Mike Davis on Swine Flu (& capitalism)
THE SPRING Break hordes returned from Cancún this year with an invisible but sinister souvenir.
The Mexican swine flu, a genetic chimera probably conceived in the fecal mire of an industrial pigsty, suddenly threatens to give the whole world a fever. Initial outbreaks across North America reveal an infection rate already traveling at higher velocity than the last official pandemic strain, the 1968 Hong Kong flu….
Michael Anderson:
I find it interesting that this is coming on the heels of a large campaign of public awareness about Mexican drug gangs, and as the immigration issue has heated up in the early days of Obama’s presidency. Coincidence?
27 April 2009, 6:28 pmDeAnander:
I am just waiting for the ag industry to put out the usual scare story about some wild animal (or worse, those goddamn organic hippie farmers) somehow being responsible for the outbreak.
A quick overview of CAFOs as unintentional biowarfare labs
It seems more and more likely to me that the avian flu outbreaks were also the result of infectious strains “developed” unintentionally in the perfect breeding facilities that commercial chicken and turkey CAFOs provide — as this article from the UK Independent suggests. And a connection has been asserted between the recent E Coli spinach contamination scandal and the CAFO practise of a pathogenic high-grain diet (which makes cattle so ill that, were they not slaughtered young, they would die of the side effects of acidosis shortly after the slaughter age in any case — despite massive doses of antibiotics and other chemicals). We keep cattle and other meat animals “barely alive” in pathogenic conditions in CAFOs — the perfect Petri dish for rapid evolution of pathogens.
footnote
more on grain “finishing” and bovine health/sickness… see also the doco King Corn for video footage of CAFO operations.
(footnote)
If y’all will recall, in each case the blame for food contamination was transferred away from industrial ag and onto “uncontrolled” elements (the “foreign devils” of the authoritarian imagination): wild birds are blamed for avian flu, and a witch-hunt is recommended to “cull” them. Organic growers using perfectly safe composted manure are blamed for the E Coli outbreak, even though it is quickly traced to “conventional” (chemical) spinach from a big-ag producer rinsed with water contaminated by CAFO effluent. Anyone want to bet that somehow, wild animals and/or organic or peasant farmers (low-tech or uncontrolled forces not conforming to the corporate paradigm) will be blamed — in the corporate press and the public’s 10-second attention span — for the new swine flu cases, while the inherently and creatively pathogenic CAFO model of animal husbandry will once again be quietly shielded from examination or critique?
28 April 2009, 1:22 amStan:
As Davis points out, Big Ag has more than a propaganda machine. They have immense political muscle. Davis mentions NC’s slaughterhouse at Tar Heel, where 30,000-plus swine are slaughtered each day (biggest in the world, iirc). Smithfield is a vertically-integrated Leviathan, that can strategically bundle a helluva lot of money into campaign coffers; or conversely, target politicians for selective destruction.
They do get pushed back, though, generally by plain people who just get tired of putting up with their shit (no pun intended). I’ll be curious to see how much more effective the pushback becomes (which needs to include boycotts of CAFO meat) with the proliferation of local food policy councils. Documentaries like the aforementioned “King Corn” are critically important popular education tools.
More than pushback, though, is the end-run strategy. Bypass their concentrations of power. Surround them at a distance, then slowly squeeze them out, by building alternatives to them. Every indication we have is that the food underground is expanding daily…. people get it, and more are getting it.
We have a church small group here that has now met ten weeks in a row — eight people who can sit around a kitchen table — to talk about these topics, using a book of essays called “Simpler Living, Compassionate Life.” Two weeks ago, we decided to approach local farmers to establish a CSA. Yesterday, we finished a draft introductory letter to one of them that lives less than a mile (as the crow flies) from my house. That letter will land in the farm-family’s mailbox this week (ojala!).
We have counted heads, and we are confident we can carry 25 subscribers to the family’s door when we meet in person the first time. Another mile to the church, where each Sunday at noon, Farmer Page (the first we are approaching) can distribute the week’s produce. And we have agreed to offer to stake the process, as well as to accept his conventional processes for growing, with a covenant to transfer a progressively larger portion of production into organic each season.
The encirclement strategy requires heads, hearts, and hands… praxis, that is.
BTW, re another thread, picked up Octavia Butler’s “Parable series” yesterday at the library, and am already neck-deep in The Parable of the Sower. De, this reminds me a lot of the sci-fi you sent along. Great stuff. Sadly, Butler died at 58 a couple of years ago.
