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January 25, 2017

Reformation and Revolution

Filed under: American Revolution, Freedom — Tags: , , , — Russ @ 6:09 pm

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This is the 500 year anniversary of the year 1517, traditionally seen as the onset of the Reformation in Europe. 1517 is chosen because it was the year of Martin Luther’s famous challenge embodied in his Ninety-Five Theses. With this public challenge Luther gave stark, concrete form to a hitherto inchoate but rising mass of ideas and feelings of discontent and the hope for a great change, and galvanized these into into a protest and movement of revolution and renewal.
 
Luther was motivated by the extreme contrast between his personal spiritual crisis and the universal epiphany it led him to, and the entrenched practice of the Latin church. Luther’s attack on the longstanding church practice of selling indulgences for remission of sins and the shortening of sentences in Purgatory wasn’t primarily on account of the tawdriness and corruption of what the institution had lately become. For Luther this was a relatively minor objection.
 
Luther’s main motivation was the fact that, corrupt or not, the institution of indulgence directly contradicted Luther’s great redeeming idea and faith, the justification of humanity before God by faith only, never by works. Luther had been tormented by the belief that he and all people are so irredeemably sinful that no amount of good works could ever justify any of us before God. For Luther personally, and he believed for all of humanity, the faith that God can only impute righteousness to us and redeem our sin as a free gift of grace, and that all we can do is have faith in this grace, was of such overwhelming importance that he could view the church’s entrenched system of salvation through works only as the most extreme and satanic heresy. This drove him to such a relentless, passionate indictment that he captured the imagination of great numbers of people who were feeling similar crises and discontent, and galvanized the many trends of ferment and dissent into a mass movement which transformed the spirit of the age and overthrew the power of the church over part of Europe.
 
The idea of justification by faith alone was not new. On the contrary Luther received it across the span of more than a thousand years, from Augustine who in turn received it from Paul’s letter to the Romans, Paul in turn quoting from the even earlier Hebrew prophet Habbakuk. For Luther, and subsequently for the millions who followed his lead, to return to the stark teaching of Augustine from the laborious apparatus of church works not only made things seem much easier, relieving a great burden (and expense). It could be a great spiritual liberation for those who, for all their church-prescribed works, were having increasing trouble sustaining faith in this system, and as a result despaired for their souls. All at once they could embrace the clear, stark, simple faith of the indelible sinner who can do nothing but throw himself on God’s mercy. This is why the idea was so potent for so many.
 
Justification by faith was familiar to anyone who could read the Bible and Augustine, though perhaps less so to those who had to rely on their priests to mediate scripture for them. But even for the educated class who had read of this idea, for centuries it had had little purchase on hearts and minds. The church systematically, if implicitly, denigrated the theology of Paul and Augustine. In place of this the church elaborated its vastly ramified theology and organizational infrastructure of justification through works of ritual, penance, and monetary payments. Thus literate people knew the idea of justification by faith, paid lip service to it, but implicitly regarded it as irrelevant.
 
We can compare it to, for example, the words of America’s Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Every American knows these words and this idea by heart. (We adjust “men” to “all people” which much better captures the meaning.) Yet almost no one believes in it or regards it as relevant to modern life. On the contrary, almost everyone agrees that money transforms natural equality into natural inequality, and that this is right and just. Almost everyone tolerates or actively supports the existence of corporate persons who automatically are considered superior to human persons. These are the tenets of a religion called Mammon, which has supplanted the Declaration’s equality proclamation and so much else of what makes us human.
 
But what would happen if there was a groundswell of the spiritual, moral, psychological need to reject Mammon, passionately to embrace a new idea of equality and justice and freedom which revolves back to the original founding idea, a new beginning which revolves back to the original beginning, in the course of which we overthrow the whole unbearable burden of corruption and decadence and anxiety and unfulfillment, breaking out of all the bottlenecks which generate our ever more intense claustrophobia and desperation?
 
Could 2017 see the beginning of a new 1517, a revolution back to the great reformation, this time ramified throughout our vastly greater intellectual, political, cultural, and spiritual vistas? The reason I ask, is because it’s happened before.
 
 
 

January 24, 2017

Seeds of Doom vs. Seeds of Rebirth

Filed under: Agroecology, Dance of Death, Disaster Capitalism, Food and Farms, Globalization, GMO Corporate State, GMOs Cannot "Feed the World", Land Reform, Neo-feudalism, Seed Freedom — Tags: , , , , , , — Russ @ 4:46 pm

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“These people think that Africa is a country of animals, that we do not think, that we know nothing, but they are wrong. We are human beings, we know what we want and we will fight on to victory.”
 
