Strict Mores

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The record is clear that the USDA and EPA intend and desire all the harms and failures of poison-based agriculture. Pretending to deal with the dicamba crisis the EPA explicitly endorsed part one of my corporate template with this quote: “We’re committed to taking appropriate action for the 2018 growing season with an eye toward ensuring that the technology is available, number one, to growers but that it is used responsibly.” Throughout the crisis the agency has provided Monsanto with its imprimatur, as per part three of the template. The EPA itself refused to perform or require volatility testing in the first place. Therefore both Monsanto and the EPA strictly admit the volatility of Monsanto’s XtendiMax. Such an admission is always implicit where those with the resources and responsibility to test refuse to do so and work to prevent anyone else from doing so. In the broad sense this is Strict Proof that the corporations and governments know or believe pesticides and GMOs to be harmful to human health. If they didn’t believe this they certainly would have performed legitimate safety tests instead of promulgating the religious lie of “substantial equivalence” along with a passel of methodologically fraudulent tests and rumors of “secret science”, a contradiction in terms. We know that the worst we can speculate is in fact true. The corporations and governments themselves admit this, proven by their consistent pattern of action.

 

In the same way, any consistent course of action on the part of those who can choose a different course proves their Strict Intent to cause all the consistent significant effects of their consistent course of action. Here we see the intent of Monsanto and the US government to wipe out all non-GM soy, as much of any other kind of farming, gardening, ornamentals, and wild plants as possible, and along the way to poison the soil and environment as totally as possible. Whatever human and animal health effects soon arise from the atmospheric suffusion of the dicamba zone also have been intended by these organizations.

 

Monsanto and the US government want to maximize dicamba use. The corporations of course want to maximize sales, from a mundane profiteering point of view. But far beyond mundane profits, maximal poison deployment is intended to masximize monoculture power and control. The corporate-technocratic system seeks this regardless of destructive effects, and intentionally to maximize the destruction. By Strict Intent there’s no practical difference between willful premeditated nihilism and the active will and premeditation to destroy. Therefore there is no moral difference, and there should be no difference from the perspective of the law or policy. This doctrine is necessary especially in a case like poison drift where it’s difficult to impossible to pinpoint responsibility for specific damage and where, even if this circumstance of non-responsibility hadn’t been anticipated and pre-planned, all the perpetrators rush to take advantage of it in a deliberate, systematic way.

 

Therefore it follows that abolitionist doctrine must be to impose Strict Liability upon all participants in the poison racket, from developers to sellers to users. It’s the same principle as for any other criminal conspiracy: The guy driving the getaway car is just as guilty of murder as the robber inside the bank who pulls the trigger, even though he never left the car. Everyone knows how toxic and destructive all these chemicals are, the corporations and regulators most of all, so no one can claim innocent ignorance. This is a core movement principle and the movement must promise to put this into effect wherever it gets the power. This principle follows practically from the principles of Strict Proof and Strict Intent.

 

The same principle applies to all programs of ecological and social destruction, all the actions of the economic civilization. If there was ever a time when anyone could claim to be innocently mistaken about the consequences of Mammon, of capitalism, of empowering corporations, most of all the consequences of treating our only home the Earth as a resource mine, waste dump, and subject of sadistic vandalism; if there ever was such a time (I doubt it myself), that time is in the distant past. No one has been innocent for a long, long time. Most of all, it’s beyond any dispute that the cadres of government, corporations, academia, and media are fully conscious, or willfully ignorant, of all the primary consequences of the system’s anti-ecological and anti-human assaults. They are all Nuremburg criminals to their rotted soulless core. We can no longer think in terms of questions or doubt. The crimes and the culpability are existential.

 

Everyone, abolitionists and reformers alike, should take up these doctrines, make them mainstays of philosophy and political communication, and promise to make them the law of the land.

 

 

To prevent confusion, I’m not saying there’s a master cabal somewhere consciously plotting out all the evils, though for example in the case of poison agriculture Monsanto certainly is conscious of much of it. I’m describing an existential inertia and a biological campaign. Therefore we’re only dealing proximately with conventional moral philosophy. Rather, we’re dealing with an elemental process whose morality we must view more primally in terms of its consistent action rather than foolish speculation about the “consciousness” of the creatures driving it. You might as well speculate about the consciousness of corporations, patents, and dollars while you’re at it. Anyway, in this case the primary organisms involved are Agrobacterium tumefaciens; soybeans, corn, and cotton; weeds like Palmer amaranth; pathogens like salmonella and botulins. The humans involved behave according to the same patterns. The technocratic propagandists who exalt corporate personhood, artificial intelligence, and robots are similarly disparaging their own role on the other, “post-human” end.

 

We see how inadequate conventional moralizing is to the crisis. Rather we need the strict morality of Strict Intent, Strict Proof, Strict Liability. We must apply it to the corporations, the regulators, the scientific establishment, academia, the mainstream media, the technocratic political class in general.

 

 

Adapted from part four of my series on the dicamba crisis.

 

 

 

 

 

The Billion Dollar Bug, Indeed

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“That which the borer has left, the earworm has eaten; and that which the earworm has left, the rootworm has eaten…”

 

The treadmill of planned obsolescence continues. The goal, as proven by the corporate state’s pattern of action, is to cause insect resistance to pesticides to evolve ever faster, to provide a rationale for the ever faster development of ever more complex GMO/pesticide packages. The real purpose of this technological deployment, beyond mundane profit motives, is control, war, and the total destruction of the ecology.

 

All prior anti-rootworm Bt GMOs are admitted failures. Rootworm now resists them all. Monsanto’s “SmartStax Pro” AKA “Corn Rootworm III” (MON 87411), currently in development, is the next GMO “solution” being touted for rootworm control. SS Pro is being developed with the RNA interference mode. RNAi is simply a more aggressive gene driving attack on the ecology than the regular GM contamination already driving its toxic genetics.* As for pest control, this is the exact same product as prior insecticidal GMOs and will fail just as quickly in the exact same way.

 

The piece GMWatch links, a pro-poison outlet, admits that all GMOs are a failure and that farmers have to spray just as much as before, as well as rotate crops and observe insects in the field (what radical ideas, those last two). A neutral observer might think they should admit that the pesticide paradigm is a proven failure. A neutral observer might think they have an ulterior motive for continuing to shill for pesticides even as they admit pesticides don’t work. Rootworm is indeed a “billion dollar bug” for Monsanto, Syngenta, and Dow.

 

Today most Bt GM seed in the US is sold in the form of a “refuge in a bag” (RIB). This means that non-GM seed is scattered in among the bulk of GM seed. RIB abrogates the entire notion of non-Bt “refuges”, which already were a propaganda scam in the first place.** The fact that the EPA lowered the percentage requirement from 20% for discrete “structured” refuges (entomologists originally insisted that at least 50% was necessary, but were bought off at 20%) to 5% for the diffused “RIB” shows their twisted sense of humor. To make the joke complete, they should have lowered the RIB to 0%. It would be just as effective. This is further proof that the pesticide arms race is an intentionally escalating planned failure.

 

 

*All GMOs have unstable genomes riddled with mutations, and almost all are driven by the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus promoter which has a recombination hot-spot. For both of these reasons GMOs are more likely to be vectors of horizontal gene transfer than natural plants and are more aggressive in this transfer, forcing their alien genetics into any available place including the genomes of animals that eat them. Therefore every GMO is inherently a gene drive agent and seeks to force its brutish promoter-amplified alien nucleic acids into every possible organism: Related plants and plant-eating animals. Every GMO is a cancer agent in a precise sense, just as each is a cancer cell from the perspective of the ecosystem as a whole. GMOs are cancer amid the ecosystem, and they seek to sow cancer within individual animals. In this way they work to weaken animal populations from below, while gross ecocide exterminates them from above.

 

**The pesticide treadmill of planned, deliberate obsolescence gives the lie to the whole notion of “refugia”, which are stands of non-Bt corn which the EPA and similar regulators in other countries require poison farmers to set aside. The idea is supposed to be that the non-Bt stand provides a “refuge” for insects without innate resistance to survive and interbreed with the naturally resistant ones who have survived feeding on the Bt crop. Their offspring will be less likely to inherit the resistance trait, and therefore the overall conversion of the pest population to a resistant variety is supposed to be delayed.

