African Wannsee Conference; Or, Bono Parties With Monsanto

>

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

***

 

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

>
>

GMO Empire: Thesis Statement

>

Wednesday’s post sums up my thesis: Capitalism/corporatism must reach its fatal limit at the limits of the Earth itself, at which point, like the proverbial shark no longer able to swim, it must stagnate, sink, collapse.

 

GMOs comprise an attempt to overcome this limit by using technology to turn the globe itself into a slate which can be wiped clean and written on all over again, over and over and over. Each iteration is a new round of capitalist accumulation, each more vicious than the last, each following more closely upon the other.

 

This is the totalitarian extreme of the corporate imperative, and the basis of total corporate domination.

 

I’ll expand upon this. I’ll describe corporate food imperialism in general, and how GMOs are its ultimate manifestation. I’ll describe how the corporate state’s thuggery on behalf of the GMO rackets and welfare handouts to them are the most typical actions of this state’s general activity.

 

To provide evidence for this thesis, I’ll also demonstrate:

 

1. That no one within the system cares about whether GMOs increase yield. (They don’t.)

 

2. That no one cares about “feeding the world”. (It’s long been proven that corporate agriculture cannot do this and doesn’t want to do this. GMOs continue the pattern of decades.)

 

3. That no one cares whether GMOs reduce herbicide or pesticide use. (They increase it.)

 

4. That no one cares whether GMOs control weeds or insects. (On the contrary, they automatically generate superweeds and superbugs.)

 

5. That no one cares about drought resistance and other alleged traits. (GMOs can’t accomplish these.)

 

6. That no one cares if GMOs contaminate other crops and the environment at large. (They inevitably do.)

 

7. That no one cares if GMOs are safe. (As a matter of policy and dogma, no systematic safety testing was ever done on ANY GMO.)

 

8. That no amount of evidence that they’re unsafe will ever sway system policy and propaganda. (The ad hoc testing which has been done, and by now there’s been a lot of it, including rigged tests done by the GMO rackets themselves, has unanimously found potential problems for human health, usually severe ones. Not a single test has EVER given GMOs a clean bill of health.)

 

9. That no one cares that every polity everywhere, with no exceptions, given any chance to democratically express its will, has rejected GMOs.

 

10. That no one cares that agroecology has been proven to outperform industrial ag, including GMOs, according to every measure.

 

I think that if you put 1-10 together (and there may be others I’m not thinking of offhand), they constitute proof that the system’s top-down forcing of GMOs (a command economic policy by any measure; no polity anywhere has ever endorsed them or failed to reject them given a chance) has nothing to do with any consideration at all other than the profit imperative, the corporate domination imperative, the totalitarian power imperative.

 

I’m planning to write this up as a long essay/draft for a book. My posts here will be at first notes toward this project, and later drafts for it.

 

 

The Imperialism of GMOs

>

Star Trek II and its sequel featured a thing called the Genesis Device. It was allegedly to be used to seed barren planets and moons with proliferant life. But what if, instead of deploying it on a barren planet the powers that be fired it into a planet which already had indigenous life? It would be a weapon of planetary genocide and ecocide. The skeptics were right to see it this way. How could power have any other ultimate plan for it? Even if we grant the legendary “good intentions” at the outset, once all the so-called empty space is filled, action demands that the already-occupied space be re-occupied. This is the fundamental logic of power, which history proves can never stop concentrating and aggressing once it’s allowed to begin the concentration process.

 

Capitalism/corporatism represents the ultimate form of this totalitarian process. It elegantly concentrates all the energies of greed, aggression, powerlust, egotism, sadism, and hatred, placing them all at the service of profiteering. The profit motive is in turn the most purely concentrated sociopathic assault on every value, institution, and physical thing, except insofar as any of these can serve the ends of profit. Profit is the one and only end. All means, literally all of existence, are to be judged instrumentally, relative to this end. Corporations, purely sociopathic in principle, obligated in principle to the profit motive and nothing but the profit motive, are the organizational form of this totalizing process.

 

Imperialism is “the highest form of capitalism”, as Lenin called it. By this he meant that capitalism/corporatism has no choice but to completely encompass the globe, since by its nature it can tolerate no limit upon its expansion. Up against any limit whatsoever, profiteering immediately stagnates and soon collapses. It must fully reach the extreme limits of the Earth itself, and then dream of going beyond. As Cecil Rhodes eloquently put it, ”I would annex the stars if I could.”

 

But notions of interstellar colonization and asteroid mining are pipe dreams. If there were ever enough fossil fuels to seed such projects, they’ve long since been squandered on more terrestrial luxuries. Alas, corporatism is stuck with the planet it has, and must kill and violently die upon it. Expansion, colonization, financialization, the corporate welfare state, these are all attempts at meta-profiteering (“super-profits”, in Lenin’s term). At the same time the new feudalism is trying to use its globalized phony cash/debt economy to gather all real assets and resources in its hands. But this too has a strict limit. In the end, the Earth is finite, and its most important resources, those of food and water, are renewable. They’re the essence of the globe’s indigenous cycle of life. Humanity is anchored in this cycle, and when the vicious parasite is finally purged, humanity amid nature shall remain intact.