– Zimbabwean participant at the 2011 International Conference of Peasants and Farmers vs. Land-Grabbing
 
Tanzania’s new seed control law is the latest victory for Western agribusiness seeking dominion over Africa’s land, seed heritage, and commodity export potential. Conversely, it’s the latest blow to Africa’s fight for self-determination and food security.
 
To gain Western “developmental assistance”, which means Western “investment” toward the goal of transforming a country into a corporate export plantation, the Tanzanian government has enacted “reform” meant to ease corporate control of the land and now will try forcibly to destroy Tanzania’s ancient and socially and ecologically stable system of seed saving and distribution among the small farmers who grow food for their people. All this is to be wiped out and replaced by corporate-controlled export agriculture while all food production disappears from the country and is replaced by mass hunger and misery.
 
This is the most recent development in an ongoing globalization campaign to enforce corporate control of all seeds and all of global agriculture and food. In Africa this campaign has been elaborated into a vast formal project, the so-called New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (NAFSN). The New Alliance is the corporate strategy for the recolonization of Africa led by Western agribusiness. Its goal is to drive millions of Africans off their land and gain full control of all arable land in order to convert it to export commodity production. African farmers, tribes, consumers, environmental and civil society groups are opposing this, with support from anti-corporate and democracy activists from all over the world.
 
The record of over fifty years of aggressive globalized corporate agriculture based on production for commodity export proves that corporate agriculture equals human hunger. Corporate agriculture generates mass hunger and seeks to perpetuate and maximize hunger. Its goal always is to destroy food production, seize the land for commodity production, and drive the people OUT.
 
The NAFSN is driven by the US and UK governments, paid for by US and UK taxpayers, and functions according to operational goals dictated by corporations such as Monsanto, Syngenta, Cargill, Unilever, and others who have signed up for the program as part of various “public-private partnership” scams. The NAFSN operates officially under the auspices of the G8. The program is directly administered by USAID in its usual role as alleged “humanitarian” front group, public sector version, with the Gates Foundation and others serving as the “private”, so-called philanthropic counterpart. The Gates Foundation has set up its “Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa” as a key activist and propaganda weapon of the campaign. The corporate beneficiaries have signed “letters of intent” to join this so-called “investment” program. This means they put up pennies to the taxpayer dollar while being slated to extract 100% of the profits. An African fig leaf is provided in the form of the African Union’s Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Program (CAADP). This is the Stockholm Syndrome blueprint African governments developed in the wake of the West’s “structural adjustment” assaults. The NAFSN is a typical vehicle wherein African governments beg for “investment” on the corporations’ terms. The New Alliance is a prime fruition of this radical corporate control of Western investment. Ten African governments have sold out: Ethiopia, Ghana, Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast, Mozambique, and Tanzania, Benin, Malawi, Nigeria, and Senegal. (The US remains frustrated by the ambivalence of Kenya, which was supposed to be the crown jewel member by now.)
 
The people of Africa are opposing this plan to destroy them. The people are organized into a coalition of hundreds of democracy networks, tribal alliances, and groups representing real farmers and pastoralists. These comprise the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa and include the African Center for Biosafety, the African Biodiversity Network (ABN), the National Coordination of Peasant Organizations (CNOP, a member of the worldwide Via Campesina, the Farmer Way), the NGO Federation of Collectives (FECONG), the Coalition for African Genetic Heritage (COPAGEN), the Food Sovereignty Campaign, Comparing and Supporting Endogenous Development (COMPAS) Africa, the Participatory Ecological Land Use Management Association (PELUM), the Eastern and Southern African Small Scale Farmers Forum (ESAFF), People’s Dialogue, Rural Women’s Assembly, Food Sovereignty Ghana, GMO Free Malawi, and many others.
 
Here we have a clear black and white division between humanity and a criminal elite. We have the aggressive elite power of the US and other Western governments, corporations, the mainstream media and technocratic establishment, and other elitists including racist liberals and NGOs. The whole project has had zero input or representation from the people of Africa or the West. Even as they mouth platitudes about helping the small farmers of Africa, the roster of participants in the cabal’s conferences reads each time like a technocratic dream guest list – Western politicians, corporate agents, NGO operatives, motley “experts” and engineers. It includes every illegitimate elite which is alien to the Earth and excludes every representative of actual human beings. Those opposing this assault comprise a truly representative lineup of African farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, and the citizenry in general.
 
Even if one didn’t know the issues and facts, just from the order of battle it would be clear who’s right and who’s wrong, who represents human prosperity, security, democracy, and freedom, and who represents the destruction of all of these.
 
The goal of the New Alliance is the corporate Gleichschaltung (coordination) of African agriculture and trade practices and policies for maximum plunder and domination. Its main goals are to drive the people of Africa off their land and into shantytowns, seizing all the arable land for corporate commodity production for export. The goal, as with all agribusiness endeavor, is to wipe out all food production and replace it with commodity production. This is the same program of globalization and commodification which has already devastated much of humanity. African governments are to collaborate in dominating and exploiting the people and the land. The goal of corporate industrial agriculture, and the ultimate goal of all globalization, is to seize control of the land and drive the people out.
 
