Who Are the Proxxers? We Start With the Vaccination Controversy

>

Here’s the source of death. An eminently respectable, scientific campaign.

 

 

Governments and corporations are engaged in a systematic campaign to eradicate antibiotics as a medically effective treatment. The three main vectors of this campaign are mainstays of corporate industrial agriculture:

 

1. In factory farms animals are massively dosed with antibiotics in order to keep them alive under such disease-promoting conditions, and to promote quick weight gain.

 

2. In genetic engineering the transgene often includes an “antibiotic resistance marker”. Following the insertion process the engineers douse the cultured cells with an antibiotic, which kills all but the cells which incorporated the transgene.

 

3. Herbicides like glyphosate and 2,4-D are antibiotics, and in the process of weeds and bacteria developing resistance to herbicides they also develop a general resistance to antibiotics.

 

 

In all these ways the corporate-technocracy system deliberately drives the ever faster evolution of antibiotic resistant microbes, and the escalating failure of antibiotics as a medical treatment.

 

Since these effects are well known we also know that this is a consciously intended result of corporate industrial agriculture, and that the cadres and supporters of this mode of agriculture are part of this campaign to wipe out the effectiveness of antibiotics.

 

Peculiarly, many of these corporate fanboys are in a state of rage about the existence of people who are nonconformists where it comes to the ideology of vaccination.* Although their denunciations are usually incoherent, to the extent they give a reason they claim to fear for the public health.

 

But they’re obviously lying when they claim to care about public health, since they express no concern at all about the corporate state’s campaign to wipe out antibiotics, even though this systematic campaign on the part of the power structure is vastly more dangerous to public health than the actions of a relatively small, ad hoc group of vaccine dissenters. This proves that the hysteria against the non-vaccinators is a proxy for something. Therefore this figurative lynch mob should be called proxxers.

 

What motivates these persons? Most obviously, they’re hard core members of the religious cult of scientism, statism, technocracy, “progress”, Mammon. This gives us the first, most obvious clue: As typical authoritarian followers, these persons will hear no evil said of the corporations, but gleefully will attack any dissident group the media directs them against.

 

In recent years there has been a top-down media-engineered campaign designed to demonize the trivial group of non-vaccinators. Given the growing evidence of the ongoing harms and great dangers of the corporate agricultural system, as well as how obviously destructive the rest of the corporate onslaught is becoming, the corporate media is increasingly desperate to trump up diversions and scapegoats. In the case of the lethal pandemics already being caused by globalization’s shantytowns and factory farms, and the far worse inevitably to come, the system’s goal is to provide scapegoats to divert public fears and anger, as well as to muster fascistic discipline among potential cadres along the lines of scientism, the only pro-corporate ideology which can tap into threads which aren’t purely mercenary. Thus the most unreconstructed, brutal greed, powerlust, sadism, and hate try to make common cause with what’s left of the withering “Progress” ideology.

 

The progress religion also explains why these cultists faithfully believe that antibiotic resistance is no problem for public health while non-vaccination or raw milk allegedly are. From their point of view, antibiotic resistance is the result of the profound “progress” of CAFOs and genetic engineering. Where a more spectacular progress is trumping another, the bigger spectacle wins. Thus the doomed efficacy of antibiotics is a price the technocracy cultists are willing to pay in order to fully develop the technocratic domination of agriculture and food. By contrast, from this perspective raw milk and non-vaccination are not examples of further “progress”, but alleged regressions. Thus the public health fears which cease to exist in the case of the far greater danger of antibiotic resistance suddenly become “real” for the cultists, and they shriek accordingly.

 

Most intense of all, the proxxers become all the more enraged and incipiently violent in direct relation to how they’re losing faith in their religion. They see ever growing numbers of people losing faith in scientism and statism, ever growing numbers rejecting these with contempt. And the cultists themselves give a daily demonstration of how they’re losing confidence in themselves and their cult. The corporate state and technocratic establishment are still in full power and still wield the overwhelming preponderance of power, while dissidents are only so many small mammals hiding in the underbrush. What kind of snowflake would a dinosaur have to be to go on shrieking hysterically about the alleged misdeeds of these powerless mammals? Obviously they sense the impending destruction of their dominion and are becoming ever more desperate, even as their power seems still to be fully intact.

 

The pogrom mentality of the proxxers against the non-vaccinators is an expression of their rage against the civil disobedience of a small dissident group. They see non-vaccination as an intolerable affront to the religious majesty of scientism and statism. They experience it as a form of lese majestie. Sensing the inevitable collapse of the system they worship (since in terms of resources and ecological destruction the technocratic civilization is unsustainable), they react with all the venom of their despairing rage against an officially designated target.

 

This brings us to a more concrete reason for the demonization campaign. The CAFO system with its corresponding eradication of antibiotic efficacy inevitably will generate lethal pandemics. The corporate state at least accepts this as a cost of ramifying the system, same as the rank and file cultists do; and it may believe it can control such pandemics as a weapon of terror and population control.

 

Whatever the nightmare visions of the likes of Bill Gates, Monsanto, and the US military, everyone knows CAFOs, along with the rest of the general campaign of environmental poisonism, will generate pandemics. So the system is already setting up non-vaccinators to serve as a scapegoat when such pandemics arise. That’s a big part of why the corporate media obsesses on the mouse in the room (vaccines) and not the elephant (antibiotics), and that’s a big part of why the lynch mob responds the way it does.

 

So we have a first draft toward understanding why supporters of the eradication of antibiotics** turn around and shriek about the alleged threat non-vaccinators pose to public health. It has zero to do with any real concern about public health. On the contrary, it’s rooted in technocratic religion; it comprises a lashing out on account of the cultists’ losing faith in this religion; and it’s preparing the ground for a disaster capitalist scapegoating of an innocent minority when the actions of the corporate system inevitably bring disaster.

