from Glass-Steagall to starvation
The following linked Doug Nowland article from AT points to statistics and trends that we have remarked upon more than once hereabouts.
This dismal accounting from the most dismal of “sciences” is not guaranteed to get your dopamine levels up through first impressons. Econo-talk is a deadly bore — designedly so to ensure that it doesn’t attract the curiosity of us proles. Nonetheless, I urge those who have the time to give this a study… perhaps with a financial-terms glosaary ready at hand. Under this battleship gray veneer is a saga of power and powerlessness that has gone on for several decades, the last act being around 18-years long, culminating in the formal repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 (it had been ignored and eroded for some time before that).
The Glass-Steagall Act was a response to the speculative meltdown of 1929-31 that walked the world into the Great Depression then World War II. It separated commercial banks (that lend money) from financial speculators, because there was a justifiable fear that the hot money of speculation would overhwelm and destabilize the cool-money of commercial lending… duh.
Many Keynesians (Glass-Steagall was a Keynesian measure) now blame the loss of Glass-Steagall, to include the systematic bypass of it by the Federal Reserve for years before Clinton signed its repeal, for the so-called “credit crisis,” or by those who need to paper over the crisis with another level of superficiality, the “subprime crisis.” This confuses symptoms with causative agents, rather like calling Dengue a “fever-and-pain-crisis.”
They are right that this is a crisis, just as a high fever, on its own, can endager a patient’s brain.
Former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, once famed for his reticence and oblique statements on the economy, seems to have spent the time since he retired from the Fed in 2006 rebuilding his persona, at least the reticence part.
Yet, though he now seems unable to decline an interview opportunity, it is increasingly evident that Greenspan is not going to be of much help when it comes to the critical issue of exploring what went terribly wrong with monetary policy and the financial system.
What is most interesting about this article, near the end of its dreaded accounting, is the mention of rising food prices, related to hyperinflation, related to oil prices, related to dollar hegemony… and so it goes.
And so the crisis comes full circle, not simply to the emblematic investors jumping out of Wall Street windows, but to the concentration of a massive global population, created by industrialism and jazzed to uber-velocity by the so-called Green Revolution, in megacities laden with overcrowded Bidonville slums along precarious terrains; the residents therein dependent on money to eat.
Meanwhile, petit-fascists like Lou Dobbs fan the flames of xenophobia against the refugees of this process with their anti-immigrant demagogy… as the band plays on.
In 1999, Mark Jones (RIP) wrote:
Immigration into the US is the direct result of the previous creation of a surplus population, principally by driving peasants off the land in the process of extending capitalist agriculture.
There is a one-to-one connection between the aggressive extension of monopolised agriculture in the oppressed peripheral countries, and the creation of the megacities in the South, which are the sumps of stagnant surplus population, and the ultimate source of contemporary tidal immigration into the US, Europe etc. The argument from social justice begins with the proposition that as of now, we have enough food production capacity to feed people all over the world comfortably. All that is needed is more equitable distribution, meaning among other things less meat in Western diets. This is the classic Green argument: if we eat more wholesome beans and vegetarian foods, there is enough food for everybody. But it is utopian. The call for social justice involves not just redistribution, but a structural change in the mode of food production itself. What will this change entail, and how can it be implemented? Once you start to examine the problem in detail, you discover that the level of food production we have today, which is historically very high, depends upon the inputs which the total capitalist system provides: everything from chemical inputs, pharmaceutical, pesticides, stock breeding, biotech — to distribution methods, the vertical organisation of agriculture, the existence of a large scale, powerful agronomy research sector, the existence of sufficient energy inputs etc.
Third World food depends on the ‘Green Revolution’ in agriculture which is itself just an aspect of modern capitalism. This ‘Green Revolution,’ which produces an abundance of food, also produces new ‘surplus’ populations, i.e., former peasants made landless and driven into the cities. But if people object on spurious grounds even to the terminology ‘surplus population’ then we are unable even to define the problem, which is that the productivity of modern capitalist agriculture creates excess population as a by-product. This surplus population is a hostage to imperialism and it guarantees that modern capitalist agriculture, far from becoming sustainable or green/organic, will be still more intensified, capitalised, and imbued with the technologies of gene-modification, germplasm patenting, chemical saturation of soils etc. … Pools of hunger, scarcity, malnutrition, epidemic disease etc. are produced by capitalism alongside and together with the enclaves of prosperity.
Over-population confronts the world with multiform crises whose scale and intensity make alternatives to capitalism almost unthinkable… [yet] the population cannot exceed Earth’s carrying capacity, and all economic processes including food production must be sustainable. The population already exceeds carrying capacity, yet it may rise to 10 bn. within forty years. This huge surplus population will be hostage to capitalist agronomy, science and technology, to monopolised agribusiness with its complete dependence on unsustainable technologies, on chemical and pharmaceutical inputs, biotechnology and gene-manipulation, to the monopolistic food producing centres which will be concentrated in the temperate zones of the rich North. The tempo of change, too swift to plan or vary; and the structural imbalances which will only deepen over time, make this fate seem all the more inescapable. But this only means that capitalism’s crises will become still more explosive and dangerous.
