Cuisine As A Humanism, and GMOs As Its Enemy

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In his Omnivore’s Dilemma Michael Pollan describes how cuisine is the culture of understanding what and how to eat, in order to achieve the highest health.

 

Yet the surfeit of choice that confronts the omnivore brings stresses and anxieties also undreamed of by the cow or koala, for whom the distinction between The Good Things to Eat and the Bad is second nature. And while our senses can help us draw the first rough distinctions between good and bad foods, we humans have to rely on culture to remember and keep it all straight. So we codify the rules of wise eating in an elaborate structure of taboos, rituals, manners, and culinary traditions…a great many of our food rules do make biological sense, and they keep each of us from having to confront the omnivore’s dilemma every time we visit the supermarket or sit down to eat.

That set of rules for preparing food we call a cuisine specifies combinations of foods and flavors that on examination do a great deal to mediate the omnivore’s dilemma. The dangers of eating raw fish, for example, are minimized by consuming it with wasabi, a potent antimicrobial. Similarly, the strong spices characteristic of many cuisines in the tropics, where food is quick to spoil, have antibacterial properties…As Paul Rozin writes, “Cuisines embody some of a culture’s accumulated wisdom about food.” Often when one culture imports another’s food species without importing the associated cuisine, and its embodied wisdom, they make themselves sick….

If nature won’t draw a line around human appetite, then human culture must step in, as indeed it has done, bringing the omnivore’s eating habits under the government of all the various taboos (foremost the one against cannibalism), customs, rituals, table manners, and culinary conventions found in every culture. There is a short and direct path from the omnivore’s dilemma to the astounding number of ethical rules with which people have sought to regulate eating for as long as they have been living in groups.

- The Omnivore’s Dilemma pp. 295-6, 298

 

This idea of health from good eating goes far beyond our physical bodies, to encompass organically our entire human experience. But it all starts with food.

 

GMOs are the radical enemy of this humanist and democratic cuisine.

 

For a stark example, we need only look at the GMO labeling “issue”:

 

1. Governments have tried to evade existing food taboos and prevent the formation of new ones through the expedient of an information blackout. They simply obscure the fact of this alien infiltration of our food. This blackout in itself proves the system’s bad faith and its anti-biological imperative.

 

2. GMO labeling will try to reinforce the taboos which are the cultural manifestation of our biology, the way we use culture to protect and enhance our health.

 

I’ve written many times about how transparency, sunshine, is a core principle of democracy. Full knowledge of public affairs is our public property. This applies to all affairs of every hierarchy. GMO secrecy is a typical example, and the worst example, of elitism’s infinite hatred for democracy and contempt for humanity. This is the imposition upon us, by “our” governments, of history’s ultimate feeding experiment, with all of us as guinea pigs kept in the dark, denied our right or ability to give (or deny) informed consent.

 

GMO labeling is trying to occupy our food supply by bringing it back into the sunshine of an organic information culture. Only when we understand what GMOs are (and how little is known about their dangers, and the fact that the little we do know indicates looming disaster) and where in our food they are can we humanly grapple with them.

 

Of course, we don’t need to figure out a position on them. Human beings rightly, naturally, reject such an obvious biological assault. All we need is to see where the enemy is so we have a clean shot (in this case, a clear path shunning them). The goal is to abolish GMOs completely.

 

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I’ll make a correction in the above quote. This function of human culture which Pollan implicitly sets apart from nature is in fact part of nature. Culture which is in accord with the natural imperative, in this case to find the good things to eat, is part of the holism of nature. It’s organic culture. “Culture” becomes unnatural and anti-natural only where it seeks to divorce us from nature, to place us outside it and in opposition to it. But this is where hierarchy seeks to divide us from our human selves and place us in opposition to ourselves. The way it induces we the 99% to fight among ourselves politically is only one aspect of it.

 

It’s characteristic that capitalism’s instinct was to turn animals into cannibals, via CAFO feed, and characteristic of the ways of nature that the direct and immediate result was mad cow disease. This was veritably, as well as in a rich symbolic sense, a direct challenge to nature and expression of infinite contempt for it. Capitalism is an excrescence upon humanity and upon the earth as a whole. It’s no accident that its quintessential qualities, biologically as well as metaphorically, are cancer and cannibalism.

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GMO Labels and Corporate Liberals

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Why Not Label GMOs?, asks this not-untypical editorial. (Studies of the media have found near-unanimous support for GMO commercialization, but a split on mandatory labeling.)

 

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) already requires food manufacturers to list ingredients, nutrition facts and common allergens. Why make an exception for genetically modified ingredients?

 

It’s obvious, isn’t it? Sunshine is not only a basic principle of democracy, which everyone at least claims to respect. It’s also a bedrock premise of consumerism and the ”free market” ideology. So how could anyone legitimately oppose it? I think we’ll find that GMO labeling is a handy litmus test to differentiate real believers in democracy from those who lie about the way they actually hold it in contempt. Without exception, all arguments against mandatory labeling boil down to “the people are too stupid to understand such labels.” Of course, even if that were true it wouldn’t make a difference – if you support democracy you have to support its practice, taking the bad with the good. But in truth the people understand GMO labels perfectly well. Humanity has always rejected GMOs on the perfectly sound, rational ground of the precautionary principle. We don’t know if it’s safe, there’s good reason to believe it’s not safe, we don’t need it in the first place, on the contrary it’s the escalation of a food system already proven to fail according to all its promises, so a rational person would reject it.