 

 

Anyone who doesn’t fight for the abolition of antibiotic abuse has zero credibility if he turns around and claims to be concerned about the relatively small risks from non-vaccination. The shrillness of the proxxers juxtaposed with their resounding silence where it comes to antibiotic abuse adds up to proof of their bad faith and cowardice. They’re nothing but authoritarian statists who are outraged by a form of civil disobedience they find particularly offensive as an affront to their statism and scientism. They should be systematically counterattacked as such, whatever one’s views on vaccination itself.

 

Faced with anyone who claims to criticize non-vaccinators from the point of view of a concern for public health, I start with one question: What have you done to oppose sub-therapeutic antibiotic abuse in factory farms and genetic engineering? Please direct me to where you’ve written or taken action on this.

 

A satisfactory answer to this question is necessary to establish one’s bona fides. Anyone who can’t do so is a fraud who’s really jumping onto an anti-dissident bandwagon out of typically cowardly bullying authoritarian motives. Where it comes to the vaccination lynch mob, dissenters and critics should always counterattack these bad faith liars the way I describe.

 

 

Do you really care about public health? If so, here’s two of the necessary goals: Abolish factory farms, abolish GMOs. Nothing short of this can suffice, and nothing short of this can comprise a rationally or morally coherent position for anyone who claims to care about public health.

 

 

*This piece is not about vaccination in itself. Vaccination makes sense in principle. But there are three separate matters here: The science of vaccination in principle; the alleged need for and safety of the corporate-manufactured vaccines we actually have; and the ideology which decrees that humans need an indefinitely expanding array of vaccinations, and that wherever the technocratic establishment orders people to get themselves and their children vaccinated, the people must obey without question. This, of course, is fundamentalist religion, not science or reason (let alone democracy). But in a typically fraudulent authoritarian tactic, those who criticize non-vaccinators always blur these three together and come up with the standard lie, “non-vaccination = anti-science”. That’s because neither the case for corporate control of vaccines nor the scientism religion of vaccines can stand up to political or rational scrutiny.

 

 

**Most antibiotics are derived from soil bacteria, the same soil microbes systematically being eradicated by industrial agriculture. So the corporate-technocratic campaign also strikes at the very root of medical research. Conversely, only the transformation to agroecology and a massive commitment to rebuilding the soil can provide any future basis for antibiotic development. More on this later.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Competition” as Ideological Proxy for Biological Warfare

>

 

 

“Although there are many examples of such mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationships, an intense competition occurs among the diverse organisms in healthy soils.”

 

Building Soils for Better Crops, p. 38

 

Where it comes to a naturally evolving ecosystem like soil, what one chooses to see as competition as opposed to cooperation is mostly a matter of ideology and one’s view of individual death. Are soldiers in combat cooperating or competing? Consider the two armies together: Are they competing to kill one another, or cooperating to carry out the war?

 

The Spencerist/Darwinist presentation, with its emphasis on competition and “survival of the fittest”, was adapted from the capitalist ideology of 19th century Britain. All of Darwin’s observations and the theory he induced from them he could have written up at least as easily in terms of cooperation. Darwin simply chose not to, for reasons of ideology which is prior to science.

 

Now consider the balanced soil ecosystem: Are predators and prey in competition or cooperation? Are two organisms which feed on the same resource competing for that resource or cooperating to process that resource as part of the flow of the ecosystem?

 

 

It seems to me that cooperation better describes the fundamental units (for example, animal-bacterial and plant-bacterial symbioses) and the overall holism, and that this is good reason to consider cooperation the better basic description of the ecology. This is according to the same logic whereby the Copernican description is preferred over that of Ptolemy. This is not because the Copernican is more “true”; neither is “true” or “false”, they’re just different depictions of the same observations. The Copernican presentation is preferable because it accounts for the most important observations in a simpler and more coherent, more logically cogent way than that of Ptolemy.

 

 

When does competition prevail? At the human level, tribes naturally cooperate within themselves but sometimes undergo intertribal competition, even to the point of warfare. As hierarchies develop, as power centralizes, as natural use-based economies become engulfed in larger-scale supply-driven commodity-based economies, human community aggregates dissolve, the people atomize, and they become subject to the competition of class war from above and intense pressure from above to tear into each other. In these ways criminals who have organized to maximize power strive to force competition upon humanity and to repress natural cooperation.

 

Yet the strongest proof that humans are naturally cooperative is the fact that, despite the power elites’ having had hundreds of years of total power to inflict their indoctrination, propaganda, inducements, threats, and violence upon humanity with all the massive, relentless force at their disposal, they still need to renew this massive barrage every day in order to get people to act in an even semi-competitive way. Self-evidently, if this daily infusion ever were to flag, people quickly would revert to their cooperative default.

 

Meanwhile, as anarchism always points out, capitalism and the state depend utterly on massive unpaid cooperation on the part of workers and citizens. If the people ever were to go on a work-to-rule general strike, which simply means working to the letter of one’s job description and not one jot more; and if the people were to obey the absolute letter of the law, not one jot more or less, the whole structure of capitalist society would collapse within days, so dependent is it upon the creative cooperation of workers and citizens vis their workplaces and the mores of social life.

 

 

At the ecological level, what we could call competition comes in where for some reason an imbalance in the system temporarily allows a species to get out of control. Industrial agriculture generates the most extreme artificial imbalances by eradicating as much biodiversity as possible and seeking to impose a strictly regimented goose-stepping monoculture regime. In practice this generates the best terrain for pests, weeds, disease, and such vermin as rats. Since this is the invariable primary result of the monocultural agriculture system, we know that this is the primary intent and goal of the governments, corporations, academics, and journalists who work to enforce this system. Related and parallel examples, part of the same ideological and paramilitary structure, are the systematic overuse of antibiotics (intended to generate resistant microbes and wipe out antibiotics as a medically effective technology) and pasteurization (intended to wipe out diverse microbial communities which keep pathogens in check, in order to create an open frontier for those pathogens; just as pesticides are intended to maximize opportunities for pests and disease by wiping out all counterbalancing diversity).