28 April 2009, 5:23 amr graves:
yes, the parables are some of my favorites. de, i’m curious what was on your sci-fi recommended reading list. we have read ursula leguin and marge piercy recently in an anarchist reading group here in nyc.
28 April 2009, 7:49 ameoinmonkey:
“I find it interesting that this is coming on the heels of a large campaign of public awareness about Mexican drug gangs, and as the immigration issue has heated up in the early days of Obama’s presidency. Coincidence?”
No, the US government have cracked the secret to the worlds most complicated epidemic virus without telling anyone, and are risking millions of deaths just to shore up a domestic immigration agenda. Of course its a coincidence!
28 April 2009, 10:11 amStan Moore:
I think that one general point that is sorely missing from public perception is that the cost of purchase (including of commodities like pork sausage, bacon, ham at the grocery store) is not the only cost the consumer pays.
The goal of business and industry in all sorts of venues is to externalize producer costs in ways that make them hidden to the public. Thus, they tout low prices at SaveMart and don’t consider or promote consideration of the costs of toxic fecal matter in the soils and waters, spread of disease, etc.
The public needs to learn that they are paying a much higher price for cheap products than they are made aware of, but not necessarily at the point of purchase. This is true in many contexts and it illustrates that a true democracy desperately requires an informed electorate and an unbiased media.
Stan Moore
PS: when I lived for a year in Liberty, North Carolina, south of Greensborough, in the late 1970’s I loved eating sausage biscuits at a local biscuit restaurant and I miss the warm local culture of North Carolina rural people that I lived among. Nothing could ever be finer…
28 April 2009, 12:15 pmDeAnander:
Re: Butler — the weak point in these otherwise wonderful stories (for me) was the emotional and spiritual commitment to humanity’s “escape” from Earth and colonisation of space.
I have been thinking hard about the chem industry and factory ag and am coming slowly to a sense that factory ag as we now know it is the last step, the logical end state of the Enclosures. The peasants can rebel — in theory — as long as they have access to land and the knowledge of how to grow their own food; their role as the food-producing sector of the society makes them necessary — essential — to the parasitical overlord class, and gives them a lever (a slender lever and not lengthy, but it has occasionally worked) on policy and history. They can be oppressed and squeezed and bled nearly dry with taxation, but they cannot be exterminated or utterly deracinated, or the food supply will fail.
Today’s lumpen peasantry have no access to land and have been stripped, by a systematic re-education campaign (it’s called “school” and “entertainment media” but basically it’s re-education), to despise the soil and those who work it. They are incapable of growing their own food; they depend utterly on food chains now wholly controlled by a handful of corporate barons. There is no strike fund. The land is now farmed in gargantuan chemical haciendas by a tiny handful of tenant farmers and near-slave labour, in fact a return to the original colonial state of post-invasion N America (where giant land grants to a handful of nouveaux aristos were farmed by slave and indentured labour for cash crops to generate rentier revenues for capitalist investors back home). Only 2 percent of the population still grows “food” and even that food is mostly not really edible (as Pollan points out) — even the “farm” family shops at a supermarket for corporate fodder. What grows in the fields is feedstock for industrial mills. You can’t live off it, and the fields are too toxic and the soil too burned to support subsistence agriculture. Even the “farmers” are subjects of the corporate foodmeisters, obediently exchanging cowrie shells (money) for sustenance.
The result is that the aristocracy, thanks to mechanisation and fossil-slave-equivalents, now owns the food supply chain top to bottom; something that’s never been the case before in human history. They may have *asserted* ownership in previous millennia, but their actual physical dependency was on the labour and knowledge of peasants… and that meant that peasants could, as a last resort, rebel; and most of the focus of governing was on crushing any possibility of such rebellion.
Nowadays our “civilised” aristocracy depends utterly on fossil fuel and the technomanagerial priesthood that designs and maintains the fossil-fueled equipment and long-haul trade that replaced local expertise, productivity, and labour. The focus of governing is on ensuring an ever-increasing flow of fossil fuel and machinery to replace workers, thinkers, and do-ers in the production of essentials. And the general population, finally deracinated to a degree unthinkable in any previous epoch, is completely at the mercy of the same systems and priesthood that the aristos require; their “interests” appear to be perfectly aligned (hence, perhaps, the “end of class struggle”?)