 

One place where this issue helps flush out the traitors is among the “food safety” groups. The Center for Food Safety, in spite of some pernicious positions like its support for the Food Control Act, has been strong on GMOs. By contrast the so-called “center for science in the public interest” (CSPI), in direct contradiction of its name, its alleged principles, and its advocacy at every other point, has been implicitly pro-GMO (no doubt only cowardice keeps it from making its support explicit; but it does regurgitate corporate propaganda at its biotech page (several links at the post I just linked)). Its executive director went so far as to personally vouch for the career of Michael Taylor, one of the most notorious corporate thugs and corrupt revolving-door transitors. (“Corrupt” by liberal good-government standards, that is. By that standard the CSPI is similarly corrupt.)

 

The CSPI’s advocacy is all about labeling. This is its default prescription for pretty much everything. That, plus the general default in favor of democratic transparency, ought to mean that if nothing else it should be at the forefront of advocating mandatory GMO labeling. That renders its absolute silence on the issue all the more glaring. (I guess they’re too cowardly to actually oppose labeling, so instead they go silent.)

 

Why would an outfit like the CSPI be such ballbreakers where it comes to labeling every other kind of additive, demanding nutrition labels on fast food, etc., but omit labels for this kind of adulteration? This provides a clue to the real nature of GMO imperialism. For savvy corporate liberals like this group, it’s the difference between wanting some regulation of things like regular additives, which are just details of secondary importance, as opposed to regulations which would compromise the integrity of the structure itself. It makes little big-picture difference whether a particular additive is subject to labeling, or is even banned as a carcinogen. But GMOs as such are not a structural detail. On the contrary, they comprise an attempt to replace the entire existing food structure, and beyond that vast swaths of Gaia’s biological structure, with themselves. Therefore any regulation which would compromise the general freedom of the GMO imperative is taboo. Here corporate liberals join hands with regular conservatives. The CSPI provides an example of where the boundary of regulation-seeking lies. This is a good example of the role of corporate liberal cadres in general, and in turn their role within neoliberalism provides insight into the basic scam of neoliberal tyranny itself.

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Wikileaks and Food Imperialism

 

This is just going to be a link dump on another of Wikileaks’ services to the world’s people. Among the leaks from the diplomatic cables have been several on food neoliberalism. These include the State department’s commitment to further inflict proprietary GMOs on Africa and Europe, to “punish” governments and economies which continue to resist GMOs, interlinkages of GMOs and the military-industrial complex (specifically the scam “AFRICOM”), the pope’s two faces on GMOs, the subversion of courts in foreing countries on behalf of the likes of McDonald’s, and other stuff.

 

I was going to write a post on it, but I don’t think I’ll get around to it. But I did want to offer the links, so here they are. There’s probably lots of others by now.

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http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2010/12/08/leaked-cables-reveal-gmo-agrofuel-agenda/

 

http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2010/12/22/wikileaks-us-ambassador-planned-retaliation-against-france-over-ban-on-monsanto-corn/

 

http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/leaked-cable-bubble-gmo-eu/

 

http://www.distantocean.com/2011/01/a-good-place-to-do-business.html

 

http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2010/12/22/wikileak-mormon-sponsored-agricultural-imperialism/

 

http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/pope-supports-gmos/

 

http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2010/12/12/leaked-cables-confirm-pope%e2%80%99s-distance-from-gmo-debate-and-limited-stance-on-bioethics/ (Also a leak, though not a Wikileak.)

What Do Wikileaks and Foreclosuregate Have In Common?

 

Much has been written about Julian Assange’s theory of how aggressive forced transparency can impose a “secrecy tax” on authoritarian conspiracies like the secrecy regime of the US kleptocracy. The ability of a system like this to smoothly function is predicated on its ability to easily disseminate information among the insiders while keeping it secret from outsiders. So the more paranoid the system becomes about its ability to maintain this monopoly, the more it must restrict information flows, police its own members, and devote resources to this maintenance. Like any other illegitimate, parasitic structure, it becomes less and less efficient and resilient as the self-generated resistance to it grows. According to Assange, Wikileaks is dedicated to imposing this secrecy tax upon these criminal organizations. If the tax becomes onerous enough, it can even render the system unable to function.

 

When I thought about this, it struck me how similar it is to other ramifications of the system crime. Everywhere there are signs of the self-imposed crime tax hindering smooth system function. Probably the best example is Foreclosuregate, where the banks’ systematic refusal to comply with the most basic, stone-carved legal procedures for conveying title and constituting MBS trusts has rendered all “ownership” questionable, and has perhaps in fact rendered most mortgages and most or all MBS trusts unsecured loans. In non-recourse states, the mortgagee may in fact not be able to have recourse even to the house itself. Meanwhile if the scofflaw servicer tried to belatedly (and illicitly) convey the note to the trust, the trust would be revealed as having been fraudulent in the first place, the trustees would incur a severe tax liability, and they’d be exposed to lawsuits from the defrauded investors.

 

The same would be true if the originator simply foreclosed on his own:

 

On one hand, the problem is easily cured – the party who is the documented owner of the loan could foreclose (the original lender). The problem with this is that the proceeds of the foreclosed property, including the recoveries intended to reimburse the servicer for advances, would have no mechanism for getting back into the trust.