 

Another example of the artificial imposition of competition over cooperation is where an invasive species becomes able quickly to debouch through an ecosystem, rather than gradually assimilate over time and through the mediation of evolutionary safeguards. The most extreme example is technocracy’s campaign to deploy GMOs as globally as possible as fast as possible with as brutal a suppression of evolutionary safeguards as possible.

 

This campaign is intended to be an even more total, more biologically eliminationist extension of the first “green revolution” of a monoculture paradigm based on poisons, machines, and enclosed seeds. Modern industrial agriculture is the most extreme anti-evolutionary campaign in history (and its cadres and ideologues the most extreme cohort of evolution deniers). GMO-based agriculture, the “Green Revolution II”, is in turn the most extreme version of this competitive/destructive debouchment.

 

 

The surest way to tell an imbalance is gathering force and ecological/economic flows are being blocked, even more sure than tangible destruction, is any buildup of waste, and any tangible accumulation which automatically is a form of pollution.

 

This is the closest we can come to an objective definition of cooperation as opposed to competition: Does the system embody Nietzsche’s idea of the Ubermensch, does it keep everything in motion and use, does it organize itself in motion at every moment? This is the mutual cooperation of all with all, and it is the normal state of nature. Or is the system becoming hobbled and unbalanced with accumulation and waste? This is the mutually destructive competition of atom against atom, with no possible result other than mutual destruction and death.

 

 

Propagate the necessary new ideas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Train in Vain, If That’s Your Only Mode

>

 

 

Reuters continues its Monsanto-instigated campaign of slander against the World Health Organization’s cancer research agency IARC.*

 

1. This study is a lie, as has been proven by the history of herbicides. Even the USDA admitted, even before Roundup Ready crops were commercialized, that these poison plants wouldn’t reduce farming costs but only make it easier to manage greater acreage. Herbicide tolerant GMOs were designed to destroy jobs and accelerate farm consolidation. But the costs never were intended to be lessened, only shifted from labor wages to corporate inputs.

 

2. Even if it did “cost” people more when they’re in the mode of being train passengers to have workers mow and otherwise tend the rail lines, this would then be money those workers would spend as consumers, thereby increasing the velocity of money and rendering the economy more healthy to everyone, including those same “train passengers” insofar as they are also workers, consumers, citizens.

 

This propaganda campaign (the fake “study” and the fake “news article”) is a typical example of media dissemination of corporate austerity ideology, austerity lies. It’s designed to strangle all thought in order to strangle all attempts to free the economy and particularly the food supply from the corporate death grip.

 

But if the train passengers reading it believe the lies and see themselves as living on an island of pure passenger-dom, they’ll find out soon enough that there is no island. Like it or not they’re subject to the forces of the economy far beyond what they pay for train tickets, and in all those ways the bell tolls for them too, not just for people with mowing jobs. Pretty soon they won’t have to worry about the price of a train ticket, since they won’t be able to afford it at any price. That’s what corporate austerity, as propagated by media campaigns like this, has in store for them.

 

 

*Although the WHO as a whole has been consistently pro-poison, the IARC is out of step with the dominant corporate/reductionist ideological framework, instead emphasizing environmental factors in cancer causation:

 

Emphasis is placed on elucidating the role of environmental and lifestyle risk factors and studying their interplay with genetic background in population-based studies and appropriate experimental models. This emphasis reflects the understanding that most cancers are, directly or indirectly, linked to environmental factors and thus are preventable.

 

The proposition that cancer is preventable runs directly counter to the dominant science ideology which views cancer as arising from genetic determinism and/or “bad luck” and the only acceptable response to be massively expensive and interventionist “cures” supervised by Big Drug and other corporate sectors. This ideology is driven by the need of the poison-peddling corporations to obscure and deny the fact that profitable products like glyphosate are in fact major cancer drivers. The corporate flacks are abetted by scientism’s religious zealots who refuse to hear any evil spoken of their technological rabbits’ feet.

 

For example, the fraudulent depiction of oxidative stress as having only “random” effects is typical of corporate science. By contrast, the WHO’s IARC considers oxidative stress to be one of the environmental factors causing cancer and applies this to its assessments of pesticides and other cancer agents. There we see one methodological divide between real science and fake corporate science. This is why the corporate scientific establishment, regulators like the EPA and EFSA, and the corporate media all despise the IARC. And this is why Reuters has embarked upon a vendetta against the agency.

 

I often ponder the irony that even among “decent” people the great heroic metaphor is “curing cancer”, while someone like me who has dedicated my life to preventing cancer is beyond the pale. That’s because even your good people do demand their worthless expensive destructive junk, and the basic template applies not just to corporate-controlled institutions but to everyone. Even cancer must be dealt with only within the framework which exalts productionism, consumerism, technocracy, corporate rule as normal and normative. Even efforts against cancer must never hinder this imperative. Among the people of the system, its supporters and its tacit followers, there is consensus on this.

 

 

 

Using the Enemy’s Own Terms Helps the Enemy

>

 

 

Scientism and technocracy depend upon the people’s tacit acceptance of their authority and legitimacy. Although this patina of authority has been tarnished, it’s still mostly intact. Part of the job of we who oppose corporate-technocratic rule and poisonism is to keep undermining, subverting, eroding this perception of legitimacy. But this mission undermines itself when anti-poison people denote the enemy using the enemy’s own fraudulent term, such as “skeptic”, which the enemy adopted in the first place in order to bolster its perceived authority.

 

Scientism cultists are religious fundamentalists. By definition a fundamentalist can never be any kind of skeptic. A fundamentalist is someone who believes, in an absolute, rote, mechanical manner in one or more “fundamentals”, and who rejects in the same absolute rote mechanical way anything which is at odds with these fundamentals. At both ends there is zero room for skepticism, since there’s zero room for thought. It’s impossible for a fundamentalist to be a skeptic.

