The Corporate State is for Corporate Food, and Can Never Be for Community Food

>

“Food safety” as a term does exactly the same political work as “war on terror”, and describes the same kind of corporate domination regime. Indeed, the Food Control Act includes provisions for Gleichschaltung between the FDA, USDA, etc. and Homeland Security. The Food Control Act also includes provisions to force domestic policy into line with globalization policies like those of the WTO.

 

Therefore, just as support for the Food Control Act (so far as I’ve seen, universal among the “food safety” NGOs) is de facto support for Monsanto, so it’s support for the food police regime, the militarization of “food safety” and imposing the race to the bottom on US food standards. The problem is the delusion or astroturfing fraud which wants to divide the corporate state into two “separate” halves, the nominal “government” and the extra-governmental “corporations”. Having performed this false separation, one then invents the fantasy, contrary to all the evidence, that “government” and “corporations” are somehow adversarial. But the corporate state is a monolith, the government artificially creates corporations in the first place, corporations are an extension of government, a veritable fourth branch totally unaccountable to the constitution or under any other conventional theory of the legitimacy of government, and this monolith then imposes a planned economy based on corporate welfare and the “government” serving as corporate taxman and thug. (Seeing distinctions between “government” and “corporation”, “public” and “private”, is just as false and misdirectional as to believe in a distinction between the “two” corporatist parties.)

 

Some are such yahoos as to want to divide the government itself into at least two different governments:

 

“If you think the U.S. government is doing a sub-par job of keeping your food safe, brace yourself. You could soon be eating imported seafood, beef or chicken products that don’t meet even basic U.S. food safety standards. Under two new trade agreements, currently in negotiation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could be powerless to shut down imports of unsafe food or food ingredients.”

 

But the FDA is part of the same bourgeois government, and performs the same function. It aggressively uses the power it has to do what it’s designed to do: aggrandize Big Drug and Big Ag and assault alternatives to these. It will be just as happy to not “shut down imports” as it is happy to not shut down domestic operations like Wright Eggs. It doesn’t even need specific policy guidelines for that kind of omission! But small raw milk producers who have never sickened anyone? There the FDA supermen are very Can Do. They’ve been using raw milk as a practice ground for the more general assault on Community Food and small organic production which the Food Control Act is intended to give “bipartisan” legislative cover.

 

(Those who think you can separate governments from corporations, and different parts of the government from one another no matter how intensively their actions are coordinated, are usually the same who also support corporations which are psychopathic IN PRINCIPLE, but still idiotically dream of separating the proper use of corporations from their “abuses”. But there’s no such thing as a corporate abuse. Monsanto has never committed an abuse. Not one. It’s always done exactly what it was designed to do.)

 

I can also never get enough of those who are supposedly anti-corporate but who use the enemy’s own propaganda terms like “free trade”.

 

I wrote this to express again how one cannot cherry-pick one’s favorite parts of the corporate state monolith, and then through fantasizing compel these parts to work for humanity against the corporations. If people want healthy, safe, nutritious food, and an economy and polity of food which are socially, economically, and politically healthy for people, then we have to build that for ourselves. We have to do it without the help of the corporate government, and most likely in opposition to such “help”. Since Western NGOs, radical chicists, and “progressives” insist on running interference for the state, we have to reject their ideology and prescriptions as well. (They’re still often useful for their reporting.)

>

Were You Watching the Same Lawsuit I Was?

>

(The same kind of lawsuit the government is going to stop allowing.)

 

“The decision today means that the farmers did have the right to bring the suit to protect themselves…”

 

News flash: The courts have been laughing in your face and calling you pathetic losers. Judging by your response so far, that’s exactly what you look like.

 

You know perfectly well that Monsanto’s “assurance” means nothing. (And why would human beings with any dignity be willing to live under the dominion of such a condescending piece of noblesse oblige even if it were sincere?) You know that Monsanto will never stop until it wipes us out.

 

So now that you know you cannot get justice from the courts, NOW what are you willing to do?

 

Are you at least willing to think about that question?

 

Plaintiffs’ attorney, Dan Ravicher of the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT), views the decision as a partial victory. “Before this suit, the Organic Seed plaintiffs were forced to take expensive precautions and avoid full use of their land in order to not be falsely accused of patent infringement by Monsanto,” said Ravicher. “The decision today means that the farmers did have the right to bring the suit to protect themselves, but now that Monsanto has bound itself to not suing the plaintiffs, the Court of Appeals believes the suit should not move forward.”

 

Hmm, I missed that part. I only saw the part where they said “You DO NOT have the right to sue, period. But you can take solace in Monsanto’s magnanimous gesture, far more than you deserve, I’m sure.”

 

Why would anyone think this decision preserves any civil right or liberty, or imposes any constraint on Monsanto whatsoever? On the contrary, it enshrines the Hobbesian might-makes-right of corporatism, while paying lip service to the notion that corporations may voluntarily choose to place limits on their license, if and only if it’s their pleasure to do so. But the principle that the corporate imperative is literally limitless, and that government has no mandate or warrant to impose any such limits, and that the people have no right to go to the courts for redress, has been legally reaffirmed.

 

Anyone who still drinks the “good civics” kool-aid, anyone who still believes in the mythical antagonism of government power and corporate power, that governments have any desire or function in limiting corporate power, or that governments are there to “serve the people” rather than the 1%, or that there’s any meaningful distinction between “corporation” and “government” at all, as opposed to the monolithic corporate state which in fact does exist, had better wake up NOW.

 

NOW what are you willing to do?

 

(For the record, the Monsanto statement declares that it “has never been” corporate policy to sue organic farmers when they become the victims of GM contamination. But this has always been exactly their policy. Therefore, the “nor will it be” simply means they’ll continue doing exactly what they’ve always done, sue organic farmers when they become the victims of GM contamination.)

