Volatility

September 6, 2010

Labor Day

Filed under: American Revolution, Freedom, Neo-feudalism, Sovereignty and Constitution — Russ @ 6:17 am

Today Bailout America pretends to celebrate a holiday dedicated to those who labor. This is a farce. This is nothing but a regime of pure hostility toward all who actually work, create, produce.

Going back decades every significant action of business, the government, the media, and academia, has been dedicated to eroding the wages and protections of the workers, crushing and corrupting our unions, watering down our spending power, forcing us ever deeper into debt for the necessities of life, menacing our public amenities, stealing our public property (“privatizing” it), and since the advent of globalization and the many forms of Walmart, systematically eradicating our jobs themselves.

And today, even as what’s left of our birthright is stolen right before our eyes through the hyper-looting of the Bailout and all other corporate welfare rampages, the criminals also menace the last economic lifeline we have to anything resembling a society, the Social Security we’ve already paid for with our blood, sweat, and tears. Led by Barack Obama, the worst traitor in American history, these villains want to steal everything down to literally the last penny. They want to impose upon us all the “austerity” of permanent impoverishment, misery, starvation, and slavery. They want to do this in order to maintain their filthy sodomite luxuries and their gutter gangster power.

And today these same criminals and their verminous flunkies in the media tell us it’s “labor day”, and they congratulate themselves on their own obscene labors. What should we say to them?

We can reply that we spit upon your lies and your claims to the mantle of America. We can refuse them, reject them and renounce them. They’re not citizens. They’re nothing to us.

Even though we know this is not our government, not our system, not our polity, we can, by the act of articulating our demands, lay bare the fraudulence of this whole usurping bastard system.

Since it’s Labor Day, we can start here: We demand of this government a jobs program. What else is this government good for if it doesn’t coordinate the economy to create sufficient jobs for all? What could capitalism be good for if it doesn’t create living wage jobs for all? What are the corporations good for if they don’t create fulfilling jobs for all? What are the rich good for if all their stolen wealth doesn’t trickle down in the form of real jobs for all?

All this applies just as much to every other demand: An end to corporate welfare, breaking the corporate power, breaking the finance tyranny, breaking the illegitimate state and police power, decentralizing and truly federalizing political and economic power, liberating our education, medical, and food systems, liberating the land itself, redeeming the law, redeeming justice, redeeming our human dignity and freedom. These are all the things I write for, and I hope my efforts and the efforts of others who strive for these things won’t be completely fruitless.

Since none of these things have happened; since none of the promises of all these decades were ever kept; since on the contrary every promise was viciously betrayed, the social contract itself ripped to shreds with infinite malice by the most despicable liars and thieves in all of history, why do we the people, we who actually perform ALL the work of civilization, who produce ALL the benefits, who create ALL the wealth, why do we tolerate their parasitic and larcenous existence at all? We must cease from such intolerable tolerance.

We must reject with infinite contempt the plan to gut the Social Security we paid for, which was coerced from us with the promise that it would all be paid back. We must renounce with furious rage all calls for austerity in all the things we the people need most of all in this time of economic travail. We must demand instead infinite austerity for the criminals who have stolen so many trillions of our hard-earned wealth.

Those who keep telling us we who have sacrificed so much already, we who have endured so much crime and abuse, must now sacrifice and sacrifice and sacrifice yet more and more and more for absolutely nothing but to keep feeding the hideous maw of greed, now add insult and more injury to our already insufferable injuries.

We must reply, No, my friend, it is you who will now “sacrifice”, it is you who will now undergo the rigors of austerity, it is you who shall be truly set free of all the bonds of civilization we foolishly extended to you and which you have held in such contempt, turning them against us as weapons; we shall now reciprocate. It is you who shall have to leave off from punching us in the face with your “invisible hand”, as you instead feel the caress of the steel hand of justice.

We the people were put here to live as human beings. Among the attributes of humanity is to work fruitfully as managers of our own effort, as distributors and enjoyers of our own produce, as controllers of our own destiny. We have right to all this. The Earth belongs to all who constructively steward it, and the fruits of our labor belong to those of us who do the work.

Today all this is denied to us. Today the Earth has been fenced off by thieves, and the produce of our hard work is stolen every day. And now, in accordance with the new feudal war upon us, more and more of us, already almost 20% of the work force, are permanently excluded from even subsistence labor, as the jobs themselves are liquidated.

All this is nothing but crime. There’s no economic or natural reason for it. It’s nothing more or less but an attempt to assassinate humanity itself, and not even for the grandiose ideological visions of totalitarians past, but for nothing but vile gutter greed.

So we see that if we wish to again fruitfully labor as human beings, our real labor of today is to work and fight to redeem America, to redeem the promise of the Revolution, to redeem humanity itself through the exemplar of what could still be a great country if we rid ourselves of the parasites and vandals who have turned it into a war zone and cesspool. To restore America and again beckon to the soul of the world requires nothing but an act of political will.

That’s our true Labor Day, that’s our every day.

Comments (10)

September 4, 2010

The NYT’s Nocera Lies About Net Neutrality

Filed under: Corporatism, Internet Democracy — Tags: net neutrality, FCC, verizon — Russ @ 7:04 am

The NYT has fitted to print a pack of lies about the telecom rackets, net neutrality, and the future of democracy. The flack du jour is business columnist Joe Nocera.

He starts out describing the basic situation – a broad coalition at least claims to support net neutrality, but the FCC keeps dithering.

And yet, here we are, a year and a half into the Obama presidency, and net neutrality is no closer to being encoded in federal regulation than it was when George W. Bush was president. Just this week, the F.C.C. asked for comments on two of the issues surrounding net neutrality, issues that have been hashed over for months. It was an obvious effort to push any decision beyond the midterm elections.

Correct so far. But then the lies commence:

The F.C.C.’s punt doesn’t begin to get at the turmoil. When Google and Verizon, a month ago, put together a well-meaning proposal for enforceable net neutrality rules, the two companies were vilified by the net neutrality purists — because they wanted to exempt wireless. “There was universal condemnation of Google for abandoning its ‘don’t be evil’ ethos,” said Art Brodsky, the chief spokesman for Public Knowledge — the very group that was leading said condemnation.

There was nothing at all “well-meaning” about the Google-Verizon Pact. Its goal is clear: to set standards for gutting net neutrality. They want to exempt wireless (which they and many others believe is the future of the Internet) completely, while setting up a paid VIP lane alongside the “open Internet”. But there’s no reason as all why wireless should be treated any differently from fixed lines. And we can fill in the blank for ourselves as to where all subsequent infrastructure development for fixed wires will go. The proposals of the Pact are a way of passively killing the democratic Internet.

Here’s a truly malicious distortion:

In the wake of the Google-Verizon announcement, the F.C.C. abruptly called off talks among the various parties aimed at coming up with net neutrality rules. The talks have since been restarted, more or less, though without the involvement of the F.C.C. Yet even if the talks succeed, the resulting framework wouldn’t have the force of law, so it is hard to know precisely what they would accomplish.

These talks were nothing but an end-run around the democratic process. The goal was to remove public policy regarding the public Internet from the public purview. Instead they’d deliver democracy into the hands of racketeer elites whose goal isn’t to ”come up with net neutrality rules”, but to gut net neutrality for profit.

And last but not least: thanks to a court decision in March — a decision that resulted directly from the F.C.C.’s effort to punish one big Internet service provider, Comcast, for violating the principle of net neutrality — the agency’s very authority to regulate broadband is in doubt.

Another lie. Only its “ancillary authority” under the tendentious and arbitrary 2005 classification is in doubt. At will the FCC can reclassify these communications services as communications services.

Nocera goes on to spew a telecom talking point:

Surely, this has to rank as the Mother of All Unintended Consequences: there is an outside chance that in its zeal to make net neutrality the law of the land, the F.C.C. could wind up as a regulator with very little to regulate.

This is a version of the Big Lie that net neutrality constitutes a government “takeover” of the Internet. On the contrary it’s a defense of the Internet against a monopoly racket takeover.