Of course kings and priests have been claiming with intermittent success for millennia that the society will collapse without them, that only they can feed the people and make the river rise in Spring; but our current infestation of human predators has created physical conditions which make this dogma almost literally true. The island I live on would run out of fresh food in its grocery stores in about 3 days after the ferries (with their load of produce trucks) stopped running; those trucks are full of the product of factory farming, are owned by huge transport or retail chains, and are headed for corporate retail outlets owned and controlled by the elite. The fossil extractors, equipment repair castes, drivers and engineers, owners and investors, are putting food on the shelves; the locals are merely consuming, never producing. The precarity (and the abject dependence on authoritarian, undemocratic capitalist structures) is staggering.
I don’t know where this thread is leading me, but it does suggest that food autarky is deeply and utterly subversive (and this explains perhaps why challenges to chemical and hacienda ag are met with such strident, panicky smear campaigns from Big Ag — not just profit is threatened, but a degree of social control and security for those in power that their historic predecessors never enjoyed). This sense of security for the aristos may be in a way a good thing; if they are not perpetually living in fear of a slave revolt then their sadistic and authoritarian behaviours are moderated somewhat by complacency. I think the Iraq/Afghanistan torture and war crimes scandals show how quickly the sadism and jackbooted thuggery come back out of the closet when the real sources of aristocratic security are menaced, i.e. there is any threat to the supply of cheap fossil slaves.
I think that the chem/big-ag/distributor nexus (vertically integrated and contrabiotic all down the line) is well aware of the threat posed by local food autarky, victory gardens, CSAs and all other manifestations of food security. What will be interesting is to see whether they use their political clout to attempt to criminalise autonomous food production. (John Brunner foresaw this in _The Sheep Look Up_, the underrated prequel to his classic _Stand on Zanzibar_; in more recent sci-fi such as _City of Pearl_ the theme returns: the growing of tomato plants is a criminal offence because all seed is patented by giant agricorps.) Such developments are not w/o historical precedent; at one time it was illegal, and severely punishable, for any family in some areas of Europe to own their own grain grinder. All grain had to be ground at the feudal lord’s mill, so that (a) the peasants were dependent on the lord for “the staff of life,” their daily bread; and (b) more importantly, levies and taxes could be assessed on the grain when it was brought in to be ground.
Cultivating one’s garden turns out to be surprisingly subversive; teaching others to cultivate, and sharing food as well as knowledge, is absolutely subversive — as subversive as teaching slaves to read, or teaching slaves to read maps.
28 April 2009, 1:23 pmStan:
Here’s from today’s paper in Raleigh… and it burned my ass worse than a three-foot bonfire.
In the text:
But here’s the headline and sub-head:
Terminal, inoperable WTF cognitive dissonance! Sheesh! Don’t blame the pigs!? Not a word in the “science” article about antibiotic resistance, etc etc etc etc.
Additional outrage at the opportunism of our local Nazis, calling it “Mexican” flu.
I wish I could send De’s remarks to the editor, but the limit for ed-letters is 250 words. It’s unfortunate that the only place Davis could get his message out is in a left-sectarian publication read by a couple thousand people, many of them self-marginalizing, and all marginalized by US kneejerk anticommunism.
CAFOs are pandemic laboratories waiting for a breach.
28 April 2009, 5:10 pmGerry.Agnosia:
[Sorry, double-post. Big fingers; small netbook. ;-)]
‘Ey-ya folks,
Stan: I’m glad to see you’re enjoying the ‘Parables’ series! I can’t wait to read your in-depth opinion of it.
De: Aye, I have to agree… The galactic colonization fantasy espoused in the later part of the series was a definite weakpoint, but I have to say that Ms. Butler’s views on rural intentional communities and urban enclaves are some of the most realistic I’ve read.
28 April 2009, 5:29 pmBruce F:
That’s an incredible comment De. Thank you for continuing to share your wisdom.
If you want to see up to the second semi-official reports on the flu from around the world, you can follow Veratect on Twitter - http://twitter.com/Veratect
Veratect claims the CDC, the World Health Organization, and the Pan-American Health Organization as clients.
28 April 2009, 7:19 pmStan:
My mistake. The Davis piece was also printed in The Guardian. At least UK will have a clue.
