African Wannsee Conference; Or, Bono Parties With Monsanto

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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Rothamsted Direct Action Against GMOs

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Sunday, May 27 is the target date for direct action in Britain, as the anti-GMO, pro-farming group Take the Flour Back calls for the people to act in self-defense against a pernicious GM wheat trial at Rothamsted.

 

The trial is for a variety of spring wheat which would allegedly be aphid-resistant. The trial has been located close to real wheat fields as well as to natural grasslands, both of which would be highly vulnerable to contamination.

 

Farmers and citizens are perplexed and asking some simple questions: Given that spring wheat is such a small crop in British agriculture, that aphids aren’t a major problem for it, and that there would be no market for GM wheat (since British supermarkets have been forced by customer pressure to boycott them), why should this trial be conducted at all, let alone at significant public expense and such risk of contamination?

 

That last part of the question answers the whole thing, as does the response of the cadres who support the test. A technocrat/scientician blathers about “sustainability”. But natural crops ARE sustainable. Industrial agriculture, 100% dependent upon finite fossil fuels, is unsustainable by definition. GMOs, or meta-industrial agriculture, are even more tenuous, even more of a hothouse flower. Spring wheat is just 1% of the British crop, it doesn’t have major aphid problems, and what little it has is easily controlled by natural predators. Plus, British supermarkets refuse to carry GMOs. There’s no conceivable reality-based reason for this test. The lame arguments of the test supporters proves it. This is clearly a nose-in-the-tent gambit, and probably part of the general contamination strategy.

 

The plan, which has already worked in India, Brazil, and elsewhere, is to contaminate the environment, including conventional and especially organic crops, with genetically engineered material. This is then presented as an accomplished fact, and used as the pretext to go ahead with whatever the next GMO escalation steps are. If they weren’t yet legal (i.e., if the trials themselves were illegal), they’re now legalized. If the crop wasn’t yet approved for commercialization, that process is sped up. Government is always happier justifiying a pro-corporate status quo than having to fight to impose it in the first place. That’s why regulators in any sector are always happy to find that their corporate ”clients” have taken the extra-legal initiative. That’s why almost never has any government acted to penalize contamination criminals, while many have seized the opportunity to reward the crime. That’s the goal here. The British government’s dream scenario would be for all of us to wake to tomorrow and discover all British crops GM-contaminated. That would end this whole gnarly “debate” with the peasants, wouldn’t it?

 

Meanwhile, those supermarkets can’t wait. Similarly, the industrial organic sector in the US is hoping alfalfa deregulation, which the USDA itself admits will inevitably contaminate all alfalfa, will render the current meat/dairy certified-organic sector untenable (since it depends on GM-free alfalfa). Both the USDA and the Whole Foods contingent dream of making the “certified organic” sector safe for GMOs. They hope to do this through a process of contamination and propaganda. The intended end goal is to be able to call GMOs “USDA Organic” and still extract the premium from the “organic” brand. It’ll be difficult for them to do this, but one shouldn’t underestimate the power of inertia and apathy. If the message seems overwhelming - ”GMOs are safe, are perfectly compatible with the Organic concept, Organic is still good if it’s GM, and everything is GM anyway so There Is No Alternative, unless you want to go all the way to really knowing your local farmer or growing your own food.” – many who vaguely oppose GMOs can be expected to surrender.

 

This kind of gambit is a key part of Monsanto’s strategy for world domination. As one of their cadres put it:

 

The hope of the industry is that over time the market is so flooded that there’s nothing you can do about it. You just sort of surrender.

 

Today, the flacks aren’t willing to directly promote GMOs, but instead call for things like going “beyond pro- and con-”. The fact that GMO supporters constantly feel compelled to use such defensive, elliptical language, and that they have to fight to keep the presence of GMOs in food a secret from the people who eat it, has to erode their self-confidence. When you have such an overwhelming preponderance of power, it’s strong evidence of your ignobility, cowardice, feeling of vulnerability, and bad conscience, that you don’t proudly avow that for which you fight. Imagine being a GE scientician whose life’s work, whose alleged great redeeming act, is considered too disreputable to be put on a simple label! I’d have to commit suicide.

 

As for the lie about “never finding the answer” until all such research is done (evidently a favorite on their current talking-points list), I’ve written about that before. The people have given, over and over, as clear-cut an answer on GMOs as democracy can ever give. We have spoken, and we have said NO. The fact that filth like this group still go out spewing their lies is facial proof that they’re totalitarians, since any non-totalitarian would long ago have accepted that NO is humanity’s final answer on GMOs.

