We Need the Abolition of GMOs

>

1. Did the colonists Ask the British to rescind the Intolerable Acts, lift the Boston Port closure, take back the Coercive Acts? No, it only took them a few years from the mid 1760s to early 70s to comprehend that Asking the British for Better Policy doesn’t work, so they stopped doing it. They knew the only options were servitude, or to get the British OUT.

 

2. Today we’ve had far more than a few years to comprehend the same fact, that Asking the British doesn’t work. (It’s a sad fact of history that no one learns lessons from history, but must learn the same lesson from experience, over and over. So be it – our own experiential evidence is conclusive.) We’ve had over a century of experience with the elemental viciousness of the corporate domination imperative, which is totalitarian in the most basic and literal sense of the term - the corporations will NEVER stop short of total enclosure and total domination. This was common sense from the beginning, and it’s been proven by the evidence. The evidence of our own lifetimes is the most decisive of all.

 

3. We know that Asking the British doesn’t work. Those who tout modern versions like “writing your congressman”, “petitioning your president”, and of course “voting” (I mean those who tout these as the only, or primary, courses of action*), we must classify as modern versions of loyalists. Corporate Loyalists. These include all system NGOs, liberals in general, and conservatives too.

 

4. GMO labeling, where it’s seen as the goal rather than a step toward the goal, toward the total abolition of GMOs, falls into this begging-for-Better-Policy category.

 

5. In response to the lousy campaign and stolen vote in California, and belated analysis of the inherent flaw of the Labeling idea (as the end goal), some people have moved on to calling for a ban on GMOs. This is a step forward, but is still mired in system consciousness. Even if a legalistic ban were possible (which it’s not, at the central or at any state level, not right now), it would still be operating within the same corporatized framework where Monsanto operates. By making a fetish of “the law” and considering it magically endowed with active power, it implicitly concedes the legitimacy of existing law (for example the very intellectual property regime which props up Monsanto) and the central government itself. But we must, as an element of our political education, reject all such alleged legitimacy, in principle.

 

Here’s some typical examples of how the law really works: CAFOs, fracking, and mountaintop removal mining are exempt from the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act. And of course the just-passed (by a bipartisan consensus, as all these examples of corporate lawlessness are held) Monsanto Rider to a typical corporate welfare law would exempt GMOs from all regulatory control or judicial review. That’s the way “the law” works. Remember that the next time you see anyone blabbering about “the law” and “petitions” and ”voting”.

 

6. Food Sovereignty rejects the notion that an alien central government can ever play any legitimate or constructive role in food production and distribution. The sector is naturally local/regional. The only thing centralized hierarchy can do is use massive top-down power to force agriculture into the commodification strait-jacket. This command economy, and the massive corporate welfare and thug apparatus which props it up, is the basic activity of the US government. It will never do anything significant which runs counter to this corporate commodification imperative. Therefore, the people’s only constructive course of action is to build a grassroots political movement to meld with the Community Food sector which is already surging as a vibrant economic movement.

 

7. Therefore, the basic nature of the anti-GMO movement, as with the entire liberation movement, has to be direct action, self-management, civil disobedience – in our minds, in our words, and as much as possible in our actions.

 

8. That’s not to say legalistic actions, where immediately possible, aren’t worth doing. Any town council with the votes to ban GMOs, ban fracking, ban corporate personhood, declare local food sovereignty, should do so. But no such votes exist at the central government level. So those who propose a “ban” on GMOs are really proposing that we build a political campaign centered on this kind of legalistic advocacy (and without even building an underlying movement structure and culture first). This is as quixotic and utopian as an idea gets.

 

9. History and today’s evidence prove that nothing will work but to relocalize our economies and particularly our food; to build the consciousness of our economic need to do this; to build a cultural and intellectual movement around this new way of life; to build upon this a new democracy consciousness; throughout all these actions to learn from the enemy’s assaults upon us, the true nature of the corporate tyranny we struggle against; and from there to politically organize to resist, reject and abolish this enemy, through rejecting its legitimacy, refusing to cooperate with it, refusing to participate in its systems, and wherever possible to take local direct action against it. Combined, this movement can preserve itself through the trials ahead, maintain the health and happiness of its people, help bring down the corporate tyranny, and lead humanity through to a new freedom and prosperity.

 

10. As with every other anti-corporate struggle, the struggle vs. GMOs is an abolition movement.

 

[*The title of an upcoming food book by a leading system liberal: Eat,Drink,Vote. Yes, that sums up passive consumerism in its most profound form. A real citizen's book, meanwhile, would be entitled: Eat, Drink, Grow, Organize, Fight. But the job of system reformists is to fence in dissent, keep it domesticated and system-coordinated, and fence out the real time-tested ideas of action.]

 
<

The “Golden Rice” Fraud Continues: China Feeding Experiment

>

Question: Who, by its action, shows more concern with being accountable to the people, the Chinese government or a typical corporatized US university, Tufts?

 

In August 2012 Greenpeace broke the story of a joint US-China human feeding experiment with GMOs conducted upon Chinese schoolchildren. The feeding experiment took place in 2008. A Tufts cadre smuggled “golden rice” into China (which has strict import restrictions for GMOs). This GM rice was then fed to schoolchildren in the Hunan province. Chinese technicians presented the parents with consent forms which concealed the fact that GMOs were to be used. They told them it would be normal rice.

 

When the crime was made public and the government launched an investigation, the lead Chinese experimenter tried to cover it all up. This didn’t work, and the government has now fired three upper-level technocrats who led the experiment. That’s impressive in this age of shameless, openly criminal hierarchy.