 

As we see, the theoretical setting aside of refuges has done little to halt the march of Bt-resistant rootworms and other resistant insects. Refuges were really a political scam in the first place. Neither the EPA nor regulators in other countries enforce them, nor were refuges ever supposed to be enforced. The idea of the refuge, as a way for regulators and corporations to reassure skeptics that the product will work, always had more significance then the real world application.

 

This is proven by the fact that, in the same way that regulators set allowable pesticide levels in water and food, not according to public health or any other scientific measure, but simply according to whatever level will result from the amount of pesticides corporations need to sell and farmers are driven to spray, so the refuge percentages aren’t set according to any scientific measure, but according to the lowest politically justifiable level.

 

Therefore although USDA entomologists recommended 50% refuge planting if the policy was supposed to have any chance of being effective, the EPA originally set the requirement at 20% for single and then double trait Bt poison crops. Needless to say Monsanto originally opposed the refuge concept as such and has always lobbied for the lowest possible level. The EPA was happy to accept the cartel’s argument that stacked varieties, by incorporating multiple poisons, would attack target insects so many ways at once that the 20% refuge was no longer necessary and could be reduced to 5%. This “reduced refuge” requirement was inaugurated with SmartStax corn in 2009, and we have indeed seen rapid results where it’s come to the evolution of rootworm resistance. RIB has further accelerated the arms race.

 

 

 

 

 

The Dicamba Crisis Part Four: The Strict Intent of the Destructive System

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Parts one, two, three.

 

Monsanto dubbed the 2017 dicamba disaster a “tremendous success” with “wonderful results.” What does it mean when Monsanto proclaims success?

 

Monsanto’s commitment in the face of disaster to push on aggressively with the Xtend expansion, to double down, proves that disaster is a core goal for them. In 2015 Monsanto marketed Xtend cotton seed in the absence of regulatory approval for any of the allegedly “improved” herbicide formulations. Xtend soybeans followed in 2016, still no brand-name dicamba. Therefore from the start it was evident that the company envisioned off-label use of the cheapest, most volatile dicamba formulations. This didn’t matter because Monsanto and BASF knew their own brand-name formulations also were highly volatile. In 2015-2016 Monsanto merely was setting up one of its future alibis, the lie that farmers were illicitly using cheap formulations. The company secured any future plausibility of this lie by ensuring it would be true for Xtend adopters in 2016.

 

The 2017 crisis of volatility and destruction of non-Xtend soybeans and all other broad-leaf crops and plants followed like clock-work. It was predicted, it was forecast, it was intended by the sellers of dicamba and dicamba-tolerant seeds. Anyone who now wants to continue with business as usual, full speed ahead, self-evidently is a conscious criminal. Monsanto is ardent to expand at the most breakneck speed in the most reckless way. The company proclaims its goal to go from 20 million acres of soybeans planted to Xtend in 2017 to 40 million in 2018 and 55 million in 2019.

 

Monsanto’s campaign is classic disaster capitalism: Intentionally generate a disaster then use it to maximize your profit and power. Dicamba’s volatility is a campaign of extortion designed to force all soy farmers to buy Xtend seeds. More broadly the goal is to render food production as tenuous as possible. The worst part of dicamba’s ravages is that it’s destroying produce farms and vegetable gardens, it’s destroying actual food production. If the Xtend system continues to expand it will render everything but commodity dicamba-tolerant soybeans impossible to grow across the range of the Xtend deployment. This is a case study in the real goal of poison-based agriculture. The will to continue this deployment on the part of Monsanto, the US and state governments, academia and the mainstream media proves that this destruction is the goal.

 

The evidence for these truths is patent throughout the historical record. We see it with Monsanto’s scorched-earth resistance to all temporal, geographic, and temperature limitations, and to all application restrictions except those of its own label. We see it in their systematic campaign of lies, blaming everything imaginable except the inherent volatility of their product. We see it in their campaign of lawsuits and corruption against even the most moderate, rational response to the crisis. We see it in their rebate plan for farmers who buy Xtend seeds and XtendiMax dicamba herbicide. This is the carrot to go with the Xtortion stick. Both are toward the same goal of seizing and holding arable territory, market share. The goal is to entrench the Xtend system to the point that it would be impossible to dislodge it within the context of commodity agriculture.

 

From the start Monsanto refused to allow study of the volatility of its brand-name dicamba herbicide. Weed scientists had to wait until they could purchase XtendiMax at the store in order to subject it to scientific purview. In a perfect symbol of Monsanto’s scorched-earth anti-science policy the University of Arkansas soybean test plot was wiped out by volatile drift from outside.

 

Nevertheless researchers soldiered on and proved that all dicamba is volatile, including the alleged “improved, non-volatile” formulations like XtendiMax. They uncovered another example of the fraudulent “science” typical of the corporations. The claims of Monsanto, DuPont, BASF were based on perfunctory tests performed in ivory tower labs. When weed scientists tested the same formulations in the field, i.e. under real world conditions, they found significant volatility for all the formulations. This is to be expected, since volatility is a function of atmospheric suffusion and weather conditions. How is it possible to test dicamba volatility in a lab? Only in the world of corporate fake science, the kind exalted by the STEM establishment, academia, and media. (The same scam was used by Matin Qaim to claim good yields for Bt cotton. This scientific fraud is still often cited in the mainstream media.) This also is emblematic of the limitations of lab-controlled experiment even if it were to be undertaken in good faith. Of course the corporations and government regulators never have any but bad faith.

 

In reality, dicamba is so volatile that in a normal year there wouldn’t be enough appropriate spraying days even according to the bogus regulations Monsanto “voluntarily” agreed to with the EPA and Monsanto’s own impossible label restrictions.

 

Anyone familiar with the history of bureaucracy and legalistic Catch-22s designed to turn everyone into a potential lawbreaker knows what’s going on here. Monsanto, with EPA connivance, intentionally designed the label to be impossible to faithfully adhere to. That way in every case of drift or volatilization they can play “Gotcha” and blame the farmer for improper application. This also proves Monsanto and the EPA fully anticipated the epidemic of off-site damage.

 

This proves that the product is impossible to use safely. The state regulations are bogus and that Monsanto does not intend for farmers to abide by them (just like with Bt refuges). It proves the only purpose of the regulations is as a political ploy to buy time against public unrest, and to play Gotcha with even the most scrupulous dicamba users, to keep them ready to become scapegoats.*

 

[*Poison farmers are criminals as well, but low-level ones. Monsanto and the EPA give the orders and control everything. Monsanto would prefer to maintain industrial farmers as a united pro-poison front, submissive to corporate control and working to poison the people. But setting farmers at one another’s throats as they’re doing here isn’t bad either. Note that all calls for compromise, unity, reconciliation are only on corporate control terms and implicitly assume submission to Xtend, continued submission to herbicide-tolerant GMO-poison systems as such. Also, it seems that Monsanto is being intentionally confusing in order to force farmers to sign up for its otherwise unnecessary Climate Corporation subscription.]

 

 

All this is proof of the systemic destructive totalitarian intent of the corporate-technocratic system. On Monsanto’s part this intent indisputably is conscious and willful. All their actions, most of which are premeditated, prove this.

 

The dicamba crisis is the latest and most extreme example yet of how co-existence with GMOs is impossible. It’s obviously impossible for organic farming. It’s impossible for non-GM conventional farming. With Xtend Monsanto has upped the ante, stepping up the assault on organic and non-GM farming and even rendering all previous GM soy varieties untenable. This is the first effective example of what the cartel projects as an indefinitely re-writable blank slate it can force to be continually wiped clean and rewritten, a process of destruction and re-destruction redolent of using war to destroy in order to generate space profitable to rebuild. This is the essence of disaster capitalism. Monsanto dreams of an agriculture totally subjugated by the most profitable GM varieties, until these too are rendered obsolete and wiped out by even higher-stacked, more expensive, more extreme varieties.

 

Today it’s universally acknowledged that soybean co-existence is impossible. The volatility is too extreme for even the most conscientious sprayers to prevent it. Where it comes to planting dicamba-tolerant seeds, it’s all or nothing. “We can’t co-exist. It’s so volatile and unpredictable.”

