The Monsanto Court and Corporatism

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Sorry for the light posting for awhile. Lots of things to do, and lots of things on my mind.

 

I don’t have anything new to say right now about the “supreme” court’s anointment of Monsanto, but I’ll refer to what I already said.

 

One thing which occurs to me, as I read some stuff on this and see the confusion of liberals and radical-chicists, as well as those ostensibly concerned with food freedom, is that it’s another example of how no viewpoint other than total anti-corporatism is sufficient to understand the political world.

 

Thus, readers of this blog know that I predicted a unanimous pro-Monsanto decision. Similarly, almost everyone predicted wrongly that the corporate court would strike down Obama’s “health insurance” poll tax. But true anti-corporatists understood how essential it was to the corporate imperative that the commerce clause be extended in this totalitarian direction.

 

My point is that anti-corporatism demonstrates its superior predictive value, which in turn is evidence for its fundamental truth. It’s hard to see which competing world view, other than corporatism itself, accurately describes the state of civilization.

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Two-For-One Sale (Deficit Terrorism and the Monsanto Protection Act)

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1. There’s no such thing as a deficit crisis as such, and any “budget crisis” is purely fabricated. It’s a government exercise in trying to confuse and scare the people. That’s why the term “deficit terrorism” is precise and appropriate. What the central government and corporate media do in inventing this problem and then conjuring up a mass of fear-itself propaganda around it is a textbook case of terrorism in its psychological aspect. It’s a pressure group trying to sow fear and intimidation among a populace, in order to force political concessions out of it. In this case the enforced concession is always acquiescence in “austerity”, which is the willful and unnecessary gutting of whatever’s left of government spending which isn’t corporate welfare. (While I’m not here to affirmatively stick up for any aspect of the central government, I’ll always say that if you want to cut government spending for any reason whatsoever, the place to start is always with corporate welfare, which is the most egregious, worthless, and destructive kind of government spending. Abolish that, and then see what problems are left. The fact that conservatives and most “libertarians” support corporate welfare proves that they lie when they claim to oppose big government, massive taxation, massive regulation of the economy. Corporatism is always the most aggressive, malignant, and massive manifestation of all of these.)

 

Meanwhile, the fact that corporate welfare is never cut, is only constantly, massively expanded, is proof that no one in the system really thinks deficits or the debt are problems in themselves. It’s proof that anyone who says so is consciously, willfully lying, with malice aforethought. This would be very strong condemnatory evidence at a New Nuremburg, where it came time to try the Streicherist propagandists. 

 

2. The latest incarnation of the deficit kabuki had an added feature, a rider which turned an appropriations bill into what democracy advocates are calling the Monsanto Protection Act. This rider would neuter judicial review* of USDA GMO approvals, by allowing planting to continue even after courts find that the USDA hadn’t lived up to its mandatory procedures for approval. The rider is merely an extension of the standard GMO contamination process. The goal is to get the things into the ecosystem and economy, no matter how, and establish them as invasive weeds which are then extremely difficult to eradicate. In countries like Brazil and India the crops were widely illegally planted, and governments then claimed this accomplished fact as justification for legalizing them (which is what they’d wanted to do in the first place, but had refrained on account of democracy pressures). In the US the USDA simply defied a court order imposing a moratorium on Roundup Ready sugarbeets. Now the legislature is following up, legalizing the previously extra-legal and illegal procedures.

 

[*This legislative rider is the kind of thing which will satisfy the passive corporatists in the judicial branch. There's almost no chance of courts finding the rider itself unconstitutional, since no judges I'm aware of find corporatism as such to be unconstitutional. None rule that constitutionally there's no such thing as corporate "rights". For example, that's the way in which, fundamentally, Citizens United was a 9-0 decision. The so-called "5-4" was only on the technical ground that four passive corporatists didn't want to overturn a law Congress had passed. But no one dissented on the ground that there's no such thing as a corporate speech right. The fact that judicial passivists try to decide things as narrowly as possible is proof of their bias in favor of the status quo of power, regardless of any fundamental constitutional issue.]

 

3. Senator Mikulski, head of the appropriations committee, rammed the thing through over Jon Tester’s attempt to get the rider stripped. Only when she received severe criticism did she pretend not to have known what she was doing. This is certainly a lie. She did her job, serving the corporate imperative. That’s why she was given this committee chairmanship in the first place.

 

Under pressure, she seized the opportunity to make this a two-for-one. She not only served Monsanto, but gave as her excuse that this was necessary in order to accomplish the critical goal of getting the appropriations bill passed. She opportunistically tied her pro-Monsanto action with her action in propagating the fraud that the central government budget is in some kind of inherent crisis.

 

Sure enough, liberal NGO cadres rushed to her defense. A hack from the Center for Food Safety ran interference.

 

“The American public have relied on Senate Democrats to be a backstop against dangerous policy riders like this,” said Colin O’Neil, director of government affairs for the Center for Food Safety. “We call on [Mikulski] to ensure that this rider is stricken from any future appropriations bills.”

But, O’Neil added, the language did not originate with Mikulski. Rather, it was included in legislation that had been developed before she took the chairmanship….”Her hands were tied by the negotiations that had previously happened,” O’Neil said of Mikulski. “We recognize the tough spot she was in.”

O’Neil said food safety groups nevertheless hope to keep the pressure on Mikulski to get the language removed later this year, when the government must pass its next round of funding legislation.

 

(And to keep asking for money. And you see what your donations to the ”food safety groups” pay for – pro-Monsanto lies, wherever the Democratic Party is involved, and endlessly fruitless “working within the system”. It also gets you those groups’ more vicious support for Monsanto’s corporate state, through their cheerleading for the Food Control Act.)

 

CFS chief Andrew Kimbrell put it this way:

 

In this hidden backroom deal, Senator Mikulski turned her back on consumer, environmental, and farmer protection in favor of corporate welfare for biotech companies such as Monsanto. This abuse of power is not the kind of leadership the public has come to expect from Senator Mikulski or the Democrat Majority in the Senate.

 

Contrary to such lies, this is exactly the kind of “leadership” we can always expect from the Democratic Party. The evidence record is massive, longstanding, and unblemished. If Kimbrell believes it, he’s simply exhibiting a pathological level of flat-earth cult-think. 