 

More typical is the reaction of Tufts University, which issued a bland statement, in an annoyed tone, dismissing the Chinese action and referring to its own “investigation”, which we can be sure will be swift, thorough, and seek truth and justice, and won’t be a whitewash at all. 

 

Anyone want to bet on what the consequences will be for the Tufts “professors” involved? Probably a bonus to compensate them for their hurt feelings, what with the nasty things the Chinese parents are saying about them.

 

[This isn't meant to call the Chinese central government accountable. It's no more accountable or legitimate than the US central government. "China" is a technical power concentration just as organically fake as "the United States". Nevertheless, this instance demonstrates how, the rare times you can see any difference, it's the US system which is the least accountable to the people and the most congenitally contemptuous of us.]

 

The purpose of the experiment, as with all system-funded GMO experiments, is to further the corporate imperative: Total economic and political domination, through total enclosure and control of all food.

 

The “golden rice” scam is part of the publicity wing of the onslaught. Golden rice is fraudulently called the answer to vitamin A deficiency in the diets of children in many parts of the non-industrialized world. Even the mainstream media pieces reporting on this non-consensual feeding experiment repeat the lie that golden rice is intended to do this and can do it. (The MSM pieces I saw were from Britain and China, none from the US.)

 

The facts are that golden rice has such a meager amount of vitamin A that you’d need ”12 times the normal intake of 300 grams” a day to get nutritionally necessary amount. Meanwhile even this amount must be accompanied by the sufficient right kinds of fats and oils in the diet to digest it. This tends to be lacking in the overall diets of the people this rice is supposed to be fed to. So this alleged vitamin A source is also non-holistic with the diet of the people who would be eating it, and would for that reason be ineffective, even if it contained significant amounts of the vitamin, which it does not. African diets, for example, are not holistic with it. As for addressing famine (caused by corporatism itself), another alleged miracle of golden rice, by definition people who are starving won’t be consuming sufficient fats to properly digest rice, so it’s a fraud to give a hungry person rice and claim he’s getting the micronutrients from it.

 

Of course, “golden rice” is not in fact intended to supply anyone with sufficient dietary vitamin A. It’s intended to be a media ploy, and it’s been very successful at that. The GMO complex, as part of its “Feed the World” Big Lie, propagated the fraud that golden rice was an imminent miracle food. All around the world the corporate media took up and amplified the message: Golden Rice, and GMOs in general, were a wondrous boon to humanity. Picture if The Loch Ness chamber of commerce were to fabricate a press release declaring that there was documentary proof the monster is a dinosaur and that tourists from around the world should rush to Loch Ness to see it while they can, and the New York Times were to uncritically plaster this on the front page. That’s exactly what’s happened with ”golden rice” and similar GMO publicity stunts. 

 

This kind of PR campaign has been necessary because the facts of GMOs are more prosaic and mercenary: There are only two “real” kinds of GMOs, those engineered to resist insects (almost all of them are modified to express the insecticide Bt, Bacillus thuringiensis, in their cells), and those for herbicide tolerance (HT; so far they’ve been engineered to resist glyphosate; but with the rise of glyphosate-resistant superweeds and subsequent collapse of glyphosate as an effective herbicide, there are new generations of HT varieties in the pipeline, resistant to ever more toxic herbicides – 2, 4-D, dicamba, etc.).

 

All other alleged GMO types are really conventional varieties with a particular trait, engineered to be Bt-expressing and/or HT. For example the USDA itself admits that the soon-to-be-commercialized “drought resistant” GM corn is really no more drought resistant than the conventional variety it pirated, but is merely this same variety engineered to be Roundup Ready.

 

That unattractive truth is the reason the GMO complex needs poster children which will allegedly “feed the world”, cure disease, serve as nutritional panaceas, etc. That these are all lies, that these varieties either never effectively exist in the first place (for example the Kenyan GM sweet potato), or are redundantly engineered versions of things that already conventionally exist (for example the allegedly cancer-fighting purple tomato), are irrelevant to the corporate media, which slavers over these stories. Even the rare MSM outlets which are usually skeptical of GMOs turn into Monsanto groupies where it comes to one of these stories.

 

These ploys are also Trojan horses. “Golden rice” is pushed by USAid and other corporate front organizations posing as “humanitarian”. In the guise of offering GMO-based ”humanitarian aid” they try to get countries to lift import restrictions on GMOs. If this works they can then dump the “aid”, further ravaging the already-devastated indigenous food production of these economies (all hunger on Earth today is artificially caused by corporate globalization). Then the “humanitarian” GMOs will be followed through the protective door they kicked down by the regular onslaught of Bt and HT varieties, whose only purpose is commodification, enclosure, and enslavement.

 

Meanwhile, as always the true solution is ready at hand. Indigenous farmers can supply all the vitamin A any population needs with a regionally adapted diversity of green vegetables. But this would help keep communities intact, organic, and self-reliant. It would maintain community prosperity and happiness. It would decentralize power and freedom. It would hinder corporate hierarchy, enclosure, and tyranny. That’s why in the eyes of corporations, government, and media, it’s a non-solution.