 

At the same time Monsanto also is driving the pesticide treadmill as hard as it can. The more total the Xtend deployment, the more volatility/drift/atmospheric loading with dicamba, the faster Palmer amaranth and other weeds will resist. This proves Monsanto’s strict intent to generate dicamba-resistant superweeds as fast and expansively as possible.

 

The corporations like the pesticide/superpest arms race for obvious reasons: It’s the most potent fuel driving the machine of ever more extravagant GM stacks and multi-product pesticide slatherings. This maximizes profit, control, power, and destruction. Again, the lies, extortion, rebates, legal and political lobbying, and refusal to allow study all prove the intent.

 

The USDA and EPA also intend and desire all this. The EPA explicitly endorsed part one of my corporate template with this quote: “We’re committed to taking appropriate action for the 2018 growing season with an eye toward ensuring that the technology is available, number one, to growers but that it is used responsibly.” Throughout the crisis the agency has provided Monsanto with its imprimatur, as per part three of the template. The EPA itself refused to perform or require volatility testing in the first place. Therefore both Monsanto and the EPA strictly admit the volatility of Monsanto’s XtendiMax. Such an admission is always implicit where those with the resources and responsibility to test refuse to do so and work to prevent anyone else from doing so. In the broad sense this is Strict Proof that the corporations and governments know or believe pesticides and GMOs to be harmful to human health. If they didn’t believe this they certainly would have performed legitimate safety tests instead of promulgating the religious lie of “substantial equivalence” along with a passel of methodologically fraudulent tests and rumors of “secret science”, a contradiction in terms. We know that the worst we can speculate is in fact true. The corporations and governments themselves admit this, proven by their consistent pattern of action.

 

In the same way, any consistent course of action on the part of those who can choose a different course proves their Strict Intent to cause all the consistent significant effects of their consistent course of action. Here we see the intent of Monsanto and the US government to wipe out all non-GM soy, as much of any other kind of farming, gardening, ornamentals, and wild plants as possible, and along the way to poison the soil and environment as totally as possible. Whatever human and animal health effects soon arise from the atmospheric suffusion of the dicamba zone also have been intended by these organizations.

 

The refusal of government and private insurers to cover off-target dicamba damage is further proof that this is a comprehensive campaign to drive out all non-Xtend soy farming. It’s government/insuser collusion against farmers.

 

 

What recourse does the imputation of justice have, what course the law? There’s a welter of lawsuits arguing correctly that the product is impossible to use safely, that the damage is the result of negligence or malice on the part of Monsanto and BASF, and that the dicamba sellers colluded to form an extortion racket.

 

We know this is true. Xtortion plus rebate is meant to add up to an offer you can’t refuse if you’re a soy farmer. Monsanto wants to maximize dicamba use (sales, from a mundane profiterring point of view; but maximal poison deployment has implications for power and control far beyond mundane profits) regardless of destructive effects, or intentionally to maximize the destruction. It makes no difference since by Strict Intent there’s no practical difference between willful premeditated nihilism and the active will and premeditation to destroy. Therefore there is no moral difference, and there should be no difference from the perspective of the law or policy. This doctrine is necessary especially in a case like poison drift where it’s difficult to impossible to pinpoint responsibility for specific damage and where, even if this circumstance of non-responsibility hadn’t been anticipated and pre-planned, all the perpetrators rush to take advantage of it in a deliberate, systematic way.

 

Therefore it follows that abolitionist doctrine must be to impose Strict Liability upon all participants in the poison racket, from developers to sellers to users. It’s the same principle as for any other criminal conspiracy: The guy driving the getaway car is just as guilty of murder as the robber inside the bank who pulls the trigger, even though he never left the car. Everyone knows how toxic and destructive all these chemicals are, the corporations and regulators most of all, so no one can claim innocent ignorance. This is a core movement principle and the movement must promise to put this into effect wherever it gets the power. This principle follows practically from the principles of Strict Proof and Strict Intent.

 

Everyone, abolitionists and reformers alike, should take up these doctrines, make them mainstays of philosophy and political communication, and promise to make them the law of the land.

 

To prevent confusion, I’m not saying there’s a master cabal somewhere consciously plotting all this out, though Monsanto certainly is conscious of much of it. I’m describing an existential inertia and a biological campaign. Therefore we’re only dealing proximately with conventional moral philosophy. Rather, we’re dealing with an elemental process whose morality we must view more primally in terms of its consistent action rather than foolish speculation about the “consciousness” of the creatures driving it. You might as well speculate about the consciousness of corporations, patents, and dollars while you’re at it. Anyway, in this case the primary organisms involved are Agrobacterium tumefaciens, soybeans and cotton, and weeds like Palmer amaranth. The humans involved behave according to the same patterns. The technocratic propagandists who exalt corporate personhood, artificial intelligence, and robots are similarly disparaging their own role on the other, “post-human” end.

 

We see how inadequate conventional moralizing is to the crisis. Rather we need the strict morality of Strict Intent, Strict Proof, Strict Liability. We must apply it to the corporations, the regulators, the scientific establishment, academia, the mainstream media, the technocratic political class in general.

 

 

Herbicide-tolerance is a proven failed technology. Xtend and Enlist are as doomed as Roundup Ready. Any support for the continuation of this genre is automatic bad faith and automatic support for all the worst effects of the deployment. Therefore all harms caused by it are willful, deliberate, malicious.

 

The system has literally zero ideas beyond poison plants, which is all GMOs are. Literally no amount of failure and destruction could cause these creatures to think in any terms other than betting even more of the future of humanity and the Earth on an already busted hand. They are criminally insane, or analogous to pathogenic microbes, and can be dealt with only as such.

 

As for soybeans, we have to purge them from processed food and from animal feed. Once again we see the critical need to abolish factory farms.

 

 

Propagate the necessary new ideas.

 

 

 

 

Dicamba Crisis Part 3: Bottleneck

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Parts one and two.

 

The common contrast of “natural” and “unnatural” is not untrue but is hard to define. Like with “terrorism”, everyone agrees it exists but finds it hard to give a definition which isn’t to some extent arbitrary. Almost all definitions of terrorism are fraudulent since each bogusly excludes things which by all rights ought to be included and includes things that ought to be excluded. So it is often with the natural-unnatural contrast.

 

As I’ve written before, a more fruitful distinction is ecological as opposed to anti-ecological because this gives us a clear criterion: Are accumulation and waste building up? Whether or not a process generates waste, defined here as a by-product the ecological system cannot readily assimilate, distinguishes ecological and anti-ecological processes. Any such build-up indicates an anti-ecological bottleneck. In a healthy ecology accumulation is rare and quickly generates the means to put it back in motion. Real bottlenecks almost always are man-made; offhand I can’t think of any species which can generate a bottleneck on its own. (Under man-made bottleneck conditions other species can participate, such as the algae which directly generate dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere. These dead zones are man-made, driven by nitrogen run-off from massive overuse of synthetic fertilizer in industrial agriculture.)

 

Anti-ecological bottlenecks often boil down to a simple equation: Wealth and power accumulation, itself an emitter of noxious political, social, cultural pollution, must be accompanied by an equal level of physical/ecological destruction.

 

The primary reason industrial agriculture (especially its GMO model) is unsustainable and must be abolished isn’t because it’s unnatural, though it is this too, but because it’s radically anti-ecological in all the bottlenecks it generates and the way its accumulations and waste poison the Earth.

 

This is the fundamental paradigm of industrial agriculture. It denudes the soil and renders it near-sterile, imports artificial fertility and poisons (the corporations accumulate the pollution of concentrated wealth and power), and exports the combination of these inputs with sunlight as a form of pollution (commodities in order to accumulate and concentrate more wealth, cheap food for biologically and ecologically worthless parasites). The great majority of the synthetic nitrogen runs off or leaches. The pesticides pollute the crop, the soil, the water, and the air. In the case of dicamba the air becomes the most acute crisis point. The nitrogen is transferred into groundwater as a form of poison and down the rivers into the gulfs and bays in order to generate dead zones. Every step of the industrial agricultural process burns vast amounts of fossil fuels and further destroys carbon and nitrogen sinks. The warmer air in turn aggravates the volatilization of dicamba, the quintessential anti-ecological, anti-agronomic disaster capitalist pesticide.