 

These fundamentalists call themselves skeptics because it falsely makes a claim to have looked honestly at the evidence and rationally concluded that something is implausible. It also has a general, positive connotation of free thinking (although even many bona fide skeptics are really cynics rather than free thinkers). When the corporate media calls someone a “skeptic” (it’s almost always someone shilling for the system line), they mean “here’s someone who is cutting through all the nonsense of the obstructionists and naysayers, and who will give you the straight talk explaining why to believe the government and the corporations”. And this is what the cultists want the people to think when they call themselves “skeptics”.

 

That’s one example of dissidents using the enemy’s own terms in the same way the enemy uses them, thereby reinforcing the enemy’s propaganda campaign. Perhaps the most common example of this is how often anti-globalists and anti-imperialists still use the term “free trade”, and often “free market”, without even the sarcastic quotation marks. “Free” trade of course is extremely anti-freedom: Globalization is a planned economy, completely dependent upon government subsidies and externalization of costs and risks, and it seeks total coerced participation and to eradicate all alternatives. But capitalism has systematically propagated the term since the 19th century for the obvious reason that people respond in a vague but strongly positive way to the words “free” and “freedom”. That’s why they continue to propagate the term today, because it still has that effect on the great mass of the people who don’t understand globalization and who might be inclined to fear and doubt it (to be truly skeptical of it).

 

So it’s counterproductive and stupid when even the opponents of globalized supply-based coerced trade adopt the enemy propaganda term “free trade”. They’re doing the enemy’s work for him.

 

It’s unfortunate that we have so many people who claim to be activists of a sort, who have a cause and say they want this cause to triumph, yet who so frequently reinforce the enemy’s own propaganda terminology. When I see such harmful sloppiness, and especially when I point it out and they don’t change this self-destructive pattern, I tend to assume that intellectually and philosophically the person is a slob who will never be reliable, since they can’t even impose the most basic terminological discipline on their thinking and communication. Someone like that is ripe to be manipulated and co-opted by every kind of enemy scam.

 

 

This goes for the term and concept science itself. There’s no such mystical thing as “science”, only the people who practice it and the structure of their actions. In principle science is just one of many philosophical tools which helps these people to perform these actions. Today in practice these actions and the way they’re structured and directed comprise only the corporate science paradigm. This corporate directed and controlled paradigm is the everyday practice, funding, and career structure of science.

 

And yet too many anti-poison people implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) endorse scientism’s lie that science is the most important tool, even the only tool. This is even though the deployment of pesticides and GMOs has zero to do with science, while genetic engineering itself has very little scientific theory. It depends almost completely on genetic determinist junk science and brute force empiricism. More importantly, today’s scientific establishment and mass media have only one system and depiction of science, and this is the corporate science paradigm. Any scientific fact or knowledge which contradicts this paradigm is ruled out by the system as unscience.

 

So the fetish of “always stick with the science”, standard among anti-GMO people who are both politically and scientifically naive, not only accepts the enemy’s fraudulent choice of battleground but it demonstrates a confusion about what the mainstream is willing to accept as being part of science in the first place. It’s not just bringing a knife to a gunfight, it’s bringing a chicken to a chess game.

 

Perhaps some of the anti-poison people see themselves as working to compile the factual evidence for some future day when a new scientific paradigm which accepts such facts will exist. (But I’ve never encountered anyone who said anything indicating such a consciousness.) That’s fine, but it has little to do with fighting to abolish poisonism here and now.

 

We who truly are abolitionists, as well as those who truly want to fight for reformist goals, have to understand that this is a struggle of politics, economics, history, philosophy, culture, religion, and biology, not of science; that there is no mainstream battleground of science, so that even if your fight is for the true science you can commence this fight only from outside the system and against it. We have to understand this, and act accordingly.

 

 

Propagate the new and necessary ideas.

 

 

 

 

 

Puerto Rico Amid Climate Chaos and Disaster Capitalism

>

A great physical and geopolitical storm.

 

 

Puerto Rico is a typical victim of colonization. It exhibits all the usual symptoms, from political swaddling to cultural derogation to massive debt predation to total food insecurity and dependency.

 

Globalization is the fully consummated form of colonialism. It starts with the historically colonized “third world” but works systematically to reduce all people everywhere to total economic helplessness and servitude. Globalization acts to destroy all local production and distribution. It destroys this outright or seizes control of it in order to force it into the global commodity framework. It seizes control of indigenous land and resources. It dumps subsidized Western goods. It destroys any functional politics and democracy. It imposes the control of multinational corporations over every part of life it can. It does this purely in the power interests of Western elites. Any benefits it lets trickle down to locals are purely calculated payouts to accomplices. Much of the global South has been crushed under the corporate boot this way. Puerto Rico already has already been subject to the West’s debt indenture shock treatment (“structural adjustment”).

 

Hurricane Maria was the most recent major colonial assault on Puerto Rico. Maria is only the latest of the accelerating procession of extreme storms being driven by climate change, and the latest opportunity for corporate disaster capitalism to further ravage an already devastated target. The climate crisis is the direct result of extreme energy consumption and the industrial campaign to destroy all carbon and nitrogen sinks. Modern technocratic politics has attained consensus on the systematic ravaging of ecosystems, culminating in the rising climate chaos driven by the patterns of energy consumption, waste, and ecological destruction practiced and imposed by Western-style productionism and consumerism. The climate crisis is caused by these actions. Since the elites and their supporters have long known this and in spite of lots of lip service have refused to do anything to avert the worst of it, it’s long been true that climate change is an intentional campaign of aggression against the Earth and all vulnerable peoples such as the people of Puerto Rico. Thus climate change takes its place as the most extreme and far-reaching of the corporate campaigns designed to cause disaster, destruction, and chaos. The corporations then proceed to use the crises they intentionally generate as further opportunities for aggression and profit. All corporate sectors practice this. Corporate agriculture is the most aggressive and destructive practitioner of all.

 

Corporate control of agriculture and food has always been at the core of the globalization onslaught. The US government systematically uses its “food weapon” to wage economic, political, chemical, biological, and often literal shooting warfare. Throughout this history of war and sublimated war, globalized food and agriculture has been a constant weapon and battleground.