 

***

 

I’m writing this to stress again that the only potential benefit of such lawsuits would be if they were conceived primarily as vehicles for public education and permanent grassroots organization. But when they’re run as regular lawsuits trying for an ad hoc “win”, they’re pointless waste.

 

And when a fenceline patroller like Food Democracy Now engages in lying spin about an outcome, like this headline for its press release from which I quoted above:

 

“Appeals Court Binds Monsanto To Promise Not To Sue Organic Farmers”

 

the whole exercise is not just pointless but malign, since its goal is to keep activism fenced within the bounds of system acceptability and practical failure.

 

Contrast the NGO spin with the headline from the article by Common Dreams (certainly no wild-eyed radicals): “Major Loss to Organic Farmers as Court Rules in Favor of Monsanto”.

 

(The title of the Common Dreams page carrying the above FDN press release added two question marks at the end of it. I agree, it’s bizarre.)

 

If anyone doubts or disputes this, then I’ll just ask again:

 

The courts won’t give justice, so NOW what are you willing to do?

 

As I’ve said many times before, anyone whose answer boils down to continuing to do what’s already proven to fail is a pro-Monsanto con man running a scam. 

 
>

Corporate Hunger and Africa (2 of 3)

>

As the great battle escalates in Africa, I should review what agroecology is, and why it’s the necessary and bountiful path forward for Africa and for all of humanity. I’ve written about it before many times, including here, here, and here. I also gave a basic account of the clash of agricultural corporatism against humanity in this post from a year ago on the plan for the recolonization of Africa.

 

To sum up, agroecology, a synonym for organic agriculture in the original sense of the term (not the degraded US government sense), is the practice of agriculture in imitation of nature. It strives to work within the rhythms of nature rather than against them, with it rather than against it, using natural features as reinforcements or remedies, keeping actions within the natural cycles of a regional ecosystem. All this makes for an agriculture which is most sustainable in producing the most nutritious food (and the most calories, acre for acre) using no artificial poisons, and doing so in a way which enhances ecosystems, economies, and communities, rather than destroying all these the way industrial ag does.

 

The term “agroecology” indicates its basis in the combined sciences of agronomy and ecology. It is truly scientific in the best sense of the term, in that its practitioners are constantly experimenting, and based on the results modifying and repeating their experiments, all toward the goal of sustainably producing sufficient calories and nutrition. Combined with the political philosophy of Food Sovereignty, AE then seeks to distribute this food, more than enough to feed everyone, so that everyone actually gets enough to eat.

 

(By contrast, science condemns the industrial ag experiment as having failed at everything it ever promised it would do, with the exception of using the temporary fossil fuel surplus to produce more gross calories. But it’s been an absolute failure in terms of ending hunger, food’s denuded nutritional value, food toxification, the destruction of the environment (including greenhouse gas emissions; the industrial ag sector is the worst emitter by a considerable margin), and the destruction of economies, polities, and communities. Food corporatism and its “Green Revolution” promised to solve all these problems, all of which industrialization generated or exacerbated in the first place. By any scientific standard it’s a proven failure. To wish to continue the experiment, now extending it to Africa in a more virulent form than hitherto, is proof that the experimenters were lying about their proclaimed goals all along. We know these facts: Corporatism is purely wasteful and destructive, does nothing for humanity, and accomplishes nothing but to enable a small group of criminals to further concentrate wealth and power and exercise domination. In the end power and domination are their only goals and their only reasons for being.)

 

Agroecology or organic agriculture is highly skilled work. It requires intimate knowledge of of the ways of the soil (building it with organic matter), weather, climate, plants (crops, other beneficial plants, potentially harmful plants called “weeds”), animals (livestock, other beneficial animals, potentially harmful ones called “pests”). AE’s innovative and highly productive techniques, eschewing monoculture and synthetic fertilizers and other poisons, include natural nutrient-cycling and soil-building, the use of manure, compost, and cover crops (AKA green manures), crop rotation, intercropping, alley cropping with leguminous trees, infusion of free-living nitrogen-fixing bacteria into the soil, biological pest control (often called “integrated pest management”), agroforestry, better water management, rotation of livestock with annual crops, the whole art of integrating grass-fed livestock pasturage with vegetable production. It also requires the most efficient and effective use of energy and other resource inputs. All this knowledge is primarily built by the farmers themselves and distributed among them horizontally. (With some supplement and aggregation help from agronomy schools and NGOs.) All of it’s done with emphasis on the most appropriate specific application of general principles within a particular region/locality. All these factors will require even more precise knowledge as the fossil fuel crutch, required for each and every part of industrial ag, from the inputs and financing to the growing to the processing and distribution and preparation, is removed once and for all.

 

Agroecology is proven to be the most nutritionally productive form of agriculture as well as the most calorically productive, acre for acre. Peter Rosset testifies:

 

In fact, data shows that small farms almost always produce far more agricultural output per unit area than larger farms, do so more efficiently, and produce food rather than export crops and fuels. This holds true whether we are talking about industrial countries or any country in the third world. This is widely recognized by agricultural economists as the “inverse relationship between farm size and output.” When I examined the relationship between farm size and total output for fifteen countries in the third world, in all cases relatively smaller farm sizes were much more productive per unit area—2 to 10 times more productive—than larger ones.

 

A team at the University of Michigan led by Catherine Badgley did a survey of hundreds of organic trials and found that agroecology/organic production, using the same amount of land under cultivation right now, can maintain and improve upon current conventional bulk and caloric production for all significant food groups, and can do so while replacing synthetic fertilizers with natural nutrient cycling. They analyzed the data according to two models, one a best-case scenario and the other more conservative, and found that even by the conservative parameters organic agriculture would produce calories, including in grain production, comparable to today’s industrial output, and therefore more than enough to feed everyone on earth. By the best-case model, agroecology could produce over 50% more than the current industrial production.

 

The 2010 report on agroecology from the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food summarized a similar survey performed by a team led by Jules Pretty, with special emphasis on Africa.