If the original lender foreclosed, took title and liquidated the loan, accountants would have an issue with how the proceeds could possibly end up back with the trust. The result would be a total loss for the trust for that loan.

The servicer’s attorneys have no desire to go this route – it terrifies them.

 

Every time I read something like this my first gut thought is to doubt there’s anyone in the system who isn’t willing to break any and every rule and law.

 

But then I figure that a massive criminal conspiracy within the system must run up against the same inertial obstacles revolutionaries have often complained about – that existing professional cadres, no matter what the professional intent of their members, are still as a group committed to certain ways of doing things. It’s their professional culture, and even as intentional criminals they must still often feel the need to dot the i and cross the t.

 

And then the system is supposed to be set up to maximize the flow of loot upward and minimize leakage at the lower levels. Having a perverted but still mechanically functional rule of law and process of bureaucracy is supposed to help effect this. This is why the Nazis were always as punctilious as possible about “legality” for their crimes.

 

So perhaps the half-baked kleptocracy, having run its crimes so far out ahead of its ”laws”, will be unable to fix this mess even with its own pseudo-legal contraptions, and will sustain a major blow here.

 

Just like its hysterical attempts to put out the Wikileaks fire are already demonstrating the validity of Assange’s ideas. Although I’m not a tech expert, from what I gather it would be impossible to shut down Wikileaks short of “shutting down the Internet itself”, which I take to mean rendering it far more slow and inefficient. We can imagine what that would do for the system’s economic “recovery”. That fits into their intensifying “cyber war” rhetoric. Joe Lieberman and others have also been threatening even their own friends in the MSM like the NYT. Government agencies and contractors are imposing all sorts of restrictions on what computers within their purview can be used for. I had one commenter tell me his company is even trying to restrict what employees can do on their own personal computers at home. And funniest of all was the spectacle of universities warning prospective government employees among their students about how intensely all their prior online activity is likely to be scrutinized by this prospective employer. The vision of these Ivy League Hitler Youth scrambling to try to sanitize their past online lives and even more vigilantly self-police their words and actions going forward gives us a prime piece of Schadenfreude.

 

So it looks like we already are imposing this secrecy tax.

 

[We can see from all this why we don't want any sort of "modernized" mortgage registry, which would simply be easier to "legally" game. It would put up less resistance to organized crime. Its very pseudo-efficiency would offer fewer handholds for citizen action.

 

We're learning everywhere that so-called inefficiency and redundancy really mean resiliency and at least the potential for accountability.

 

In this case, there's nothing wrong with the existing legal procedure. (Not the scofflaw mortgage mill and securitization procedure.) Is this slow when you're trying to convey and securitize millions of loans? Yes - which is a good thing. Slow is Good. And as we should have learned by now, we never needed or wanted such financialization of mortgages in the first place. They should have stayed with the originator, with what worked perfectly well before these crimes were invented.

 

There's no need for shock-doctrine speed and false efficiency, which as we've learned to our sorrow is a false economy.]

Wikileaks, Hypocrisy, and Sunshine (2 of 2)

 

As discussed in part 1, the most important thing about Wikileaks is the simple democratic fact that we the people are the rightful owners of all system information. This information is our property and the elites have zero right to monopolize it. Anyone who leaks it or delivers those leaks is simply restituting stolen property to its rightful owners.

 

This can be distinguished from our private information as individuals, which is our individual property. For anyone – government, corporation, private scumbag –  to seize and organize that information without our full consent (contracts of adhesion are not consent) is the same theft, and generally perpetrated by the same elite criminals or their thugs.

 

But system secrets, the secrets of government and big corporations (which are all welfare leeches upon society), are public property. The information belongs to we the people. Therefore by definition a system secret is a theft, unless there’s some truly critical reason why it has to be a secret. As the Wikileaks deliveries prove, this is almost never the case. So far the Wikileaks record has been 100% illegitimately secreted information, stolen property, now restored to its rightful owners. (Since this record is so complete, so unanimous, so definitive, we now have proof, if there were any doubt before, that the press has an affirmative professional obligation to publish all system secrets, based on the presumption that the secret is wrongly classified, and/or is being kept in furtherance of crime.) 

 

But the elites themselves, by having betrayed their citizenship and humanity, reveal themselves to have no such private information either. That’s because in their essence, where they’re not conscious criminal conspirators, they are something far more odious, pure hypocrites. In On Revolution (chapter 2, section 5) Arendt discusses the hypocrite, who “is the actor himself insofar as he wears no mask. He pretends to be the assumed role, and when he enters the game of society he does so without any play-acting whatsoever. In other words, what made the hypocrite so odious was that he claimed not only sincerity but naturalness, and what made him so dangerous outside the social realm whose corruption he represented and enacted was that he instinctively could help himself to every “mask” in the political theater, that he could assume every role among its dramatis personae, but that he would not use this mask, as the rules of the political game demand, as a sounding board for the truth but, on the contrary, as a contraption for deception.”

 

This “mask”, as a public persona, was supposed to help clarify and enhance truth by serving as a buffer between the private person and the public citizen. In this sense it’s related to though not the same as Nietzsche’s concept of the mask, as discussed e.g. in Beyond Good and Evil sections 40, 270, and many other places. As Arendt discusses elsewhere in the chapter, it can be horrible for personal secrets to be dragged into the light. So for the individual to participate as a citizen requires some mediation of the concept of political persona, if only as a boundary between public life and what’s legitimately private.