 

The herbicide tolerant GMO model is perhaps the most extreme distillation of the industrial paradigm. It’s designed directly to accelerate human and ecological harm, job destruction, farm consolidation, and the evolution of pest resistance driving the pesticide treadmill ever faster and most intensely.

 

We see another extreme example of the participants in man-made anti-ecological bottlenecks: The pesticide treadmill, and monoculture cultivation in general, provide the best terrain for the most aggressive and hardy weeds, insect pests, and disease organisms.

 

Dicamba’s intrinsic volatility renders it the most potent driver of these phenomena. Most directly, dicamba’s volatile drift is destroying all other soy crops, vegetables, fruits, and many trees, thus generating an intense wastage. The more herbicide volatilization, the more drift, the more atmospheric loading, the faster Palmer amaranth and other potent weeds will develop resistance. We see the Strict Intent of Monsanto and the EPA and USDA to drive the pesticide resistance treadmill as hard as they can. In general monoculture cultivation, as a simple application of plowing and poison, provides the best terrain for pests compared to the complexity of agroecological pest control based on biodiversity and a diversity of tactics. The model of herbicide tolerant GMOs is the most pure manifestation of this weed-maximizing terrain.

 

Therefore in addition to the great accumulations and waste inherent to industrial agriculture we have the build-up of pest resistance to pesticides which drives further escalations of the poison paradigm and all its bottlenecks. Dicamba’s volatility and suffusion of the regional atmosphere comprise an acute poisoning crisis, an acute crisis of waste buildup. The land is condemned to sterile production of commodity soybeans. This really is designed to be a waste dump for surplus fertilizer and pesticide, which are generated in the first place as a by-product and weapon of the system whose real action is to generate money and power for those who control it. By striving to force all soy farmers to buy Xtend seeds if only in self-defense against the deliberate toxic suffusion of the poison, Monsanto and the US government are trying to further strangle the already threadbare diversity of soybean varieties and farming diversity in general, thus further intensifying the genetic bottleneck the monoculture commodity system has been ruthlessly imposing for decades.

 

The land is condemned, fossil fuels pointlessly are extracted and burned, generating carbon and nitrogen pollution in the air and fertilizer and pesticide waste to be dumped into the soil, dumped in the water, dumped in the air, driven into our bodies.

 

Dicamba is designed to suffuse the air and resettle on all broad-leaf crops and other plants as destructively as possible. This is an extreme anti-ecological bottleneck. Look at all it destroys: Food production, human and animal health from wholesome food, the spiritual and cultural work of growers, the aesthetic love of trees and flowers. All these already are bottled up by the corporate-technocratic civilization. Specific extreme outbreaks like the dicamba crisis make these bottlenecks even worse.

 

The entire system of poison-based agriculture is designed to bottle up and destroy the entire ecology replacing it with a technologically controlled monoculture. In this way the biotech/agrochemical cartel joins the finance sector and other core corporate sectors working to bottle up all elements of nature and the real economy, replacing these with the purely fake economy of money, corporate personhood, finance, and patents. The corporate-technocratic accumulation of wealth and power directly corresponds with the technosphere’s physical poisoning and destruction of the Earth. Accumulation naturally indicates an ecological bottleneck. Accumulation equals waste. It is pollution. Those who manipulate such wastes are merely using poison as a weapon. The modern agrochemical onslaught is the latest, worst, most literal use of poison to destroy the Earth in order to hoard power.

 

And this goes with the legal and physical condemnation of the land. The corporate agricultural campaign ultimately is a campaign of land seizure, forcing all human beings off the land and enclosing it within a system of a few big corporate-controlled robot-managed plantations. As I said earlier, herbicide tolerant GMOs are a milestone in the corporate enclosure program, designed directly to eliminate all hand-weeding jobs while enabling farmers to manage much greater acreage, thus accelerating farm consolidation and the forced exodus of humans from the land. By rendering impossible all competing forms of soybean farming and many other kinds of farming, Monsanto’s Xtend-dicamba system is designed to escalate this totalitarian process. The systematic refusal of government and private insurers to cover drift damage, a massive consumer fraud, is another example proving that this is economic warfare against all but the biggest farmers. As is the concurrent campaign, even among the same state governments and weed scientists who deplore the dicamba crisis, to force 2,4-D tolerant crops upon agriculture. The clear goal is an agriculture where no crop (or any other plant) not resistant to both dicamba and 2,4-D will be able to exist at all.

 

The industrial monoculture and land enclosure system also is meant to render food production as tenuous as possible by forcing all people into a condition of complete dependency upon money and the corporate system, while deliberately rendering food production as vulnerable as possible to drought, erosion, pest ravages, soil degradation, intrinsic crop failure, and ultimately the guaranteed shortages of necessary fossil fuels. The corporate food system already systematically generates hunger; it is also preparing famine.

 

As Howard Vlieger points out, the worst part of the dicamba GMO system is how it’s destroying actual food production at fruit orchards and vegetable farms and gardens, rendering anything but commodity soybean production more and more difficult. This is a case study in the real goal of poison agriculture. The will to continue this onslaught, on the part of the corporations, the US and state governments, academia and the media proves their Strict Intent to reach an outcome of total destruction.

 

Here we have the full consummation of the inherently destructive character of industrial soybean production in general. All land planted to commodity soybeans is condemned, lost to us. Soybeans aren’t food; they’re used only destructively, for CAFOs, biodiesel, and processing; a diet loaded with processed soy is hormonally unhealthy even leaving aside the soybeans’ GM character and high pesticide residues; a soy-based economy is a plunder economy which offers nothing to the people but only ravages the countryside for the benefit of the corporate criminals. Soybean cultivation is ground zero for all the pathologies, and dicamba-tolerant Xtend soybeans are most extreme. The land is bottlenecked; the economy is bottlenecked. Industrial soy itself must go. (And as for so many other reasons here too we see the critical need to abolish CAFOs.)

 

 

The extreme energy civilization, having bottlenecked all human potential and driven humanity into a socioeconomic and political dead end, now drives itself into its own terminal bottleneck.

 

Do you feel ill, or your children or pets? Do you fear sickness? Do you feel financially secure? Secure in your job? Are you optimistic things will change for the better? Do you know who has destroyed all security? Do you know what’s making us sick? Do you feel safe when you look at the news from America and around the world? Do you know why the world is going insane?

 

You’re feeling the great bottleneck. Our health, our security, our peace of mind, our work, our culture, our spirit, our freedom, all are bottled up. You feel the fear, you sense our psychological, spiritual, cultural, economic bottleneck.

 

To anyone who feels bottlenecked, whatever the surface reason seems to be, you must understand that yours is a symptom of a global ecological crisis. You cannot solve your crisis within the bottleneck which causes it any more than the civilization can pull itself out of its own bottleneck.

 

All of this civilization’s bottlenecks boil down to the simple equation: Wealth and power accumulation must be accompanied by an equal level of physical, economic, spiritual, cultural, and ecological destruction. The elites’ wealth and power equals your destruction.

 

 

Propagate the necessary new ideas.

 

 

 

 

 

The Dicamba Crisis (Part 1)

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Decades of experience prove the model of agriculture based on pesticides doesn’t work and is unsustainable. A rational, honest person would long ago have rejected poison-based agriculture in favor of agroecology. They would have had a “Show Me” attitude toward Missouri-based Monsanto’s proposition that the GMO version of this poison model would be any different, and they quickly would have realized it’s the same failure.

 

That’s how we know support for GMOs, and continued support for pesticides, has zero to do with reason and science. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of the resurrection of such herbicides as 2,4-D and dicamba which the GMO paradigm previously declared obsolete. Nowhere is the big lie more obvious than in the case of how dicamba’s new GMO-based escalation immediately precipitated the most acute American agricultural crisis since the Southern corn leaf blight epidemic of 1970.

 

In the 1990s Monsanto rolled out its glyphosate-tolerant Roundup Ready product line of GM crops. One of the big selling points was that glyphosate allegedly was less harmful to human health, the environment, and other crops than dicamba and 2,4-D. Monsanto and the USDA promised Roundup Ready would permanently supersede these bad old poisons. Monsanto and the USDA also promised weeds never would become resistant to glyphosate.