So now we are reading about food riots… not because the food is in shortage (though our system is one where food is simultaneously over-abundant and scarce depending on where and who you are), but because of money… because the prices increased for this monocropped, globalized food.
And population is not an issue of the fecundity of the poor. It is an issue of what we are doing to the earth to simultaneously reduce its carrying capacity (destruction of biomes, of soil, air, water) and support the over-developed, energy-intensive, industrialized metropoles (especially the USA).
“Explosive and dangerous,” Mark said…. that’s the essence of it. “Anything that can’t go on forever, won’t,” as they say; but what goes on in the wake of “won’t” should alarm us enough to think seriously about how this crisis is about to affect us, and those within our proximity. The stranded billions in the megaslums are not the only hostages to this inertial capitalist agronomy.
If it comes for “them” in the morning, it shall come for us in the afternoon.
xenia:
in the last few months, there has been much talk in europe about the purported reason for food inflation: it’s those pesky chinese and indians consuming “our” dairy and meat and raising the cost for “us” at home!
of course, there is growing affluence for *a few* managerial sections of chinese and indian societies, and an increased tendency to consume european and american foods (or imitations thereof). but during my recent travels in asia, as i was blowing my very last money, i realized some cliches were true: most inhabitants of china still don’t like milk, even if it comes in ice-cream or milk chocolate (i tend to believe it’s a cultural preference, but many folks cite genetics, which i do not accept a priori, but the argument may be of some validity).
as for india, european cheese tends to be two or three times more expensive there than its price in europe (often around 8 dollars for a package), so it’s a delicacy which few people, even the so-called “middle class” can afford on a regular basis, so indians have started producing european-style cheeses locally.
yet, in the articles i checked over the last few days on hunger uprisings, chinese and indian consumption of european foods have become the knee-jerk explanation for inflation in europe.
as i said, imitations of american malls, freeways and other wasteful mores abound in india and china, but this is really a crude racialist argument, just like the idea that africans are destroying the resources of our planet through overpopulation.
lou dobbs et co. should rejoice, it’s time to blame it on the brown/black/yellow man and woman! the same old boring story…
14 April 2008, 2:53 pmRobert Karaffa:
Per Mark Jones’ words: Explosive, dangerous, unsustainable, unthinkable, unescapeable; Exactly. When I think of the billions of us here in this paradigm the word that comes to mind is inertia, I’m glad you used it in regards to capitalist agronomy.
Not entropy, as has been discussed here before in terms of thermodynamics; but inertia. Not the slow coasting kind when you powerdown a small aircraft; but the absolutely terrifying kind you feel the first few times you drop a motorcycle at speed and there are obstacles ahead that you can see (if still concious.) You know a terrible bang is coming and you know pain and hamburger flesh is coming, but that is not the scary part. It’s that horrific out of control dragged by the tide hang on for dearlife with nothing to hang onto panic feeling.
And all of those words of inevitability (and all of us) are wrapped up in all of this global systemic inertia. Nothing to counter this into a slow powerdown can happen fast enough. I respect Jones lack of optimism.
Structure on this scale has to fall catastrophically. Humanity doesn’t learn. Humanity doesn’t change. All the basic behavioral tendencies remain. We just do bigger and bigger do-overs. While the greed and ego-sociopaths and the conned keep spouting econo-talk and candyland propaganda. What in human behavior has changed since the Fall? And I suppose most of us here are trying to figure out how to change it without killing everybody.
14 April 2008, 3:43 pmStan:
I’ll tell you something that may sound odd about Mark Jones. He was an absurd optimist.
That may be the best thing I learned from him. Optimism is a necessary exercise of revolutionary faith; and one that can have no meaning if it is not fearless in its discernment of reality.
Amilcar Cabral said, “Tell no lies, mask no difficulties, claim no easy victories.” But he never said to quit. And that is the opposite of misanthropy.
Humans, by our existential condition, require immense courage just to wake up, wash our asses, and get through each day with the capacity for any joy at all… confronted as we are with that unkowable abyss at the end.
We’ve produced our share of miscreants, to be sure, as cultural inertia and the lust for power sweeps us beyond our own capacities to self-correct. But we’ve also produced a lot of people who have been blessings, examples, and benefactors.
If any of us think for a moment, we can name the names… those we know, and those we know of.
14 April 2008, 7:14 pmRobert Karaffa:
I would agree completely with that. And no, Cabral or Jones never said to quit and I will never do that; although in the ‘68 speech, for totally good reasons Jones seems to say at times to desist, think, readjust attitude and come back. The respect for Jones is for the expression of the hugeness of the challenge. In this context I too am an absurd optimist.
Goodness gracious, the huge number of extraordinary human beings I have met that are definitely blessings, examples and benefactors and that have crawled, scrambled, jumped up or just plain walked right up to my face (or just e-mailed) seemingly having come into their own “overnight” to express realization and all kinds of support and commitment is an inspiration beyond words, and that’s just all the regular folks I know, not including the various international historical examples.
