The Imperialism of GMOs

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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.

 

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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.

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Genetics and Environment (And GMOs)

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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.

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History As the War of Abundance vs. Scarcity

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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.

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Taking Stock

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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

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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.

The Joke’s On…..

 

So I took a break for a few days, and came back today, on April Fools’, to check out a joke newspaper’s headlines for the day. They actually didn’t look all that different from the normal headlines.

 

“Uncle Sam’s Citi exit partly vindicates Bailout” 

 

“Hedge Fund Managers’ Pay Roared Back Last Year”

 

“Risk Is Clear In Drilling; Payoff Isn’t”

 

“Pfizer Chief Says Growth Is Imminent” (I don’t doubt “growth” in extortion is expected; but that’s not what the NYT wants you to read from that.)

 

“Deadlock Is Ending On Labor Board” (Here the blurb contains the punchline: “The National Labor Relations Board will soon have three Democrats and one Republican, and businesses are bracing for a wave of pro-union rulings.”) 

 

But here’s my favorite joke piece, though the headline’s flatly descriptive enough: “Fed Ends Its Purchasing of Mortgage Securities”.

 

The Federal Reserve’s single largest intervention to prop up the American economy, its $1.25 trillion program to buy mortgage-backed securities, came to a long-anticipated end on Wednesday.
The program has been credited with holding mortgage interest rates at near-record lows and slowing the nationwide decline in home prices that threatened to send the economy into an extended slump.

 

In other words, as a key part of history’s greatest robbery, it helped prevent to restoration of economic reality, so that when reality inevitably does impose itself, the result will be experienced by most people as far more disastrous.

 

The government sentenced the people to this fate in order that the banks could steal yet further trillions. It’s part of the official establishment of Bailout Nation, Bailout America.

 

The academic prostitutes are out shilling:

 

Demand for mortgage bonds had been frozen since the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant mortgage-finance companies, in September 2008. “We were in a deflationary spiral, causing mortgages to go underwater, more foreclosures and a further decline in housing prices,” said Susan M. Wachter, professor of real estate and finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “The potential maelstrom of destruction was out there, bringing down not only the housing market but the overall economy. That’s what was stopped.”

She called the Fed’s mortgage purchases “the single most important move to stabilize the economy and to prevent a debacle.”

 

(That’s a joke in itself, that we now have such a thing as a “FIRE sector professor”.  Of course all such quotes have to be read in Orwellian code. “The maelstrom of destruction, currently decimating the jobs of the real economy and sending it into the Second Great Depression, had to be segregated from the housing market in order to enable further FIRE sector looting. That’s what we accomplished. It was the single most important move to temporarily stabilize the financial (as opposed to real) indicators and prevent a debacle for Wall Street. Thus we’ve been trying and so far succeeding in shifting the entire bankster-created debacle from Wall Street onto the people. We’ll now attempt to make the people of America sustain the entire maelstrom of destruction, while the banksters and government criminals abscond with the loot. Hopefully they’ll still need a few whores and take me along.”)

 

The Fed is leading this propaganda offensive:

 

“Financial markets have improved considerably over the last year, and I am hopeful that mortgages will remain highly affordable even after our purchases cease,” Janet L. Yellen, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said in a speech on March 23. “Any significant run-up in mortgage rates would create risks for a housing recovery.”

Ms. Yellen is President Obama’s choice to be the next vice chairwoman of the Fed, after Donald L. Kohn retires in June, but she has not been formally nominated.

 

What’s left out of this quote from “Obama’s choice”, i.e. from Obama himself? As with everything else these criminals say, it has zero to do with the real economy, with economic, energy, or resource fundamentals, with anything which has anything at all to do with the lives of actual Americans or of actual people anywhere.

 

That’s because to a sociopath like Obama, and to a gangster like anyone at the fed, real people simply don’t exist other than as a cash cow to be milked and then bloodlet and then skinned and then roasted.

 

The whole MBS conveyor is simply the ongoing main vehicle of the Bailout:

 

A major factor in that recovery was the government’s announcement last December that it would guarantee debts owed by and securities issued by Fannie and Freddie, according to David Crowe, chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders.