 

This is a good example two allied phenomena:

 

1. System NGO types, and liberals in general, are there as pro-corporate triangulators. We have two opposed trenchlines, humanity against corporatism. Liberals, and especially NGO types, are out in no-man’s-land, running interference, obstructing our shots, and helping to set up corporate shots.

 

2. System NGO types, and liberals in general, are there to build a fence and patrol it. This fence is meant to fence in the acceptable kind of dissent, with reformist ideology, and actions like “vote for Democrats”, “petition Obama”, perhaps “file a lawsuit” (ouch! this rider puts a crimp in that one!), qualifying as acceptable. Meanwhile actual analysis and criticism of the system itself, and the ideas and actions of fighting for real structural change, including advocacy of things that the vast majority of humanity actually wants, are to be fenced out and forbidden.

 

In this case the “anti-GMO movement”, in the wretched state it currently is, felt very uncomfortable condemning a famous liberal Democrat, and in such a critical context as the deficit fraud, so the likes of the CFS rushed to try to lull any grassroots anger, and erstwhile anti-GMO reportage sites rushed to publish these lying extenuations.

 

How is it that an excellent journalism site like GMWatch doesn’t recognize pro-GMO policy and deficit scaremongering, always meant to generate the political environment for imposing “austerity”, as affiliated aspects of corporatism? How is it they don’t see the obvious affinity between the corporate media’s manufactured “GMO science” and its similarly manufactured “deficit economics”? As the pieces they aggregated here demonstrate, the corporate system lies about the alleged need for a “budget deal” in the exact same anti-evidence, anti-rational way it lies about the alleged need for GMOs.

 

This is an example of how, to build a true abolition movement, we need a far more holistically and systematically anti-corporatist orientation. As things are, even the better groups and sites frequently lapse into their own kind of anti-holistic “NPK mentality”, as Albert Howard called it. It’s not constructive to be anti-GMO within a myopic mindset inclined to uncritically accept other aspects of corporatism. That’s not going to work toward abolishing GMOs.

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What To Do – First Principles

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Here’s another try at clarifying first principles, something I think still has not been done except on a purely individual basis, and rarely even there.

 

I take it as empirically proven, and as common sense in the first place, that a fundamentally criminal system cannot be reformed. If it’s a car, you can’t make it act like a boat or a plane. We’ve seen the results of driving this car into a lake, or off a cliff, over and over and over. To insist we keep on trying, the way liberals insist, with things like the Food Control Act or GMO “co-existence” (any version) or Obama’s health insurance poll tax, can no longer be called ignorance or naivete. It’s intentional misdirection on behalf of evil.

 

So by now I take it for granted that “reformism” is impractical, inexpedient, and wicked. Again, it was common sense from the start (how can you get anything but psychopathic behavior from a thing, a “corporation”, which has been formally enshrined as a mercenary psychopath in principle, from the start? it’s not a plane, it’s a car), and has been proven by the evidence record beyond any shadow of a doubt, let alone a reasonable doubt.

 

Then why do liberals still exist in the West in such large numbers? Because they lie when they claim to oppose the evils of empire and corporate domination. Just as much as their conservative twin, they support organized crime because they’re still getting some of the crumbs, and because they enjoy the pathetic vicarious sadism of feeling like they have a piece of the power and violence, although they really have no power at all. The only difference between liberals and conservatives is one of temperament – a conservative is more conscious, more “honest”, about supporting organized crime, a liberal is more of a hypocrite, has more of a lingering fake “conscience” he needs to assuage by mouthing anti-criminal platitudes. But he supports the exact same array of criminal policies the conservative does.

 

This has always been true, although the seamless continuity from the criminal Bush regime to the identically criminal Obama regime has been the most extreme manifestation yet. It looks like Obama’s real significance has been to encourage more and more liberals to dump even the fake vestige of conscience, the “compliment vice pays to virtue”, as La Rouchefoucauld called hypocrisy, and openly avow their support for aggressive war, the police state, and a corporatist command economy. This wipes out the last meager shred of difference between liberals and conservatives. I think we can call the case closed, and from here on use those terms merely to denote the tribal supporters of the identical Democrat and Republican parties.

 

In that case, what can a decent human being, advocate of democracy, enemy of the toxification of our food and environment, do? One thing she cannot do is still be a “liberal”, still be a ”reformist”. These are evil in their essence, and will continue to try to suck nascent idealism into the corporate maw. I hope there won’t be many who decide in that case to give up and seek some private garden to tend. That’s a kind of desertion, and it won’t work - no matter how much you try to keep your head down and mind your own business, the enemy will still be coming for you eventually. That’s what totalitarianism does, and why it’s called by that name.

 

I think the only course open is to recognize the need for the abolition of empire, of corporatism, of globalization, of all top-down, supply-based organization; to abolish these, and replace them with purely bottom-up, demand-based organization. (Perhaps this distinction shall be more acceptable to those who still consider “hierarchy” as such to be too vague a term. Although I’d say that by definition hierarchy usurps power upward, concentrates it, and then imposes it in a top-down, supply-based way.)

 

To need this, to want it, to will it, and to fight for it, first by propagating the ideas of this fight, getting them into the public consciousness by whatever means possible; and by organizing a movement which intends to accomplish these goals, and which can sustain itself during the times of trial while the system is still strong.

 

In that case, here’s a few hypothetical questions people can ask themselves, to help clarify this first principle.

 

1. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you could press a button and abolish all supply-based modes of organization, the corporate form, centralized government, and all things which are leeches upon these. Let’s say pressing the button would somehow accomplish this painlessly, except for whatever “pain” would then be involved in communities having to live within their natural means and not by stealing from others. Would you press that button? It seems that most Western ”liberals” would not, because that would mean they could no longer live off the fruits of imperial crime. Many of their kinds of “jobs” would cease to exist, since all the phony “work” of maintaining corporatism would no longer exist. Only the real economy would still exist.

 

2. What if pressing the button would guarantee humanity’s victory, but it would also guarantee that the criminals would force lots of unpleasantness along the way. Would you still press it? This question is meant to distinguish between those who really want to abolish organized crime, which of course will use any means to try to preserve itself, and those who are really just radical-chic liberals who talk the radical talk but would run home to momma the moment things actually got rough.