 

But the greedy, power-seeking political hypocrite abuses and betrays this humane concept. His mask protects nothing, since his private essence is the same as his public crimes; he’s simply a criminal, nothing more or less.

 

All this is bound up with the bizarre obsession and debate over Obama’s state of mind. Obama’s actions as an aggressive neoliberal corporatist and warmonger are crystal clear. So why the obsession with motive? I suppose it’s progress that so many people are now reaching the stage of at least questioning what he really stands for, however absurd it is that this is not obvious to everyone already. It seems like a proxy for figuring out the real nature of the kleptocracy itself. For many people the real nature of the corporations and their goon government is still a paradox. The belief in the goodness of these things (or at least their necessary evil) is dying hard. Can the expanding argument over Obama be a working out of broader psychological issues among the masses, a solving of the conceptual problem, a withdrawal from the brainwashing?

 

The mere possibility of this demonstrates why transparency is so important, why the criminal suppression of information is so destructive, and why the hypocrite is so morally repugnant. If they can keep the crime secret, they can lessen the chance of the victims liberating themselves. And if they can successfully deny the crime in their own minds as well, it never happened. A hypocrite is a walking exemplar of the possibility of destroying truth. He’s willfully oblivious of the truth of his own action, denies this truth, and therefore destroys it in himself.

 

[T]he hypocrite’s crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only the crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

 

Of course our “leaders” are both criminals and hypocrites, and hypocrites precisely in order to be able to commit their crimes and still live with themselves, since they’re moral cowards as well.

 

Here’s just one choice example, especially bizarre in light of the absolute hatred of Hillary Clinton and all the others for Wikileaks and by extension the Internet itself:

 

Consider, for instance, how the views of the US administration have changed in just a year. On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which many people welcomed and most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google. “Information has never been so free,” declared Clinton. “Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”

She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack Obama had “defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity.”

 

So this presents the possibility of a nation of hypocrites which commits hideous crimes whose truth is then lost forever. If a mass murderer convinces himself that he’s innocent, did the crime ever take place? Did the victims ever exist? Or were they in fact the criminals? The only existing witness says Yes, if hypocrisy is able to triumph. That’s obscene. That’s why humanity needs total transparency, not as the solution, but as a prerequisite, a basic tool. That’s why letting in the sun is part of our moral imperative. Wikileaks is helping with this mission. 

 

Therefore we have to publicize all elite secrets, nor is there any fear here of violating the persona of individual criminals, since the system criminal is not a citizen or an individual, but a piece of crime incarnate. The level of this crime is exemplified by the secrecy regime – done purely to cover up crime, and simply as an exercise in illegitimate power itself. This secrecy is in fact another assault on our sovereignty as a people. This sovereignty gives us the right, and by now the obligation (now that pseudo-democracy has been proven not to work), to rule ourselves directly. But the elites construct a system which allegedly requires secrecy, monopolize those secrets, and then turn around and claim this need for secrecy rules out direct democracy. But that’s simply a criminal lie, an act of classical usurpation, classical tyranny. The obvious response is to get rid of the artificial, illegitimate system which is claimed to require such secrecy in the first place.

 

We know our property has been stolen and our political heritage usurped. For us to continue to allow the secrets to be kept is to alienate our own sovereignty. We have a citizen imperative here. As citizens we have no choice but to demand total sunlight. We have the right to total transparency, the responsibility to demand it, and no right to shirk this responsibility.

 

Then there’s also the practical fact that the secrets all involve crimes against us, robberies and assaults on our freedom. So also in self-defense we must seek total transparency. We must reciprocate war on their secrets (our public property) as they declared war on our informational private property – surveillance, databases, consumer info compiling and selling, advertiser tracking, drug testing, DNA testing, TSA scanners, polygraphs. When we consider the monumental level of crime, the existential hypocrisy of the criminals, and the special insult of their absolute assault on our human privacy at the same time that they impose a blackout on our informational property as citizens, the French Revolution’s absolute rage for unmasking and its impetus to drag all hypocrisy into the light becomes comprehensible.

 

Wikileaks hasn’t done anything so expansive, but has simply engaged in some targeted restorations of public property. It is in fact trying to support and protect true American interests and values (as opposed to the interests of the criminal elites).

 

Here’s all my Wikileaks posts so far:

http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/05/24/transparency-vs-kleptocracy-bp-oil-spills-wikileaks/
 
http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/afghan-sunshine-wikileaks-and-transparency-vs-corporate-tyranny/
 
http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/transparency-wikileaks-and-odious-secrecy/

Wikileaks, Secrecy, Federalism, and Globalization (1 of 2)

 

The question of what the American Revolution was primarily about – ideals or governmental forms, politics or economics – was temporarily settled by the framers themselves in 1788 when they imposed it as a fact that the revolution had been fought to establish a strong central government which embodied in many details the exact details the revolution had claimed to find odious, and flouted in many ideals the exact ideals the revolution had claimed to embody.

 

Here at least there’s no question – the emphasis was on a form of government, a republic. They called it (and themselves) “federalist”, but even then that was clearly just a successful Orwellian terminological inversion. It was actually the framers and adherents of the new Constitution who were anti-federalist in normal terms, according to the standard usage of the time, while their opponents whom they successfully smeared as “anti-federalist” were at least arguing on behalf of something closer to true federalism, power much closer to its true source in the people. (I won’t claim they were all sincere.)