 

Puerto Rico needs to produce its own food on an agroecological basis. Only food self-sufficiency can help build political and cultural independence, while dependency upon commodity globalization can only reinforce every kind of dependency. Food sovereignty is the core and foundation, but the implications go much further.

 

If you’re colonized, don’t have your own currency, and want to buy all the worthless expensive junk the colonial power is peddling, you’re going to be enslaved by debt. (Same as the position of the average middle class American.) Until the neoliberal austerity system collapses, it will never wipe out any odious debt, only further “structurally adjust” it as the Obama administration just recently did. The one and only way for a people to free itself is to self-jubilate the debt*.

 

Of course, even if a people roused itself to do this and could make it stick against the escalated US aggression that would follow, it would be in vain if they went right back to the globalized Babylon. (You’re also then voluntarily contributing to the climate chaos and other environmental crises which will keep hitting you ever harder.) Consider how Argentina renounced its debt in 2001, but then turned right around and wiped out its previously self-sustaining food system in order to turn the country into one big industrial soy plantation, all in order to rejoin the globalized debt system. They just couldn’t help themselves. They still craved all the worthless expensive imported junk, exactly like an individual who could grow food to feed himself but just HAS to have a widescreen TV…

 

The self-enslavement scales well, from individual to the people of a country to the “New World Order” of corporate globalization fantasy: One can wish to live like a human being, which makes it possible to live within one’s means while enjoying freedom, self-sufficiency, economic sovereignty and security, well-being, and peace; or one can surrender to the productionist/consumerist derangement, renounce all human measure and hopes, set one’s desires at infinity and set out on the death march of rat-racing and debt, never attaining anything but increasing clutter, waste dumps, dependency, insecurity, ill-health, unhappiness, and fear.

 

The people of Puerto Rico, just like the people of all historically colonized lands, and just like the people of America and the West itself, will have to make the choice truly to free themselves if freedom and security is truly what they wish. All versions of the “we can have it all” fraud comprise the same lie, a symptom of the general pathology of Babylon. On the contrary, those who try to have it all, gamble for the infinite, guarantee themselves one terminal end. The corporate productionist system has one fated end for everyone on Earth from the colonized South to the gradually fading Western middle class: Debt slavery and the total destruction of food security, amid total ecological devastation.

 

To recap the truth about the climate crisis: There is one and only one way to avert the worst consequences of climate change: Greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, stop destroying carbon and nitrogen sinks, rebuild sinks on a massive scale.

 

All else is a lie. The same goes for all other ecological crises. And the same goes for the great spiritual and economic crisis of the terminal Oil Age. You cannot solve the crisis of mortality by suicide or murder. You can solve it only by changing your life, choosing what lets us live, renouncing what is killing us.

 

 

 

 

*There’s been lots of rhetoric about how the Jones Act, a typical example of how the strongest powers like the US still enshrine “protectionist” trade barriers even as they ruthlessly try to wipe out all protective measures on the part of weaker powers, has allegedly been standing in the way of food relief to Puerto Rico. (So-called “free trade”, just like “law”, “property”, “science”, and every other alleged value of modern corporate societies, really is no value at all but only a propaganda notion to be used and abused according to the contexts of corporate advantage.) The form of this rhetoric has often gone “repeal the Jones Act and wipe out the debt.”

 

But this is a self-contradiction, just as it’s a self-contradiction to say “we need to become self-sufficient in food, and the Jones Act must be repealed.” In fact the two items don’t have the slightest logical or practical affinity. Anti-imperialists want to wipe out the debt but recognize the scapegoating of the Jones Act as standard misdirection. (And of course the US government could waive the Act anytime it chose, as it did a week later. In fact the existence of the Jones Act had zero to do with preventing food deliveries, but rather was only a pretext for extortion.) Meanwhile pro-globalizers, especially among congressional Republicans, want to use the crisis as an opportunity to get rid of the Jones Act, destroy the maritime union, further fling open the frontier of corporate rapacity, and drive the people of Puerto Rico and everywhere else deeper into debt slavery. Any force to repeal the Jones Act certainly will not wipe out any Puerto Rican debt, but will only strive to compound it.

 

Therefore there’s zero reason for anyone who actually wants the good of the island’s people to fixate on the Jones Act. (Indeed, from this perspective anything like the Jones Act which possibly could hinder the full fury of globalization is a good thing. It would be similar to how the US embargo has been a great help to Cuban self-sufficiency in food.) But the globalizers are getting their usual help from confused “progressives”, many of the same who couldn’t understand why the Haitian food sovereignty movement destroyed a predatory Monsanto seed shipment in 2010. Monsanto was seeking to take advantage of another “natural disaster”, the 2010 earthquake and UN-caused cholera epidemic. They sought to render the man-made disaster far worse than any “natural” component. So it is with the infantile fixation on “food aid”. Yes, in a crisis immediate food aid often is necessary. But the US-controlled food aid infrastructure has no altruistic component. On the contrary it’s designed to serve as a disaster capitalist campaign of its own, using the opportunity of the crisis to crush any local food production and distribution that still exists and forestall any aspirations to build such food sovereignty systems.

 

There’s great immediate need in Puerto Rico. But there’s a much greater long run need for the people to break their many colonial dependencies and reclaim their ecological sovereignty, most of all their food sovereignty. Hurricane Maria is just the latest and most extreme demonstration that Puerto Rico’s colonial dependency, including its globalization dependency, is not sustainable. Any aid ideology or measure which would hinder realization of this truth and the work toward this necessary goal is counterproductive and ultimately harmful.

 

And to say again, this truth is truth for us all, everywhere.

 

 

 

 

 

The Primal Mammalian Movement

>

From the smallest beginnings, and the power of a seed.

 

 

One of the mainstream media’s primary tasks is to convince each individual media consumer that he’s all alone with any critical or dissenting thought he might have, so it’s best to suppress those thoughts. It’s part of the “softer” neoliberal alternative to fascism: Rather than de jure censorship and violent repression of dissent, get the mass of atomized individuals each to censor himself, use crimestop, never listen to thoughtcrime or entertain any cognitive dissonance.

