African Wannsee Conference; Or, Bono Parties With Monsanto

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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GMO Imperialism as Biological Warfare

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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Genocide By GMO Famine?

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Peak Oil and Kleptocracy (The Theory of Kleptocracy)

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The other day in a comment thread I saw someone asking for a theory of kleptocracy. I think one of the things I’ve accomplished here is to elaborate such a theory. The most relevant posts can be found in places like my Corporatism and Neoliberalism pages.

 

But I thought I’d briefly sum it up:

 

1. Non-kleptocratic government (the liberal welfare state; representative government which was responsive and accountable at all; periods of actual reform, the Progressive Era, etc.) was a manifestation of the Oil Age. These phenomena never existed prior to it (the ideas did, ineffectually). They won’t exist after it. This was all ahistorical and context-specific.

 

2. The fossil fuel surplus was so extravagant that, given real competition from communism and nationalism, the path of least resistance for capitalist governments was to actually spread some wealth, allow a temporary mass middle class to arise, and pretend to be accountable.

 

3. I’ll add here that under regimes of economic competition, the Rule of Rackets always applies – no one is willing to capitalistically compete for one day longer than he has to. The day he can switch to racketeering – using market muscle to suppress competition and get favorable government intervention in the form of subsidies and pro-oligopoly courts, laws, and regulations - he does so.

 

Then we have the fact that any power concentration automatically tends toward looting and tyranny. Modern modes of organization and technology have exacerbated this.

 

4. So those are the universal structural parts. Specific to the capitalist age, the maturation of all sectors and subsequent fall of the profit rate requires that all these oligopoly/kleptocratic effects be imposed in a more intensive form.

 

5. Peak Oil looms. The US oil Peak in 1970 was a wakeup call. If the elites were to complete the looting of the entire fossil fuel surplus in time, they had to start then with dismantling the welfare state, demolishing all reforms and social advances which had been achieved, eradicating all actualities of government responsiveness and accountability, and imposing the forms of the neofeudal tyranny which would succeed the Oil Age.

 

6. Finally, capitalism itself was never anything but a modification of feudalism. Feudalism was just temporarily refitted for the fossil fuel age. The system’s real nature remained feudal throughout. Corporatism and financialization, imperialism and globalization, have been the most clear manifestations of this.

 

Now that the fossil fuel age is ending, the goal is to restore full feudalism, in an even more vicious and exploitative form than that which existed previously.

 

So there’s a basic theory of kleptocracy. I didn’t include subjective greed, powerlust, sadism, hatred on the part of cadres and elites. But since the system selects for these, these too become a structural, objective feature.

Seed Savers Exchange, Svalbard, and Corporatism

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I’ve been uncertain what to think about the power struggle at the Seed Savers Exchange, the deposition of its co-founder and longtime executive director Kent Whealy, the charges and countercharges of mismanagement, Leader arrogance, and lack of transparency and democracy (there seems to have been quite a bit of these on both sides), and the SSE’s peculiar partnership with the globalization seed vault at Svalbard.

 

One thing that’s clear is that the Svalbard relationship is gratuitous and cannot have been undertaken for the reasons current management claims, that it represents an increased resiliency for the SSE’s stocks. If that were really the intent they’d have expanded and distributed their own network and facilities (like the way a plant would with its own seeds), not have sought further concentration in a corporate fortress.

 

This is true even if the claims of Whealy and others about the contract between SSE and Svalbard are exaggerated. Whealy claims that the varieties reposed at Svalbard cannot easily be repossessed, nor are there barriers to Monsanto and others using them for proprietary research. Worst of all, Svalbard can now demand access to and possession of any and all seeds in the SSE library. SSE would have to comply with any such demand laundered through Svalbard by Monsanto and other rackets.

 

Torgrimson and the rest deny these claims. They and the NordGen managers of the vault say they can take back their deposits any time they want, that nobody can do anything with those deposits without their OK, and that nothing in the contract gives Svalbard any right to anything other than what’s been deposited in the vault.

 

My own reading of the contract is that it’s intentionally vague and can possibly be interpreted the way Whealy claims. Anyone who knows the history of globalization knows how these things are likely to work, so it’s reasonable to be suspicious of anything vague. But of course a pollyanna liberal (or someone pretending to be that; Whealy’s own interpretation of his nemeses is that they’re mostly stupid starfuckers who don’t know how they’re being manipulated by corporatism – see below for the latest on this) would argue that the contract’s fine.

 

(I wrote more on the War on Seeds here and here.)

 

I repeat that no one trying to set up a network of seed banks for democratic and relocalization purposes would have anything to do with centralized system vaults like Svalbard. If you fear for the safety and viability of the seeds at any one location, then spread them among hundreds, thousands. This year I’m making a (so far very modest) start at beginning a seed library as a project of our relocalization group. We’ll see what kind of help I get this fall from the community garden, etc. But a corporatist vault is dubious on its face, the contract language gives grounds for further suspicion, these are enough to make the decision that such collaboration is likely to cost far, far more than one might gain, and it’s unnecessary from any legitimate point of view. (For more on Svalbard’s backers, see for example the donor list at the Global Crop Diversity Trust. Monsanto’s not explicitly listed, but most of the rest of the gang’s there – Syngenta, Dupont/Pioneer, the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank CGIAR, etc.)

 

And now for the latest, the most clear window yet on SSE’s corporate liberal treachery. They’re now crowing about a visit from none other than their president Obama. I’ll spare you excerpts from their sickening paean to a mass murderer and co-conspirator in the looting of tens of trillions of dollars from the American people. But masochists can read it here. Note how all the happy talk about seed saving is 100% from their side, while Obama evidently didn’t even pretend to respect SSE’s mission.