 

I think it’s moot to ponder how sincere the “federalists” were as champions of this central government. If the rise of the fossil fuel age and the industrial revolution really necessitated strong central governments, then perhaps this Constitution was one of the better (I don’t say “good”) attempts to harmonize that need with protecting the people’s rights and freedoms. At the same time, Hamilton and others seemed ardent to maximize power for its own sake, and displayed the standard elitist contempt right from the start. It’s beyond dispute that a major purpose for this power concentration was to use it aggressively for continental imperialism. The Federalist repeatedly cites this goal as a reason to concentrate federal power. What later came to be called “Manifest Destiny” was already a core element of the Founders’ ideology.

 

So what’s the specific link between imperialism and the republic form of government? In On Revolution (chapter 2, section 4) Hannah Arendt emphasizes how Founders of various stripes agreed that a desired goal was to encourage faction among the people in domestic matters while seeking a united front where it comes to foreign policy. She quotes Jefferson as wanting “to make us one nation as to foreign concerns, and keep us distinct in domestic ones”, and cites Madison’s Federalist #10, with its celebration of “the spirit of party and faction”, which of course was to be kept within the limits of representative government.

 

This formula would allegedly generate the maximum political freedom within the country compatible with a sufficiently strong projection in foreign policy. While this was already dubious in the 18th century, in modern times it appears in a sinister light. We see what it means today: The elites encourage and foment discord among the non-elites, while we must all submit to the astroturfed united front for whatever foreign policy our betters assure us is necessary, no matter how wasteful, deranged, and destructive to the very domestic freedom and prosperity for which the policy allegedly exists in the first place.

 

This puts in a different light Arendt’s contention, no doubt literally true, that ” the direction of the American Revolution remained committed to the foundation of freedom and the establishment of lasting institutions.” The question is begged more starkly than ever, Freedom for whom? To do what?

 

But this question was already being begged when Madison wrote numbers 10 and 51. It’s here that he notoriously posited that the greatest threat to social stability would be the rancor of the people, who to him were inherently a kind of proto-mob ready to realize their full mob potential at any moment, against the elites. It was explicit in Madison’s concept that political elites need to exist at all (only they, as elected representatives, know how to organize power and run a government). Implicit were such propositions as that economic elites need to exist at all; that their wealth and property concentrations are justified; that their own aggressive actions, which from the outside and from the receiving end look like depredations, are the natural way of the world and can’t be held accountable in any way (therefore if the people react with anger it’s really they who are the aggressors); that a foreign policy designed and dictated by those elites is to the benefit of “the country” as a whole. All this, so viciously and tiresomely familiar to us today, adds up to compel the strong presumption that another implication of Madison’s scheme was that the very “faction” celebrated by Madison and Hamilton and even Jefferson was always intended to be a tool of divide and rule.

 

However it was with the original intent, we now know it represents the essence of misdirection. For America, the rule has long been (if it wasn’t always) aggression against others and hijacking of public resources, which is always for the benefit of the elites only, and could only ever accidentally coincide with the interests of the people. The misdirection is meant to distract from this and help trump up the tawdry “united front”.

 

It’s this fraudulent pretension to a unified America in its foreign policy which Wikileaks has directly attacked with this latest document delivery. The leaks demonstrate in the clearest detail how the specially designated foreign policy elites are the same petty, incompetent crooks we’re so familiar with everywhere else, and how their concerns are the exact same combination of crime and meanness as we see everywhere else. But most importantly in assaulting their pseudo-monarchical secrecy prerogative, a key trapping in their very claim to authority and power, Wikileaks has dealt a blow to their ability to pseudo-legitimately maintain this prerogative. Once the people understand once and for all what a sham “foreign policy” is, in the same way they’ve come to understand the central “federal” government as a fraud and a parasite in domestic policy, we’ll finally be ready to relinquish it completely, all at once or in stages.

 

Here’s just a few things the leaks have proven:

 

Each leak is something which should never have been classified in the first place. It proves how promiscuously they’ve abused the classification privilege, as a matter of normal practice. We citizens already knew under Bush that this privilege needed to be rescinded. (Of course, we now know that most of the liberals were lying when they said that at the time.)

 

Each leak is proof that there’s no real “national security” at stake. Each proves further that the only secrets regard the power and crimes of the elites.

 

Every document is further proof they have no valid secrets. Each act of secrecy is an affront to democracy and a violation of the social contract.

 

As has already been proven with previous deliveries, the leaks don’t endanger the American people or our interests. On the contrary, to whatever extent the leaks hinder the corporate agenda, they serve the American interest. The empire itself, and the stateless corporations themselves, are contrary to the American interest, as history has proven over and over, every time. Empire serves no one but imperial elites, and harms everyone else. In 2008 that became brazen here in America.

 

We saw the NYT and the WaPo suppress leaked information which lessens the case for war with Iran, at the request of the administration. (We got it through the Guardian.) So there we see the scurrying cockroaches exposed in broad daylight – your leaders, your elites, your government, and your media, suppressing evidence against war.

 

Wikileaks has proven that elite secrecy has no right or reason to exist at all, and that transparency is a citizen right and imperative. With the evidence of the leaks, no one can any longer argue for secrecy other than as a brazen celebrant of domination for its own sake. No one can any longer cite “reasons of state”, or that the elites know pertinent facts at all, let alone pertinent facts which can’t safely be shared with the public. No one can any longer argue with a straight face that foreign policy has anything to do with “American interests”, or anything other than the same ugly, paltry elite interests.