28 April 2009, 7:32 pmKeith:
pork and pigs and bacon are a commodity that is available to all, at this point. and it really doesn’t matter much how it will be available in the future; we live in the future past, the 13th century just as relevant as the projected 21st. its at the edges, but also the decentralized ultra dominant center, where this story and the decisions pre-decided emanate from. the swine flu story picks up steam around the water cooler in the workaday world.
davis’ stuff is great, but marred by his reaction to the global crime syndicate that is in fact operating quite rationally within a thought/praxis framework that is completely batshit.
smithfield, as stan points out, is not concerned in any way with outcries over public health, and why should they be? the scramble they make in the so called field of public opinion is to annul the relationships that they exist on and can’t do any of the work they do (cause it is work to supply the liberal bourgeoisie with bacon on a sunday) without.
the immigration services, even before this article, are swarming around the trailer parks where the workers that splinter the bacon are housed, every night, and 365 a year. to offset and deflect any legitimate criticism about their all to unhealthy revenue stream, their only choice is to blame the only malfunction that people can see, the only opening that in fact ties it all together: the “greasy” worker from foreign lands. an explosion like this in to the public consciousness only increases the likelihood of reactionary mainstream attitudes toward it, like, its sunday man, i eat bacon, there’s been 40 cases reported around the world, let me roll the mf’in dice…
we can’t expect anyone to understand the virile and viral nature of this tapped out, slow moving organism that doesn’t want to take it down like Gulliver was by the feet, which is, by virtue not of its moral or polemical orientations, but its inability to cover its tracks. and they’re not interested in that. they’re interested in the dude that’s going to continue to eat his bacon on sunday.
28 April 2009, 9:51 pmDeAnander:
@r.graves
a few years back I started compiling a Recommended Reading list as a companion to my “car free” web site. it’s sadly out of date now but what the heck, here are the links for the non-fiction list and the SF fiction list. I should update the nonfiction list, and soon, with agrarian and Food Underground titles… (oh no, more Stuff To Do…)
28 April 2009, 11:14 pmDeAnander:
@Stan US liberal website Commondreams has picked up the Guardian reprint of the Mike Davis piece… so it may start to get some traction.
meanwhile I’m reading a disturbingly fascinating book, The War on Bugs — a comprehensive history of chemical agriculture in the US. Just started it, but it promises to be an essential reference. Wanted to flag it for your attention — maybe a book review? It tries to answer the question that haunts us all… how did our farming and food system get so hopelessly, appallingly, frighteningly broken? The author goes back to the beginnings of capitalism in the Enclosures (which of course endears him to me) and proceeds from there.
here’s one (pretty shallow) review — I think FS could maybe do better
29 April 2009, 12:34 amStan:
Keith is in the reach of the Raleigh News & Observer… where that infuriating headline appeared. The eastern third of the state, everything east of I-95, has been colonized by Smithfield. Well, it was colonoized by Murphy Farms and Carolina Food Processors, then the big fish from Virginia came along and swallowed the other two big fish. That’s what we do here in NC, at least out east. We manufcture pigs, chickens, and turkeys for export and maim the workers in the meat factories.
Here is a slightly recycled account from a 1998 research bit I did on Smithfield, whose Veracruz facility may have hatched out current nascent pandemic.
Ten million swine expel nine million tons of excrement into that biome every year. That amounts to 52,500 tons of nitrogen, 40,000 tons of phosphorus, 37,000 tons of potassium, and a smorgasbord of heavy metals.
Back in 1998, when I was part of the active opposition to these factory farms, Rick Dove, a Neuse River Keeper, explained that these numbers by themselves are significant. “We are importing over a hundred million pounds of nitrogen from Nebraska in the form of corn, and dumping it into the ecosystem of North Carolina East of Interstate 95 in the form of crap.”
That nitrogen, just one of the nutrients being imported, does not disappear. It cycles all through the ecosystem here—in the water, the soil, and the air—cycling and recycling. That irrevocably changes the actual composition of the air, soil, and water in a way for which we can’t even predict the long term consequences.
Add to that the fish kills from algae blooms, the condemned wells, the airborne ammonia that provokes respiratory emergencies, flesh-eating pfisteria (called the “cell from hell”), and a host of other public health concerns, not to mention the environmental racism implicit in the siting of these facilities, and the picture is clear. Even 60 Minutes has found the environmental story worthy of their attention, twice.
“The independent family farm is headed to extinction,” said Don Webb, a former independent swine farmer from Stantonsburg, North Carolina. Back in ‘98.
“The folks who’re still on their land in this part of North Carolina—the ones who signed corporate contracts—are in denial. They’re sharecroppers now, and ain’t nothin’ but pride and hopelessness keeps ‘em in denial about bein’ sharecroppers.”
Webb’s reference to sharecropping is based on the contractual relationship between farmers—referred to as contract growers—and integrators, the huge corporations who own the genetically engineered livestock. The integrators completely control livestock operations. They arrange for its transportation and processing and marketing; they dictate the facility specs, including approved builders, chemicals, food additives, and pharmaceuticals to be used for maximum growth and disease control; and they specify the management practices the “farmer” will employ.