 

But this NO will never be completed until we also say No to continued tolerance for these criminals.

 

At Rothamsted, these criminals are facing a real fight from democracy advocates. In typical elitist fashion, the aggressors expound an Orwellian view of democracy, the neoliberal pseudo-democratic scam. This involves going through a legalistic process which is rigged to box out the people’s participation and true democracy (also common sense, morality, reason, science), while producing the pro-corporate result. Thus, a typical corporate technician calls direct democracy “undemocratic”. This is a typical attempt to turn the truth upside-down. As Jyoti Fernandes of Take Back the Flour says, we’ve tried system channels for years and know it goes nowhere. The corporate cadre accuses us of not wanting to debate, when we’ve tried to debate for over twenty years now (over fifty years, if we count corporate agriculture in general).

 

Rothamsted director Maurice Moloney said: “This act of vandalism has attempted to deny us all the opportunity to gather knowledge and evidence, for current and future generations, on one possible technological alternative approach to get plants to defend themselves and therefore reduce pesticide use.”

 

This is straight Ignorance is Knowledge. As this cadre knows perfectly well, the goal of corporate agriculture and its propaganda, including his own words, is to suppress knowledge of the facts that today’s agriculture produces far more than enough food for everyone; that this food is intentionally maldistributed in order to increase scarcity, hunger, and profits; that GMOs are intended to radically escalate this artificial enclosure and scarcity; that meanwhile agronomic science has established that organic agriculture can outproduce industrial even now, let alone post-oil; and that therefore all available resources should be put in research toward improving organic methods not dependent on fossil fuel inputs; and that most of all our problem is political, not one of agronomic knowledge.

 

The fact is that by now the only knowledge humanity needs is that corporate agriculture does not feed the world, cannot feed the world, and has no intention to feed the world, which is why it does not and cannot. The only knowledge we seem still to need is where to find the will to get rid of it.

 

GMO flacks like these scienticians are dedicated to destroying all such knowledge, and the very possibility of knowledge. That’s why they support a technology which is legally shielded from scientific oversight (for “proprietarian” reasons). That right there strips all pretensions to “science” on the part of the filth who work on the GMO project.

 

We see the need for direct action. Direct self-defense against the contamination launch pads, and beyond that a general will toward all forms of direct action, bottom-up movement-building, toward self-management and mutual assistance. System reformism will never work against this level of organized crime. This Rothamsted action is just a small one, and may fail to achieve its operational goal. But it’s symbolic of the rising global movement for Food Sovereignty and positive democracy. It’s the kind of mindset and action which needs to become typical, if humanity is to survive.

 

THIS Is Where the Olympics Will Be!?

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“Really?”

 

Luckily, the Olympics will provide the pretext for razing this nasty place, making the world safe for democracy.

 

(The post title was the headline at AOL. I added some punctuation.)

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Notes on the GMO “Co-Existence” Scam

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The British parliament is squabbling over their own version of the GMO ”co-existence” scam (C-E). Over there they’re calling it “sustainable intensification”. Allegedly the goal is to grow “more with less”. It’s really a GMO greenwashing gambit. As detractors are pointing out, it’s really an alternate vector for intensification of profiteering, while “sustainable” is just a meaningless word tacked on. Compare Walmart’s bogus sustainability gambit.

 

The parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee challenged the policy, proposed a set of reforms as an alternative policy, and called for a moratorium on GMO approvals.

 

The report said the initial focus should be on the risks of C-E. We need to be much more assertive than this. The first focus must be always on forcing GMOs to prove they have any right to exist at all. This is according to two common sense principles.

 

1. Where it comes to anything aggressive or disruptive, which corporate agriculture in general and GMOs in particular indisputably are, its supporters must prove the need for it to exist. What’s the alleged need? Like all previous corporate agriculture, GMOs have never solved or been intended to solve a single real problem. (On the contrary, they’re allegedly intended to double down on the problems of toxicity and pest resistance created by industrial agriculture itself.) They’re only a “solution” to the problem of how corporatism and its profits can continue to exist.

 

2. Where it comes to anything of dubious safety, as GMOs indisputably are, the Precautionary Principle applies. We must proceed with caution until the thing is proven safe. But “our” criminal governments have enshrined the radical policy of ideologically declaring GMOs to be safe and “equivalent” to real crops. This is how they justified abrogating the precautionary principle and performing ZERO safety testing prior to commercialization.