So we already see how Nocera and the NYT are in the bag for the rackets. Note how throughout the entire piece Nocera takes for granted the rationale for the very existence of the access rackets, and never explains why the public Internet which the public built and paid for shouldn’t be in the public’s hands, since the very fact that we’re even having this fight proves that the private sector can’t be trusted with it. (As we’ll see later, Nocera agrees with this but draws the opposite conclusion – the very fact that the rackets want to destroy the democratic Internet is sufficient reason for the citizenry to surrender completely.)

Just in case there was any doubt left, Nocera brings in Wall Street for commentary. Now we know Nocera and the NYT are on the side of the people!

“Net neutrality arguments have been reduced to bumper stickers,” sighed Craig Moffett of Sanford C. Bernstein, Wall Street’s premier telecom analyst. Mr. Moffett’s point is that like most political slogans that wind up on bumper stickers, the issue isn’t nearly as simple and straightforward as it might appear to be at first. Net neutrality is, in fact, incredibly complicated.

Data networks, after all, have to be managed. The engineering is complex. The capacity is limited. Inevitably, some form of prioritization is bound to take place. Rules also have to be created that will give companies the incentive they need to spend the billions upon billions of dollars necessary to extend broadband’s reach and improve its speed, so we can catch up to, say, South Korea.

Again, a flat out lie. Network management can be reasonably performed under net neutrality, and the FCC’s proposed rules allow for ”reasonable network management”. Indeed, they’re probably too lenient.

Nocera goes on with some backhanded “balance” and distortions, repeatedly sneering at citizen advocates as “purists”. (Of course, mercenaries like Nocera arguing for the existence and aggrandizement of parasitic monopoly rackets aren’t “purists” making a “furor” with hatchet jobs like this piece, oh no!)

He lies and calls the existing adherence to net neutrality standards “purely voluntary”, representing the FCC’s attempt to sanction Comcast for discrimination as capricious and autocratic. On the contrary, implicit in the ancillary authority argument was that net neutrality could and would be enforced. Even the Bush administration said so.

Since that ruling came down in March, the agency has been going down two tracks at the same time. It has been desperately trying to find a way to re-establish jurisdiction over broadband services, while at the same time continuing to push for net neutrality. It has become a very complicated dance.

In May, for instance, Mr. Genachowski proposed that the F.C.C. could use Title II of the Telecommunications Act to re-establish jurisdiction. (Trust me: You don’t want to know the details.) But Title II brings with it all sorts of onerous, outmoded regulations better suited to the age of rotary telephones — including price regulation. Although Mr. Genachowski vows not to impose such regulation, who is to say that his successor will agree with his “forbearance” approach (as he calls it)?

Another lie. There’s nothing at all complicated about Title II classification. It’s very simple: Title II applies to communication services like telephone and cable lines. The ISPs deliver Internet access over telephone lines (Verizon, AT&T) or cable (Comcast). They are communication services. They should be classified under Title II.

Was that so hard? Are we the people really as stupid as Nocera pretends we are?

As for Genachowski’s forbearance, the real question regards the “voluntary” forbearance of the rackets, in which propagandists like Nocera always want us to believe.

And no matter how strenuously Mr. Genachowski vows not to impose price regulations, the Internet service providers have made it plain that they will sue to prevent the F.C.C. from asserting Title II jurisdiction over broadband. It is not inconceivable that the providers will win. At which point, the F.C.C. might as well close up shop.

So we should give in to extortion. Yes, Nocera’s colleague Errand Boy Sorkin has made a career of it. I guess Nocera wants to get on that ransom note delivery gravy train.

It is this strange stew — uncertainty over jurisdiction, combined with a campaign pledge to establish net neutrality — that explains the recent Google-Verizon proposal. The truth is, virtually every player involved wants the F.C.C. to have oversight over broadband services. Otherwise, chaos is likely to ensue.

Yeah – in exactly the same way the banksters want Treasury and the Fed to “have oversight” – in order to serve as bagmen for bailouts and otherwise enable them. Otherwise, to do nothing. To help privatize public wealth and socialize risk and cost. That’s all the telecoms and their flunkeyboy Nocera want here.

And now back to the earlier lie about the anti-democratic cabal of “stakeholders” against the net neutrality:

That’s why, at the request of the F.C.C.’s chief of staff, Edward P. Lazarus, representatives from all the sides of the issue, including the Open Internet Coalition, convened to see if they could come up with a framework for net neutrality they could all agree on — and that the F.C.C. could supervise. When those talks bogged down, Google and Verizon decided to come up with their own plan, thinking that they could help lead the others into the light.

Instead, they were slammed. Why? Because even though the framework they came up called for no discrimination of Web sites, for transparency and for all sorts of good things when it came to the kind of broadband that came in through a pipe, it exempted wireless broadband.

Google’s rationale — and, without question, Google was the one that compromised — is that wireless was still too new, and the capacity constraints were still too severe, to impose net neutrality, at least at this point. To put it another way, Google was looking at the issue realistically, instead of theologically.

There’s totalitarian code. Read: Our corporate theology cannot coexist with net neutrality, so it must be gutted. The FCC sought a realistic way to apply theology here but failed, so Google made its own attempt. The most realistic lie to try to put over is that wireless is somehow “new” and “complicated” and needs special study and lots of time before we can decide if net neutrality should apply. That way we can entrench the wireless Internet free of democratic requirements. It’ll be a done deal. Net neutrality will be dead.

Nocera proceeds with his sermon:

So there we now stand. Net neutrality is in limbo because the public interest purists believe that any compromise is a sellout, and because the F.C.C. so badly shot itself in the foot by pursuing the Comcast case. It is difficult to see how we’re ever going to get net neutrality rules.

Yes, net neutrality isn’t in limbo because it’s under attack by the monopoly rackets. No, this attack is simply part of nature’s way, God’s order. The world was put here for the profit of gangsters. They have an absolute god-given right to assert every prerogative everywhere. Anyone who resists this is resisting the market god himself….There’s the corporate theology. Nocera’s one of its priests.

And then an anodyne ending:

Then again, maybe the current snarl isn’t such a bad thing. “If everybody just walked away, the probability of anything bad happening is quite small,” said Mr. Moffett. I agree. Consumers have come to expect an open Internet, and companies will violate net neutrality at their peril. That is just the way the Internet has evolved.

Um, no. Access to the Internet has (d)evolved into a monopoly. If nothing is done the rackets will destroy the open Internet. That’s the Rule of Rackets. The moment a corporation can switch from competitor answering to the customer to an oligopolist who buys power and rams that power down the public’s throat, it will. That’s what’s happening here. Nocera knows that. He’s simply lying about it.

He does make one useful admission:

Without the F.C.C., the Federal Trade Commission would probably wind up serving as the Internet’s sheriff, using antitrust law as its guide and bringing tough enforcement actions. Nobody in the industry wants that.

Yes, the “industry” definitely doesn’t want real public interest enforcement. I’ve always said that breaking up the rackets is the only answer. That’s as true here as everywhere else. Anti-trust would be a good tool for this and should be applied to both the horizontal and vertical monopolies that afflict us.

Then with any luck a parasite like Nocera would lose his paid liar gig and have to get a real job for the first time in his life. We already know he can figuratively shovel shit. So maybe physically doing so is his proper place in this world.

September 3, 2010

Did You Read Your Own Post?

Filed under: Corporatism, Health Racket Bailout, Regulation Can't Work — Tags: corporate liberals — Russ @ 8:01 am

Yesterday Glenn Greenwald put up a short but comprehensive post which takes a little tour of the crimes of the Democrats. Corporate aggrandizement, war crimes, Big Lies, petty fascism, arrogance and disdain for the base, and most of all the Democrats’ willful, contemptuous refusal to regard mass permanent unemployment as a problem at all, let alone the greatest crisis facing America – it’s all there in just a few sentences.