The contract grower pays for facility construction with huge loans, indebting himself for the long haul, and assumes all financial, legal, and environmental liability. At the end of the day, the integrator appropriates the majority of the value produced, and the contract grower averages between eight and 10 dollars an hour. Thus Mr. Webb’s notion that this is a 21st Century form of tenancy.
While the application of this specific contractual arrangement to agriculture was pioneered by poultry corporations, the underlying trends were predicted as early as Marx. In 1955, Dr. Sidney Hook made the claim that Marx had erred in his prediction that even agriculture would become “proletarianized.”
From Hook’s perspective in 1955, the farmer-peasant class had not disappeared but remained strong. It was so strong, in fact—asserted the professor—that it remained more significant than the working class. The current state of agriculture, however, if one looks at the North Carolina hog industry as just one example, makes it appear that Dr. Hook’s critique was premature.
The application of modern management practices and technology to pork production has converted farms and slaughterhouses into meat factories. The subdivision of every process into the simplest component tasks has resulted in the complete deskilling of production. The majority of actual sweat invested in every stage of production—the precise application of engineered foods, hormones, and drugs to confined animals—is coming from…wage laborers.
The “management” of the grower facility by the “farmer” is conducted in accordance with a strict, formulaic rule-book. The situation for the contract grower is less akin to sharecropping—where a poor farmer applied his or her knowledge of the art of agriculture to production for a “share”—and is more like being the “manager” of a McDonald’s hamburger stand: an alienated surrogate saddled with accountability by his debts and stripped of his creativity.
Farmers who have opted not to sign these contracts have been left far behind, and they are losing land (to developers mostly) at an astronaomical rate (especially Black farmers). The resulting concentration of the industry was seismic. In 1983, the State Department of Agriculture reported over 24,000 swine growers raising just over 2 million head of hogs. By 1997, fewer than 4,000 growers remained, but the state herd had conservatively grown to over 10 million. (Ten million is a USDA figure, but reliable counts from independent interests put the herd at closer to 14 million.)
In the parlance of modern economists, the consolidation of an industry across one stage of the production process is referred to as horizontal integration. The pulling together of the various stages of the production process under one corporate roof is called vertical integration. Reality is that both forms of “integration” are inextricably linked and occur simultaneously to concentrate wealth in a way that some of us who are wedded to archaic language simply call “monopoly.”
More and more, monopolization happened in the pig industry through something called interlocking directorates.
A clear example was Smithfield Foods, Inc., whose CEO, Joe Luter, a wunderkind of agribusiness, said in 1994 that his mission was to accomplish the total vertical integration of pork production. “Smithfield is on the right side of the major industry and consumer trends,” said Luter in his 1993-94 Annual Report. “Vertical integration is them most significant of these. Clearly, the drive to improve quality, consistency, and value of agricultural products requires collaborative relationships between producers, processors, and marketers.”
In North Carolina, he took a giant stride in that direction with Smithfield-Tar Heel Division, formerly Carolina Food Processors.
Smithfield-Tar Heel is the largest swine slaughterhouse in the world and the linchpin of North Carolina pork output. Built in 1992, Smithfield ran into opposition from community and environmental groups who saw the mega-slaughterhouse as a threat to the Cape Fear River, to the local aquifer, and as a magnet for even more rapid expansion of pork production in Eastern North Carolina. But Tar Heel, North Carolina and surrounding Bladen County are among the poorest areas in the state, with the highest levels of unemployment, especially among the African-American and Native American populations. Smithfield offered 4,000 jobs as the big carrot, and called on their political muscle to do the rest.
Then-State Senator Wendall Murphy, who just happened to be the largest hog producer in the world, and then-Governor Jim Martin were told by Director George Everett of the Division of Environmental Management that the Cape Fear River was at or above nutrient carrying capacity, and that Tar Heel was an inappropriate location for the slaughterhouse. Martin directly intervened with reworked figures for the river, and awarded Luter a waiver for any environmental impact study. The facility was built. Smithfield was convicted of over 6,000 discharge violations in Virginia at their Pagan River facility before 1998, yet North Carolina let Smithfield monitor its own discharges.
North Carolina integrators saved a bundle on shipment costs by having a facility of Smithfield-Tar Heel’s magnitude in their back yards. Even when Smithfield was operating at their claimed limit of 24,000 kills a day by 1998, the state’s integrators were still shipping 5,500 hogs a day out of state to be slaughtered. In 1998, employees on Smithfield’s kill floor began reporting to union organizers in Tar Heel that the lines had been sped up to 30,000 kills a day. Earlier that year, the state expressed surprise at Smithfield’s output, when the actual line speeds were made public.