 

17. Such resource-conserving, low-external-input techniques have a proven potential to
significantly improve yields. In what may be the most systematic study of the potential of
such techniques to date, Jules Pretty et al. compared the impacts of 286 recent sustainable
agriculture projects in 57 poor countries covering 37 million hectares (3 per cent of the
cultivated area in developing countries). They found that such interventions increased
productivity on 12.6 millions farms, with an average crop increase of 79 per cent, while
improving the supply of critical environmental services. Disaggregated data from this
research showed that average food production per household rose by 1.7 tonnes per year
(up by 73 per cent) for 4.42 million small farmers growing cereals and roots on 3.6 million
hectares, and that increase in food production was 17 tonnes per year (up 150 per cent) for
146,000 farmers on 542,000 hectares cultivating roots (potato, sweet potato, cassava). After
UNCTAD and UNEP reanalyzed the database to produce a summary of the impacts in
Africa, it was found that the average crop yield increase was even higher for these projects
than the global average of 79 per cent at 116 per cent increase for all African projects and
128 per cent increase for projects in East Africa.

18. The most recent large-scale study points to the same conclusions. Research
commissioned by the Foresight Global Food and Farming Futures project of the UK
Government reviewed 40 projects in 20 African countries where sustainable intensification
was developed during the 2000s. The projects included crop improvements (particularly
improvements through participatory plant breeding on hitherto neglected orphan crops),
integrated pest management, soil conservation and agro-forestry. By early 2010, these
projects had documented benefits for 10.39 million farmers and their families and
improvements on approximately 12.75 million hectares. Crop yields more than doubled on
average (increasing 2.13-fold) over a period of 3-10 years, resulting in an increase in
aggregate food production of 5.79 million tonnes per year, equivalent to 557 kg per farming
household.

 

The 2008 report from the World Bank’s own International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development, endorsed by all participating countries except the US, Canada, and Australia, insisted on the sufficiency and necessity of agroecology.

 

Today we need to build new food systems in light of this knowledge. Where the age-old organic practices persist, as in Africa, farmers need to sustain them and enhance them in light of modern agroecological knowledge. Where these have been marginalized or obliterated, they need to be rebuilt.

 

In the past public sector agricultural investment worked well to support farmers, although in emphasizing industrial ag it was building on sand, for farmers and for itself. But in principle there’s no reason there couldn’t be a “New Deal for Agroecology”, which would have to start with land reform. As Rosset explains,

 

In order to reverse these trends and provide a life with dignity for farming peoples, protect rural environments, and correct the structural causes of the food crisis, we need to revitalize family and peasant farming. That means restoring the public sector rural budgets that were cut under neoliberal policies, restoring minimum price guarantees, credit and other forms of support, and undertaking redistributive agrarian reform. The peasant and family farm sectors in most countries cannot be rebuilt without land reform, which redistributes land from export elites to food-producing peasants and family farmers. This is a central pillar of the alternative proposal for our food and agriculture systems that is put forth by the international farmers’ movement.

 

This could be the basis for a general program of farmer assistance, public credit, public sector research and education on organic practices and public domain plant varieties, policy favoring local/regional inputs and natural demand-based markets, storage of the harvest and maintenance of grain reserves, doing all of these with full farmer input and participation in decision-making. All this would recognize the fact that the basis of a healthy economy, polity, and society is the ability of the productive class to buy everything it needs for a decent life. So given the premises of modern civilization and the middle-class aspiration, agroecology is the most fruitful and healthful basis of agriculture. As always, where it comes to food issues the answer to any problem is along the same vector regardless of whether one’s a sincere reformist or a revolutionary. Either way one must be an anti-corporatist.

 

No such revival of public sector investment seems to be in the offing for much of the world. (It’s still working in parts of Latin America.) The system’s disaster capitalist response to the food price crisis of 2007-08 (NOT physical scarcity, which doesn’t exist) and the social unrest it provoked wasn’t to call for new investment, but new “investment”, meaning an escalated corporate agricultural assault, using the global financial crisis the banks themselves triggered as the pretext to accelerate and intensify corporate enclosure and domination. (That’s the definition of neoliberalism in this context: Corporatism’s use of globalization to seek and enforce total domination.*)

 

As Rosset put it, corporate agriculture has an “export-producing vocation”, what’s also called commodification, while real farmers have a ”food-producing vocation”. In the end this is the clear criterion by which to judge the benevolent or evil character of a type of agriculture: Does it seek to produce food, or does it seek to produce commodities, toward the goal of corporate power? This is also the measure by which to judge anyone who claims to care about “feeding the world”. As we already see with biofuels (for which there is no demand and no market; the sector is 100% the planned-economy creation of government subsidies and mandates), corporate agriculture has literally zero concern with producing food for anyone. If the most profitable thing to do would be to burn the crops in the fields instead of harvesting them, it would do so. (This would actually be less destructive than harvesting industrial crops for fuel.)

 

Corporatism offers nothing to humanity but destruction, and humanity can find no path forward on the same Earth with corporatism. We have what might be called a “clash of civilizations”, or the final conflict of humanity against the depraved corporate “civilization”. Or we can keep the best of the word civilization and call corporatism a post-civilizational Hobbesian barbarism.

 

However one connotes it, the denotation is that this is a struggle between agroecology, as the basis of a steady-state economy of, by, and for the people, with Food Sovereignty as its companion political philosophy, vs. the totalitarian “growth” economy, and the neoliberal anti-politics which is its appendage. (It’s totalitarian because it recognizes nothing but its own imperative.)

 

This is a global struggle, and the front line is everywhere. Today the continent of Africa is the site of an escalating battle which promises to be the most critical of all.

 

[*Just as corporatism cynically regards country, government, and property as tools and weapons to be exalted or disregarded according to convenience, so in the end it will be the same with money and profits themselves. They understand that money is a fiction, and that for those who greedily seek it power is the only thing that's real. The only thing corporatism wants, like prior forms of totalitarianism, is total power and total control.]