Greenwald’s sarcastic title, The Profound Mystery of the “Enthusiasm Gap”, certainly implies the right question. By now the proof is overwhelming that the Democratic party is just an organized crime syndicate, every bit as bad as the Republicans in ideology and policy and almost as bad in sheer viciousness, meanness, sadism. (The fact that they refuse to do anything about permanent mass unemployment proves they desire permanent mass unemployment. It’s an intentional policy goal.) All this is empirically proven. A post like this is just another stone on the Everest of evidence. So to still have questions about the Democrats is indeed a profound mystery, assuming the questioner isn’t actually a criminal partisan operative.

Yet having just written a post proving by itself that the bad and predatory policies of Democrats are not abuses or renegade examples but rather constitute a structural pattern, Greenwald turns around and performs an attitudinal flip and beriddles us with his own profound mystery in an update. It turns out in spite of his post and its title, he too remains ”amazed”:

What’s most amazing about this is that Democrats generally and the White House specifically seem completely uninterested in doing anything about this — other than exacerbating it. The need to do something is what leads me to believe (without knowing) that Obama will nominate (without necessarily causing to be confirmed) liberal favorite Elizabeth Warren to head the new Consumer Protection Agency created by the Financial Regulation bill. If they do that and are serious about it, that would definitely be a good thing, but at this point, Democratic malaise and apathy are so entrenched that it’s hard to imagine a single nomination doing much to change it.

You think that what you yourself know ahead of time would be a sham appointment would still be “a good thing”? You think something you just implicitly said would serve no purpose but to try to obscure the truth about the Democrats, the truth you yourself just wrote a post dedicated to exposing, would be a good thing? Do you read your own posts?

This is why in the end most liberals, even the best of them, will never be worth anything in a fight. They’re congenitally elitist and conformist and simply can’t break out of those self-imposed constraints. This is an existential matter, a matter of temperament. They’re walking refutations of their own Enlightenment Myth. That’s why they get caught up in profound mysteries. No matter how much education they receive, no matter how much they learn in principle, no matter how much they even become teachers of the truth, they’re unable to really learn the lesson in practice. They’re always close to caving in, selling out, double-crossing the cause. Thus we see the guy who just wrote a good post laying out how the Democrats are our permanent, irreconcilable enemies spin right around to say he can be appeased by a Warren appointment, even though he intellectually knows it’s a sham.

I don’t normally think in terms of the ”the worse it gets, the better for us” philosophy, but moments like this do make me feel like this country really does have to hit rock bottom before any change can come, just like any other incorrigible dope fiend. If that’s true, we’d be better off having Bernie Madoff become head of the CFPB than Warren. Such an appointment would be infinitely more honest, would have such greater clarity, would be so much more educational, and not have the bank-enabling soporific effect on liberals the way Warren seems to have. It would be stark and undeniable, while a Warren appointment will only be occasion for another profound mystery.

This is nothing new for Greenwald. His characteristic two-steps-forward-one-step-back pattern is to write a post which does a good job of laying out the big picture structural issue, and then regress to process liberal mode on that same issue. For example he wrote one of the best posts I’ve seen on the health racket bailout as exemplary of the great defining corporatist issue. Then just days later, evidently having been criticized by Obama hacks, he whined “I wasn’t saying I didn’t support the bill”, and whipped out a microscope to try to ascertain whether or not it might be infinitesimally better than the status quo.

One should acknowledge: the mere fact that the health insurance industry and the market generally sees this “reform” bill as a huge boost to the industry’s profitability does not prove, by itself, that this is a bad bill. Contrary to what I’ve seen said in various places, I haven’t advocated for the defeat of this bill. I’ve said from the start that there are reasonable arguments on both sides and that one must weigh (a) the corrupt, mandate-based strengthening of the private insurance industry, the major advancement of the corporatism model of government, the harm this is likely to do to some who are now covered and some who cannot afford the forced premiums, and the chances for a better bill if this one is defeated, versus (b) the various substantial benefits to many people who do not now have and cannot obtain health insurance and the risk that defeat of this bill will ensure preservation of the status quo. Weighing those factors is difficult and, at least for me, produces ambivalence.

No, we shouldn’t acknowledge any such thing, when the truth has been proven to be the exact opposite. That kind of picayune parsing and the wretched process fetish are typical of liberals. As is this profoundly mysterious refusal to personally register the truth about the Democrats, no matter how much they know about them, no matter how much they write to expose them.

For another, new example on that same health racket bailout, we have two posts from Jon Walker at FireDogLake*.

The first discusses how polls reveal support for the bill and in particular for the individual mandate deteriorating from their already low levels. Over 80% oppose the mandate, most of them strongly so. Once again we see how the people in general are far more intelligent than the non-rich who support either kleptocratic party. The post condemns the Democrats’ crimes in engineering and imposing this reactionary, kleptocratic bill. You’d think the author comprehends the Democrats. Well, evidently not.

Why Democrats fought so hard to include this provision which could have been replaced by far less objectionable alternatives is beyond comprehension.

Again, if by that he means he doesn’t understand the substantive reason why they wanted to do it, then it’s only “beyond comprehension” how anybody can be dense enough to still think the Democrats are anything other than an organized crime racket, or that they’re less evil than the Republicans in this sense.

What anyone who’s been paying attention comprehends is that the Dems included this provision because their intent and goal was to bail out the insurance rackets and help them better loot the people.

On the other hand, if he had meant he doesn’t understand how they could have been politically incompetent enough to do this unilaterally and fail to either make the Republicans share responsibility or else drop it, I’d concur. The Dems are evil but also strategically and tactically very stupid. But on the evidence of his second post a day later, it sounds like he still doesn’t comprehend the Dems themselves.

He describes how Senator Ron Wyden, a longtime vocal supporter of a racketeering mandate, is now back-pedalling from his support for the version in this bill and exploring ways for Oregon to avoid it. Wyden’s doing this for purely political reasons, of course. Like many, many other Democrats, he’s already sweating over re-election. (What’s really amazing and incomprehensible is how these crooks thought they could not only aggressively and systematically flout the will of their own voters, but do so in such an intentionally brazen and offensive way, and then coast to re-election. But like I said, they’re malicious in their intent, stupid in the execution.)

Again, another interesting post which helps to compile the criminal indictment. We can add hypocrisy and cowardice to the list for Wyden. But what does Walker comprehend from this? What’s his takeaway?

We can only hope that Wyden’s recent shift away from the individual mandate is a sign that the Democratic Party is beginning to acknowledge what a massive political and policy mistake they made.

We need for the Democrats to do better! And that’s our “only hope”!

Again, however useful some of their writings are, we see how partisan liberals (which is practically a redundancy) can’t be a reliable part of anyone’s hope for radical change. By definition a liberal is an obstacle to such change. (And if, on the other hand, one does want radical change and is willing to fight for it, whatever he is he’s not a liberal.)

[*According to this,

-----------------------
wayoutwest August 4th, 2010 at 9:37 pm
5
I think it’s going to take a while for Americans to move from anger and scapegoating to understanding who is the real enemy. When and if they do wake up we might get a***edited in moderation***.

Too many progressives and liberals still think that we can change the system by electing a few more good guys to fight for us.

Until someone stands up and demands that the TBTF banks, oil companies and other predatory capitalists are nationalized we are not going to change anything.

***MODNOTE: comments advocating violence or revolution are not permitted***

Reply
wayoutwest August 4th, 2010 at 10:19 pm
6
So peacefull Democratic Revolution is a taboo subject on FDL?

FireDogLake itself is implicitly and censoriously committed to the Democratic Party. Even civil disobedience advocacy, even advocacy of non-violent resistance, are forbidden, at least according to that moderator. (There was no response to that last question, and looking around for an official proclamation I couldn't find one.) I saw a moderator in another thread, which I couldn't locate again in order to link it, explicitly say that the only advocacy allowed is legal change through the electoral process. That can only imply in particular that Democrat partisanship is the only acceptable viewpoint. In general, it's the liberal process fetish taken to the level of debate-quashing dogma.

We see how, in spite of how FDL allegedly learned a lesson from past follies, deep down it really hasn't changed. Just like with Greenwald's posting pattern, the old Democratic "party of the fathers" brainwashing is never far submerged, today in the form of "liberal" ideology.]