Here’s the main elements of the plan:
 
*The privatization of land. In Africa vast numbers of people still farm and graze the commons. This makes it difficult for the corporate state to impose dependency upon money and loans of indenture, to set up corporate infrastructure and distribution facilities for pesticides, proprietary GM seeds, synthetic fertilizer, industrial machinery, to impose commodity cash cropping, and to arrange the export of the entire production of the land, leaving the people with nothing. As a prerequisite, corporations which would dominate and exploit these people and their land first need government to enclose and parcel out the land. This has been a priority of the World Bank going back to the 1980s. Obama’s USAID chief Rajiv Shad emphasized that the goal is to accelerate land grabbing. As Via Campesina put it, “These policies aim to allocate title deeds to land in order to facilitate the purchase and sale of landed property. In the end, poor peasants and other rural people lose out to the benefit of those who have the means to purchase land.” Tribesmen and pastoralists who have farmed the land for generations suddenly are told that the land of their ancestors is “legally owned” by a Western speculator or the land-grabbing agent of a foreign government. The NAFSN is designed to escalate this colonial process of stealing the land. The only difference from the old-style conquistadors is that the direct gun and sword have been replaced by the fountain pen, backed by guns, drones, and cruise missiles.
 
*The formation of economic hierarchies to centralize and integrate production, processing, storage, and distribution. All this is to be done according to corporate specifications, toward the goal of forcing most farmers off the land and reducing the rest to indentured servitude and wage slavery within a cash-based commodity export regime. Today the farmers of Africa are smallholders and commons managers producing food for their families and communities. This is ideologically odious to Western technocracy and an obstacle to total corporate domination and exploitation. The goal of the New Alliance is to eradicate this human order and replace it with the corporate-controlled globalized commodity export system.
 
*Use propaganda to induce the beleaguered farmers to adopt commodity cropping themselves, then impose expensive industrial infrastructure on them. The NAFSN reprises the decades-old ploy of offering credit in order to indenture farmers and trap them on the cash-crop debt treadmill. The procedure is always the same everywhere, with only minor modifications. 1. Propaganda – you have no choice but to get on board with commodification, and you better do it fast or you’ll be left behind. 2. Enforce this with Western commodity dumping and general coercion into a cash economy. 3. Offer the necessary product (“improved”, i.e. corporate-controlled seeds, synthetic fertilizer, industrial herbicide and pesticide, machinery, oil) and the debt-mongering loan in order to buy it. 4. In this way destroy most independent farmers completely, turn the rest into indentured sharecroppers or wage slaves.
 
*A severe and rigorously enforced “intellectual property” regime for the benefit of the seed cartel and its patents. The Tanzanian law is the latest example. All intellectual property in seeds has been the result of biopiracy. All crops and landraces were developed by farmers selecting seeds over thousands of years in cooperation with nature, and all existing varieties have been developed by farmers in tandem with modern public sector breeding projects. The private sector has never contributed anything constructive at all. This is just as true in Africa as anywhere else. IP seed regimes are designed to expropriate a vast property interest of the people as a whole, in exactly the same way as land-grabbing.
 
*Selectively open borders for corporate dumping and looting. “Free trade” is the standard Orwellian term for this; a truthful term would be something like corporate command trade, forced markets, forced commodification. This so-called “liberalization” applies where it comes to the government-approved and licensed “formal sector”. Meanwhile traditional markets and actual free trading among the people would be criminalized and repressed, as we see in the case of corporate seed regimes like that being imposed upon Tanzanians.
 
*”Free trade” zones, tax-free zones, laws licensing the total repatriation of profits by Western “investors”. These ravages of Latin America and Asia are set to be reproduced in Africa.
 
We already know the end result of this because we’ve seen it play out over sixty years in Asia, Latin America, and in South Africa which already has a near-fully corporate controlled regime. Seeds and the land are largely enclosed, farmers have been reduced to servitude, profits are ruthlessly extracted and removed from the country.
 
The program of the New Alliance is being called a “Second Green Revolution”, a “Green Revolution in Africa”. We already know the evils of the first Green Revolution. It drove the people off the good agricultural land, forcing them to struggle to grow food for themselves on worse, environmentally more fragile land. Meanwhile all prime agricultural land was enclosed for export production. The land is stolen and locked away. From the people’s point of view it’s as if all the best land literally was destroyed, while all the food they used to produce ceases to exist. This is the driver of all Southern hunger, just as forcing the people who used to support themselves across the land to become crowded into small desolate regions is the cause of so-called “overpopulation”. Thus the Green Revolution drives ever more people off the land and into urban slums and shantytowns. Shantytowns have always been the direct, intended result of this agricultural policy. The goal always is to further separate humanity from the land, assault human food economies, replace these with the global corporate commodity economy from which food is supposed to “trickle down” to those who have money to buy it, forcibly turn community farmers into “job”-seekers, generate population pressures and all the political divide-and-conquer gambits this enables, drive up the proportion of the population which is food insecure, drive down wages. In all these ways the Green Revolution increases desperation and infighting among the destitute masses and aggravates and accelerates the processes of colonialism and corporate rule in general. Today’s onslaught of corporate agriculture is an escalated version of all this.
 