 

3. What if there was no guarantee at all, other than that humanity will try to free itself from empire and create real democracy. Would you join that fight? This question is meant to get people to think about their endurance, their morale, their discipline and belly for a long fight.

 

I think time is running out for mere ad hoc contemplation. If the people are going to organize real anti-corporate movements in the West, now is the time to start doing it. That would mean agreeing on the basic principles, the basic will to renounce Western empire, deciding on a list of operational goals and necessary tasks toward those goals, and then getting to work on those tasks in a systematic, disciplined way.

 

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Liberals: Election Bribery Example

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1. In the time of the Roman Republic, and in many other places and times, politicians directly bought votes. What’s better, this or the modern mode of corporations buying politicians? I’d say the former is less pernicious, while a liberal no doubt would say we’ve made progress.

 

2. This is another example of how liberals care only about the form, the surface, and nothing about the substance of things. As long as you don’t literally see money changing hands on the streets, things are somehow “cleaner”, and that’s a positive good. This primacy of form and process over substance and result is the core of the liberal pathology.

 

3. Conservatives are no better, but we’re disputing among those who claim to care about what are called “progressive” ideas. There, real believers in democracy and freedom, real fighters for them, must view the liberal ideology as the main enemy. For example, if we’re fighting for the hearts and minds of people who are vaguely worried about GMOs and industrial/corporate food in general, who’s our main rival: Conservatives or “libertarians” who will openly spew the Monsanto prerogative, or liberals who will say, “We’re concerned too, which is why we need to keep voting Democrat and petitioning the FDA and lobbying for better legislation. And good news! We just got part of the legislation we need, the Food Safety Modernization Act. We’ll keep working for a federal GMO labeling bill. So we’re on it, and all you people need to do is keep writing us checks and voting Democrat. Beyond that, you can go back to sleep. Please, stay asleep.”

 

4. The example of the differing mechanisms of election bribery also demonstrates how liberals are just another form of conservative, because part of the reason why they like the modern way better is that for a politician to directly buy the votes of the poor is to directly give money to the poor. Liberals, just as much as conservatives, have a visceral loathing for this, because just as much as conservatives they viscerally loathe the poor.

 

5. Similarly, liberals don’t mind the corporate purchase of elections any more than conservatives do. (Again, as long as it’s not too formally brazen: Thus their finicky aesthete’s distaste for Citizens United. But they have no principled objection to corporate ownership as such of elections in general, which is the basic structure of things.) This is because just as much as conservatives they agree that corporate officers and the rich are Galtian supermen, and that their ownership of society and its institutions, as de facto (and increasingly de jure) private property, is normative and desirable.

 

6. If you disbelieve any of this, just look at the evidence record of what policy liberals support. (I.e., Democrat Party policy, and analogous parties and policy throughout the West.)

 

7. Liberals are less and less inclined to dispute any of this. On the contrary, they increasingly avow it, because although liberalism has always been just another form of authoritarianism, it’s only nowadays that liberals are really finding themselves as open thugs, openly celebrating all the most powerful forms of organized crime – corporatism, Galtism, militarism, police statism, prisonism, and the cult of “authority” and Fuhrerprinzip as such.

 

They used to whine about evil even as they always, systematically, collaborated with it. Today they’re openly evil. This has been Obama’s primary role, to normalize the corporate liberal version of fascism.  

 
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GMO Labeling Vis the True Food Sovereignty, GMO Abolition Movement

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Commenter Lidia posted an excellent report on her experience at an organizational meeting for Vermont Right to Know.

 

Here’s my somewhat negative review of the campaign, so far as I’ve learned about it from her and elsewhere. I’ll let this criticism of the Vermont effort stand in for my growing doubts about the whole “labeling” premise, which I see as, in general, a typical collaborationist “market solution” which by its nature cannot be any real solution; and in particular as part of the GMO ”co-existence” scam. This is the scam whose basic premise is that organic agriculture and humanity can live in the same world with GMOs and the corporations who purvey them.

 

But we know this is false. GMOs are totalitarian, politically and environmentally. Totalitarian means there is literally no limit to one’s aspired domination, and that one in fact has the potential power to aspire to total domination. We know that Monsanto, the rest of the GMO cartel, and their flunkey governments recognize no limits to agricultural enclosure and domination. We know that’s the one and only reason GMOs exist in the first place. (They have no redeeming qualities, don’t work even at the two things they’re “supposed” to do, be herbicide tolerant and produce their own insecticide, have no natural market among farmers or eaters, and are 100% dependent on corporate welfare, government lies and thuggery, and trapping farmers on an indenture treadmill. Their one and only purpose, as Monsanto has been quite frank in stating, is total domination of the world food supply.)

 

We also know that GMOs cannot be prevented from contaminating and polluting every possible part of the ecology. Organic canola is basically impossible in Canada. Same for sugar beets in Oregon. It’s less and less possible to find non-polluted corn and soy shipments. This isn’t even counting the cartel’s intentional planting so as to contaminate the entire agriculture in Brazil, India, and perhaps with alfalfa in the US. Here too, there can be no co-existence. 

 

Are the organizers of labeling campaigns sincere about Food Sovereignty and abolishing GMOs? The fact that the Vermont organizers are already flouting the boycott of the corporations who gave money to defeat Right to Know doesn’t bode well. Nor is their evident place as part of the industrial organic complex. I don’t doubt that they’ve internalized much of the system mindset. Thus they’ve unilaterally dumbed the bill down to comply with central government directives, voluntarily racing to the bottom. (In California they did the same thing, and then added stupidity to timidity by saying stuff about THEIR OWN BILL like “loopholes are good”! I’d almost have wanted to vote No just out of contempt for such a lame campaign.)

 

It’s Politics 101 that you demand far more than you really want to achieve, and that where you’re trying to get Better Elitism (begging the elites for labeling is certainly an elitist strategy; indeed, here it’s not even a ballot initiative, but trying to get a law passed), you supplement it with as much grassroots direct action as possible. Therefore anyone sincere and competent would encourage direct labeling in the supermarkets, as one example of the kind of things citizens of a real democracy can and will do, as their right and responsibility.