 

As anyone could have predicted and many did, these were both lies. Within a few years Roundup-resistant weeds began to proliferate. Soon the same old arms race was on between ever more commonplace and resistant weeds and escalating glyphosate applications. A few more years and Roundup Ready was in ruins, glyphosate near worthless, glyphosate-resistant weeds on a triumphal march across America’s farmland.

 

Monsanto was lying when it claimed Roundup Ready was the final word on weed control. On the contrary, as per the standard corporate program of planned obsolescence the company developed a new type of herbicide tolerant GMO in anticipation of the obsolescence of Roundup Ready. Monsanto’s new flagship product, designed to rescue the company from its Roundup dependency and lift it to new heights of dominion and profitability, is the Xtend system of dicamba herbicide and dicamba-tolerant GM cotton and soybeans. In 2015 Monsanto put Xtend cotton seed on the market, in 2016 Xtend soybeans. The EPA was uncharacteristically slow and didn’t approve the new Monsanto and BASF dicamba formulations until autumn of 2016. In 2017, in tandem with the new and allegedly improved brand-name dicamba, Monsanto was able significantly to escalate the acreage of Xtend soybean sales.

 

Knowledgeable commentators long forsaw problems. Pesticide drift has always been a problem, and this problem is especially acute with dicamba. Prior to the advent of the Xtend system dicamba was used only early in the season before crops had sprouted and under weather conditions which didn’t maximize its drift potential. As early as 2011 farmers, scientists, and industry figures warned that any large-scale spraying of dicamba under the warm, humid conditions of late spring onward was likely to maximize drift and the damage to other crops and plants this drift would cause. Dicamba kills all broad-leaf plants. Soybeans are especially sensitive to it, but it easily damages and kills most crops, ornamentals, and trees.

 

Right on schedule, as dicamba began to be sprayed during the growing season the drift damage to innocent bystander crops began to be reported. There was significant damage in 2015 and far more in 2016 as the acreage sprayed greatly increased. But this was only the prelude to the full blown disaster of 2017. By May a flood of damage reports was coursing in to the agricultural departments and university extensions of the major soy producing states, especially Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, and Tennessee. Soybeans everywhere not engineered to be tolerant of dicamba were sustaining often lethal damage, along with peanuts and vegetable crops such as tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, and leafy greens. Arkansas’ largest peach orchard was decimated for the second straight year. Symbolically, the University of Arkansas test plot where researchers were studying the drift potential of name-brand dicamba succumbed to drift and was wiped out.

 

By July Arkansas and Missouri issued emergency bans on further spraying of dicamba, but Missouri quickly backpedaled under Monsanto pressure. The damage reports continued to pile up across more than twenty states. By season’s end weed scientist Kevin Bradley of the University of Missouri tallied 3.6 million acres of non-Xtend soybeans damaged or killed by drifting dicamba.

 

Throughout the destructive year Monsanto ran its standard campaign of denial, lies, and scapegoating. Forced to take some kind of action the EPA announced a voluntary agreement with Monsanto and BASF to impose new certification requirements for dicamba applicators. More substantially, the Arkansas Plant Board unanimously recommended that its existing emergency ban be made policy for 2018, banning dicamba use from April 16th through October 31st. (This proposal is currently in limbo as Monsanto-subservient state legislators are trying to gut the ban. Monsanto also has sued to prevent its enforcement.)

 

 

Dicamba can move off site in several ways. One typical way for pesticides to drift is when applicators are careless about spraying under windy conditions and the poison immediately is wafted away on the wind. This is what is properly called “drift”. But dicamba has a far more insidious and destructive mode of drifting. Under common conditions of warmth and humidity liquid dicamba resting on plants and soil is prone to volatilize, turn into a gas, lift off the surfaces, and float on the air often many miles from the site of spraying before weather conditions change and cause it to resettle on whatever plants are in the vicinity. The more dicamba is sprayed in a region, the more all-pervasive the suffusion becomes. This is called atmospheric loading.

 

Dicamba’s volatility effect is well known. Monsanto and BASF promised that their new dicamba formulations, XtendiMax and Engenia, had solved the problem and would not be volatile. But Monsanto immediately signaled it was lying when it forbade university researchers pre-market access to XtendiMax in order to test it for volatility. They were allowed to test only its herbicidal capability.

 

Sure enough, in 2017 when researchers were able to purchase XtendiMax and Engenia at the store and test it themselves they found that these brand name formulations are nearly as volatile as the earlier cheap formulas. The fact is that all dicamba is volatile. It’s impossible to use it under warm humid conditions, i.e. the way it’s intended to be used under the Xtend system, and not have it promiscuously volatilize, move off site, and kill any broad leaf crops and plants it resettles upon.

 

Many farmers already have filed suit against Monsanto and BASF, as individuals and in class actions, seeking to hold these poison-peddlers accountable and make them pay for the damage they willfully have caused.

 

 

The Xtend/dicamba GMO series is the most extreme manifestation yet of what is typical of all commercial GMOs. They’re pesticide plants designed to escalate poison use and escalate the futile arms race between pesticides and the resistant pests and weeds. This absurd and destructive treadmill clearly is, in itself, the purpose of poison-based agriculture and especially its GMO-based incarnation. The pesticide treadmill ensures incessant product obsolescence, constant escalation of the potency and amount and cost of the pesticides which must be deployed, maximal dependency of farmers on the most artificial, vulnerable mode of agriculture which requires the maximum of the costly inputs supplied by agribusiness.

 

In this way agribusiness consolidates maximum control over farming and the food supply and launches a general assault on the ecology, all toward the goal of maximizing human and ecological monoculture. This is the scorched-earth terrain which provides the best habitat for pest, weed, and disease infestation, and therefore the maximum ideological and political habitat for the power claims of agribusiness, the scientism cult, and all who hate humanity and nature and who seek total domination. Poisonism therefore generates the maximal habitat for the propaganda campaign of lies, fear-mongering, and fraudulent promises that the solution is right around the corner if farmers and society only stay the poison course. This is proven every day in a hundred new articles and press statements from corporations, governments, Wall Street, academia, and the mainstream media, all speaking as one proclaiming that the only solution to the escalating crisis is to escalate the poison.

 

 

This doesn’t cause those of the true faith to falter, because beyond mundane profiteering poisonism is an ideological cult. Monsanto of course has responded with a campaign of lies. They openly deny that brand name dicambas are volatile and instead blame farmers for improper application which leads to regular wind drift, and for using older dicamba blends which are volatile.

 

The response of pro-dicamba activists across the board has been to promulgate new certification requirements and restrictions on how and when dicamba can be sprayed, in accord with the right wind conditions, temperature, time of day, and the right equipment. The EPA’s voluntary agreement with Monsanto and BASF enshrines these kinds of restrictions which allegedly will solve the problem.

 

But the whole notion of new regulations is based on the false premise that volatility isn’t the main cause of the off-target damage. This already has been proven false. The 2017 research demonstrated that no amount of care in the application can prevent dicamba from volatilizing and moving off site. Therefore the entire campaign for new restrictions is conjoined with Monsanto’s primary lie. In other words the entire campaign is bogus, nothing but a sham. As usual, EPA is the lead government propagandist backing up the corporate lies.

 

The most direct proof that these restrictions don’t work comes from Missouri. I mentioned earlier how in July Missouri instituted a temporary spraying ban but quickly lifted it. At the same time it rescinded the dicamba ban Missouri imposed the now standard set of new restrictions on its use. But this accomplished nothing: Within weeks the damage reports surged anew. This is the most proximate proof that the extra regulations don’t work.

 

But then we didn’t need that extra proof. Contrary to Monsanto’s lies, most farmers who spray dicamba do their conscientious best to spray so that it doesn’t spread beyond their farms and damage their neighbors. (Besides, if you’re going to pay to spray a pesticide, of course you’re going to do your best to keep the maximum amount on your site in order to get the full extent of what you think is the benefit.) In spite of this dicamba has drifted promiscuously, in many cases miles away from where it was sprayed. This is in spite of every care taken, and it certainly will continue in spite of any added care short of a ban on spraying past mid-April.