The Democratic party is beyond redemption. It cannot be rehabilitated. It does not do bad things out of stupidity or cowardice. It does them out of criminal will. (The Dems are often stupid and cowardly, but that’s only in the policy execution and the politics; their premise and their intent are always fully, consciously malevolent.) At best we may be able to find decent individual persons at the lower levels of politics. Some of these may sometimes be worth supporting, for purely tactical reasons, but never with the thought, “maybe this can be the beginning of a takeover of the Democratic party!” That way lies nothing but frustration and the pure waste of time and effort. Power corrupts; power within an organized crime network makes one a criminal. The longer one is a cadre within, and especially the higher one rises, the more one is corrupted. That has to always be the measure of any establishment politician. “Establishment” includes being a member or supporter of either establishment party.

Comments (38)

Nice Company You Keep. Your Kind of People…

Filed under: Corporatism — Tags: BP, Gulf oil eruption — Russ @ 7:50 am

On the same day there’s another oil platform explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, Obama’s favorite non-bank corporation BP issues a threat:

BP is warning Congress that if lawmakers pass legislation that bars the company from getting new offshore drilling permits, it may not have the money to pay for all the damages caused by its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico……

“If we are unable to keep those fields going, that is going to have a substantial impact on our cash flow,” said David Nagle, BP’s executive vice president for BP America, in an interview. That, he added, “makes it harder for us to fund things, fund these programs.”

This kind of racketeering behavior is of course standard for BP, as it is for every corporate gang. Obama and the corporatists want a world ruled by these thugs. Obama and every corporatist, and every hack of the establishment, is that same person.

They’re nothing but criminals.

Comments (2)

September 2, 2010

The FCC and Net Neutrality: Superfluous Public Comment = “No Comment”

Filed under: Internet Democracy — Tags: net neutrality, FCC — Russ @ 7:05 am

Continuing its truant pattern since spring, the FCC has called for an extension of the comment period on its proposed net neutrality rules.

After months spent gathering comments about preserving an open and competitive Internet, the F.C.C. requested more feedback on Wednesday about whether regulations should apply to wireless Internet service.

The agency is also asking for comments about one of the most hotly debated Internet regulatory issues: special services that offer to prioritize certain digital traffic for a fee.

Those two issues were at the center of a recent proposal by Verizon and Google that generated widespread debate in the telecommunications and Internet communities.

To recap the timeline, the FCC issued its proposal for rulemaking and held the requisite comment period. In April an appeals court ruled that under the FCC’s existing classification scheme (a classification done by fiat in 2005 and which can be changed at the FCC’s will) it lacks authority to informally enforce net neutrality principles. (The 2005 classification of access providers as “information services” rather than ”communications” claimed any additional regulation needed could be performed under “enhanced authority” provisions; this is what the court denied.) This called into question the agency’s formal net neutrality proposal as well as its proposed National Broadband Plan.

The obvious solution is for the agency to reclassify ISPs as communications services. The Communications Act also provides for separating communications from information elements of a bundled service, applying the two different levels of regulation. The FCC’s own proposed “Third Way” is a version of this. Either would certainly satisfy any non-corrupt court.

But instead of doing what it can, should, and must, the FCC has consistently acted as if the court setback has permanently traumatized it. Later last spring it was hinting it wanted to cave in completely. Pro-racket Congressmen signed threatening letters while astroturf groups propagated the lie that net neutrality would constitute an FCC takeover of the Internet, when on the contrary it would prevent Interent racketeering, a takeover of the Internet by the same corporate criminals who crashed the economy. A stern letter from Waxman and Rockefeller seemed to have reinvigorated the process; after some earlier defeatist talk, Commissioner Genachowski reaffirmed his devotion to the Third Way and the net neutrality rulemaking.

But at the same time he convened an anti-democratic cabal of telecom rackets and big information providers to negotiate the issue. The FCC’s goal was to contravene the democratic process and gut net neutrality indirectly. The goal was to broker a deal between the telecoms and big information providers like Google and Amazon which would be beneficial to the latter and pull up the ladder behind them on all smaller info providers. Big Info would join the big telecoms as entrenched rackets dominating a newly enclosed, feudalized Internet.

The evidently unsatisfactory tempo of this haggling led Google and Verizon to strike their own bilateral deal and spew their own proposal for a phony “net neutrality” deal which would actually gut it. Genachowski apparently took this as emblematic of the failure of the FFC-brokered discussions and ended them. (For a more optimistic take on this closure, see here.)

Public commentary throughout the process has been overwhelmingly in favor of strong net neutrality rules and against a corporate takeover of the Internet. The reaction to the Google-Verizon Pact was particularly fierce.

Optimists took all this as a hopeful set of indicators that the FCC would finally find a backbone and go ahead and do the right thing - issue the net neutrality rule and go ahead with the Third Way classification.

Instead today we get the ultimate whimper: an extended comment period, which will extend the existing procrastination at least beyond November.

There have already been two extended comment periods, both of which established a clear demand for strong net neutrality rules among everyone except the lobbyists. The agents of delay and subversion are trying to claim that yet another round of comments is necessary to satisfy the courts:

F.C.C. officials said the request for additional comments was tied in part to the Google-Verizon proposal. But the agency was also trying to guard against generating unintended negative consequences, and to ensure that any rules it did adopt would not be thrown out on a technical claim that the commission had not followed federal rule-making procedures.

“As we’ve seen, the issues are complex, and the details matter,” Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, said in a statement. “Even a proposal for enforceable rules can be flawed in its specifics and risk undermining the fundamental goal of preserving an open Internet.”

But this is a lie. The agency has been punctilious to a fault about the process. No non-corrupt court would ever find that the FCC hasn’t already gone by the book. And of course if judges on a court (or anyone else) are corrupt, then nothing you could do would ever satisfy them. (Appeasement never works – a rule; no exceptions.)

So there’s no conscientious reason for this delay. The real reason is simply to again “kick the can down the road” as Derek Turner of the Free Press said. The FCC is now using the parameters of the G-V Pact itself (as Google and Verizon intended; they were trying to set political standards for the struggle going forward) as the pretext for starting from square one.

The FCC will seek comments on whether net neutrality rules should apply to mobile broadband or specialized and managed services, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced Wednesday. Under a net neutrality proposal released by Verizon Communications and Google in August, mobile broadband and managed services would be exempt from net neutrality rules, but many consumer and digital rights groups have complained that those exemptions would fragment the Internet and hurt users.

There’s no call whatsoever for recasting the crux of the debate this way and saying we need to rehash the whole thing. This is a wretched little ploy by Google and Verizon whose spirit was already resoundingly rejected in the prior comment rounds, and has been rejected in particular since the pact was announced. No one who commented before would feel the need to rethink because some new consideration has been brought to light. There’s nothing new here at all. (Indeed, if anything the fact that Google sold out after having claimed to support net neutrality for all those years will probably deepen feelings that net neutrality rule-making is even more imperative and should be considerably stronger than the rules the FCC actually proposed.)

If there’s still any doubt, look who’s praising the extension:

The National Cable and Telecommunications Association, a trade group representing cable-based broadband providers, promised Wednesday to work with the FCC on net neutrality rules. The new inquiry raises “important and complex issues,” NCTA said in a statement.

Randolph May, president of conservative think tank the Free State Foundation, praised the FCC for issuing the new inquiry.

“Seeking further comment on the issues relating to specialized services and wireless platforms can only serve to further clarify the issues and, potentially, bridge differences,” May said. “This is surely positive.”….

Thomas J. Tauke, an executive vice president at Verizon, said the company was encouraged by the commission’s decision to further study net neutrality as it applied to wireless broadband and specialized services.

“At the same time, it remains clear that whatever action the F.C.C. takes will be clouded by legal uncertainty until the Congress enacts legislation that spells out the authority of the F.C.C. and establishes a broadband policy,” Mr. Tauke said.

As that last line said, the rackets want this thing decided in Congress, which is likely to either do nothing (thus ratifying the status quo heading toward Internet enclosure) or pass a sham bill. This outcome would be even more likely in next year’s Congress.

