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1.
There’s no such thing as a deficit crisis as such, and any “budget crisis” is purely fabricated. It’s a government exercise in trying to confuse and scare the people. That’s why the term “deficit terrorism” is precise and appropriate. What the central government and corporate media do in inventing this problem and then conjuring up a mass of fear-itself propaganda around it is a textbook case of terrorism in its psychological aspect. It’s a pressure group trying to sow fear and intimidation among a populace, in order to force political concessions out of it. In this case the enforced concession is always acquiescence in “austerity”, which is the willful and unnecessary gutting of whatever’s left of government spending which isn’t corporate welfare. (While I’m not here to affirmatively stick up for any aspect of the central government, I’ll always say that if you want to cut government spending for any reason whatsoever, the place to start is always with corporate welfare, which is the most egregious, worthless, and destructive kind of government spending. Abolish that, and then see what problems are left. The fact that conservatives and most “libertarians” support corporate welfare proves that they lie when they claim to oppose big government, massive taxation, massive regulation of the economy. Corporatism is always the most aggressive, malignant, and massive manifestation of all of these.)
Meanwhile, the fact that corporate welfare is never cut, is only constantly, massively expanded, is proof that no one in the system really thinks deficits or the debt are problems in themselves. It’s proof that anyone who says so is consciously, willfully lying, with malice aforethought. This would be very strong condemnatory evidence at a New Nuremburg, where it came time to try the Streicherist propagandists.
2. The latest incarnation of the deficit kabuki had an added feature, a rider which turned an appropriations bill into what democracy advocates are calling
the Monsanto Protection Act. This rider would neuter judicial review* of USDA GMO approvals, by allowing planting to continue even after courts find that the USDA hadn’t lived up to its mandatory procedures for approval. The rider is merely an extension of the standard GMO contamination process. The goal is to get the things into the ecosystem and economy, no matter how, and establish them as invasive weeds which are then extremely difficult to eradicate. In countries like Brazil and India the crops were widely illegally planted, and governments then claimed this accomplished fact as justification for legalizing them (which is what they’d wanted to do in the first place, but had refrained on account of democracy pressures). In the US the USDA simply defied a court order imposing a moratorium on Roundup Ready sugarbeets. Now the legislature is following up, legalizing the previously extra-legal and illegal procedures.
[*This legislative rider is the kind of thing which will satisfy the
passive corporatists in the judicial branch. There’s almost no chance of courts finding the rider itself unconstitutional, since no judges I’m aware of find corporatism as such to be unconstitutional. None rule that constitutionally there’s no such thing as corporate “rights”. For example, that’s the way in which, fundamentally,
Citizens United was a 9-0 decision. The so-called “5-4” was only on the technical ground that four passive corporatists didn’t want to overturn a law Congress had passed. But no one dissented on the ground that there’s no such thing as a corporate speech right. The fact that judicial passivists try to decide things as narrowly as possible is proof of their bias in favor of the status quo of power, regardless of any fundamental constitutional issue.]
3. Senator Mikulski, head of the appropriations committee, rammed the thing through over Jon Tester’s attempt to get the rider stripped. Only when
she received severe criticism did she
pretend not to have known what she was doing. This is certainly a lie. She did her job, serving the corporate imperative. That’s why she was given this committee chairmanship in the first place.
Under pressure, she seized the opportunity to make this a two-for-one. She not only served Monsanto, but gave as her excuse that this was necessary in order to accomplish the critical goal of getting the appropriations bill passed. She opportunistically tied her pro-Monsanto action with her action in propagating the fraud that the central government budget is in some kind of inherent crisis.
Sure enough, liberal NGO cadres rushed to her defense. A hack from the Center for Food Safety
ran interference.
“The American public have relied on Senate Democrats to be a backstop against dangerous policy riders like this,” said Colin O’Neil, director of government affairs for the Center for Food Safety. “We call on [Mikulski] to ensure that this rider is stricken from any future appropriations bills.”
But, O’Neil added, the language did not originate with Mikulski. Rather, it was included in legislation that had been developed before she took the chairmanship….”Her hands were tied by the negotiations that had previously happened,” O’Neil said of Mikulski. “We recognize the tough spot she was in.”
O’Neil said food safety groups nevertheless hope to keep the pressure on Mikulski to get the language removed later this year, when the government must pass its next round of funding legislation.
(And to keep asking for money. And you see what your donations to the “food safety groups” pay for – pro-Monsanto lies, wherever the Democratic Party is involved, and endlessly fruitless “working within the system”. It also gets you those groups’ more vicious support for Monsanto’s corporate state, through their cheerleading for the Food Control Act.)
In this hidden backroom deal, Senator Mikulski turned her back on consumer, environmental, and farmer protection in favor of corporate welfare for biotech companies such as Monsanto. This abuse of power is not the kind of leadership the public has come to expect from Senator Mikulski or the Democrat Majority in the Senate.
Contrary to such lies, this is exactly the kind of “leadership” we can always expect from the Democratic Party. The evidence record is massive, longstanding, and unblemished. If Kimbrell believes it, he’s simply exhibiting a pathological level of flat-earth cult-think.
This is a good example two allied phenomena:
1. System NGO types, and liberals in general, are there as pro-corporate triangulators. We have two opposed trenchlines, humanity against corporatism. Liberals, and especially NGO types, are out in no-man’s-land, running interference, obstructing our shots, and helping to set up corporate shots.
2. System NGO types, and liberals in general, are there to build a fence and patrol it. This fence is meant to fence in the acceptable kind of dissent, with reformist ideology, and actions like “vote for Democrats”, “petition Obama”, perhaps “file a lawsuit” (ouch! this rider puts a crimp in that one!), qualifying as acceptable. Meanwhile actual analysis and criticism of the system itself, and the ideas and actions of fighting for real structural change, including advocacy of things that the vast majority of humanity actually wants, are to be fenced out and forbidden.
In this case the “anti-GMO movement”, in the wretched state it currently is, felt very uncomfortable condemning a famous liberal Democrat, and in such a critical context as the deficit fraud, so the likes of the CFS rushed to try to lull any grassroots anger, and erstwhile anti-GMO reportage sites rushed to publish these lying extenuations.
How is it that an excellent journalism site like GMWatch doesn’t recognize pro-GMO policy and deficit scaremongering, always meant to generate the political environment for imposing “austerity”, as affiliated aspects of corporatism? How is it they don’t see the obvious affinity between the corporate media’s manufactured “GMO science” and its similarly manufactured “deficit economics”? As the pieces they aggregated here demonstrate, the corporate system lies about the alleged need for a “budget deal” in the exact same anti-evidence, anti-rational way it lies about the alleged need for GMOs.
This is an example of how, to build a true abolition movement, we need a far more holistically and systematically anti-corporatist orientation. As things are, even the better groups and sites frequently lapse into their own kind of anti-holistic “NPK mentality”, as Albert Howard called it. It’s not constructive to be anti-GMO within a myopic mindset inclined to uncritically accept other aspects of corporatism. That’s not going to work toward abolishing GMOs.
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