. Obvious examples of the latter are calls to “reform” Wall Street, Big Ag, private health insurance, or to “reform” the Democratic Party by electing “better Democrats”. Since these are fundamentally criminal structures, they can’t be reformed any more than an incorrigible individual psychopath can be. They have to be abolished completely.

 

I’ll add that this kind of system reformism is empirically proven to fail. Just to give the most glaring example, history will never again offer such a favorable environment for “progressive” politics, a “better” Democratic party, and system-reformist policy like reforming Wall Street, than 2009 presented. The Dems had a de facto one-party dictatorship, Wall Street and corporatism itself were on the ropes structurally and politically, Obama was elected with a vast, open-ended mandate for “change”, and the people were ardent for radical reform. They thirsted for it. Reformists will never see a moment like that again for the rest of history.

 

So what happened? The ”reform” Leaders committed treason across the board. Led by Obama, they aggressively propped up Wall Street and the rest of the system while repressing all bottom-up energy for change. In the most symbolically rich example, within days of the election Obama moved to destroy his grassroots organization by assimilating it to the Democratic Party hierarchy. This was as clear-cut as it gets, to anyone who was paying attention. That set the pace for Obama’s anti-democratic and anti-human agenda to this day. Everything has followed the same pattern.

 

The centerpiece of the Obama agenda was “health care reform”. In practice this was a bailout of the health insurance rackets, which were on the verge of collapse. Obama presided over a joint Democratic Party/ liberal NGO front to suppress single-payer (which the people favor), propagate the “public option” bait-and-switch, and force the beleaguered people to pay protection money, a government-thug-enforced poll tax, to buy worthless “insurance” policies. So there’s just a few examples of worthless and malignant system reformism.

 

By contrast, I’ve argued that time banking, while technically reformist, is on a vector toward full economic democracy. That’s because it’s explicitly subversive of “the market” and the money economy, it explicitly repudiates the privileging of capital over labor, it explicitly rejects capitalist measures of the value of various kinds of work and alleged work, and it implicitly rejects all capitalist measures of value. While most of its current practitioners consciously see it as a supplement to capitalism (and thus a “reform” measure), this is just a subjective feature. We’re only a change of consciousness away from using time banking as a potent vector away from capitalism completely.

 

So to sum up, where one’s in doubt a question to ask is, would a proposal, if achieved, mean real progress along a vector toward true democracy, or would it leave us more mired in corporatism and statism than ever?

 

In part 2 I’ll suggest several more such criteria for strategic and tactical choices.