The FCC again looks willing to abdicate and abandon net neutrality and Internet democracy to its fate.

Was there ever any reason to hope for effective regulation here? Is there still any chance of it, if everybody comments yet again, this time demanding even stronger rule-making? This time explicitly rejecting the parameters of the Google-Verizon Pact as absolutely unacceptable? Even under a Republican Congress, a resolute FCC could still accomplish this.

My rationale for thinking it’s still possible is that the FCC never had to issue proposed rules in the first place. The number one piece of evidence that Obama wants to gut Social Security is that he unilaterally, as an act of pure volition, set up his Star Chamber, his Catfood Commission. So by the same logic, the FCC’s original unforced, voluntary proposal of net neutrality rules is the best evidence that in principle it does want to make such rules. If they’d always wanted to gut net neutrality, the path of least resistance would’ve been to do nothing, right from the start. So I go with the premise that, while maybe never gung-ho about it, the FCC did have a basic interest in preserved net neutrality.

Since then, the evidence has been that, while maybe having started with these good intentions, Genachowski is craven and inertial, and is likely to act in accordance with the strongest stimulus upon him at any given time. Thus his multiple flip-flops in terms of indicating his will: proposing the rule, then backpedaling in the face of the adverse court decision, then flipping again after receiving one Congressional letter, but convening the racket cabal in the face of corporate pressure (including a contrary congressional letter), now seeming to want to just throw the bone out there once and for all for the public and the rackets to fight over by reverting to “comments” again. (Anyone who’s read The Peter Principle will recognize this pattern of behavior. The “teeter-totter syndrome”, perhaps? Or in this case the “John Q. Public Diversion”.) Almost certainly his dream is that Congress will take the whole mess off his hands.

But as I said, I think it’s still possibly worth trying again, so I hope people will comment. As I’ve pointed out before, this seems to be an issue where renouncing the system can’t work by itself. Internet democracy, so far as I can see, will need regulation to protect it.

That doesn’t mean I think it’s an exception to my Rule of Rackets (you cannot regulate rackets; they will always win the war of attrition; you have to destroy them completely; as a rule the ROI will be much better if we eschew the “regulation” delusion completely and work on the destruction). All I mean here is that while we try to muster the counterforce to destroy these rackets, we do still have to keep fighting the war of attrition. Here rejection and passive resistance won’t suffice; action within the system is necessary.

September 1, 2010

The Prize of the Venture

Filed under: American Revolution, Civil Disobedience, Civil Liberties, Food and Farms, Freedom, Health Racket Bailout, Internet Democracy, Neo-feudalism, Relocalization, Resource Fascism — Russ @ 5:15 am

We survey the rubble-strewn landscape. Aftershocks continue to threaten further earthquakes. Ignorant armies lashed on by criminal leaderships intensify their bombardments of themselves and one another. Surveying this desolation, we may feel the gravity of despair. How can anyone hope to turn the guns against their masters, as part of a vague wish to calm the earth itself? The solution seems unfathomable. The problems themselves seem so vast as to be innumerable.

There’s the structural atmosphere of corporatism, where by now it seems the very oxygen we breathe is financialized. The air through which our encumbered limbs try to move is corporatized, suffused with the gaslight of our indoctrination into consumerism, capitalism, the “American Dream”. The things we can see are increasingly branded with various scars signifying ”property”, fronting increasingly aggressive guard towers and barbed wire. Our entire cognitive and sensory experience is dominated by this paradigm. We can add the tyranny of technology and bureaucracy. These inexplicable and inextricable tangles and wires and bonds seem strewn and writhing everywhere.

Even the few who can still conceive of actual freedom – freedom to move, to act, to speak and express, to define one’s own being and decree one’s own action, through both the course of a day and on the long arc of a lifetime – must feel daunted by what seems by now a complete enclosure and imprisonment. In principle it would still be easy to smash down all the walls, but who can tell how to do it in practice?

Economic enclosure is the great prison of humanity. Its walls have always been erected by the elites as prison walls of a vast forced labor camp. This has been the goal of economic and political elites throughout history. Although Marx correctly called our history the history of class struggles, one aspect of this history has been the developing prison-building consciousness of the elites. Enclosure, AKA primitive accumulation, was the criminal strategy which marked the transition from medieval feudalism to the modern feudal/capitalist hybrid. We’ll never know how experimental capitalism would have remained without the boost it got from fossil fuels and concomitant industrialization; as things are the rentier sectors were temporarily eclipsed enough that classical economists could believe capitalism was phasing out the rentier completely.

Today we know that was a vain notion. Feudalism – land rents, resource rents, usury and other finance rents, IP rents, branding and marketing rents, lobbying, bribery and extortion rents - was never euthanized, but only submitted to temporary shadow status. But by the latter 20th century, as resource limits and the innovation limits of capitalism loomed, the elites embarked upon a combined strategy of refeudalization. I’ve written about that several times before. Here’s a few summary examples:

The New Feudal War - Part 1: Kleptocracy.

Part 2: The Bailout

Part 3: ”Austerity”

Part 4: The Intended End State

Beyond the Freedom Flotilla

So the only question left is What to Do? And the only action left is to do it.

Nothing is innocent now but to act for life’s sake. – Cecil Day Lewis

A first step toward fathoming things is to in fact enumerate the problems. We have the finance tyranny, the Bailout and the Permanent War. These are indelible features of the landscape which can only be destroyed by their own inner turbulence. This will happen, but for these I think we who serve must stand and wait. The answer to the big banks is to refuse to engage with them, move our money, otherwise shun them, cut all rents out of our lives as much as possible. That’s the negative aspect of relocalization. The positive actions are everything we can do to redeem our way of life on the local level and protect our heritage and property against the assaults of external, alien barbarians. This means forming our own political and economic relations, growing our own food, preserving our own seeds, crafting our own manufactures, providing our own services, living as the political and economic actors of ourselves, affirmatively defining and decreeing ourselves as much as possible, excluding and shunning the enemy where we can, reacting and defending and counterattacking where we must.

There are two great legislative assaults upon us, what we must properly call Stamp Acts. The first is the health racket bailout which not only does nothing to control the cost of basic, decent health care, but adds aggressive tyranny to injury by forcing us to pay crippling extortion to vile, parasitic gangsters, in the form of the Mandate.

The second is the legislation of food tyranny the system’s trying to impose upon us. Here the law isn’t complete yet, and indeed the Senate version seems somewhat less oppressive than last year’s House version. But let’s not be fooled – the kleptocracy’s barbarous intent is clear. They want total control of food production and distribution. They know what we know, that relocalization is the great threat to their power. (Indeed, if anyone doubts that proposition, he can look to the elites’ goal here as confirmation.) So even if this particular bill ends up not being as severe as it could have been, that’ll only be one inconclusive battle. They’ll be just the next corporate food-borne illness away from gaining the pretext for the next assault, just as every alleged terrorist plot is the excuse for the next assault on civil liberties.

That leads us to the two Stamp Acts of neglect, where it’s not so much a formal policy assault as the inertia of the status quo which is the main vector of tyranny. Civil liberties were being gradually but steadily eroded even prior to 9/11 and the Patriot Act. Once the elites had this “war on terror” pretext, as we know, the assault was accelerated and intensified. In the latest outrage, a federal court has claimed that you have no privacy right in your car even if it’s parked in your own driveway. Police agents are now said to have the right to commit criminal trespass at their whim. No search warrants necessary. (Although the decision was unusually honest about its class war aspect, openly declaring the double standard that if you can afford walls and other security barriers, the police have to respect those and can’t enter without a warrant.) This assault will continue all the way to a totalitarian police state exactly like those of Stalin or Hitler (and much worse thanks to improved technology; as Arendt wrote of Stalinist secret police, imagine if they had computers), until somehow the inertia is halted. No rational person can deny this.

The other inertial process of tyranny will be gutting net neutrality and rolling back Internet access in general. These, along with old-style censorship, will combine to assassinate Internet democracy and strangle the Internet as an economic frontier. In this case, just as with civil liberties, all that will be required for evil to triumph is “for good men to do nothing.” It’ll sure be a surprise if the FCC’s Genachowski even tries to proclaim a semi-strong net neutrality policy. And of course the war of attrition will continue from there.