 

There’s good reason for that. Monsanto is one of Obama’s favorite corporations, according to the record of his actions. Anyone who knows anything about seed saving knows that Monsanto is dedicated to a totalitarian purge of all non-proprietary seed use from the face of the earth. Over ten years ago it commissioned Enron collaborator Arthur Andersen to reverse-engineer a strategy for literal world domination based on control of the food supply, through a monopoly on all seeds. Anyone who cares anything for SSE’s mission regards Monsanto as enemy #1.

 

Obama, meanwhile, has appointed and promoted more Monsanto cadres in his administration than Bush did in 8 years. Most notoriously, he elevated Monsanto lobbyist Michael Taylor to the anti-democratic post of Food Czar, with vague but vast theoretical administrative power over our food and seeds. The recently passed and Obama-supported Food Control bill is intended to legislatively validate an administrative dictatorship over food. Monsanto wrote much of this bill. Obama is Monsanto’s president.

 

The SSE Leadership knows all this, yet chooses to welcome this arch-criminal and lie to its membership about what it means. This is the strongest evidence yet that Whealy is right about the “seat at the table” corporate liberal sellout attitude among SSE’s management, or perhaps something more sinister. Since Obama certainly wants organizations like SSE to cease to exist, it follows that if traitors within wanted to dissolve the project (not overtly, but by gutting it from within), they’d try to astroturf the membership into thinking Obama’s their ally, and that the organization should fall into line with administration directives. For example, there haven’t yet been any new FDA rulings on seeds based on the new legislation, but they’re probably coming.

 

This would then put the Svalbard collaboration in a more explicable, evil perspective. 

 

Food Sovereignty and Agroecology (the UN Special Report)

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I’m not an expert on farming. I’m just starting to learn about it through gardening, saving seeds, working at a farmers’ market, and as in this case reading and writing about it. Probably most of my readers fall into this category as well, although some have more knowledge than I do.

 

But I think propagating and discussing knowledge is one of the key elements of our movement, so part of the way I’m trying to learn about what we’re trying to do is to educate myself as much as possible on the state of the agronomic science, and report on how the evidence supports Food Sovereignty in every way. That’s why I wrote my earlier posts on farming, and that’s why I want to continue analyzing the best stuff I’ve read.

 

Today I’m going to summarize the recent Report from the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter. This position is not in the UN’s mainstream; the Special Rapporteur is, I gather, more like a marginalized Elizabeth Warren type. It also contains several reformist concessions to the corporatist status quo. Nevertheless, on the whole it presents an alternative to corporatist agriculture. It explicitly enshrines agroecology as the desired paradigm for food production, and implicitly exalts food sovereignty as the desired ideology and mode of social organization. It also does a great job of assembling all the recent science and scholarship on the issue, which proves the superiority of agroecology to corporate agriculture in every way – productivity, nutrition, resiliency, accessibility, stability, democracy.

 

The introduction describes how, after decades of neglect, the food stagflation which started in 2007 has triggered an increase in agricultural investment. But this isn’t the old style public interest investment which worked so well; it’s neoliberal “investment”. What’s more, investment as such isn’t sufficient to deal with the food crisis, since this crisis is part of a much greater civilizational crisis. The food solution must also be a socioeconomic, political, and environmental solution. It must not only maintain quantity of production but greatly improve quality, be more ecologically sound, and improve the position of small and mid-size farmers. The science proves agroecology can do these.

 

It is possible, however, to significantly improve agricultural productivity where it has been lagging behind, and thus raise production where it needs most to be raised (i.e. in poor, food-deficit countries), while at the same time improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and preserving ecosystems.
(section 3)

 

It’s just a matter of political will. This will require a comprehensive transformation, a philosophy and a set of practices which will obliterate neoliberalism. The philosophy is Food Sovereignty and the set of practices is agroecology.

 

The report starts out describing how even corporations and neoliberal agencies are starting to pay attention to agroecology (2) (which is a bad thing in the short run; but I think in the long run it’s still a good thing when they move beyond the “ignore you” stage to the “try to co-opt you” stage Gandhi forgot to mention). It says that continuing to increase gross yield (if that were possible) isn’t sufficient (3-4). Thus it implicitly admits that the necessary transformation cannot occur under capitalism. Agroecology and food sovereignty are directly opposed to neoliberalism, in philosophy, intent, and practice (3-4).

 

Schutter gives a Diagnosis (5-11); food systems must achieve Availability, Accessibility, Adequacy. I agree with these serviceable measures, since once we apply the principle, You Will the End, You Will the Means, they sum up what we need.

 

Availability: Sufficient food to meet human needs. We have more than sufficient physical bounty, but commodified agriculture generates artificial scarcity as its goal. We won’t have this physical cornucopia for long, however, because industrial agriculture will fail. Fossil fuels will fail, and GMOs will fail. So by the availability criterion, we must transform to relocalized smallholder agroecology.

 

Accessibility: Physical and economic. This implicitly means doing away with the commodification straitjacket. Food sovereignty has to mean access to the land for anyone willing to work it, with no squatting rights (propertarian “ownership”) for those who refuse to work. We must farm what we own and own what we farm. By the access criterion, we must transform to relocalized smallholder agroecology.

 

Adequacy: Dietary/nutritional, safety, culture. Industrial agriculture has stripped food of its taste and nutrients, while pumping it full of toxins and slathering it with poison. On a more macro level, it has stripped and poisoned the soil, the water, the air, and ravaged natural and socioeconomic systems. It has culturally impoverished us, cutting us off from our land, from knowledge of our earth and our food that grows from it. It has perpetrated sublimated genocide through the forced extinction of most of the cultivars which were bred over tens of thousands of years. Seeds are vectors of culture. To forcibly prevent their cultivation, economically or by other means, is a crime against humanity. By the adequacy criterion, we must transform to relocalized smallholder agroecology. (And jettison the “intellectual property” tyranny.)