 

But what if the corporate imperative could find a way to destroy indigenous nature and replace it with a proprietary, enclosed pseudo-nature sufficient to sustain hominid life*? This would, at one stroke, wipe the slate clean and replace a full planet with an empty one, ready to be recolonized and re-enclosed. At the same time it would wipe out the final landbase for any form of independent human existence. Once we’re forced into dependence upon Monsanto for our literal food – first politically, through tyrannical police enforcement of patent prerogatives, and eventually physically, as the seeds will be engineered to render their replanting physically impossible – it will be the end of any human hope whatsoever.

 

That’s the goal of GMO imperialism. To drive out nature itself and replace it with a corporatized pseudo-flora and fauna. This will be the death blow to democratic resistance, and will open up an entire, literal new world for capitalist accumulation and domination. In principle this process will be infinitely repeatable, as each genetically engineered “order” is superseded by a new one. (Just like how Louis XIV would sell titles of nobility, then declare them void and resell them. Repeat as necessary.) Each time the globe shall be wiped clean, to present capitalism with a blank slate. This will be the final, fullest development of disaster capitalism (which by now is synonymous with capitalism itself). This will be the ultimate harmony of total destructive chaos and total order. This harmonized contradiction is the holy grail of totalitarianism.

 

*GMOs cannot in fact sustain life, and everything I just described is insane. They’ve done nothing but fail in every way – at yield, at controlling pests and weeds, at meeting environmental challenges – while steadily subverting our physical health and fertility. They can lead to nothing but total biological collapse. It would be a race to see what happens first – a catastrophic crop failure and subsequent famine pandemic, or a non-linear health cataclysm suddenly crippling us after years of ingesting these poisons.

 

But this is completely irrelevant to the corporate imperative, which cares about nothing but carrying out its power mission for as long as it exists. Think of the Terminator and its single-minded murderous focus. That’s the character of psychopathic totalitarianism. Indeed, this appetite for collapse is a feature, not a bug. The system considers the hyper-vulnerability of monoculture in general and GMO monoculture in particular to be desirable. That’s part of why the system is so unconcerned with the predicted and now documented rise of Bt- and herbicide-resistant superbugs and superweeds. This was always a desired outcome, since it now escalates biological warfare, requiring the purchase of ever greater amounts and varieties of herbicide and ever more expensive proprietary seeds. Each new GMO generation is more expensive than the failed one it must replace. GMOs were the epitome of disaster capitalism from their inception. We already knew that corporate agriculture, contrary to its propaganda, seeks scarcity and disaster, not plenty. Only continuous disaster makes capitalism/corporatism possible at all. Thus we have the preparation of the GMO Genesis Device, whose goal is to wipe out a flourishing living planet and fill the artificial dead zone with its synthesized ”life”, whose one and only goal will be to continue the hideous death march of profit.

 

***

 

The situation is untenable and intolerable. We must, with all organized speed, decentralize, relocalize, and democratize food production and distribution, on a truly organic basis.

>
>

Genetics and Environment (And GMOs)

>

That everything’s “in our genes”, and that this is more important than environmental factors, is another notion that’s rapidly becoming a Big Lie as the contrary evidence piles up on all fronts.

 

For example, a new Stanford study on spiking autism rates estimates that the incidence of autism is around 38% genetically influenced, 62% caused by environmental factors. Analyzing the steep spike in autism rates in recent years, and taking the possibility of “improved diagnosis” into account, the study finds that rates have spiked steeply enough and fast enough that it can’t be accounted for by genetic change. It must be on account of changes in environmental factors which in turn are preponderant in causing the condition to develop. We’ve long known that environmental factors are critical where it comes to “switching on or off” various genetic predispositions. This is just one example.

 

Today, wherever there’s any doubt, the obvious place to look for environmental causality is among the poisons inflicted upon us by the corporate/government system, especially in our food. For example, genetic engineering is a violent, disruptive process from start (where the alien genetic material is literally shot into the target genome with a gun; did you picture some kind of “precision” technique?) to middle (where the alien material more or less randomly and chaotically sprawls over the indigenous genes, disrupting and destroying along the way) to end (where, contrary to system lies, the alien material is absorbed intact into our digestive systems and bloodstream, where it proceeds to modify internal bacteria, viruses, and our own cells, toward what chaotic effects even god would have a hard time predicting).