Pro-technocracy, pro-corporate types still believe and propagate the lies of the Green Revolution. But it takes only a look at the historical record and current events to see that corporate agriculture has nothing to do with feeding people and everything to do with starving them for the sake of its profit and domination imperatives. How does it feed an African community to force it to stop feeding itself and start growing cash crops to be turned into cheap meat for Westerners and ethanol for Western cars? How does it feed people to drive them off the land they farm and into shantytowns? How does it feed people to impose artificial scarcity on the abundance their work coaxes from nature?
 
Let’s cut through all the lies. If you want human beings to eat, you want people to provide their own food for themselves, their families, their communities. If you want corporations and governments to crush this normal, natural food system and replace it with the corporate system of scarcity, coercion, domination, extraction, you want only those with money to feed. (As for the Western middle class among whom this attitude is common, the bell is tolling for them as well. If any among them ever wonders what the corporate and technocratic elite has in store for them, they need only look to the farmers of Africa now. In the end they’re slated to be liquidated the same way, even if it takes a little more time. But there’s already no lack of tent cities in America.)
 
The entire modern record of corporate agriculture and food proves that the corporate system does not want to feed the world and cannot do so, by its very nature. It takes a unusual form of stupidity to think that the way to end hunger is to take naturally abundant food and render it artificially scarce, as capitalism must do according to its nature. Just as it takes a special kind of arithmetic to think the way you end hunger is through a system whose primary action is to use ten calories’ worth of grain to produce one calorie of meat. This fact lays bare the entire truth about the corporate system, its goals, and the evil of anyone who supports it while even a single child goes hungry.
 
Corporate neoliberal ideology is a proven lie in every sector. There is no sector, especially food and agriculture, where corporate practice hasn’t brought oligopoly, inequality, deteriorating agronomic results, ever more frequent socioeconomic and environmental disaster, and mass hunger. All the while our prosperity, freedom, democracy, and happiness are destroyed. We know that agroecological production and distribution bring better practical results than the corporate system, we know that only it can sustain the environment, we know that all true innovation in agriculture throughout history has been the result of cooperative action in the public domain, and we know that corporate enclosure like the intellectual property regime has functioned only to smother true innovation. We know that the industrial food system is unsustainable in terms of energy consumption, we know it’s the worst driver of the climate crisis and other environmental crises, we know that even in the West it’s no longer keeping prices down, and we know that at every point it diminishes our freedom, autonomy, and community.
 
In direct contrast to the failure, destruction, and organized crime which is the proven pattern and intention of corporate industrial agriculture, the true way forward is already operating and achieving great things in Africa and around the world. This is the path of Food Sovereignty and agroecology. This is the way human beings produce abundant food for themselves and their communities without massive, expensive, and destructive inputs of fossil fuels and poisons, in harmony with the greater ecology, toward the greatest freedom, democracy, security, and happiness.
 
There’s zero problem with the sheer amount of food produced. We produce far more than enough food for everyone on earth and then some to fill their stomachs. This is true globally and it’s true in every region of the world. The only problem anywhere is with the corporate distribution system. Anyone who truly wants to feed people has to want people to be able to feed themselves. We have to change the distribution of the food we have, not struggle to produce “more” within a framework which has already proven it won’t distribute that food to humanity. Anyone who truly wants the world to have food must fight to abolish corporate agriculture, abolish the enslavement of food production to the commodity system, rebuild socially and economically natural food systems (food production and distribution is naturally and logically done on a local/regional basis, and only authoritarian systems can ever force the contortion of these into a globalized framework), and build the Food Sovereignty movement. This movement must be based upon the great class of small community farmers who have always been the food producers for humanity and always will be, and upon agroecology, a fully demonstrated science and set of practices ready for full global deployment any time humanity wishes to embrace them. Look at what agroecology is already accomplishing in Africa against such economic pressure and corporate and government hostility.
 
Meanwhile anyone like the elites and elitists of corporate domination and technocracy, who claims to want to “feed the world” but wants to do so by doubling down on the proven failure of a “Green Revolution” and corporate industrial agriculture is really a liar and a criminal.
 