They didn’t get a unioni there unitl last year (2007), after a knock-down-drag-out fight that included the company incarcerating its employees on site.
But the integrator-processor relationship is deeper than shared competitive need. In the research then, I found that proxy statements from Smithfield dated in 1997 showed F. J. Faison of Carroll’s Farms, Inc., William Prestage of Prestage Farms, Inc., H. Gordon Maxwell of Mexwell Foods, Inc., and Wendall Murphy of Murphy Family Farms, Inc., the major integrators in the state, to be the members of then-Carolina Food Processor’s Board of Directors. This is an interlocking directorate; a seamless legal connection between the different phases of the production process. (Maxwell and Murphy later resigned in what was rumored to be a dispute with Luter.)
The concentration of the industry proceeded apace in other ways as well. The paradox of Smithfield’s increased output from 24,000 to now-35,000 kills a day is that the market for American pork has plummeted in response to the world-wide economic crisis. Processing capacity is up, and the size of the North Carolina herd is up. But five of the six largest foreign importers of American pork, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Russia, can no longer afford to buy that much American pork, a replay of 1998, when all of them were in the depths of the Asian financial crisis (see Gowan and know that Big Ag and self-imploding securitized finance are part of the same suicidal dynamic).
In February 1998, when the Japanese recession began to take a serious toll on U.S. pork, the United States Department of Agriculture stepped in and bought up $30 million worth of the “other white meat” to prop up prices…again demonstrating the government’s willingness to privatize gains on behalf of corporate America but to socialize the rich’s losses. The USDA then lined up a $50 million bailout for the deepening losses. See, this ain’t new.
Production costs for pork then were around 42 cents a pound. In February 98, when prices first fell, the selling price was 36 cents. With the collapses, prices dropped to around 29 cents by November. They were hovering under a quarter. So the question should be, why were the big integrators and processors increasing production?
Leland Southard, then an economist for the USDA who specializes in pork, attempted to answer. The expansion of production is a monopoly grab by the largest integrators and processors, who can sustain losses longer than their competitors. “The big guys are putting the squeeze on the little guys,” said Southard. “The big companies sell at a loss for a while, but the small, independent farmers can’t.” Farmers around the state, like Gary Grant who had locked horns with the industry for the past decade, say that Southard is sugar-coating the situation a bit. “Independent hog farmers,” says Grant, of the Black Farmers and Agriculturists Association, “are over. This a case of the biggest fish swallowing the merely big fish.”
A spokesperson for Murphy Family Farms, Inc., the ironically named top pork producing corporation of former State Senator Murphy, said in Fall 1997, “We’re taking a hit right now. It’s going to take some time for things to turn around. Some producers aren’t going to make it.” Alas! Murphy and the handful of other giant integrators stand not only to gobble up competitors. When they have sustained the last losses they can afford, they will have to jack prices up to recoup. That will mean drastic reductions in production. Many contract growers are already having their contracts canceled. Inevitably, when the de-contracted fold and sell, the big producers will step in to buy the “farms” at fire sale prices. Yet again, vertical integration.
Consumers, oddly enough, never saw the price reductions at the meat counter. Only the processors like Luter cashed out.
“This industry has shown it cares nothing for farmers, workers, communities, or the environment,” said Boyd McCamish, a United Food and Commercial Workers organizer who was involved in NLRB hearings against Smithfield for dozens of violations of labor laws during the UFCW’s 1996-7 organizing drive. “Now they are preparing to cannibalize one another. It’s monopoly capitalism at its best.”
McCamish and fellow organizers had been involved in exploratory discussions with community, environmental, and legal groups about building alliances to confront Smithfield in a broad way. “Conditions inside this place are medieval,” says Jorge Carrillo. “In one year, out of 4,000 workers, 3,500 lost their jobs…mostly from injuries.”
The processor has systematically shifted from a largely African-American work force to a majority Latino work force over three years. The perception that Latino workers are more compliant had partly driven the shift, but the ability to pay below the industry standard wage figured heavily into the entire industry’s preference for the foreign born. UFCW Assistant Director for Strategic Operations, Al Zack, believed North Carolina had been targeted for the express purpose of using Latino workers to put downward pressure on wages across the industry nationally. “That’s why we have made a long-term commitment to organizing in the Carolinas, where the levels of unionization are the lowest in the country,” said Zack.