 

>

What the NSA Surveillance Revelation Means for the Community Food Movement

>

The latest revelation of the scope of the surveillance state is a good example of the need for an uncompromising, united democracy front vs. corporations and the central government. Linking this overarching manifestation of the police state with the assaults of the food police regime on the Community Food movement is a good example of a way this front can be conceived. Nothing’s going to work unless a critical mass of people clear their heads of all prior notions, all brainwashing, all preconceptions of politics (“left-right”, “public-private”, “government-corporation”), and assess everything in clear, simple terms of human relationships at the community level vs. the power hierarchies which want to destroy all such relationships and turn us into atoms amid masses.

 

The NSA’s assault is really no revelation to anyone who’s been paying attention, but then for each issue there’s a sliding scale of what’s necessary to compel the attention of those who aren’t actively seeking real information. That’s part of the reason the Community Food movement needs a coherent, systematic PR campaign. We need that in order to find one another, to convert increasing numbers of farmers and eaters, and to educate the public, including just making them consciously aware that there does exist an alternative to industrial food.

 

It seems that most people don’t really support corporatism, but passively accept it because they’ve come to believe the Big Lie, “there is no alternative”. But there are far better alternatives which are proven to work, not just in food but in every sector. The first step, along with recruiting activists, is to force this into the public consciousness: The basic awareness that the alternative ideas exist.

 
>

Corporate Summit to Impose Hunger on Africa

>

These people think that Africa is a country of animals, that we do not think, that we know nothing, but they are wrong. We are human beings, we know what we want and we will fight on to victory.

- Zimbabwean participant at the 2011 International Conference of Peasants and Farmers vs. land-grabbing

 

The aptly named ”Hunger Summit” is the one year anniversary of the inaugural conference of the “New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition”, the corporatist strategy for the recolonization of Africa led by Big Ag and the G8. A year ago I called the opening session a Wannsee Conference for Africa. Obama was master of ceremonies at Camp David. This year Britain’s David Cameron has the honors. The criminal conference will deliver a progress report and issue a public strategy. African farmers, tribes, consumers, environmental and civil society groups are opposing this, with support from anti-corporatists and democracy activists from all over the world. Here’s the order of battle.

 

The whole project is being led by the US and UK governments (and paid for by their taxpayers), along with the rest of the G8. USAid is playing its usual role as “humanitarian” front group, “public” sector version, while Bill Gates and his “Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa” serve as its “private” counterpart. The corporate beneficiaries, who have signed “letters of intent” to join the ”investment” program (meaning they put up pennies to the taxpayer dollar, while being slated to extract 100% of the profits), include the GMO cartel led by Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta, along with Norway’s Yara (earmarked to build a massive synthetic fertilizer factory), arch-commodifier Cargill, Unilever, Diageo, and others. Bono is reprising his role as useful idiot celebrity tinsel. An African fig leaf is provided in the form of the African Union’s Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Program (CAADP), which is the Stockholm Syndrome blueprint African governments developed in the wake of the West’s ”structural adjustment” assaults, meant to beg for “investment” on the corporations’ own terms. The New Alliance is certainly the fruition of this radical corporatization of Western investment. Six African governments – Ethiopia, Ghana, Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast, Mozambique, and Tanzania – have already joined up, while the accession of four more – Benin, Malawi, Nigeria, and Senegal – is considered by the regime to be imminent. (But the US remains frustrated by the ambivalence of Kenya, which was supposed to be the crown jewel member by now.) 

 

The people of Africa are opposing this, represented by a coalition of hundreds of democracy networks, tribal alliances, and groups representing real farmers and pastoralists. These comprise the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa and include the African Center for Biosafety, the African Biodiversity Network (ABN), the National Coordination of Peasant Organizations (CNOP, a member of the worldwide Via Campesina, the Farmer Way), the NGO Federation of Collectives (FECONG), the Coalition for African Genetic Heritage (COPAGEN), the Food Sovereignty Campaign, Comparing and Supporting Endogenous Development (COMPAS) Africa, the Participatory Ecological Land Use Management Association (PELUM), the Eastern and Southern African Small Scale Farmers Forum (ESAFF), People’s Dialogue, Rural Women’s Assembly, and many others.

 

Here we have a clear division between democracy and the criminal elite. We have the aggressive power of the 1%: the US and other Western governments, corporations, the corporate media and technocracy, and other elitists including racist liberals and NGOs. The whole project has had zero input or representation from the 99%, and from the people of Africa least of all. The roster of participants reads like a Tom Friedman dream guest list. It includes every illegitimate elite which is alien to the Earth, and excludes every part of humanity. Just like corporatism in general, and GMO imperialism in particular. Opposing this assault is a lineup truly representative of African farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, and the citizenry in general.

 

Even if one didn’t know the issues, it would be clear who’s right and who’s wrong, who represents democracy and freedom, and who represents evil.

 

The goal of the New Alliance is the corporate Gleichschaltung (coordination) of African agriculture and trade practices and policies for maximum plunder and domination. It’s the same slate of globalization and commodification practices which have already devastated much of humanity. African governments are to collaborate in dominating and exploiting the people and the land.

 

*A severe and rigorously enforced “intellectual property” regime, for the benefit of the GMO cartel and its patents, which were the result of piracy in the first place.