 

I’d say GMOs comprise a pretty aggressive intrusion by the environment upon our genes and our biology. One study found traces of Bt toxin from Monsanto’s Bt corn in the blood of 93% of pregnant women and 80% of umbilical cords and fetal bloodstreams. This is one of many studies disproving the Big Lie that alien GE material is destroyed in cooking and/or digestion, and it demonstrates how any potential genetic switch for any disease whatsoever is completely exposed to this invasion from the outside environment.

 

Someday, when humanity has overthrown this scourge and convened the New Nuremburg, we’ll know the full extent of biotech’s crimes against humanity. This wholesale assault on our genes and our health is among of the worst of these world-historical crimes.

>
>

History As the War of Abundance vs. Scarcity

>

Very true.

 

Baudrillard was, I think, on the mark when he asserted that the transformation from primitive to feudal to mercantile to capitalist society was instigated by a human desire for hierarchical differentiation, and not by material scarcity, as claimed by Marxists.

 

(Except for the part about it being a “human desire”; humans are naturally cooperative.) I haven’t read the Baudrillard on this, but it’s long been clear to me that the normal circumstance of humanity is abundance. Since our earliest days, the human brain has been capable of producing extraordinary bounty, in necessities, leisure, and the opportunity for happiness.

 

Natural scarcity has never been a problem for us. Our human capability transcends it. On the contrary, it’s always been abundance which subhuman criminals, lusting after elite parasite status, have viewed as the most dire problem, but also as a great opportunity. Naturally flush with all we want, the people could never be dominated or enslaved. But the construction of hierarchy could steal this abundance, use it to concentrate luxury wealth and power for this criminal elite, and at the same time artificially impose scarcity upon everyone else.

 

This has always been the purpose and function of all economic and political hierarchies. Fossil-fueled capitalism and the modern state represent the most extreme development of this organized crime trend.

 

With the end of the Oil Age, history now reaches its final crossroads. This shall be the final conflict between history’s democratic movement and its criminal movement. The latter will try to use the crisis of Peak Oil to lever civilization into a terminal slave system, the most vicious ever, once and for all.

 

But the end of oil is also democracy’s great opportunity. Humanity has come of age. We have complete knowledge of how to economically organize ourselves to produce abundance. We have complete knowledge of how to politically rule ourselves. A critical mass is reaching full democratic consciousness. With the end of oil, we resume history’s normal path of energy consumption. But we can now do it with a fully human consciousness, free of all the superstitions of the pre-oil age, and armed with all the immense knowledge we’ve accrued during the time of fossil fuels.

 

We can achieve the full triumph of humanity, once and for all. The only need left is the will to fight.

>
>

Taking Stock

>

If anything, the stock market is even more fictive as an issue than the federal debt. And a stock market crash ought to have no more significance for real people and their real work than deficits and debt ceilings.

 

To be clear, gambling with stocks (everything that happens on “the market”) has nothing to do with investment even in principle. The capital was already raised with the initial offering. From then on the stock is just batted about unproductively by a bunch of scammers trying to get something for nothing. A lot of foolish ones lost a lot of paper money yesterday. (I’m sure the banksters will do just fine.)

 

If, as capitalist propaganda would have it, stocks are supposed to be productive investments in the real economy, then the stock market shouldn’t exist at all. So there’s my remedy. The big bucket law I’ve proposed so many times, to outlaw (in the sense of declaring the “contracts” unenforceable) all sorts of gambling, would encompass the stock market itself.

 

(Even better would be to simply get the government out of contract enforcement period. Which would mean getting rid of centralized government as such.)

 

Unfortunately, the finance sector has used the government to impose a parasitic tyranny on the core economy. That means that bizarre reifications like stocks and deficit ceilings become real forces wreaking havoc on real people and real work. As we continue our descent into a Depression far worse than that of the 1930s, we’re passing the same milestones of mass unemployment and wastage of labor goodwill, which is really the wasting of lives, alongside bountiful production which is promptly thrown worthlessly down ratholes, and even more production potential which simply goes to waste.

 

This waste, which is the result of nothing but intentional policy on the part of criminal elites, is just as profoundly destructive as the murder of physical bodies. This is the murder of souls.

 

Is there any way out of the trap? It’ll have to include breaking free of the command cash economy of the financializers. Those who will be capable of taking in hand the stagnant potential and rendering it kinetic, in order to meet the needs of those in material peril, at the same time they uplift these needy masses and turn them into kinetic producers for themselves, and who will do all this without resort to cash, taking it for granted that there’s no need for it – who will they be? Is it possible that the time banks which are sprouting up everywhere can function as training programs for such cash-transcending cadres? And could the time banks themselves function as such revolutionary nuclei?

 

That’s a lot to ask of something starting out so modestly. But then, vision must see as far as the circumstances of the day compel it. Today we must look to everything with only one question – what role can this play toward our liberation and transformation? 