 

(GMO supporters are merely biological vectors. The GMO itself is a virus on the Earth. The carriers of this virus, the cadres of its politics, of metaphysical ideology like “intellectual property”, the professional liars in media and academia and among corporatist technocrats, are indelible disease vectors.)

 

“Co-existence” also violates the Polluter-Pays Principle by forcing, as a matter of government policy, all the risks and costs of GMO contamination onto the victims. It’s the USDA’s official policy that GMO propertarians have the right to trespass on the property of others, for example organic farmers. It’s 100% the organic farmers’ responsibility to try (fruitlessly) to prevent this trespass, and to bear the costs of it when it occurs.

 

That’s also how it’s possible for the trespasser to claim his victim actually assaulted him (like the urban legend of the burglar who injures himself and sues the homeowner – but this is real), as in the Percy Schmeisser case where, instead of Monsanto being found guilty of a tort, Schmeisser was found guilty of stealing Monsanto’s “intellectual property”. Government policy lays the groundwork for this by explicitly turning normal legal concepts upside down. This is a good example of what I’ve written previously about property as a mutable might-makes-right concept and policy.

 

That’s how we must understand the C-E scam. It’s an Orwellian term for allowing the total assault of GMOs on everything we’d previously considered our rights.

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Cuisine As A Humanism, and GMOs As Its Enemy

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In his Omnivore’s Dilemma Michael Pollan describes how cuisine is the culture of understanding what and how to eat, in order to achieve the highest health.

 

Yet the surfeit of choice that confronts the omnivore brings stresses and anxieties also undreamed of by the cow or koala, for whom the distinction between The Good Things to Eat and the Bad is second nature. And while our senses can help us draw the first rough distinctions between good and bad foods, we humans have to rely on culture to remember and keep it all straight. So we codify the rules of wise eating in an elaborate structure of taboos, rituals, manners, and culinary traditions…a great many of our food rules do make biological sense, and they keep each of us from having to confront the omnivore’s dilemma every time we visit the supermarket or sit down to eat.

That set of rules for preparing food we call a cuisine specifies combinations of foods and flavors that on examination do a great deal to mediate the omnivore’s dilemma. The dangers of eating raw fish, for example, are minimized by consuming it with wasabi, a potent antimicrobial. Similarly, the strong spices characteristic of many cuisines in the tropics, where food is quick to spoil, have antibacterial properties…As Paul Rozin writes, “Cuisines embody some of a culture’s accumulated wisdom about food.” Often when one culture imports another’s food species without importing the associated cuisine, and its embodied wisdom, they make themselves sick….

If nature won’t draw a line around human appetite, then human culture must step in, as indeed it has done, bringing the omnivore’s eating habits under the government of all the various taboos (foremost the one against cannibalism), customs, rituals, table manners, and culinary conventions found in every culture. There is a short and direct path from the omnivore’s dilemma to the astounding number of ethical rules with which people have sought to regulate eating for as long as they have been living in groups.

- The Omnivore’s Dilemma pp. 295-6, 298

 

This idea of health from good eating goes far beyond our physical bodies, to encompass organically our entire human experience. But it all starts with food.

 

GMOs are the radical enemy of this humanist and democratic cuisine.

 

For a stark example, we need only look at the GMO labeling “issue”:

 

1. Governments have tried to evade existing food taboos and prevent the formation of new ones through the expedient of an information blackout. They simply obscure the fact of this alien infiltration of our food. This blackout in itself proves the system’s bad faith and its anti-biological imperative.

 

2. GMO labeling will try to reinforce the taboos which are the cultural manifestation of our biology, the way we use culture to protect and enhance our health.

 

I’ve written many times about how transparency, sunshine, is a core principle of democracy. Full knowledge of public affairs is our public property. This applies to all affairs of every hierarchy. GMO secrecy is a typical example, and the worst example, of elitism’s infinite hatred for democracy and contempt for humanity. This is the imposition upon us, by “our” governments, of history’s ultimate feeding experiment, with all of us as guinea pigs kept in the dark, denied our right or ability to give (or deny) informed consent.

 

GMO labeling is trying to occupy our food supply by bringing it back into the sunshine of an organic information culture. Only when we understand what GMOs are (and how little is known about their dangers, and the fact that the little we do know indicates looming disaster) and where in our food they are can we humanly grapple with them.

 

Of course, we don’t need to figure out a position on them. Human beings rightly, naturally, reject such an obvious biological assault. All we need is to see where the enemy is so we have a clean shot (in this case, a clear path shunning them). The goal is to abolish GMOs completely.

