Two Futures (And the Decade of 9/11)

>

As you might imagine, this blog doesn’t have much to say about the anniversary of 9/11. This wasn’t the start of Western imperial aggression, nor the start of its neoliberal stage, nor of terrorism in response to it, nor of the cynical use of terrorism as a pretext for the premeditated actions of corporatists and totalitarians. So 9/11 didn’t generate anything new. What it did was dramatically accelerate things. But the basic game plan was already set and would’ve been played out regardless. In its absence, today we’d be in pretty much the same spot, although the police state might not yet be as overt and the degradation of civil liberties not yet as advanced. The state of kleptocracy, the Bailout, and the captivity of the economy, I think, wouldn’t be significantly different. The movement imperative toward relocalization and true democracy wouldn’t be different.

 

In a comment yesterday Strieb mentioned seeing a new cult of death. I’m not sure what he meant, but the cultural fetish of 9/11 certainly bears comparison to the old fascist cults of death. Nazi rallies always celebrated death, Hitler had his cult of the Blood Banner from November 1923 and his yearly anniversary ritual speech and invocation of the blood of the martyrs (about whom he was utterly cynical in private; one was ”irreplaceable” only because of his social connections to rich donors, that’s all; the rest were infinitely more useful dead than alive – sound familiar today?), Rumania’s Iron Guard, Spain’s Falange with its favorite marching song, “Long Live Death!”

 

This sense of a cult of death is rendered more uncanny vs. a backdrop of heightened terror warnings and ubiquitous militarized police. The aftermath of the hurricane and a second big dumping of rain and flooding a week later adds to the sense of destruction and doom.

 

Meanwhile, we’re all about life. As negative as we often must be, our emphasis is affirmative toward positive democracy, community, a new way of life built around a new agriculture, positive freedom in the broadest as well as most specific sense. We aspire to take full responsibility for ourselves, and as much as possible we take responsibility today. We look to the future, we believe in the future.

 

By contrast, everything about this system and its culture reeks of decrepitude, decadence, rot, the dying. Its flight from responsibility and freedom, its short-run greed and short-run fear, its total surrender to “fear itself”, betray how it has no confidence in the future, because deep down it recognizes it has no future.

 

So however obnoxious things are today in their overt death cult aspects as well as their more sublimated circus/sports fan manifestations; more importantly, however much more crime and violence this system commits in its death throes, we can remain confident in our aspirations, for tomorrow belongs to us. Negatively, every element of the physical, economic, and political unsustainability of today shall hand tomorrow to us. Affirmatively, we shall seize tomorrow with the democratic hand because our cause is just and is blessed by history, whose democratic arc is long but curves toward its own consummation. All the vaster trend lines, far more vast than the temporary data noise of the fossil fuel binge, are vectors toward it.

 

We may be small at the moment and have to scramble to avoid the teeth and feet of the huge, lumbering reptiles. But 9/11 was a pebble toss compared to the asteroid that has already hit them, though as Nietzsche said lightning takes time to arrive, and it takes time to hear the thunder. Today we already begin to thrive in our own way, and we shall survive, and eventually stand tall as the new humanity we already constitute in embryo.

 

 

We’re All Lumpenproles Now (Part 2)

>

I’ve had people accuse me of “Manichaeism”, and while I used to bother to dispute this, there’s actually a truth to it. Not that I’m the Manichaean (and not that I claim to represent the absolute Good), but that I recognize the fundamental assault of Evil on everything outside itself including everything I value.

 

(Of course, I’m also not Manichaean in the technical sense that I don’t recognize this evil as being some necessary element of the universe. On the contrary, I recognize it as gratuitious, pointless, worthless, easily rid of if we only found the will to rid ourselves of it, and we’d be infinitely better off if it ceased to exist. That’s a major part of what’s so obscene about it. Like the Ancien Regime Tocqueville described, its wickedness is exceeded only by its worthlessness.)

 

Contrary to the lies propagated by system hacks and ”progressives” in unison, we’re not at all “in this together”. Even Marx thought the capitalist was integral, played for a time a progressive role, and was only at the time of his writing (in Europe) reaching the decadent/malevolent stage. But unlike in regular Marxist analysis, under colonialism capitalism was always purely alien and imposed itself by main force. Today Fanon’s mid-century analysis sounds more convincing. The world of colonialism/imperialism, and today globalization, has always been a Manichaean world. There’s no co-existence, let alone dialectic, only total, zero-sum war.

 

The “native” sector is not complementary to the European sector. The two confront one another, but not in the service of a higher unity. They follow the dictates of mutual exclusion: There is no conciliation possible, one of them is superfluous…

The colonial world is a compartmentalized world. It is obviously as superfluous to recall the existence of “native” towns and European towns, of schools for “natives” and schools for Europeans, as it is to recall apartheid in South Africa…

The colonized world is a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border, is represented by the barracks and the police stations. [I add: Today it's more sublimated - the credit card and privatization fire line. But de jure violence is always ready to provide support.] In the colonies the official, legitimate agent, the spokesperson for the colonizer and the regime of oppression, is the police officer or the soldier…

This is why a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched where it comes to the colonial issue. It’s not just the concept of the pre-capitalist society which needs to be reexamined here. The serf is essentially different from the knight, but a reference to divine right is needed to justify this difference in status. In the colonies the foreigner imposed himself using his cannons and machines. Despite the success of his pacification, in spite of his appropriation, the colonist always remains a foreigner. It’s not the factories, the estates, or the bank account which primarily characterize the “ruling class”. The ruling species is first and foremost the outsider from elsewhere, different from the indigenous population, “the others”…

The colonial world is a Manichaean world.

The Wretched of the Earth pp. 3-6.

 

We can look to Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism to find the mortal peril of the economically superfluous, those even the capitalist cannot and does not want to economically exploit. These are in imminent danger of becoming the targets of genocide. This is technically our position today, any of us. When those who rejected Obama’s health racket bailout would say of it that its real policy was, “If you’re not rich, then either don’t get sick, or else die”, this was no exaggeration. Death to the non-rich in a very literal sense is the ideal goal of the elites.

 

It’s unlikely the enemy can directly exterminate overwhelming numbers of us, and anyway they have us earmarked for restored serfdom in the post-oil fields (where vastly more manual labor, backbreaking work to maintain the corporate mode of agriculture by hand, will be necessary). But any particular minority, however defined, which they find obnoxious, will be in immediate danger of literal extermination.

 

Isn’t all this already visible in outline? There’s no doubt about the nature of imperialism. Nor is there any doubt that this imperialism has fully come home, as its critics were warning it would eventually do since the latter 19th century. Yes – the banks, the corporations, their thug-and-bagman government, are worthless to the people. They’re nothing but alien parasites and predators. They do nothing but steal and destroy. They partake nothing of indigenous family, community, civil society, democracy, landbase. On the contrary, they viciously assault all of these with the goal of eradicating them completely. The land is stolen, the people driven off, and the productive essence of the land itself then destroyed. There’s zero relationship between these aliens and the people. We’ve been internally colonized.

 

But we are the humans of this land, and this land is the landbase of our humanity. Our families, friendships. communities, society, democracy, morality, humanity are the natural and rightful shoots from this soil. We can’t conceive or have any order or prosperity other than those native to our land and ourselves on this land. Today we’ve been driven into the political and legal shantytown of being mere vagrants on our own land, and increasingly we’re being driven into physical ghettos. It’s a purely foreign excrescence which is perpetrating this infinite crime, a vile disease rotting on the face of the earth. We can free ourselves, restitute and cleanse our great land, re-assert our humanity, restore our prosperity, redeem our democracy. To do so, we must recognize our human imperative, and denounce everything superfluous to it, and everything harmful to it.

 

Our fight shall, on the strategic and tactical level, mostly be one of building outside the colonial structures, renouncing, refusing, withdrawing to build elsewhere, where necessary evading or resisting. But in principle this is total war to the most bitter zero-sum end. We didn’t start it, but we must finish it. Either kleptocracy or humanity must perish completely from the face of the earth. This shall be the great question which settles the fate of the earth itself.

 

 

Movement and Psychology/Spirit

>

Would it be better to die knowing your life had been meaningless, or would you rather have created meaning for it? This question always looms for us, but especially in those bad times where crime and tyranny imposes a long time of troubles on a people, where the stark options are to fight or die, this death being perhaps literal, perhaps “only” spiritual. In such times, part of the task of a political movement is to help the fighters organize their struggle in such a way that they create this meaning for themselves, independently of whatever temporal success they attain.