While the future of the two mortgage-finance entities remains uncertain, the government backing has been particularly reassuring for foreign investors, including the Chinese and Japanese central banks, that hold securities based on mortgages originated in the United States, Mr. Crowe said.

 

It’s been particularly reassuring for the attempt to prop up the insolvent debt zombie of America as a whole, as well as its insolvent zombie banks.

 

These are the same Fannie and Freddie who keep hemorrhaging taxpayer money, intentionally buying MBS from sleazy lenders at far-above-market rates. This is simple embezzlement, simple theft, and simple money-laundering, being committed by what is simply a criminal government, orchestrator of a criminal system.

 

Bailout America is a de jure kleptocracy. Neither the government, nor the political nor media nor academic class, nor the top-down economy in general, any longer even pretend to have any rationale other than to loot the productive activity of society. Since people still work in order to eat and shelter themselves and raise their children, as well as because they labor under the brainwashing of consumerism, once a gangster parasite has successfully planted itself on the people’s backs, it can suck their blood for as long as the sucking’s good. Only two things can put an end to it: When and if the people fight back to kill the parasite; or once the blood has all been sucked.

 

Meanwhile the parasite may reach the point where it becomes so drunk on the blood of its host, and so incapable of even pretending to generate any value whatsoever, that it goes insane in its psychopathy. No longer content to just extract at a constant rate, it must rend and flay, beat the people, burn the crops, salt the land. We’ve been seeing this saturnalia set in with the rush to resume bankster bonuses, the more brazen and obscene the better (that it’s as open and obnoxious as possible is clearly a value to them), and the health racketeering bill. And right in the middle of it, the massive escalation of the already unsustainable, losing imperial war.

 

Between these there can no longer be any doubt whatsoever about this government and the so-called “two” party system which is really as calcified a one-party system as the decrepit stage of the Soviet Union was. There can be no doubt that this is not just a criminal finance sector and a criminal government but that it has gone insane in its orgy of looting. This is a whole globalized finance economy now dancing its Dance of Death.

 

Nor can there be any doubt about the unspeakable vile MSM, the corruption of the universities, the prostitution of “culture”, or the treason of almost all existing political activist leadership. The end result on the extension of the Bailout to the insurance rackets is the final, irrevocable divide. Kucinich’s treason made it literally unanimous among existing politicians. The same treason was almost unanimous among existing “progressive” groups of almost every stripe and alleged focus. We now know they’re all sellouts, all Astroturfs, all corporatized traitors.

 

The defining abyss which slashes its bloody gouge across every arena of our lives is corporate tyranny vs. freedom and humanity itself. The great virtue of the Bailout and its health racket microcosm is the cosmic lucidity with which it has cleared the air and defined the positions. The clarity through which it has rendered the great fault line.

 

The definition of economic Fascism is a command economy based upon private profits and socialized costs. While there can be debate on when exactly America became this fascist country, there can be no debate whatsoever on the fact that the Bailout enshrined it once and for all. That the Fed has today temporarily ended its trillions in MBS buys (though it ostentatiously reserves the right to resume at any time, and with infinite boundaries), even as Fannie and Freddie continue with their infinite guarantees of this worthless paper, doesn’t change anything at all. On the contrary it simply highlights how, as with every other totalitarian system, the tactics are flexible even as the nefarious goal is always one and the same.

 

So we know what America has become, and we know that all existing leadership has declared for crime, for tyranny, for the great enemies of the people, for treason.

 

Meanwhile, the people…this bent-backed peasant with the bloodsucker on its back….all this peasant need do is shrug to rid itself of this parasite. Is the people’s refusal to do so our own Dance of Death? Are we really no longer citizens, no longer human, but just the husks of “consumers”, and soon no longer even able to pretend any longer at being that?

 

Only we can answer that for ourselves. Our actions shall be our testimony before history, before the universe itself……

Insurance Rackets, Lost Reform, and the Process

 

The final push on a health rackets bailout and stickup puts me in mind of Eric Hoffer’s lines:

 

The well-adjusted make poor prophets. On the other hand, those who are at war with the present have an eye for the seeds of change and the potentialities of small beginnings.