 

The report states (7) that first of all we must transform away from cereal production for animal feed (“nearly half of the world’s cereal production”). This in itself could feed 3.5 billion more people than are fed already, even accounting for less meat in the food supply. (Under corporate agriculture, ten grain calories are required to produce one calorie of beef; think of the vastly greater efficiency of letting people eat this grain. But this would require us to measure things according to a realistic definition of efficiency, not the Orwellian corporate definition.)

 

There are plenty more economies to be realized through upgrading agricultural practice (corporate ag wastes immense amounts of potential food in the field, albeit in ways which increase its profits and socialize the losses) and eradicating ethanol subsidies and mandates (7).

 

This transformation will improve the economic position of small farmers (8). To this day, the cause of hunger is never insufficient physical stocks but artificially induced poverty among the very people who grow the food or would be growing it if they hadn’t been illicitly excluded from the land. It’s a self-evident calculus: The more people who redeem their rightful food sovereignty by becoming autonomous and cooperative producers, the fewer who will be hungry. (For the reformists, the report discusses how studies have proven that “GDP growth originating in agriculture” is twice as effective in reducing poverty as any other GDP growth, and that “the multiplier effects are significantly higher when growth is triggered by higher incomes for smallholders” than for any other kind of income increase. So those guys should be on board with food sovereignty as well.)

 

Section 10 states:

 

Most efforts in the past have focused on improving seeds and ensuring that farmers
are provided with a set of inputs that can increase yields, replicating the model of industrial
processes in which external inputs serve to produce outputs in a linear model of production.
Instead, agroecology seeks to improve the sustainability of agroecosystems by mimicking
nature instead of industry. This report suggests that scaling up agroecological practices
can simultaneously increase farm productivity and food security, improve incomes and
rural livelihoods, and reverse the trend towards species loss and genetic erosion.

 

The rest of the report describes how agroecology will accomplish these goals where industrial agriculture failed.

 

Agroecology is both a science and a set of practices. It was created by the
convergence of two scientific disciplines: agronomy and ecology. As a science,
agroecology is the “application of ecological science to the study, design and management
of sustainable agroecosystems.”
(12)

 

It’s the best for soil, for nutrition, energy usage, integration of crops and livestock, crop diversification, self-sufficiency for farmers and communities, the interaction and productivity of the entire system rather than isolated (monoculture) species.

 

Agroecology is knowledge-intensive. (We recently talked about the importance of propagating knowledge.) The emphasis is on the horizontal, decentralized development and spread of knowledge. As much as possible it’s farmer-driven (12, 38). Enough practical and scientific knowledge has already accumulated to prove that agroecology is the most productive system and is in harmony with the democratic principles of food sovereignty (14).

 

Although the Oil Age is ending, the agricultural knowledge we’ve amassed during it is the key to maintaining a higher level of production than in pre-oil times, and doing so in a democratic rather than feudal way. (Of course, neoliberal corporatism wants to restore the worst of feudalism in both the physical and political senses.)

 

A wide panoply of techniques based on the agroecological perspective have been
developed and successfully tested in a range of regions. These approaches involve the
maintenance or introduction of agricultural biodiversity (diversity of crops, livestock,
agroforestry, fish, pollinators, insects, soil biota and other components that occur in and
around production systems) to achieve the desired results in production and sustainability.
(16)

 

These practices include integrated nutrient management, agroforestry (20), water harvesting, integration of livestock into farming systems, and the push-pull system (19). I’ll add that the full virtue of these will be realized to the extent they’re deployed by the people rather than through corporatism (the report seems to have a temporizing tone in some places).

 

These are the answer to the scoffers who cite the Maya, Anasazi, Hohokam and others who malfarmed themselves out of existence in the pre-oil age. Their self-defeating practices were the unwise pre-oil equivalent of industrial agriculture. Today we have the knowledge to do much better. Again, it’s simply a matter of political will.

 

Sections 17 and 18 detail the improved yields to be gained by agroecology.

 

17. Such resource-conserving, low-external-input techniques have a proven potential to
significantly improve yields. In what may be the most systematic study of the potential of
such techniques to date, Jules Pretty et al. compared the impacts of 286 recent sustainable
agriculture projects in 57 poor countries covering 37 million hectares (3 per cent of the
cultivated area in developing countries). They found that such interventions increased
productivity on 12.6 millions farms, with an average crop increase of 79 per cent, while
improving the supply of critical environmental services. Disaggregated data from this
research showed that average food production per household rose by 1.7 tonnes per year
(up by 73 per cent) for 4.42 million small farmers growing cereals and roots on 3.6 million
hectares, and that increase in food production was 17 tonnes per year (up 150 per cent) for
146,000 farmers on 542,000 hectares cultivating roots (potato, sweet potato, cassava). After
UNCTAD and UNEP reanalyzed the database to produce a summary of the impacts in
Africa, it was found that the average crop yield increase was even higher for these projects
than the global average of 79 per cent at 116 per cent increase for all African projects and
128 per cent increase for projects in East Africa.

18. The most recent large-scale study points to the same conclusions. Research
commissioned by the Foresight Global Food and Farming Futures project of the UK
Government reviewed 40 projects in 20 African countries where sustainable intensification
was developed during the 2000s. The projects included crop improvements (particularly
improvements through participatory plant breeding on hitherto neglected orphan crops),
integrated pest management, soil conservation and agro-forestry. By early 2010, these
projects had documented benefits for 10.39 million farmers and their families and
improvements on approximately 12.75 million hectares. Crop yields more than doubled on
average (increasing 2.13-fold) over a period of 3-10 years, resulting in an increase in
aggregate food production of 5.79 million tonnes per year, equivalent to 557 kg per farming
household.