 

The kleptocracy itself makes an effort to astroturf a simulation of such meaningfulness. Indeed, even today polls still indicate that Americans think this “country”, such as it currently is, is still the best kind of place to live. But such sentiments are clearly only skin-deep. Except for the rich and a few stupid progressives, everyone knows in his gut we’re headed at high speed for a brick wall. The “war on terror” can’t drum up the requisite enthusiasm. To do what? – Snitching as an heroic deed? All these idiots can do is meekly submit to TSA scanners and an ever-intensifying police state. Not even as active fascist cadres, but merely as passive recipients. No, one can’t muster the true collective civic enthusiasm that way, even in a perverted form. Rousseau had it pegged a long time ago – to have a citizen movement, the citizenry must actively participate. Where they passively abdicate their own function to mercenaries and become mere spectators and subjects, they liquidate themselves as a people. That’s what’s happening today at every juncture within the system and its rump vestige of civil society.

 

In the end, the kleptocracy is hamstrung by its own ideology that only money has value. So by definition it will have a difficult, perhaps impossible, task in seeking to enlist the spirit. How do you do that when you just told everyone that only money matters?

 

Our movement, on the contrary, declares that among public actions only what you do out of your moral imperative has any value. (In private actions we have love, friendship, family and community loyalty. In public actions, where these come into play at all, we have only the moral value of loyalty to them.) For now we still need money to survive, so we have no choice but to acquire it. But as far as what it is in itself, we spit on it.

 

The movement will have many aspects which appeal to many elements of the human experience. There’s philosophical and moral principle. There’s rationalism in accord with the evidence. Food sovereignty is extremely powerful on both counts.

 

There’s also the appeal to the soul, the attempt to create a deep sense of spiritual meaning. How will this new movement make this appeal? One obvious example, ready to hand, is to revive the Victory Garden ideal of WWII and apply it to our own food relocalization efforts. In theory this can be far more potent today, as today we are literally fighting for our communities and families in a way we weren’t back then. A movement of seed saving and seed banking can similarly be elaborated as Freedom Seeds.

 

What else is there? For now I’m still in a brainstorming stage, not yet clearly seeing what is to be done. But I’ve long had my idea of transposing the idea of the American Revolution to our present moment. We embody the exact same ideals facing up against the same onslaught as the original Revolution. We continue in its spirit. The original was hijacked and misdirected in 1787-8. Today, facing the climax and final resolution of this hijacking, we must continue the original Revolution. We must take up that fallen torch and carry it to its rightful, historically ordained democratic destination.

 

Part of how we’ll do this is through the righteous movement for Food Sovereignty, which ties in with our fundamental imperative to redeem our connection with the land. This spiritual grounding in the literal ground itself was one of our most precious human possessions, and one which we so carelessly threw away. People sense this. Even the 60s-70s era “getting back to the land” movement, as premature, unprepared, and even childish as it often was, still captured the imaginations of far more people than actually participated. Today the need is infinitely more critical, we have far more knowledge and resolve, and the time is ripe. I expect that this time, as the public imagination comprehends what’s at stake and what can be done, this imagination will evoke a far more enthusiastic response.

 

Time banking and other alternatives to money, in addition to their proximate practical effects, constitute the building of a whole new economy, alongside and eventually superseding the system economy. This may be a rich vein of spiritual appeal in itself. My relocalization group has just started a time bank. Last week we had an educational booth at the farmers’ market. In just the discussions we had that day with customers who stopped by (some who already knew us, others strangers to us), my impression was that while they tended to be uncertain about the actual mechanics of the thing, when you said something like “alternative to the cash economy” they responded enthusiastically. They instinctively understood and cherished the idea.

 

Negatively speaking, anti-corporatism is the struggle of the age. Because corporate tyranny is so far advanced in practice, and seeks totalitarian control in principle and intention, anti-corporate vs. pro-corporate is the dividing line on literally every issue. This stark demarcation, while daunting, can also be a source of strength. Eschatological struggle in itself, the knowledge of being a fighter in the final conflict, is often a potent source of psychological power and determination. We must cultivate this sense.

 

In the end, what is the age-old “quest for glory” (a term which we often disparage, but which, if we’re honest, sums up much that motivates even the best people), and how is it related to the political animal, politics/volunteering as something not only to be done for its own sake, but in order to be seen, heard, recognized, even acclaimed? This was at the core of the ancient Greek concept of democracy, and it is part of the essence of participatory democracy itself (even if it’s not politically correct to say so). The quest is not stupid or dishonorable in itself. On the contrary it’s part of our humanity. What’s dishonorable is the way it’s been so easily hijacked and perverted to the service of criminal governments and corporations. It is glorious to sacrifice for one’s family, friends, community. It’s stupid and dishonorable to lift a finger for governments, corporations, the rich, any elites.

 

And what might our affirmative movement look like to the eye, which is also a transmitter to the soul? Here’s one great example from history, excerpted from Lawrence Goodwyn’s The Populist Moment:

 

In the succeeding eighteen months their new way of looking at things flowered into a mass expression of a new political vision. We may call it (for that is what it is) the movement culture of Populism. This culture involved more than just the bulking of cotton. It extended to frequent Alliance meetings to plan the mass sales – meetings where the whole family came, where the twilight suppers were, in the early days, laid out for ten or twenty members of the suballiance, or for hundreds at a county Alliance meeting, but which soon grew into vast spectacles; long trains of wagons, emblazoned with suballiance banners, stretching literally for miles, trekking to enormous encampments where five, ten, and twenty thousand men and women listened intently to the plans of their Alliance and talked among themselves about those plans…

How is a democratic culture created? Apparently in such prosaic, powerful ways. When a farm family’s wagon crested a hill en route to a Fourth of July “Alliance Day” encampment and the occupants looked back to see thousands of other families trailed out behind them in wagon trains, the thought that “the Alliance is the people and the people are together” took on transforming possibilities.

 

We must repeat such experiences. But this time we shall win.

Bin Laden Dead? It Has Nothing to Do With the War

>

So I wake up to hear that Osama bin Laden is allegedly dead. I remember back in 2001, once the government launched the war in Afghanistan, the consensus among my co-workers was that they’d kill or capture bin Laden within two weeks. That’s actually not far short of when they had him bagged at Tora Bora and let him escape through suspicious negligence of the back door into Pakistan. Of course, in 2001 most people thought Bush really wanted to capture or kill him. The idea that bin Laden was more useful to corporate imperialism alive and at large than dead or a prisoner was too cynical for most people at that point. We’ve since learned differently, and most people are jaded about it all.

 

Still, this has caused a ripple of excitement. At Naked Capitalism they’re even asking if this makes Obama a shoe-in for 2012. Nobody’s cared about bin Laden for a long time, and I’ll eat my hat if anyone cares about this in 2012. This criminal probably will win in 2012 if he’s up against anyone from the current slate of Republicans, but only by default on account of how repulsive they all are.

 

I suppose it’s not surprising that stimulus-response Americans in general, always desperate for a novelty to give them a temporary rush, are momentarily excited over such a non-event. (Bin Laden hasn’t had any operational significance in many years; he’s long been of only symbolic significance. Indeed, while his death means nothing from America’s point of view, his symbolic martyrdom may be more influential to the declining jihadist movement than he was alive as a has-been.)

 

Still, I hope people can turn this momentary enthusiasm to good effect by insisting, “This means the objective of the war is complete and we can end the war now.” That’s really nonsense, of course. The purpose of the war has nothing to do with actual terrorists, who are merely a pretext. Obama hopes he can score political points with a momentary proclamation of victory but still continue the wars unabated. Maybe for once this kind of scam won’t work.

 

(A cynic on this issue might go with the following line: For general audiences, pretend to go along with the notion that bin Laden was the one and only true leader of Islamic terrorism, that this is conclusive, and say, “So this is it. We’ve won. Now we can end the wars and bring the troops home.” Accuse anyone who disputes this of being a liar who always claimed killing bin Laden was the primary goal.)

 

What’s the real point of the war? I’ve written about it extensively before; see my categories “Afghanistan” and “Global War on Terror”. But I’ll sum up my more recent refinement of my view.

 

Going back to 1990 and through the early 2000s, I used to think Middle Eastern aggression was primarily about oil. It used to be, but I think by now it’s more about corporatism and domination.

 

An empire which was truly, rationally focused on the global flow of oil would have gone about things very differently. If you want the oil to flow smoothly, you want geopolitical stability. You want calm in the Mideast. But the US has done all it can to disrupt the region and create chaos. Similarly, if you want to maintain consensus on the dollar as reserve currency and the currency paid for oil, you’d want to maintain the same calm, not do all you can to break up that consensus and drive others to seek alternatives.

 

I think in Washington the goal of ensuring the oil supply is considered too boring and isn’t the most short-term profitable priority. As we’ve seen everywhere, no one in the kleptocracy seems capable any longer of setting a priority based on longer-term self-interest, or even of conceiving such things. No one seems capable of thinking or doing in any way other than to maximize short run profiteering.

