I’m still enjoying my working vacation from regular posting, but since it’s MLK Day I thought I’d link my post from a year ago, One Big Birmingham Jail, for anyone who didn’t see it or has forgotten it.

 

Rereading it a year later, I think it holds up well and makes the right argument. I’ll recommend one section as especially topical. King gave as one of his criteria justifying direct action that the people attempted in good faith to negotiate and met a brick wall.

 

Not that we the people owe it to those who are in principle our public servants to negotiate with them, but nevertheless we have done so ad nauseum. What more profound negotiation can there be than the 2008 election where the people definitively voted for “change”, wrongly thinking there was a candidate who stood for change, because he systematically lied to that effect…

And what about the negotiation over the TARP? The people raged against it. In some congressional offices the calls and messages were over a thousand to one against. Nowhere was there anything but a huge majority against the Bailout. (That McCain didn’t roll the dice and oppose the TARP, run against the TARP, try to turn his fortunes around by turning the election into a referendum on the TARP, proves not only his political incompetence, but also the fact that we have nothing but sham “elections” which offer no meaningful choice at all.) We can multiply the examples – the health racket bailout, the war, Big Ag subsidies, almost any instance of corporate welfare.

No, we’ve done all we can to negotiate. The fact is, representative democracy itself, the periodic elections, were supposed to constitute such negotiations. But we see that this was always a sham. The opposite party never did anything but lie to the people, and never felt the slightest obligation to live up to his promises after the election. Indeed, many ideologues of pseudo-democracy (if not the practicing liar politicians themselves) have explicitly argued that the “representative” has no obligation to his constituents at all after the election is over, but is free to “vote his conscience”, conscience here being a euphemism for corrupt personal interest.

Reasonable people have to concede that the “negotiation” failed. We can never have a responsible, responsive, legitimate government in the form of representative democracy. It’s a structural fraud.

 

Since the kleptocracy will devote the year to astroturfing the people into this anti-political farce of an election, our goal has to be to get people to repudiate everything having to do with this phony anti-politics and turn instead to the real politics of direct action and movement-building on a self-management basis. The Occupy movement is the street vanguard, while the food/relocalization movement is the primary long run battleground and most fertile soil for the real democratic movement roots.

 

But when anyone tells you to “vote”, they’re telling you to continue to negotiate with those whose bad faith has been proven beyond any doubt at all. They’re calling for continued negotiation with proven terrorists. They’re calling for appeasement.

 

Don’t listen to the Neville Chamberlains and pro-fascist Fifth Columnists of our day. Reject the election. Vote For The 99%. That means vote with your feet (away from the ballot box), with your wallet (Move Your Money, and purge as many rents from your life as possible), with your mind, with your soul.

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After a year’s journey through the New Jersey legislative process including a 71 to 6 passage in the Assembly last spring, the raw milk partial decriminalization bill was allowed to die on the vine at the end of the Senate’s session this week. Big Dairy was putting pressure on key senators throughout the process. It looks like their failsafe all along was to prevent a Senate vote, and that they succeeded in this. Now the process needs to start all over again.

 

I doubt I need to tell the readers of this blog how this is a perfect example of the futility of “working within the system” and expecting “reform”. If I were still inclined to let myself get angry about stuff like this, I’d want to use a copy of the senate register to crack the skull of the next person I see lecturing us about “voting” and “getting the law changed”. It’s long been impossible to be aware of current events and not see how this is a kleptocracy where the only system action will be to further gut what’s left of society and further entrench organized crime. Just look at the work of the NJ senate here as a typical example, and you’ll see how there were plenty of bills passed, all of them worthless, most of them destructive.

 

Sure enough, there was plenty of time for votes on gutting water protections, urban school privatization, and extending legalized gambling. With “privatization” and “legalization” we see two typical elements of corporatism.

 

I wouldn’t mind seeing gambling decriminalized, but I don’t want it legalized as a state-sanctioned numbers racket or betting parlor. In this form gambling is a far worse scourge on the community than if it were merely neutral from the point of view of the law. Worst is how the ubiquity of gambling propaganda helps entrench the something-for-nothing desperation of the culture. Legalized gambling is the biggest part of what the finance sector does. Derivatives, securitization, credit default swaps, currency and commodity speculation are all such back-alley bets enshrined as state-enforced and media-exalted ”contracts”. A sincere and non-cowardly reformist would demand nothing less than one big bucket law to de-legalize these, outlaw them in the technical sense of placing them outside the law. Without government thug backing for these phony contracts, the finance tyranny would collapse immediately. That’s just one way in which the banksters would cease to exist without massive government interference in the market.