 

Section 21 describes how agroecology helps break the cycle of debt by liberating farmers from synthetic fertilizer, through sound practices of livestock integration (including keeping their manure on the farm) and cover crops (“green manure”). Section 22 cites the Badgley study which proves that “on a global scale, leguminous cover crops could fix enough nitrogen to replace the amount of synthetic fertilizer currently in use” (Footnote 37). Imagine the economic and democratic savings from that!

 

Agroecology is labor-intensive (23). While kleptocracy intends to deploy us all as slave labor, a human community could turn this labor-intensiveness into a full-employment boon of meaningful work. Human beings love working the land, growing their own food, where they’re truly doing it for themselves and their communities rather than for some alien boss. Agroecological practices also make for more pleasant work. There’s more shade (from trees planted for many purposes) and no smell and toxicity from pesticides and herbicides. And once we achieve the social revolution, it’ll all be our work. That’s the most important thing of all. (For the reformists, I’ll add that according to section 23 the cost of creating agricultural jobs has been found to be much less than in other sectors. So sincere trickle-downers should also be on board with this.)

 

Section 25 (not Peak Oil-aware) describes how “agroecological practices are fully compatible with a gradual mechanization of farming”. The need for new machines for no-till agriculture and direct seeding will generate new manufacturing jobs, if societies choose to host these jobs. Agroforestry is also a proven job creator.

 

Sections 26 and 27 describe how agroecology will solve the malnutrition problem generated by cereal monoculture. Commodity cereals contain mostly carbohydrates; they lack protein and are denuded of vitamins and minerals. Crop diversity, as is provided by agroecology, is necessary for human nutritional needs. Women and children will especially benefit (27). This diversity of grown species will also be resilient in the face of natural challenges and the ravages of our environmental vandalism. Sections 28-30 detail how agroecology will be the most resilient practice in the face of climate change, particularly its increasing incidence of extreme weather events and migration of pests and weeds. (Climate change assists vermin everywhere. I’ll add that corporate agriculture and husbandry in general, GMOs and CAFOs in particular, intentionally drive a biological arms race with intentionally fostered superweeds and superbugs. This is the business plan of these biotech and pharmacological ”industries”. It’s obvious that humanity must lose this struggle, unless we purge ourselves of our own indigenous vermin.) This resiliency will be a primary value if the human race is to continue to physically exist at all.

 

Agroecology also uses less fossil fuel energy (31), which is perhaps the most critical issue of all. Either we’re going to figure out how to feed ourselves without cheap, plentiful fossil fuels, or we’re going to starve. (The report thinks climate change is more important than Peak Oil, but in fact only the latter can possible mitigate the former. Even with my can-do political attitude, I regard voluntary GHG mitigation as a lost cause.) That implies the political solution as well, since neoliberal corporatism intends to expend through starvation as many people as necessary to construct its neo-feudal slave agriculture, while it uses the residual fossil fuels to maintain its luxuries and enforce its police state. Getting back to the importance of knowledge and education, Cuba provides the classic example of the importance of knowledge in transforming food production from an environment where oil is taken for granted to one where it’s scarce.

 

What can be done to achieve wide application of agroecology, toward food sovereignty? The report emphasizes democratic farmer participation toward dissemination of the best knowledge (32). Section 33 details how farmer field schools have been proven to teach farmers how to significantly reduce pesticide use while increasing yields, and do all of it in an environment which empowers them, helps organize them, and always furthers their education. Sections 32-3 list many organizations involved in this work. Even existing governments like that of Brazil are incorporating agroecology and farmer participation in their investment programs (34). Even where this investment remains predominantly corporatist, wherever it helps gather agroecological knowledge and gives farmers democratic experience, it helps food sovereignty toward its goal.

 

Section 35 describes two types of “scaling up” of agroecology: Horizontal (acreage) and vertical (expansion of education, finance, distribution networks, etc.). The report focuses mainly on the vertical expansion. (Previous reports, as cited in footnote 66, discussed horizontal expansion, for example issues of access to land, water, and seeds. I haven’t read these reports yet but I’m going to.)

 

The report calls for old-style public interest investment (37), which I doubt is going to happen. (To give credit where credit is due, the extinct developing-country investment programs were an example of a New Deal-style government program that worked to spread prosperity and freedom. That, of course, is why the IMF targeted those programs for extirpation. And that attrition is why reformism can’t work. Even if we could get such programs back alongside the rackets, they’d just be wiped out again by those rackets. Why do people want to continue fighting this endless fight?) Section 37 does give a good account of how reformist investment programs could work if we weren’t already under the thumb of kleptocracy.

 

Section 38 returns to the emphasis on knowledge. Again, the report calls for public investment in horizontal agricultural education, which is proven to have the most important impact on poverty in developing countries. While we may not have much faith in governments undertaking this education, we can agree with the need for this education, and the need to find a way to achieve it ourselves.

 

The report goes on to call upon governments, corporations, and NGO donors to work on all this (43-7). But the meaningful prescription is implied in sections 39-42, which envision a democracy of food emphasizing the primacy of small farmers and co-ops.

 

I think the importance of a report like this isn’t its intrinsic call for reform, which I think is in vain, but its implicit call for revolution. Physically, morally, politically, the corporate status quo in food stands for the ultimate death of humanity. Certainly politically, as food tyranny is imposed. And probably physically as well, as we shall not be able to withstand the end of oil as well as the incipient pest afflictions, pandemics, and crop failures nature will impose on our unresilient monoculture system.