 

That’s why the imperial wars are so impulsive, scattershot, strategically incoherent, and more in the nature of drunken plunder raids than calculated empire-building. Iraq provided the most stark example, as the neoliberal Einsatzgruppen surged in immediately following the troops, and with the indiscriminate destructiveness of a tsunami rushed to impose a policy of total deregulation, privatization, and throwing the borders completely open to the full fury of globalization. Not one bit of this was even the slightest bit coordinated according to any guiding principle whatsoever. It was total corporatist chaos as its own principle. Every racket which could get to Iraq now cashed in its chips. It could be compared to a bank run, in that for short term profit corporatism was depleting any basis for its long run ability to maintain a revenue stream from these new colonies. But nobody cares about that anymore.

 

In Afghanistan that same dynamic has sought to prevail, although there it’s more difficult as there isn’t the same domestic economy to exploit, so the pirates have to content themselves mostly with government contract plunder.

 

So we can see how improbable it is that anyone among the elites considers the death of bin Laden to have any significance at all. Indeed, the way Obama’s exulting in this looks like self-indulgence for the sake of merely a short-run political profit. Over the long run, wasn’t bin Laden still more useful at large than dead? At any rate, there was no downside to his still being alive, but like I mentioned above, there’s a possible political downside for them now that he’s dead.

 

But like I said, I doubt it will matter either way. The corporate imperial “war on terror” has nothing to do with actually fighting terrorists.

Libya and the Permanent War

 

I don’t think I have much that’s new to say about the latest US war, the first which is 100% Obama’s.

 

It does represent a further evolution of the Permanent War, as this time there wasn’t the slightest pretense of seeking Congressional approval. Congruently, it’s another advancement of imperial presidency doctrine, with Hillary Ribbentrop actually declaring that for Congress to try to restrain the president would be a violation of the prerogative of the executive. It’s simply amazing how meaningless the Constitution has become even for those who swear to uphold it and claim to base their legitimacy upon it.

 

My readers will know that I consider no phenomena to be unrelated to the kleptocratic war on America, and so it is with the imperial presidency. I’ve written briefly about this before, how the emphasis on foreign policy favors the executive. US foreign policy since WWII has focused on colonial exploitation. At the same time this emphasis is meant to starve and show contempt for domestic policy. And then, when this exploitative, contemptuous government turns to domestic policy, it does so from point of view of a foreign conqueror like Attila. So it’s logical that executive would take the lead here as well, with Congress his rubber-stamp. I’ll probably have another post on this, developing the idea in the corporatist context.

 

I don’t care any longer in principle about matters of the “balance of powers”, since I recognize this as having been a scam in the first place. These powers, properly balanced or not, were always intended to uphold a new ruling class over the people, and so it has been throughout US history. All that’s happened since the 70s is that the development of this ruling class has required increasing imbalance and contempt for even the forms of its own Constitution.

 

As for the war itself, it looks like a farce and a crime. We know that Western wars are waged only for malevolent ends and have only destructive consequences for everyone but the power elites. This one will and can be no exception. (When I earlier considered the possibility of supporting a no fly zone, I stipulated that we were discussing only that by itself. Of course, one of the reasons for rejecting such a zone was that by itself it could never accomplish anything. Therefore we see how the moment the West decided to seize the opportunity for war, they took the original “no fly zone” idea and turned it into something far more vast.)

 

It’s hard to say who these rebels even are. From what I read, most military units on either side have melted away as the air strikes began, and we’ve been left with Gaddafi loyalists against rebel paramilitaries of uncertain provenance. Nor is it clear who’s represented by the ”rebels”, including turncoat Gaddafi officials and Chalabi types who have been living in America, who requested this NATO war.

 

We know from history that this war will not help the Libyan* people. From our point of view, the most important thing about it is how it will further entrench the military state in our own countries.

 

[* I'm not an expert, but so far as I read there's no such thing as "Libya". Rather, it's a conglomeration of tribes, with Gaddafi leading a tribal coalition largely from the western part of the country, which has always been at odds with the tribes from the eastern part. The rebellion, at least in the east, has arisen largely among these tribes. If anyone thinks I have that wrong, let me know.]  

 

The war is another act of aggression, and demonstrates yet again how the neoliberal West intends for its wars to continue permanently, flaring up ever anew at new boundaries, with zero democratic restraint and increasing contempt for even the pretense of such restraint. (Meanwhile, the US praised the violent crackdown upon the undisputed rebellious majority in Bahrain.) I’m reminded of Hitler’s planned end stage for the Nazi empire, once the Soviet Union had been pushed beyond the Urals, its main power permanently smashed, and the most intense part of the war won. At that point, he envisioned a permanent “bleeding boundary” at the periphery of the empire, as over generations chronic distant warfare was enshrined as the permanent feature of life. Something similar is intended today, although at this empire’s bleeding boundary the conflagrations are likely to be more severe. This will continue for as long as the neoliberal empire stands, although we can hope that every act of overextension, including political overextension abroad (and, dare we hope, at home? but previous wars haven’t had that effect), will bring closer the day of its fall.

The War On Terror Is Over: Synopsis

 

I don’t write much about the wars anymore, simply because I can’t write about everything and had to whittle down my topics. But I wanted to sum up the rational case against the war in one short post, perhaps as the basis for a set of talking points if anyone wanted to use it that way.

 

I won’t go again into the true corporatist nature of the war. I’ve written extensively about that in the past, for example here, here, and here. Let me just again cite two choice pieces of evidence: War Secretary Robert Gates assuring an audience of weapons racketeers that the administration’s main priority is escalating Pentagon budgets solely for the sake of spending escalation itself, i.e. for the sake of corporate welfare; and Nick Turse’s account of how Pentagon contracting extends to a whole menagerie of “civilian” consumer goods and services companies. This gives an overview of how the military-industrial complex extends much further than most people think. The corporate-militarist state has already become far more integrated than it ever was under classical fascism prior to WWII.

 

So here’s the basic facts:

 

1. Terrorism is not a real threat to America. If you don’t believe a pinko like me, how about the neocon consultant corporation Stratfor? Stratfor, unlike some blowhard in the jingo NYT or WaPo, actually gets paid for the actionable quality of its opinions. That’s how it makes its living. And as it’s an imperial consultant, for Stratfor to support war would be talking its book.

 

Yet according to this and many other pieces, terrorism “does not represent a strategic, existential threat”.

 

In fact, Stratfor’s basic position on the Global War on Terror goes as follows:

 

A. Terrorism is not a strategic, existential threat.

 

B. Al-Qaeda’s capabilities have been greatly degraded.

 

C. Whatever diminished action international terrorism can undertake, it can undertake it outside Afghanistan Yemen, or any other particular place.

 

D. Most Afghans reject the Karzai government. (So according to Petraeus’ and McChrystal’s own counterinsurgency doctrine, which declares the necessity for a legitimate indigenous client government, the Afghanistan war cannot be won.)

 

E. The Taliban cannot be defeated.

 

Nietzsche wrote that, “The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we were trying to do in the first place.” The stated U.S. goal in Afghanistan was the destruction of al Qaeda. While al Qaeda as it existed in 2001 has certainly been disrupted and degraded, al Qaeda’s evolution and migration means that disrupting and degrading it — to say nothing of destroying it — can no longer be achieved by waging a war in Afghanistan. The guerrilla does not rely on a single piece of real estate (in this case Afghanistan) but rather on his ability to move seamlessly across terrain to evade decisive combat in any specific location. Islamist-fueled transnational terrorism is not centered on Afghanistan and does not need Afghanistan, so no matter how successful that war might be, it would make little difference in the larger fight against transnational jihadism.

 

So we have Stratfor making the whole case right there. We should end the wars and get out.

 

And it’s not just them. Even arch-neocons like Zakaria admit that terrorism is no threat remotely commensurate with what we’ve lost and spent in pretending to fight it.

 

2. Any actual war on terror element of the “war on terror” has already been won. Administration experts themselves say so:

 

CIA chief Leon Panetta: “We’re looking at 50 to 100, maybe less” al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

 

Terror “czar” Michael Leiter: Maybe “more than 300″ jihadists in Pakistan.

 

National Security Adviser James Jones: “Fewer than 100″ AQ in Afghanistan.

 

ABC news quotes an intelligence official who sums it up: the DoD, CIA, and other intelligence agencies agree that there are at most around 100 jihadists in Afghanistan and several hundred in Pakistan.

 

So actual jihad has been smashed, like Stratfor says. The US government and military agree. The actual war on terror is over. It was won a long time ago.

 

3. The one and only thing now driving insurgencies and what little jihadist sentiment is left is the imperial war itself. This Pew study demonstrates that jihad is unpopular in Pakistan, but that American aggression is even less popular. The same public opinion is common throughout the Muslim world. Most people are sick of jihad and don’t want caliphates. The only thing they’d prefer it to is Western domination. And the one thing which causes them to look favorably upon insurgency and jihad is Western aggression.