Our organization is of course not an NGO and we can still, though it gets harder and harder, work under the radar so to speak. But we work with everybody. USAID, GHESKIO, the head of PEPFAR in Haiti, embassy people new or seasoned, we understand the structure and we can’t be ideologues and will not play politics in either country or any other (for the most part,) it is just not productive; which has gotten us accused of being Pro-Minustah etc. which is not true. When you need to get things done: HIV meds delivered at cost (I mean generic IDA delivered cost,) Get one of your best friends released from brutal captivity so his wife doesn’t have to listen to him screaming and crying over the cell phone, make sure your feeding program gets regular delivery etc. you need all the connections you can make and you must be even-handed and honest about everything you do. Our outfit is about assisting the people in what they want to do. We don’t tell people what we will do, we sit down in an office or by a kerosene lamp at night in the mountains and ASK the people, what can we help you with? What do you envision for the structure you have started here? I have seen horrible damage inflicted by (as Kevin Pina might put it..”Spiritually Challenged” evangelicals) going into Demier with a group of blan berating and literally damning “witch doctors.” After one of these expeditions, 2 of the Voodoo docs passed, and the evangelicals sent letters out proclaiming victory! (SHUDDER!)This we will not tolerate. As I said, we also understand the structure. You take the good you can get. And there can be good attained at AID and other places. Most of these institutions of course contain individuals who have been through many administrations and see the structure themselves and know how to move.
I shouldn’t waste your blog space with my sometimes irrelevant ranting. But I am an optimist. I see it in every smile. Every scowl turned into a smile, not by me, or my wife, or any blan team; but by the realization of perhaps solidarity somebody just felt, or just from the relief of physical and emotional pain. Hell, I see it everyday in my own stupid gray bearded smile!
14 April 2008, 8:40 pmDeAnander:
Mark Jones, whose work I mostly know via Stan quoting it, was evidently a close observer and a fearless thinker. the fact that he could see the predicament we are in so very clearly — the trap that Ponting called “the ratchet effect” — and still have hope for any kind of better future, gives me a small shred of that same hope.
one ground for hope is that small scale intensive polyculture is more productive per hectare than factory ag. that is, we could produce more food per hectare by abandoning factory ag. and it would be more nutritious food, and our ag praxis would build rather than liquidate topsoil. however, billions of people would have to be “repatriated” to the land, because what factory ag is best at is labour-shedding, i.e. producing less food per hectare (and with brutal asset-stripping of soil and water), but more food per hour of human labour; whereas small- and medium-scale polyculture is by its nature labour-intensive and local, requiring hands-on tending, local knowledge, a dedication to the land and its life that only local stewardship can provide.
the good news is that the keys to survival are in our hands, we know how to do things better. but the bad news is that doing things better means deposing an entrenched elite and the belief system that keeps it entrenched. this is the inertia, this is where the sense of “inevitability” comes in. it’s a cultural inertia, and we know from instinct and from experience that cultural inertia is enormous — that some cultures have committed collective suicide rather than change their belief systems.
a revolution more radical than any yet consciously undertaken is required to undo the memes of scientism (not science), nutritionism (not nutrition), biophobia (not hygiene), cornucopianism, and hyperindividualism (not freedom). these beliefs are key to a new kind of arrogance, one quite novel and unusual in human history: the conviction that we are smarter, better, and in every way superior to our ancestors. for most of human history, people revered their ancestors and their achievements; it is uniquely “modern” to despise our ancestors and consider them stupid and backward, to be consciously proud that we live and think quite differently from previous generations. much of our sense of self-worth is invested in this notion of Progress and superiority to all previous generations of humans (and, for those in “the West,” superiority to all other colours and nations of human contemporaries as well). many of us still believe that our children (and their “way of life”) will be far superior again, and so on (literally) ad infinitum. this is a remarkable and imho delusional creed. and it’s daunting to challenge.
many people respond with a panic attack or a tantrum when the fairly straightforward strategies for better food security and sustainability are discussed. it’s not just because they are spoilt brats who whine and kick their feet and scream if you even mention taking their toys away (though there does seem to be some such element in their reaction); imho it’s because any critique of industrial capitalism strikes at the very heart of their sense of personal worth, which for many people (especially white boys, but nonboys and nonwhites may still subscribe to bits of the True Faith) their sense of exceptionalism, racial superiority (where applicable), gender superiority (where applicable), national superiority (where applicable). it also strikes at the very heart of their optimism, the place where they invest their hopes — i.e. the promised techno-future, in which their children will live better, longer, more wonderful lives. it strikes at the heart of meaning (everything we do is somehow believed to promote the cause of “growth,” “development,” “progess,” and suchlike fantasies, and this lends a kind of meaning to even the least creative work). it strikes at the heart of our good opinion of ourselves [I mean, which would you rather understand yourself to be — an earnest worker for a brighter and better future, proud member of an invincible army of Progress- and Wealth-creators, one of the Elect of the Master Culture constantly “improving” the world? or one of a mob of clueless, selfish vandals and thieves destroying the infrastructure that your own and everyone else’s children need to survive? pretty easy choice, eh].
challenges to technocracy and “civilisation” are the ultimate heresy in a culture where Growth, Progress and Technology have become the official religion.
there are certain key points in the creed of this fundamentalist religion which urgently need to be challenged. the Green Revolution fairytale is definitely one of them…
14 April 2008, 8:43 pmRobert Karaffa:
Perfect Deanander. I have felt this intrinsically (sp?) since about the 2nd grade when my Weekly Reader talked about how a nickel sometime in the 19th. century would be worth, you know a dollar maybe in 1965 or something whenever that was. Never looked back. It was the first time in my memory that I realized that some twisted system of capitalist infinite growth paradigm was horseshit. (my teacher at the time would have none of it!!) I was a very bad little boy.