 

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I’ll make a correction in the above quote. This function of human culture which Pollan implicitly sets apart from nature is in fact part of nature. Culture which is in accord with the natural imperative, in this case to find the good things to eat, is part of the holism of nature. It’s organic culture. “Culture” becomes unnatural and anti-natural only where it seeks to divorce us from nature, to place us outside it and in opposition to it. But this is where hierarchy seeks to divide us from our human selves and place us in opposition to ourselves. The way it induces we the 99% to fight among ourselves politically is only one aspect of it.

 

It’s characteristic that capitalism’s instinct was to turn animals into cannibals, via CAFO feed, and characteristic of the ways of nature that the direct and immediate result was mad cow disease. This was veritably, as well as in a rich symbolic sense, a direct challenge to nature and expression of infinite contempt for it. Capitalism is an excrescence upon humanity and upon the earth as a whole. It’s no accident that its quintessential qualities, biologically as well as metaphorically, are cancer and cannibalism.

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GMO Empire: Thesis Statement

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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

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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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GMO Imperialism as Biological Warfare

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GMO imperialism is set to escalate on the biological warfare front. Glyphosate, including Monsanto’s previously dominant Roundup, is completely collapsing under the assault of the superweeds it generated against itself. This means the complete empirical failure of the entire concept of herbicide tolerant (HT) GE crops. Just as the dialectical destruction of Roundup was easily predicted, so the exact same dynamic will destroy 2,4-D and dicamba as effective herbicides, no doubt even more quickly. Everybody knows it.

 

But imperialism doesn’t recognize failure according to reality-based measures. Therefore a whole new HT suite, Dow Chemical’s “Enlist” herbicide and set of HT varieties (they’re starting with corn, but have soybeans and cotton in the pipeline), is poised to supplant the Roundup Ready system. This will do nothing but repeat the same failures and destruction as Roundup has wrought, but on an even more vicious scale. Enlist is based on 2,4-D, one of the primary components of the war-grade defoliant Agent Orange.

 

This corporate media piece blames farmers for having “relied too much on glyphosate”. This is a common Monsanto lie. The fact is that growers of Roundup Ready crops adhere scrupulously to Monsanto’s guidelines for application. (Monsanto’s technical support requires such adherence, as do what flimsy warrantees there are in the contract.) Yes, the corporate system, from any reality-based point of view (i.e. any point of view other than corporate profit and domination), relied too much on glyphosate. But this was systematic top-down policy, imposed by the corporate/government system. It wasn’t undisciplined farmers, the way the NYT wants us to think. On the contrary, Monsanto’s Gleichschaltung (coordination) is quite rigorous.

 

2,4-D and dicamba are bad enough under normal circumstances, where they’re mostly applied before crops are grown. This is the stage at which they’re least volatile and likely to be spread far and wide, poisoning the fields of every other farmer. But the HT GMOs will encourage promiscuous spraying (perhaps as much as a 30-fold increase in 2,4-D application over the next decade) throughout the season, including times of peak volatility.

 

To the extent they now use 2,4-D and dicamba, corn and soybean farmers usually apply the chemicals before the crops are growing, he said. But with resistant crops, the chemicals will be sprayed later in the growing season, when the hotter weather increases the chance of volatilization.

 

So the goal here is to greatly escalate the use and promiscuous drift of these extremely toxic substances. Let’s recall that government/corporate propaganda touted HT GMO 1.0 as eliminating the need for the more toxic herbicides, as we could now rely upon the relatively inert and less toxic glyphosate. (Glyphosate’s lower toxicity also turned out to be a lie.)

 

Now the corporate state is back touting HT 2.0, which will depend upon the very same “more toxic” herbicides which 1.0, it was promised, would render obsolete. Of course, as everyone at Dow, Monsanto and the USDA knows perfectly well, these GMOs will be subject to the same superweed dialectic, and will also fail.

 

If journalism as depicted in the good civics textbooks still existed, every piece written on this doubling down on an already busted hand would focus on this extraordinary fact. In addition to their socioeconomic, political, environmental, and health ravages, herbicide tolerant GMOs are a proven failure. That the government* would still push this failed and destructive policy ought to be a world-historical scandal. Do we the people learn about this scandal from “the paper of record”? On the contrary, the NYT scribbler (Andrew Pollack) pushes the party line with a verve that would make Goebbels proud:

 

The activity stems from the huge success, at least initially, of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready crops, which are genetically engineered to tolerate its herbicide Roundup, also sold generically as glyphosate.