 

>

Movement Focus – Community Food

<

I’ve made the strategic decision to focus, for however long the doldrum lasts, on the Community Food movement, “inducing” broader anti-corporate and Food Sovereignty ideas from that, rather than going into every situation calling for the immediate and full Food Sovereignty revolution. This movement has to be built, has to confederate, and has to directly fight the growing government/liberal attempt to repress it through the escalating “Food Safety” assault. (“Food Safety”, as I’ve written many times for years now, has the same character and serves the same purpose as the ”War on Terror”. Indeed the two are increasingly intermingled, as in the way the Food Control Act provides for massive shifting over power over the food supply to DHS. More clear evidence for how the military-industrial complex is increasingly a Monsanto adjunct, just like the FDA and USDA already are. We see how liberal fascists are on board with the whole program.)

 

So the basic activity:

 

1. Build the Community Food movement, as a viable economic sector and a political/community manifestation.

 

2. Counterattack industrial ag and the “Food Safety” assault. I think the fights against food corporatism in general and GMOs in particular are not just true and necessary, but are good political wedges, ideological sweet spots. Everyone except the most dedicated liberals fears and loathes these things, even if they passively accept them because they currently see no alternative. Our job is to present the alternative.

 

3. Elaborate Food Sovereignty philosophy, but not as part of the primary publicity campaign (which must focus on community food, food relocalization). This part is for within the movement.

 

4. In the course of these build the movement framework so that when the terminal crash is triggered the movement will be ready to aggressively propagate a philosophical solution and course of action, and be ready organizationally to receive the disintegrating masses.

 

I want to create an Internet forum dedicated to this project. In the meantime I’ll do the best I can with this solo blog, but it’s not the right vehicle, and I can’t do all the jobs myself. (Especially since I’m going to try to become a “professional” farmer in 2013.)

>

The Temporary Resumption of Petty Middle Class Faith

>

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.

>

Is the Triumph of Food Sovereignty Inevitable?

>

Let’s compare it to Marxism.

 

1. Marx saw industrialism as part of the normal development of history. (So he implicitly saw the modern level of energy consumption as permanent.) He thought it would naturally and inevitably generate a centralized industrial and finance structure and a physically centralized industrial proletariat. He also saw the evolution of democracy as a linear progress.

 

2. Marx thought the material conditions of capitalism would automatically generate proletarian consciousness, which would then drive the proletariat to abolish capitalism and establish communism. These developments would basically be stimulus-response. 

 

3. These ideas, which Marx saw as laws of history/nature, are summed up in the idea of historical materialism.

 

4. But things didn’t happen as Marx projected. Industrialism and finance physically and organizationally dispersed. I’ve previously made the point that corporatism has in a sense turned the tables of guerrilla warfare tactics. It’s corporate power which seems infinitely agile, concentrating at the enemy’s weak points and dispersing at any concentrated enemy attack. Meanwhile it’s the people, civil society, and democracy which have seemed lumbering, clumsy, off-balance, their own weight a weapon against them.

 

The industrial proletariat itself was also physically dispersed through globalization.

 

5. It turned out that the Western proletariat, to the extent it ever did concentrate, was pretty easily co-opted by the corporate system. Instead of naturally and spontaneously developing proletarian consciousness, it was co-opted and infused with petty bourgeois consciousness. The GI Bill, the subsidized car culture and mortgages which fostered suburbia, the ”American Dream” and “Ownership Society” propaganda campaigns, all did their work very effectively.

 

So Marx’s forecast of this particular automatic development of consciousness was disproven. It turns out the proletariat was not automatically going to do that, and was able to be indoctrinated into a different mindset. (This is confirmation of some elements of Lenin’s organizational philosophy.)

 

6. Meanwhile capitalism itself didn’t develop in the way Marx projected. It never liquidated all feudal vestiges, but conserved most of them (really all but the nominal trappings of monarchy, aristocracy, etc.). It turns out that “pure” capitalism was never going to exist, but rather at most a feudal-capitalist hybrid.

 

7. This is because history was in fact more materialistic than Marx’s historical materialist idea. Unlike Marx, history always understood that fossil fuels are not infinite, that the modern era of extreme energy consumption is not normal or natural, but rather a unique, ahistorical blip. It understood that modern industrialism is also a unique and ephemeral circumstance. Therefore it understood that pre-oil modes of organization, what we in the West can loosely call “feudal”, were not being abolished but were merely being temporarily modified for the high-energy age. The “bourgeois revolution” was really a kind of scam, and all the commentators like Tocqueville who noted how much was conserved instead of thrown out were recognizing the basic truth of the development.

 

(In the preceding passage I was using “history” as a metaphor for the truly material, unconscious forces driving the developments. Even at their most insane men can’t act completely against nature, and the finitude of fossil fuels was a constant material fact, even during the glory days of extraction.)

 

8. It turns out that historical materialism itself, and the predictions Marx derived from it, were part of the “superstructure” and one step removed from the real materialism of energy consumption.

 

That’s why Marx’s inevitabilities turned out to be contingent at best, and mostly failed to come true. His physical inevitabilities were wrong, and his psychological inevitabilities failed to materialize. It turns out that within the modern framework economic democracy was not fated to develop the way Marx projected. Does this mean the democratic evolution is not linear, but cyclical, and just as it surged with fossil fuels, so it’s fated to subside with them? Or could the development still be linear, with the modern pseudo-democratic co-optation being a temporary obstacle? More on that below.

 

9. We’re left, first, with the real material inevitabilities. These are the facts of fossil fuel depletion, fossil water depletion, soil exhaustion, and the degradation/depletion of every other natural resource.

 

10. I’ll focus on industrial agriculture. It’s guaranteed to collapse on account of any of four causes – fossil fuel depletion, fossil water depletion, phosphorus depletion, soil exhaustion. (Which of these will be the proximate cause is a horse race.) It could also collapse even ahead of these because of the climate change it’s causing (industrial agriculture is the #1 greenhouse gas emitter), or the superweeds and/or superbugs it’s generating, mostly via GMOs.