Kleptocratic Self-Cannibalism and the Opportunity It Opens Up

>

The early Marx and the existentialists emphasized the alienation of human beings from their fabricated world. In particular, Marx explored how capitalism, in stealing the fruits of our work, alienates us from our labor. Our communion with our work is one of the core elements of our humanity, essential to our happiness, dignity, and wholeness. This emotional, psychological, and spiritual robbery practiced by economic elites is perhaps a far worse crime than the material deprivation and monetary “value” stolen.

 

A similar alienation is the result of the same crime in the political realm. Our humanity craves democratic participation. But representative pseudo-democracy, blaspheming the name and the ideal, robs us of our participation and our sense of real political control. This participation and control is part of the definition of true democracy. On a practical level, it achieves the most wise and socially productive outcomes. Far beyond this, it’s a core human value in itself, essential to our felicity, self-respect, and sense of being whole. This emotional, psychological, and spiritual robbery practiced by political elites is perhaps a worse crime than the destructive and evil outcomes their hijacked political system produces.

 

The result is humanity’s complete alienation from the economy, polity, society only we create at all. This generates a huge amount of potential energy in the mass. Millions of people not only have no constructive vehicle for their most elemental energies, but feel the added stress and tension of the economic and political instability and fear the kleptocracy engenders. Therefore, as Eric Hoffer says, the alienation from the self proceeds amid intense passion. The refugee energy and socioeconomic tension, arising out of our alienation from ourselves, further intensifies this alienation, which in turn generates further tension. Usually, at least at first, this is an inchoate passion. Then it’s often misdirected, hijacked/astroturfed by the very system which produces the psychological crisis. Fascism and innumerable quasi-fascist an co-optation phenomena comprise this category.

 

The kleptocracy will try to organize all the alienated passion it causes to its own benefit and the further detriment of those confused enough to conform to this plan. What are the chances that it will be unable to do this? One of the things we have going for us is how this system is liquidating its own base, and how it propagates an ideology of atomization, selfishness, and such a totally mercenary way of thinking and being that it will be difficult for it to ever muster real idealism on its behalf. Sure, it can astroturf a surface idealism on the part of pseudo-fascist scum. But these will never be anything more than a rabble. As for the system’s police and soldiers, they’ll never think in terms other than their paychecks and their material stuff at home (maybe their personal families as well). Historically, fascism was strong as it piled up victories, but started collapsing immediately as soon as it sustained losses and faced adversity. A fascist (including the kind of neoliberal pseudo-democracy we have today), individually and systemically, is typically a bully who feels strong as long as he’s winning but runs away as soon as the going gets tough. Mussolini was like that, and that’s why his system (and himself on a personal level) collapsed as soon as the war reached home. That was real fascism which had enlisted a high level of non-mercenary idealism on its behalf. It’s likely today’s purely mercenary kleptocracy will collapse even more completely as soon as it begins sustaining losses and enduring hardship. Mussolini wasn’t very tough, but I bet he was far tougher than today’s bloated, childish, infinitely “entitled” elites.

 

So who are the groups, naturally the base for political and economic elitism, who are under assault by very kleptocracy which depends upon them for its political sustenance? Who’s the newest and most critical alienation base?

 

1. Pensions are a linchpin of the liberal welfare state and a core part of the Ownership Society propaganda (“We are ExxonMobil”). For both the liberal and conservative ideologies they’re a key co-optation ploy. But the kleptocracy is now liquidating them. First they came for the manufacturing unions’ pensions, then for the public sector union pensions, and now for Social Security… Anyone who thinks the day of the 401(k)s of white collar workers won’t come soon is delusional.

 

2. “Home ownership” is a similar joint liberal-conservative ploy. Commentators have often been frank about how the goal is to give a large middle class a stake in the stable propagation of capitalism. So you’d think that after the blowup of the housing bubble and consequent deflation, the system would want to temporarily hit the reset button and retrench. But instead the banksters launched a veritable foreclosure war, enlisting the federal government as collaborator with such frauds as the HAMP. Meanwhile even the most modest prophylactic measures like principal mods and bankruptcy court cramdowns have been fiercely resisted by banks and government. Here too, although it still spews the propaganda, the kleptocracy has clearly renounced even the pretense of its own ownership society co-optation plan.

 

3. Public sector unions are a major part of the base for government as such, and the Democratic party in particular. But the kleptocracy, including the Democrats, is liquidating them as fast as it can.

 

4. College grads, if there are system jobs available for them, are always a major part of any status quo base. Instead, today’s grads find that there are no jobs for them, and that instead they were made the victims of a joint bank-government-university debt indenture scam. Historically, this has been a major revolutionary indicator. (The results were mixed. In 19th century Russia, unemployable students and graduates became revolutionaries. In Weimar Germany they became Nazis. Since as a group students are a nihilist rabble at heart, it’s probably just a matter of seizing upon the most radical idea lying around.) I previously devoted a post to this factor.