 

We’ve now seen it all, and we know there’s no there there. From here on, we know secrecy is nothing but an anti-democratic ritual. We must be all the more relentless in asserting sunlight as a democratic ritual. No one can see the American flag when its hidden away in the dank and dark. Only the sun shining upon it renders it visible at all. So there’s the real essence of the symbol. Not the mere dyed fabric, but the light upon it. Darkness, secrecy, is the true mortal insult to the symbol, and to the essence.

 

We should also recognize how this bogus “foreign policy” astroturf, which we can trace to the original framing of the system, is by now completely entwined and indistinguishable from globalization. The slow but steady progress of over two hundred years has been for these elites, and their government, to extract the wealth of the land they did nothing to work for, abscond upward in power and “law” with it, and eventually detach government and law themselves from the land. The anti-sovereign globalization entities and agreements represent the full logic of the entire process. The WTO is a kind of one world super-constitution. All of this is rule by pure administrative decree, intended to extract all wealth and power from the land but leave behind the dead husk of government, law, and civil society. This husk is now meant to be just a weapon against the people, but nothing in itself. It’s a world-historical secession of the elites.

 

The neoliberal franchise is a sick joke. It’s the symbol and ritual of nothingness. And then this stateless, anti-sovereign body is to rule the disenfranchised people by direct bureaucratic tyranny, as the direct private agent of the corporations. That’s the goal of globalization.

 

When “federalism” was redefined and centralized upward in 1888, and organized to be focused on a false unified foreign policy, this secession process was set in motion. From there it’s been the same vector and the same logic which have advanced through every trial. Since the end of the Cold War, in the face of imminent Peak Oil, this false federalism is attempting its final upward redefinition. But this depends upon keeping the people gazing spellbound up into the fog, instead of seeing clearly how every truth is right there in front of us, easy to understand, and always at our own level, except where it’s actually below us.

 

There’s no reason at all for wealth and power to concentrate upward. The people are understanding this intuitively. We’ve always known to be suspicious of globalization, and now we know to reject it completely. This means we must also reject the globalizing elites. We should see their “foreignness” for what it is and reject it. They chose to abstract themselves from our land and wage war upon it and us. So while we reject their foreign policy front, we can accept that framing against themselves.

 

A good place to start is to actually see them for what they are, and insist upon this clarity at all times. We know they mean us nothing but harm. If we didn’t know before that every secret is kept not on our behalf but against us, we know it for a fact now. We can thank Wikileaks for the documentary proof of the illegitimacy of the elites’ foreign policy pretensions and alleged prerogatives.

 

And since the false federalism which has led us so far astray was already based upon this false foreign policy emphasis in its inception, we must take our hard-won knowledge and apply it back as we reconceive our democracy. This has been a case study in the falseness of representative pseudo-democracy itself, and proof of the need for and unique legitimacy of positive democracy.

Crime Blotter

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I wanted to clear some clutter I had saved, so I’ll do one of those link dump/quick hit things:

 

Researchers at Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, are studying how to create an infrastructure out of human beings interconnected by wearing sensors, gateways and radios, resulting in a “body-to-body” network. Because human beings are so easy to come by, the networks could potentially be massive as well as high in bandwidth…..Long term, actual functioning body-to-body wireless networks could render cellular base stations unnecessary in heavily populated areas.

 

Note on crowdsourcing and cooperative economics: If we’re all going to be unpaid crowd-sources, that can only be equitable and can work at all only if we all purge all profiteering. It can’t be: rent-seeking for me,  anarchism for you. But that’s the way they currently want it.

 

Every quarter, content delivery network Akamai delivers a State of the Internet report looking at the Internet in terms of traffic, speed and connectivity. The latest report shows that the rest of the world is continuing to outpace the U.S. in terms of speed, while the U.S. becomes the leading source of “attack traffic” worldwide.

According to the report, the U.S. “became the top attack traffic source in the second quarter of 2010, account for 11% of observed attack traffic in total.”

 

The US is the world leader in “attack traffic”, while it continues to fall further behind in actual productive performance. Why does that strike me as typical?

 

As for whether the student was ever reimbursed, a spokesman for the law school issued a written statement to ABC News saying that the school was “deeply concerned about the job prospects and general well-being of our students and our recent graduates” in the downturn. “But no institution of higher education can make a guarantee of a job after graduation.” It added, “What we can do is provide the best education possible, and work together to provide as many career opportunities as possible.”

 

You made an implicit guarantee that if the student was reasonably conscientious, had reasonably good grades, graduated and jumped through whatever other credential hoops, and there was no other self-inflicted reason he couldn’t find a job in the field your degree trained him for, then he could find a job. This is fraud, predatory lending and a lemon product, period. Meanwhile the student debt isn’t dischargeable even in bankruptcy. Basically the victim of this scam has been placed in the state of nature vis the system and the corporate universities. Since this is the only way to fight back, everyone ought to sue on this ground.

 

I mean more than that. I mean that Zuckerberg subscribes to an entire hacktivist information-freedom-fighting culture that values truth and transparency for its own sake. But it’s not enough for him to hold and promote that ideology by striking against the powers that be in any way he can, like Julian Assange; Zuckerberg’s means are more nefarious. He imposes his ideology on users, seductively, through the architecture of his tool itself. People who like this ideology and are happy to see it inflicted on others through the tyranny of architecture are MarkZists.