 

11. Therefore humanity certainly will return to historically normal modes of food production and distribution. Food production will once again be 100% organic, to use the modern term for the traditional. Markets and distribution will once again be predominantly local/regional. These are physically guaranteed.

 

12. How painful this transformation will be, whether it must mean mass famine, whether we’ll be left at first with woefully denuded soil which will take centuries to rebuild, will be functions of how strong a Food Sovereignty movement we can build prior to and during this collapse, and how forcibly corporatism is able to keep a death grip on power for how long. Corporatism will certainly try to force total devastation upon humanity, since it would rather see humanity starve and die than achieve freedom. It would rather see genocide than relinquish power. It’s too early to know if the forces of evil will be able to hang on once they start to weaken, or whether they’ll collapse quickly in spite of their malevolent will. But there’s no doubt that the stronger humanity’s own organization against this curse and toward its own future, the better a chance we’ll have of averting the worst. But all these things seem to be open questions.

 

13. As for the consciousness of democracy and freedom in themselves, we’ve certainly assimilated the ideas as completely as a species can. This goes with modern agroecological knowledge as one of the two great heritages of modernity we can take with us beyond it, if we choose.

 

14. What does it mean to say humanity “can choose” something? It’s natural for a species to seek its own aggregate survival, under the best conditions possible. We don’t usually say a non-human species “chooses” to seek to survive and triumph. Is there any reason to think homo sapiens is different?

 

15. If not, and if it’s true that our best chance to continue to eat going forward is to organize toward that goal, does this mean that affirmative imperatives like Food Sovereignty (and negative ones like the total abolition of GMOs) are not just political but biological imperatives? And if this is true, does that mean that the triumph of Food Sovereignty is inevitable?

>

Left vs. Right

>

Is this spectrum meaningful? Was it ever? On what basis?

 

In my search for a rigorous definition, a while ago I settled on: “Left” and “Right” are different factions arguing over how to divvy up the oil surplus and the general wealth of oil-driven industrialization. The distinction doesn’t seem to work very well for pre-oil periods. I’ve read a lot on Ancient Greece and Rome, for example, and find it difficult to read this dichotomy back into those times and places.

 

So the Left-Right thing is a feature of modernity. (The definition of “modern”: The unique period of ahistorically high energy consumption on account of the fossil fuel drawdown.) It has little validity for normal pre-oil history, and will likely have little for the post-oil resumption of normality. It follows that this distinction will also have little validity for the relocalization and Food Freedom movement, since these are on the vector of normal history. Sure enough, Food Freedom cuts across conventional Left-Right boundaries in rejecting both government and corporate hierarchies, rejecting the entire “public-private” dichotomy as fraudulent, rejecting all centralized false culture from country-based patriotism to liberal “multiculturalism”, while respecting the precedents of traditional community life including and especially the tribal cultures of indigenous peoples. Those are a few examples. I’d also say that the gathering global civil war between humanity and those who wish to force humanity to literally ingest nothing but poison is an eschatology vastly transcending and dwarfing all the picayune squabbles of “left” vs. “right”.

 

Speaking of which, Left vs. Right was also often an argument over how to divvy up the fruits of crime as well, since most Westerners of either ideological persuasion agreed in principle on the total exploitation of the non-Western world. 

 

What are core Left principles? For me, for example, any meaningful distinction has to divide between pro- and anti-globalization. Is anti-globalization a left principle? Not historically – communism and liberalism have always been pro-globalization in principle. Industrial organic, “fair trade”, “sustainable development”, all are beloved of liberals and various motley radical chic-ists. While it can be argued that liberalism was always a “right”-tending ideology, to argue that industrial communism wasn’t “leftist” would seem bizarre. Certainly, there are anti-communist forms of socialism. But communism must surely be part of “the left”, if that term’s to have any historical meaning at all. But since it was pro-globalization, it also proves that “left-right” is not sufficient to humanity’s needs, since humanity needs to dissolve the globalist tyranny.

 

Is environmental stewardship a Left principle? It wasn’t for communism in practice. Indeed, for all the attempts of Monthly Review and others to reinvent Marx himself as caring about stewardship, this clearly wasn’t a mainstream element of his philosophy. But this stewardship principle is clearly part of humanity’s great need.

 

Those are just two examples of how “the Left” is insufficient for humanism, democracy, and freedom. That “the Right” hates those things was always self-evident.

 

So it’s pumping a dry well to keep framing things in terms of this obsolete, oil-dependent, and morally insufficient dichotomy. We seek a whole new politics which in many ways shall be old politics, but fertilized with the freedom and democracy ideology which was one of the two great gifts of modernity (the other was modern organic agroecological science).

 

Here’s some ways of expressing the only meaningful spectrum today:

 

Democracy vs. elitism.

 

Freedom vs. enclosure.

 

Natural abundance vs. artificial scarcity.

 

Democracy vs. corporatism.

 

Humanity vs. corporations.

>

Pollan is Mystified

>

Michael Pollan:

 

Q: Are there any positive advances that biotech has made recently in the food industry? Any on the horizon?

 

A: They’ve been on the ever-retreating horizon for a long time. I started writing about biotech in ’98 and I remember being told by executives at Monsanto that Roundup and Bt were just the first chapter in this wonderful story and within five years so many other interesting crops, crops that could withstand saline or salty soil or crops that could withstand drought or crops that might even be able to fertilize themselves with fixed nitrogen, crops with higher yields and for reasons that remain something of a mystery to me, those wonders have yet to appear. I don’t know why, whether they’re proving harder to engineer than expected might be one reason. Or they could tell you regulatory hurdles are standing in the way but in fact there are very few regulatory hurdles introduced in these crops.