 

5. Professionals are also a key system base element, as long as their jobs are protected. This is why even as globalization ruthlessly drove a race to the bottom for all other forms of labor, for a long time it protected doctors, lawyers, journalists, IT professionals, and most others. But today these too are starting to be liquidated. A computer programmer’s already in the same boat as a manufacturing worker. Everyone else will soon be joining us. Again we see the “First they came for the factory workers…” dynamic.

 

6. The federal government depends upon the states for a vast amount of administration and supplementary enforcement. It has bought this compliance with gravy train of biblical flood size. But now the federal largesse is being rolled back furiously. The states are being cut off. Under these harsh new conditions, will state governments continue to comprise such a compliant power base for Washington?

 

7. The assault on civil liberties is the kind of petty harassment more likely to drum up resistance than is systematic repression.

 

8. Economically, here’s the biggest one, the classical contradiction of capitalism which is even more unsolvable today than it was a hundred years ago. Capitalism depends on infinitely growing consumption while it grinds the worker down to nothing. But this worker is also the consumer. Once capitalism liquidates its own consumers, who’s gonna buy? The answer nowadays is corporatism. The federal government buys and tries to force individuals to buy (Obama’s health racket Stamp mandate is the ultimate example so far). In these ways the government coerces markets. By now we have a command economy, corporatist version.

 

But this is only kicking the can down the road. Forcing the consumer to buy won’t increase the amount of blood you can squeeze out of him. In the end, capitalism will endure for as long as the federal government can run its debt Ponzi scheme. Deficit terrorism is a lie where it claims that deficit spending as such, and deficit spending toward socially productive goals based on real production, is inherently unsustainable. But it will be true in the end that deficit spending toward no goal whatsoever but enabling corporate looting, and based upon no productive base whatsoever but just the lies and vapors of financialization, is unsustainable. In the end this capitalist fraud will collapse of its own rancid yet hollow bloat.

 

9. I described the psychological contradiction of capitalism above. It alienates us from our work, our thoughts, our friends, our families, our communities, our democracy, and ourselves. Our alienation accumulates as a tremendous force, and no matter how that force is eventually unleashed, it will place the status quo in peril.

 

10. Part of this alienation, a strategic blunder on the part of corporatist ideology (if we could impute any long-term strategy, as opposed to short-run greed, to them at all), is how this ideology and kleptocratic practice seek to radically atomize the individual instead of trying to provide even a sham sense of belonging. By contrast, classical fascism worked hard at this, and with considerable success.

 

This has left a void and an opportunity for any movement which wants to fight the kleptocracy.

 

11. Based on the system’s record so far, we can expect a continuing escalation in the assault which will be malevolent in principle but haphazard in the execution. This is exactly the kind of oppression most likely to generate resistance. The alienations, contradictions, and self-injuring liquidations I just described are both part of this haphazardness and will contribute to it. See also my post, The Limits to Racketeering.

 

So we see how there’s a big opportunity for anyone who wants to fight and defeat the kleptocracy.

 

But the existence of the opportunity doesn’t guarantee it will be seized. We have to meet it halfway. We have to work hard to build the democratic movement which can transform all the alienation and disintegration into a coherent vector, which can gather all the festering potential energy and render it kinetic in one direction.

 

The negative element of this vector is to destroy the kleptocracy. The affirmative element is to build and practice positive democracy.

 

So part of this necessary work shall be to account for all the factors I described above (and probably others I missed) and learn to speak to them, and then do so relentlessly.

Chernobyl in Japan?

 

I can’t tell how bad it is yet, but after dire news of how officials at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Okuma were trying to stave off a meltdown, we’re getting reports of an explosion inside the plant.

 

Here’s the text of two e-mail alerts from Stratfor:

 

Red Alert: Japan Warns of Possible Nuclear Meltdown
March 12, 2011

Japanese officials are cautioning that a nuclear meltdown may occur at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant near the town of Okuma. According to Japan’s Jiji Press, some of the reactor’s nuclear fuel rods were briefly exposed to the air after the reactor’s water levels dropped through evaporation. A fire engine is currently pumping water into the reactor and the water levels are recovering, according to an operator of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), which operates the plant. A TEPCO spokesman said the company believes the reactor is not melting down or cracking and that workers are currently attempting to raise the water level.

If a meltdown takes place — essentially the core of the reactor overheating and damaging the fuel rods themselves — it would be the first since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and the Three Mile Island incident in 1979.

Red Alert: Explosion Reported at Japanese Nuclear Plant
March 12, 2011

An explosion occurred March 12 at the Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s (TEPCO) Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Japan, Japanese news agency Jiji reported, citing local police. Reports of an explosion and smoke come after Japanese officials cautioned that a nuclear meltdown was possible. Officials at the plant had reported that part of the reactor core was exposed to air for a brief moment and that they were attempting to raise the water level to continue cooling the reactor. Officials later stated that steam was vented from the power plant to release the pressure built up by evaporating water. If an explosion occurred, it would indicate that the additional water pumped into the reactor has been unable to stave off the meltdown reaction inside the reactor core and that the plant is experiencing a far more serious crisis than initially reported by the Japanese authorities.