 

*The privatization of land. Indenture loans and distribution facilities for proprietary GMO seeds, synthetic fertilizer, industrial machinery, commodified crops bound for ethanol and industrial food processing, can’t be arranged with people farming a commons. As a prerequisite, corporate gangs who would dominate and exploit these people and their land first need government to enclose and parcel out the land. This has been a priority of the World Bank going back to the 1980s. USAid chief Rajiv Shad has emphasized that the goal is to accelerate land grabbing. As Via Campesina put it, “These policies aim to allocate title deeds to land in order to facilitate the purchase and sale of landed property. In the end, poor peasants and other rural people lose out to the benefit of those who have the means to purchase land.” (p. 14)

 

*The formation of economic hierarchies to centralize and integrate production, processing, storage, and distribution. All this is to be done according to corporate specifications, toward the goal of forcing most farmers off the land, and reducing the rest to indentured servitude or wage slavery within a cash-based commodification regime. Today the farmers of Africa are smallholders and commons managers producing food for their families and communities. This is what must be eradicated and replaced by industrialized corporatization.

 

*Open borders for corporate dumping and looting (“free trade” is the standard Orwellian term for this; a truthful term would be something like corporate command trade), where it comes to the government-approved and licensed “formal sector”. Meanwhile traditional markets and actual free trading among the people would be criminalized and repressed.

 

*”Free trade” zones, tax-free zones, laws licensing the total repatriation of profits by Western “investors”. The ravage of Asia is set to be reproduced in Africa.

 

*Impose expensive industrial infrastructure on farmers. Offer credit in order to indenture them and trap them on the cash-crop treadmill. The procedure is always the same everywhere, with only minor modifications. 1. Propaganda – you have no choice but to get on board with commodification, and you better do it fast or you’ll be left behind. 2. Enforce this with dumping and general coercion into a cash economy. 3. Offer the necessary product (GMO seeds, synthetic fertilizer, industrial herbicide and pesticide, machinery, oil) and the loan in order to buy it. 4. In this way destroy most independent farmers completely, turn the rest into indentured sharecroppers or wage slaves.

 

We already see the end result of this in Asia, Latin America, and in South Africa which already has a corporatized regime. Seeds and the land are largely enclosed, farmers have been reduced to servitude, profits are ruthlessly extracted and removed from the country.

 

Beyond the usual short run goal of corporate plunder, the ultimate goal of the “New Alliance” is to force GMOs upon Africa.

 

All this is being called a “second green revolution”, a “green revolution in Africa”. We already know what the first Green Revolution did. It drove up the population while accelerating the arc of enclosure. It drove ever more people off the land and into cities. Shantytowns have always been the direct, intended result of this agricultural policy. The goal was to further separate humanity from the land, to assault subsistence food economies and replace them with food commodification, forcibly turn subsistence farmers into “job”-seekers, drive up the population, drive up the proportion of the population which is food insecure, drive down wages. In all these ways it increases desperation and infighting among the destitute masses, and aggravates and accelerates the processes of colonialism and corporatism in general. Today’s GMO onslaught is an escalated version of all this. That’s why neoliberalism calls GMOs a “second green revolution”.

 

There are many idiots and criminals who still believe and propagate the lies of the “Green Revolution”. But it takes only a look at the historical record and current events to see that corporate agriculture has nothing to do with feeding people and everything to do with starving them for the sake of its profit and domination imperatives. How does it feed an African community to force it to stop feeding itself and start growing cash crops to be turned into ethanol for Western cars? How does it feed people to drive them off the land they farm and into shantytowns? How does it feed people to impose artificial scarcity on the abundance their work coaxes from nature?

 

Let’s cut through all the lies and filth. If you want humanity to eat, you want people to provide their own food, as organic communities. If you want corporations and governments to crush this normal, natural food system and replace it with their system of scarcity, coercion, domination, extraction, you want only the 1% to feed. (As for the Western middle class among whom this attitude is common, the bell is tolling for it as well, and if you wonder where the 1% intends for you, look to the farmers of Africa now. In the end you’re slated to be liquidated the same way, even if it takes a little more time.)

 

We see the results in Asia and Latin America: immense shantytowns, mass coercion of women into sex work, over 300,000 cotton farmer suicides (really murders) in India. We also have the African example of the Makhatini Flats cotton farmers of South Africa, who were similarly economically destroyed.

 

All this is now what’s being consciously planned for the people of Africa. It’s truly the plan for the second, far more vicious, colonization of Africa, this time not by ad hoc national rapacity, but coordinated and administered by disciplined totalitarian corporations led my Monsanto. This, I think, is the primary battleground on Earth today. In my next post I’ll write about the alternative to this, and what’s to be done.

 

>

Abolitionism and GMO Labeling

>

As an abolitionist, I’m unwilling to “be patient” again at the behest of the same corporate liberal types who have told so many lies about being patient before. I also can’t abide new efforts which end up parroting that same call for patience. We KNOW that the corporate state will never act on behalf of the people, but will only ever assault, subvert, and degrade our rights, our freedoms, our health, our economic and political viability and vitality.

 

Therefore, although I can understand the excitement over the apparently imminent passage* of Connecticut’s Right to Know GMO labeling act, I cannot share in it nor can I agree to wait the interminable wait until the “trigger” conditions are met. Four more states have to pass such laws, one of them has to be contiguous to CT, they have to comprise a population of at least 20 million according to the US census, one of them has to be called “New York”.

 

(That last one is no longer explicit in the law, but it was in a previous draft, and the trigger conditions still make it a de facto requirement. It’s clear that the “trigger” is meant to play a role similar to “safety valves” and “off-ramps” in cap-and-trade legislation: To ensure the legislation is never effective in practice. The only difference is that the latter are meant to suppress a policy’s effect if it ever starts actually changing something, while the former is meant to prevent it from nominally going into effect in the first place. The political effect is intended to be the same: Politicians and system liberal types get to piously proclaim they’ve done something, corporations and conservatives get to condemn this alleged restraint upon them, activists and citizens can be told “you have to be patient, let the law take its time to work, you have to wait”, while time is wasted, nothing is ever done, the people are left further demoralized, and corporatism continues its inexorable advance.)

 

Nor, even if these improbable conditions were met, could I wait the next wait for the state to effectively enforce this law. Nor could I wait while the all the lawsuits played out.