 

In July the NBER released a study which found that the Afghan occupation itself is the driver of insurgency.

 

“Local exposure to violence from Isaf [NATO's "International Security Assistance Force", i.e. the invaders] appears to be the primary driver of this effect.”

 

Meanwhile as Petraeus took over from McC, he was mulling whether to relax McC’s relatively restrictive rules of engagement. Those were the same rules under which McC himself admitted they were doing little but slaughtering civilians:

 

We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force . . . . [T]o my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it.”

 

From the report: “When Isaf units kill civilians, this increases the willing number of combatants.”

 

That’s the main thing driving the insurgency, and it’s the only thing still breathing life into jihad. And Petraeus wants to escalate it. What did they say this war was about again?

 

4. The people are increasingly realizing this and are turning against the war.

 

So anyone who starts to doubt the war should be told that he’s not alone. On the contrary, he’s joining the majority, although you’d never know it from the normal MSM coverage.

 

 

So the war on terror is over and has been won. Terrorism is no strategic threat. The power elites admit as much. Whatever the real reason is for the “war on terror”, it’s not to defend against terrorism.

 

Maybe the best way to educate against the war is to start, not by directly calling it a corporate imperial boondoggle and war crime, but by proving that whatever it is, it’s not a war against terror.

 

In the same way that people are coming to reject the banks as they realize how the banks produce nothing but are only parasites, maybe more people will reject the wars as they realize how the wars have zero to do with terrorism or any other kind of defense, but are only a project of corporate aggression. (And maybe focusing on the “corporate war” angle can help do an end run around residual “patriotic” delusions about the wars.)

What’s For Dinner: Corporate Food Tyranny (1 of 2)

 

(Also posted at Food Freedom.)

 .

Last April the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund (FTCLDF) filed a lawsuit against the FDA’s interstate raw milk ban. While the suit is unlikely to prevail given likely court deference to the imperial executive branch, it’s already done important work in eliciting a remarkable statement of the FDA’s ideology and general attitude toward the American people. Before I get to the FDA brief, let’s first recap the pending food bill. This bill has been the subject of great controversy, with many like me calling it a Food Tyranny bill, others dismissing this as overly alarmist. I will establish in this two-parter that there’s nothing exaggerated in the alarm we raise. I’ll cite the evidence of the government’s stated ideology and its record of action to date.

 

But first let’s look at what the food bill actually says. (There are actually many of these bills. So far the only one which passed was HR 2749 in 2009. This was the main House food “safety” bill. The Senate’s corresponding version is S 510, currently in limbo. Reid had said he’d seek cloture during the lame duck session, but it’s now questionable whether that will be possible, pending the outcomes of still-disputed races. At any rate, if S 510 passes it will go into conference with HR 2749. Henceforth I’ll refer to this pending conference as “the” food bill, although there are significant differences between the House and Senate versions. The Senate version was considerably improved in committee, thanks to public interest pressure. But in spite of the optimism of NSAC and others, I’m going to go by the established trend, exemplified by the health racket bailout and the sham finance “reform”, that the conference results in a bill far worse than the better version, and perhaps even worse than both prior versions, as in the case of the health “insurance” Stamp Act.) For much of this I’ll be drawing on this excellent analysis at Food Freedom, which includes citations of the bill’s sections and subsections for every point.

 

The bill claims to be about food safety, vs. both pathogens and terrorism. But the fact is that all threats to food safety are either caused or magnified by our dependence upon a radically centralized industrial food production and distribution system. Existing regulations, if rigorously enforced against big corporate producers, would have been sufficient to prevent recent outbreaks like the egg salmonella, the peanut butter salmonella, or the spinach E. coli.

 

But the proposed bill does nothing about either of these conditions. It not only does nothing to decentralize and decorporatize the system, but will do all it can to further entrench this system. It will do nothing to force “regulators” at the FDA or USDA to enforce the law against the real culprits. Instead it will increase their discretion at the same time it increases their power. Meanwhile, neither existing nor proposed regulations are sufficient to meet the clear and present danger posed by the very existence of factory farms, which are nothing but unregulated bioweapons labs which will one day be the vector of a lethal pandemic. The food bill studiously leaves them intact.

 

Instead, this bill imposes a one-size-fits-all standard on all producers and distributors of any size. This standard is intended to be a minor nuisance at most to the big corporations (and probably won’t even be that, given the government’s record of benign neglect of the big offenders), while imposing a tremendous, perhaps insurmountable, financial and logistical burden on small outfits.

 

So the bill will definitely do nothing to improve food safety. The bill is definitely crafted to further centralize the system, further shackle us to corporate agriculture, and make our food even less safe. That’s indisputable. I suppose the only “controversy” here is whether that’s the government’s intent or not, and therefore whether under this bill things would just get inertially worse, or whether on the contrary it will be aggressively used as a weapon of accelerated tyranny. I’ll argue it’s the latter, and provide evidence.

 

There’s plenty of evidence of malicious intent in the bill itself.

 

If we think back to 2008 we can remember how the original version of the TARP was even worse in principle than the one that ended up passing. It was a three page demand sheet which would have made the Treasury secretary a veritable economic dictator. Opposition focused especially on the provision declaring that the secretary’s fiat could not be subject to judicial review.

 

Today’s food bill proposes something similar but far worse, as it would give the secretary of Health and Human Services dictatorial, unreviewable power over our very food. The House bill explicitly delineates “Quarantine Authority for Foods”, which could be declared upon the flimsiest pretext. This quarantine could give the federal government total power over all foods within a state or states. The criterion for this would be if the secretary “believes there’s a reasonable probability” of a danger of food-borne illness. One of the measures of assessing this probability would be the distribution of “adulterated” or “misbranded” food. But these and other FDA criteria have historically been interpreted in vague, capricious, selective ways, generally against smaller producers. “Misbranding” itself is not an English language term for fraud, but a Humpty-Dumpty bureaucratic category and status offense. The FDA issues a definition, and then anything which doesn’t meet its specifications is by definition ”misbranded”. For example, the FDA defines “milk” as pasteurized milk. Thus raw milk becomes unmilk. It is by definition misbranded and outlawed.

 

Whatever you think of raw milk, it’s easy to see where this process leads. The FDA has systematically encouraged and helped market antibiotics, hormones, pesticides, and GMOs: the very malefactors most responsible for food-born illness. So there’s no reason to doubt its potential will to bureaucratically define any food as being a GMO variety, or as having been sprayed with a kind of pesticide, and so on. (And the health racket Stamp mandate also provides the precedent of the government forcing us to buy private products. In tandem with corrupt court decisions on this mandate, the FDA would have a wide open field to mandate any and every kind of corporate input for all food production.)

 

So under the bill the government would achieve sweeping new powers to declare a kind of martial law over food, based upon a corporatized bureaucrat’s notion of a “reasonable probability” that any sort of threat to food safety exists. As we’ve just seen, this alleged ”threat” needn’t be an actual safety threat, but perhaps only a threat to the FDA’s corporate-captured definitions of food itself. Meanwhile, either as part of this quarantine, or as part of any action short of it, the bill also gives the FDA vastly greater power to search and demand access to records without a warrant. I previously wrote about the illegal Rawesome raid and fraudulent Morningland ”warrant”. But once this bill passes, actions like this will probably become technically legal, as the warrant requirements will be largely suspended. Armed food police will be able to kick in your kitchen door on the say-so of some bureaucratic thug.

 

The spirit of these vague standards will also be applied to an amorphous new set of allegedly “science-based” safety standards for produce. This ignores the fact that existing standards are sufficient if applied to the big producers. Here we see how the bill’s real intent isn’t to render existing production safe, but rather to impose a backdoor form of prior restraint on small producers. There’s no need for a whole new set of standards for growing, harvesting, processing, and distributing if we’re not going to go all the way and ban CAFOs. Short of that, all we need is to actually enforce what we have. So the very fact that they’re making such a show of how we need new regulations is strong evidence that the real target is small production and distribution as such. The bill will also impose onerous new record-keeping requirements which might be appropriate for the dangerous, hitherto unaccountable big producers, but are pointless and near-impossible for small producers to meet. 

 

The notion that “the food safety system is broken”, common among liberal and conservative commenters, is nothing but a corporate talking point. It’s true that the structure is broken and needs to be completely dismantled. But that’s not what they’re talking about. They want to leave the structure intact, but they claim the regulatory process is broken in principle. No, given the structure, the process is conceptually as good as it can be; it’s only that this existing process isn’t applied. So the only rational courses of action for someone who truly cares about food safety are to revolutionize the structure, or failing that to rigorously enforce the existing regulations. Anyone who claims to care about food safety, but who wants to leave the structure and the enforcement practice intact, and says we need “new rules”, is a liar. It’s textbook disaster capitalism – the big producers create the food safety problem, triggering several outbreaks. They and their creatures in government (and their useful idiots in the commentariat) then use that as the pretext for assaulting small producers.