 

This proves that all dicamba is highly volatile and nothing can prevent it from moving off site and killing other crops and plants. Co-existence with the Xtend system is impossible. If dicamba continues to be deployed the way it was in 2017 (and Monsanto is projecting a doubling of the Xtend soybean acreage in 2018, from 20 million acres to 40 million), all soy farmers will have no choice but to buy Xtend GM seeds, while much vegetable farming and gardening as well as the existence of many other plants and trees will become impossible in the soybean zones. This proves that Monsanto’s goal remains the same as it’s always been, the goal it enshrined in what it calls its “Expanded Trait Penetration” program. Monsanto’s goal always is to force farmers to buy as many stacked GM traits as possible. Xtend is the most extreme version yet of this program. Monsanto’s goal is to extort all soybean farmers, under threat of the drift destruction of their crop, into buying the Xtend seeds and the XtendiMax herbicide (along with Roundup; Xtend is tolerant of both dicamba and glyphosate).

 

 

We see their wickedness. The dicamba crisis is the epitome of all that’s bad about GMOs as such and herbicide tolerant GMOs in particular. Agronomically this system shackles farmers to a destroyed soil and weak, denuded crops which constantly must be goosed with fertilizer, irrigated water, and an ever greater slathering of pesticides. It drives the monoculture of crop varieties as Monsanto seeks its goal of forcing seed growers to increase and farmers to buy only the few varieties into which the Xtend trait has been crossed, as only these will be viable in an atmospheric zone suffused with dicamba vapors. Weeds are guaranteed to evolve to resist dicamba, indeed already are doing so. This will require an even more complex, expensive, toxic brew to be deployed. Sure enough, in 2017 the corporations already were touting the poison plants slated to replace Xtend in a few years.

 

Socioeconomically the herbicide tolerance GMO model is designed to destroy hand-weeding jobs and force farm consolidation by driving out smaller farmers and rendering giant plantations more easy to manage. In this way agribusiness works to attain domination over farming. The fewer and bigger the farms, the easier they are to control.

 

Ecologically this poison-based monoculture wipes out habitat for monarch butterflies and many other animals and plants, kills honeybees, and directly poisons the soil, water, and air, causing havoc among these ecosystems. During spraying season humans and animals continually breathe the atmospheric load of vaporized dicamba. This aggravates dicamba’s known irritant effects on the eyes, nose, throat, and lungs. Dicamba causes cancer and birth defects. We can expect to see a spike in birth defects in the dicamba zone in 2018. Along with glyphosate and 2,4-D dicamba, as a grossly abused antibiotic, drives antibiotic resistance among many strains of harmful bacteria, thus contributing to the general campaign of corporate industrial agriculture to wipe out antibiotics as a medically effective treatment.

 

These crises are endemic to massive herbicide use in general. Dicamba, by spreading beyond where it’s sprayed to a far greater extent than other herbicides, represents a great escalation of all the crises of agronomy, farm economy, ecology, and public health.

 

 

The system offers no solution, whether it be to the acute dicamba crisis or the general chronic crisis of corporate industrial agriculture. Even the weed scientists who have been doing the volatility research, tallying the destruction, and sounding the alarm offer nothing but the meek suggestion that poison use, while “necessary”, should be reformed and limited. In a mass manifestation of Stockholm syndrome damaged farmers still say the same. But the scientists’ own research demonstrates that the standard reforms can accomplish nothing, while the corporations will never accept such limits. Even as Monsanto pretended to endorse the EPA-brokered voluntary agreement it continued defiantly to assert there should be no restrictions beyond its own label.

 

Nothing within the system can meet the challenge of a crisis inherent to the core premises of the system itself. Poisonism has no future. The only way forward for weed and pest control is soil-building combined with organic pest management. The health of the soil, so ravaged by industrial agricultural practice, is the foundation of all sustainable agriculture and agriculture’s entire future. Everything else is a footnote.

 

Only a new movement built completely from outside the corporate agriculture system can meet the challenge of the day. This movement must be based on the rising ecological, agronomic, cultural, spiritual paradigm centered on the necessary transformation to agroecology and food sovereignty and the necessary abolition of poison-based agriculture.

 

 

We started by pointing out that anyone motivated by reason and the scientific mindset would long ago have concluded that poison-based agriculture doesn’t work, does far more harm than good, and should be rejected in favor of agroecology. They would have been skeptical of GMOs based on escalating this already disproven agricultural model. They would’ve found quickly that the GMO version of this model is no different and simply intensifies the same failure while rendering it even more destructive.

 

The continued denial and defense of the dicamba outbreak on the part of the pro-poison activists proves that for today’s cultists reason is the last thing any of them care about, and actual scientific evidence a close second to last. It proves that support for GMOs has zero to do with reason and science and everything to do with religious/ideological wingnuttery, where it’s not just a gutter profiteering motive. They have proven this true with every step of the genetic engineering deployment. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than the way they’ve seized upon the collapse of Roundup Ready, by any rational measure a catastrophic discrediting of the entire GMO and pesticide paradigm, as an opportunity to exalt an even more destructive poison product, one which they themselves started out promising Roundup Ready would render obsolete, and whose doom at the stems and vines of the same resistance-evolving weeds is already on the horizon.

 

The already disastrous advent of the dicamba GMOs, and the fanatic will of the GMO cultists to push forward such an insane, disproven, short-sighted, destructive project, is the best proof that the scientism/technocracy cult, just as much as the poison corporations, is the enemy of humanity and the Earth. Humanity must organize against this cult as surely as against the corporations themselves, as a key part of the corporate totalitarian cabal against humanity and the Earth. The ecocidal and genocidal monoculture aspiration of this cabal is self-evident, as is clear from the dicamba onslaught.

 

 

 

 

Superficial and Systemic Corruption Among Regulators

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You’re Pre-Approved, if you’re a big corporation.

 

 

Ex-GM developer turned critic Belinda Martineau is intrigued that the New York Times, in discussing Henry Miller’s role in Monsanto’s regulatory ghost-writing, doesn’t mention that Miller was an FDA cadre in charge of biotech regulation from 1989-1994. She’s right, the mainstream media systematically avoids placing any “abuse” it’s forced to acknowledge into any broader context.

 

But by the same token I’m similarly intrigued that Martineau, along with most other GMO critics, still thinks that the main problem with regulatory agencies is particular “corrupt” cadres like Miller or the EPA’s Jess Rowland (or, to add everyone’s favorite, Michael Taylor), rather than the congenital institutional structure of an agency like the FDA or EPA. But these agencies were designed to “manage” poisons (and the politics of poison), not to protect the people and environment against poisons. The only thing distinguishing the likes of Miller or Taylor from a regular career cadre is that these are examples of de jure “corruption” who transcend the standard institutional banality-of-evil structure. But this de jure corruption is only a minor if more politically visible appendage to the systemic corruption.

 

Therefore, while reformists by their nature will be content to emphasize only the superficial appendage, since they want only superficial reforms (i.e. they agree that poisonism should continue, it merely needs more and better “management”), abolitionists must highlight the inflammatory yet superficial corruption only as an introduction to the facts about systemic corruption.

 

 

Propagate the necessary new ideas.

 

 

 

 

The Need to Renounce All System Hierarchies (EPA-Monsanto Example Again)

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Basically a symbiotic creature.

 

 

The notions expressed in this article aren’t factually false, but it remains amazing that anyone ever could have been surprised, as these authors profess to be, at such a phenomenon as “When questions have been raised about [glyphosate’s] safety, Monsanto has ensured that the answers serve its financial interests, rather than scientific accuracy and transparency.”

 

The system based on productionism, technocracy, and in particular the capitalist mode of these chose to develop profit-seeking corporations as the main organizational mode for this paradigm of civilization. Corporations, a creation and extension of government, were explicitly designed to be sociopathic and totalitarian, exalting profit as the one and only value. They were designed to enshrine a Mammon theocracy, which means the total domination of all human-to-human and human-to-ecology relations by reducing these to monetary exchanges.

 

Implicitly, corporations were designed to become the repository of all real economic and political power, while nominal “public” government is retained only as a facade. That’s the procedure and goal of neoliberalism as a system of power, while the ideology of neoliberalism is based on the notion that this is how things should exist, and the only way they can exist. The historical record is unequivocal.

 

Therefore it’s also no surprise that the EPA consistently has covered up and lied on behalf of Monsanto and other poisoner corporations, or that

 

The record suggests that in 44 years — through eight presidential administrations — EPA management has never attempted to correct the problem. Indeed, the pesticide industry touts its forward-looking, modern technologies as it strives to keep its own research in the closet, and relies on questionable assumptions and outdated methods in regulatory toxicology.