 

All this time the labeling advocates would have to be educating the public about what these labels will mean. (These campaigns DO have such educational plans in place, right?) Why not just educate them now about what GMOs themselves mean, and why we need their total abolition!

 

Why wait for the corporate state to label the corporate product? We can label the whole system ourselves, directly. (And physically, with our own GMO stickers.) We can label the brands, we can label the retailers, we can label the manufacturers, we can label the government bureaucracies (USDA and FDA) which serve as GMO propagandists and thugs, we can label the NGOs who run interference for Monsanto, we can label Monsanto, we can label GMOs in general, we can label corporate and industrial ag as a whole.

 

We can label these as unwanted, worthless, pointless, inefficient, uneconomic, bad for our health, bad for our crops, bad for our soil, bad for our environment, bad for our politics, bad for our economies, bad for our societies, impossible to sustain in their fossil fuel use, impossible to sustain in their water use, impossible to sustain in their phosphorus use, guaranteed to lead to mass famine and feudal enslavement.

 

That sounds like a lot of work to do! Enough for many lifetimes. Not to mention the organizational movement-building and direct action that follow from it. So how could we have the luxury of waiting, in order to undertake a vastly diminished educational and action campaign? This would be insufficient, to be polite about it.

 

No, we must be clear that labeling, even if it could be fully achieved immediately, is insufficient for the great need of humanity and the earth to be free of GMOs and of food corporatism. The indefinitely-delayed achievement of an anodyne labeling regime, this thing we’re now supposed to wait for, is absolutely unacceptable. When you hear the word “wait”, or the word “patience”, it will always be coming from a system cadre, or from someone woefully brainwashed into believing in the fenceline of respectable system-approved “activism”. Either way, tear down that fence. It’s an abomination.

 

There can be no substitute for building a movement dedicated to the full abolition of GMOs, and there can be no delay in beginning to do so.

 

[*While I'm calling this campaign a wild goose chase at best, we can still learn from its tactics.]

 

***

 

What must we begin to do? The ground is not yet prepared for a full-scale Food Sovereignty movement in America, nor for a full-scale counterattack against food corporatism. Therefore the first task of GMO abolitionists is to lay the philosophical groundwork. We need to explain the structural context of GMOs as a linchpin of corporatism, and prove the need for their abolition, first in the broadest sense of this need, as key to the general war of corporations vs. humanity. We need to explain how GMOs are a worthless product no one ever needed or wanted. How their existence is 100% dependent on corporate welfare and government thuggery. How the concept of patenting life is a rational idiocy and a moral abomination. How GMOs serve zero constructive purpose. How all the claims made for them are lies. The evidence for their danger to human and environmental health. Their catastrophic political and socioeconomic effects.

 

From there to a general critique of industrial agriculture as agronomically and environmentally destructive, politically and economically malign, unsustainable on a practical level.

 

All this is to be compared to the great affirmative solution, decentralized organic farming and agroecology as the basic agricultural solution, Food Sovereignty as the basic political and socioeconomic form of society.

 

These ideas must be developed and systematically, relentlessly publicized through writing, public speaking, and interpersonal discussion (proselytization).

 

Meanwhile the ground is ready for a true Community Food movement to cohere, and this political/social movement is already being built, parallel to its spontaneous rise as a new and distinct economic sector, as distinct from industrial ag as it is from fossil fuel extraction.

 

The anti-GMO movement, as a vector of anti-corporate, pro-democracy ideas, is separate from but complements this Community Food movement, whose basic philosophy and program will at first tend to seek reform within the system, but which may evolve as it experiences the repression of the corporatist “food safety” regime. (The food equivalent of the “war on terror”.)

 

>

Yet Another GMO Contamination Outbreak

>

Last week the USDA announced that for several months it has been conducting an investigation of environmental and economic pollution of the US wheat supply by illegal GMO wheat. 

 

The problem came to light when an Oregon farmer discovered a stand of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready spring wheat growing feral on his land. This is not a commercially available crop. Monsanto has done hundreds of field tests of genetically engineered wheat in at least 17 states, from 1997 to 2005 and resuming in 2011. This includes the last known testing in Oregon, from 1999 to 2001. But in the face of farmer opposition, fears over the viability of US wheat exports if the supply was contaminated, and other obstacles, the GM rackets never commercialized any GM wheat, and the government never approved it for sale.

 

Field testing in the US is usually rubber-stamped by the government and subject to little USDA scrutiny. In most cases the USDA doesn’t even know where the test plots are. Monsanto and the other rackets are given almost total license to draw up their own safety protocols and police themselves.

 

Today’s discovery is only the latest in a long history of contamination episodes. The USDA’s own Inspector General issued a 2005 report which criticized inadequate agency oversight. The GAO was more harsh in 2008, emphasizing the agency’s own data admitting over 700 violations of USDA testing regulations, including nearly a hundred which could lead to GMO contamination in the ecosystem. USDA “oversight” of the GMO cartel is a typical example of letting the corporations write up their own rules and police themselves, while the government’s only role is to rubber-stamp the process and then lie to the people, telling them a rigorous regulatory protocol exists. The government is looking out for us, so there’s no need to grow up, to educate ourselves, to take direct action for ourselves, to build a movement to take our politics and economy in our own hands.*

 

It’s further proof that even under “test” conditions, and even where unauthorized release is not deliberate (which we don’t know in this case), GMOs cannot be prevented from escaping into the environment and contaminating economic crops and wild relatives.

 

All this is giving GMOs some unusual bad press in the corporate media, because it’s causing major reverberations in the wheat export markets. Japan rejected a US wheat shipment, South Korea has suspends wheat imports from the US, other Asian countries and Europe announced intensified testing. This shall be another major economic headache for an $8 billion export industry, caused by a totally gratuitous product for which there has never been any demand, but which has been 100% forced on farmers, markets, and consumers by corporatist economic planning. The vast majority of people and institutions, including most other economic sectors, wish GMOs would just cease to exist. Their existence and power are 100% the command economy artifice of a handful of corporations and governments, 100% the creature of corporate welfare and government thuggery.