14 April 2008, 9:14 pmDeAnander:
the myth of compound interest
I am not sure if this link will work for others… ET seems to be having some trouble from where I sit, so I can’t get to it. but perhaps from other locations the route will be better.
[later that day: just fixed the link so it leads directly to the “compound interest debunked” post]
15 April 2008, 11:18 amJames M:
any system based on the idea that real wealth can accrue by usury, is going to need a devastating reset and devaluation every few years — let alone centuries — to overcome its own divorce from physical reality… real wealth in the end comes down to material reality.
Another DeAnander’s Law?
Jeez, write a book, willya? Or an anthology — “The Collected Wisdom of DeAnander”? It’s getting hard to keep up with all these comment-threads in various places. Such incisive analysis (you’ve got one of the sharpest scalpels around) and insights (as forehead-slappingly obvious as they can, or should, be — as in the quote above) deserve to be collected and given a worthy presentation.
15 April 2008, 3:51 pmStan:
Today on BBC(?), there was a story about the World Bank suggesting that just maybe many in the third world might possibly want to return to traditional methods of agriculture… the concern, of course, is that starvation makes people unruly.
BBC then did one of those pro-and-con things, and a representative from Syngenta was squealing like a pig in the kill-chute. “Crop protection, crop protection, crop protection,” was all he could say. That means GMOs with pesticides. Agribiz is now seeing how they could go to the wall in the forseeable future. Expect their propaganda apparatus to go into overdrive. Ours should, too. It’s the fight of our lives.
Food praxis is no longer a theoretical supposition. In the last few weeks, it has strode onto the world stage in a dramatic way; and it is not going away.
The exact point that De makes above about polyculture/permaculture is now before us as an historic ideological, epistemological, and mass-communications challenge.
15 April 2008, 5:02 pmMarion:
Sorry to bother you Stan, but I’ve googled, wikied, and search your archives until I was cross-eyed.
Is this deceased Mark Jones really one of the 300 Welsh footballers or rock stars by that name?
Can you point me to a source for more of his work?
Thanks.
15 April 2008, 5:28 pmJosiah:
Speaking of the BBC and pro-and-con segments, the BBC recently aired a televised “panel discussion” on the cause of rising food prices. Most of the panelists were neoliberals (Unilever’s Jan Kees Vis, a British academic economist named Sean Rickfield, a shrewdly chosen African female World Bank rep wearing traditional garb). But there are also two voices of sanity, and the only ones talking about the oligopolistic domination of food by multinational corporations: Raj Patel of Food First and Sarath Fernando of the Sri Lanka Small Farmers Association, both of whom easily deflate the self-serving “let the free markets solve the problem” arguments of the other side. See it here:
http://stuffedandstarved.org/drupal/node/294
15 April 2008, 7:21 pmStan:
Lou Proyect maintains a kind of Mark Jones Archive. Mark was an irrascible Welsh communist, married to a Russian, and lived in Russia for over a decade working in the oil sector. He was even thrown in jail there once for some manner of political faux pas. Even when one disagreed with Mark (at one’s peril), that combination of language (which he used beautifully) and intensity made him a fine mentor. Mark was a generalist.
This link doesn’t work, btw. But if you paste in the titles and mark’s name, you can google many of the texts.
Here’s an excerpt:
FULL
15 April 2008, 8:53 pmDeAnander:
Just taking a very broad brush to the problem for a moment… what do we have a whole hella lot of? People. What are we running out of? fossil fuels, potable water, topsoil, food.
So, if we could produce food (the most important of human projects) in a way that reduces use of our most scarce resources (fossil fuels, topsoil, water) and makes good use of our abundant resource (humans, human ingenuity), that seems to be a good thing, no?
And I’m not talking Soylent Green here (though the recent biofuels scams and crimes certainly bring it to mind — also reminiscent of the devastating final scene in The Idaho Transfer). “Organic” (the French more sensibly call it “biologique”) agriculture on a small/medium scale, highly tailored to local conditions and highly fractal (diverse on a small geographical scale), (a) requires less/no fossil inputs, (b) requires far less water inputs, (c) properly done will build rather than depleting topsoil, and (d) can even have local mitigating effects on aridity and high temperatures (polyculture/permaculture oases have a local humidifying effect, much as urban overpaving produces a local “heat island”).
The only way in which it doesn’t “make sense” is in the mindset of the money (or moai) economy, in which what really matters is employing as few people as possible to “produce” wealth (read: mine, strip, liquidate biotic/mineral assets), i.e. reducing the number of peasants in order to increase the number of landlords and managers. The rule of landlords and managers has led us to where we are now, and of course what they want to do is to intensify their rule — even vaster plantations of copyrighted, secret, technologically tinkered monocrops! more consolidation of land and food control in the hands of fewer corporate barons! more laws against ordinary people producing any food for themselves! These tactics will fail in an evolutionary/civilisational sense, of course, but the tragedy is that they may “succeed” in the short term (the only term these sociopaths are capable of thinking in) — and hence doom billions who might otherwise have lived fairly happy lives.
