Venezuela, Russia, Britain, Greece…..America

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There is complete consensus on transforming the Amazon to this.

 

 

1. The US government openly is trying to overthrow the democratically elected government of Venezuela* for no reason other than because it’s nominally “socialist” (really a hybrid more capitalist than socialist) and simply for the sake of chaos and destruction, which are the primary values and goals of the late-stage Extreme Energy Civilization. The US government simply issued a diktat that Maduro is not the real president of Venezuela, while some geek who was never even a candidate, who has no broad political support at all, who a large proportion of Venezuelans had never heard of before, but who was brought to the US and put through one of its Chicago Boy-type stooge-training programs, is in fact the real president.

 

[*At any rate Maduro has more democratic legitimacy, in terms of the transparency of ballots and the percentage of votes received from the electorate, than US president Trump, prior US presidents Obama, Bush, Clinton and most others, UK prime minister May, French premier Macron, German premier Merkel, and most other Western executive officers. Electoralism is not a value at this site, but all these governments and political habitats starting with the US profess electoral “democracy” as the highest political value, so as always we hold them to their own standard. By the United States’ own standard, Venezuelan democracy is far more legitimate than that of the US, and Maduro is one of the most legitimate heads of state on earth.]

 

The US is heading up a coalition of anti-democracy regime changers. Like synchronized swimmers the EU and almost all Western governments issued statements recognizing Guano or whatever his name is as the legitimate president. In the US both halves of the Imperial One-Party and the entire political-cultural-academic-media class all rushed as one to condemn Venezuelan democracy and support the incipient US coup with the inevitable destruction of the country and its people guaranteed to follow. To be as symbolically explicit as possible, Trump dug up Elliot Abrams, overseer of the Nicaraguan “Contra” death squad campaign, to be architect of the terror campaign the US plans for Venezuela.

 

Although Democrats have a deranged personal hatred for Trump and oppose almost anything he does (almost all of which is substantively the same as Obama policy), including Trump’s announcement that he plans to withdraw US troops from Syria and Venezuela (I’ll believe it when they’re actually out; but in the meantime Trump gave the occasion for the liberals as a whole to demonstrate their rabid lust for maximal war), the one point of friendship where they’ll joyously join hands and sing with him is an incipient new imperial adventure, new war, new bloodbath.

 

The US already has been waging murderous war on Venezuela’s people for twenty years through economic sanctions. Democrats have all the same blood on their hands as Republicans already, but as we saw with their sanctions war on the Iraqi people which murdered over half a million children, there’s no amount of dead which can satisfy Democrat blood-lust. As one of their most respected and revered moral leaders has said of this genocide against children, “We think it was worth it.”

 

Now they want to escalate the war to total physical destruction. The Democrat Party speaks as one on this. The fake “insurgents” did their best to dodge any comment at all. Only when pressed did the likes of Bernie Sanders speak out, and when they did it was to regurgitate Trump’s lies. Only lamely at the end did some of them say “nevertheless the US shouldn’t interfere”. Of course the sanctions they’ve all supported have constituted massively interference all along. They’re the direct cause of most of Venezuela’s economic chaos and suffering. Of course, in standard disaster capitalist practice, US propaganda blames the victim for the disaster that the US itself directly caused. The entire US political class – both parties, their partisans, the entire media – mouths this lie as one.

 

The evidence record is that the US corporate state, both flavors of the Destruction One-Party, the entire US political-cultural-media class have no goal other than complete destruction in every way. I can’t think of a single way in which US policy, and the overall US culture, isn’t committed to destroying as much of humanity and the Earth as possible, for nothing but destruction for its own sake. It’s certainly not for any alleged benefits of power or wealth; it’s clear that none of these psychopaths could ever be satisfied in any way with anything less than the infinite.

 

The only thing they’re stopping short of, so far, is a nuclear first strike. But it a guarantee they’ll come to this as well if things keep going like this.

 

 

2. Part of the general situation today for globalization and empire:

 

“Of all areas of global power politics today, international finance and foreign investment have become the key flashpoint. International monetary reserves were supposed to be the most sacrosanct, and international debt enforcement closely associated.