“But the opposition is formidable. Two of the biggest Republican anti-union attack dogs in Congress are Representative Cass Ballinger (R-NC), who had worked tirelessly for years to do away with safety and health regulations for workers, and Senator Lauch Faircloth (R-NC), who is himself a North Carolina pork producer.” (Mr. Zack made this comment before Faircloth was thankfully defeated in the next election, by John Edwards of all people.)
Pork producers consolidated their friendships among elected officials with generous and frequent campaign contributions. The biggest recipient of hog money in North Carolina in the ‘96 election cycle was Governor Jim Hunt…who is a close friend and confidente of Wendall Murphy. Dozens of key state elected officials take money from pork producers, and the industry does not take kindly to dissenters.
For example, Republican Cindy Watson of Duplin County, where 2.1 million hogs resided, broke ranks in 1997 and voted to support more stringent regulation of the industry. The industry spent millions to unseat her with a hand-picked candidate in the primary. In the election for Watson’s House seat, both the Republican and the Democrat candidates were employees of Murphy Family Farms (a joke name), Inc. The Republican won.
The industry was systematic in fighting for its interests, economically and politically, and in capitalizing on the most reactionary aspects of Southern culture and ideology. The fightback, on the other hand, remained fragmented.
So it goes.
29 April 2009, 5:23 amStan:
Dare I say it? The issue of the early 21st Century in the United States may well be land reform. We don’t collectively know it yet, but it already is. Irony upon irony, in the 80s and 90s, I spent a considerable amount of time in the US project to assist Latin American government attacks on land reformers.
29 April 2009, 6:04 ameoinmonkey:
Human beings arent very good at reacting to infectious disease outbreaks. It makes us realise our supreme powerlessness in the face of nature. thats why we exhibit such odd stress reactions. One of these is a casting around for someone to blame. When the Black Death hit Europe, its friendly local Christians decided it must be the Jews who were to blame- either for spreading it to kill Christians, or because it was a punishment from an angry god for allowing Jews to live amongst the faithful. The result was widespread massacres.
29 April 2009, 10:04 amFunnily enough, people always seem to realise that those who are to blame happen to be the same people they have always disliked anyway. Hence the Jews. Hence your local Nazis blaming the Mexicans. And, dare I say it, hence you guys laying the blame on agribusiness. Even if it does turn out that this swine flu came from a massive industrial pig farm, thats not the same as agribusiness causing the outbreak- a flu pandemic was inevitable at some point. Being the source of this outbreak does not equate to being solely responsible for this outbreak. Im not criticising your point of view on the subject- agribusiness, especially the meat industry, IS a foul bloated disgrace to the human race. But dont jump on the “find a scapegoat” bandwagon along with every other lunatic ranting about the coming Aporkalypse. People would still get flu in a perfect socialist state you know.
DeAnander:
The issue is always land reform; the issue was land reform when the Romans invaded Britain and established cash-crop haciendas. The issue was land reform when the Normans invaded Britain and established cash-crop haciendas. The issue was land reform when the Romans deforested North Africa with their cash-crop grain-export megaranches. The issue was land reform when the wealthy expropriated the peasants from the European commons to make (guess what) cash-crop haciendas — and (leveraging the ill-gotten gains thus secured) then grabbed huge tracts of arable land from the indigenous farmers of N and S America. The issue is land reform when a minority of Jewish settlers grab all the best land in Israel/Palestine from the peasant farmers and bulldoze their olive groves, replacing them with irrigated “modern” farming.
Oh dear, seems like there’s always some overclass, a delusional and sociopathic elite (religious, national, racial, wealth-based) trying to appropriate the fruits of other people’s labour; the invention of liquid money and compound interest just gives them new tools, more effective than the sword and the gun (though behind the liquid money, always, lie the sword and the gun, the gunboat and now the terrible airplane). And liquid money, alas, offers the illusory promise of infinite accumulation (especially in its new aphysical, abstract forms); there is literally no end to accumulation and greed, as the recent shenanigans of the bankers demonstrate. Illusory “paper” wealth can be built up to utterly fictitious levels, divorced entirely from the real wealth of the world (which is diminishing, being destroyed, not increasing at all). The gap between what real wealth is available to share, and the illusory wealth controlled by the elite that controls access to real wealth, is what squeezes the poor entirely out of existence.
Hmmm think about it… even the richest Sultan can only consume so much food in a year; what remains can be shared by aristos who also can only consume so much food in a year, and what remains eventually can be consumed by peasants; but if food is *only* accessible through spending notional, money and the Sultan has enough money to buy all the food in the world several times over — notionally — then there’s a warping effect on the price of food (i.e. the value of money) that may well put the cost of a simple meal beyond the monetary buying-power of the peasant, who then starves… particularly if the peasant has been driven off the land, no longer has a kitchen garden, and is trying to survive in the favelas of some industrial city. Of course eventually the currency collapses entirely and maybe the ruling class goes down with it, but meanwhile, during the heyday of imaginary wealth, lots of peasants starve.