 

But the authors are naive to attribute this to “capture”, as if there was ever a pristine morning where the EPA was born innocent and pure of heart. On the contrary, regulatory organizations like the EPA are designed to serve corporate imperatives, organizing the government subsidies and exemptions from legal responsibility upon which all corporate sectors are 100% dependent, and helping to pilot them through any hazardous political shoals. Of course the strong pro-corporate bias is hard-wired into the very principles of regulatory ideology, based as they are on “managing” poisons and ecological harms, always assuming one can find the right “tolerances” for these. To put this in perspective, all one need to ask is what’s the right tolerance level for child molestation, rape, murder? Do we assume there’s a non-zero “tolerance” for these? In action, yes, the US system assumes exactly this. But not in principle. Yet the regulator ideology assumes in principle that every corporate action has its proper tolerance. This tendentious ideology, in turn, is then stretched and “abused” in practice the ways this article describes. But these pro-Monsanto EPA actions aren’t really abuses; they follow logically from the original principle.

 

Anyone interested in the history of the EPA would do fine to start with E. Vallianatos’ Poison Spring. Vallianatos was an EPA cadre who for years was maverick enough actually to try to carry out a public health mission, and his book details the institutional rejection of any such mission. For example, he describes how, when the EPA was originally founded with such fanfare in response to public outcry about several high-profile environmental disasters, it was staffed by imports from the USDA in order to ensure that it understood its real pro-corporate mission, which had nothing to do with the pro-environment, pro-public health propaganda.

 

Because people refuse to understand these realities, we continue to be mired in the slough of such reform prescriptions as this:

 

The only way to establish a scientific basis for evaluating glyphosate’s safety, as a group of 14 scientists suggested in 2016, would be to make proprietary industrial studies public, put them up against the peer-reviewed literature and conduct new studies by researchers independent of corporate interests—in other words, force some daylight between regulators and the regulated.

 

But the scientific establishment is no more capable of avoiding “capture” than the regulator. Parallel to the inherently pro-corporate, pro-poison regulatory ideology, system science is completely beholden to the corporate science paradigm which directs it to the exact same biases, cover-ups, frauds, political lying, and similar “abuses”.

 

Therefore it’s of no avail to correctly renounce the regulator but immediately repose the same vain faith in the scientific establishment. When you finally realize this establishment is equally pro-Monsanto, to which system hierarchy will you turn next? And how many times must you repeat the religious experiment before you realize the evil (the corruption, the capture, or however you choose to see it) is congenital and universal to the corporate-technocratic system?

 

The only solution is to renounce this system completely, based as it is upon a totalitarian will to destroy humanity and the Earth, and commit to the abolitionist necessity in thought and deed.

 

 

Propagate the new and necessary ideas.

 

 

 

The EPA Stalls for Monsanto

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Stonewalling the people, building a wall against the future.

 

 

The EPA’s most common practice is to receive PR copy from corporations like Monsanto and launder Monsanto’s lies to the public with its own “regulatory” imprimatur. But sometimes the collaboration is more actively hands-on, as in this long-running delay of a toxicological review of glyphosate. The new review was promised for 2015. The delay leaves in place the EPA’s 2013 proclamation denying the fact that glyphosate causes cancer. This proclamation was a prime example of the stenography and rubber-stamping of the corporation’s own self-description I mentioned above. This new information about EPA/Monsanto collusion is the latest to come out of the many cancer lawsuits Monsanto is now fighting.

 

Note well, this is Obama’s EPA in action. The Obama administration was the most aggressively pro-pesticide and pro-GMO to date. Trump certainly will try to catch up and surpass Obama, but as with so many other crimes against humanity and the Earth, he has a long, long way to go.

 

 

 

 

 

“Impossible”, i.e. Fake Food, Fake News, Fake Media, Fake Regulators, Fake Humans

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Corporate violence makes rivers of real blood flow

 

 

The New York Times has long been the premier purveyor of fake news, i.e. systematic lies, on everything from the Iraq War and “war on terror” to GMOs and pesticides to the housing bubble.

 

By now this corporate tabloid is so brazen that if you were to read a randomly selected paragraph from any issue you’d often have a hard time telling whether it came from a “news article” or the op-ed page.

 

 

Since the NYT’s coverage of genetic engineering is among the most corrupted, it’s unsurprising that an article has this corporate flackery and right-wing rhetoric spliced in:

 

Impossible Foods is finding out what happens when a fast-moving venture capital business runs headlong into the staid world of government regulation.

Investors like Bill Gates and Khosla Ventures have poured money into a variety of so-called alt-meat companies. Silicon Valley has noble goals, applying technological solutions to address major issues like climate change, farm animal welfare, and food security.

But food is not an app. It is far more heavily regulated by governments and much more heavily freighted with cultural and emotional baggage.

 

Ronald Reagan couldn’t have said it better. Of course the bit about Silicon Valley’s alleged goals goes beyond editorializing to being a flat out lie. The scribbler and her editors know perfectly well that Silicon Valley has no goals but profit and power and is just as opposed to real action on climate change, animal cruelty, and food security as the NYT itself is. This is proven by the fact that a core writing standard at the NYT is for reporters to regurgitate as “fact” whatever governments and corporations say about their own goals, regardless of how unevidenced or contrary to the evidence such claims are. In this case, the “journalist” goes even further and asserts the alleged goal on her own authority. This NYT paradigm, which is followed by the entire mainstream media, is a major constituent of how this media disseminates fake news.

 

Similarly, for corporate media like the NYT the most hysterical, hyperventilating exaltation of capitalism and high-maintenance technology (and the most shrill defenses of these) is considered the normal baseline while even the most moderate questioning or skepticism is branded “emotional baggage.” It’s like Chomsky’s observation that when the NYT says “the people” it means big corporations and the rich, and when it says “special interests” it means the people and the environment.

 

Oh, I almost forgot to mention what this is all about. You’ll have to forgive me, but by now all the particular GMO scams blur together into one fuzzy streak of lies and religious wingnuttery. Each new scam is just like all the preceding ones and musters the same canned lies which were completely refuted years, often decades ago. By now only the wicked and the morbidly, terminally stupid still support GMOs and genetic engineering. In this case, GM yeast generates a synthetic version of the heme protein found in soybean roots. This protein is then incorporated into synthetic vat meat to make it “bloody” like a rare hamburger. The target consumers are the kind of wingnut who wants a bloody meat look and texture but doesn’t want to eat real meat. Allegedly, many vegans fall into this bizarre category.

 

(The Gates Foundation is a big investor in this strange product which is certainly nothing but a boutique item. That’s exemplary of how all the Gates claims to philanthropic motivations are nothing but lies. On the contrary, this exemplifies how the Gates Foundation is motivated by nothing but profit, power, tax dodging, and technocratic religious fundamentalism. Bill Gates is the same as any other televangelist.)

 

This particular scam does engage some broader trends and pathologies. Is celebrating a literal blood-lust, just offering a substitute for real blood, the right way for vegans to go, in their personal actions and social advocacy? I condemn all forms of animal cruelty, not just the specially cherry-picked ones middle class vegans usually care about. Therefore it seems to me that it’s the blood-lust itself which should be criticized rather than appeased. There’s certainly nothing natural about it; it’s not “human nature”. Indeed, the blood-lust in eating bears an uncanny resemblance to the jingoism of chicken-hawks who have never been to war and would collapse in tearful hysterics at the thought of having to go to war personally. In the same manner, CAFO eaters never want to see how CAFOs and slaughterhouses work. Meanwhile I’ve read much that’s been written by farmers who perform their own slaughter, and though most enjoy meat, I’ve never read one who revels in the blood. Only some parasitic eaters do that. So to the extent we see vegans celebrating the “blood”, we see their affinity group.