 

Central banks have long held their gold and other monetary reserves in the United States and London. Back in 1945 this seemed reasonable, because the New York Federal Reserve Bank (in whose basement foreign central bank gold was kept) was militarily safe, and because the London Gold Pool was the vehicle by which the U.S. Treasury kept the dollar “as good as gold” at $35 an ounce. Foreign reserves over and above gold were kept in the form of U.S. Treasury securities, to be bought and sold on the New York and London foreign-exchange markets to stabilize exchange rates. Most foreign loans to governments were denominated in U.S. dollars, so Wall Street banks were normally named as paying agents.

 

That was the case with Iran under the Shah, whom the United States had installed after sponsoring the 1953 coup against Mohammed Mosaddegh when he sought to nationalize Anglo-Iranian Oil (now British Petroleum) or at least tax it. After the Shah was overthrown, the Khomeini regime asked its paying agent, the Chase Manhattan bank, to use its deposits to pay its bondholders. At the direction of the U.S. Government, Chase refused to do so. U.S. courts then declared Iran to be in default, and froze all its assets in the United States and anywhere else they could.

 

This showed that international finance was an arm of the U.S. State Department and Pentagon.”

 

 

At least as early as 1979 (when the Pentagon seized and re-sold weaponry Iran already had paid for) the world has known that the US government and international banks will engage at will in outright robbery of assets legally deposited within the US-dominated system. In spite of this knowledge Venezuela’s Bolivarian government has been unflaggingly in its desire to be part of this system and therefore has been victimized by it repeatedly. In December 2018 the Bank of England simply stole $11 billion worth of Venezuelan gold deposits. It refused to follow the Venezuelan central bank’s instructions to begin to transfer the gold and told them it would no longer respond to any communications from Venezuela. This is straight robbery, straight organized crime, straight gangsterism. But it’s neither new, nor surprising, nor unexpected. Obviously Venezuela was willing to run this risk for the privilege of participation in the global economy of total destruction.

 

As we’ve seen so many times, participation in globalization is a badly misguided commitment for any nation vulnerable to economic and physical aggression, or any nation who is merely one of the passengers along for the commodity globalization ride (often an extremely tempestuous ride) rather than one of the drivers.

 

I’ve written many times how it’s especially insane to relinquish one’s food security and self-sufficiency in food by subjecting food production to any commodity system. The national governments which have done this and all propagandists everywhere who have supported it are Nuremburg-level criminals.

 

It’s similarly insane for a nation to subject itself to colonial dependency by basing its economy on “resource extraction” (including the physical destruction of one’s own land), with these extracted materials then placed on the global commodity market. Thus a people willingly enslaves itself to the global finance system and the whims of Washington. Why not just offer to become de jure slaves on the estates of the banksters? (Libertarian ideology offers baroque justifications for voluntarily selling oneself into slavery.)

 

It would be bad enough to physically destroy your own country to extract oil for your own use. To do so in order to put the oil on the global commodity market is insanity. But then all modern governments, and all cultural-political elites among all peoples who have such elites, are insane.

 

Venezuela including its so-called “socialist” government is a willing, eager participant in the capitalist globalization system.** As are Russia and China, so often touted as alleged opponents of this system. In reality all the actions of Russia, China, Venezuela, and other officially designated “enemies” prove that these governments never wanted to challenge US-led globalization and don’t want to challenge it even now. All they want is to take what they see as their rightful place within the system and be treated accordingly. Only the flat-out totalitarian lunacy of US bullying and aggression is forcing these countries into the de facto position of challengers and therefore rivals if not enemies. In the same way that only US aggression has created Muslim terrorists, so only US aggression has created any opposition at all to US domination of the globalization system. And there’s still no systematic opposition anywhere on earth to globalization as such, other than the rising opposition and counterattack of the Earth itself.

 

Like anyone else, the people of Venezuela would be vastly better off if they had neither oil nor gold. That’s why it’s called the resource curse. Humanity as a whole would be infinitely better off if fossil fuels never had existed, and if nothing existed which could have been made to play the role gold has played.