 

So with these new “safety standards” we have a wild blue yonder of statist and corporatist possibilities. Who knows what restrictions, what mandates, are possible in theory?

 

The Senate version of the bill did make significant corporate progress over the House version in one way – it wants to integrate our food into the Department of Homeland Security’s “war on terror”. The DHS of course shouldn’t exist at all. It has never served any purpose other than pork and police statism. (It should be called the Dept. of PPS.)

 

Why aren’t the tea partiers outraged over how the food bill orders HHS and the DoA to coordinate with DHS, via a gaggle of secretive executive master plans, to conjure up a “National Agriculture and Food Defense Strategy”? This is Big Government at its most stupid and brutal. Anyone who hasn’t read about the Nazi party’s Four Year Plan and the wartime SS program to take over the entire economy had better study these examples of extreme corporatism, because we have the same phenomenon progressing today through the mechanisms of the DHS and its bogus “war on terror”.

 

As I said before, terrorism can be a threat only to a highly centralized food system. So anyone who was truly concerned about terrorism would call for decentralizing it. We see again how all security is always increased by heading in that direction, while the bogeyman of “terrorism” is always being fraudulently trumped up to justify further centralization. This again proves that this bill is a sham.

 

The DHS itself admits that there have only ever been a handful of cases of willful contamination of the food supply, and that these cases are negligible compared to the hundreds of thousands of corporate-caused food poisoning cases each year. Meanwhile, the FTCLDF compiled a telling selection of quotes from the Office of the Inspector General on how qualified DHS is to have anything to do with food:

 

Here are some of the findings from the 2007 OIG report, “The Department of Homeland Security’s Role in Food Defense and Critical Infrastructure Protection” [1], which focused on post-harvest food production:

DHS was assembled from twenty-two (22) preexisting agencies and organizations, none of which had a primary mission focus on post-harvest food products. [1--p. 15]

“The enormity of the food sector and the complexity of government oversight pose substantial challenges to food defense and critical infrastructure protection. These challenges are compounded by the fact that some of the department’s obligations to the food sector are set out in guidance documents that are not clearly compatible.” [1--p.17]

“Several organizational units in the department carry out DHS food-sector-related activities. The supervision of these activities is distributed across several managers in these units. This divided leadership arrangement has produced similar programming across different components and has not provided the level of internal coordination required.” [1--p.18]

“Because numerous public sector entities regulate the food industry, the insights to be gained through partnerships with food industry regulators come with a significant coordination requirement.” [1--p. 16]

Different frameworks created under different Homeland Security Presidential Directives put priorities into question. [1--p. 17]

DHS has four directorates, seven agencies, fifteen major offices and a center. “There is no major organizational entity within DHS that is focused exclusively or even largely on the execution of DHS responsibilities in the food sector.” [1--p. 19]

“The management of DHS’ food-sector-related activities is as dispersed as the activities themselves. At the time of our fieldwork, no single senior manager or official in DHS was dedicated to monitoring or overseeing all of the department’s food sector activities.” [1--p. 22]

“The limited leadership attention to food defense and critical infrastructure protections is so pronounced that several key DHS staff could not identify a senior DHS official responsible for Homeland Security Presidential Directive 9 implementation. One DHS employee advised us that a single DHS contractor was responsible for tracking and monitoring the department’s efforts to implement Homeland Security Presidential Directive 9 responsibilities.” [1--p. 29]

“FDA and National Counterterrorism Center staff were critical of food-related intelligence products developed by the Homeland Infrastructure Threat and Risk Analysis Center. They said that these products had not drawn on subject matter expertise as much as conjecture, and said that some included irresponsible speculation. They said that they often considered the center’s products to be at odds with the experts in other government organizations, and asserted that the center’s products had not been vetted to the extent necessary.” [1--p. 43]

“To improve overall U.S. food defense and critical infrastructure protection, DHS must execute its related responsibilities more effectively. Disjointed DHS work on defense of the food supply caused by the absence of a clear leader brought confusion in cases in which DHS made good faith efforts to work with partners.” [1--p. 90]

 

So again, if you really care about the alleged terrorist threat to our food, and want to make our food more safe, you wouldn’t try to get there from here. The DHS couldn’t protect against terrorism even if there were a threat.

 

All this proves the DHS is not concerned with food safety, but is using it as the pretext for power and budgetary accumulation and assertion. As with everything else DHS does, this bill is intended to set up more corporate boondoggles and aggrandize the police state.

 

I’ll have more to say about the way the bill would further subordinate America’s food supply to anti-sovereign globalization cadres like the WTO in an upcoming post specifically about globalization. (See here.) For now I’ll just stress that food safety means greater recourse to food grown as close to home as possible, with the greatest community accountability. But this bill would place our food under the supervision of WTO ”free trade” mandates, and would increase the amount of imported food in our food supply. Imported food is far less accountable than even the barely overseen domestic industrial food system. More proof that this bill doesn’t really care about safety and will actually make our food less safe.

 

Finally, we have one smoking gun regarding the bill’s malign socioeconomic intent. The HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points) concept is an alleged ”food safety” program dating back to the Clinton administration. Its proclaimed purpose was to make the meat supply more safe.

 

Here’s what it did in practice:

 

John Munsell, a former owner of a meat processing plant and current manager for the Foundation for Accountability in Regulatory Enforcement, has developed a powerpoint presentation, entitled “HACCP: USDA’s Current Style of Meat Inspection” [5]. Munsell found that USDA’s implementation of HACCP deregulated the big slaughterhouses and processing plants and enabled big packers to “operate in the relative absence of USDA inspections. They author their own HACCP plans, they self-police, create their own standards in the absence of national standards, and maintain their own command and control.” Meat inspection consists of paperwork auditing, leaving consumers ”unnecessarily imperiled” as a result. In regards to the small plants, Munsell made the following findings:

There was “hyper-regulation” of small plants.

“Paper flow and daily HACCP records, most of which have no connection to safe food, are swamping small plants.”

“Small plants have been targeted for higher numbers of enforcement actions.”

“Small plants lack staffs to challenge USDA’s unethical demands. Easier prey.”

Unlike big plants, USDA dictates what must be in their HACCP plans.

Small plant disappeared. Between 2000 and 2005, there was a 21.9% reduction in processing plants and a 19% reduction in slaughter plants, this occurring while more livestock producers were desiring to enter “the niche livestock field (beef, hogs, lambs).”

While large plants had the resources to deal successfully with USDA attempted enforcement actions, the agency could bully small plants.

FDA does not have anywhere near the number of inspectors needed to carry out the inspections of food facilities mandated by HR 2749 and S 510. The agency would have all the incentive to address this shortage of inspectors by implementing USDA-style HACCP. With all the paperwork required by the two bills (especially the food safety plan in section 418A of HR 2749 [B--p. 33]), it would be easy for FDA to enforce the HACCP plan in such a way as to drive significant numbers of small food facilities out of business for reasons that have nothing to do with food safety.

 

So we have over ten years of experience proving that HACCP does not improve meat safety but only increases monopoly consolidation and serves as a weapon vs. small producers. Whether or not it was originally a mistake, its real effect quickly became clear. Since then maintaining it could only be out of intentional pro-corporate malice against small producers. For over ten years it has been an intentional government weapon of class war.

 

Now both versions of the bill want to extend this weapon against all produce. Given the proven record, this can only indicate the conscious tyrannical intent of the bills’ crafters.

 

To sum up. It’s already clear that the alleged goals of this bill – food safety and anti-terrorism – are both lies. We know that in both cases, relocalization is the road to the goal. And we know that existing regulations are not enforced against the real culprits in all significant food outbreaks, like Wright Eggs.

 

It’s also clear that, short of banning CAFOs and GMOs, no new food safety legislation is needed at all. Again, corporate concentration is the source of all significant outbreaks (and the only plausible terrorist target), and existing regulations aren’t enforced against these sources. This bill wouldn’t do anything about any of these. On the contrary it seeks to impose a one-size-fits-all regime which will naturally have little effect on the big producers, the real culprits, but fall hard on the innocuous small producers. It will also increase imported food, as we see from the globalization provisions. So in every way this bill not only doesn’t touch the real problems, but is crafted to make them worse, while seeking to destroy the healthy alternative.

 

So we know the bills aren’t really intended to do what they claim to do. So what is the intent? The most plausible explanation is that the intent is to further empower corporate profiteering, impose tyranny over the food supply, and like everything else involved in the sham “war on terror”, to set up new corporate boondoggles and help spread the police state in general.

 

Is this being “hysterical”, as the corporate shills and hacks claim? To further answer that, in part two I’ll return to the FDA’s brief in the Farm-to-Consumer lawsuit.