 

(By no means do I mean to criticize veganism as such. I have great respect for vegans with political integrity, and animal cruelty is one of the several reasons I abominate CAFOs and call for the abolition of industrial agriculture. But I despise anyone who is nothing but a myopic, anti-political, generally ignorant “lifestyle” enthusiast whose objective action not only serves systemic evil but runs counter to their own alleged cause. This is the case with anyone who claims to care about animal welfare but opposes abolitionism and acts as a corporate operative, supporting any aspect of corporate agriculture and food. Like all agronomic, ecological, and socioeconomic crises, the crisis of the ongoing animal holocaust through factory farms, environmental poisons, and habitat destruction can be met only with a strong, coherent, disciplined, relentless movement for the abolition of corporate industrial agriculture in toto and the global transformation to agroecology and food sovereignty. But just as with the crocodile-tear climate criminals and de facto climate deniers, so any self-alleged animal welfare activist who claims to find common ground with the corporate onslaught is a liar and a fraud.)

 

As for the Impossible Foods, they’ve been wrangling with the FDA over the lack of taxpayer-funded, regulator-guaranteed advertising for their product. I’ve written before about the FDA’s fraudulent non-regulating “regulation” of GMOs, which literally is nothing more than a voluntary exchange of letters: The corporation asserts (it doesn’t need to provide any evidence at all) that its GM product is safe, and the FDA replies, “We acknowledge that you claim the product is safe.” That’s it.

 

The beef here is that Impossible Foods wants the FDA to go beyond this abdication. They want the FDA to state affirmatively that their blood-pack is safe to eat. So far the FDA has refused. (The EPA actually lies more aggressively than the FDA, which in this case prefers passive abdication.) Meanwhile Impossible has “self-affirmed” that its synthetic blood-letting proteins are safe by paying flacks impersonating scientists (they’re all contractors for Monsanto, DuPont, ADM, the Gates Foundation, etc.) to assert this, again with zero testing or evidence. Literally everywhere we look, whether it be to the government regulator, the corporations, the scientific establishment, or the mainstream media, we the same absolute lack of contact with reality – no testing, no evidence, literally nothing but lies made up out of thin air.

 

It would be rather comical, like a bad liar on a sitcom, if so much weren’t at stake: Page 1 of Impossible’s FDA submission has the usual rote citation of the FDA’s “substantial equivalence” religious dogma, while page 6 acknowledges that the GM product is a “novel protein”. (This self-contradiction is meant to justify the company’s patent. If the heme protein is “identical”, why should anyone be able to patent it? This kind of contradiction has been standard throughout the GMO/pesticide era. Dow even managed to spook the EPA, it was so brazen about denying synergistic pesticide effects in its regulatory application while celebrating them in its patent application.) Meanwhile their website touts the product as “identical” to what we eat in nature. Once again we see the congenital culture of the lie among technocrats.

 

 

GMOs are indeed impossible foods. Impossible to improve health and nutrition, impossible to improve food safety, impossible to improve food security, impossible for crop biodiversity, impossible for the soil, impossible for the environment, impossible for the good of farmers and communities, impossible for science and reason, impossible for any coherent human culture, impossible for animals, impossible. On the contrary, they’ve long been proven to be directly destructive of all of these values and goals.

 

 

 

PS. “I hacked my body for a future that never came”: This headline pretty much sums up all high-maintenance technological deployments. But this author and her self-mutilating brethren, with their “hi-tech” version of cutting, are especially mentally ill. Be aware of the level of physically violent dementia these creatures demonstrate.

 

 

 

 

Your EPA in Action

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It’s been common knowledge for years that the EPA knew at least since the early 1980s that glyphosate causes cancer, and has been helping Monsanto cover up this fact ever since. Glyphosate doesn’t work in practice, and the brain-dead cult of it is driven only by profit and power.

 

The flood of cancer lawsuits now ongoing against Monsanto is providing more information about the EPA’s pattern of crime. In one of the suits the plaintiffs’ experts are reviewing one of Monsanto’s own original studies which found evidence of glyphosate’s cancerousness.

 

This 1983 study, entitled “A Chronic Feeding Study of Glyphosate (Roundup Technical) in Mice”, was conclusive enough that in 1984 EPA toxicologist William Dykstra wrote in a memo: “glyphosate is oncogenic…in a dose-related manner.” Other EPA scientists concurred over the next year. In 1985 they officially signed a consensus review classifying glyphosate as Category C, “possibly carconogenic to humans.”

 

In response, Monsanto cadre George Levinskas, the company’s cover-up artist who previously led the campaign to lie about the devastation wrought by PCBs, suborned doctor and academic Marvin Kuschner to whitewash the evidence. Levinskas assured colleagues that Kuschner’s testimony was in the bag even before Kuschner actually looked at the slides. Sure enough, Kuschner claimed to find a tumor in the control group which previous researchers, including Monsanto’s own, had not located.

 

At the same time as this alleged control group tumor was being “discovered”, Monsanto sent the EPA a secret report which blamed the tumors found among the experimental group on how the study allegedly used “aged mice”. Why, praytell, would a scientific toxicology study use “aged” experimental subjects such that tumor evidence, if found, would be overdetermined? Precisely for that reason – so that in the event of experimental trouble Monsanto could dismiss the evidence as caused by the age of the subjects. In other words, this is Monsanto openly admitting that its study was a deliberately designed to be a fraud, because they intentionally used experimental subjects which could not provide legitimate scientific evidence. In legitimate science, of course, the goal of experimental design is to isolate the experimental variable(s) and control for every other variable. Legitimate researchers therefore select their experimental subjects in order to prevent any overdetermination of the results. In a cancer study, the subjects would be selected from the demographic which has the least actuarial incidence of cancer. But if you select older mice who are statistically more prone to tumors in general, you’re intentionally designing a fraudulent study. Here we have Monsanto openly avowing that it perpetrated such a fraud, and claiming that therefore the evidence of its own study should be dismissed.

 

Any society which respected science would drive them out with a whip. But we see how things function in a system of establishment science dedicated to the corporate science paradigm.

 

Monsanto also bombarded the EPA with “historical control data”, a standard methodological fraud. Standard in industry tests, this tactic is designed to generate irrelevant noise in order to drown out any toxicity or cancer signal which does arise.

 

 

These Monsanto lies gave the EPA enough of a pretext to reclassify glyphosate into Category D – “not classifiable as to human carcinogenicity.” But they still asked Monsanto to repeat the study, which Monsanto refused to do, thus implicitly validating the original results. In other words, Monsanto believed that even with all its chicanery and fraud, a new study would still produce evidence that glyphosate causes cancer. If the company didn’t think that, it would happily perform the study. The same goes for the fact that the GMO corporations have absolutely refused ever to perform a single safety study upon any GMO. This proves that the corporations and governments believe that such studies would produce evidence of the health harms of GMOs.

 

In 1989 the EPA dropped its request for a new study. The EPA was warming up to its whitewashing role. In 1991 the agency finally performed a complete inversion, dubbing glyphosate Category E – “evidence of non-carcinogenicity for humans” – a bald-faced lie.

 

The EPA has held fast to this pro-glyphosate line ever since, reaffirming it most recently in 2013.

 

Meanwhile the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), one of the few public bodies dedicated to legitimate science*, has deemed this same study, along with a 1981 study finding evidence that glyphosate causes testicular cancer in rats, as evidence that glyphosate is a “probable human carcinogen”.

 

 

Since at least the early 1980s Monsanto and the EPA have known that glyphosate causes cancer. Every US president, agriculture secretary, and other government officials also have known this at least since then. All of them have systematically covered up this fact ever since. They are all complicit in mass murder by poisoning. This is indelibly what the EPA and other regulatory agencies are, just as it’s indelibly what the Corporate One-Party is, regardless of its fake “Democrat” and “Republican” groups. There is no path forward for humanity with these criminal organizations. The regulatory agencies are dedicated in principle to “managing” the infliction of deadly poisons upon the people, and in principle are supposed to keep the number of deaths and injuries at a politically tolerable level, thus the regulatory concept of “tolerances”. But in practice they make no attempt even to manage the death toll, but strive to maximize the use of every kind of deadly agricultural poison. This is indelibly what they are.

 

There is no path forward for humanity in seeking to “co-exist” with these poisons and poisoners. The only solution is total abolition. Therefore there is no path forward in trying to “reform” these indelibly poisonist agencies. They too must be abolished along with the vile poisons they inflict upon us.

 

 

 

*Although the WHO as a whole has been consistently pro-Monsanto, 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 dogmatically views cancer as arising either from genetic determinism or “bad luck”, and which considers 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.

 

 

 

Help propagate the abolitionist idea.