 

Indeed. Zuckerberg’s a totalitarian, but a kiss-up kick-down snivelling gutter bully worm of a totalitarian. Compared to him the Bond-villainesque evil of Monsanto looks downright majestic.

 

Compare the citizen philosophy of Assange:

 

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

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

 

And finally more from liberalism, an ideology which just looks more and more on the ball all the time, doesn’t it?

 

The name of the principle is the “cultural defense” — the argument by a defendant that his or her allegedly criminal behavior should be excused or subject to a lesser penalty because in the culture of origin that behavior is an accepted and even commanded norm….In a way, the person pleading the cultural defense is saying that he has brought the tribunal of his religious faith with him by virtue of having deeply internalized its precepts and imperatives.

 

I guess it’s not surprising how so many liberals like Greenwald and the ACLU supported Citizens United. The liberal ideology seems like among other things a template for enshrining corporatist double standards – a bankster should be allowed to steal, because “that’s how they do things.”

 

Like MERS tried to tell the judge in Ohio:

 

“Plaintiff’s ‘Judge, you just don’t understand how things work,’ argument reveals a condescending mindset and quasi-monopolistic system where financial institutions have traditionally controlled, and still control, the foreclosure process…

 

“Cultural defense”:

 

The question raised by the cultural defense is, “When people come to America [do] they have to give up their way of doing things?”

 

Or in this case, do we have to give up America and all aspects of civilization and humanity when we enter “the market”, which is totalitarian and seeks to impose itself upon us everywhere, at all times. 

Sham Meritocracy and Cloaked Elitism

 

Naked Capitalism recently had a guest post which falls into the category of well-meant but really pernicious, as it still wants to pretend there’s a “good” elitism and a bad elitism, and all we need to do is reform the elites.

 

Thus it centers on an alleged meritocratic argument, that we need to exalt “what you know” over “who you know”. In theory that’s right, but it has nothing to do with today’s kleptocracy or any other system where What You Know is largely dictated by a system based on Who You Know. So even if tomorrow we instated a meritocratic educational system, for example, the “merit” would still be measured according to a What which was dictated by the interests of the rich and powerful. “Talent” would remain the same Orwellian term and concept it is today.

 

What You Know vs. Who You Know is largely a false distinction by now, since more and more the “what” is not reality-based but rather dictated by the criminal interests of the “who”. (It’s the same as how we no longer have innovation but only “innovation”.)

 

This piece seems to think the “what” of today’s system isn’t simply extortion on top of embezzlement on top of robbery.

 

“Lobbying” is part of the extortion racket.

 

Therefore, this is absurd:

 

A plausible argument can be made that former staffers would be high earners even if political connections did not matter.

 

Mind you, that’s referring to Congressional “staffers” as these productive Randian heroes. But in fact the entire careers of most of these worthless persons are based on nothing but being functionaries of a parasitic criminal system which has been set up for the sake nothing but its own preservation and aggrandizement.

 

(I’d love to learn what the author thinks any of these people actually do even in principle, ”even if political connections didn’t matter”. The answer is that if political connections didn’t matter, none of these ”jobs” would exist. But there would be far more real jobs for real citizens.) 

 

It’s long been a truism (and is true) that the law is made intentionally complex for the professional benefit of lawyers. This is just a modern version of the Church’s old monopoly of knowledge on how to stay out of hell. This knowledge too was made gratuitously complex, was forbidden to be translated into the vernacular, etc.

 

Today we have the same thing with financial sector “products”, the whole insane complexity of the global financialization. None of it serves any purpose whatsoever but the direct profiteering of the banks and the tollbooths they’re able to set up everywhere thanks to their own totally artificial and unproductive system and the “laws” accompanying it.

 

Thus we had the many real-economy companies lobbying against the proposed changes in derivatives regulation, not because the system benefits them but because they’re unable to understand the existing system and are intimidated. The banks can always plausibly threaten to subvert or blow up the existing system if they’re not given free rein.

 

And we’re all too familiar with the fraudulent “state secrets” doctrine and the general Big Lie that we need to trust and obey our betters when they claim there’s some peril only they have the mystical knowledge to avert. The “war on terror” has been the main example in recent years, though they’re trumping up “cyberwar” as we speak.

 

Today when somebody says “you need to hire me to give you advice” it’s usually a stick-up. It’s someone who placed a bomb on your car now offering advice on how you can drive without detonating it.

 

Even where it’s not directly a matter of who one knows, most examples of what a lobbyist/consultant/professional etc. knows really boil down to which gang he’s from. It seldom involves any reality-based need for real knowledge.

 

The main piece of real knowledge today is that we don’t need any of these elite advice-givers and knowledge monopolists at all, for anything.

Afghan Sunshine (Wikileaks and Transparency vs. Corporate Tyranny)

 

Today Wikileaks, in collaboration with the NYT, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel, released 92,000 pages of documents on the Afghan war. So far it looks like strong reinforcement of everything we already knew.

 

From The Guardian:

 

The war logs also detail:

• How a secret “black” unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for “kill or capture” without trial.

• How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.

• How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

• How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

 

And the NYT:

 

The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001……

The archive is a vivid reminder that the Afghan conflict until recently was a second-class war, with money, troops and attention lavished on Iraq while soldiers and Marines lamented that the Afghans they were training were not being paid.