Transparency, Wikileaks, and Odious Secrecy

 

Today the people are the beneficiaries of the latest Wikileaks document delivery, nearly 400,000 pieces of information touching on every aspect of the horrors of the Iraq war of aggression. I’ve previously written about Wikileaks here and here.

 

We ought to be the beneficiaries, if we choose to use this opportunity to learn about the crimes of this system. Unfortunately the previous deliveries didn’t have much immediate effect on the shocking complacency of what may be a terminal slave populace. But it’s too early to know how the beer will taste until it’s fully brewed. These things sometimes fester underground, like the flame that can slowly smoulder its way invisible through miles of subterranean pine needles before it bursts into the air as wildfire.

 

We have no idea what the tipping points will be, and what gradual, organic forces and tensions will have undermined the balance to the point of sudden imbalance.

 

However that may be, sunlight is a pure value. It warms, it invigorates the air, conjures the photosynthetic basis of complex life. It illuminates, it directs, it teaches, it inspires.

 

And while as individual human beings we also need and are entitled to our shade and shadow and our night as well, no one has the right to block out the sun. The information our society creates belongs to us all. It is our property as citizens. It’s our social sunlight, which illumines our collective truths. Top down secrecy is odious. It’s a theft of public property. It’s a characteristic crime of tyranny, committed for the obvious reason of concealing from us the rest of their crimes against us. It’s also done for its own sake, out of the inertia of power and the haughty sense of entitlement of elitism itself. It’s the smothering fog coughed up to obscure our sun. It’s shoving us into the grave dug for us, and the shoveling of sterile dirt upon our heads. Secrecy is death.

 

There’s certainly no “practical” reason for it. America has no existential enemies, except the criminals themselves. And even its lesser terrorist enemies are not a threat worth all we’ve pusillanimously surrendered to them. They’re mostly a threat to the elite empire, not to the citizenry. And it’s the empire’s war which creates the terrorists anyway. The Arab world long ago got sick of jihad. Only US aggression still fans those flames. So the pretext for the secrets is the same crime which generates the opposition whose alleged threat is supposed to justify the secrets. This is the same crime whose details the secrecy seeks to cover up. We’ll find that this applies in every example, not just the war.

 

So secrecy has no practical purpose or moral validity. Secrecy can only be part of legitimate sovereignty to the point it is absolutely necessary on account of some existential threat. Where, as in our case, this threat is nonexistent, the justification is nonexistent. So to the rest of our indictment we can add that a secretive government is an illegitimate government. In our case secrecy is not part of sovereignty, but is only instrumental toward tyranny.

 

Julian Assange of Wikileaks is an eloquent articulator and relentless activist of this ideal.

 

WikiLeaks receives about thirty submissions a day, and typically posts the ones it deems credible in their raw, unedited state, with commentary alongside. Assange told me, “I want to set up a new standard: ‘scientific journalism.’ If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.” Because Assange publishes his source material, he believes that WikiLeaks is free to offer its analysis, no matter how speculative…..

Assange does not believe that the military acts in good faith with the media. He said to me, “What right does this institution have to know the story before the public?”…….

In some respects, Assange appeared to be most annoyed by the journalistic process itself—“a craven sucking up to official sources to imbue the eventual story with some kind of official basis,” as he once put it. WikiLeaks has long maintained a complicated relationship with conventional journalism. When, in 2008, the site was sued after publishing confidential documents from a Swiss bank, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, and ten other news organizations filed amicus briefs in support. (The bank later withdrew its suit.) But, in the Bunker one evening, Gonggrijp told me, “We are not the press.” He considers WikiLeaks an advocacy group for sources; within the framework of the Web site, he said, “the source is no longer dependent on finding a journalist who may or may not do something good with his document.”

Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events. In an invitation to potential collaborators in 2006, he wrote, “Our primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and Central Eurasia, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal illegal or immoral behavior in their own governments and corporations.” He has argued that a “social movement” to expose secrets could “bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality—including the US administration.”

 

And here:

 

This information has reform potential. And the information which is concealed or suppressed is concealed or suppressed because the people who know it best understand that it has the ability to reform. So they engage in work to prevent that reform . . . .

There are reasons I do it that have to do with wanting to reform civilization, and selectively targeting information will do that — understanding that quality information is what every decision is based on, and all the decisions taken together is what “civilization” is, so if you want to improve civilization, you have to remove some of the basic constraints, which is the quality of information that civilization has at its disposal to make decisions. Of course, there’s a personal psychology to it, that I enjoy crushing bastards, I like a good challenge, so do a lot of the other people involved in WikiLeaks. We like the challenge.

 

He writes in his manifesto, “Conspiracy as Governance”,

 

He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled “Conspiracy as Governance,” which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.

 

The organization is a model of rhizomatic resilience and redundancy:

 

Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account. The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.” He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries……

Assange also wanted to insure that, once the video was posted online, it would be impossible to remove. He told me that WikiLeaks maintains its content on more than twenty servers around the world and on hundreds of domain names. (Expenses are paid by donations, and a few independent well-wishers also run “mirror sites” in support.) Assange calls the site “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis,” and a government or company that wanted to remove content from WikiLeaks would have to practically dismantle the Internet itself……..

As it now functions, the Web site is primarily hosted on a Swedish Internet service provider called PRQ.se, which was created to withstand both legal pressure and cyber attacks, and which fiercely preserves the anonymity of its clients. Submissions are routed first through PRQ, then to a WikiLeaks server in Belgium, and then on to “another country that has some beneficial laws,” Assange told me, where they are removed at “end-point machines” and stored elsewhere. These machines are maintained by exceptionally secretive engineers, the high priesthood of WikiLeaks. One of them, who would speak only by encrypted chat, told me that Assange and the other public members of WikiLeaks “do not have access to certain parts of the system as a measure to protect them and us.” The entire pipeline, along with the submissions moving through it, is encrypted, and the traffic is kept anonymous by means of a modified version of the Tor network, which sends Internet traffic through “virtual tunnels” that are extremely private. Moreover, at any given time WikiLeaks computers are feeding hundreds of thousands of fake submissions through these tunnels, obscuring the real documents. Assange told me that there are still vulnerabilities, but “this is vastly more secure than any banking network.”

 

This is a new model for the kind of sunlight activism we need. Imagine a whole media system dedicated to such recovery of the people’s stolen information. (I’m of course referring to collective public information, regarding politics, the economy, business, foreign policy. Just as with property in general, the personally used item or information belongs to the individual; the collective infrastructure belongs to those who build it.) We can know our need for so many suns as we survey the wasteland of odious secrecy. I’ll just select some of the examples from some of the fronts.

 

The Banks:

 

So many secrets of the Bailout. The Fed’s still stonewalling the fight for sunlight which has outlived its originator, Bloomberg reporter Mark Pittman. Will we ever know how much taxpayer money was embezzled by the Fed’s “facilities” and arcane Treasury programs? How much was handed to the banks practically for free to let them gamble against our economy, prosperity, and society?

 

No sooner was the sham finance bill passed than it came to light (heh) that the bill contained a provision allowing the SEC to keep practically all of its activities veiled from the FOIA. Although Congress went through the charade of “fixing” this “oversight”, even the fix still adjures the SEC to protect the secrets of hedge funds.

 

So there’s a good example of what the sham finance “reform” bill was really about. Since they were worried that SEC activities which were subject to FOIA requests could become a conduit for throwing sunlight on the shadow banking system, they used the bill as a mechanism for indirectly gutting the FOIA where it comes to the finance sector. We should look for such anti-FOIA gambits in every other kind of bill.

 

Mortgages:

 

Among its many vectors of criminality, the MERS system is meant to cause all mortgage information to disappear down a black hole. But the land belongs to the people, and the banks have no right to secrets over it. Why should we ever agree that some secret system vouches for the ownership of land? It’s not bad enough we have private property in land on the part of unproductive bankster ”owners”, but this system of ownership is also being kept secret from we the people, from whom this potentially productive land was stolen in the first place?

 

The truth is that the banks themselves have long since lost track of this ownership, and abrogated the chain of title beyond redemption. Part of the point of MERS was to carry that out, and now part of its point is to conceal it.

 

Even a neoliberal propertarian like Hernando de Soto deplores this assault on transparency, considering it subversive of property rights. Among the criteria he lists for stability of the property regime are that all assets and transactions be listed on publicly accessible registries, that all finance deals must stay closely tied to the real value of the underlying asset (so it follows that this value must be transparent), and that government must forbid opacity and obfuscation in the language of market transactions.

 

(I mention de Soto to demonstrate that a leading neoliberal concurs in the assessment that the MERS system, including its secretiveness, has called landed property itself into quesion.)