 

The fact is that you can’t legalize unnatural things according to some ivory tower ideal and then expect their artificial reality to conform to the fictive notion. I’ve written before about how property is a good example of this legalization scam. True believers in property rights like Hernando de Soto expect the state to enshrine and enforce this fiction, and are then dismayed to see the concept and practice deployed in typical Might Makes Right fashion. But it should be obvious that property, just like representation, law, and rights themselves where these are developed, elaborated, administered, and enforced by a centralized system dominated by obscenely concentrated wealth, will exist in all these ways only as a weapon on behalf of the 1%. It cannot exist otherwise. If something doesn’t exist in nature, and is fabricated by an aggressive interest system, then it will never exist other than as the weapon of that interest. Nothing outside nature “is”. Everything is always on a vector. To expect these fictive legalizations to exist on anything but a class war vector is delusional.

 

Meanwhile, if the 99% abolishes the system as such, all these vectors disappear, as well as the fraudulent rationales for the fictions.

 

That’s a good example of how the decriminalization vs. legalization distinction is usually intertwined with the scam distinction of “public vs. private”. In a corporatist system (and all large structures inherently tend toward corporatism), there is no such distinction in substance. Government and private rackets comprise one whole, with the former serving as thug and bagman to the latter. The ornamental fictions “public” and “private” are merely a typical pretext for empty divisive propaganda, to artificially divide people into corporate tribes and set them against one another.

 

Meanwhile “privatize” doesn’t mean what the English language might cause you to think. It doesn’t mean the private sector takes on the costs, risks, responsibilities, and rewards. No, the risks and responsibilities remain with the taxpayer. The costs are covered by corporate welfare. The only thing that changes is that a private corporation now gets to steal directly from the government system, while this incorrigibly criminal system becomes even more corrupt.

 

To take the example of the schools, you either maintain the system schools or you don’t, but the alleged public-private distinction is a scam. I want community schooling and support home schooling. I’d like to see the abolition of the system schools. But the worst of all worlds is to maintain the system schools but “privatize” them. This maintains and aggravates everything that’s bad about them, while adding new racketeering pathologies and cons. (I saw that the Republican thug Santorum was involved in a typically sordid “charter school” rip-off. As usual, none of these thieves is going to prison, because such crimes are the proper use of privatization, not at all an “abuse” the way liberals would claim.)

 

 

For food or anything else to be organic is for it to exist and evolve in harmony with the rest of nature and human history. Our natural history, in its culinary aspect, can be called grass farming. We worked hard to maintain the savannah as the best habitat for our food and for our safety.

 

Over thousands of years we were forced by elites into the strait jacket of agriculture based on annual grasses with giant seed pods: wheat, corn, rice. Although agriculture had many potential forms, on account of the malevolence of the hierarchies in control it became politically and socially destructive and environmentally unsustainable.

 

The idea of organic food production was originally a call to restore agriculture to its rightful context amid the flows and relationships of nature. By the mid-20th century agriculture was already largely converted to monocultures fed by synthetic fertilizer. Mechanization took over. Traditional practices of crop rotation and cover cropping were being driven out. The results were apparent in soil destruction. Air and water pollution were already visible. Industrial agriculture looked unrivaled and unstoppable.

 

The organic idea was a resurgence of the beleaguered traditional practices. Bolstered by new agronomic knowledge, pioneers like Albert Howard and J.I. Rodale called for an agriculture which would work in synch and mutual reinforcement with nature rather than in belligerent defiance of it, and in the process produce more than the destructive industrial practice.

 

This was the classical organic idea. It’s necessarily one part of a natural whole, and is inextricable from relocalization. This is because natural, sustainable food distribution is limited by perishability and energy efficiency. That’s why, except for a few imperishable basics as well as a few luxuries, food markets have historically been local/regional. Food commodification has never been possible except through massive subsidized energy, robbery including externalized costs, and many other forms of corporate welfare. I emphasize energy here since I’m discussing the most basic inherent limits of organic food production and distribution. By organic I mean the true, holistic organic. (Just as for terms like natural or sustainable I use their common sense English language definitions.)

 

By definition (the real definition, not the official credential, which is a pale shadow of the substance) organic must use as little input substitution (for example, fossil-based synthetic fertilizer for natural nitrogen-fixation; oil-based pesticides and herbicides for natural pest-fighters and pest resistance) and industrially transported inputs and outputs as possible (an “organic” strawberry from Chile on a US supermarket shelf is a contradiction in terms). Organic and relocalization must go together, if we’re to meaningfully conceive and seek either.