So these, I propose, are the four problems of policy we must focus upon, even as we try to build a relocalization movement. We must vigorously resist the health insurance mandate and any manifestation of government tyranny over food production and distribution. And we must actively fight to change the inertia on civil liberties and Internet democracy. So it’s two kinds of fights, each on two battlegrounds.

From here on when I write about corporate and government assaults I’m going to write mostly about these four fights, trying to work out strategy and tactics.

Meanwhile I’ll also try to develop the affirmative principles which animate relocalization and positive democracy. These are both ideals and actions, dialectically cycling to constitute a way of life. The fight for them is already the living of them, just as living them must always involve the vigilance of the fight for them.

Unfortunately, the enemies of America are providing us with an all too rich environment for living this struggle. But there’s no point passively lamenting it, no utility in despair, no virtue in defeatism. It’s an obstacle that has to be overcome, and the attack of a wild animal that has to be fended off. Our ancestors dealt with the same and fought through to victory. We can do the same, if we get on with the job.

Comments (4)

August 30, 2010

The Internet and Its Two Kinds of Monopoly

Filed under: Internet Democracy, Regulation Can't Work — Tags: neoliberalism, factory farms, net neutrality — Russ @ 9:10 am

The whole net neutrality issue boils down to racketeering. How can the public interest co-exist with rackets, is this even possible? We know it’s not possible. Net neutrality and equitable broadband access wouldn’t even be issues, let alone bitter bones of contention, if the publicly built Internet infrastructure remained a public utility as it legitimately must be. Only a rogue government’s illegitimate alienation of this public property created this monopoly mess in the first place.

Thus we’ve been driven into this impasse where horizontal integration has throttled all competition among Internet providers. Contrary to the lies of the rackets and government, in most parts of the country the customer for Internet access has two options, tops: the phone company and the cable company. (Let the “libertarian” spew his let-them-eat-cake lies about taking one’s business elsewhere or starting one’s own company on this one.)

So as we approach the FCC’s upcoming meeting where it’s expected to announce (or fail to announce, thereby caving in) net neutrality regulations, we must remember that underlying all the obfuscations and lies are two simple, moral facts.

1. We the people paid for and built the pipes. They belong to us. What subsequent investment the telecom rackets have undertaken has been heavily subsidized by the public. We continue to pay for it all. So why were the pipes privatized at all? Simple gangsterism, corporatism, with the veneer of neoliberal ideology. (Neoliberalism is nothing but ideologically dressed-up gangsterism.)

So the real debate here must be over the scope of the restitution required.

2. Beyond the legitimate ownership of the pipes, we know that oligopolies in any necessary sector are contrary to the public interest as well as to textbook capitalism. So anyone who claims fidelity to either of those must support the breakup of such monopolies. Therefore the very existence of the telecom rackets is odious and shouldn’t be conceded. By definition they are not “stakeholders” (to use the enemy’s own ideologically loaded term), from any public interest or even capitalist point of view. Whatever they argue is on its face invalid.

So the real debate here should be over the scope of the anti-trust action required.

Meanwhile, the fact that what are obviously communications providers who should therefore always have been regulated under Title I of the Communications Act were able to scam their way into Title II “information” classification by cobbling together some rump e-mail and similar services nobody cared about in signing up for access, proves that vertical integration is also at least a major political threat, before it becomes an economic one.

But we can see both threats in the monopoly antics of Intel, whose latest gambit is to gobble up Infineon’s wireless outfit. (This is also a commentary on how the consensus seems to be that wireless is the real future of the Internet, not fixed line. Therefore this acquisition seems to be on the same wavelength as the Google-Verizon deal to gut net neutrality for wireless. Everyone who has the muscle is staking a monopoly claim on this pre-enclosed frontier.)

We see the level of “entrepreneurship” and “innovation” and “competition” involved here:

Intel’s own efforts to build a wireless chip business through its Atom processors have faltered, analysts say. Intel has deals with LG and Nokia to provide wireless chips. Mr. Otellini has been seeking ways to get into this market and diversify the company beyond PC chips.

Unable to innovate or compete, Intel uses congealed wealth to buy, i.e. destroy, the competition.

What might our heroic public servants do about this?

Intel expects the deal to close in the first quarter of next year, pending regulatory approvals…..

Intel has also faced antitrust scrutiny in its primary chip business. This month, it reached a settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to resolve regulators’ complaints that the company had thwarted the efforts of competitors like Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia.

Under that settlement, Intel agreed to refrain from a variety of business practices in an effort to resolve accusations of anticompetitive behavior in the market for computer processor and graphics chips.

We see indeed how much this brush with the law has deterred them. But of course the “reformists” will continue to call for better, sleeker, shinier “regulation”, looking for that magic formula which will get the gangsters to behave.

The same which has worked so well with the finance gangsters, agriculture gangsters, oil gangsters (BP sure has cleaned up its act over the years, hasn’t it?), and which they all assure us will work so well with the health insurance gangsters.

Yes, if we do get a good announcement from the FCC, I’m sure everyone will play nice from then on. The “Third Way” will be sufficient, and we can all go home.

Comments (3)

August 29, 2010

Kleptodicy and the NYT’s New Public Editor

Filed under: Mainstream Media — Tags: ACORN, finance terrorism — Russ @ 7:52 am

Scold, scourge, wreaker of cold justice: apparently, that’s what’s expected of the public editor.

With those words the NYT’s new Public Editor, Arthur Brisbane, kicks off his tenure. If only it were so.

He describes an introductory interview with an NYT reporter, his own nervousness over everyone demanding to know, “Why would you want this job?” It is hard to understand why Brisbane’s predecessors wanted it. So far the job has been mostly to go through the motions of pretending to impose accountability, mostly in the eyes of organized conservatives, while pretending the paper’s real class war agenda doesn’t exist.

The pro-bank ideology of the business page and the paper’s general war-mongering propaganda, both of which dominate the alleged reportage, seldom comes under the “public editor’s” purview. Clark Hoyt was far more comfortable joining in with the NYT’s campaign to destroy ACORN than he ever would have been of forced to deal with the paper’s reportage of the Peterson/Obama assault on Social Security and democracy.

The public editor is a radical concept.

Um, no, it’s a self-evident, common sense concept among people of good will. It’s radical only among criminals.

If I were the one asking the questions my first would be:

Do you believe the core job of a journalist is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, as Murrow put it?

Brisbane’s own statement of principle, such as it is, doesn’t inspire confidence:

And, so you know, I do bring certain articles of belief to this.

I believe a news organization needs to be aggressive. When caution trumps ambition, something dies.

I believe there is no conspiracy. Neither Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. nor Bill Keller is the Wizard of Oz, dictating an agenda from behind a screen. Rather, The Times comes together like parallel computing: many lines simultaneously flowing through a filter, hitting the driveway and flashing on a screen. It is very messy.

I believe that journalists should leave their political views at the door when they report and edit the news. I’m a registered Democrat who voted for Barack Obama and then Scott Brown, so, as you can see, I have already left my views at the door!

Those sure are peculiar “articles of belief”. Notice the total lack of any proclaimed principle. It’s purely process, purely instrumental. “Aggressive” – on behalf of what? “Ambition” to do what?

The very fact of this lacuna here implies what really fills it: The NYT’s mission is to preserve, and do what it can to intensify and entrench, the corporatist status quo. This is its ambition, and it is aggressive in the service of this ambition.

As for the “conspiracy theory” strawman, obviously once the whole cadre’s been selected for a certain ideology and even more for a certain temperament and mindset, there’s little need for a Keller to still play the Wizard of Oz. In the same way, Dimon and Blankfein probably don’t need to micromanage everything Keller, or Obama, does. (Although all those phone calls with Geithner are ambiguous evidence. Is Geithner really such a pathetic tool that he needs such constant guidance, or maybe emotional validation?)

Of course I do accept that execution at the NYT is often sloppy, which contrary to Brisbane’s assertion is not evidence of the absence of agenda, but only of incompetence in execution.