 

The escape of GMOs from test plots is just one part of the overall contamination problem. Commercialized GM crops promiscuously contaminate regular crops as well as organic crops, often destroying their economic value. To give two examples, organic canola is largely impossible in Canada, as are non-GM beets and chard in Oregon, because of GMO contamination. The USDA admits that this contamination is inevitable, and has further demonstrated its character as a Monsanto lackey by ruling that it’s the legal responsibility of organic farmers to protect themselves against this trespass and tort, not the responsibility of the intruder and vandal. A lawsuit asking the courts to override this policy was rejected, demonstrating again how the people will not find justice amid “the law”. On the contrary, it’s longstanding GMO jurisprudence that if, through negligent or deliberate contamination, a proprietary GMO pollutes a victim’s crops, the victim is then legally culpable for violating the aggressor’s patent rights.

 

(This is an example of the radical extremes to which patent law and the ”intellectual property” regime are being taken. This is one example of GMOs as the ultimate corporate frontier. GMOs are critically important to corporatism in themselves, as well as critically important for developing intellectual property as a totalitarian enclosure weapon.)

 

We’ve learned nothing new from this incident, just confirmation of everything which was already evident. Most of all, it’s further proof that there can be no “co-existence” (to use the system’s Orwellian term) with GMOs. Co-existence, compromise, conciliation, are impossible because GMOs are totalitarian. The definition of totalitarian is that a cadre aggressively seeks to carry out an imperative, recognizes no limits to this imperative, and believes that no value has any right to exist other than this imperative. This describes corporatism and corporate profit-seeking in general, and Monsanto and the GM rackets have been particularly frank that their goal is total domination of the world seed supply and, through this, total control over all the world’s food. We’ve seen the political and socioeconomic effects. The US, Canadian, UK, and many other governments and globalization cadres have made clear that they will accept no limits on Monsanto’s domination imperative, and will do all they can to aggrandize it. GMOs are politically totalitarian.

 

They’re also environmentally totalitarian in that given the chance they’ll contaminate any ecosystem of which they’re a part. This would be true of field tests even if these were conscientious about contamination protocols, which they’re not. It’s proven to be true of commercialized GM cultivation.

 

At least this environmental totalitarianism is still largely dependent upon aggressive, artificial (economic and political) pro-GMO action. Nature is highly resilient and prone to reject most contaminants. We’re still at the point where, if humanity politically abolishes GMOs, nature will probably be able to clean up the pollution mess. But as contamination escalates, this won’t be true for long. This is all the more reason we need to build an abolition movement now.   

 

[*This typical statement from the Center for Food Safety demonstrates how our liberal "food safety" NGOs offer no alternative to the Monsanto-USDA regime, even in principle.

 

“USDA has once again failed to protect the food supply from GE crop contamination,” said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director at Center for Food Safety. “This incident underscores why stronger regulation is long overdue. Congress needs to investigate how this occurred and the prevalence of contamination. Until then, USDA, at a minimum, should immediately place a moratorium on open-air field testing of genetically engineered crops.”

 

The USDA is proven to fail, and regulation is proven to fail, so we need the USDA and regulation. And of course "congress".

 

We see the total intellectual and strategic bankruptcy of the entire liberal NGO complex. It offers nothing to the future, and is not part of the necessary path forward.]

 

>

The Monsanto Court and Corporatism

>

Sorry for the light posting for awhile. Lots of things to do, and lots of things on my mind.

 

I don’t have anything new to say right now about the “supreme” court’s anointment of Monsanto, but I’ll refer to what I already said.

 

One thing which occurs to me, as I read some stuff on this and see the confusion of liberals and radical-chicists, as well as those ostensibly concerned with food freedom, is that it’s another example of how no viewpoint other than total anti-corporatism is sufficient to understand the political world.

 

Thus, readers of this blog know that I predicted a unanimous pro-Monsanto decision. Similarly, almost everyone predicted wrongly that the corporate court would strike down Obama’s “health insurance” poll tax. But true anti-corporatists understood how essential it was to the corporate imperative that the commerce clause be extended in this totalitarian direction.

 

My point is that anti-corporatism demonstrates its superior predictive value, which in turn is evidence for its fundamental truth. It’s hard to see which competing world view, other than corporatism itself, accurately describes the state of civilization.

>

Two-For-One Sale (Deficit Terrorism and the Monsanto Protection Act)

>

1. There’s no such thing as a deficit crisis as such, and any “budget crisis” is purely fabricated. It’s a government exercise in trying to confuse and scare the people. That’s why the term “deficit terrorism” is precise and appropriate. What the central government and corporate media do in inventing this problem and then conjuring up a mass of fear-itself propaganda around it is a textbook case of terrorism in its psychological aspect. It’s a pressure group trying to sow fear and intimidation among a populace, in order to force political concessions out of it. In this case the enforced concession is always acquiescence in “austerity”, which is the willful and unnecessary gutting of whatever’s left of government spending which isn’t corporate welfare. (While I’m not here to affirmatively stick up for any aspect of the central government, I’ll always say that if you want to cut government spending for any reason whatsoever, the place to start is always with corporate welfare, which is the most egregious, worthless, and destructive kind of government spending. Abolish that, and then see what problems are left. The fact that conservatives and most “libertarians” support corporate welfare proves that they lie when they claim to oppose big government, massive taxation, massive regulation of the economy. Corporatism is always the most aggressive, malignant, and massive manifestation of all of these.)

 

Meanwhile, the fact that corporate welfare is never cut, is only constantly, massively expanded, is proof that no one in the system really thinks deficits or the debt are problems in themselves. It’s proof that anyone who says so is consciously, willfully lying, with malice aforethought. This would be very strong condemnatory evidence at a New Nuremburg, where it came time to try the Streicherist propagandists. 