 

The strategic principles listed at the event contain one good point – they acknowledge that the central government won’t do anything. (I hope they acknowledge that anything the central government does would be a scam.) So they’re capable of digesting the evidence that far. Maybe it’s possible for them to do so about state governments as well.

 

There’s also several bad points:

 

“Common language among all the state bills will offer “as level a playing field as possible” for food companies to comply”

 

As I said, voluntary racing to the bottom. And why would the people want to “offer a level playing field” to criminal organizations that never offered it to us? That have done all they can to deprive us of any playing field at all, let alone a “level one”. And why should we want to “play” this game at all, and with such cheaters?

 

“They “didn’t want retailers to have to be responsible” under the law (instead, producers)”

 

Why not? Is there a tactical rationale for this, or is it some stupid moral misguidance? Retailers had their chance to strangle GMOs in the cradle and chose instead to join the conspiracy against humanity. They’re enemies, not bystanders. As for what’s good tactics, I haven’t thought it through completely, but my first thought is that targeting the weak link, the most publicly exposed and vulnerable link, is often a good tactic. Supermarket chains are far more vulnerable than Monsanto. (Not to mention all their other bad effects.) It’s worked well in keeping most GMOs out of Europe. Perhaps the winningest union going, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (one of the few that’s been winning at all), has based its strategy on targeting one retailer after another.

 

Most of all, it’s up to we the people to take matters into our own hands, not “the states”. But that truth may be frightening for some of these cadres, who by training and temperament may identify more with Monsanto than with small farmers, indigenous peoples, and true democracy activists (that is, active participatory citizens).

 

But here’s the core question to ask any advocate of system reformism, i.e. Better Elitism – When this fails, THEN what do you want to do? If the answer is vague, or boils down to, “keep doing what’s already failed, ad infinitum and ad nauseum”, we know we’re dealing with con artists whose only real agenda is to keep dissent firmly within system-endorsed bounds.

 

The right question would be, “If this doesn’t work, will you then convene a conference dedicated to enshrining abolition as the only goal, and working on strategy only toward this goal?”

 

We already have the fact that this was already tried in Vermont and already failed, for one reason and one reason only, because the state government doesn’t want to do it. So why would that same government change its mind? The same has been true in every other state where the legislative route has been tried. How much evidence will be needed? The fact is, where the propagators of the “co-existence” scam (of which labeling is a part) aren’t conscious liars (I think the likes of Whole Foods Market, Hirshfield, etc. certainly are), they’re still acting according to indelible system-compliant limitations. They’ve internalized the rules of the criminal system, and by now voluntarily collaborate with it. The real goal is to try to prevent a real anti-GMO and anti-corporate food movement from cohering and gathering force.

 

What could cause me to change my mind about this tactic and goal? It’s tough, because I argue that these campaigns have unilaterally pre-failed by making their proposed legislation so lame. I think labels for GMO-fed meat and dairy are also necessary. (I’m well aware that the central government claims to have “pre-emptive” power over this. So what? To unilaterally cave in on account of such a bogus and tyrannical presumption is hardly in the Spirit of ’76. Why not go ahead and challenge these usurpers? We can at least agree upon and publicize the fact of this usurpation and this illegitimacy. Would that cost the state money from the central government? If so, that should be seen as a feature and not a bug. We’re never going to take back our political and economic sovereignty while we remain a dependent cog of the central money system. Everything is interrelated, and we must be organic and holistic about our philosophy and activism. To think anti-GMO activism can be a stand-alone campaign which doesn’t fundamentally challenge the entire structure is, ironically, a perfect example of the NPK mentality that’s destroying our agriculture, and which was the ideological fount of GMOs in the first place.

 

On that note, I’ve heard of an ongoing secession movement in Vermont. I don’t know its specific ideology, but perhaps there’s a ready-made ally, once people get serious about Food Sovereignty.)

 

Leaving aside the scope of the labeling, I’d have to see the thing passed and fully enforced. More importantly, I’d have to see the campaign organize itself as a permanent grassroots organization dedicated to enforcement of this measure, and to expanding the action as far as it can go, toward full abolition. This is a non-negotiable baseline for any democracy activism worthy of the name. Within-the-system reforms like getting a law passed are always to be seen as supplementary to directly democratic movement-building and direct action.

 

But more likely, the elite organizers of the campaign wouldn’t see grassroots action as even a supplement to the “legalistic” action. On the contrary, we’d have proof that the campaign had been a con job if, once the bill was passed, the Leaders were to turn to whatever grass roots had sprung up and say, “We won! Now you can disband and go home. We, Your Betters, will now confer with our fellow elites in government and at the corporations. We’ll try to keep you posted.”

 

I’d say that if we the people want to support a labeling campaign, we must do so as a parallel grassroots organization, built from day one to be a permanent, ever-growing movement. Under no circumstances should we let ourselves be “led” by elites, however well-meaning they may seem. We must lead ourselves.

 

I think the answer is that existing groups won’t be part of the true wellspring which shall one day surge to a purifying Flood.
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GMO Labeling and Movement Strategy and Goals

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There’s a growing ambivalence among we who oppose GMOs where it comes to GMO labeling. Most obviously, it implies the continuation of industrial agriculture and food commodification, and globalization as such. It merely seeks Better Consumerism within that framework.

 

If people saw labeling as a temporary measure within the framework of an ongoing movement to abolish industrial ag and build Food Sovereignty, that could be good. If people saw the campaign for labeling as primarily a movement-building action, an occasion for public education, for democratic participation in a grassroots action, and to help build a permanent grassroots organization, that would be good. (POE as I call it – Participation, Education, Organization.)

 

But many of the advocates seem see it as a panacea. They at least claim to expect miracles from it: Labeling = the end of Monsanto. This is highly doubtful. Just because a labeling initiative or law is passed doesn’t mean it will be enforced with any alacrity. It’s still the same old pro-Monsanto government which would be in charge of enforcement. That’s why I always said getting the California initiative passed was just the first and easiest step; then the real work of vigilance, forcing the enforcers to follow through, would begin. That, too, was a reason why the campaign needs to be, even more than just an intrinsic campaign, the building ground of a permanent grassroots organization.