 

Failure is Success wasn’t included among Big Brother’s sloganeering toolkit in 1984, but it’s a favorite among today’s corporate hacks. God knows they have frequent need of it, though it’s seldom applied in such brazen contradiction of physical facts.

 

Industrial monoculture was already a hothouse flower doomed to collapse even before GMOs. But these have added a vastly more weighty, complex, and flimsy layer. The Tower of Babel, already tottering, becomes ever more top-heavy. 

 

But some other scientists say there is little choice but to turn to the new crops and their matching chemicals. Without them, “we’re going to get to a situation where we have no tools at all,” said Greg Kruger, assistant professor of cropping systems at the University of Nebraska

 

This does look like the premeditated end goal. There’s no other way to interpret this kind of propaganda, and the already failed policy it seeks to continue.

 

It’s clear that corporations and the government are determined to keep speeding up the GMO treadmill, extracting as much profit as possible and enforcing as much domination as possible, until it completely and irrevocably collapses, leaving behind nothing but the ruins of agriculture – toxic, dead soil, rampaging superweeds and superbugs, seed genocide, and the death by starvation of billions.

 

We see this second, infinitely worse Holocaust being prepared in plain sight. Are we going to let ourselves be marched into the gas chambers as meekly as the first group of victims did?

 

[*In this case "the government" means the USDA, i.e. the Obama administration. But the Republicans are just as in the bag for Monsanto as the Democrats. For anyone who still believes in system electoralism, remember that in November you have an easy choice: you can vote for Monsanto or for Monsanto. Anyone who wants to vote against Monsanto will need to look to alternatives to electoralism and sham "representative" government.]

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Genocide By GMO Famine?

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I’ve seen more mentions lately of the possibility of new genocides perpetrated upon the billions being rendered economically superfluous. The idea’s in the air. 

 

Economic superfluity, permanent unemployment, are of course nothing natural and could never occur under natural conditions, including conditions of social organization which are adapted to the ways of the earth. On the contrary, these are the artificial productions of economic hierarchy in general, and capitalism in particular. The basic goal of capitalism is to impose artificial scarcity upon natural abundance. This is applied to the land, to natural resources, and to the products of human labor.

 

It’s also applied to access to work itself, which like everything else is enclosed, parceled out as “property”, and then rented to us, the true owners. In this case the scarce parcels, carefully rationed, are called “jobs”. The ability to function in society, and the very measure of being human, are to be tied to this piece of property, and whether one is allowed to rent it from “the employer”.

 

On the other hand, the number of jobs is being further constricted all the time. Billions are being rendered permanently non-functional from the point of view of the system. They’ve been dispossessed, and dehumanized. They are, in fact, not human.

 

Nor does the system intend to use them all as slaves. The 1% don’t need so many slaves. So what could possibly be the intended fate of these billions of unpersons?

 

I’ve been tossing around an idea regarding the system’s attempt to impose GMO monoculture by force. This monoculture is guaranteed to frequently collapse, triggering catastrophic famines. This is by its own inertia and inherent vulnerabilties.

 

But I think it may be true that even beyond the corporatist motives for this policy, the 1% also intend to be able to trigger these collapses and famines at will. After all, no accumulation of artificial collapses, famines, and disease outbreaks causes them to admit the bankruptcy of the policy, any more than Wall Street’s intentional destruction of the global economy in 2007-08 caused them to dismantle the finance sector.

 

We know for a fact that Wall Street is, by system intention, to be allowed to destroy and plunder economies at will. We know for a fact that the system cares nothing about food safety, but that on the contrary the lethal pandemics which will arise (and may already have arisen) from CAFOs are considered acceptable. This is at best collateral damage, at worst something desired. Similarly, we know that the system considers the hyper-vulnerability of monoculture in general and GMO monoculture in particular to be desirable. It’s a feature, not a bug. (This is 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 of herbicide and ever more expensive proprietary seeds. Each new GMO generation is more expensive than the failed one it, by intention, must replace. GMOs were the epitome of disaster capitalism from their inception. We already knew that corporate agriculture, contrary to its propaganda, seeks disaster and scarcity, not plenty.)

 

When we consider all this, we must also take seriously the possibility that artificially-engineered mass famine, like those engineered by the British in India, the Nazis, Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, and many times before by Western capitalism, is on the drawing board here.

 

At the very least, no one can deny that with our total dependence on corporate agriculture, this is a practical possibility. Nor can anyone deny the malevolence of the 1%. Put the two together, and we have more than enough to know that the current situation is untenable and intolerable. We must, with all organized speed, decentralize, relocalize, and democratize food production and distribution, on a beyond-organic basis. 