 

Hierarchical, professionalized science, including its hyperspecialization, is inherently authoritarian and pro-status quo. This is especially true of the technocracy paradigm under which science is assumed by almost all practitioners and fans to be equivalent to the development of technology. Under this paradigm, science = engineering. Most of all it’s true under the corporate science paradigm where this tech development mission automatically is assumed to be in the service of profit-seeking corporations. Putting that together, we have the modern scientific paradigm where what Kuhn called “normal science” quite simply is what otherwise would be called “corruption”.

 

I propose to overthrow this scientific paradigm and replace it with a paradigm of science rededicated to seeking knowledge for its own sake and for the well-being of humanity and the Earth. In the same way that every branch of politics must be socialist if it’s to have any legitimacy at all, so all branches of science must become the ecological versions of their respective disciplines. Therefore the ecological sciences, inflected by chaos theory, must become paramount. In the same way, technological design must adhere to the ecology rather than strive for domination and control. In particular, only agroecology offers a way for humanity to restore the soil, avert the worst of climate chaos and all other environmental crises, eat sufficiently and well, and organize society in a way combining the best of reason, humaneness, and ecological holism. This is the vision of food sovereignty.

 

There’s lots of people already doing good work toward that eventual goal. We need to scale that up, first as a campaign of ideas. As for our personal lives, the Earth’s call to anyone is to commit your life to the cause. That’s a very hard sell in this Mammon theocracy where even among the people who superficially have the right ideas and good intent, most still are objectively Randroids in the way they view the world. Even fellow travelers of the necessary ideas fundamentally don’t understand the concept of having no private existence, existing fundamentally as a political animal, a public citizen. All we can do for starters is to keep propagating ideas which are fundamentally against the whole grain of this theocracy, and try to find fellow atheists versus the superstitions of Mammon, technocracy, scientism, productionism who want to work on that atheism-propagation project. This is one of the basic building blocks necessary to build a true cultural, spiritual, existential movement dedicated affirmatively to the necessary agroecology/food sovereignty transformation, negatively to the total abolition of poison-based agriculture.

 

That’s the ultimate need. What individuals and small groups can do right now:

 

1. Take on as much of the propagation work as one can.

 

2. Become active building up the community food sector as much as one can. Growing some of one’s own food in a garden is a good first step, and the actions quickly scale up from there.

 

3. In one’s personal lifestyle get as independent of the system, as “off-grid” (using that term both literally and metaphorically) as possible.

 

4. To the extent one has to remain enmeshed in the system for the time being, at least be clear in thought and word that this is under duress. I still have to drive a car, but I never think or say anything other than that the car as such has to go. This is contrary to the climate crocodiles who wring their hands and then tout hybrids and electric cars (i.e. fracking cars, nuke cars, coal cars) as some kind of answer. No, that’s just a more pernicious form of climate denialism.

 

5. In general: Do the most good you can and never do evil. I have never once heard of an example of an evil action that was necessary in any way. That’s always a lie.

 

Much of this focuses on ideas and propagating ideas. I’m forced to be a writer since for now I lack any greater scope for action. In Eric Hoffer’s terminology, I’m an activist by nature who’s been forced into the role of the “man of words”. For now there really is no greater scope for action in America, since the necessary movement doesn’t yet exist in any tangible, coherent form. Or, any rudiments which may be cohering are not yet visible to the general culture of dissent.

 

So it follows that the first, prerequisite step toward building this movement is to propagate the necessary ideas for this movement. Not even at first to convince people, but to force the existence of truly alternative and practicable ideas into the public consciousness so that, when the cultural tipping point suddenly comes (history demonstrates that we have no idea when it will come or what proximate cause will trigger it) and lots of people are suddenly looking for a new idea, this set of ideas will be one of the sets laying around ready to be taken up.

 

Toward that great goal, the second necessary preliminary step is to form at least the nucleus of a future mass movement in the form of coherent organizations, of whatever size attainable, which will undertake whatever wedge actions are possible for the time being but whose primary action will be to propagate the ideas as far and wide as possible.

 

 

And then all this must take place in tandem with building up the community food sector. We especially need more local retail producers, and processing infrastructure, and political organization against the state’s repressive campaigns. The community food movement already exists as a vibrant movement with great scope for all the action one could desire (in addition to my so far intermittent market gardening, I’ve worked at a farmers’ market, herbal medicine garden, and am director of two community gardens). We need for the whole thing, from organic horticulture to market gardening to abolition of pesticides/GMOs to a global agroecology transformation, to evolve into one coherent cultural force.

 

 

Propagate the new and necessary ideas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The “Green Revolution” and the Food Weapon

>

From the IMF-imposed debt hole to the literal excavation of the continent for commodity soil mining.

 

 

1. Corporate agriculture’s global liquidation campaign must be seen in the overall neoliberal context. In the 1970s Western banks were shocked by the first realization that fossil fuels are finite and that the Extreme Energy Civilization soon will collapse for lack of sufficient fuel, if it doesn’t destroy itself sooner some other way. The first political manifestation was the OPEC crisis, which threatened both physical fuel stocks and the power of the petrodollar. The finance sector roused itself to offer cheap money across the global South to buy fossil fuel energy and the agricultural system based on extreme energy consumption. The Cold War political term for this agricultural strategy was “green revolution”. It really meant nothing but high-energy-consumption revolution, and the only green was the dollars it was designed to empower. US and Western corporate elites bribed and induced Southern elites into running up odious debts payable by “the country”, i.e. the people. To the extent anyone in the South actually believed the lies and false promises, it’s just like the US student debt scam.