 

This is why it’s incoherent to try to separate organic from localism and even try to play them off against one another. Organic as a set of practices can be meaningful and benevolent only within its rightful context, the sum of natural interrelations – including those of a non-corporatized, non-propertarian economy, the real “free market” – which it’s meant to epitomize.

 

Organic, just like any other commons, cannot meaningfully exist amid a hostile capitalist environment. You can’t plunk it down amid the corporate food system and expect it to “be”. It has to be actively moving on an anti-corporate, relocalist, democratic vector.

 

This is a key part of the food movement’s political character. Organic and relocalization are vectors toward true democracy. Any diversion of either, any wanting organic to sit passively and stagnate, letting itself be corporatized, industrialized, even forming alliances with CAFOs and the GMO rackets, is to seek destruction of it. This is one of the basic flaws of the official USDA organic credential. Even if this credential weren’t weak and continually subverted (but it is), in itself it would still relegate the organic practice to the same sterility as processed food in general. One rips whole food from its natural context, dismantles it to its bigger constituent parts (remember “parts is parts”?), then mixes and matches and reassembles them in synthetic combinations. It’s the ”food” of no context, natural or human. “The NPK mentality”, as Howard called it (referring to the three main soil nutrients nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, each removed from its context and then synthetically glued into combinations with the others) envisions soil and agriculture, and human society itself, as machines. This is scientistic reductionism. Chemistry supplants biology, and the tail wags the dog.

 

The same goes for the political context. Organic originally had a broad and deep social connotation. The health of the soil is a barometer and direct determinant of the health of society and democracy. As Howard put it, “Artificial manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.” To destroy the soil by subjecting it to the endless shock treatment of artificial fertilizer and pesticide to produce endless unevolving generations of zombie monocrops is to destroy the nation, polity, and spirit. Environmental domination always indicates and helps enforce social domination.

 

Corporatized “organic” agriculture, industrial organic as Pollan calls it, is just another form of this reductionist, synthetic, out of context mentality.

 

That’s why it’s both unhistorical and philosophically wrong to see organic in a hermetic, instrumental way, as a one-size-fits-all spare part one can plug in anywhere (for example within corporate capitalism), rather than as an implicitly vast, profoundly intertwined social concept, or to see organic food other than within this context.

 

Meanwhile “industrial organic”, organic production and distribution which is part of commodification and globalization, is a contradiction in terms because it flouts every principle of nature. It’s “holistic” only within the temporary aberration of corporate agriculture dependent on the corporate state and cheap, plentiful fossil fuel. It’s the instrumental holism of an insane and ephemeral context. This is why organic credentialism is insufficient at best, and often a sham. We see where it leads – globalized, corporatized “organic”; “co-existence” with GMOs; predation on workers.

 

Organic food won’t feed our bodies or our souls unless it expresses the entire organic holism, which means the restoration of food to its rightful, historical, natural and human context. In part two I’ll expand upon this and extend it to other examples.

 

 

1. The system is based on dependency, conformism, submission.

 

2. The system uses money to render its own processes and products “cheaper” than the “more expensive” age-old human ways of life, in food, manufacture, education, politics, culture, and many others.

 

3. The system ways are actually far more expensive than the human ways, but are temporarily rendered cheaper by shifting most of the costs to hidden taxes on the consumer, to various dispossessed groups, to the environment, and to the future. The system cheapness is nothing but accounting fraud.

 

4. For example, the system uses taxpayer money to subsidize its ways and render them cheaper. This has the dual effect of rendering the human way of life more expensive even as we’re forced to pay from our ever-diminishing financial base to subsidize the system which assaults us. 

 

5. To repeat, the fact that we have to look to our “finances” is a purely artificial state of affairs imposed upon us from the top down. Money is unnecessary and undesirable from any point of view other than that of the 1%. It’s part of a command economy.

 

6. So we must be clear that this government and the economic system it imposes comprise an artificial tyranny. It has no legitimacy, and on a practical level it never helps us, but only harms us. We’d be far better off without it.

The original movement fought to abolish slavery. The new movement also fights to abolish slavery.

 

For example, in spite of all the anguish and turmoil over what the Occupy “demands” should be (most of this being trumped up by aspiring hijackers of the Occupations), the basic demand is obvious, given the premises of the protest and the personal reasons that brought out many of the Occupiers.

