Movement Focus – Community Food

<

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

 

So the basic activity:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

>

The “War on Terror” Is No Joke

>

I’m reading how a member of a local school board opened up his speech at the graduation with some jokes about snipers and explosives. Everyone’s now professing to be shocked and traumatized, every political enemy is oozing smarm about how inappropriate it was, and he’s falling all over himself with abject apologies.

 

Certainly the jokes were stupid given the cultural environment, and this guy’s no comedian anyway. He agrees with the whole “war on terror” charade, so he was ill-advised to be irreverent toward it. (Someone who really despises it, and especially someone who’s actually funny, might have done better.)

 

But the part I’m chuckling over is everyone’s reaction. I bet they’re upset, not because they’re really scared of “terrorism” and that he poked such fears with a stick, but because these “fears” are by now part of their cultural identity. On some level they understand how bogus the whole thing is, but they’ve accepted this mode of social and psychological domination. So they take it as deeply insulting and threatening – not that someone made them think of terrorism, but that someone said something which sounded like mocking those fears. That in turn makes them uncomfortable over the whole unreality of it, what a lie it all is. The more dubious the reality basis of a tribal identification becomes, the more people need intense propaganda conformity in order to feel at home with that identification, and the more they lash out at anyone who breaks reverence ranks in any way.

>

Notes on the Imperial Presidency and the Secession of the 1%

>

1. The basics: The executive wants aggressive, total foreign policy power and regards domestic policy with contempt. He wants the corporate/government system to secede from any responsibility to the latter, while maintaining total rights and prerogatives over it. He then wants to bring home the conquistador foreign policy attitude, and treat domestic policy in the mode of a foreign conqueror.

 

2. This is part of the 1%’s general secession trend. The government abdicates its power to corporations at home, to globalization cadres abroad. It imports the alien power of the globalization cadres to domestic affairs. (For example, corporate suits at the WTO against the laws of countries and communities; or the Food Control Act’s explicit subordination to the WTO of all food-related policy within the US.) Throughout, government abdicates all public policy, privatizes all public property, but maximizes its absolute size, only now as corporate welfare bagman and thug.

 

3. The imperial presidency first developed as a manifestation of (1), and seeks the secession goals of (2).

 

4. Here’s the specific Obama version:

 

A. In practice, continue to expand the unaccountable, anti-democratic, anti-constitutional imperial presidency along Bush/Cheney lines

 

B. For the sake of the liberals, argue in theory that president is domestically weak, strong only foreign policy.

 

C. In this most radical manifestation of the “two-party” ratchet effect, Obama wants to normalize in principle that the executive branch governs at home in the mode of a foreign conqueror. They’re of course not actually rolling back domestic executive power, only declaring it ”weak” in principle. Since it’s intended to get ever stronger in practice, that’s meant to get the sheeple to accept this autocratic, piratical mode as the norm.

 

D. Meanwhile, vs. any corporation or globalization cadre, or in the case of the Democrats, vs. the Republicans, they’ll simply say “we’re too weak”. But in practice Might-Makes-Right kleptocracy will be ever more open and brutal.

>

Waiting In Line

>

Under “civilized” conditions people are constantly herded into lines. This is unnatural and unhuman.

 

Apologists for power hierarchies like corporations and governments claim that waiting in line is the civilized improvement on a mob beating each other with clubs.

 

But in reality natural human beings know how to organize themselves without lines. Meanwhile it’s domesticated/feral people who allegedly need to be herded with queues and clubs. The club is actually maximized under “civilized” conditions, but it’s the police club. That was the real argument of Hobbes with his Leviathan state, that it’s civilized man who’s a nasty, brutish beast unless kept firmly in line at all times*. He fraudulently called that the “state of nature”, but his argument had nothing to do with natural humanity. The Steven Pinkers whose project is to normalize mass state violence as “peace” and “security” perpetrate the same fraud. (That’s also why Obama was given the nobble pries. The Committee, and liberals in general, want to normalize permanent imperial war and the neoliberal police state, under some rubric of “humanitarianism”, as the new baseline for “peace”.)

 

*This too is a Big Lie. On the contrary, one of the great testaments to human nature is how, even after centuries of relentless system propaganda, economic assault, and brutalization, most people still naturally cooperate, including under disaster conditions. It’s elites and their hierarchies who, under stress, either panic or, more commonly, behave as opportunistic predators.

>

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.)