 

People don’t eat oil or gold, they eat food, which they’re perfectly capable of growing for themselves if they choose. The problem of the Venezuelans, Greeks, and so on up to the Americans themselves, is that they want all the worthless Earth-destroying material junk instead of health, happiness, and freedom. I recall well how the people of Greece were targeted for economic destruction in order to bail out German banks, how they wailed and cried about this, how they voted to oppose the Troika’s austerity program, and yet how after all that they still opposed leaving the EU. They just couldn’t conceive of a world without merely the idea of “free trade” in allegedly-less-expensive worthless Earth-destroying junk. Never mind that they were dooming themselves to impoverishment and wouldn’t able to buy the junk anyway.

 

This is the self-enslavement of the production-consumption religious insanity which is the core psychic force driving globalization and modern civilization itself. That’s why all civilized masses (“nations”) are made up of slaves who wallow amid cancer-giving poison. That’s why the Greeks immolated themselves. That’s why the Russians still temporize. That’s why Bolivarian Venezuela practically poised itself for the war crisis it now faces. And that’s why all civilized peoples have shackled themselves to an unsustainable mode of agriculture where they are in fact eating oil, figuratively and physically (the diet is loaded with fossil-derived plastics and pesticides and other toxins) but which will soon collapse leaving them to starve in earnest. Because they chose slavery over freedom.

 

As for the American Mordor itself, the gaslight-pulsing glowing-plutonium core of the global psychosis, the American people are doing the same thing. They’re surrendering their lands as sacrifice zones to fracking and pipelines, to poison plantations and state-wide fire traps, all to produce globalized commodities usually earmarked to send to Asia or Europe. Mr. MAGA, of course, wants to destroy even more American land to send liquid natural gas to Europe at taxpayer-funded below-cost prices. Just as all US logging, mining, and fossil fuel extraction is done at a massive loss which the taxpayers make up. The voters vote for it unanimously every time. Nor does there exist any alternative within US electoralism. America has terminal cancer of the body and soul. This places the domestic political depravity I discussed above in its biological, existential context.

 

 

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 and subject to imperial terror and aggression. The Venezuelans and Americans are colonized. The Venezuelan currency depends on its ability to sell dollar-denominated oil which is as good as having no currency. Of course the American 99% have no control over the dollar and therefore no native currency. The Greeks, Italian, Iberians, Irish, and the rest of the EU have no currency of their own. (Except Germany itself, which has transformed the euro into a de facto German-controlled currency. Thus by a longer and more convoluted route the German elites have attained the economic goals of WWII.) The one and only way for a people to free itself is to end their self-enslavement, end all their dependencies and addictions, and renounce the lust for junk, including the self-jubilation of all debts.

 

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 health, happiness, freedom, 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.

 

All the peoples of all colonized lands, including the peoples 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 global 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.

 

We’re undergoing the great spiritual, economic, ecological, existential crisis of the terminal Oil Age. We cannot solve the crisis of mortality by suicide or murder. We can solve it only by changing our lives, choosing what lets us live, renouncing what is killing us.

 

 

 

**The fact that it’s still possible to use the term “socialist” for ecologically destructive, oil-extraction-dependent (therefore by definition colonial) systems is a perfect example of why I renounced “the left”. Just as it’s a fact that anything truly feminist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist has to be socialist, so it’s also true that ecological socialism is a redundant term. It’s not possible to separate ecological domination from social domination. The two invariably go hand in hand. Of course a capitalist hybrid system like that of Venezuela, or like what the Bernbots claim to want in the US, isn’t socialist even from a purely human-centric point of view. Meanwhile “the left” as a whole has renounced even anti-globalism, as we’ve seen with its complete dereliction on Brexit. Here was an opportunity to seize the controversy, to place the referendum in the context of anti-globalization and democracy vs. the technocracy represented by the European Commission, to put a socialist Brexit on the agenda, and the leftists all ran home to globalist mama. They did it for the same reason as the gilded youth of London, the same reason as always: In their indelible corruption they feared their worthless “stuff” might cost a bit more, or their swank weekends in Spain wouldn’t go as seamlessly, or that it wouldn’t be as easy to go job-hunting around the continent for parasitic global-corporate-system jobs. (Needless to say no real kind of human work, work which by its nature is bound up with a geographical region, was enhanced by EU-style globalization, quite the contrary.) In addition to allegedly opposing globalism and corporate rule, I also thought leftism was supposed to oppose the employer-“job” model as such.

 

No, the left offers no alternative, and no way out of the all-encompassing existential crisis of humanity and Earth.