 

Here’s the latest from Al Jazeera.

Trading, Drilling, Technology, and Kleptocracy

 

The other day Barry Ritholz had a brief post expressing his skepticism about some Tradebot self-hype:

 

The founder of Tradebot, in Kansas City, Mo., told students in 2008 that his firm typically held stocks for 11 seconds. Tradebot, one of the biggest high-frequency traders around, had not had a losing day in four years, he said.

 

True, exaggerated, or bullshit, any way it’s another example of the unproductive, parasitic nature of these outfits, and of how they operate in a totally rigged market which is the opposite of a “free” market.

 

Using the word “risk” as part of the English language, how is it possible to profit every day and yet still be running “risks”? It’s statistically impossible. If you win every time, by definition you’re not running risks. By definition you’re playing a game rigged in your favor.

 

How is HFT not insider trading and market manipulation? It is obviously those things. If the system is rigged so that it’s possible for computers to do this, and this method then becomes the monopoly of those who can afford the hardware and the quant “talent” to perform these manipulations, by any objective measure it’s a rigged insider-trading market. The fact that the “law” has failed to adequately criminalize it doesn’t change its criminality. (And meanwhile the neoclassical ideologues will still prate on about the “information” of the “free market”.)

 

What value does this activity create for the economy and society? Obviously none. I doubt that much of the alleged well-planned, constructive capital investment which is supposed to justify the existence of the stock market occurs at 11 second intervals. I’m pretty sure the vaunted “market making” and “liquidity provision” will always be likely to disappear exactly when it’s called upon, as we saw on May 6.

 

That’s the state of affairs when we look at just the “shadow banking” side of it. When we look at this kind of market manipulation from the TBTFs Goldman, JPM, Citi, and BofA (all also perfect last quarter; by contrast Morgan Stanley was downright pathetic with four losing days), and we see how they’re not only playing the same rigged market games but doing it with free money from the Fed, the only question to ask is, How can they lose? On the contrary, if anything they should be far more “profitable” than they actually are, if they’re really as “talented” and smart as they’re cracked up to be, and not just a bunch of thugs leveraging an entrenched monopoly position. For example, according to this Zero Hedge analysis, Goldman’s performance is actually mediocre given its advantages. (And MS must be really incompetent, to have lost at all under these circumstances.)

 

As for whether it’s really possible to be perfect, to rig the market to the point of total domination, I wish they could and would. That would simply be the end of this rotten currency, since if one man sits on an infinite pile of paper dollars while everyone else has none, then the dollars are worthless. That’s simply the core contradiction of capitalism at work once again. The core logic of all these crimes. The only real issue is to what extent they use the ephemeral fake wealth to buy and try to hold real assets like farmland, watersheds, the means of production for post-oil craftwork, toolmaking, etc. From that point of view I suppose it’s good news when we see the banksters still using the looted ”bonuses” to buy mansions and yachts and Ferraris and such, the way all the media reports say. While the bank rackets as a whole are positioning themselves for the return to feudalism, apparently most of the individual cadres still consciously think it’s business as usual.

 

Meanwhile, the HFT issue is a distillation of the absurd power we’re giving these criminals and their machines. We see how technocracy in action will always be the tool of corporatism. What could these computers and the “talent” which programs them do if put to socially productive purposes? I suppose the propaganda tracts are full of highfalutin visions, but in real life we’ll never know. All those high-flying promises were nothing but lies.

 

An even more tremendous example of prostituted technology run amok is currently injecting poison into our ocean at an unfathomable rate. It looks like my post which I whimsically named after a volcano erupting forever was more prescient more quickly than I thought. I just mistook which volcano it would be (though ominous Katla’s been rumbling).

 

I just used the word “unfathomable” to describe the rate of the oil’s eruption from the wound, because that’s literally true. Not because the technology to gauge the flow with considerable precision doesn’t exist, but because the government is allowing BP to veto such measurements. (Is anybody still going to say something about this technology existing for the public good, and not purely as a racketeering tool?)

 

Finally, under extreme duress, BP enabled an improved view of the hemorrhage, and what does it show? Although the lying MSM continues to parrot the 5000 barrels/210,000 gallons fraud, which the NOAA itself at first contradicted weeks ago before falling into line, the new view proves that it’s bleeding out at least 20K barrels a day, as independent commentators have been saying, and probably far more. Some estimate the current flood at 70K per day. And it can get a lot worse. BP itself estimates the maximum likely flow at 163 thousand barrels per day.