 

I add to those the tragedy of our bottlenecked economic prospects.

 

But there is one path and only one path out of our physical, economic, and political predicament. This is the path of Food Sovereignty and agroecology. These comprise a unit, and they unify with democracy and humanity. Our course is clear.

Corporatism’s Toxic Touch

 

One of the many frauds Obama proffered in his Assault on the Union was his false paean to green energy. I know faith in such cherished ideals dies hard, but under kleptocracy “green energy” is a scam. Its only goal is to open up more corporate welfare ditches, help figure out ways for the elites to maintain their Sodomite lifestyles post-Peak Oil, and do it in a greenwashed way.

 

Cap-and-trade is a similar scam.

 

That’s just one example of corporatism’s corruption of everything it touches. Even Midas’ perverted touch merely turned things to inert, sterile gold. But corporatism’s touch turns everything to virulent, aggressive, communicable poison.

 

The same goes for every other neoliberal talking point. “Competitiveness” is one of the worst whips driving us along this death march. What human being still wants this hideous fascist competition? It’s been proven to bring nothing but murder, war, need, fear, despair, and devastation. It’s pure evil, and today the propaganda of it is simply the face of evil.

 

And how Orwellian is “government overregulation”? We know exactly what that means – strip all regulation and restraint from corporations and the rich, while imposing ever more totalitarian regulation on small economic actors and the people. Obama himself just signed the Food Tyranny bill, a major escalation of aggressive government regulation – but only of small producers and distributors, of course.

 

Yes, let’s get rid of ALL government regulation. That means all government assaults on our rights as citizens and human beings. And it means eradicating big corporations and all the regulations and taxes those corporations impose upon us.

 

1. Corporations are artificial creatures of the government. So by definition they are extensions of the government, and all corporate power is laundered government power. Every regulation and tax a big corporation inflicts upon us is really a government regulation and tax.

 

2. Corporations directly write or implicitly dictate all government laws, regulations, and taxes anyway. So any direct government regulation or tax is being imposed upon us by the big corporations.

 

So however you look at it, whether you approach it from the “left” or the “right”, whether one’s preferred mode of thought and expression is anti-corporate or anti-government, either way it comes down to the same thing.

 

This is one tyrannical nexus of regulation and taxation, corporate and government, all of it purely predatory and parasitic. The only answer, the only way forward, is to rid ourselves of this evil nexus in all its manifestations. 

We Have A (Fascist) Command Economy

 

1. I mean that in a precise sense. The economic definition of fascism, which is roughly synonymous with corporatism, is a command economy which maintains private rent extractions. (This is separate from other aspects of classical fascism – political authoritarianism, ideological obscurantism, censorship, destruction of civil liberties, tribalism, racism, military aggression. But as we’re seeing, most of these definitely follow from the economic aspect, and all are likely to follow in the end.)

 

2. Given that necessary part of the definition, there can be two manifestations of this command economy. It may be corporatized toward an ideological goal, as in the case of Nazism. In this case the rentiers are kept because they’re judged to be the most effective vehicle to achieve certain practical goals, e.g. fast rearmament in Hitler’s case. Or, the corporatization may be done for the sake of maximizing the extractions themselves. The already classic case is modern neoliberalism. In this case, the rentiers prefer to dispense with the full fascist phenomenon for as long as they can, since classical fascism generally means the thugs take over the operation, while the “legitimate businessmen” become the junior partners. Today’s corporatists want to maintain control of their thugs, and anyway there’s no need to go all the way to full fascism in the absence of any real leftist movement.

 

So it’s a fist/glove relationship, although which is the fist and which is the glove varies with the system. The Nazi Four Year Plan was based on building political prestige through a jobs program while the thing was really geared toward rearmament and war. (When Hitler was told about Keynes’ ideas, he grasped the essence immediately. To paraphrase, ”It’s all propaganda. The government makes a show of force toward the economy, this causes the people to believe in the government and therefore the economy, and this actually makes the economy strong.” This wasn’t really classical Keynes, which was supposed to function in the context of liberal democracy, if capitalism weren’t actually totalitarian. But of course it is, and Hitler was thus an early exponent of Samuelson-Friedman-Krugman bastard Keynes.)

 

Neoliberalism flips this relationship over. State, party, war are all meant to serve as accoutrements of profiteering and greed fundamentalism. It’s robbery for its own sake, and everything else is meant to be instrumental toward this.

 

3. Examples.

 

*The Bailout. The big banks are permanently insolvent, and all government policy boils down to stealing from the people to hand the loot over to the banks. The banksters are then supposed to directly steal as much as possible in the form of “bonuses” and other “compensation”, as well as swindle, speculate, gamble, wage economic war on currencies and governments,  and commit any and every other financial crime they can think of. They’re not supposed to hold anything back. This is the most profound and evil Permanent War the US government wants to enshrine.

 

*The military wars of aggression. This is the Permanent War proper. The wars are launched with public money and resources. The main purpose of the wars is to convey stolen public money to an innumerable menagerie of corporate rackets. Weapons contractors are only the beginning. Beyond that, the Permanent War’s goals are to directly aggrandize big government, quell dissent, provide pretexts for further assaults on civil liberties, and keep the phony “war on terror” going as a political astroturf.

 

*The health racket bailout. Congress artificially commodified health care by propping up zombie “insurance” rackets. They did this first with an antitrust exemption which was meant to shield them from any market competition. Now this bailout, assisted by a corrupt judiciary, is trying to eliminate market competition in the form of non-participation. The government’s command goal is to maximize the forced market for the worthless Stamp, the mandated “insurance” policy, while stripping all cost controls and restrictions on it.