A pleasant existence blinds us to the possibilities of drastic change. We cling to what we call our common sense, our practical point of view. Actually, these are but names for an all-absorbing familiarity with things as they are. The tangibility of a pleasant and secure existence is such that it makes other realities, however imminent, seem vague and visionary. Thus it happens that when the times become unhinged, it’s the practical people who are caught unaware and are made to look like visionaries who cling to things that do not exist.

On the other hand, those who reject the present and fix their eyes and hearts on things to come have a faculty for detecting the embryo of future danger or advantage in the ripeness of their times. Hence the frustrated individual and the true believer make better prognosticators than those who have reason to want the preservation of the status quo. “It is often the fanatics, and not always the delicate spirits, that are found grasping the right thread of the solutions required by the future.”

 

Those who call themselves “pragmatic” really want the status quo. To have ever said demanding single-payer was “not politically possible”, when it obviously was if everyone who claims to want reform had simply stuck together and demanded reform, has always been code for not wanting single-payer, for not wanting reform, for wanting the status quo only.

 

In the case of these status quo-mongers, they don’t actually feel secure, and things don’t seem to be very pleasant for them. But at least, and at most, they have the pleasure and the security of the status quo itself. Thus, as Hoffer described, they are completely blind to the realities of a radical kleptocracy and a revolutionary situation, with such vast potential for the best and the worst, but with nothing but failure and shame falling upon those who still dream of “incrementalism”, the “process”, their spineless, contentless notion of “pragmatism”, which is the least truly pragmatic stance imaginable, as it has no present and no future. 

 

The only measure of wanting something is demanding it and fighting for it. if you don’t fight for it, that’s proof you didn’t want it. Indeed that you oppose it.

 

If you want to fight, there are two options. You can stand on principle and judge prospective results according to it, or you can define the acceptable result and fight with the intent of accepting nothing less than that result.

 

But liberals with their “pragmatism” do neither of these. They claim to either hold a principle (like “reform”) or demand a result (like the “public option”), but they really care only about going through the punctilious motions of a process solely in order to reach the formal end of that process (getting a bill, any bill, which has the word “reform” on it), without reference to principle or result.

 

This process of enacting legislation which deals with the health insurance system has been extremely messy and deranged right from the start. The combination of a president’s heady but vacuous rhetoric, his incompetence and spinelessness in action, his absolute failure as a leader, leaving the process in the hands of a cesspool of gangsters and psychopaths, resulted in something like the medieval Dance of Death. Especially once the scam political bubble of the “progressive bloc” popped itself, it seems like the tension released itself in an orgy of racketeering and vandalism. Everyone competed to root out any aspect of the bill which could have been any good while loading it up with as many thefts and assaults as possible.

 

The result is clear. No sane person thinks any of its “regulations” or “subsidies” will ever be effective. It contains loopholes to ensure rescission will continue, while its complete lack of cost control will render the vaunted ban on discrimination against pre-existing conditions de facto void.

 

Every restraint on the thugs has been removed. The centerpiece of the bill, the real reason the whole process was set in motion, is the individual mandate, the roundup of a conscript market to ensure extortionate profits for the insurance racket. They have no market competition as it is, and no regulatory restraints on the protection money they demand. The talk of removing their antitrust exemption, a no-brainer from any sane point of view, is just empty talk. The ONLY restraint upon them, other than the limits of economic reality itself, has been people’s refusal to pay this protection money. But under this mandate the rackets will no longer have to compete even with non-participation.

 

Meanwhile, in an environment where Medicare itself is under assault, no sensible person thinks the promised “subsidies” for those who can’t afford this mandate to buy a worthless policy (another toxic asset) will ever sufficiently materialize. Hacks like Krugman who say so are just conscious, brazen, damned liars. The bill has also become a vehicle to gut the hard-won insurance benefits of many union workers. These benefits are part of their wage, every bit as much as the nominal wage itself.

 

(It will even try to gut access to abortion. Though it’s obviously true that there’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats on the economy, war, or civil liberties, abortion is the kind of thing where the voter supposedly has an immutable choice.