The goal of corporate industrial agriculture, and the ultimate goal of all globalization, is to seize control of the land and drive the people out. This has always been the ultimate goal of all imperial conquest: To render all land terra nullius, empty space, to be subjugated, exploited to the hilt, wrung out like an old rag, left for dead. Today is humanity’s last chance to halt this corporate campaign of total destruction of our agriculture and our environment. We have our great chance to halt it and roll it back. This is what is necessary if we hope to have any agriculture and ecology left going forward beyond the fossil fuel age. The land is still there for us if we wish. We must save it and cherish it.

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January 6, 2017

The Right to Judge What’s Right

Filed under: Climate Crisis, Corporatism, Mainstream Media — Russ @ 9:32 am

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If we wish to do what’s right, we must have faith that we have a right to judge the right. Lacking this, no other “rights” have meaning.
 
We can sum up all of today’s indoctrination and propaganda, and almost all formal education: There’s the right way, the wrong way, and the corporate way.
 
This right-way-wrong-way-my-way template means it’s not your place to think in terms of right vs. wrong in the first place, but rather you must leave that to the Leader and do whatever he says without thinking. In this case, it’s not the place of the citizen to think, but to leave that to corporate and government elites. From there it’s meant to purge all thinking on right vs. wrong, except within the narrow frames allowed by the mainstream media.
 
To give an example very prominent these days, it’s allowable to think about the “right and wrong” of climate change in terms of self-proclaimed “belief” or “disbelief”. But any thinking in terms of right vs. wrong actions, any judgement on whether what a political organization or party or government or NGO actually does will be good or destructive, is not allowable. This is supposed to remain literally unthinkable. And as I can personally attest, for most Americans these days, at least for the ones still religiously committed to electoralism, it is literally unthinkable.
 
Which leads to another purpose of the indoctrination. Dissidents who try to publicize their ideas constantly encounter the abject conformists of orthodoxy to whom alternative ideas are nothing but thoughtcrime, to be rejected and shouted down in the most brainless, shrill way possible. This is an effect of being indoctrinated into the mode of thought that since it’s never the business of a non-elite to think about right and wrong, therefore by definition any dissenter must be some kind of rebel or criminal to be rejected out of hand. That’s the main reason it’s so rare to encounter a corporate system advocate who will actually engage on the level of argument. It’s not just that they tend to be stupid and are always utterly ignorant about the subject at hand, though these are also true. It’s that they reject in principle the very premise of non-elites having any kind of discussion or argument over right and wrong. That’s simply not done, according to the corporate indoctrination they have assimilated. And so it’s always been for every kind of authoritarian indoctrination.
 
This “pure” authoritarian mindset underlies and is prior to propaganda. Propaganda then presents the corporate way which is to be accepted and obeyed on faith, dictates the framing ideology, terminology, slogans, rituals, and prescribed actions. And it delineates the limits within which debate is “allowed” to take place. It’s axiomatic that the corporations regard this kind of “debate” as not harmful to their power interests, and usually actively helpful. Climate change provides a perfect example. Here system “debate” always assumes that business as usual (corporate globalization and the high-consumption lifestyle) can and will continue and escalate forever, that all policy proposals will never interfere with corporate profit and indeed will open up new profiteering opportunities, and that the true, necessary actions* will never truthfully be discussed. This is true of literally all system-approved climate change policy proposals.
 
What follows from this? The same lesson that follows from all dissident attempts to find truthful representation in the system media or to argue with system-loyal authoritarians: Either of these is a waste of time and effort which is doomed to failure. No one wants to hear it, but there is no substitute for gathering cadres, forming real organizations toward building a real social and cultural movement, every step of the way speaking directly to the people only. Only after what may be a long period of such work will the movement reach a level of cohesion and strength that it can force interaction with the mainstream and with the tribalists on its own terms.
 
But until then, talking to the system is as talking to a wall.
 
 
*There is one and only one way to avert the worst consequences of climate change: Greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, stop destroying carbon sinks, rebuild carbon sinks. Nothing more or less than that. All else is a lie.
 
 
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January 3, 2017

For An Introduction, Poison vs. Evolution

Filed under: American Revolution, Climate Crisis, Dance of Death, Disaster Capitalism, Freedom, Globalization, GMO Contamination, GMO Corporate State, GMO Health Hazards, GMO-Based Poison Infliction, GMOs Cannot "Feed the World", Peak Oil — Tags: — Russ @ 10:37 am

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The law and culture of Gaia’s ecology is the framework for human citizenship on Earth. Civilization enhances ecology where it upholds this law and embodies this culture. Today humanity and ecology alike stagger as slaves in a wilderness, beaten and insulted by the barbarism of a civilization berserk in its rebellion against the very womb which feeds it. This is a civilization gone mad.
 