 

The Health “Insurance” Rackets:

 

They’re notorious for total darkness where it comes to pricing. (Doctors and hospitals are guilty of that too.) The customer has practically no basis for cost comparison or any kind of understanding of why he’s being quoted the rate he’s experiencing. The racket bailout bill alleges it will change that, but we’re already seeing how well the bill’s provisions are being enforced.

 

Internet Access and Participation:

 

The telecoms and cable companies have so far mostly refrained from transmission discrimination because they fear political fallout and a consumer backlash. But the formal enshrinement of net neutrality has become all the more critical as the technology now exists to let the telecoms discriminate in a secretive manner.

 

(The FCC’s proposed net neutrality principles, even if enshrined, may actually be pretty weak against such secret discrimination. But one fight at a time. Let’s get a basic net neutrality enshrinement, and then we’ll improve it.)

 

Food:

 

The FDA, a corporate tool, has done all it can to keep secrets from the American people about the safety and costs of their own food. It seeks to ban GMO-free labeling. Although it hasn’t (yet) banned bovine growth hormone labeling, it allows and is encouraging states to do so. Recently a federal court overturned an Ohio state ban where the Agriculture Department sought to intervene on behalf of the state.

 

The Obama administration also continues the Bush tradition of refusing to update public environmental databases even where required by law. In this case the USDA has refused to update its pesticide use database since 2007.

 

The Gulf Oil Eruption:

 

Perhaps the most chilling secrecy event, imposed not by stealth and bureaucracy but by brute force, was Obama’s literal handing over of (anti-)sovereign jurisdiction over much of the US part of the Gulf of Mexico to BP. Federal employees openly said they could only do or allow what BP authorized, and federal agents became de facto privatized deputies. We still know almost nothing about what’s really happening in the Gulf, and while we’ll eventually know the full effects if only by experience, the system criminals will do all they can to keep our information from us as long as they can, to our economic and health detriment.

 

(With all of these, we should recall the sick joke out of Chicago, how markets were going to be “free” and “efficient” and “rational” since all “participants” would have all the necessary information. But as I described in my deconstruction of the ideological and “constitutional” rationale for the Stamp mandate, we were really never considered participants in this utopian market, but passive subjects, clay to be worked, a resource to be mined, victims. That’s the full Orwellian truth of neoclassical economics. So there also lies their explanation for how Secrecy = Transparency. Their theory was only ever meant to apply to the elites themselves.)

 

It’s easy to see how many powerful interests are ranged against the people’s sunlight. So it’s also no surprise that Assange and Wikileaks have been demonized by the government, the MSM, and conservative and liberal hacks alike. (Including quite a few of the “real progressives” who oppose Obama, but who nevertheless as liberals remain elitists and still viscerally abhor the ideal that the elites are entitled to no secrets at all.)

 

The fact that such an array of criminals has assembled against Wikileaks is a metric of its effectiveness, and even more, of its perceived threat, and a badge of honor. We can expect every kind of tactic to be deployed against Assange and the rest of the team, but the aspirations of the organization and the task may just withstand the onslaught. It’ll help if more people and organizations follow on this path.

 

We who reject the existence of the “elites” also reject their nonexistent right to keep secrets. Every leak against the will of the elites is a restitution of stolen property. Wikileaks is in fact an agent of law and order, and its people are part of the human citizenry.

Who Said It? Bob Altemeyer.

 

OK, I hope this was worth the guessing game and the wait, and that the discussion of what kind of person would write something like that was worthwhile.

 

The answer is Bob Altemeyer, author of The Authoritarians, available free online here. (I apologize for sticking the answer in the title. Even we filthy peasant rebels, if we’re bloggers, must bow to the dictates of the all-mighty search engine.)

 

The book is very interesting. It details and documents Altemeyer’s development of the Right Wing Authoritarian (RWA) scale. This is a measure of conformity to system “authority”. It’s not ideology-specific. Instead, Altemeyer defines “right wing” authoritarianism as submissiveness toward constituted structures and the willingness to be their active tool. He gives a good example – during the Cold War, the flag-waving American patriot and the Russian Communist party member were likely to be the same kind of right wing authoritarian type.

 

So what’s the most obvious example of this today? It’s clearly how Obama’s cultists are every bit as stupidly and aggressively tribal as Bush partisans were, and on behalf of the exact same policies, on democratic* political participation, the economy, banks, corporations, transparency, the wars, civil liberties, energy policy, and even liberal social issues like abortion and gay rights.

 

[*From here on I'm going to dispense with the "small-d" disclaimer and assume readers will understand what I mean based on whether or not I capitalize the word. I'll be extra-vigilant to avoid typos there.]

 

What’s most amazing is how the liberals and “progressives” claim to support Obama and the Democrats based on a belief that he’s doing the opposite of what he obviously really is doing. Bush supporters may have supported very stupid things, but at least they were less often wrong on a basic factual level about what they were supporting. They wanted escalating war and got it. Obama supporters support a president who is also escalating the war, but claim to believe he’s winding it down, and many of them are probably ignorant enough that they do believe this. The RWA phenomenon doesn’t get more typical than this. (And how characteristic of liberals – most of those who are pro-war are too cowardly to openly want escalation, and those who in their moods are anti-war are still too cowardly to demand full immediate withdrawal, because of some unarticulated but implicitly horrible consequences which would allegedly ensue. No, they want a gradual winding down. That gives their RWA trait full room to range. If Obama says we withdraw now, that’s great. If he says it’ll take years, that’s great. If he says we’ll be there for a hundred years, which is in fact what he has implicitly been saying, that’s great too.)

 

So guess who is himself one of these RWA cultists? After all his decades of studying the phenomenon, Altemeyer himself is completely un-self-aware of how his entire world view is simply derived from Democrat and corporate propaganda, evidently going back to his student days.

 

I’ll reproduce the short exchange, which can be found here. (I think it runs onto the next page. I haven’t read the entire thread since then to see if anyone else challenges him on the same point.)

 

I saw how Altemeyer had written a note on the tea partiers as RWAs, which is insightful as usual because he’s talking about Republicans, his partisan enemy. So I asked if he was going to write a similar note on the Obama cultists. He starts out denying there’s such a thing as an Obama cult. (It’s also funny how he says, “I read two liberal blogs and two conservative blogs”, and names the Huffington Post.)

 

Knowing there was a problem, I expanded my question to include himself as a possible cultist.

 

Here’s the full exchange:

 

Russ
04/23/10 at 05:06 PM

Comments:

Are you planning on also writing a note on the Democratic RWA followers who persist in believing Obama and the Democrats are “progressives” even as they continue and in most cases escalate Bush/Cheney policies on the Bailout, the war and war crimes, the assault on civil liberties, and corporatism in general, just to name a few?

—————-

Bob Altemeyer Email

05/11/10 at 11:46 AM

Comments:
Hey, I got here in only three tries!

To Michael: Yes, putting the Global Change Game on-line would be wonderful, if it could be done right. But I doubt anyone is interested in investing the time and money it would take, and running the thing would probably be a beast.

To Russ: Well, if somebody shows me the studies that demonstrate the Democratic RWA followers supporting these things, while they condemned Bush/Cheney for doing the same things, I’ll write that note. But I read two conservative blogs and two liberal blogs each day, and both TPM and (especially) Huffington Post have been at least as persistent at pointing out when Obama continues Bush policies as Matt Drudge and Politico have been. Moreso, in fact. Which fits into my findings rather well. Anybody who expects liberals to march together to the same drum, compared to the way high RWAs insist on group loyalty, is probably going to be proved quite wrong.

(For the record, I personally supported TARP as necessary, and the war in Afghanistan. As my wife will tell you, I am not much of a progressive.)

———————–

Russ
05/20/10 at 10:01 AM

Comments:
Bob says:

Quote:
“For the record, I personally supported TARP as necessary, and the war in Afghanistan.”

Out of your own expertise, or because you were told so by your betters, and never mind the evidence?

Looks like you better retake the RWA follower test yourself.

How about assassinations?

———————-

Bob Altemeyer Email

05/20/10 at 03:12 PM

Comments:

To Russ: Well, your comment’s a bit ad hominem, but I’ll answer it as best I can.

In a world of ever-advancing knowledge, one can’t know a lot about everything. So you do have to listen to those who have expertise. In some fields (economics would sure be one) the experts often disagree, and the wise non-expert makes sure he listens to the differing opinions.

Now as for TARP, I have some background in economics. I took two years of econ as an undergraduate business major, including a memorable semester of macroeconomic theory from an anti-Keynesian young turk. I also had a semester course in corporate finance. So I probably had some sort of a handle on the crisis that hit the American financial sector in the summer of 2008. I believed that the economy would plunge into a deep depression if the major banks failed and credit virtually disappeared. It was difficult to imagine where the dominoes would stop falling as one sector after another collapsed. And I haven’t heard anyone who has criticized TARP acknowledge what would have happened if the government had not stepped in.