 

 

Our Real Job

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Where it comes to fossil fuel use, it’s superfluous to “advocate” this or that; the end of cheap oil is a fact. Most of the population of future societies will be agricultural workers, as is the historical norm. The legacy of the modern age is our newfound democratic consciousness and a large accumulation of agronomic knowledge. We can choose to use these to establish agroecology as the basis of truly democratic economies and communities. That’s the real goal of the food sovereignty movement, to establish itself as the basis of post-fossil fuel societies.

 

It’s not an argument against any of this to say that non-mechanized farming is physically more laborious than industrial agriculture. That’s never been true for farm laborers under capitalism. Nor, on the other hand, was it necessarily true from the other point of view. Medieval peasants worked less than modern industrial workers, for example. Even non-industrial agriculture, if democratically organized and purged of all parasites, can produce more than enough and still leave far more leisure time than we have today with the “job” model. Meanwhile life expectancy is now headed back down in the West. Under capitalism, the mass availability of modern medicine was a temporary feature of the Oil Age. Society is certainly supposed to continue spending ever more obscene amounts on the “health care” system. But more and more this will simply go down corporate ratholes, and to prop up luxury care for the 1%. In the hands of the 1% even seemingly good things like modern medicines become fraudulent and weapons against us.

 

The fact is that where it comes to medicine or something like renewable energy, even if their promises were physically possible post-oil (but they’re not), these promises are actually lies, as these sectors, like all others, are to be completely enclosed for the benefit of the 1%. To believe in a renewable energy utopia is just like continuing to believe in the liberal welfare state. This welfare state was a feature of the Oil Age, a temporary concession on the part of the 1%. It’s now being rolled back across the board, and as we see everywhere, any attempt to hold a “reformist” line somewhere is immediately obliterated. Reformism is simply a misdirectional ploy. We can have freedom and prosperity, but only by eradicating the 1% and its hierarchies completely. We can’t have the rancid liberal utopia of reformed capitalism and state.

 

As for the actual nature of the work, physical labor is not ”bad” and a chore to be avoided. On the contrary, all able-bodied citizens must do their fair share of the physical work. He who does not work shall not eat. Work is something we’ve only been indoctrinated into thinking is an undesirable chore. It certainly is that under any hierarchy, and anyone who willingly works for a boss and considers that desirable is a scab. Historically people have always sought to avoid that, and the modern mass willingness to do so is yet another bizarre, ahistorical trait of industrialization and capitalism. As Marx analyzed, modern “workers” with “jobs” are systematically alienated from their work, robbed of both the physical produce and the spiritual satisfaction. By design, people are driven to hate work and seek ways, as individuals, to shirk it. They’re supposed to want to individually rise to petty bourgeois status and then fight furiously against anything which might level them with those who still do the hated physical work. Thus they’re acculturated to support the hierarchy which oppresses them all, for the sake of its false promise that their slightly higher position will be maintained. As we’re seeing today, this was always a lie. The mass middle class was a temporary concession on the part of the 1%, affordable on account of the oil surplus. This middle class is now being liquidated.

 

But it remains humanly true as ever that work undertaken on one’s own and for one’s family, friends, community, however physically hard, is fulfilling and even enjoyable. I usually enjoy the physical work I do in my garden and for our various relocalization projects. And even where the work is unpleasant in itself, it’s still ultimately satisfying, as it’s toward a cooperative democratic goal. That could be the nature of all work, where it’s finally liberated from the control of criminal elites.

 

We stand here, ready and able to work. Our work is there before us. The only thing in our way is a barbed wire fence which a few gangsters have strung between us and our work. They now force us to pass through checkpoints in the fence to get to our work. We need passes, in the form of “jobs”, to be let through. Almost all that we produce we must leave on the criminals’ side of the barbed wire, taking home only a meager portion in the form of “wages”.

 

There’s a similar fence between us as political animals, and our political sovereignty. There we may pass through the checkpoints only as “voters”.

 

No amount of dreaming about better checkpoint procedures will avail. We’re dispossessed, disenfranchised, alienated, enslaved. It’s this barbed wire enclosure which does it all. And in turn, all we need to do, and all we can do, is to tear down this fence between us and our human birthright. Our entire birthright.

 

It’s the only thing that’s necessary, and the only thing that’s sufficient. Tear down all system fences. Tear down all enclosures.

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