This madness is driven by humanity’s depraved creation of “corporate persons” and the exaltation of these entities as tyrants over all actual human beings. By any measure, religious or secular, this has been a summoning of demons, and for as long as humans believe in them and worship them the demons are real with incredible power for evil. The evil they’ve done has been devastating, and the evil they yet intend is unfathomable.
 
Today the true human and citizen of the Earth is a voice crying out from the wilderness of barbarism. Today there can be only one call: Prepare the way of the Earth. Because all which is sustained by the finite and fleeting fossil fuel hoard, the entirety of the fossil fuel civilization, its energy and agriculture, cannot be sustained. All must soon collapse and destroy itself forever. If the faithful remnant of humanity prepares nothing, builds nothing in anticipation, the final immolation will leave nothing but the ashes.
 
What is fossil-fueled corporate civilization doing to Gaia’s ecology? We humans have always modified our environments with predictable as well as predictably incalculable direct and reverberation effects. Indeed, the grammar which makes us tend to separate “the organism” from “the environment” is scientifically and philosophically wrong. There’s no such delineation. Organisms interact with and change and are changed by their environments, which are inextricable working parts of “the” environment as a whole. Each species is an active participant in its environment, a participatory citizen of this ecological polity, an integral action amid the vast commonwealth of the Earth.
 
But the modification which industrial civilization has been able to undertake, afforded by the one-off spending of our inheritance, the fossil fuel residue of billions of years of extremely refined sunlight, is at such a higher order of magnitude than the historical norm as to be qualitatively different from this norm. The “Anthropocene” scam is designed to absolve industrialization and capitalism of any absolutely unsustainable level of destructiveness, and to justify continuing with business as usual. But to leap from a thousand foot cliff is very different from undergoing a two foot drop.
 
What are we doing to Gaia, this Earth, our only womb and home for the rest of our human journey? The environmental chaos of climate change is already rending the Earth and will only get much worse. This is the thrashing of a body trapped in an oven while the temperature rises and rises and rises. The physical and psychological agony is profound, and the potential chaos can only become more kinetic in every way as the system is ever more energized by the embodied violence our fuel-burning and soil-ravaging corporate industry keeps pumping into it.
 
All the networked organisms of the ecological system are always reacting to changes in temperature, and climate change has always occurred naturally. The organic reactions generally sum up to relative stability over evolutionary time, and this is part of the process of evolution. This evolutionary process, in climate and ecology, would have proceeded naturally in recent centuries as well.
 
But where the change radically overleaps the dampening effect of evolutionary time including its many safeguards and diminishing feedback loops, especially where this radical change is combined with many other drivers of chaos and destruction, the network becomes overstressed as many component organisms find it difficult or impossible to adapt. Civilized humans, and people subject to corporate imperial civilization, are the most vulnerable of these organisms. The emission waste from the industrial burning of fossil fuels and destruction of carbon sinks (natural processes generate little or no waste) comprises an absolutely different order of magnitude and a qualitative difference in the speed and extremity of modern artificial climate change.
 
Those who deny this, who deny the time element of evolution’s process of simmering and adjustment, are the most irrational and destructive kind of evolution denier, far worse and more ignorant than religious creationist types.
 
(Whether or not a process generates waste, defined here as a by-product the ecological system cannot readily assimilate, is a criterion for distinguishing ecological vs. anti-ecological processes. The more usual attempt to distinguish “natural” vs. “artificial” is an unfruitful diversion. While as a rule there cannot persist a natural process which is anti-ecological, artifices can be ecological or anti-ecological. As examples of the latter, human-artificed industrial processes often produce massive, toxic waste. Agroecology is the best example of an ecological artifice.)
 
Industrial consumption of water, especially for industrial agriculture, and personal luxury consumption are rapidly depleting the fossil aquifers which originally filled over geologic time. This depletion proceeds in the same way we’re depleting the fossil fuel principal. Since the water cycle can recycle only a finite amount of water, far less than we use, the rest is effectively lost to us after at most a few usages as it empties into the oceans.
 
Those who deny this, or who deny fossil fuel depletion, are simply denying the very existence of geologic time. They blaspheme against the actual Gaian creation with the exact same mindset as those who believe the Earth is 5000 years old. They’re the Oil Creationists, the Water Creationists. Again, their version of creationism is the most ignorant, irrational, and destructive. We do indeed need an evolution education movement, and its main target must be the false teachings of those who deny evolution because of corporate and techno-cultist faith.
 
We are decimating Gaia’s biodiversity and habitats. At any ecological level, from the microscopic to the global, from the most pristine wilderness to agriculture (these are all interlinked and are divided here only into broad, convenient conceptual groupings), the more diverse and multi-linked the networks, the more resilient, robust, complex, adaptable, and therefore healthy the organic network is. As we started out saying, the network itself is a collective organism. By contrast, the more denuded and simplified the interconnections become, the more they become vulnerable, inflexible, calcified, maladaptive, inherently unhealthy and exposed to predation and disease.
 