 

 

 

 

 

The Climate Crisis Goes Vastly Beyond Any Notion of “Rights”

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“While scientists and climate negotiators mostly speak in terms of human impacts, we must begin to see the planet and its atmosphere as an ecosystem unto itself, worthy of being accorded the highest rights and protections….”

 

I’ve long respected the basic strategy of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and consider this community rights strategy to have promise against such specific physical assaults as fracking, pipelines, highways, CAFOs, etc. But I fear even they must falter where it comes to the vision necessary to come to grips with the climate crisis.

 

They’re correct to dismiss the “scientists and climate negotiators [who] mostly speak in terms of human impacts…”, primarily because these speak fraudulently even in those terms. None of them comes close to calling for the one and only meaningful response to the climate crisis: Stop emitting*, stop destroying sinks, rebuild sinks.

 

And it’s pure truth that “we must begin to see the planet and its atmosphere as an ecosystem unto itself” within which we ourselves are inextricably wound, bound, dependent.

 

But when they go on to say Gaia is “worthy of being accorded the highest rights and [legal] protections” I reply that we must get past the “rights”-speak which is yet another figment of the modern civilization dedicated to murdering Gaia. No great spiritual/cultural movement in its ascent and prime ever spoke of “rights”, only of power and responsibility. We do need a cultural campaign for a sea change in the human view of nature; this is a necessary part of spurring the necessary action. But to call for this change in terms of according liberal bourgeois “rights” to nature would be insufficient even if such rights were to be technically enacted. (Itself an extreme long-shot.) We’ve long seen how well legal rights actually protect us. We’ve seen how well blacks’ being accorded full civil rights has eradicated systemic racism. But what we’re up against here is the equivalent of systemic racism, albeit on a vastly greater, vastly more aggressive level. (Besides, the very liberals who would have to get behind it tend to be hostile toward the idea. Which is what one would expect, since by definition liberals are pro-capitalist, pro-property, pro-civilization; these are core principles of liberalism upon which the ideology’s adherents would never accept significant constraints. But any move to respect, let alone restore Gaia on any significant level automatically must mean the most extreme constraints on these forces of destruction.) The fact is, while notions of fighting for the legal rights of nature may sound good superficially**, they’re really another example of seeking reform within the congenitally destructive framework, a project self-evidently foredoomed to failure.

 

 

 

*Let’s be clear on what “stop emitting” means: It means STOP EMITTING, completely, NOW. It does not mean “a slight reduction in emissions by 2050,” such as envisioned (and falsely, at that) by the Paris Accord. That’s a contemptible dodge, a lie as bad as any which has wafted from ExxonMobil. If your spouse was a terrible drunk who lost their job, beat you, wrecked the car, set the house on fire, would you ask them to moderately reduce their drinking by 2050? Or would you demand they totally stop, NOW?

 

Of course the real reason the fraudulent climate crocodiles prefer the 2050 notion is that they themselves love getting soused, and they cherish all the same destructive actions. That’s why they refuse to acknowledge what’s necessary, for the climate crisis and every other ecological crisis. Only the total collapse of this “civilization” will change anything, and that’s the correction Gaia ultimately will impose.

 

To recap the fact, there is one and only one way to avert the worst consequences of climate change: Stop emitting, stop destroying carbon sinks, rebuild sinks on a massive scale.

 

All else is a lie. Especially, any version of claiming the crises can be met within the framework of productionism and capitalism is the most odious lie of all.

 

 

**I myself have found the rights-for-nature idea attractive at times. But I still always thought my way to what’s truly necessary:

 

“This judgement is nothing new but restates the truths of natural law, the moral and biological truth known to all of us..This tribunal has only restated the eternal truth. What’s lacking is the will to exercise this truth in reality…Multinational corporations like Monsanto comprise the core of this system, which is dedicated to aggrandizing these criminal organizations. So there’s an obvious contradiction in calling for Monsanto’s own lawyers, bagmen, and thugs to arrest and prosecute it. The same goes for corporate rule as such…To apply law and order to the crimes of ecocide and to all crimes against humanity cannot be done within the framework of a civilization dedicated to exploitation, waste, and destruction. The laws of such a civilization and the way these laws are enforced always will follow from this underlying dedication.