Sorry if this is somewhat incoherent. I have been struggling with my own personal industrial technology base the last few days (an antique diesel engine whose removal has become a Campaign more than a mere Project) and I’m tired and a bit dazed.
btw James, blushes and thanks for the kind words. I have been toying with the idea of adding a section to my private web site called “Best of DeAnander” or something like that: a collection of mini-essays and rants that other people have particularly enjoyed (not necessarily the ones I personally liked best, but those that got the best reviews). OTOH this is Yet Another Project and I have a few too many at the moment…
15 April 2008, 9:06 pmStan:
The linked file comparing mono v poly cropping in Australia hints at a crucial point related to the $113-a-barrel oil conjuncture we have just entered.
On every measure except one, polyculture was superior to monoculture… that one being to make money. But as the Cuban experience demonstrates, circumstantially-forced adoption of non-industrial, polycultural methods results in economic viability for small producers in local monetized economies as well. Not so for agribiz.
Now, just as we are witnessing with the airlines, the price of oil along with the overstretched dollar is beginning the process of rendering agribiz economically untenable. Local production of clean food in polycultural systems is becoming more economic than buying price-inflated corporate chow. That’s what the squeals of protest from Syngenta were about.
The drive of the ruling class now will be to put the brakes on this local-economic viability until they can figure out how to enclose it. But they are at a distinct disadvantage for the moment, because their entire enterprise is based on a model that has been disrupted by an historic bifurcation. They cannot “re-tool” their way out of this; therefore, they can be expected to use propaganda and policy (all they have) to preserve their power. The historic vulnerability on this count (for agribiz) is that the public’s eye has been directed to the issue of sustainability by the emergence of anthropomorphic climate change as a very visible topic.
On this account, we have consistently better arguments, access to great mines of supportive data and evidence, and the attention-riveting fact of higher food prices.
Now is a perfect time, a temporary window of opportunity, for the acceleration of development of local food initiatives alongside an intense public education effort using every communication venue we can find. Gains made by local producers/consumers during this interregnum create “facts on the ground” that people will defend.
That is why I honestly believe that the time for a food-praxis has arrived, several years ahead of anything I would have anticipated two years ago.
16 April 2008, 7:22 amJosiah:
One intrinsic advantage of polyculture over monoculture is that it doesn’t automatically break down if global capitalism does. It doesn’t require oil imports, or the mediation of wholesale buyers and banks, or expensive academic indoctrination, or the handshakes of neo-Green Revolutionists arriving in jeeps with lawyers. It is already indigenous to every country on earth I know of, from Paraguay to Denmark to Malawi to Mongolia, as a long-established, if endlessly belittled and embattled, social practice. That doesn’t mean every slash-and-burn and digging stick method used in the past was sustainable, but generally speaking polyculture has stood the evolutionary test of time, and industrial monoculture won’t. It is too adaptive to go exinct completely in any large arable land area, no matter how hard the rulers of that land may try. Even in Latin America, where the indigenous peasantry was enclosed almost completely into sharecropping and gang labor on plantations, it has never really been destroyed. In South Africa whites still control 80% of the arable land, and boast of their superior agricultural methods when the issue of land reform is forced on them, but traditional Xhosa, San, Zulu, etc. agriculture is still practiced. There must be many little-known pockets of productive traditional agriculture in places we would not expect, near us.
I got a chance to see some of this last weekend in the rural town of Jong-Ju (?????; I don’t know if wordpress can read the hangul script), where thousands of Koreans are still farming the way their ancestors did, for who knows how long before them, despite the exaction of landlords/Japanese occupiers/U.S. clients, and doing so well! I visited a village where the people raise chickens and all types of fruits and vegetables, and whose people are nearly self-sufficient in food, as well as producing a surplus which they can sell face-to-face in Jangye (?????), the nearest town market. The population is a mix of life-long locals and urbanites who chose to go back to the land, and there are plenty of contradictions to go around, e.g. patriarchal fathers and teenagers who are ashamed rather than proud of their rural background. But the people looked healthy, and far more fulfilled and psychologically balanced than the urban workers I’ve seen, who are going through the motions of the familiar late-capitalist drama of office overwork and stress relief through individualized consumer escapism. One thing’s for sure: a lot of city-dwellers are going to be knocking on the doors of people like this for food and advice if there is some economic or war-induced exodus from the cities that once attracted rather than repelled people.