Brisbane’s disclosure about his voting habits, if true, is questionable. He seems to think it should be impressive that he’s a registered Dem who voted for Obama and then for the Republican in a pseudo-critical Senate race. (The criticality being bogus because the “60 vote” meme is fraudulent in every way; nobody with a simple majority ever needed more than 51 vote for anything, and once the Dems had their mythical 60 votes it served mainly to embarrass them, since they still had no intention of passing reform legislation.)

It’s of course discreditable that somebody so allegedly experienced and intelligent, who allegedly cares about the public interest, would still be supporting either kleptocratic party. (It’s another version of the theodicy question, which clearly has no valid answer. Brisbane must either lack intelligence, or else he actually doesn’t care about the people but only the elites. The same applies to all who call themselves Democrats or support them. What should we call it -”kleptodicy”?)

Here’s a suggestion for Brisbane, if he really wanted to be this public interest ombudsman. He could start with today’s spotlight editorial on Obama’s feckless economic policy.

First, he needs to keep driving home that he is committed to addressing the deficit…

It’s of course a lie that from the point of view of the non-rich the deficit as such is any problem at all, let alone “the first”, most pressing problem.

On the contrary the overwhelming weight of practical experience as well as theory prove that in a Depression the government should spend as long as such spending is directly for the people’s well-being. Getting money into the people’s hands, where it will then be productively spent, is the only practical and moral measure, if one truly wants to avert the worst of an economic downturn, if one truly wants the public good. (By contrast corporate welfare spending like the Bailout, the permanent war, Pentagon budgets, Big Ag subsidies, etc. do nothing to help the people or reinvigorate economic circulation. These are just ratholes where potentially productive wealth goes to die. Typically, it’s precisely this kind of spending which is “off the table” for Obama’s deficit terrorist commission.)

But just like the rest of the MSM, just like the business and political elites in whose service the MSM plays its stenographer role, the NYT systematically engages in deficit terrorism. This is because it does not want the people’s well-being, it does not want productive circulation of money, it does not want to avert the Depression.

On the contrary it wants the further unproductive concentration of wealth. It wants to help the gangster elite further loot the people. It wants the Depression to come in slowly, its harshness proceeding at just the right pace such that the people feel helpless before inexorable fate, but not so fast that they lash out in hopeless desperation. (Again, this is no “conspiracy theory”, there’s no need for a master wirepuller; the whole cadre by training and temperament is on board with the project, and once you accept the premise the strategy and tactics are obvious enough that an ideological version of the invisible hand goes to work. The messiness in the execution is simply the difference between best practice and the competence to carry it out.)

Deficit terrorism is meant to directly afford new looting opportunities, to misdirect the people’s attention from real problems toward fake scapegoats and fraudulent “solutions” (to the people’s credit, they seem to be rejecting the propaganda of Obama’s Social Security privatization campaign), and to shred what little is left of any kind of socioeconomic stability and sense of security.

The NYT, as an aggressive practitioner of deficit terrrorsim, is a conscious traitor against the people. As I said, experience and proven theory both prove every word of it to be a Big Lie. So will the new ombudsman make this his main project, and really act as a Public Editor? Or will he pack his columns with controversies over the social gossip blogs, the way Hoyt loved to do? Will he, like his predecessors, act as the “public editor”? I know what I expect from a guy who votes for Obama and Scott Brown and who talks in the sociopathic way of the above quote about unprincipled ambition and aggression.

Comments (5)

August 25, 2010

Food For Thought: We Can Have Food And Thought, Or Else Neither

Filed under: Civil Disobedience, Civil Liberties, Food and Farms, Globalization, Health Racket Bailout, Neo-feudalism, Relocalization — Tags: smithfield, krugman, factory farms — Russ @ 5:51 am

The salmonella egg scare is just the latest outbreak of corporate food-borne illness. I’m sure it won’t be the last or anywhere near the worst, in spite of the purported food safety bill now moving through the Senate to join the predatory bill the House already passed last year.

It’s already clear that even given corporate food production, the egg outbreak could have been prevented with the simple expedient of vaccination. Britain instituted this ten years ago and saw salmonella incidence plummet.

But of course our corporate-captured FDA decreed that there “wasn’t sufficient evidence” to take this measure. That’s a basic difference between Europe and the corporatized US: Over there they still recognize the precautionary principle, which is really just common sense. Where there’s any question, as there always is with any new development in industrial agriculture, the burden of proof must be on the technological or organizational “innovator” to prove his practice is safe, not on those who wish to take precautions to prove that it’s unsafe (which usually can’t be done until it’s too late).

So here we are again. One of the criminals responsible is a familiar name from previous outbreaks, worker abuse, accusations of rape, and endless incidents of contempt for the most basic rules of food safety, Jack DeCoster and his company, Wright County Farms. This guy’s record really is something to see. Sometimes real Mwa-ha-ha type evil finds room to gratify itself under the fig leaf of “business”. That’s an example of the FDA’s forbearance in action, and for whom it sees itself as working.

That seems unlikely to change under the food bill. I’ve written before about the House bill from last year (for example here and here), which systematically seeks to destroy small food producers by imposing a one-size-fits-all regime upon them. This regime is calculated to be a mere nuisance to the industrial producers while posing severe financial and logistical hardship on smaller producers. Small-scale producers obviously cannot cause large-scale outbreaks. Only factory farming (CAFOs are in fact unregulated bioweapons labs) and corporate distribution systems can do that. And they have been doing it, as every year brings more severe outbreaks. The swine flu may have originated at a Smithfield factory farm in Mexico*. It’s only a matter of time before a massively lethal pandemic originates at a CAFO.

But for the criminals in Congress the idea was to use these very corporate-caused outbreaks as the pretext to pass pro-monopoly food bills. This is exactly what happened with HR 2749. The Senate bill was originally crafted in the same disaster capitalist way.

[*These bills also seek to tighten the stranglehold of globalization over food, surrendering our food sovereignty completely to anti-sovereign syndicates like the WTO. Let's recall globalization arch-cadre Paul Krugman's celebration of CAFOs themselves.]

In committee there were several modifications to the Senate bill:

The amendment sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) pertaining to farms that engage in value-added processing or that co-mingle product from several farms. It will provide the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with the authority to either exempt farms engaged in low or no risk processing or co-mingling activities from new regulatory requirements or to modify particular regulatory requirements for such farming operations. Included within the purview of the amendment are exemptions or flexibilities with respect to requirements within S. 510 for food safety preventative control plans and FDA on-farm inspections.

The amendments sponsored by Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) to reduce unnecessary paperwork and excess regulation. The Bennet language pertains to both the preventative control plan and the produce standards sections of the bill. FDA is instructed to provide flexibility for small processors including on-farm processing, to minimize the burden of compliance with regulations, and to minimize the number of different standards that apply to separate foods. FDA will also be prohibited from requiring farms and other food facilities to hire consultants to write food safety plans or to identify, implement, certify or audit those plans. With respect to produce standards, FDA will also be given the discretion to develop rules for categories of foods or for mixtures of foods rather than necessarily needing to have a separate rule for each specific commodity or to regulate specific crops if the real food safety issue involved mixtures only.

The amendment sponsored by Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) to provide for a USDA-delivered competitive grants program for food safety training for farmers, small processors and wholesalers. The training projects will prioritize small and mid-scale farms, beginning and socially disadvantaged farmers, and small food processors and wholesalers. The program will be administered by USDA’s National Institute for Food and Agriculture. As is the case for all of the provisions in S. 510, funding for the bill and for this competitive grants program will happen through the annual agriculture appropriations bill process.

The effort championed by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) to strip the bill of wildlife-threatening enforcement against “animal encroachment” of farms is also in the manager’s package. It will require FDA to apply sound science to any requirements that might impact wildlife and wildlife habitat on farms.

An amendment proposed by Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) to amend the traceability and recordkeeping section of the bill that will exempt food that is direct marketed from farmers to consumers or to grocery stores and exempt food that has labeling that preserves the identity of the farm that produced the food. The amendment also prevents FDA from requiring any farm from needing to keep records beyond the first point of sale when the product leaves the farm, except in the case of farms that co-mingle product from multiple farms, in which case they must also keep records one step back as well as one step forward.