 

Well, apparently not. Apparently the Dems will happily sell out on this as well. That’s where liberal cowardice and the process mentality gets you. Women’s groups who sold out on single-payer have rightly been reminded of the bitter lesson, “First they came for the communists, and I did nothing because I wasn’t a communist….” As always, if you’re willing to compromise one core value to preserve another, you’ll end up with neither and deserve neither.)

 

So in a nutshell: The bill has zero value, while serving as a weapon of union-bashing. Most of all, it would greatly add to our already miserable servitude. I’ve said before, we have to vow to refuse to comply with this vile roundup. It’s already guaranteed that tens of millions will be financially unable to comply with it. So this bill, if it goes forward, will create a vast class of literal outlaws, existential criminals. Such people are then at the mercy of the wayward tyranny of a capricious system. Any of them, through bad luck, personal vendetta, or arbitrary enforcement, will at any time be vulnerable to the equivalent of debtors’ prison.

 

[This is the way things will be, unless we turn it into civil disobedience and an underground economy on an organized scale. The informal economy is the answer to every other problem as well, and is going to have to vastly expand regardless. The more that people are conscious of this and resolve to do it systematically, the better off we'll all be, both in providing for ourselves and defending ourselves against any sort of criminal, including racketeering government.]

 

So that’s where the “process” mentality gets us. There was nothing unpredictable or accidental about the way this end has been reached. It was hardwired into the system right from the start, given the toxic alliance of kleptocrats and “progressives” who were carrying out this process. This guarantees that reform will be gutted and replaced by crime varnished with flimsy, ugly lies.

 

We see the process mentality in action today as embarrassed supporters of this wreck struggle miserably to parse how its features add up to a marginal improvement. Even an electron microscope would only highlight with greater definition the fact that this bill is a vehicle of corporate tyranny. That it will do nothing but further entrench the racket and further empower its assaults upon us.

 

That’s the core issue here, freedom versus tyranny. A real reformer resolved to fight would have started with the principle that decent basic health care is a human right, and that such basic decency is a core reason we even have society in the first place. Our freedom is inextricably bound up with our humanity. For the sake of both we must resist and destroy tyranny.

 

So real reform would never accept anything which fell short of that imperative, let alone this bill which fights on the side of the criminals, against our freedom and well-being. Given this outcome, there’s no way one can deny that either the claimed reform principle was a lie from the start, or else “progressive” fecklessness abdicated this principle along the way and surrendered to “process”.

 

As I said, this outcome was preordained given the personnel. To bloodless wonkery, the very idea of a philosophical and moral objection to a gangster stickup is incomprehensible. Instead, they’re paid, or they force themselves, to parse the process, assuming dogmatically that if a process is called “reform” then it is reform (since no other measure of reality is available to the process mentality). Given that congenital mindset, there’s no conceivable outcome on whose behalf they couldn’t come up with a pack of lies to justify it. And so it is in this case.

 

They don’t (can’t) understand that wonkery can only ever be a means to what should be a humanist end. The moral objection, the refusal to pay off these rackets, goes to the core of what it is to be human. Process is never anything more than a tool. The goal is supposed to be reform. But as we’ve seen, the process/wonk mindset is far more easily converted to the ends of crime and tyranny.

 

To their eternal shame this is the fact: If everyone who wanted reform would’ve demanded single-payer, we’d have it. But when they unilaterally caved in, when they commenced by negotiating themselves down (and of course they could only negotiate with themselves since there was no strong opponent), all the enemies of reform starting with Obama had them right where they wanted them. Everyone knew that once they started out so spinelessly, they’d never put up a real fight on any line.

 

Again the lesson is clear. Activists, reformers must break completely with the Democrats and with the liberal “leadership.” We must recognize the absolute, permanent failure and moral dishonor of the “process” mindset and the Orwellian “pragmatism” lie. We must shun all who still propagate such lies.

 

The way ahead is clear. The principles are freedom, economic self-determination, socioeconomic community self-reliance. The enemy is corporatism in all its forms – economic and political.

 

Since the human ideals and the great cause no longer exist within the system, it follows that we can fight it out only on fronts outside the system.