16 April 2008, 10:13 amStan:
Eisenia hortensis — the European nightcrawler (earthworm) — under ideal worm-farming (vermiculture) conditions double their volume through reproduction every 90 days. Each individual worm can eat approximately half its body weight each day. A pound of E. hortensis, then, can consume a half-pound of non-oily, vegetable kitchen scraps each day. The majority of that mass is excreted as an extremely high quality compost, with a bit of fluid (worm tea) left over (considered by many to be the organic uber-fertilizer). So, potentially, one pound of worms can convert around 180 pounds of kitchen scraps each year into the highest quality organic soil additive. Every five pounds of worm-castings can convert one-square surface-foot of soil into a super-producer for a four months. So one pound of worms can sustain 12 square surface-feet of garden throughout the year for the highest levels of productivity. My own anecdotal evidence, wihtout using worm castings, but using simply composting mulch on organic compost over non-compacted soil, is that in 12 square surface-feet, one can grow three species of food, with six plants each… producing okra, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, peas, bush beans, etc. Mixing them, and adding a couple of marigolds and aromatics (like mint or parilla) seems to keep the bugs from taking more than their share. Last summer I had one cucumber vine that produced around 50 mature cucumbers, totalling well over 20 pounds of food, for around three months. By rotating seasonals, it is easily conceivable to take a 12 square foot plot in a temperate zone and raise 100 pounds of food a year… being very conservative. Neither Syngenta, nor Cargill, nor Archer-Daniels-Midland want you to know this.
16 April 2008, 12:44 pmDeAnander:
They cannot “re-tool” their way out of this; therefore, they can be expected to use propaganda and policy (all they have) to preserve their power.
I haven’t the time to pursue this in depth — gotta get back into a project here — but I note that the myth-peddling of the GMO industry is one aspect of this final panic of the Enclosers and industrialists. They are trying as hard as they can to sell the public the idea that genetic modification — desperately “tailoring” new crops to suit rapidly changing circumstances — will somehow save centralised factory agriculture. They desperately hope, themselves, that they can not only capitalise on the present crisis but extend and tighten their iron grip on food production by the imposition of patented GMO seeds on farmers worldwide.
Everyone should be well aware that one major objective of the Bremer consulship in Iraq was to Enclose Iraqi agriculture, displacing traditional varieties of wheat with GMO versions imported from the US — and to impose US patent law on Iraq at the same time, so that along with the patented GMO wheat varieties would go the debt-slavery enforced by the intellectual property laws of corporatised science. In other words, the breadbasket of history — the Mesopotamian basin where wheat was first cultivated on a large scale (the beginning of the monoculture error, if you like) — was to be converted to a cash cow for US agribiz.
Similar efforts are underway in India — a low-intensity war of money and lawyers vs peasant farmers — to wipe out or render illegal local food production and replace it with either (a) imports dumped from the US, such as stocks of GMO canola and soy that are hard to sell in any other market, or (b) factory-farmed products from vast consolidated agricorps inside India. Recent events in this war include an attempt to ban the sale of home-produced cooking oils (varietal seed oils traditionally made by any smallholder with a few plants to his/her name) in favour of GM canola oil from the US and Canada; and a wave of farmer suicides related to debt slavery and despair over dispossessions and foreclosures. One of the most common methods of suicide for Indian farmers is to drink the chemical pesticides pushed on them by their “friends” from the Green Revolution Mafia… see P Sainath’s investigative reporting here, much of which has been published at Counterpunch.
In N America the assault on independent food production has been mostly under the guise of “health and safety” regulations which initially, during the Reform period of the 20’s, were intended to rein in abusive and fraudulent practises by the emerging factory food industry; nowadays, these regs have morphed into a set of byzantine rules calculated to freeze the small producer out of the marketplace and ensure that only the big boys can afford to play. Combined with cartel tactics by commodity ag buyers and the destruction of local economies, these legislative manoueuvres leave the small farmer completely at the mercy of a monopsony, prohibited from selling directly to any consumer, producing crops that are not even food (but which, as Pollan points out at length in his “cornography” books, require enormous industrial/fossil inputs to be processed into something superficially resembling food).
An enormous moment of dogwaggery has transformed the purpose of US farming — it is no longer about producing food to feed people. It is about producing commodities to be speculated on, and supporting a huge sector of transport and packaging which grosses far more money than the actual farming operation. Essentially, the activity of growing/harvesting and the activity of eating have become subsidiary to the activity of investing and using up plastics and other fossil products. I was recently staggered by a statistic from the “sustainable” ag scene in California: the 2nd largest expense for most struggling organic farmers is…
… what did you guess? water? fuel? organic certification? all of those are expensive, but the 2nd largest expense is really… packaging. “health and safety” regs now prohibit selling many products in bulk, and consumers have been trained to demand “individual plastic packaging”, so farmers have to pay a fortune in ransom to the plastics industry in order to sell their “natural” produce to eaters.
Anyway, I could go on indefinitely but must stop and make some progress on my own local problems
16 April 2008, 1:00 pmxenia:
i remember two comments by my grandmother, a tough and quite heartless yugoslav peasant who was born in WWI and who lived through WWII as a girl and the 1990s wars as an old woman, to die exiled and deprived of her land in the early 2000s.
1. “you book-readers are all sentimental and soft, as if made of shit.”
2. “whenever there is a war, city people are screwed [polite substitute]. if you think there might be a war, go back to the land immediately, chop wood and get yourself some chickens.”
she did nothing noble in her life, giving her daughters away, because she viewed them as worthless, and feeding every army that knocked at her door, including the nazis. but she survived three wars.
16 April 2008, 1:42 pmas much as i hated her for her first comment and her general meanness, i concede that her second point still holds.