 

Allow me to lift the veil of mystery for Mr Pollan:

 

G……M……Os……DON’T……WORK.

 

The fact is that only two things about GMOs ever sort-of worked for a little while: Herbicide tolerance and internal pesticide expression. As predicted by anyone who knows even the slightest bit about how nature works, the weeds and pests which Roundup and Bt expression were supposed to suppress quickly transformed themselves into Roundup-resistant superweeds and Bt-resistant superbugs. Roundup has totally collapsed. (Which is why the next generation of 2,4-D resistant GMOs is in the pipeline. This ever-escalating herbicide treadmill is an intended outcome of corporate/government policy. Otherwise the USDA would admit that herbicide tolerant GMOs don’t work and refuse to authorize any further commercialization of them.) Bt crops no longer work, and ever more toxic pesticides need to be sprayed on them.

 

In fact, we’re left with only two meager things that GMOs do as advertised: Bt crops do express Bt toxin, even though it no longer works. And glyphosate-resistant crops can have glyphosate sprayed upon them without killing them, which doesn’t help because glyphosate also doesn’t kill the weeds it was supposed to kill.

 

That’s all GMOs do.

 

And for that worthless performance, we’re willing to physically poison ourselves and economically and politically enslave ourselves? I think humanity better wake up and abolish GMOs, by whatever means necessary, while there’s still time.

 

But the fact that we’re not likely to do so with any help from liberal elitists is exemplified here: “I await those products and I would love to see this industry make a significant contribution to solving one of the world’s problems. But they’ve been promising that for a long time and have so far grossly under-delivered.”

 

Pollan doesn’t specify which “problems” he means. He knows perfectly well that the only problems with the world’s food are problems caused by corporatism, especially GMO corporatism, and that the only solution is the abolition of food corporatism. But as a good technocratic and pro-corporate elitist he can’t countenance real solutions.

 

Like all liberals, in the end he’s a triangulator in the total war of corporations vs. humanity. He wants to procure somewhat Better Policy within the corporate framework, but also wants to run interference on behalf of corporatism. In the end, when they’re finally forced to choose, most of them will side with Monsanto.

>

NOW Obama’s Going to do Good Stuff! (Michael Pollan version)

>

Here’s a good test of liberal Obama-worship, a prediction by Michael Pollan:

 

“I think we will stop subsidizing biofuels very soon, perhaps right after the election.”

 

Obama, of course, has been aggressively pro-ethanol so far.

 

Pollan’s a typical case. He spent eight Bush years calling for bottom-up food relocalization and warning against technocratic control of our food, including faith in the central government. As soon as Obama came along, Pollan performed a 180 degree flip-flop. Suddenly the future of the food movement depended on begging elites for Better Policy. This included support for the Food Control Act, whereby Pollan mystically believes that giving far more power to the Monsanto-adjunct FDA will, by magic, make it less pro-Monsanto. Someone with common sense might be forgiven for suspecting that it’ll merely help the FDA further Big Ag’s interest even more aggressively, but then we’re not initiates of the liberal cargo cult.

 

At least Pollan supported the Right to Know initiative, so he’s a somewhat less pure liberal elitist than the scum mentioned in this piece, who opposed the initiative simply because as a good “process” liberal he “distrusts” filthy peasant ballot initiatives as such.

 
>

Draft Notes for A Raw Milk Presentation

>

[This is a first draft, and will use tinkering, maybe some shuffling, and a source list for the evidence.]

 

[[1. Introduction and Plan - Raw Milk as an Economic and Health Imperative.]] 

 

*[Open with one's personal story], and it’s very important to me that I feed my family healthy, nutritious food. I also want as much as possible to buy and eat locally, because this helps me really know my food, my farmer, and helps rebuild the local economy and community.

 

*I want to include cow’s milk in their diet, but I was suspicious of pasteurized industrial milk. I’d heard that pasteurization destroys many of the beneficial parts of the milk and may have bad health effects. I was also suspicious of the fact that raw milk has been criminalized in many states like New Jersey and is the subject of federal persecution, even though almost all food outbreaks are caused by the very same corporate Big Agriculture system the government does all it can to force upon us. I decided that as a citizen I needed to research this for myself. This presentation sums up what I learned.

 

*I learned a lot about the economics of the food system, about food safety, and how the government and the corporate media turn ideas about food safety upside down, in order to further the brutal economics of corporate food system, and to suppress our attempts to learn about our food and to find healthy alternatives to the unhealthy system. There are many ways to analyze this subject. Today I’ll discuss as it relates to raw milk.

 

*Under pressure from the industrial dairy system and systematic government policy, tens of thousands of small dairies have been destroyed since the mid 20th century. New Jersey used to have thousands of dairies which marketed locally, such as the renowned Walker-Gordon Dairy Farm in Plainsboro. Now only a handful remain, none of them marketing to the community. They’re all just cogs in the globalized corporate dairy system. This is one example of how the corporate assault has gutted our local economies, rendering us dependent upon an alien system, degrading our quality of life, driving up our cost of living, and making us and our children sick. In light of energy supply crunches, the escalating price of energy and food, the way the industrial system poisons us, and all the evils of our dependency upon the corporate system, we need to rebuild our local and regional economies.