 

To make the call to justice real requires the movement dedicated to realizing these truths and values. We cannot carry out the tasks of necessity and justice within the framework of a system dedicated to every anti-human and anti-ecological action and institution. We can do it only through the action of a movement dedicated to abolishing these crimes and abolishing their ideological and institutional basis…The Monsanto Tribunal, in its compilation and assessment of the evidence and the history, has only provided the latest demonstration that humanity and the Earth cannot “co-exist” with these destroyers, and therefore cannot continue with a regulatory and legal model dedicated not just to this co-existence, but to co-existence on the basis of corporate profit [and destruction for the sake of destruction] as the great normative purpose. The Tribunal itself identifies this as the core of the crisis, even if it doesn’t draw the necessary strategic and organizational conclusions.

 

Morally, rationally, and legally the ruling of the Monsanto Tribunal is true and follows from the ruling of the Nuremburg Tribunal. The only difference so far is the force to put the truth into effect. Only the abolition movement can muster and organize the strength and the will to realize all the necessary truths. We have to begin.”

 

 

 

 

What’s Really Indicted by the Indictment

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On its face the indictment of some Russians for internet trolling sounds just like all the previous “evidence” for Russian perfidy: A big nothing. Certainly all the attempted manipulations of every country on Earth add up to nothing compared to the daily manipulations all over the world engaged in by the US corporate system. It’s the field against Tiger Woods in his prime. But the real goal of this indictment is the subsequent criminalization of anti-corporate dissent as such. The key part isn’t the allegations about “foreigners”, but about what kind of speech they engaged in which allegedly is criminal: Regular, run-of-the-mill political speech.

 

The mainstream media is sounding the toy bugle of judgement day for Russia’s day that will live in infamy, while our earnest “progressives” are engaged in microscopic parsing of the statues invoked in the indictment, trying to discover whether this is “real” evidence that Putin is the Antichrist. Reading them, a visitor from another planet would think there’s such a thing as a “rule of law” here. But in reality there’s nothing but Might Makes Right with the law being nothing but a weapon to be deployed however power wants to deploy it.

 

All one needs to know about US concepts of “citizenry”, “foreignness”, who is and isn’t “alien” etc., is that in the US/globalization system corporations are considered legal persons as well as given priority over all nominal “law” at globalization tribunals, and that in principle and practice big money is the only real right. The most direct legal application of this to elections is Buckley v. Valeo and its appendix Citizens United. These are just logical extensions of the Mammon ideology as such, which believes money is a real thing and that all human-to-human and human-to-Earth relations should be reduced to money relations. All forms of liberalism (and conservatism) and the mainstream media agree with this and are components of it.

 

So it’s easy to see that the “rule of law” exists nowhere but in the minds of regressive progressives. Money also doesn’t really exist, but unlike with rule of law, the rule of money is enforced aggressively enough that it has become the real power.

 

So all one needs to know about these Russian allegations is what a piddling amount of money is involved, even according to the indictment. That says it all about the real effect of Russian trolling if it ever existed, how much attention anyone should pay to it, and how the real purpose of the indictment lies elsewhere: Part of the ongoing campaign, supported across the mainstream political spectrum and by all mainstream institutions, to criminalize any real dissent on the part of Americans themselves. From the corporate mainstream’s point of view, including the Democrat and Republican Parties, we are the true foreign criminals.

 

 

 

 

 

The Action Spirit of King

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In April 1963 Martin Luther King and his fellow Birmingham direct actionists sat in jail. They had expected such a response from the segregationist power structure. It was also predictable that they’d be hearing criticism and condemnation from most of the people who in theory should have been on their side. King anticipated this, and responded immediately with an eloquent refutation and exposure of this collaborator position. This was the Letter From Birmingham Jail.

 

In the letter King refutes those who object to demonstrations, boycotts, sit-ins, civil disobedience in general, those who reject anything but the most lukewarm, “civil” criticism which is guaranteed to remain impotent. He opens up with their standard objection to any real resistance, that it’s “unwise and untimely”. Today this could be the signature of all who are lukewarm.