 

Then there’s the fact that most if not all of these initiatives and laws are riddled with loopholes, categories of food which don’t need to be labeled. That almost always includes GMO-fed meat and dairy. Actually, labeling would apply mostly to the same corporate-manufactured processed foods we ought to be getting out of our diets and economies regardless.

 

When we combine the picayune content of these labeling proposals with the fact that their advocates do often call them a self-sufficient panacea, and with the fact that the California effort was designed like a one-off electoral campaign rather than as a process of building a permanent grassroots organization, we gather a sinister picture of what’s going on here. Namely, GMO labeling often looks like another kind of liberal fenceline patrolling, meant not so much to fence GMOs out as to fence anti-GMO activism in.

 

States like Vermont and Connecticut have previously been the scenes of a scam. Facing a groundswell of anti-GMO verve among the citizenry, the state government hijacked this groundswell by going through the motions of proposing labeling legislation (which is conceived and drafted in a lame way), then saying, Br’er Rabbit fashion, “please Monsanto don’t sue us!” When Monsanto then made this briar patch threat, the governor, crying crocodile tears all the way, rued how “we can’t pass this law because mean old Monsanto will sue us.” The legislature then quashed the law it had never intended to pass in the first place. The whole thing was just a pantomime. It was the same basic briar patch scam in both cases.

 

In reality it’s doubtful that Monsanto, 100% government-dependent, without even the slightest iota of a natural base, would actually sue a government that really intended to make life difficult for it. (Although a lawsuit the government never really intends to fight could be the occasion for a different form of the scam.) Regardless, it’s the duty of a government to fight for the public good (so the good-civics textbooks tell me), even if the going gets tough. So no matter how one looks at it, these state governments have abdicated, and intend to continue doing so.

 

So it follows that getting legislation introduced, and getting initiatives on the ballot, are just part of the time-dishonored, field-failed, disproven set of within-the-system tactics, alongside petitions, “voting” etc. The liberals will keep saying, “that doesn’t work, so let’s try it again, and again, and again, and again, forever and ever!” The goal is to ensure that nothing is done until we’re enslaved once and for all.

 

The real answer is that we need to build a true Food Sovereignty movement, which is also an abolition movement. No goal short of the total abolition of GMOs will suffice. We know that GMOs cannot be prevented from contaminating other crops and the environment at large. We know that GMO corporations and their government thugs are totalitarian in intent. It’s proven that neither organic agriculture, nor the environment, nor our political and economic freedom, can co-exist with GMOs. But labeling, in itself, is another version of the “co-existence” scam.

 

I’m not saying all this to oppose labeling activism. But I would be suspicious of anyone who’s implying that it’s a panacea. I’d say, “If we get this passed, then what’s next? How will we organize the necessary public education and government pressure work? How do we prevent ourselves from being co-opted and corrupted like the anti-tobacco groups?” If they have no coherent answer, you know it’s a scam. In that case the goal is just to go through the motions. Even if the thing passes it’s meant just to be cosmetic. In that case the corporate liberals would then say indefinitely, “we got the law passed, now you have to be patient and give it time to work.”

 

I’d be suspicious of anyone viewing, running, organizing things like an election campaign. I’d say, “First of all we need to use actions like this toward movement-building. In what ways are we building permanent organizational and publicity structures? What underlying principles dictate our support for labeling, and how are we working to propagate those principles?” If they have no coherent answer, or directly say ”this isn’t movement-building, this is a one-off campaign”, you know it’s a scam, or at any rate that they have in fact no coherent principle or strategy, just a vague feeling and a handy tactic. Needless to say, this mindset will never win the war of attrition it will take to bring down Monsanto’s tyranny.

 

Most of all, I’d want clarity on the ultimate goals. Do labeling advocates really support Community Food and Food Sovereignty? Do they really oppose food corporatism? Do they really seek to constitute an abolition movement vs. GMOs and industrial ag as such? Nothing short of this will work for humanity.

 

Does labeling have a coherent rationale at all? We mentioned how, in itself, it still rationalizes industrial ag, food commodification, unhealthy processed foods, passive consumerism, and the “co-existence” scam. In the end, it still rationalizes food corporatism and “market solutions”. These are all unsustainable evils, politically, morally, and practically. But in itself, the kind of solution labeling purports to be sees these evils as normative.

 

Once again we see how corporatist “solutions” cannot solve problems generated by corporatism, and are not intended to. If taken as a self-sufficient panacea (and as I said, the evidence is that most of its advocates and organizers see it that way), GMO labeling is part of the same instrumental, non-holistic NPK thinking which is destroying humanity.

 

The organic place of labeling activism, as part of a movement to restore the primacy of organic agriculture, would be as a movement-building opportunity. It would provide the occasion and the practice to build a permanent movement structure. It would also provide the forum for movement and public education about not just labeling, and not just the evils of GMOs, but about the evils and unsustainability of the entire corporate food sector. It would bring home the need to build Community Food as a full-scale economic and political movement.

 

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GMO Action Imperatives; Lessons of the Wetteren Case

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A judge in Belgium has convicted the Wetteren 11 of charges related to a non-violent action where they dug up a GMO potato field trial and planted real potatoes. The judge agreed to the prosecutor’s characterization of the political demonstrators as having formed an illicit conspiracy. The defendants refused to attend the proceedings after the judge refused to convene this as an actual trial, instead letting the prosecutor run it as a purely administrative, technical, “civil” matter.

 

The public prosecutor and the research consortium (Flemish Institute for Biotechnology, University of Ghent, HoGent and the Flemish Agency for Agriculture and Fishery) chose to have this debate in court via direct summons and civil proceedings.

The group of activists had prepared a thorough defence. This was based on calling up expert witnesses, video testimonies from scientists, and video footage from the action in order to prove that 1) the action was covered by the principle of freedom of expression, and 2) that action was necessary in order to protect the precautionary principle. The action in Wetteren was carried out to protect the environment, public health and small-scale farming.

Without any further discussion, the judges refused to hear these testimonies or to view the video footage. The testimonies, however, were crucial to emphasise the political nature of the action. The judges therefore denied the defendants their legal right to an appropriate defence, as well as the opportunity to question the use of genetically modified organisms in agriculture.