There’s another kind of Creationist (usually the same person, of course) who believes there’s the water he poisons, and a “different”, separate, Specially Created Water which is reserved for himself, his kind, their families. Same for the air they poison and the Specially Created Air, the Specially Created Food, the Specially Created Soil, and in general the Specially Created Earth, which is different and separate from the Gaia these Poisoners ravage and are attempting to murder.
 
Indeed they are attempting universal murder by poison. The entire corporate industrial system has a poison mandate at its core. Its core goal is to supply poisons and generate, by force where necessary, markets for these and deployment of them. This has many metaphorical applications, but today I’m speaking in the most physical sense. Poison-based agriculture is the core activism of corporate globalization, and in the end the entire structure will stand or fall based on capitalism’s ability to sustain this poison imperative. The proximate goal is to destroy everything which lives on Earth, figuratively and physically, except what’s functional toward corporate domination.
 
We’re already seeing the physical ravages, as the ever-compounding poison load destroys human, animal, and environmental health. Everywhere these poisons are deployed we see the surge of cancer, birth defects, every kind of reproductive and developmental disease, neurodisease, allergies and other autoimmune disease, respiratory and digestive ailments, hormonal and neurotransmitter chaos, genetic damage, and myriad acute symptoms. All these are iterated at every scale, from the bacterial, where antibiotic-resistant pathogens are boosted, beneficial gut and soil bacteria suppressed; to the complex organic, where the networked diversity of life has more and more of its bonds frayed and broken completely as the poison load accumulates in organic tissues and, as an expanded mutation load, in the genes, as well as wreaking havoc with the endocrine, neurotransmission, and immune systems of organisms; to the global, as vast amounts of arable soil and groundwater are toxified, their microbial ecosystems decimated, the oceans are blemished with dead zones expanding from the great estuaries, as just the most visible leading edge of the oceanic toxification, and all the ecosystems which ramify from these are crippled by the poisoning of the foundation.
 
All environmental crises and all hunger on Earth are driven completely by globalization, and most of all by commodity agriculture. There is no human or environmental problem which would not disappear completely or be greatly mitigated if humanity were to abolish corporate industrial agriculture. And we would prosper in every physical, psychological, and spiritual way. The abolition of the corporate demons is the great necessity, preliminary to the great affirmative preparation of the Earth for the ecological human age to which we must evolve or perish completely.
 
Corporate industrial agriculture seizes all the best land, drives the people and their food production onto marginal lands and into forests, or else off the land completely into shantytowns. Corporate agriculture is the worst emitter of greenhouse gases and destroyer of carbon sinks. Along with industrial loggers it destroys the rain forests. It destroys the grasslands. It is dedicated to maximizing the use of poisons which toxify the soils, waters, air, and food. Poison-based agriculture is the worst driver of climate change, the worst destroyer of forest and grassland and all other habitats, the worst destroyer of biodiversity and driver of the modern era’s mass extinction, the worst poisoner of every element of the environment right down to our very bodies. Poison-based agriculture is pure evil, has zero purpose, zero rationale, zero redeeming qualities. It must be abolished completely. There is no goal as critical, no need as pressing, no imperative as severe. This abolition imperative encompasses all other goals, all of which are in line with it or would be meaningless without it. Only the parasite squatters on the planet’s surface, those who have renounced their ecological and therefore human citizenship, would dispute this.
 
Capitalist industrialization, globalization, corporate rule, scientism and technocracy, most of all where these crystallize as the Poisoner and monoculture campaigns of corporate industrial agriculture, systematically and willfully destroy all biodiversity and the entire basis of organic resiliency and health. This will to destruction and monoculture has always been characteristic of tyranny, but only in the modern era have the aspiring tyrants been able to deploy such destructive force with the hope of wiping out everything which is not under the most physical direct control and manipulation of the tyrants and their engineer lackeys.
 
In all these ways corporate barbarism pumps ever more potential energy into the system. It pumps its poison, its greed, its powerlust, its gluttony, its violence, its sadism, its hatred, its anguish, its despair.
 
This, most of all, is the joint assassination attempt upon humanity and the Earth being conducted by the corporate and techno-cultist Poisoners. Humanity must act in the same self-defense vs. this murder attempt as any intrepid individual or group would against any other.
 
They are cancer.
 
What do you do when you’re suffering heat exhaustion? First thing, you stop throwing fuel on the bonfire. What do you do when you’re dying of thirst in the desert? You stop pouring your water out onto the sand. What do you do when you’ve ingested poison and become violently ill? You stop drinking the poison. When you’ve damaged or destroyed so many of the things you depend upon for your very life? And all the things you love? You stop destroying, and start fixing what you broke. And you seek the antidote for the poison. And you drink salubrious refreshing water. And you douse the flames and welcome a cool breeze.
 