 

Protest is always timely and wise in the broadest sense. As for the specific timing, we who want humanity and the Earth to have a future must recognize when the time has come, and when today is the day. Our task today isn’t the same as that of the civil rights movement. They sought a specific set of reforms. They were up against an obsolete set of attitudes and practices which for the most part were an embarrassment to corporate power, and the reforms the movement sought wouldn’t interfere with corporate imperatives. Indeed, the end of segregation was put to good political use by corporate power. It has helped render racially astro-turfed divide-and-conquer even more insidious and harder to counteract. It also generated the terrain for anti-political “identity politics”. This isn’t the fault of the civil rights movement, but rather these are crimes of the corporations and the rich and the fault of malingering racists and corporate liberals themselves. But we should be aware of this history of corporate domination.

 

Today we need to abolish poison-based agriculture and transform food production and distribution on the rational, scientific basis of agroecology and the social basis of food sovereignty. We must build this alternative to the corporate agriculture and food system, counter to it where possible, in resistance to it where necessary. This is a permanent necessity whose goal is the eventual complete replacement of this world of waste, bottlenecks, and destruction by a world of socioecological health, well-being, and freedom.

 

We’ll constantly be propagating the need for total abolition. Along the way we’ll encounter many opportunities for the kind of direct action and civil disobedience campaigns King led. We’ll likely have to engage in civil disobedience on behalf of the Community Food movement which the corporate system is trying to repress as an economic and political threat to its domination. Up against these assaults, we’ll often encounter the same sort of opposition, including the opposition King specifically addresses in his Letter.

 

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds. You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations.

 

When we speak of the global ecological and human network and the global corporate assault upon it, in particular the global onslaught of poison-based agriculture, we know that anyone who lives as part of Earth can never be considered an outsider anywhere upon it. Conversely, corporations and the hominid functionaries of corporations are purely alien to the Earth, nothing but parasite squatters on the planet’s surface. They never can be considered part of Earth or humanity. They themselves proclaim this with their ugly foreigners’ disdain for what they call “the rock” with its “messy nature”.

 

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham.

 

1. The injustice is clear.

 

There’s many reasons to abolish poison-based agriculture. It’s agronomically and environmentally totalitarian. It poisons the soil, all crops and the environment. It accelerates soil, water, air, and habitat destruction. Industrial agriculture is by far the worst driver of the climate crisis. The longer humanity remains in thrall to industrial agriculture, the more abject its dependency shall become, the worse the environmental destruction shall be, and the more profoundly the global ecology shall be chaotically wrought.

 

Poison-based agriculture also is destroying our health. All pesticides cause cancer, infertility, birth defects, organ damage, and autoimmune disease such as allergies, asthma, autism, disease of the gut, and gastrointestinal inflammation which leads to every other kind of disease. These are just the best documented effects. It’s likely GMOs themselves also cause these health harms. Glyphpsate-tolerant crops are nutritionally denuded, and eating the processed foods made from them merely adds to the nutritional deficiency already inherent in diets centered on such “foods” and the many diseases this can cause or exacerbate.

 

The most amazing thing is how all this is over such a pathetic, worthless product. Pesticides and GMOs are shoddy, antiquated, failure-prone products based upon the backward, luddite mental framework of dealing with crop pests and disease with poison. Agricultural poisons and GMOs don’t work for any purpose which could actually help people. GMO yield is poor, no improvement over non-GM conventional agriculture. They require far more pesticides than non-GM conventional agriculture. By helping weeds and insect pests build resistance to pesticides, they generate pest resistance against themselves, uncontrollable by the same poisons which were supposed to be the reasons for having these GMOs in the first place. The ”special” GMOs – those for drought resistance, vitamin fortification, nitrogen-fixing, etc. – are all media hoaxes.

 

These factors build the despair, anger, and the sense of social, political, and economic bottlenecks which are driving the rising global will to rebuild the community food system and abolish the industrial food system.

 

 

2. We the people owe don’t it to those who in principle are our public servants to negotiate with them, but nevertheless we have done so ad nauseum. Citizens have fought for and passed anti-corporate legislation at the local level. Citizens and farmers have filed lawsuits like OSGATA vs. Monsanto. Almost everyone involved with the rising Community Food movement has wanted to do so with the blessing of the power structure and has been appeasement-minded about it.