 

This, of course, was tantamount to finding the defendants gulity before the trial began. As the Red Queen put it, “Verdict first, trial afterwards!”, and if the accused never commit the crime, “That would be better!” The judge refused to hear evidence on the substance or merits of the issue or of the action, even though it’s a well-established principle of law that the people mustn’t obey unjust laws, and have the right to break the law in extreme circumstances. Thus, in a rare example, an English jury found Greenpeace demonstrators not guilty on the grounds that their “illegal” action was a necessary response to a clear and present danger. Historically, juries have a good record of acquitting direct actions when the judge informs them of their options. In the Kingsnorth case the judge said the action could be found justified if the trespass on a corporation’s “property” was necessary to defend the property of people.

 

Where it comes to GMOs, this imperative couldn’t be more clear-cut: The USDA itself admits that once GMOs are in the environment, contamination of related crops, including those of organic farmers, is inevitable. That’s why the USDA promulgated the doctrine that GMO corporations and tenders have a presumptive right to trespass upon and destroy the property of others (organic growers and many others with an interest in not being contaminated), cannot be sued for this or otherwise sanctioned, and that on the contrary the burden of the full cost of trying to defend oneself is 100% upon the victim. Indeed, when this inevitable and intentional contamination occurs, Monsanto is allowed to sue the victim for patent infringement. In 2012, when a broad alliance of farmers and Food Freedom groups sued Monsanto and the government to turn this abominable policy right side up, the system judge rejected the suit, ridiculing the damaged plaintiffs in the process.

 

What could be more clear, that we shall never achieve justice, reason, safety, or simple human decency within this system, and shall have to seek it outside? 

 

Getting back to the Belgian case, the prosecutor and judge also refused to charge a large number of ”voluntary defendants” comprising a list of civil society organizations from farmer groups to trade unions to consumer and environmental groups to some politicians and professors, who called themselves co-conspirators after the fact and demanded to join the defendants in the dock. The people recognize that the prosecution here was not just of this particular democracy action, but intended to set a precedent vs. all direct expressions of democracy.

 

The defendants have explained (to the people, not to the court, which has refused to listen or to allow any substantive defense) how the secretive and unaccountable machinations of the “regulatory” system do not serve public health or democratic accountability, but only the corporate imperative. We can add that the mainstream media is in fact a corporate propaganda ministry which systematically propagates Monsanto’s lies and suppresses the facts and truths about GMOs, and about food corporatism and industrial agriculture in general. It also systematically neglects and, increasingly, slanders organic agriculture, which is the only solution to humanity’s artificial food crisis.*

 

Groups have been calling for a democratic debate about the introduction of genetically modified crops for years. Environmental and agricultural organisations including Friends of the Earth, Landwijzer, Greenpeace and the organic Bioforum have been campaigning constantly for sustainable agriculture and emphasising that GMO’s cannot be a part of this. They objected to the potato field trial which they described as unwanted and useless. Above all, they highlighted the environmental risks involved in such an experiment. Three experts from the Biotechnology Safety Council gave negative advice regarding the potato trial. They emphasised the environmental risks linked to the trial and pointed out that it was scientifically ungrounded. In August 2012 a judge in Ghent ruled that the GM field trial itself was actually illegal because there was no justification for the fact that the ministers in charge did not allow for objections or for minority positions on the Biotechnology Safety Council to be considered.

The action took place after all these other attempts from people to express their views had been systematically swept aside. The structural problems in agriculture, and the consequences of the use of genetically modified organisms have still not been openly discussed in Flanders, and public debate about the issue is systematically avoided.

 

Nor can “reform” be accomplished within “representative” electoral channels. We know that our elections are frauds. In the US or Canada, one can vote for Monsanto or Monsanto. (Meanwhile in the Wetteren 11′s European Union, there’s an “elected” parliament which is purely advisory with zero actual legislative power. It’s more purely cosmetic and fraudulent than the tsar’s early 20th century Duma, and has far less power than the kaiser’s Reichstag.)

 

Of course, this case is a good demonstration of what we can usually expect from the system courts, in procedure and outcome. The fact is that the system comprises organized crime, and that corporate and government agencies are criminal gangs. They automatically view any kind of democratic combination as an affront to their sense of entitlement and a threat to their prerogatives. Their goal will always be to use their illegitimate power to criminalize any manifestation of democracy, and of any human value.

 

Conversely, citizens must start by recognizing the elemental illegitimacy and fraudulence of all system institutions, and the folly of trying to achieve real change by working through system channels. As today’s defendants pointed out, they and their allies did all they could to get action within the system where it came to the pointlessness and likely harms of this GMO potato trial. (We can say the same of the Rothamstead GM wheat trial in Britain – totally worthless, gratuitously harmful, done only as a corporate welfare handout and as a political exercise in the alleged ubiquity and irresistability of GM crops. These field trials often serve the same purpose as the aimless marching of SA formations in Weimar Germany – they usually had no particular destination, but were merely for intimidation and propaganda purposes. So it is with most GM trials today.) It was only when the system made it clear that there was no process, but only the fraudulent simulation of one, and that the system viewed its task as to serve the Monsanto imperative no matter what, that these activists decided their task was to serve the freedom imperative no matter what. So they undertook non-violent direct action and pulled up the crops, in the same way that anti-Nazis in the Weimar time tried directly to challenge the Brownshirt domination of the streets.

 

The message: We reject the legitimacy of Big Ag and GMOs, and we don’t believe there’s anything necessary, fated, or irresistible about them. Some criminals chose the pro-GMO policy, the people can make the opposite choice, whenever we want. This action was a counter-demonstration on the part of those who value freedom, democracy, and natural economic autonomy, vs. a propaganda event set up by the corporate planned economy and its political Big Government flunkey regime.

 

So we have procedural disenfranchisement, political dispossession, media blackout and slander. What’s left for us to do? What can we do?

 

The primary task is to organize a coordinated Community Food movement, with a generally agreed upon set of principles and strategy, while tactics would be decided upon at the local level. (Operational goals and publicity** might be partially standardized and partially vary locally.) One advantage such a movement would have over the 19th century Populist movement would be that the Farmers’ Alliance comprised cotton farmers who were necessarily participants in commodification agriculture (and therefore had no choice but to seek to revolutionize or “reform” it), while we not only can but must desire to dispense with industrial ag (a completely separate and alien sector from Community Food) completely. An aggressive abolition campaign against GMOs and CAFOs could be part of this movement.