 

2. The latest incarnation of the deficit kabuki had an added feature, a rider which turned an appropriations bill into what democracy advocates are calling the Monsanto Protection Act. This rider would neuter judicial review* of USDA GMO approvals, by allowing planting to continue even after courts find that the USDA hadn’t lived up to its mandatory procedures for approval. The rider is merely an extension of the standard GMO contamination process. The goal is to get the things into the ecosystem and economy, no matter how, and establish them as invasive weeds which are then extremely difficult to eradicate. In countries like Brazil and India the crops were widely illegally planted, and governments then claimed this accomplished fact as justification for legalizing them (which is what they’d wanted to do in the first place, but had refrained on account of democracy pressures). In the US the USDA simply defied a court order imposing a moratorium on Roundup Ready sugarbeets. Now the legislature is following up, legalizing the previously extra-legal and illegal procedures.

 

[*This legislative rider is the kind of thing which will satisfy the passive corporatists in the judicial branch. There's almost no chance of courts finding the rider itself unconstitutional, since no judges I'm aware of find corporatism as such to be unconstitutional. None rule that constitutionally there's no such thing as corporate "rights". For example, that's the way in which, fundamentally, Citizens United was a 9-0 decision. The so-called "5-4" was only on the technical ground that four passive corporatists didn't want to overturn a law Congress had passed. But no one dissented on the ground that there's no such thing as a corporate speech right. The fact that judicial passivists try to decide things as narrowly as possible is proof of their bias in favor of the status quo of power, regardless of any fundamental constitutional issue.]

 

3. Senator Mikulski, head of the appropriations committee, rammed the thing through over Jon Tester’s attempt to get the rider stripped. Only when she received severe criticism did she pretend not to have known what she was doing. This is certainly a lie. She did her job, serving the corporate imperative. That’s why she was given this committee chairmanship in the first place.

 

Under pressure, she seized the opportunity to make this a two-for-one. She not only served Monsanto, but gave as her excuse that this was necessary in order to accomplish the critical goal of getting the appropriations bill passed. She opportunistically tied her pro-Monsanto action with her action in propagating the fraud that the central government budget is in some kind of inherent crisis.

 

Sure enough, liberal NGO cadres rushed to her defense. A hack from the Center for Food Safety ran interference.

 

“The American public have relied on Senate Democrats to be a backstop against dangerous policy riders like this,” said Colin O’Neil, director of government affairs for the Center for Food Safety. “We call on [Mikulski] to ensure that this rider is stricken from any future appropriations bills.”

But, O’Neil added, the language did not originate with Mikulski. Rather, it was included in legislation that had been developed before she took the chairmanship….”Her hands were tied by the negotiations that had previously happened,” O’Neil said of Mikulski. “We recognize the tough spot she was in.”

O’Neil said food safety groups nevertheless hope to keep the pressure on Mikulski to get the language removed later this year, when the government must pass its next round of funding legislation.

 

(And to keep asking for money. And you see what your donations to the ”food safety groups” pay for – pro-Monsanto lies, wherever the Democratic Party is involved, and endlessly fruitless “working within the system”. It also gets you those groups’ more vicious support for Monsanto’s corporate state, through their cheerleading for the Food Control Act.)

 

CFS chief Andrew Kimbrell put it this way:

 

In this hidden backroom deal, Senator Mikulski turned her back on consumer, environmental, and farmer protection in favor of corporate welfare for biotech companies such as Monsanto. This abuse of power is not the kind of leadership the public has come to expect from Senator Mikulski or the Democrat Majority in the Senate.

 

Contrary to such lies, this is exactly the kind of “leadership” we can always expect from the Democratic Party. The evidence record is massive, longstanding, and unblemished. If Kimbrell believes it, he’s simply exhibiting a pathological level of flat-earth cult-think. 

 

This is a good example two allied phenomena:

 

1. System NGO types, and liberals in general, are there as pro-corporate triangulators. We have two opposed trenchlines, humanity against corporatism. Liberals, and especially NGO types, are out in no-man’s-land, running interference, obstructing our shots, and helping to set up corporate shots.

 

2. System NGO types, and liberals in general, are there to build a fence and patrol it. This fence is meant to fence in the acceptable kind of dissent, with reformist ideology, and actions like “vote for Democrats”, “petition Obama”, perhaps “file a lawsuit” (ouch! this rider puts a crimp in that one!), qualifying as acceptable. Meanwhile actual analysis and criticism of the system itself, and the ideas and actions of fighting for real structural change, including advocacy of things that the vast majority of humanity actually wants, are to be fenced out and forbidden.

 

In this case the “anti-GMO movement”, in the wretched state it currently is, felt very uncomfortable condemning a famous liberal Democrat, and in such a critical context as the deficit fraud, so the likes of the CFS rushed to try to lull any grassroots anger, and erstwhile anti-GMO reportage sites rushed to publish these lying extenuations.

 

How is it that an excellent journalism site like GMWatch doesn’t recognize pro-GMO policy and deficit scaremongering, always meant to generate the political environment for imposing “austerity”, as affiliated aspects of corporatism? How is it they don’t see the obvious affinity between the corporate media’s manufactured “GMO science” and its similarly manufactured “deficit economics”? As the pieces they aggregated here demonstrate, the corporate system lies about the alleged need for a “budget deal” in the exact same anti-evidence, anti-rational way it lies about the alleged need for GMOs.

 

This is an example of how, to build a true abolition movement, we need a far more holistically and systematically anti-corporatist orientation. As things are, even the better groups and sites frequently lapse into their own kind of anti-holistic “NPK mentality”, as Albert Howard called it. It’s not constructive to be anti-GMO within a myopic mindset inclined to uncritically accept other aspects of corporatism. That’s not going to work toward abolishing GMOs.

>

Money, Reprise

>

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?

>