 

2. Having attained this power position through predatory lending and the threat of military intervention, the US corporate state then ordered the countries of the South to eradicate food production and independent community farmers in order to earn currency via cash cropping. In huge numbers the people were driven off their land and into shantytowns. Southern governments were supposed to get dollars by exporting agricultural commodities. But the price plummeted because everyone was exporting the same commodities, including heavily subsidized Western dumping. Meanwhile the forced migrants could “be fed” only by importing Western food commodities. This opened up the range for more dumping, which destroyed the vast majority of Southern food processing and manufacturing. From every angle the agricultural globalization campaign of the US government, the agribusiness cartels, and rich ideologues from the Rockefeller brothers to Bill Gates who coordinate the whole onslaught, is designed and deployed to eradicate all food security of a society. This has been deployed most fully in Asia and Latin America, the main targets of the first “green revolution”. Today Africa is the main target of the “second green revolution” based on GM seeds. Eventually the same total liquidation process is slated to be brought home to the West.

 

3. This aggravates the target countries’ debt crisis. The intended result always was an even worse debt hole. The money was stolen by Southern elites (often parked back in the same Western banks which lent it, ergo the term “petrodollar recycling”), the alleged responsibility for the debt was imposed on the people. Then the IMF swooped in to demand a “structural adjustment” of the debt. Under the auspices of this sham, the criminal government of the country collaborates with the criminal Western globalization administrator to gut every public institution, every element of civil society, leaving nothing but scorched earth to be ravaged by Western corporations. This was never any solution but only a radical escalation of the predations of the Western finance and agricultural sectors, among others. The abstract structural adjustment (which can exist only because the minds of the people are so self-enslaved, they allow it to exist) has its exact physical analogue in monoculture commodity agriculture for globalized commodity export. The Western goal is the general liquidation of these countries as such. They work to turn the entire country into nothing but a scorched-earth “free trade zone”, a country-wide food desert. That’s the eventual end goal for America itself.

 

4. From the point of view of the corporate neoliberal system, the people of the targeted country are completely superfluous and can only be a danger. The globalized commodity agricultural system structurally is set up for maximum vulnerability. The elites have the ability, they have the motive. And while no acute genocide event, such as a directly forced mass famine, has been perpetrated yet, the chronic escalation of hunger, malnutrition, poison-induced illness is a long-running willful campaign. No criminologist would have any problem recognizing the latter as a deliberate crime against humanity, nor the fact that the systemic potential for the former is a state of things which is deliberately sustained and intensified, with the possibility of going into acute genocidal action always a possibility.

 

5. Leaving aside consciously evil motivations, corporate industrial agriculture guarantees mass famine, pandemics, and eventual complete collapse.

 

6. Humanity has only two possibilities for a future: We mammals can do our best to survive and keep for salvage some worthwhile things while the dinosaurs still dominate. Or, humanity can organize to build a cultural, spiritual, economic, eventually political movement to abolish corporate rule and deploy food sovereignty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For Some Definition of “Food”….

>

 

 

 

National Press Foundation president Sandy Johnson described on Twitter a “free 4-day reporting bootcamp,” of which Monsanto is the only for-profit corporation. Reached by Eater for comment, Johnson disclosed that the total donation amount across all four sponsors is $100,000, which covers conference costs for 20 journalists plus speakers and NPF staffers, including travel, hotels, meals, and NPF-branded tote bags, notebooks, and pencils. Johnson refused to provide the precise amount of Monsanto’s contribution, or to say whether sponsorship amounts were evenly or unevenly divided across the four organizations.

Johnson did say that she personally initiated the NPF’s sponsorship relationship with Monsanto after she found herself seated next to a member of the Monsanto board of directors at a dinner party in January. She also said that once Monsanto signed on as a sponsor, the NPF decided to locate the conference in St. Louis in order to include a visit to the company’s labs in their programming. When asked if she was familiar with Monsanto’s controversial reputation, Johnson replied, “In whose eyes? In your eyes? I’m familiar with the Monsanto that created research and science around agriculture that has allowed the United States to feed the world.”

 

We’re here to Feed the World. But before we do that we’re going to use all political, economic, military, and technological force to change your feeding needs. We’ll cleanse, engineer, and kill in order to eliminate your need for food, shelter, community, security, companionship, love, and happiness. Whatever’s left shall be that which subsists on what we choose to feed it. Then verily we shall Feed the World.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two Favorite Quotes

>

AKA, “No, you follow me.”

 

 

I measure “favorite” here by how often the quote comes to mind and I smile ruefully and say “that’s true.”

 

 

1.The all-time champion remains a line I read in some political column or essay many years ago. I can’t recall the writer, outlet, or what he was writing about, but this line has stayed with me, constantly coming to mind:

 

“America is not permissive, it’s just promiscuous.”

 

That sums up perfectly the average American and all US institutions: Grossly self-indulgent where it comes to their own whims and crimes (often including violence), indulgent toward the whims and crimes of others they approve of, puritanical and censorious toward anything they don’t like, and in principle dismissive of such values as tolerance, minding your own business, live and let live, living in peace, even as they scream like stuck pigs the moment anyone impinges upon their sense of entitlement to all these things.

 

2. The challenger is a line from Freud’s essay “Dostoevsky and Parricide”. In contradistinction to the often profound political and religious philosophizing of his fiction, when Dostoevsky moonlighted as a regular political columnist he regressed to run-of-the-mill right wing fulmination. In dismissing Dostoevsky’s political position Freud calls it “a position which lesser minds have reached with smaller effort” (p. 177 in this scan).

 

How often I recall this, when I see all the hyper-educated “experts” and “intellectuals”, all pompously proclaiming their participation in this or that millennial intellectual paradigm, whether it be scientism, technocracy, neoliberalism, establishment versions of environmentalism and other causes, and yet their social and political vision invariably boils down to the same flat-earth worship of the system of money, “jobs”, temporal power, including regurgitating the same lies any half-assed mainstream media columnist is paid to spew. I assume as an axiom that 99.9% of Mensa members have utterly mainstream, mediocre political opinions. (Opinions, not even thoughts, let alone values.) Almost without exception these persons submit to the exact same bounds of political partisanship which are dictated to them by the mainstream media. All their learning, all their alleged intellectual principles, do nothing to give them even a single new idea.