In the case of TARP, I’ve only heard of one economist who said the government should not step in. The experts seemed virtually unanimous, and what they said made sense to me. It was also true that the Bush administration, including the secretary of the treasury, and the Democratic nominee, Barrack Obama, and his economic advisers agreed TARP had to happen. True, most of the Republicans in Congress voted against it, but their reasons seemed short-sighted to me. I didn’t like the idea of bailing out the banks any more than Sen. McConnell did. But I thought it was more important to keep the economy from collapsing.

I think you’ll find, by the way, that a lot of the TARP loans have already been paid back, and in one way or another, most of the government investment will return to the treasury.

As for Afghanistan, it was a rogue state under the Taliban that was the breeding ground for terrorist attacks around the world, including 9/11. I knew both the British and the Soviets had come to grief fighting wars in Afghanistan, and I knew the power of the war lords in the countryside and the refuges available in Pakistan would make the military mission difficult. But I believed the Taliban had to be defeated in their home base, and I still believe that today, although the problems with Karzai remind me more and more of Vietnam. I also feel we owe something to people in Afghanistan, especially the women there who have become educated,
to stay and see the mission to its close.)

You suggested that my beliefs came from “what I was told by my bettors, never mind the evidence.” I can’t even think whose opinion I cared about regarding Afghanistan. I mean, everybody knew where the terrorists were being trained, and where Osama bin Laden was based. You’ll have to tell me about the evidence I ignored.

I’ve told you why I thought as I did. Maybe you could tell me what and why you believe in these matters.

 

At that point I was frankly amazed and gave up on the exchange. It was a surprise to realize how unused I am to talking to total ignoramuses. I know how to discuss with fellow informed citizens, and how to argue with liars, but not how to tell it like it is to people who know it like it ain’t.

 

I should have sent the link to The Truth About the Bailout, although that doesn’t include stuff like the basics on the TARP being only one part of the Bailout and so on.

 

So I thought that was an interesting case study in how rampant and insidious the cult-think is, that even a commenter who is known specifically for analyzing this kind of tribalism is such a tribalist himself. (I meant to post this earlier but it kind of fell between the cushions and I forgot about it.)

 

So I hope people found this interesting.

The Violent Corporate State (Monsanto and Blackwater, Perfect Together)

 

 

 

We know that among Obama’s and HRC’s (Hillary Ribbentrop Clinton) favorite corporations are Monsanto and Blackwater.

 

Even after Blackwater’s long, proven record of mass murder, thuggery, embezzlement, and incompetence, Clinton’s State Department continues to hand them new contracts. In this case, it’s an 18 month, $120 million handout for “protective security services” in Afghanistan. The contract was given to a Blackwater subsidiary called “The US Training Center”. (The mother corporation has been renamed from the tarnished aggressive name “Blackwater” to the intentionally bland “Xe”. Now honcho Erik Prince wants to sell it while he absconds with with the millions he stole to the overt slave society, the UAE.)

 

(In addition to how evil and corrupt such contracts are from the point of view of the public interest, this is also yet another example of Obama’s utter incompetence even from the point of view of partisan politics. Prince is a longstanding Republican operative and Bush fundraiser. Indeed Blackwater was set up in the first place with the business model of lobbying for fat corporate welfare gigs, to cash in as Bush came into office. It was never for a single day a legitimate entrepreneurial, “capitalist” outfit. It was always an embezzlement racket.

 

But evidently being a de facto extension of the Republican Party and self-defined exterminationist Christian crusader doesn’t disqualify one from service in the Obama administration.)

 

And what about the ongoing DoJ attempt to indict Blackwater murderers for the Nisoor Square Massacre? What about the allegations and indictments for theft? A State Dept. flack cheerfully chirped that none of that matters:

 

“Under federal acquisition regulations, the prosecution of the specific Blackwater individuals does not preclude the company or its successive companies and subsidiaries from bidding on contracts,” the spokeswoman said. “On the basis of full and open competition, the department performed a full technical evaluation of all proposals and determined the U.S. Training Center has the best ability and qualifications to meet the contract requirements.”

 

Evidently while the 1st Amendment is to be gutted for phony examples of providing “material assistance” to terrorists, and while RICO provides for severe penalties for most forms of money laundering to known organized crime outfits, neither of these forms of abetting are to apply in the case of the known terrorist and mafia gang “Blackwater”.

 

Meanwhile, in another example of how Obama loads his administration with corporate operatives, he has sought to install Monsanto cadres in positions of power over our food supply. Thus Michael Taylor, Monsanto executive and lobbyist, was appointed FDA Deputy Commissioner for food. Another Monsanto name which was widely vetted was Dennis Wolff. Wolff is a notorious thug who as Pennsylvania secretary of agriculture wanted to ban milk producers from labeling their product hormone free, on the grounds that it would “confuse” consumers. (Monsanto markets rBGH, and Wolff as a government cadre saw his job as to serve Monsanto against the public interest.) Governor Ed Rendell had to override this anti-democratic power grab in the face of massive public outcry.

 

Monsanto has a long history of seeking nothing but to poison, loot, and dominate the world. It once hired Arthur Anderson (of Enron notoriety) with this commission: Monsanto wanted world domination of the food supply through control of all seeds. They asked AA to reverse engineer a strategy: How do we get there from here? Here’s a harrowing tale of Monsanto’s legalized thuggery, with the full collaboration of the rigged law and corrupt courts, all the way up to the Canadian “supreme” court.

 

Both of these corporations must be called fascist, not as anti-corporate rhetoric but by any objective, reasonable measure. Both are authoritarian and violent and operate with open contempt for democracy and the public interest. Both are unproductive, parasitic leeches off the corporate welfare state. Both propose to use brutal force to entrench that state.

 

And now they’re working together. According to documents uncovered by journalist Jeremy Scahill (who has specialized in educating the public about Blackwater), Blackwater has conferred with Monsanto about setting up a Nixon-style dirty tricks outfit and god knows what else:

 

“The relationship between the two companies appears to have been solidified in January 2008 when Total Intelligence chair Cofer Black traveled to Zurich to meet with Kevin Wilson, Monsanto’s security manager for global issues.

“After the meeting in Zurich, Black sent an e-mail to other Blackwater executives, including to [then-president Erik] Prince and [former CIA paramilitary officer Enrique] Prado at their Blackwater e-mail addresses.

“Black wrote that Wilson ‘understands that we can span collection from internet, to reach out, to boots on the ground on legit basis protecting the Monsanto [brand] name…. Ahead of the curve info and insight/heads up is what he is looking for.’

“Black added that Total Intelligence ‘would develop into acting as intel arm of Monsanto.’ Black also noted that Monsanto was concerned about animal rights activists and that they discussed how Blackwater ‘could have our person(s) actually join [activist] group(s) legally’….

“…Wilson confirmed he met Black in Zurich and that Monsanto hired Total Intelligence in 2008 and worked with the company until early 2010. He denied that he and Black discussed infiltrating animal rights groups, stating ‘there was no such discussion.’”

 

This is chilling in itself, as well as typical of the kind of corporate collaboration and Mussolini-style corporate-state collaboration which we see everywhere we look. Just a few days ago the people learned of the same dirty tricks at something called the Pennsylvania Homeland Security Agency. (Do all states have those? Is there no end to the “war on terror” police statist and corrupt bureaucracy gravy train? Typically, not a peep from the allegedly anti-bureaucratic tea partiers and “libertarians” on this one.) A government thug there proposed a secret surveillance campaign using taxpayer dollars on behalf of shale-drilling “stakeholders”. The private goons hired this time were an Israeli outfit called ITRR. (The Israelis are the real pros at this kind of parasitic thuggery. The likes of Blackwater just imitate them, often hiring Israeli cadres to teach them.)

 

Rendell swooped in to the rescue again, ordering the contract canceled. (But the bureaucratic criminal hasn’t been fired, so far as I can see.) Is this recurring theme of Rendell overruling ”abuses” starting to look like a pattern? It’s the same thing as with Facebook’s assault on privacy, and so many other examples. Push as far as you can, then when you go too far and bring down too much heat, backpedal and claim it was a mistake. Wait for the heat to die down and resume the assault. (This was also a common tactic of Lenin and Stalin in their war on the peasants.) Rendell clearly knows the game plan.

 

So Blackwater and Monsanto now blandly dismiss the significance of these contacts, just as Monsanto claims it has no interest in the food bill, just as Prince says he’s sick of the security business and is getting out (he wanted Xe to become some kind of paper pushers or something), just as Google says it has no plans to use the “managed services” VIP lane to run parallel to the Open Internet, it’s all just so much ennui, isn’t it? Nothing to see here, move along. The MSM does its part by seldom talking about any of it, and abetting the theme of downplaying everything when it does.

 

Although this is all slated to end with a bang, the sheep are expected to go with a whimper.