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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.
Volatility 
I see a third path, an ever-escalating series of “natural” disasters, with no money reserved or set aside to respond to them, as the country slowly goes broke mainly due to the excessive military expenditures which simultaneously accelerates the runaway global warming at the heart of most of them.
Ever growing areas rendered uninhabitable in various ways, from urban blight becoming empty lots, to coastal areas submerged under rising seas, and repeated record floods rendering flood plains permanently abandoned.
And as things slowly get worse & worse, the corporate criminals, war criminals and climate criminals impose ever more control on managing our perceptions, keeping the population spellbound in the unreal, on every channel and every station, while the world turns to shit all around us.
– by the time we ourselves become climate refugees and are rudely awakened out of our corporate media induced slumber, we’re already been rendered completely voiceless, powerless, atomized and invisible, silently joining the rapidly growing millions already there. Only then does personal awareness, and regret, set in.
this is already happening..
Comment by Anonymous — October 19, 2017 @ 9:55 pm
That’s what I say is most likely. The question I ask is to what extent will a dedicated group work to salvage something worthwhile. By far the most important modern achievement is ecological and agroecological science.
That’s why I feel such infinite hatred for the scientism cultists. I regard them as the ultimate traitors against the human project as such, especially as summed up by true science which is about general human betterment and the pleasure of knowledge. They surrendered everything human to the cult of engineering for the unattainable sake of control, and most of all to Mammon.
Comment by Russ — October 20, 2017 @ 5:31 am
The same dynamic is in play with science – a small group with an unquenchable thirst for money and power is ruining the field for everybody.
To adapt Utah Phillip’s quote :
Science isn’t inherently bad, it’s being corrupted, and those who are corrupting it have names and addresses.
All this is supported by propaganda, in this case the propaganda is being drilled into their heads in educational institutions, in order to get a degree, so by the time the person enters employment they’ve already been conditioned to dispose of any morality or conscience. Same as war criminals, the media conditions us to think of them as “OUR heroes” “support OUR troops” (notice the plurality) when in fact they’re foot-soldiers of a handful of even bigger war criminals, paid less than minimum wage while these bigger war criminals (war profiteers, ‘defense’ contractors and their shareholders) make off with all the loot, bankrupting the country in the process. In every case all the worst problems are under-laid by propaganda.
The power of propaganda lies in it’s simplicity – it provides an excuse to not think at all. Feeling good while avoiding thinking about uncomfortable issues is an irresistible temptation for most people, especially when doing so is made socially acceptable by the manufactured consensus where it appears everyone else is doing it too. It’s not just used by it’s investors to get their way, the much more effective use is to rob us of the language and therefore concepts to even resist at all. – along with conditioning people to desire empty good feelings over harsh reality. Infantilizes us, dumbs us down and makes it seem normal and acceptable, even desirable (anti-intellectualism) to be that way. THIS is the root of wanting leaders – if we thought for ourselves and managed our own affairs, they would be out of a job. Dumbing down the populace is simply job security to them. No analysis of the state of civilization is complete unless the vast power of suggestion is exposed, because without it, one tends to fall into the trap of blaming the victim. Which again renders us powerless. To fail to focus on the small handful who use propaganda (as well as the legal system, conducting economic warfare, economic terrorism on poor workers just trying to survive) as a weapon, and to discount their huge carbon footprints, is to be misdirected to safe venting that accomplishes nothing.
“Live simply so that others may simply live” – apply that truism to climate criminals and see what they really are..
So my favorite quote, which is rather radical since it goes directly to the root of the problem, is actually one I made up:
“the media is our single greatest enemy”
Comment by Anonymous — October 20, 2017 @ 9:13 am
And one of the 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.
I’d say 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. (IOW, 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 a 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. The ecological sciences therefore must become paramount. 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.
Comment by Russ — October 20, 2017 @ 10:32 am
To me that’s not science at all, but rather corruption hiding behind the banner of science.
Reuse, recycle and re-purpose performed by ordinary people is (one of the facets of) true science.
I scour the internet looking for others doing just that, and gather tips and experience on changing what would have been toxic and energy intensive e-waste into useful appliances, systems, applications and tools. Not surprisingly, it’s most often mid-eastern and ‘third-world’ areas where this is happening, while there’s a sad lack of such activity and thought in ‘advanced’ ‘first-world’ areas, since under the constant onslaught of propaganda, consumerism and consumption is the order of the day, so incredible amounts of materials and parts are thrown out. One need merely cut the power cord (for the copper) off a discarded electronic device to guarantee it’s fate as e-waste. I actually have a log jam of too many TV’s in particular (along with a shortage of wire) that were thrown away in working order that I’m hesitant to scrap for the parts because they’re still functional. The most toxic part of course is the picture tube funnel glass – huge volumes of which are sitting in piles at recycling operations because there’s no market or use for it (the dirty secret of e-waste management) while the phosphors are quite valuable rare-earth elements, the mining and processing of which have large environmental impacts. So basically we’re stockpiling such materials waiting for the day when they become scarce enough to create their own demand as natural ore is depleted.
Neighborhood networking with no insanely expensive monthly fees (mesh networks) is another, including free space optical.
– using IR LED’s from tossed out remotes, PIN diodes from discarded appliances, lenses from projection TV sets, and the parts required de-soldered from scrapped circuit boards. Old computers with serial ports are used for gateways and routers.
I’ve achieved color video using VCR boards (wired to record for transmit and play for receive) along with sound using TV channel modulators and TV sound demodulators (IR LED’s have very limited speed, so trying to pass composite video over an IR link results in a blurry B/W picture and with unstable sync at distance, VCR’s compensate for that by converting the video to wide-band FM and the color to a lower frequency, called ‘color under’)
Neighborhood cable TV resulted from this, after I was harassed for transmitting on channel 3 (the cable company here operates a monopoly and aggressively goes after anyone they perceive as competition) I added internet links too by connecting phone line modems to sound-only paths and sharing a few DSL connections among several ‘optical dialup’ users.
This activity is fairly common in other countries, while here ‘thinking outside the box’ is rare. We’re all just supposed to pay out the nose for overpriced poor quality, individually spied upon service, while the city, county and state participates in nickel & diming us to death on top of it, with added fees and taxes.
– just part of being the change you want to see in the world. I completely ignore television and only play movies from a large library (free video on demand) which is constantly expanding. Now using wi-fi links and catering to smart phones as well these days..
Comment by Anonymous — October 20, 2017 @ 1:02 pm
That’s interesting stuff. I wish I could remember which post it was (years back) where commenters had a good discussion about the prospects for an “off-grid”, jerry-rigged local-based internet. I know little about such things, though I need to learn about off-grid wind and solar. There’s some opportunities to work with that around my way.
Comment by Russ — October 20, 2017 @ 3:36 pm