Not in the package but still under serious negotiation for inclusion in the bill when it reaches the floor of the Senate is an amendment by Senator John Tester (D-MT) to exempt food facilities with under a certain annual gross sales threshold from preventative control plan requirements and to exempt farmers who primarily direct market product to consumers, stores or restaurants from the bill’s produce standards regulations. Our expectation is this amendment will be successfully negotiated over the coming weeks and will be accepted as part of the final bill once the bill reaches the Senate floor.

We also continue to note and emphasize the additional provisions NSAC helped secure when the bill was marked up in Committee last year. Those changes included:

requiring FDA and USDA coordination (including with respect to organic farming);

limiting recordkeeping for farmers to just the initial sale to the first purchaser of the crop; and

language in the produce section directing FDA to create rules that are appropriate to the scale and diversity of the farm, that take into consideration conservation and environmental standards established by other federal agencies, that do not conflict with organic certification standards, and that prioritize high risk crops.

As a result, some sustainable food organizations now support this version of the bill, and would presumably support a final version which was closer to the Senate bill than the House bill. [Edit: The support of the NSAC, linked here, is contingent on inclusion of the Tester amendment; cf. comment below.]

The fixes still seem weak. The bill still gives the government too little power over the real threat, the industrial producers, and too much over the innocuous small producer. We know how “regulation” always works out. Sure enough, even as the FDA (and other agencies; I’m not even getting into the intentionally Byzantine regulatory structure whereby one agency is responsible for the eggs while they’re still in the shell, another once they’re liquefied and processed, and those federal agencies are responsible except where they’re not and the state is….) refuses to do its public interest job where it comes to the big producers, it’s been launching aggressive raids against small producers. (In principle the bill gives the bureaucracy immense power with little restraint. The implications for civil liberties and unaccountable authoritarianism are chilling.)

This shows the kleptocracy’s real intent. The goal of these police actions, and the goal of the bills in Congress, has nothing to do with food safety and everything to do with corporate and social control. Corporate food wants a total monopoly on production and distribution. The nascent relocalization movement, which is necessarily focusing on food sustainability as one of its core goals, is a threat to this elite control.

Even if this bill ends up having been stripped of its most overtly aggressive features, it would be foolish to think that’s not just a temporary tactical retrenchment on the part of the power structure. Although some of what’s written about these bills sounds alarmist, the language is clearly being carefully crafted to provide scope for the most far-reaching power assaults, perhaps some years down the line.

That’s why we who want to build new economies and polities from the soil up will have to be ready for civil disobedience and self defense. Although many don’t want to think about it in those terms, I think that’ll be a necessary element for successful relocalization. I plan to develop the idea and try to figure out a strategy when I write more about how we have to conceive and fight the health racket mandate as our Stamp Act.

But as we see with the corporate food bill, there are in fact many Stamp Acts. Just as in the 1760s, the plan is systematic expropriation and feudal indenture. But since we’re commencing upon the descent of the industrial age rather than its ascent, the serfdom in store for us is far more bleak, far worse even than medieval, if we don’t rouse ourselves to redeem our country, our freedom, and our humanity.

Comments (17)

August 23, 2010

Liberal HAMP-Smokers Kicking the Habit?

Filed under: Bailouts Only Propped Up Zombies, Regulation Can't Work — Tags: corporate liberals — Russ @ 9:56 am

I’m always glad to see liberals waking from their slumbers, however belatedly. Who knows, maybe some of them might turn into real activists in the struggle ahead.

So this time the revelatory catalyst was Steve Waldman’s report from last week’s econoblogger conclave at Treasury. Here’s the critical quote:

On HAMP, officials were surprisingly candid. The program has gotten a lot of bad press in terms of its Kafka-esque qualification process and its limited success in generating mortgage modifications under which families become able and willing to pay their debt. Officials pointed out that what may have been an agonizing process for individuals was a useful palliative for the system as a whole. Even if most HAMP applicants ultimately default, the program prevented an outbreak of foreclosures exactly when the system could have handled it least. There were murmurs among the bloggers of “extend and pretend”, but I don’t think that’s quite right. This was extend-and-don’t-even-bother-to-pretend. The program was successful in the sense that it kept the patient alive until it had begun to heal. And the patient of this metaphor was not a struggling homeowner, but the financial system, a.k.a. the banks. Policymakers openly judged HAMP to be a qualified success because it helped banks muddle through what might have been a fatal shock. I believe these policymakers conflate, in full sincerity, incumbent financial institutions with “the system”, “the economy”, and “ordinary Americans”. Treasury officials are not cruel people. I’m sure they would have preferred if the program had worked out better for homeowners as well. But they have larger concerns, and from their perspective, HAMP has helped to address those.

(BTW, in the post Waldman continues with his rather disgusting teenybopper fawning over those who are nothing but wretched scumbags. His tone after the first such meeting last year was the same. I really can’t fathom why anyone would admire these bureaucratic thugs or find them humanly attractive in any way. In a comment today Yves Smith tries to explain it in terms of human nature, but I’d say it’s more likely endemic to those who are or in the past have been insiders of a particular system. I’d bet if true outsiders ever had such a meeting, we’d be coldly polite at best, and in our minds just plain cold. At least Waldman admits that it’s discreditable of him, and rues it.)

So there followed a chorus of outraged liberals: “We’ve been had!” I won’t bother analyzing any in detail. Here’s one example, and another, and another.

Now, those of us who maintain an open mind (and read the econoblogs) knew this a long time ago. If I may toot my own horn for a moment, here’s me calling the HAMP a scam on exactly these grounds last December. There were plenty of others too. As with everything else, none of this is ever a secret nor does it ever require any special genius to figure out. It just requires paying attention and not maintaining stupid faith like faith in Obama and the Democrats (let alone faith in the banks; unbelievably, many still do).

Nor were our sources exactly obscure: To give two, McClatchy is a mainstream outlet, while The Nation is a liberal publication.

So why didn’t our liberals learn about the HAMP from The Nation back in December? I think the best answer is that Waldman is quoting Treasury cadres themselves affirming that the HAMP was a scam. A liberal, being a type of Right Wing Authoritarian Follower* and elitist suck-up, is congenitally unlikely to believe non-official sources on things (he’ll believe an anti-Republican allegation when a Democrat leads with it), and needless to say he won’t think things out for himself. So he wasn’t previously willing to believe housing activists or some unusual examples of real reporting, and of course he won’t believe econobloggers or radical bloggers.

But now that an official from the Treasury Department itself admitted the scam, it suddenly becomes a real scam, for at least some of the liberals.

Well, like I said I’m glad when we seem to see some progress in the education of our liberals. Of course I won’t believe anything from anyone until he takes an explicit stance renouncing the Democrats and the system once and for all.

[*Altemeyer himself recently came out as an RWA Follower, an Obama cultist, Bailout-believer, war-monger and what have you. Kind of ironic, if you're familiar with his work. Who knew he was talking about himself all along? (Well, at least I didn't. Maybe others did.)]

Comments (4)

Older Posts »

Aug	SEP	Oct
	08
2009	2010	2011

Volatility

September 6, 2010

Labor Day

September 4, 2010

The NYT’s Nocera Lies About Net Neutrality

September 3, 2010

Did You Read Your Own Post?

Nice Company You Keep. Your Kind of People…

September 2, 2010

The FCC and Net Neutrality: Superfluous Public Comment = “No Comment”

September 1, 2010

The Prize of the Venture

August 30, 2010

The Internet and Its Two Kinds of Monopoly

August 29, 2010

Kleptodicy and the NYT’s New Public Editor

August 25, 2010

Food For Thought: We Can Have Food And Thought, Or Else Neither

August 23, 2010

Liberal HAMP-Smokers Kicking the Habit?

Pages

RSS feeds from this blog

Email Subscription

Recent Posts

Archives

Categories

Subjects:

Blogroll

Economy

Energy

politics

Meta