These are what humanity must do in order to save the Earth for our time and prepare for the next age, the age of Gaia, the ecological age. This salvation is necessary for the entire weave of life, but most of all for its most frayed, vulnerable thread – our own species. In the long run Gaia will recover from us and continue as she was, whether we save ourselves or not. But unless we take the necessary cooperative action now, we shall not be part of this recovery. As I’ve written of many times before, the first step toward ultimate destruction will be the full dominion of the corporations. This will be political tyranny and economic enslavement. But this will be followed shortly by physical death.
 
Let us change from this future. We start by changing our minds. From there, as Shakespeare wrote it, “All things are ready if our minds be so.” All the ideas, the entire system of reason, science, and morality, starting with agroecology and food sovereignty, are fully demonstrated and ready for the entire human and ecological deployment all over the world. All the resources for today and the future are available and waiting. All that’s been lacking is sufficient will and organization. All that’s lacking is the spirit, the faith, the action of faith.
 
 
 
 
 
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January 1, 2017

How to Read the Corporate Media and What To Do

Filed under: GMO Corporate State, GMO-Based Poison Infliction, Mainstream Media, Scientism/Technocracy — Tags: , , , — Russ @ 7:12 am

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There’s a new NYT piece about Syngenta’s control of research on the poisoning of honeybees. This and the paper’s recent articles about Kevin Folta and other paid liars, indicate that the paper believes the controversy over corporate control of “science” has become too alive among the public to continue suppressing discussion of it. Our efforts have accomplished that much.
 
So the NYT, and the corporate media which follow its lead, will now discuss the matter but in such a way as to minimize it, giving personal profiles showing what good people the corporate-funded researchers are, fraudulently claim skeptical scientists are equally compromised by funding from “the organic industry”, and where all else fails depict the most “corrupt” researchers as bad apples not typical of corporate-funded science.
 
In the case of the pesticide-driven mass destruction of bees, the NYT continues to propagate the lie that this is a new phenomenon and that there’s any doubt about the science. The article here is devoted to seconding Syngenta’s campaign to cast false doubt on what’s already known. But in fact the evidence that pesticides kill honeybees has been accumulating since the 1940s, and by the 1970s it was a well-known dirty secret among federal regulators which they collaborated to keep quiet. Read E. Vallianatos’ Poison Spring for a detailed account of the history of the scientific knowledge. Today corporate media like the NYT collude with corporations like Syngenta to suppress this history. In reality there’s no doubt about the fact that pesticides decimate honeybees, and there has been no doubt since the 70s. Of course they would prefer not to talk about it publicly at all, but we have forced them to. So they move on to public lies.
 
What’s the effect of this mass media discussion? The NYT hopes it’ll defuse the controversy. Their message: Corporate funding of science isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the practitioners retain their integrity, it’s a force of nature anyway which can’t be undone, and all that’s happening is a healthy investigation of areas where the science is still unsettled. So, as Neil Degrasse Tyson said, “relax”. Everything’s fine.
 
Anti-poison fighters must fight to make the effect the opposite: Any discussion casting doubt on the integrity of the scientific establishment and reminding people of the corruption of science, whatever this discussion’s immediate effect, will over the longer run continue to erode the legitimacy and authority of the scientific establishment as such. Any high-profile public discussion which acknowledges the controversy automatically puts the idea of “corruption” and “fraud” in the public consciousness. This is why the corporations and media would prefer never to have this discussion in the first place: They know how easily they could lose control of it, and how easily it can backfire on them.
 
So what to do now? We must cease from arguing piecemeal about things we’ve already forced into the mass media discussion. We must broadly assert what the fact of the mass exposure already proves: “See, even the New York Times admits the scientific establishment is corrupted by corporate money, and therefore you can’t trust anything establishment science says about pesticides and GMOs. They admit it’s all a lie on behalf of profit.”
 
And when the pro-poison activists try to dispute this, never let them draw you into nit-picking exchanges, always an infinite rabbit-hole. That’s their way of trying to keep sowing doubt and confusion. We’re reaching the point where we can turn the tables of political communication on them and use the psychology of politics to our advantage. The way to do this is to continue hammering away with the basic clear truths, now implicitly being acknowledged by the NYT itself, that the poison-peddling corporations control everything today’s “science” does and says. Leave the pathetic nit-picking to the enemy, while we keep our eye on the prize: Destroying the credibility of the corporations’ false “science”.
 
Say it again and again: “The New York Times itself admits you’re paid liars.” We’ve evolved, and the political situation has evolved, to the point that we can hone our attack to a few clear standards. This is one of them. Let’s stop muddling through, let’s get organized and disciplined.
 
 
 
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