 

I’ve already written it: Abolish Debt. Abolish Wall Street.

 

By this debt I mean all system debt, to banks, to corporations, to central government, to the rich, to the 1% in general. I don’t mean we should be liars and cheats toward one another. On the contrary, that’s how capitalism tells us to behave. Part of abolishing system debt is finding ways to rebuild modes of exchange based on community credit, which was the mode of core economies through tens of thousands of years of humanity’s natural history, and shall be again as soon as we abolish the monster now feeding on us.

 

By Abolish Wall Street I mean the finance sector as such. It’s proven fact that the banks create nothing which is necessary or desirable, but only steal and destroy real wealth. By now they are embarked upon a full scale war of aggression against the people. Even after we the 99 had trillions stolen from us (by “our” governments) to bail out the banks, they have stepped up their crimes and aggressions. It’s clear that humanity must completely purge this infinitely vicious and incorrigible parasite.

 

From there several abolition demands follow. To give the two primary examples, we must abolish corporations, and we must abolish system “property”.

 

On a more specific level, where transformation can temporarily co-exist with the more adventurous and committed branch of reformism, we must abolish GMOs, factory farms, and food commodity speculation. This is a necessary preliminary step toward affirmative food sovereignty, which is in turn necessary for our democratic and physical existence going forward. We must abolish all intellectual property, derivatives, and contracts of adhesion. This means outlawing them by declaring any such contract null and void, unenforceable by society. We can start by being clear in our minds and words that such contracts don’t exist, but are only forcibly imposed by gangsters. The same goes for 1% propertarianism and debt indenture as such.

 

These abolitions would wipe out the foundation of kleptocracy and the Tower of Babel built upon it.

 

I wrote these as notes toward clarity on where we must eschew all reformist hemming and hawing and be crystal clear on what’s necessary, what’s the end goal. One can be a reformist or an abolitionist, not both.

 

I wrote this piece in negative terms, what must be destroyed. I called it an abolition movement. But it’s far more than that. The negative is always a preliminary toward the affirmative: Food sovereignty, relocalization, full positive democracy, economic and political. The final consummation of history’s motion toward justice, morality, freedom, democracy.

 

 

 

 

If we use the sun with wisdom, justice, and respect for the land, it’s tantamount to the mythical free lunch. It’s win-win for everyone.

 

This perverse species, by enslaving itself to capitalism, by letting the earth-embodied sun’s rays themselves be enclosed and used for destruction and tyranny, has renounced the sun’s bounty.

 

We must set the sun free.

 

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

 

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As we’ve seen with the recent repression of the Occupation movement, including hostile court action, the 1st amendment is inadequate to the rights and needs of the people. It funnels freedom of assembly into the representative government containment system. The people have the right to assemble only in order to petition the government. This means that the movement’s refusal to make demands, in itself, could be argued to place it outside the Constitution.

 

A true democratic movement, one which seeks to challenge directly Enclosure and 1% propertarianism by physically occupying and redeeming the land would perhaps be found by the courts to be outside the Constitution. So we have to be clear in our minds and public words that this is our constitution, not something to be mediated by the courts. We can be our own constitutional professors, just as we can rule ourselves in every other way.

 

We must assess the entire Constitution from this point of view: Is it applicable toward democracy, or does it try to kettle us into pseudo-democracy, “representative” government?

 

Meanwhile, this physical refutation of the criminal enclosure of our land and space is clearly the demand the movement was seeking all along. It’s a bottom-up direct action demand, one we make in earnest only of ourselves. Our occupation must be physical, of REO, of corporate land, of stolen (“privatized” or contracted out) public land, of idle arable land, of any idle resource, of any shuttered or threatened factory. The Occupation, true to its name, must run the gamut from the protest tents in the city parks to organized squatting to an MST-style land redemption movement right here in America and Canada.

 

And if it’s true that great protest movements have always challenged unjust and invalid laws, like Gandhi’s Salt March or the civil rights movement’s bus boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins, well here the illegitimate laws we challenge and physically flout are those of Enclosure of public space itself.

 

This shall be part of the foundation of a new constitution which embodies the sovereignty of the 99. But we’ll get none of it by begging courts (that is, making a begging system “demand”) to uphold the letter or spirit of the existing Constitution. Certainly we should try to do this, as much as possible. Try to “make them live up to their own rules”, as Alinsky said. But we must be clear that this is only one piece of the puzzle. We’ll need far more, and far stronger, tools than that.