The reports — usually spare summaries but sometimes detailed narratives — shed light on some elements of the war that have been largely hidden from the public eye:

• The Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, a fact that has not been publicly disclosed by the military. This type of weapon helped the Afghan mujahedeen defeat the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

• Secret commando units like Task Force 373 — a classified group of Army and Navy special operatives — work from a “capture/kill list” of about 70 top insurgent commanders. These missions, which have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment.

• The military employs more and more drone aircraft to survey the battlefield and strike targets in Afghanistan, although their performance is less impressive than officially portrayed. Some crash or collide, forcing American troops to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban can claim the drone’s weaponry.

• The Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and conduct night raids. From 2001 to 2008, the C.I.A. paid the budget of Afghanistan’s spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary.

 

This enhances the clarity of the general picture: administrative and strategic incompetence, corruption, an attitude of utter callousness toward civilian life, the increasing effectiveness of the Taliban’s defensive measures, above all how this is a corporate war being waged with hijacked public resources for criminal ends.

 

We in the blogosphere knew all this, but will Assange’s turning the jingo NYT into a journalistic accomplice help get the message out to a broader audience? 

 

By making the release of the documents a collaborative effort with major MSM outlets, Wikileaks founder and impresario Julian Assange seems to have made a smart tactical move. This co-opts the generally hostile MSM and tries to force focus on the story itself rather than the fraudulent meta-story of whether or not this information should have been released in the first place. (Though we’ll no doubt see plenty of that as well.)

 

[We should be on the lookout for another bogus media provocation. Who knows whether or not it was an accident that right-wing and liberal corporatists came together last week for a splendid little race flap just when the Washington Post's extraordinary series on the Pentagon corporate welfare state should have been the dominant story.]

 

Assange won’t reveal his sources, so we don’t know if this was another example of Bradley Manning’s heroism. He hasn’t been charged in relation to any of these leaks. But regardless we should compare Manning’s position, that of someone who actually tried to do his duty as a soldier and a citizen and looks to be severely abused for it, to that of the great capital criminals of our own or any other time, the likes of Blankfein, Dimon, Hayward, the weapons purveyors, Obama and Bush, and all the corporate and government gangsters, how they have only prospered and seem to go from strength to strength as they destroy America for no ideal higher than their verminous greed.

 

(Obama’s reaction to the release is typical. He blames everything on Bush while condemning the exercise in transparency itself. It’s exactly the same combination of unaccountability, remorselessness, and hatred for democracy you’d expect. Have you ever seen cockroaches scatter when a light is turned on? A commitment to transparency, of course, was one of Obama’s key campaign promises. But from day one in power he has reviled any light shone upon him and his fellow criminals.)

 

The almost complete destruction of democracy is just one of their ultimate crimes. (They’re not completely there yet; while Citizens United was more the formal consummation of a crime than a significant change, the defeat of net neutrality and public broadband access would signal the eradication of Internet democracy itself, the last real democratic space available to those who can access it.)

 

This is why transparency is such a critical issue. It’s not just a point of process, the way a liberal would typically say; by now we must exalt and demand it as a sacred ideal in itself.

 

As I wrote before, the “secrets” of a country which faces no existential threat have no practical reason to exist. And in a country whose economy has matured and then become decrepit to the point of rentier oligopoly, there are similarly no valid economic secrets. By now all the produce of the mature sectors is simply the work of the society itself, and therefore all the information which exists is similarly the public’s property. Not the corporations’, and not the government’s.

 

So there are no practical or moral reasons for elite secrets to exist. Given what we know of how malevolent a role secrecy has almost always played throughout history, how no matter what its pretext it usually also was enlisted to serve the criminal ends of power elites, it follows that if elite secrecy has no practical or moral standing, then it becomes ipso facto impractical and immoral. It’s a moral affront to the rights of the people, and a clear and present danger to the health of our democracy. By now it’s a core duty of citizenship to demand total sunshine for all elite information. Or, to put it a different way, “elite” information has no right to exist. Just like every other elite monopoly, this one must be broken up and restituted to the people.

 

(As I said in that previous post, this doesn’t apply to our individual, personal, bottom-up information. That truly is our individual property. Of course there too the elites, whether it be Facebook or the government, try to steal what’s ours and use it for their own power and profit goals. So a corollary is that the elites have zero right to our informational property, since all their purposes are, as I described, illegitimate. By definition elite activities have no practical or moral standing.)

 

So we must hail the all-too-rare true journalism of transparency as exemplified by Julian Assange and Wikileaks. They’re doing great work. As for the incipient martyrdom of Bradley Manning, I don’t know what can be done there. Bloggers like Greenwald try to interest the populace in the plight of our heroic citizen whistleblowers who are under such assault by the same administration which refuses to “look backward” to the Bush administration’s veritably Nazi crimes because Obama’s committing all the same crimes himself. But so far the people don’t seem all that interested. Nor do they seem all that concerned about the crimes themselves.

 

Things look grim. But one thing which can only help is sunshine. The more the better. We the people should have zero tolerance for pretensions to secrecy on the part of any elite, and regard any such claim as if the elitist had uttered the worst racial slur. That’s how unacceptable elite claims of secrecy should be among civilized people.

 

So that just brings us back full circle to what’s always our starting question: Can we save civilization itself? Is there even anything left to save?