 

Meanwhile, propagating the more revolutionary ideas of Food Sovereignty (as defined by Via Campesina and other Southern indigenous farmer movements; the term’s already somewhat obfuscated in North America) might be, for the time being, the province of individual writers or a separate organization. The idea would be that the experience of fighting for Community Food against the corporate state’s increasing repression would make the CF movement an educational vector of radicalization, in addition to its inherently positive actions and results.

 

This will be the only way to systematically propagate a disciplined set of ideas, truths, and facts about food corporatism and corporatism in general, and about the need to rebuild our polities and economies on a natural, rational, resilient local/regional basis. 

 

*There is no natural food crisis. Today’s agriculture produces far more than enough food for everyone on Earth, although much of it is toxified and of inferior nutritional quality. Meanwhile even today organic agriculture could produce more food than Big Ag, of vastly higher quality, under much healthier physical, environmental, socioeconomic, and political circumstances. This margin shall become infinite with the end of the fossil fuel age, as industrial ag becomes physically impossible.

 

**The reproduction of Field Liberation’s press release at GMWatch is given a headline regurgitating the prosecutor’s slander. Why anyone would want to do this is a mystery. But it’s a typical example of the current lameness of our movement. It’s a good example of the elements of publicity which will need to be standardized and applied in a disciplined way. You know, NOT regurgitating system propaganda, terminology, framings?

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We Need the Abolition of GMOs

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1. Did the colonists Ask the British to rescind the Intolerable Acts, lift the Boston Port closure, take back the Coercive Acts? No, it only took them a few years from the mid 1760s to early 70s to comprehend that Asking the British for Better Policy doesn’t work, so they stopped doing it. They knew the only options were servitude, or to get the British OUT.

 

2. Today we’ve had far more than a few years to comprehend the same fact, that Asking the British doesn’t work. (It’s a sad fact of history that no one learns lessons from history, but must learn the same lesson from experience, over and over. So be it – our own experiential evidence is conclusive.) We’ve had over a century of experience with the elemental viciousness of the corporate domination imperative, which is totalitarian in the most basic and literal sense of the term - the corporations will NEVER stop short of total enclosure and total domination. This was common sense from the beginning, and it’s been proven by the evidence. The evidence of our own lifetimes is the most decisive of all.

 

3. We know that Asking the British doesn’t work. Those who tout modern versions like “writing your congressman”, “petitioning your president”, and of course “voting” (I mean those who tout these as the only, or primary, courses of action*), we must classify as modern versions of loyalists. Corporate Loyalists. These include all system NGOs, liberals in general, and conservatives too.

 

4. GMO labeling, where it’s seen as the goal rather than a step toward the goal, toward the total abolition of GMOs, falls into this begging-for-Better-Policy category.

 

5. In response to the lousy campaign and stolen vote in California, and belated analysis of the inherent flaw of the Labeling idea (as the end goal), some people have moved on to calling for a ban on GMOs. This is a step forward, but is still mired in system consciousness. Even if a legalistic ban were possible (which it’s not, at the central or at any state level, not right now), it would still be operating within the same corporatized framework where Monsanto operates. By making a fetish of “the law” and considering it magically endowed with active power, it implicitly concedes the legitimacy of existing law (for example the very intellectual property regime which props up Monsanto) and the central government itself. But we must, as an element of our political education, reject all such alleged legitimacy, in principle.

 

Here’s some typical examples of how the law really works: CAFOs, fracking, and mountaintop removal mining are exempt from the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act. And of course the just-passed (by a bipartisan consensus, as all these examples of corporate lawlessness are held) Monsanto Rider to a typical corporate welfare law would exempt GMOs from all regulatory control or judicial review. That’s the way “the law” works. Remember that the next time you see anyone blabbering about “the law” and “petitions” and ”voting”.

 

6. Food Sovereignty rejects the notion that an alien central government can ever play any legitimate or constructive role in food production and distribution. The sector is naturally local/regional. The only thing centralized hierarchy can do is use massive top-down power to force agriculture into the commodification strait-jacket. This command economy, and the massive corporate welfare and thug apparatus which props it up, is the basic activity of the US government. It will never do anything significant which runs counter to this corporate commodification imperative. Therefore, the people’s only constructive course of action is to build a grassroots political movement to meld with the Community Food sector which is already surging as a vibrant economic movement.

 

7. Therefore, the basic nature of the anti-GMO movement, as with the entire liberation movement, has to be direct action, self-management, civil disobedience – in our minds, in our words, and as much as possible in our actions.

 

8. That’s not to say legalistic actions, where immediately possible, aren’t worth doing. Any town council with the votes to ban GMOs, ban fracking, ban corporate personhood, declare local food sovereignty, should do so. But no such votes exist at the central government level. So those who propose a “ban” on GMOs are really proposing that we build a political campaign centered on this kind of legalistic advocacy (and without even building an underlying movement structure and culture first). This is as quixotic and utopian as an idea gets.

 

9. History and today’s evidence prove that nothing will work but to relocalize our economies and particularly our food; to build the consciousness of our economic need to do this; to build a cultural and intellectual movement around this new way of life; to build upon this a new democracy consciousness; throughout all these actions to learn from the enemy’s assaults upon us, the true nature of the corporate tyranny we struggle against; and from there to politically organize to resist, reject and abolish this enemy, through rejecting its legitimacy, refusing to cooperate with it, refusing to participate in its systems, and wherever possible to take local direct action against it. Combined, this movement can preserve itself through the trials ahead, maintain the health and happiness of its people, help bring down the corporate tyranny, and lead humanity through to a new freedom and prosperity.

 

10. As with every other anti-corporate struggle, the struggle vs. GMOs is an abolition movement.

 

[*The title of an upcoming food book by a leading system liberal: Eat,Drink,Vote. Yes, that sums up passive consumerism in its most profound form. A real citizen's book, meanwhile, would be entitled: Eat, Drink, Grow, Organize, Fight. But the job of system reformists is to fence in dissent, keep it domesticated and system-coordinated, and fence out the real time-tested ideas of action.]