 

No, we’ve done all we can to negotiate. The fact is, representative democracy itself with its elections were supposed to constitute such negotiations. But this always was a sham. System politicians have done nothing but lie to the people and have never felt the slightest obligation to live up to their promises after the election. Indeed, ideologues of fake electoral “democracy” have explicitly argued that the “representative” has no obligation to his constituents at all after the election is over, but is free to “vote his conscience”. In this case conscience is a euphemism for corrupt personal interest.

 

The “negotiation” failed. We can never have a responsible, responsive, legitimate government in its current form. In his reform context Martin Luther King came to a similar conclusion.

 

As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community.

 

All that’s left to us is self-purification, and then to go out there and do it.

 

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

 

This is a direct rejoinder to those who want to keep we the people kettled inside a polity-wide “free speech zone”.

 

King goes on to discuss the change of governmental administrations which never constitutes a structural change. He agrees with the anarchists: Only direct action ever accomplished anything, and it did so with nonviolent force.

 

My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

 

We have not only the right, but the obligation, to disobey unjust laws:

 

One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I it” relationship for an “I thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

 

Today things are even worse than Buber’s “I-it”. Mammon and the corporate technocracy seek to reduce all relationships to purely technical and money relationships. This system does not recognize the existence of human beings, only technology and money. It views all relationships as “it-it.” Corporate personhood and patents on life, two kinds of demon worship, represent the most clear distillations of this.

 

On the contrary, the only relationships are ecological relationships, most importantly to us the relations of human being to human being. Therefore the only just laws would be laws in harmony with ecosystems and interrelating constructively with them, since the only thing which biologically exists are these ecological relationships. Agricultural and ecological pioneers long knew this intuitively and empirically, and over the course of the 20th century science has confirmed it. By contrast, poison-based agriculture, genetic engineering, “intellectual property”, property in land, the corporate-held agricultural system, segregates we the people from our work, from our land, from our food, from our own bodies. The whole ideology of productionism, consumerism, scientism, technocracy, instrumental reason, arises out of a fundamental self-loathing and hatred for the physical earth and the physical human body.

 

The “I and Thou” invoked by Buber and King also signifies the human affinity with the Earth, its natural ecosystems, its soil, its crops, its food, and especially the earthly human labor which indelibly interacts with these. The “I and it” indicates our sundering from all that makes us human, our forced exile driven by corporate agriculture. Alien, anti-human corporations and all that comes from them render human society a destructive and self-destructive parasite squatter on the surface of the earth, no longer a constructive part of it. With every action corporate industrial agriculture expresses its contempt for the earth. It insults the soil as the cradle of all complex life, treating it as nothing but an inert medium. It insults the seed as the universal embryo, treating it as a commodity to be painted, pimped, and most of all controlled. It adds the obscene injury of its wholesale poisoning of the soil, air, water, crops, and environment.

 

Legally and ideologically also this is a surface squatter regime and an obscene alienation of humanity. The land, the soil, the very seed are “owned”, which word we must render in all corporate contexts as controlled and dominated by an alien, anti-human entity. Indeed, a patent on a seed is alienation squared, since the patent is an abominable segregation and sundering of we the people from our common heritage, and it’s “owned” by an alien, anti-human entity whose very existence is also an abomination.

 

Economically as well this is a surface squatter regime and an obscene alienation from humanity. Growing our food is the essential human labor, the core human economic activity, the primary economy, a deep cultural and spiritual endeavor. It’s the main form of our communion with the Earth and our thread of its harmony. We’re now to be alienated from this, driven off the land. For the Western middle class, into spiritual ghettos. For the global South, into physical concentration camps called shantytowns. And soon this bell tolls also for us in the West, as our economic liquidation proceeds and the capitalist era deteriorates to a more brutally direct mode of tyranny.

 

We’re all too familiar with this type today:

 

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

 

Today the “moderate” isn’t an outsider with a shallow understanding, but either a predatory collaborator or a willing part of the prey herd himself. His moderation and lukewarm stance are homicidal and suicidal. He sides with the oppressor against those who would fight.

 

King describes how the inertial mass deplores those who fight as “extremists”, as instigators of violence, and as being too impatient. But these charges are false. It’s the enemy who’s extreme, it’s the enemy who’s violent, and we’ve been far too patient for far too long.

 

But in all the things we do, we aren’t the ones generating the “tension” so unpleasant to conformists. Where it comes to that, we’re merely symptomatic:

 

Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

 

This is the only path forward.