 

So having triggered an absolute economic and environmental catastrophe, what do BP and Obama do? Do they want to fix it at all costs? Do they feel remorse? No, they have one overriding priority – lies and secrecy. Just as the purpose of the MMS was never to regulate Big Oil but to facilitate its looting, so Obama sees the government’s purpose as to run propaganda interference for BP. He apes its lies, supports its spin, accedes to its information blackout, and even lets BP deputize the Coast Guard as a private thug to smack down any would-be accurate media coverage.

 

The fact is that just as corporatized technology could financialize and loot the economy, but can never repair any of the damage it’s caused, indeed can only complete the destruction on a one-way track (the Bailout), so BP’s technology could tear this hole in the bottom of the sea causing energy concentrated to the point of poison to hemorrhage out into the lifeblood of the earth itself, its allegedly infinitely renewable seas. But the same technology cannot fix it, and can’t even accurately look at it. (Physical and political impossibilities are the same thing if we refuse to change the latter.) Once Humpty Dumpty falls off the wall, all the kings horses and men wouldn’t be able to put him together again even if they wanted to.

 

But of course they don’t want to. They want to lie and say he’s fine, that they’ve restored him to his perch, that he never even fell off the wall in the first place. In Lewis Carroll’s great parable, Alice isn’t actually talking to Humpty Dumpty at all when he tells her “When I say a word, it means whatever I want it to mean, nothing more and nothing less. The question is who is to be Master.” She’s talking to a hologram, with the words being thrown to the image by the spinmasters. The real Humpty is on the ground, dead and in pieces, on the other side of the wall where she can’t see.

 

So it is today with our politics and our economy. And now with the sea itself.

 

Obama’s and the system’s lies for BP and Drill Baby Drill are typical. They’re the only response the system has available as each new disaster hits. It’s just like the Bailout secrecy: How much public money has the Fed allowed the big banks to steal via its “facilities” and MBS buys and QE? Who were the robbers and to what extent? They know their actions constitute history’s greatest robbery, and they have no defense other than secrecy and stonewalling. They even wanted to declare the details of the AIG money laundering scam a matter of “national security”, that’s how hysterical Geithner was about trying to cover his criminal tracks. It’s the same instinct of gangsters everywhere. As Jimmy says in Goodfellas, “Never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut.”

 

Let’s get it straight once and for all. Nothing works anymore. Corporations, government, system technology – it all exists for no purpose other than to steal, and in the process it can do nothing but destroy. It can never again create, never distribute, never fix or heal. It can steal and destroy and then lie and cover up. That’s kleptocracy. It can never be “reformed”. Anyone who doesn’t want to live forever as its slave has to do all he can to break free of it. We have to go ”off-grid” as completely as possible - economically, socially, and politically. We have to work to strengthen relocalized ties, and to defend what we build from the system’s inevitable attempts to crush us in the cataclysm of its own collapse.

Bailout, Bubble, Bunker

 

On Sunday the NYT had a story about the demented Las Vegas real estate market, where even as a necropolis of unsold empty residential husks already sprawls out into the desert, builders are apparently rushing to build even more (and even more putatively “luxurious”), claiming there will be a real estate boom any day now. No word on where the buyers or the water’s supposed to come from.

 

Even the NYT writer kept to a skeptical, rolling-his-eyes tone as he quoted obvious shysters talking their book at a party which was obviously meant to do nothing but drum up lots of free advertising for their little exercise in trying to reflate the suburban bubble. But dubious tone or not, the shills achieved their goal, a Sunday feature in the Times.

 

Meanwhile Naked Capitalism linked this piece describing the resumption of RMBS bundling. So even as we learn the details of an endless line of fraudulent securitizations from the likes of Magnetar and Goldman, the new models are coming out. This comes after the elite media kept assuring everyone that securitization was dead. This is that same toxic waste polluting the banks’ balance sheets which to this day, so far as I can see, remains the elites’ justification for the Bailout. The problem is supposed to be to find a Yucca Mountain for the waste we’ve already generated (since the only reality-based waste disposal, writing it off, has been ruled out by the ideology and practice of kleptocracy). But the elites claimed it was a given that there wouldn’t be more new waste generated. (In that they sounded actually more sane than they are where it comes to actual nukes, where we continue to generate massive amounts of indestructible poison even as we’re utterly unable to find a disposal site for the waste which already exists.)

 

The advent of new “products” might signify that they think the political coast is finally clear. But it’s even more of a testament to how much public money they’ve looted through the Bailout and continue to loot.

 

Think about it. They continue to award themselves record “bonuses”, and meanwhile free money via the Fed’s QE has enabled such a lucrative carry trade and other speculations that Goldman, JPM, Citi, and BofA all reported perfect quarters of so-called ”profitability”. And yet even with this, there’s so much loot flowing in they still can’t find a way to gamble all of it. While the proposed Hollywood exchange makes for amusing nonsense, I doubt that would suffice to assimilate all the surplus cash. It looks like their only choice is to rev up MBS again.