 

I’ve decided to take a few months off from regular blogging in order to rest, collect my thoughts, and take stock of the situation. I also have some study I need to undertake, and I want to give it my undivided attention.

 

So my plan is to put the blog into partial hibernation until sometime this spring. I may still post from time to time over the winter, but there’s no regular schedule for it. I intend to return to full-scale posting in spring.

 

I want to say thanks to my readers and commenters, and I hope you won’t forget me while I’m gone.

 

Let me know in comments if people would still like to have open threads at this blog. I’ll still put up short posts to allow for that, and participate in the threads.

 

As of 2009 this treaty had been ratified by every country except the US and Somalia. It’s not a surprise that Europe is more enthusiastic than the US. As I’ve discussed before, although for the moment I forget in which post, by now corporatism in the US has relegated globalization to a secondary role, in favor of directly using the US government as the preferred thug. This is because “pure” globalization has generated what from the corporate point of view is gratuitous opposition in the US. But the US as an administrative entity is centralized and homogenized enough that it wasn’t really necessary to dissolve US government pseudo-sovereignty in order to impose corporate rule. The government was already powerful and entrenched enough, while the system interpretation of the Constitution already seeks to dissolve all other levels of federalism.

 

But globalization has been more important for the Europeans, who needed to undermine the existing menagerie of polities, cultures, sovereignties, in order to achieve economic centralization. (Of course, they were only ever to partially achieve this. They achieved a monetary union but were had to stick with the dreaded “patchwork quilt” of fiscal policies still in the hands of rump countries. They’re been trying to dissolve fiscal policy independence by force, via “austerity”. But the euro and the EU itself are doomed, and good riddance.) 

 

So we know the context in which to place all internationalism, including even the best-sounding. Something like the Convention sounds good on paper, but no one ever intends to enforce it against economic coercion. Just like with everything else, no one assaults children more systematically and viciously than corporations, yet the few attempts to invoke treaties like this against globalization assaults have been laughed at and ignored. Nor was such a treaty ever intended to be used in such a way. Like with everything else, it’s meant to be used by the global power structure as a weapon against “rogue” countries, but to not exist in any meaningful way where it comes to members of the fraternity or their hired thugs.

 

That’s the common nature of all these things – freedom, government, law, rights, property, constitutions, democracy, public morality – they’re all intended to be used only as weapons on behalf of power. No one among the powerful considers any of these to have any meaning or value in itself. You invoke and apply them where convenient, distort or ignore them where convenient. It’s heads-I-win-tails-you-lose. The FDA’s peculiar notions of “science” and “precautions” are good examples of this double standard.

 

Just as we see with US “food safety” policy, which has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with empowering corporations and assaulting independent farmers, so the Convention on the Rights of the Child does nothing to protect children against their great corporate enemy, but will on the contrary assault them on behalf of those same corporations.

 

By contrast, home schooling and true community schooling are what are what true democracy advocates want. Anarchism means simply to oppose large, alien structures and to restore all power to the people at the natural, relocalized level on a true democratic basis. Although many have an aversion to the term, even many who ought to be friendly toward it, it’s really synonymous with democracy, meaning true participatory democracy, self-rule by natural communities.

In the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund’s (FTCLDF) raw milk rights lawsuit against the FDA, the FDA has previously said it considers individuals transporting raw milk across state lines for personal use to be engaging in “interstate commerce”, that they were criminals, and that while it had no immediate plans to arrest individuals for this, it reserved the right to do so. 

 

In response to this and countless other acts and declarations of FDA tyranny, the Raw Milk Freedom Rider demonstration engaged in a mass individual transportation of raw milk across the border from Pennsylvania to Maryland. Proving the value of direct action, this and other pressure has forced the FDA to issue a press release affirming that it will not try to enforce its renegade “law” that way.

 

Here’s the money quote:

 

With respect to the interstate sale and distribution of raw milk, the FDA has never taken, nor does it intend to take, enforcement action against an individual who purchased and transported raw milk across state lines solely for his or her own personal consumption.

 

The press release is nevertheless filled with lies and Big Lies. It lies about the evidence for raw milk’s health benefits. It lies about the number of cases of illness attributable to raw milk, a miniscule amount nonetheless. It elides the vastly greater number of illnesses caused by pasteurized milk.