 

(The favorite lie of these corrupt judges and other system hacks, that “Congress didn’t create this market”, is one of the most brazen direct lies we’ve heard in recent times.)

 

*Food. The government is indirectly but inexorably trying to repress and strangle all competition for corporatized food.

 

*“Austerity”. Gut public interest spending and public services, take the money freed up and hand it over to the rich and to big corporations.

 

*Privatization. For decades now, governments at all levels have engaged in massive control fraud, simply handing over public property to private criminals for pennies on the dollar. (Of course the federal government has led the way.) The corrupt officials involved are paid off in direct bribes, quasi-direct bribes (bribery laundered as “campaign contributions”), and most of all, lucrative revolving door sinecures. This is simply corruption, bribery and embezzlement. It’s a capital crime.

 

(The commodification of education falls into this category.)

 

4. Here’s the command pattern.

 

A. The government borrows and/or prints (i.e. credits accounts), and hands the money directly or indirectly to corporations.

 

B. The government austeritizes and hands over the loot.

 

C. Bogus government programs (e.g. the Obama stimulus, or employer tax credits) are really just corporate loot conveyances.

 

D. The government is now planning to raise taxes on the non-rich. The VAT is one example often bruited. Such regressive levies are then meant to be handed over to the corporations and the rich. The health Stamp mandate is one such tax. Obama, the Democrats, and the Republicans now openly call it a tax.

 

E. Austerity and privatization are direct robbery. The Bailout-inflicted loss of interest income to pensioners and other savers is indirect robbery.

 

F. The eventual goal is to buy up all the land as well. (Foreclosuregate is a critical development. The people are still on the land. We could always morally seize it. It’s now clear we can legally seize it as well, even according to the banksters’ own rigged law. This blunder of the banks is a one-time opportunity. Our choice can be to stop paying, stay on the land, Jubilate in Place, and as industrial agriculture fails, we can work our own land as our own bosses. Or the other option is to meekly depart, let the banks take it all, let all land revert to the equivalent of REO, and end up working it as indentured debt slaves. Which of these outcomes we deserve will be demonstrated by the choice we make.)

 

G. Eventually the dollar collapses, hyperinflates, whatever. Or maybe the system can somehow maintain it, with the public owing all the debt. However it works, the rich and the corporations end up with all the real assets.

 

We worked for every cent that exists.

 

They stole every cent they have, and want to steal every cent still outstanding.

 

But if we let them steal the rest, then I guess Ayn Rand would be proven right, and they really were entitled after all.

 

So that’s the goal of neoliberalism. That’s the nature and the goal of today’s command economy. I think we can see why the term “fascist” would also be appropriate for it.

What Does the Class War Mean for Research and Development?

 

We have a permanent Depression setting in, the normalization of 20%+ unemployment, and it’s clear that the kleptocracy views the health care system as nothing but a rent extraction machine. The legislated policy is to use the IRS as a strong-arm goon to extort protection money in exchange for a worthless Stamp, while there will be no credible cost controls or realistic regulatory restraints on the health insurance rackets.

 

Under those circumstances, it’s hard to imagine how, for as long as this system endures, the actual care available to the non-rich won’t continue to rapidly deteriorate.

 

So we must ask about something like medically necessary research (publicly subsidized, of course): What difference does any medical advance make if it will increasingly be the monopoly of the predatory rich? In that case, don’t even medical advances become weapons against us? Weapons we pay for, to add insult to injury. Gibbon depicts the plight of conquered people doing forced labor in metal shops, “forced to forge the implements of their own destruction”. Is this the case with all technological R&D by now?

 

Do alleged advances really still advance us? Does the African farmer benefit by being driven off his ancestral land, which is then converted to corporate biofuel production to feed Western cars? No honest person would try to argue that. Yet isn’t that the core logic of neoliberalism, which is increasingly coming home to the West itself? Those same biofuels have been driving up the price of our food for three years now, even as our jobs vanish and the cost of living soars in every other way. Is the ethanol mandate, and the cost it imposes on us, different in kind from the looming health racket mandate? Aren’t all these mandates really the same thing?

 

African agro-imperialism is only a seemingly extreme, but really typical example of how this system allocates its research and the output of this research. None of it is intended to benefit the people. The people are only there to be mined and exploited, or just driven out to die. The only intent, anywhere, is corporate rent extraction. “Profit”. We are those dispossessed tribal farmers. We can see it everywhere already. Their enemies are our enemies. We’ll end up exactly as they are.

 

In the end, all the mid-century liberal advances were fruit of the cheap oil surplus. With Peak Oil, that period has come to an end. That’s part of why in the 1970s the power structure switched over from normal exploitation, which could include the concessions* that enabled the rise of a mass middle class, to neoliberal kleptocracy, through which those concessions have been rolled back and that middle class is being liquidated.

 

So everything has changed politically. The kleptocratic process is intended to be terminal toward the the restoration of feudalism. 

 

[*I use the word concession with deliberation. Liberalism, as an elitist trickle-down ideology, never contested the right of predatory elites to steal the labor and produce of the productive people. At its best, what liberalism did was beg for some concessions to be trickled back down. Today it no longer even does that.]

 

At the same time, physical resource limits are imposing a great change, the end of “growth”. A different way of putting what I said above is that it was easier for the corporatists to concede more wealth equality when the pie was growing thanks to cheap, plentiful oil. But now that the pie must contract, and the oil surplus recede, we’re headed back to history’s normal economic course, the course prior to the drawdown of the fossil fuel principal.

 

It’s up to us whether we let ourselves be driven back into serfdom, or whether we take all we’ve learned from the Oil Age, politically and economically, and use it to build a wiser, more prosperous world.