 

This applies to the great majority of self-alleged “radicals” as well. They too constantly renew their devotion to all the main ideas and institutions of productionism and consumerism, however much it pleases them to sneer at “bourgeois” ideology (but their own ideology is bourgeois to the core) and arbitrarily to separate productionism into the two flavors of “capitalism” and “socialism”.* Of course many of them, come time for the kangaroo election (they also have no ideas beyond electoralism), tell the people to vote Democrat. I think Freud would agree that it never required intensive study of Marx to reach the position of “Hope and Change…I’m With Her”. I personally know plenty of utterly uneducated people who reached the same position, or its “Make America Great Again” flip side, with zero effort.

 

Of course most of these pseudo-educated elites are “lesser minds” themselves, mediocrities who had the grinder aspiration and the money to go to school. I’m applying Freud’s quote more to their grandiose ideological pronouncements more than to themselves. The point is that such grand intellectual projects, if they really possessed any of the integrity, profundity, and altruistic impulse their adherents claim for them, ought to better the minds and spirits of those who participate. But we see every day how there’s almost an inverse relationship between the grandiosity of the ideal and the gutter quality, intellectual and moral, of its practitioners and fanboys.

 

To come closer to Freud’s example of the steep drop-off in quality from Dostoevsky’s fiction to his everyday political opinionation, even where it comes to the few writers today capable of the true eagle’s eye perspective, those who speak profoundly about the soon-to-go-fully-kinetic crises of economics, energy, and ecology, they’re still prone to insist on self-indulging in “topical” political commentary where most of them immediately regress to the level of cranky right-wing bloggers. A decades-long spiritual training and intensive reading about the profundities of the relationship of ecology to the economy leads one to Archie Bunker-level political spewing about “the left”? Yes indeed, much lesser minds often reach that position with much less effort. (For real criticism of the left as offering no alternative to productionism and technocracy, one has to come to a site like mine.)

 

Perhaps the greatest irony of this culture is how the “Progress” ideologues are the most hidebound, intellectually stagnant, politically retarded epigones who are congenitally incapable of ever actually progressing to a new idea, a new vision. For them the laws of the world are never anything but the status quo forever. In many ways “progressives” are, objectively speaking, reactionaries in how they desperately cling to revanchist fantasies for things which long ago were disproved and/or destroyed forever, not to mention how meager their fantasies usually are. (To fixate on “bring back Glass-Steagal” manages the feat of being simultaneously nostalgic and lame.)

 

I think their parents who paid for all those university degrees should ask for their money back. All that investment of money, time, effort, all that “thinking”, and look at what the modern intellectual/political class comes up with: Straight parroting of all the most gutter “values”, lies, and ideological precepts of Mammon and the corporations, every last one of these a thousand times refuted. The modern intellectual is hidebound, stagnant, and stupid. The modern expert is a prostituted liar. I say we the people can do better.

 

 

In case anyone thinks I’m exalting novelty or radicalism for their own sakes, no. My total opposition to thoughtless reckless promiscuous technological deployment sufficiently refutes both. Nor is that the case with ideas. I call for propagating and enacting the new and necessary ideas. What’s wrong with productionism isn’t that it’s an old idea and institution, but that it’s proven destructive to humanity and the Earth. What’s wrong with “progress” isn’t that it’s antiquated, but that it’s long been disproven as at best a religious fantasy, more often an ideological lie. What’s wrong with liberalism and “vote Democrat” isn’t that it’s the same old thing, but that it’s long been proven ineffective and a malign scam. Those who still adhere to these disproven notions, claiming to be finding something new and possible in them, are liars and/or idiots.

 

The necessary new ideas, most of all the great need to abolish corporate industrial agriculture and globally transform to agroecology, are those needed to overcome and transcend these failed and destructive old notions and actions. That’s the one and only real kind of progress.

 

 

*This morning I read another piece exalting “science” from a “left” perspective. That means one denounces “Trump” and is indistinguishable from a partisan liberal. For this kind of scribbler, what’s wrong with de jure climate denial is that it’s an affront to the authority of “Science”, a kind of lese majestie. In reality, what’s wrong with any kind of climate denial isn’t that it’s intellectually “wrong”, let alone that it insults the majesty of Science. What’s wrong is that climate chaos already is profoundly destructive of humanity and the Earth and will become far worse. Denial of this and obstruction of real mitigation and adaptation measures comprise a crime against humanity and the Earth. That’s what’s wrong with it, not the liberal vs. conservative culture war part of it.

 

Such misdirection highlights how the de jure deniers are just one minority faction among the deniers. Far greater in number are the de facto deniers, who may “believe in” anthropogenic climate change and often claim to care about it, but whose actions prove they want no change in the status quo paradigms which drive climate change. They only tell various lies and propagate various scams in order to pretend they care and are doing something. These are the climate crocodiles, crying crocodile tears over climate change. They include the liberal hand-wringers, as well as the scientific establishment and its fanboys such as the author of the typical piece I linked above. All these persons and institutions systematically do their worst to drive climate change, even as they deplore it with empty words. This kind of denialism is far more pernicious than the de jure kind, since it reflects a much deeper Earth-destroying inertia.

 

For the climate crocodiles this hypocrisy driven by destructive inertia causes them to fixate on “Trump” even though ecologically destructive policy and ideology is the realm where, more than anywhere else, Trump is nothing but the continuation of the Clinton-Bush-Obama paradigm. And here is the best example of the pathology I mentioned above, where “leftists” decompose to become indistinguishable from liberals, often to the point of touting the Democrat Party, thus demonstrating their own indelible bourgeois character, to use one of their own favorite curse words.

 

All that education and ideological pomposity, and one still decries Trump’s affront to the Paris accord or the “corruption” of the previously public-spirited EPA. So-called lesser minds usually reach those positions with much less effort. It’s taken a bit more effort to work out the new and necessary ideas for a human future. We’ll see how much effort it takes to propagate and then realize them.

 

 

 

 

Comments (4)