 

On the big scale, it calls itself a “science-based public health agency”. Yet all its actions are directly in aggressive support of corporate interests. These actions and declarations are usually directly contradictory to one another. Thus here it claims raw milk isn’t sufficiently supported by science. Yet by that measure GMOs should never have been approved in the first place, and at the very least there should be mandatory labeling of all “foods” containing them. Indeed, by now evidence of GMOs’ menace to health is piling up. But where it comes to GMOs the FDA’s position is full steam ahead, with no claim ever having to be substantiated, no precautionary regulation ever having to be applied, no contrary evidence ever considered for a moment.

 

The “science-based” FDA dogmatically declares that GMOs aren’t different ”in any meaningful or uniform way” from food, in spite of its possession of over 20,000 internal documents proving the myriad ways in which GMOs are radically different, always to the malign side. This is at the same moment that the same government’s patent office declares GMOs to be so different from other crops that they deserve patent monopolies. So far as I can see, the science-based FDA has not tried to correct what it presumably must consider the patent office’s mistake.

 

Meanwhile, there’s no doubt whatsoever about the science of CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations, AKA factory farms). These are literally unregulated bioweapons factories. No such concentration of animals could ever exist long without being wiped out by an epidemic. All such confined animals are permanently sick. They’re kept on a constant, heavy maintenance regime of antibiotics. By design the system is a biological arms race, as ever more powerful antibiotics desperately try to stay one step ahead of ever more resistant microbes. It’s a fact that each and every CAFO is a clear and present danger to the public health. A factory farm will one day be the source for a lethal pandemic among humans. This is not a possibility but an inevitability.

 

But the science-based public health agency is uninterested in this. On the contrary, it does all it can to defend and promote the CAFO interest. The day this mass pandemic comes, FDA officials will among those guilty of literal mass murder. They must be held accountable as such.

 

So that should put into perspective the FDA’s oh-so-touching solicitude for the public health where it comes to the big bad raw milk monster. 

 

So there’s one small gain, with a long hard fight ahead.

 

Which leads to some not-so-good news.

 

To succeed, a movement has to have a clear view of who’s the enemy, for starters. In the case of food the enemy, of course, is Big Ag. It has tremendous power and is very aggressive in getting the also very powerful government to act as its thug. Yet according to this piece, Joel Salatin in his new book wants to divert the focus of the movement away from the real enemy and toward a phony peripheral target, “overzealous consumer advocates”. 

 

Of course such myopic advocates do exist, but they’re powerless in themselves and gain a phony nimbus of power only where their advocacy advances corporate interests. In that case, they receive corporate money, they’re featured in the corporate media, and the corporate interest tries to hide behind this phony public face. Such “consumer groups”, some of them perhaps dupes and useful idiots, are really corporate front groups. That’s the source of the phony “Food Safety” pseudo-movement. Meanwhile, these front groups seek to defend and intensify all the worst corporate practices – factory farming, GMOs, the whole pesticide/herbicide regime, and so much more – which are very things making us sick.

 

Salatin must know all that perfectly well, as I’m sure Gumpert, Mark McAfee, and others do. Yet here they are propagating this pro-corporate lie, and the rest of the comment thread was eating it up. I didn’t see a single anti-corporate voice raised in dissent.

 

I don’t know what Salatin’s real agenda is, but at any rate here he is sticking up for Big Ag, representing them as innocent bystanders whose power just “accidentally” keeps increasing. Big Ag stands by passively, while these ferocious advocates run around terrorizing the poor little government into doing things which just inertially happen to benefit the corporate food rackets. They also force the poor innocent little corporate media into covering them. This is a typical line of corporate propaganda we’ve already seen in every sector – bank regulations cause financial crashes, environmental regulations cause oil spills, and on and on. Here it is indeed the regulations which are the problem, but their real source isn’t a food safety/consumer advocacy movement which on its own has no more power than, for example, the single payer movement. “Food Safety” regulation, as in the recent Food Control bill, is engineered by the likes of Monsanto and Cargill, often directly written by their lobbyists, and then laundered through these “consumer” front groups. This gives the corporate media the best angle to present what’s nothing but corporate propaganda.

 

Anyone who knows anything about how the system works knows that no activist movement can accomplish anything whatsoever with the government or media other than through direct action from the bottom up. Unless, that is, the “advocacy” happens to coincide with the corporate interest. Then the media’s red carpet is rolled out, the doors of government access are thrown open, and the “advocate” himself becomes a system fixture. But that’s all he is – an ornament, a piece of tinsel.

 

The movement can never win so long as forces within want to act as agents of misdirection. There’s only one enemy: the corporate-state nexus. There’s only one direction to attack: straight up.