 

*The most important part of this is restoring the food economy to its natural local and regional character. A revived network of small dairies serving local and regional markets is a key part of the economic rebuilding. Reviving the traditional raw milk economy can be the road to rebuilding our own dairies.

 

*This is also a key battleground, in substance and symbol, in our fight for Food Freedom, for freedom against corporate domination and government tyranny in general.

 

*Raw milk is legal to buy from farms in 26 states. Various kinds of retail sales are legal in 10 states. The result is that a few states have regular legal sales, others allow sales from the farm, others explicitly or implicitly allow cow shares. This is where the customers are part-owners of the cow, and the farmer is just a manager. There’s never any significant safety issue with raw milk in these states. The record proves that raw milk is wholesome and safe. Since it’s legal to buy in many states, it should be legal to buy in all states.

 

*Although there’s no safety reason why milk should be criminalized, for economic and political reasons it’s currently illegal in New Jersey. In 2011 a bill to partially decriminalize it had majority support and was voted out of the Assembly with a huge majority. That’s why a Senate committee let it die on the vine without bringing it up for a vote. The same bill was reintroduced in 2012*************************

 

*Why was raw milk outlawed in New Jersey and many other states, and why is it the target of a federal government assault? In spite of government and media lies, it’s not a food safety issue. As we’ll see, the evidence proves this to be a lie. I just gave the real reason – the goal of government pasteurization mandates and its attacks on alternative milk economies is the same as its goal for Big Ag in general and its general attack on all alternative food economies. It’s to enforce total corporate domination of the food supply and destroy all Food Freedom, which means crushing all human freedom.

 

*In New Jersey, this artificial barrier is why more and more people are traveling to New York and Pennsylvania to get milk, instead of buying it at our choice of New Jersey dairies, thereby helping to rebuild our farming economy and keeping our dollars in our local economies. They’re doing it because they know that raw milk is a safe, nutritious whole food, that it contains a natural mix of nutrients and beneficial bacteria, and that pasteurized milk is nutritionally sterile, causes or exacerbates many illnesses, and is likely to contain harmful bacteria.

 

[[2. Raw Milk vs. Pasteurized - Health Facts.]]

 

*Raw milk is a wholesome, beneficial, nutritious, safe food. Like any whole food, it has the right natural balance of proteins, fats, enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and micro-organic communities.

 

*Raw milk has the perfect balance of protein to fat, by natural design. It’s rich in healthful Omega-3 fats and in the fatty acid CLA, or conjugated linoleic acid, which is a potent cancer fighter.

 

*Raw milk has more nutrients than pasteurized. It has high levels of whole vitamin A, the B-complex, D, and E. These are all degraded or destroyed in pasteurization. Today’s factory farm cows are crammed full of hormones and drugs to maximize production, which dilutes the milk’s nutritional content. Pasteurization then further destroys what’s there. That’s why pasteurized milk has to be ”enriched” with synthetic versions of these vitamins. These synthetics are potentially harmful, as in the case of synthetic vitamin D which has been linked to heart disease.

 

*Raw milk is great for the digestive tract. Its proteins, fats, and lactose are easily digested. Beneficial micro-organisms help with this. Meanwhile, pasteurization kills these micro-organisms and changes the molecular structure of many proteins, fats, enzymes, and nutrients in the milk, rendering many indigestible, others digested in potentially harmful forms. Its lactose is indigestible to more and more people.

 

*Raw milk is also has its vitamins and minerals in an easily digestible form. Calcium and phosphorus absorption are highest with raw milk. The whole vitamins A and D in butterfat are needed for the assimilation of calcium and protein. Milk’s beneficial bacteria help with the uptake.

 

*These beneficial bacteria also help to enhance the immune system, as a recent study demonstrated. [AMISH] Beneficial micro-organisms contribute over 70% or our protective immunity. By natural design, raw milk is one of the main sources of those natural immunofactors.

 

*Another new study [CALIFORNIA] provides further reinforcement for the fact that the control of harmful bacteria is a function of natural balances of micro-organisms. In a symbiotic microbial environment, as with raw milk, beneficial micro-organisms compete with potentially harmful ones and secrete antimicrobial factors against them. By natural design, raw milk contains antibodies against potentially harmful bacteria.

 

*Raw milk is a key part of the diet that’s best for dental health. In the 1930s, studies by Dr. Weston Price established that where tribes had cuisines based on raw milk, the people were healthy and had near-perfect teeth. Meanwhile cavities and other dental problems are associated with processed foods including pasteurized milk.

 

*The nutritional, molecular, and microbial distortion and destruction caused by pasteurization creates a kind of food which is hard to digest and contains many potentially harmful adulterants. This is why pasteurized milk is associated with causing or aggravating a long list of diseases and other ailments, while switching to raw milk leads to the alleviation or complete cessation of these illnesses. Such studies as [********], as well as the testimony of millions of raw milk drinkers, attests to this. In general, most diseases are directly or indirectly associated with the industrial food system, and their cure or alleviation is associated with switching to a traditional diet of healthy whole foods. The case is especially clear with natural raw milk vs. pasteurized industrial milk.

 

*Food allergies are a clear-cut disease of industrial food. They’ve especially skyrocketed in recent decades. Pasteurized milk is the #1 most allergenic food in America. Studies have documented how milk allergies cause nasal congestion, asthma and other chest infections, skin rashes, vomiting and diarrhea, and many other digestive and other problems. For many of these sufferers who would otherwise have to give up milk completely, switching to raw milk cures the illness.