 
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Pollan is Mystified

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Michael Pollan:

 

Q: Are there any positive advances that biotech has made recently in the food industry? Any on the horizon?

 

A: They’ve been on the ever-retreating horizon for a long time. I started writing about biotech in ’98 and I remember being told by executives at Monsanto that Roundup and Bt were just the first chapter in this wonderful story and within five years so many other interesting crops, crops that could withstand saline or salty soil or crops that could withstand drought or crops that might even be able to fertilize themselves with fixed nitrogen, crops with higher yields and for reasons that remain something of a mystery to me, those wonders have yet to appear. I don’t know why, whether they’re proving harder to engineer than expected might be one reason. Or they could tell you regulatory hurdles are standing in the way but in fact there are very few regulatory hurdles introduced in these crops.

 

Allow me to lift the veil of mystery for Mr Pollan:

 

G……M……Os……DON’T……WORK.

 

The fact is that only two things about GMOs ever sort-of worked for a little while: Herbicide tolerance and internal pesticide expression. As predicted by anyone who knows even the slightest bit about how nature works, the weeds and pests which Roundup and Bt expression were supposed to suppress quickly transformed themselves into Roundup-resistant superweeds and Bt-resistant superbugs. Roundup has totally collapsed. (Which is why the next generation of 2,4-D resistant GMOs is in the pipeline. This ever-escalating herbicide treadmill is an intended outcome of corporate/government policy. Otherwise the USDA would admit that herbicide tolerant GMOs don’t work and refuse to authorize any further commercialization of them.) Bt crops no longer work, and ever more toxic pesticides need to be sprayed on them.

 

In fact, we’re left with only two meager things that GMOs do as advertised: Bt crops do express Bt toxin, even though it no longer works. And glyphosate-resistant crops can have glyphosate sprayed upon them without killing them, which doesn’t help because glyphosate also doesn’t kill the weeds it was supposed to kill.

 

That’s all GMOs do.

 

And for that worthless performance, we’re willing to physically poison ourselves and economically and politically enslave ourselves? I think humanity better wake up and abolish GMOs, by whatever means necessary, while there’s still time.

 

But the fact that we’re not likely to do so with any help from liberal elitists is exemplified here: “I await those products and I would love to see this industry make a significant contribution to solving one of the world’s problems. But they’ve been promising that for a long time and have so far grossly under-delivered.”

 

Pollan doesn’t specify which “problems” he means. He knows perfectly well that the only problems with the world’s food are problems caused by corporatism, especially GMO corporatism, and that the only solution is the abolition of food corporatism. But as a good technocratic and pro-corporate elitist he can’t countenance real solutions.

 

Like all liberals, in the end he’s a triangulator in the total war of corporations vs. humanity. He wants to procure somewhat Better Policy within the corporate framework, but also wants to run interference on behalf of corporatism. In the end, when they’re finally forced to choose, most of them will side with Monsanto.

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Can There Be A January 1905?

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A core trait of liberals and reformists is to genuflect before power, always looking and begging upward for Better Policy to trickle down from Better Elites. Liberals are basically elitists with some vague hopes for more “progressive” practices on the part of the power structure. They basically dream of benevolent despotism, and fantasize that this benevolence exists in intent, somewhere up there. This benevolence is somehow, mysteriously, prevented from realizing itself. The already classical example is the fundamentalist cult of Obama’s Good Intentions which he mysteriously cannot act upon.

 

Since a cult can’t get by on mystery alone and needs a more tangible explanation, the mystery is sometimes explained in terms of how those nasty Republicans thwart Obama. Of course this doesn’t explain why Obama couldn’t do what he wanted for two years of a veritable one-party dictatorship, when the Dems held both houses of Congress. Nor does it explain how the benevolence has been unable to trickle down through the executive branch bureaucracies, over which the president has vast unilateral power. But then, in the end, it’s all still a mystery.

 

I used the “progressive” cult of Obama as a prime example, but we see the same phenomenon everywhere hierarchies and middle classes exist. Middle class liberals and reformists look upward and dream of Better Elites, like cargo cultists worshipping an airplane high overhead.

 

This is an example of how the petty bourgeois mindset is simply an adaptation of the original peasant mindset, just as the modern professionalized and suburbanized petty bourgeoisie is a temporary offshoot of the peasantry. The basic mindset remains the same, and today’s technocratic worship, “if only Obama knew…”, is the same notion as the that of the Russian peasant who sighed, “if only the tsar knew…if only those nasty ministers and officials wouldn’t keep thwarting his benevolent will.”

 

On Bloody Sunday, January 1905, the tsar’s troops fired on a peaceful procession coming to the Winter Palace to present a reverent petition, killing and wounding as many as a thousand people. This instantly broke the spell. It was a mortal blow to the cult of the tsar’s benevolence. Never again would it be taken for granted among any significant portion of the Russian people that the tsar was an essentially well-meaning would-be benefactor who was being misinformed and disobeyed by subordinates. While this change of basic mindset didn’t permanently turn the Russian people into revolutionaries, and the 1905 revolution ended up fizzling out, it was still a permanent change, and a significant milestone on the road to 1917.

 

I wonder now, when we strive for a change in the basic mindset toward corporatism, let alone for a real movement to abolish it, is there any possible event which could strike off the blinders once and for all? We saw the way open police brutality temporarily boosted support for Occupy, but also the way this increased support was more of a mood than a basic shift in the state of mind. Conversely, we see how a historically unprecedented wave of Monsanto-driven farmer suicides in India, upwards of 300,000 by now, for all intents and purposes a mass murder campaign, means very little to Western liberals. So we cannot rely on moral sense to demonstrate to any significant number of middle class Westerners the difference between good and evil. If anything’s to do it, it will be something visceral and horrific, right before their eyes.

 

But by now, can any action, any crime, rise to the level of clarity for such willfully blind masses? Is a sea change in mindset still possible for masses still living within the intact corporate civilization? Or has corporate Gleichschaltung, “coordination” and indoctrination, reached such a terminal point that nothing large-scale will happen until the system starts collapsing of its own diseased weight?

 
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