 

That requires the relentless fight against corporatism on every possible front. This fight must supersede all other concerns, since the progress of the fight dictates the status of those concerns. Even issues which are ambiguous in themselves will often become clear once placed in the corporate war context. We have to oppose the redistribution of wealth upward in all its forms, including the use of public money for alleged social goods which will really be rationed by ability to pay in an extremely wealth-concentrated environment.

 

When I say “fight” I’m thinking of the likelihood that it’s far more possible to block bad government actions than to induce it to perform good ones. I’ve long considered the latter impossible, and that it’s a waste of effort to beg the system for the good. But maybe it’s still possible for citizen pressure and resistance to block some of the bad. On that front, we have to be obstructionists wherever possible.

 

We can no longer afford to contemplate the intrinsic ambivalence of things. The struggle against corporatism and for direct democracy dictates most positions out of its own imperatives. Few things now are significant in themselves.

 

So that’s what I meant when I started out expressing skepticism about system research, and obviously all proprietary research. Like so many things which look intrinsically benevolent from the ivory tower, removed from the real world context (cap and trade? electric cars? a VAT?), it becomes far less so in practice if undertaken under kleptocratic auspices.

 

So that’s why by now my default position is: Political transformation first, even at the temporary expense of things which may be theoretically beneficial but are not so under this dispensation. 

Food Sovereignty vs. the Final Stage of Neoliberalism

 

What is globalization, really? Among other things, it’s the replacement of national sovereignty by corporate anti-sovereignty. Their own cadre, Dani Rodrik, wrote of how national sovereignty and democracy are incompatible with the corporate pseudo-sovereignty, and how if you want to maximize the latter you must destroy the former. This association of nation and democracy as the twin targets of the “free trade” onslaught demonstrates how national sovereignty itself can only arise out of the people. We can deduce from this that the only way to defend either and maximize both is to eradicate corporatism and elitism completely. It’s democracy which must be maximized: Direct democracy.

 

Who are the globalizers? Don’t look first at the World Bank, IMF, WTO and so on. Those are just the power launderers, the stooge cadres. In America, the real globalizers are Wall Street, the Republican and Democratic Parties, the weapons rackets, and the Big Ag rackets – Monsanto, Cargill, ADM, Tyson, Smithfield, and others. These are the players who concoct the “agreements” among “countries” which are really turf deals among gangster elites. The politicians sign these agreements and set up special organizations like the WTO and IMF to serve as the point men. But the WTO, and for that matter most of the Dems and Reps, are the hired goons. The “free” trade treaties are really corporate contracts, written by the likes of Monsanto and Cargill. But these contracts aren’t actual agreements among free parties. They’re instruments of tyranny to be imposed by elite diktat, from the top down, from the highest, most concentrated power, as a hail of rocks, burning ash, and poison upon the disenfranchised people below.

 

The proper legal term for a “contract” imposed by thuggery is an unconscionable contract of adhesion. Where there’s a huge power and need differential between the parties, it’s obviously impossible for them to freely contract with one another. Such contracts clearly have no moral validity. In theory these are also supposed to be legally invalid. But in practice the whole endeavor of neoliberalism, at every level, from the basic employer-employee “negotiation” to the most univeralized global trade agreements, is to replace actual freedom of contract with these contracts of adhesion. It’s to replace true economic freedom with gangster-imposed and enforced protection rackets and direct plunder.

 

All this proves how freedom of contract is impossible under conditions of wealth inequality. It’s been proven a thousand times – you can have one or the other, but never both.

 

What’s the final stage of neoliberalism? The elites have imposed financialization and are manipulating it to amass all power and real assets. This is positioning them for neofeudalism.

 

What’s neofeudalism? This is the elites’ strategy to achieve corporate totalitarianism and maintain as much of their material luxury as possible under Peak Oil and energy descent. Their strategy has been to use the corporate form, the propaganda of “capitalism” and “democracy”, and the forms of representative pseudo-democracy, to monopolize ever growing portions of wealth and power. Having achieved this position of dominance, they will now use it to push the rest of us down into actual medieval conditions. Their preferred path for doing this will be debt slavery. If necessary they’ll try to use the police state whose skeleton they’ve assiduously constructed, and even classical fascism.

 

Meanwhile, in various ways, they’ll attempt the shift from fossil fuels to alternate fuels, for the sake of their own luxury consumption. We’ve already seen a larger-scale version of this, with the diversion of vast amounts of food from the already-hungry people of the world to the gas tanks of the Western personal car. This is the industrial agrofuel strategy. Just like all other liquidations, this one’s coming home as well. America itself already has ever growing numbers of the hungry while more and more corn is hijacked for agrofuels. Obama just doubled down on the ethanol scam. So here we can see one iteration of the basic pattern I’ve called resource fascism. All ideas along the lines of corporate renewable energy buildouts have the same basic goal. Picture a network of fortresses powered by the ”smart grid”, biofueled private jets travelling between, while outside the walls permanently indentured debtors slave in the fields and sleep in shantytowns, their labor compelled by the draconian penalties dangling over the heads of all defaulters, their debt compounding every day. That’s the goal of the political and economic elites.

 

How is the barbed wire being strung around us? For example, where it comes to food policy? The Green Revolution itself was intended to eradicate food self-sufficiency and economic independence. It hooks the farmer on fossil fuels, proprietary seeds, and growing cash crops for export. This then plunges him into the age-old vicious circle of debt indenture. The elites used petrodollar recycling to leverage the GR-imposed need for oil (which had to be bought with dollars) into brute power over those countries. As they sank into hopeless debt (enriching the Western banks along the way), the goon IMF could deploy its structural adjustment programs to use the existence of this unilaterally imposed debt to completely loot the people of the country, who had already been dispossessed by the same corporate process which imposed the odious debt upon them.