Robert Karaffa:
Sounds much like my great grandmother (older/earlier in time) who was a Polish Jew and left the old country before WWI. She didn’t have to do what your grandmother had to do with her children. And fortunately my grandmother and her siblings lived almost their entire lives here. My baba married a steelworker in the Ohio Valley. Everyone in that part of my family (Mosiejewski/Karaffa, Karaffa is a “Germanized” Italian name ‘Carafa’ and a whole different story) that settled here chopped wood and had chickens. So do I. My Karaffa great grandmother had 13 children, the last of which, Sister Maria Karaffa Lucia a Byzantine Catholic nun recently passed at the age of 98. If you ever asked my great grandmother Mosiejewski what her ethnicity was…she would simply reply “Catholic.” If you asked her what she thought of book-readers, well she would have been about as polite as your grandmother. Her oldest daughter complained (didn’t complain, was mad, none of these people complained about ANYTHING, ever, and we had better not have either, certainly not in front of them) until she was at least 92, about the Catholic mass no longer being said in Latin. The power of understanding what these people’s lives were like in Eastern Europe didn’t hit me until I was about thirty and began to understand the animosity between my father’s family and my mother’s English/Scottish/Irish, DAR, been here since before the revolution family when she married an “Immigrant” boy in Martin’s Ferry Ohio. This is not totally relevant to you Xenia, but you struck some nerves. And I’m keeping my chickens, and my woodpile seasoned and stocked.
16 April 2008, 9:27 pmRobert Karaffa:
Oh, and by the way, the first time I said the derogatory term “Hunkie” around that side of my family; the right side of my jaw hurt for at least a week.
16 April 2008, 9:30 pmaudrey:
There was an article in our local suburban newspaper this week about some local nuns and their worms:
“The Sisters, Servants of Immaculate Heart of Mary Order’s “underlying directions” have guided them to “choose to build a culture of peace and right relationship among ourselves, with the Church, and with the whole Earth community. The IHM Sisters completely renovated the IHM Motherhouse and campus using green technologies and established an organic farm, among other projects. In a nutshell, the renovation stems from Catholic social teachings … being socially and sustainable aware. The two big things are we have the geothermal heating and cooling - using the Earth as a radiator - and gray water recycling …”
… “We compost, use crop rotation, do companion planting … sometimes we use horse or cow manure,” said McNeil, adding that worms also play a big part in a healthy garden, which is why every spring the Sisters and CSA members gather to bless the garden and offer worms.”
“The blessing will be held June 14 at 10 a.m., and everyone is welcome to come. A lot of people take a worm either in a cup if they’re squeamish or in their hand.”
http://www.candgnews.com/Homepage-Articles/2008/04-16-08/XF-EARTHDAY.asp
16 April 2008, 9:54 pmStan:
Clorox hunger
17 April 2008, 5:44 amDeAnander:
17 April 2008, 12:35 pmMew:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7351437.stm
This may seem an absurd distraction, given the gravity of this subject; but it looks like even the Moon (especially the Moon) may not escape enclosure.
But, he added, scientists could look to go further, by selecting plants or bacteria that are especially well adapted to lunar conditions, or even by genetically engineering new strains.
Coincidentally, Parable of the Sower is my train book this week, from the recommendation on this site - this article just made me think ‘Earthseed’.
17 April 2008, 4:01 pmpeggy:
Just a conservative news item on this, in case you haven’t seen it:
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=11049284
17 April 2008, 11:04 pmpeggy:
Truck drivers stop work. Support them!
http://ehrenreich.blogs.com/barbaras_blog/2008/04/truckers-protes.html
18 April 2008, 3:13 ampeggy:
Even from the New York Times, top story
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/business/18hours.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
18 April 2008, 5:58 ampeggy:
More from the New York Times, second top story
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/world/americas/18food.html?th&emc=th
18 April 2008, 6:02 amStan:
Clinton & Glass-Steagall
18 April 2008, 6:05 amm.c.:
Two articles from Wednesday’s UK Guardian caught my eye.
1) Titled “Slave Wages”
(First two paras of story)
Rowton Houses were opened in London in the 1880s as “poor men’s hotels”. By the 1930, they were still considered the best of the common lodging houses by George Orwell, who wrote in Down and Out in Paris and London that a shilling would buy you “a cubicle to yourself and use of an excellent bathroom”. Fast-forward just over 100 years, and documentary filmaker Larry Herman explains that the same building in Whitechapel, in the East End, offers three-bedroom apartments that rent for around &495(~$1,000) a week to well-off City workers looking for a weekday base close to the office.
The City of London may be a global financial powerhouse, but Herman says, the wider economy is serviced by people earning a fraction of the wages of the bankers & brokers. “Without them, this city would collapse,” he says.
2) Full page story about Hermann Scheer, German MP, economist & physicist, winner of the Alternative Nobel Prize & Leader of the Alternative Energy Movement(Solar[including photovoltaic] & Wind)
A few Highlights:
*He came up wth the idea of a Feed-In-Tariff Law where the government would pay a guaranteed premium price for electricity that people generated & sold back to the grid. Scheer invisions a future where every commercial building as well as residential is a net producer of energy. Germany already used 15% renewable energy although solar energy isn’t even premium in this northern European country.