 

*Pasteurized milk is the cause of lactose intolerance, an ailment so common as to be practically endemic to our society. The reason for lactose intolerance is that pasteurization destroys lactase, an enzyme necessary for the digestion of lactose.

 

*Pasteurized milk is associated with arthritis, while raw milk is associated with its remission[, especially rheumatoid arthritis in children].

 

*Rates of autism have also skyrocketed, and here too there’s a clear link with diet, and with pasteurized milk in particular. Pasteurization destroys many enyzmes in the milk necessary for its proper digestion and renders the key protein casein indigestible. The milk is then digested in such a way that naturally occurring opiods and other factors which would normally be broken down are instead directly assimilated. This aggravates autism symptoms. But many parents of autistic children testify that switching to raw milk has greatly alleviated their children’s symptoms.

 

*Infants show reduced growth and health on pasteurized milk vs. raw breast milk.

 

*Those are some of the most important examples. A partial list of the ailments where the same pasteurized vs. raw milk dynamic has been observed includes multiple sclerosis, Attention Deficit Disorder, prostate and urinary tract problems, obesity, diabetes, thyroid conditions, osteoperosis, and kidney disease. 

 

[[3. Food Safety and CAFOs.]]

 

*What about the safety issue? The government and the mainstream media claim that raw milk is unsafe. But the numbers don’t bear this out. In fact, the numbers show the opposite. Dairy products in general are responsible for far fewer acute outbreaks than meats or salad greens. And pasteurized milk has caused far more outbreaks than raw milk.

 

*There have been few illnesses attributed to raw milk. Those which have been are often attributed through a fraudulent epidemiology which performs extensive tests only where the patient has ingested raw milk, and which assumes the raw milk as the cause, but which doesn’t bother with the tests or with further inquiry into the cause where the patient did not drink raw milk. It’s easy to see how under such a procedure raw milk’s outbreak record will be falsely inflated and will be inflated relative to all other foods. 

 

*The Centers for Disease Control itself counts 422,000 cases of illness from pasteurized milk since 1973, including 20 deaths (80 counting miscarriages). in the most recent fatal case, in 2007 three people died in Massachusetts from listeria-contaminated pasteurized milk. This is compared to 1100 cases and zero deaths from raw milk. All salmonella outbreaks from milk in recent decades were from pasteurized milk. Both in absolute numbers and compared to the proportion of people drinking pasteurized vs. raw milk, these data demonstrate that industrial pasteurized milk is not the “safe food” the government claims it to be, and is far less safe than raw milk.

 

 

*These numbers involve acute outbreaks of food-related illness. When we get to chronic illness we get into a whole new realm of difference between harmful industrial foods like pasteurized milk and healthful whole foods like raw milk.

 

*Industrial milk is produced in factory farms, or CAFOs, which stands for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. That name’s more honest than “farms”, hmm? Thousands of animals are packed into small enclosures under horrific and filthy conditions where they can be most “efficiently” fed synthetic food, pumped full of hormones and antibiotics, and have their products harvested.

 

*CAFOs are cesspools of germs and filth. The animals are permanently sick. The system requires massive injections of antibiotics and other drugs just to keep the animals alive and producing. Dairy cows also receive antibiotics and hormones to boost their milk production. This use of antibiotics is reckless and against medical science. The milk is produced under such filthy and germ-infested conditions that it’s badly contaminated. It’s laden with the residues of all the chemicals injected and force-fed into the animal. On account of the stress on the animal’s system, as much as 30% of CAFO milk is pus. That’s what an open sore a factory-farmed dairy cow is.

 

*The residues of the antibiotics are in the milk, and this reckless and unmedical use of antibiotics generates antibiotic resistant bacteria which are also in the milk. Pasteurization doesn’t always kill all of these harmful CAFO bacteria. We then drink these antibiotic-resistant microbes, which can transfer their resistance to other microbes in our bodies. This makes it less likely that antibiotics will work if we get sick from bacteria. That’s how CAFOs are a public health ticking time bomb for all of us. Drinking pasteurized milk may render us more vulnerable on the level of our individual health.

 

*CAFOs are cesspools, where animal products including milk are produced in a filthy manner. The milk is full of CAFO germs, fecal particles, drug residues, pus, and other pollutants. The industrial system then uses pasteurization as a panacea.

 

*Raw milk dairies are by their very nature small and for local and regional distribution. In spite of government and media lies, raw milk dairies are far more clean and safe than those for pasteurized milk. Proper inspection can confirm this. (Incidentally, the government makes almost no effort to inspect CAFOs. What would there by to inspect anyway? It’s government policy to allow industrial milk to be produced under cesspool conditions.) 

 

*Pasteurization as a practice is part of the false ideology that proper sanitation and safety measures means total sterilization. In truth sterilization of food is impossible, unnatural, and unhealthy. In truth natural whole foods include communities of micro-organisms where beneficial and neutral microbes tend to keep naturally harmful ones in check. [CALIFORNIA study] But quasi-sterility, as is temporarily generated by pasteurization, is a monoculture, and monocultures are always bad for biodiversity and favorable to vermin and pathogens. Pasteurized milk, even if the pasteurization does initially kill all the bacteria, becomes over time a favorable environment for harmful bacteria to return and proliferate, while the organic bacteria communities in raw milk tend to maintain their bacterial balance over time. That’s why raw milk sours over time, while pasteurized milk rots.

 

*The facts, contrary to the sterilization ideology and pasteurization practice, are that we depend upon beneficial bacteria and that it’s not possible to destroy only harmful bacteria. The fact is that imbalances of harmful bacteria are rare in nature but common in CAFOs, and that an imbalance can infect an entire commingled industrial batch. Pasteurization was a response to this need of industrial milk production and corporate distribution systems. It has nothing to do with the inherent safety of natural milk or of local production and distribution.