 

I guess it’s not a coincidence that this comes at the same time as NYT subdivision advertisements masquerading as news articles. Both are parts of the bubble reflation machine, the only thing by which the elites can hope to continue propping up their Tower of Babel.

 

And if the phony “recovery” production can hold the stage for awhile, they might be able to sucker more people back into the consumer brainwashing. It’s all too clear that all too few left in the first place. If anything, many among the perishing “middle class” are reacting by digging in and doubling down on all the most wasteful, impractical, destructive elements of the suburban consumer pathology. We could call them a cohort of consumerism teabaggers.

 

Picture a couple in their 60s who spent their lives running on the treadmill and doing relatively well by their own standards. They lived a normal suburban existence, made good upper-middle class money, fixated in theory on their lawn even though they didn’t really take good care of it. They built up a sizeable retirement fund, most or all of it in stocks. They pretended to themselves to pay attention of current events, and even made a point of “voting”, but their comprehension remained shallow, and they really cared more about tabloid crap.

 

So then came the crash of 2008, following years of rising oil prices and other tensions to the point that even they admitted they had a sense of impending disaster. Now that disaster has hit them personally – their retirement fund, so long cultivated and with such expectations reposed in it, has been decimated. They’re in shock. They have no explanation for what’s happened. They might know some people who could explain it and give advice on practical ways to change what they’re doing, but they don’t ask. Maybe it’s even a point of truculent pride not to ask.

 

That truculence seems confirmed over the next two years. Miracle of miracles! The Bailout worked! It’s a recovery, and stocks are booming again. Well, maybe they don’t think it’s literally a miracle, but to them it might as well be. For all they know the government miracled a recovery and miracled the Dow back to what they think is health. The stocks are back up, and the retirement fund is rich again.

 

So what lesson do they learn from this? In a sense it is miraculous – they’re actually getting a second chance. We don’t often get a do-over after having made such a catastrophic mistake over so many years. So do they get that money out of stocks and use it for something practical like strategically situated farmland, or to invest in a venture with a post-oil future, or even in gold (though I have doubts about that, but it’s much better than stocks), or in anything which offers a more promising expectation of return once the terminal collapse comes, as it will in the not-distant future? Or, to look at it somewhat differently, in anything which is better geared to preparing for the Second Great Depression into which everyone outside the elites is now descending, slowly but surely? Do they seize their unlooked for opportunity? Do they at least tear up the stupid lawn and get a real vegetable garden going?

 

Not at all. Not only do they leave the money in the same idiotic funds that just tanked a little while ago, thereby proving themselves dumber than a toddler who knows not to touch a hot stove a second time. Not only do they refuse to recognize the end of “suburbia” in its physical and economic viability, that they’re holding a hand there which already lost. They’re actually doubling down on it. They’re choosing now to redo that long talked about but long neglected “lawn”. They’re cutting down oak trees (never mind that the woman always whines about how hot it gets in the house during summer, and how killing the trees means it’ll now be several degrees hotter; she’s an American “consumer” which means destroy first and then be sincerely shocked and outraged when there are actually consequences of stupid destruction), they’re going to have large ornamental stones ripped out with some kind of tractor, the whole threadbare existing lawn ripped up, and have some thick lush sod lawn put down. Who knows how much that’s going to cost, or what the point is supposed to be. They’d say “that’s needed to be done for years”, but could never give a coherent answer to why it needs to be done; “needs” to be done according to whom. In the end it’s just the old brainwashing, and facing the destruction of their unsustainable way of life, their response isn’t to think, to learn a lesson, to seek real solutions and change their lives.

 

The response is to hunker in the bunker, dig in and double down in the dead end. It’s like the lawn is a fetish of empire, and if they can just keep that talisman glowing in their feverish eyes, the future will remain safe.

 

I suppose if everyone who felt this way just stuck to their lawns with this attitude, the result would be ugly and destructive enough, but would not bring the end of American freedom itself. Unfortunately many will not just redo their lawns. They’ll take that same reactionary mindset into the political realm, and do so with great aggression. That’s where fascism arises. The mindset I described, and of which I just gave an anecdote, of trying to dig the hole deeper rather than try to climb out, because climbing out would require admitting that digging the hole was a mistake and a dead end in the first place, is endemic to a group which had achieved a relatively high level of economic and political power and is now rapidly losing ground. That does create a revolutionary situation, but unfortunately the historical record shows that the most common upheaval it produces is not radical change, but a violent, reactionary attempt to stall the liquidation process, which of course never works, but which does, for a little while, offer a psychological release.

 

That’s what’s happening with all aspects of reaction, from lawns to right-wing extremism gaining ground. Can true freedom activism offer an alternative, which would not only work toward real solutions but provide psychological sustenance in the very act? We have no chance if we fail to do so.