*Scheer strongly disagrees with people like James Lovelock that only nuclear power can halt global warming.
*Countries like Spain, Italy, Portugal, Brazil, China, etc. have expressed interest in this Feed-In-Tariff Law.
*Paradoxically, in the UK the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives are officially more interested than Labour because they don’t have as strong ties to Nuclear, Coal & Oil.
* As Scheer says, the Sun sends around 15,000 times more energy than the 6 billion people on the planet can use and its free.
18 April 2008, 12:23 pmBob H:
The NY Times sunday magazine has an article about the need for food self-sufficiency, etc.:
20 April 2008, 4:12 pmhttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20wwln-lede-t.html
Stan:
FULL
20 April 2008, 4:45 pmJimmy Higgins:
While obviously there’s a lot more deep investigation of this stuff right here, some might find it useful to look at (or forward to less-clued-in friends) the quick summary of the food crisis, which is all over sudden front and center in the media, posted yesterday at Fire on the Mountain.
21 April 2008, 9:51 amStan:
21 April 2008, 3:04 pmStan:
FULL
Corporate goes against small producers, via local ordinance.
And, there’s peak potash:
FULL
Finally, there is China & Peak Oil
21 April 2008, 4:06 pmRobert Karaffa:
Just realized that in an earlier post on this subject (with Illich on my mind from a different article) while talking about Mark Jones, I cited the 1968 speech by Illich in which I referenced Jones by mistake just for one particular thought: “think, desist, readjust and come back.” I was at the time so taken by Illich’s mention of “mission vacations” by Americans, gosh have I seen that. Stupid whif on my part. I am old enough for brain farts. Doesn’t change the core of what I said in that post about Jones, I was just referring back to another thought for an instant and I’m sure you can forgive me.
Oil goes up at least a dollar a day. Things are happening fast. Our work in Haiti could be in real trouble. But….we still got alot done this month and brought home 3 terribly sick kids, one of which we couldn’t get to eat. The one that wouldn’t eat was gender non-specific and had cleft pallet so bad it just had a hole in it’s face. I cite no gender because with cases like these you really don’t know (the doctors called the baby “Shim;” couldn’t tell whether a she or a him. Now I hear that this child will probably pass soon because no-one can get the child to eat significantly and a feeding tube or central line may not be possible. Speaking of “central line” in a different context, my wife says that this child has alot of central line problems, ie. spinal. Shouldn’t bore you all with this. The world is of course full, way too full, of such.
22 April 2008, 9:54 pmStan:
Not boring at all. Robert, have you run into Carla Blutschi there?
23 April 2008, 5:28 amRobert Karaffa:
Stan,
23 April 2008, 8:34 amI haven’t run into Carla Blutshci. I asked my wife, who gets around Haiti more than I do and does much more real work, (I don’t deserve to gather up the crumbs under her table) and she hasn’t heard of her either. I googled the part of Hideous Dream where you mention Carla. Christian Peacemaker Teams sounds kind of like the Greenpeace of evangalism. I like that. By accident I came upon the chapter “Motorcycle Madness” I think it is called. Sounds like you too have felt that inertia (mentioned earlier) from your own personal body ploughing experiences.
Thomas:
While searching the Internet for information on “Eisenia hortensis” composting worms, I came across this site. Between the articles and quotations at the top of each page - I couldn’t understand what ANYTHING I read had to do with worm composting.
What an odd site.
MODERATOR: Go here and read.
2 May 2008, 3:19 amLisa:
Recent Interview on the Financial Tsunami and the Titanic Shift
http://www.hipcast.com/export/P101b6233f1ed4af842be7c678c65619cbFh9S1REYmZ2.mp3
Very wide-ranging interview, including the Glass-Steagall Act, food politics, and more.
5 May 2008, 11:59 amm.c.:
From the San Diego Reader(5/14/1998) a free weekly:”Zen and the Art of Running for Congress” by Peter Navarro (note: I don’t necessarily agree with his views about US-China relations)
RE: Bill Clinton & the 1996 Elections
“… The Clinton sellout to Gingrich and the Republicans was the most selfish deal that William Jefferson Clinton has ever cut. It was selfish because its primary purpose was to guarantee Clinton a victory over a hapless opponent whom Clinton was going to destroy anyway. The deal did so not only by positioning Clinton further to the right with its tough approach to welfare and immigration, it did so by taking away criticism by Bob Dole that Clinton couldn’t work with a Republican Congress.
8 May 2008, 3:55 pmBut the Clinton sellout was also shortsighted because it virtually guaranteed that Clinton would be a lame duck President thwarted by a Republican Congress for the rest of his tenure in office. Indeed, as history has already shown us, the Clinton-Gingrich compromise was not an example of good things to come under a working divided government–as it was so lavishly advertised at the time. Rather, it was simply an aberrant compromise struck in the heart of a campaign by two men– one desperate(Newt) and one selfish(Bill) who saw that deal in their own self-interest.
… Having gotten this off my chest, let me now turn to the other thing Bill Clinton did to virtually insure that the Democrats would not take back Congress from the GOP. This was to suck every available Democratic fund raising dollar–leaving nothing but crumbs for many critical House & Senate races….”