 

*Pasteurization is a scorched earth tactic in the form of scorched milk. It’s the equivalent of wiping out a whole ecosystem to get rid of one intermittent pest, which wouldn’t be a pest if you worked in harmony with that ecosystem instead of against it.  

 

*The CAFO system incubates the MAP bacteria, Mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis, which causes Johnes’ disease in cattle and Crohn’s disease in humans. In addition to its faulty record in eradicating other harmful bacteria, pasteurization often does not kill the MAP bacteria, according to [European studies] which found that 5-20% of pasteurized milk contains this potentially harmful bacteria. The surge in Crohn’s disease has occurred in the age of filthy factory farm production and the pasteurization necessary to make this filthy milk consumable by humans.

 

*We already discussed the vast array of chronic diseases which are caused or aggravated by consumption of pasteurized milk, but which are alleviated or not affected by consuming raw milk.

 

*The CDC counts 5000 deaths per year from food-borne disease. This does not include deaths from MRSA, Crohn’s, cancer linked to pesticides, diabetes or asthma linked to diet, Mad Cow disease, all the chronic diseases caused by the factory farm cesspool and GMOs. Then we must add the chronic diseases and acute afflictions of the industrial food system in general – heart disease, stroke, type-2 diabetes, many cancers, high blood pressure, obesity and its related maladies.

 

*All this proves once and for all that the government lies when it claims to care about food safety at all. No one who cares about food safety would build a planned economy around commodity grains and “food” processed from them. No one who cares about food safety would have commercialized GMOs with zero safety testing. No one who cares about food safety would allow the practice of nonmedical antibiotic use. No one who cares about food safety would be doing anything but fighting to abolish all these. Anyone who’s involved in these policies, or supports them, has zero credibility to then turn around and claim to be concerned about raw milk.

 

*And then we see the government’s overwhelming record of neglect, lassitude, cover-ups, and obstruction where it comes to outbreaks caused by big corporations like Wright Eggs, or Cargill, or Taco Bell, or Westco Peanuts.

 

[[4. The Real Political Import and Conclusion.]]

 

*The government’s real interest is not food safety, or serving the public in any way. The government’s real interest is Big Dairy’s interest. That’s why the government imposed industrial pasteurization in the first place, and why it wants to outlaw raw milk. As I mentioned earlier, pasteurization was never a response to a naturally occurring safety problem, but a special response to the special problems generated by the industrialization of milk. It has nothing to do with the needs or issues of natural milk production or the natural economy of milk.

 

*This is a microcosm of how all government policy has the solitary goal of further centralizing, further consolidating, further concentrating the corporate food system, increasing corporate profits, and maximizing corporate enclosure and domination of food and of everything else.

 

*In response to this joint corporate-government onslaught, the people are rising with a new movement to take back our Food Freedom and rebuild our local economies. The raw milk movement is part of this. As with every other aspect of the local food movement, its dual goal is healthy food instead of the toxic food of the industrial system, and healthy local economies instead of the toxic and tyrannical corporate economy.

 

*This is the real reason for the government’s assault on raw milk. This is a microcosm of and template for the government’s assault on all alternative food production. As we speak, the so-called Food Safety Modernization Act is planned to be the centerpiece coordinating legislation for the total domination of food. It’s meant to use the “food safety” scam we’ve been highlighting here to impose upon the produce sector the same level of corporate concentration and government control as already exists in the meat sector. As we’ve seen with meats, the government policy does not make the food more safe, instead makes it less safe, but does serve to bring it more firmly under the control of a handful of big corporations. This is the federal government’s one and only imperative where it comes to all food policy.

 

*Raw milk isn’t an isolated food issue, but is in many ways the most typical food issue of all. It perfectly crystallizes all the aspects of Food Freedom against corporate totalitarianism; and real nutrition, health, and safety against the toxic opposites of these being forced upon us by the industrial food system. On the broader level Food Freedom crystallizes all the aspects of nature vs. corporate industrialism, individual and community freedom vs. tyrannical government, prosperity based on productive local economies vs. the stagnation, sterility, dependency, and despair of the corporate global economy being imposed upon us by government policy.

 

*Raw milk is a wonderful food. It’s good for us. It’s a delicious, nutritious whole food. It helps build our immune system. It helps cure or alleviate many of the diseases caused by industrial food. It’s economically and politically beneficial. It’s part of the social movement toward getting to know farmers and real food, and becoming producers of such food ourselves. It’s good for us, body and soul.

 

*So the fight for raw milk freedom is the fight for our individual liberty and health. It’s the fight for Food Freedom. Beyond this it’s part of the fight for human freedom itself. 

 

 

—————————

 

*STUFF ON RM OUTBREAKS, RECALLS, SLANDERS – FOR SUPPLEMENT – The government does not publicize these systemic figures. It does try to turn each alleged raw milk incident into a three ring circus. But alleged raw milk outbreaks are seldom well documented, often simply invented by the fraudulent epidemiology we discussed earlier. And in many cases the government retracts its initial allegations, as in the case of some illnesses in California in 2006 which were initially blamed on Organic Pastures Dairy, but which turned out to have nothing to do with raw milk.

 

*(insert somewhere?) They’re literal cesspools when you include the vast manure lagoons which spread out from any big CAFO, toxifying the entire landscape and atmosphere. 

 

>

“Libertarians” Are For Big Government

>

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”.

>