 

Once again we see the basic fraudulence and tyranny of the corporate “contract”.

 

Other assaults include the globalization “treaties” whose only goal was to destroy all barriers civil society and democracy posed for naked corporate aggression. The WTO, NAFTA, and subsequent proposed assaults like the FTAA, CAFTA, and the SPP, right up to the bilateral ”agreements” of today, are intended to prevent messy elections or protests, or meddling laws and regulations, or any archaic notions that public property belongs to the people, from interfering with the corporate rampage. (These, including the bilateral pacts like the one Obama’s trying to impose on India, are of course agreements only among elite gangs; the respective peoples of these countries are disenfranchised in principle and are regarded as the targets for plunder in practice.)

 

There’s also the quest for domination via “patents” over seeds and genes. And then we have the new colonial land grabs. These are the maneuvers of rich countries brazenly trying to lock up their future food and biofuel supply by directly stealing the land of poor countries.

 

All of this takes place under the supervision of the big banks, who use globalization to impose their ideal of ruthless commodification upon every part of the economy.

 

As Sophia Murphy puts it:

 

The AoA [globalized Agreement on Agriculture] presupposes a particular model for agriculture and reinforces that model through the rules it establishes. It is a model for wealthy countries pursuing industrial agriculture, and for developing country governments that wish to follow suit. It ignores the needs and interests of the billions of farmers who do not live in that world. Only 10 to 15 percent of food is traded internationally, yet the AoA pressures all of agriculture to be run as if it was a trade concern.

 

This brings us back to the essence of globalization itself. The goal is to take what according to the capitalists’ own textbooks should be a small appendage of the economy and ruthlessly, recklessly, destructively impose its morals and culture on all of life. Not just economic life, but political, social, cultural, and private life as well. These “morals” and “culture” are really sociopathy and barbarism. Their goal is the absolute eradication of all competing values, which means all moral and cultural value as such. The intent and the practice is literally totalitarian, and neoliberalism is a totalitarian ideology and strategy in the classical sense.

 

Today in America the Food Tyranny bill intends to formally bring this globalization regime home. It would explicitly subordinate all domestic food policy to the WTO:

 

COMPLIANCE WITH INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS.

Nothing in this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) shall be construed in a manner inconsistent with the agreement establishing the World Trade Organization or any other treaty or international agreement to which the United States is a party.

 

This overthrows the doctrine of “perfect protection”, enshrined in America from the outset of globalization, that these rules didn’t supersede our own domestic food sovereignty. (Perfect protection was of course hypocrisy on the part of US elites, since they were destroying the same principle elsewhere. But the point is that all peoples deserve food freedom, and should receive such protection if we’re to have ”free trade” at all. But by now we know the very point of free trade was to wipe out all such protections. Now it’s coming home.)

 

The bill could also subordinate us to the Codex Alimentarius, which is a globalized version of the disaster capitalist “food safety” scam. Just as in America, so everywhere globalism reigns there’s the same pattern of allowing corporate agriculture to cause food outbreaks, then use these outbreaks as the pretext to impose further corporate domination. The Codex is one “legal” vehicle to empower administrative tyranny over food. Revolving door corporate bureaucrats could issue fiats banning medicinal herbs or vitamin supplements, while requiring all growers right down to the backyard gardener to use any kind of synthetic fertilizer, pesticide or herbicide, hormone in an animal, or GMO seed. (As always in this connection, let me remind the reader that if Obama’s health racket mandate is allowed to stand, that will provide another precedent for any and every corporate mandate. The exact same logic will allow the FDA or even the WTO to “constitutionally” force us to buy, for example, GMO seeds. I defy any Obama cultist to explain how that’s incorrect. But then, an Obama supporter probably also supports Monsanto. More here and here.)

 

The bill’s extended power of recall, forced destruction of animals and product based on the flimsiest allegations, and the goal of forcing all small producers to register their animals (via NAIS) and all the details of their land and facilities (via “traceability”) with corporate databases demonstrate how the plan is to bring all non-corporatized, independent food activity under the surveillance and then control of the big corporations.

 

These are a few examples of how the food bill seeks to impose the corporate anti-sovereign assault upon us in our own country. That this is being done as a bipartisan project of our own government proves that this is a rogue government which no longer serves the people but assaults the people on behalf of our enemies. And the bipartisanship of it is stark proof (as if we needed it by now) that both Parties are equally malevolent, criminal gangs out only to rob and hurt us.

 

We’ll never be free until we get rid of them completely.

 

So this food bill needs to be put in the big picture context of debt indenture, offshoring, Walmartization and the general destruction of jobs, the assault on civil liberties, “austerity”, and the ever-tightening stranglehold of corporatism everywhere.

 

What’s the common thread everywhere? They seek to steal what wealth is left and destroy all economic and political possibilities and our very freedom to try to improvise any way out of the trap.

 

Will we ever draw a line and say No Further? A good place to draw that line is at our food. We should resolve to be growers, farmers, seed savers, on our own and in tandem, to do it directly and to assist one another, in the direct act and in resisting criminal assaults upon us.

 

More affirmatively, we need the land. We must demand it in principle (demand it, not of the elites who stole it, but as exemplary toward reawakening the people to the fact that our land has been stolen, and that if we’re to survive and prosper we must redeem it) and flow like water onto all available land. Our tactics must embrace everything from guerrilla gardening to adverse possession and organized squatting to mass land reclamation movements. Food production stewardship, and any other mode of productive economic relocalization, must always be the basis.

 

This is the only road to growing the millions of small farmers America needs, and meeting the twin goals of growing sufficient food post-oil, and providing the economic and cultural basis for the redemption and flourishing of democracy itself.