 

King describes how the early Christians were sustained by their faith and their relentless will against long odds.

 

Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.” But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests.

 

The hardest thing is to overcome this feeling of astronomical intimidation. The mission is daunting, and existing institutions can play no constructive role.

 

 

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world.

 

 

This will ring true for us today wherever we transpose it to any institution of the corporate-dominated system.

 

Today in the West the conflict isn’t over de jure slavery (but there’s still much of that worldwide) nor de jure segregation (but land policy is very effective at “segregating” out of existence small farmers who produce food for the community and do so without poisons; and in general we’re all being driven off the land and segregated into ghettos, shantytowns, tent cities, cemetaries), we are being economically destroyed and physically malnourished and poisoned. We are being given cancer. Ecosystems, carbon sinks, arable soil all over the world are physically poisoned and destroyed. New crop deployments based on massive upsurges in dicamba and 2,4-D will turn vast swathes of US cropland into the equivalent of Times Beach, while the “New Alliance” plan to recolonize Africa coupled with corporate-driven climate chaos threatens to turn all of sub-Saharan Africa into a literal desert. Does the Earth have the luxury of the “patience” King discusses here?

 

I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

 

 

Time itself is neutral, and the flow of time itself has no characteristic independent of what we choose to do with it. Abolitionism is a way of life. It’s not just labor toward a goal, let alone the ideas contained in the goal itself. Most of all it’s a way of life. The goal is most realized in the here and now, every day. This way of life means not only exercising ecology and freedom in any way we can but also fighting for it everywhere we must. This adds to the challenge and striving, but this challenge is the challenge of being human at all. In the context of King’s struggle he was writing of direct action in the most literal sense. Abolitionists of agricultural poisons will certainly have all too many opportunities and needs for such direct action as well. But primarily we rise to the direct action of rebuilding our agricultural and food systems, building agroecology and food sovereignty, propagating far and wide the ideas of these while rejecting the poison systems on a personal and group level and propagating the demolition and condemnation of the ideas of these.

 

The essence of humanity is to take responsibility for oneself within the community and ecology, to achieve power over oneself, to exercise one’s responsibility, combining one’s personal strength in free cooperation with others to build a free and prosperous human community. Only in such a community can we then create the space for the essence of humanity, positive freedom. This is spiritual freedom, creative freedom, political freedom, participatory freedom, ecological freedom. These can exist only on the basis of the cooperative prosperity which affords the time and opportunity for this freedom. Only this deserves the name democracy, and only this can be called in the most profound sense civilization.

 

Today corporate-technocratic barbarians seek to destroy democracy, civilization, agriculture, the world ecology, humanity itself. These barbarians are the opposite of the original tribes raging out of Central Asia. Those were the vigorous barbarians of ascent toward a richer civilization. Today’s barbarians of decadence are rotted and malevolent, ugly and stupid, meanly wicked. Their technology and wealth renders them the most powerful ruling class in history, at the same time that their utter lack of any redeeming quality whatsoever renders them history’s nadir, history’s most degraded, nihilistic, parasitic, worthless ruling class. They represent not a stage of Western Civilization but its final self-cannibalization. This is the end of this pseudo-civilization, for better or worse. The corporate barbarians certainly intend the worst: The full reinstatement of a slave economy, through economic liquidation, debt indenture, and corporate domination of agriculture and food.

 

We can defeat this satanic plan if we redeem from the wreckage of the corporate industrial agriculture system the greatest treasure we’ve won: The consciousness that we the people can feed ourselves and rule ourselves. We can realize and fulfill our freedom, well-being, and strength through full ecological democracy.

 

All we need is to accept this fact, believe in it, take responsibility for it, take action upon it. The true Human Renaissance beckons. This is the same human evolution and salvation for which Martin Luther King fought, for which he sat in jail, for which he wrote a letter from that jail.

 

We shall live up to the standard he and so many other great fighters for humanity have set for us. It’s a very high standard, and the forces ranged against us are powerful and evil. But we can do it. Freedom is ours wherever and whenever we want it. The time is ours whenever we choose it. Our freedom will assert itself as soon as we freely choose to fight for it.

 

 

Propagate the necessary new ideas.

 

 

 

 

 

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