The people displaced from their land are always a pool of cheap labour and potential trouble — exploited by bosses and “disciplined and contained” or “pacified” by mailfist authority. When, I wonder, are the mass of displaced, delanded (is there some better word for this I wonder? disagrified?) N Americans going to become potential trouble rather than just potential slave/indentured labour? And how long before the American elite displays the mailed fist to “their own” people? (whom of course they don’t see as “their own” — as Bush said to his wealthy backers, *they* are his “base,” not ordinary people.)
I think it’s about time we started referring to the consolidators and integrators as what they are: the Food Mafia. Buying politicians, silencing dissenters, killing and maiming workers, dumping toxins (whether under cover of darkness or blatantly in full daylight)… it’s organised crime. Which, as an old slogan reminds us, is what capitalism always was and still is: organised crime. Very well-organised crime. Crime organised by time-and-motion experts for maximum productivity.
29 April 2009, 11:33 amStan Moore:
In America a unique history of mass control was perfected — in large part because of the ability of the elite ruling class to grow a huge economy on the basis of cheap energy over several decades of time. Recall Howard Zinn showing this not to be the case in colonial times, where European style repression of local poor and unlanded was omnipresent. But the exploitation of petroleum in a new era grew an economy so fast and so large that astute elites realized they could share small portions of the wealth, while eventually increasing citizen indebtedness as they withdrew their somewhat generous wages and substitited credit instead. But the relative affluence of the American public was a very successful ploy to separate the public from the outrage and revolutionary fervor that occurs in more harshly exploited populations elsewhere. American citizens became undereducated, decadent, distracted, hyperentertained by music, sex and media and thus exploited to the max as natural resources became more and more depleted. At the tail end of capitalism, the elites shifted their methods from exploiting resources and engaging in manufacturing and commerce to a system of financial capitalism with hedge funds, paper trading, subprime mortgages, deliberately inflated home values, and the like.
The end of an era of gentle exploitation of the American public is upon us. The economic pot of real wealth is now evaporating, and along with it will be the gentleness that allowed unprecented levels of personal comfort for the working class even as the elite grew obscenely wealthy. Now the trick for the elite is to convert their paper wealth into real wealth by looting the public treasury and the economy. Take hedge fund profits and buy highways and airports and real estate. Dump the public into the gutter and hire Blackwater mercenaries to keep them in line.
This is the fate of Americans in the near future.
Stan Moore
29 April 2009, 12:28 pmDeAnander:
I’m going to throw in (sorry about the shameless self-quoting) a comment from MoA — B suggested that the swine flu alarmist headlines were a distraction tactic to get the public mind off the torture scandal in the US. I said:
29 April 2009, 1:31 pmStan:
CAFOs are perfect incubators for pandemics that would not otherwise occur in their absence. Crowd a bunch of the same species together, one that lives near humans and shares a considerable part of our genetic inheritance as a mammal, then pump them full of antibiotics to accelerate the outgrowth of AB resistance. Et cetera. The reason I posted the Davis article is that Davis wrote a book about precisely this a few years ago. It was - and is - predictable. And comparing the critique of agribiz to medieval anti-Semitic pogroms is contemptible.
29 April 2009, 4:37 pmStan Moore:
As a wildlifer, I can tell you that the same mentality has for years been observed in the wildlife management field. In places like Wisconsin and Wyoming, they develop “farms” for “wild” elk and deer to provide more hunting opportunities for trophy animals. Of course, the basis for this ios 90% economic and 10% sporting as hunter license and tag fees drive state game management departments.
What happens is that the unnatural concentration of these wild ungulates with food provided by humans in limited space enhances disease transmission, including zoonotic diseases such as chronic wasting disease.
It is driven by greed and capitalism just like the domestic meat industry and with similar results. No one complains until a disease outbreak hits the news cycle, and all is quickly forgotten when the professional spin meisters do their duty.
Of course, global problems are getting too big to be forever ignored.
I recommend the new movie “Earth” at theaters everywhere now. One of the saddest scenes is of a male polar bear that is starving because it cannot find seals to hunt in the melted ice of the arctic. The big bear trieds to kill a walrus pup by separating it from its herd, but the adult walruses are too big and strong to be overcome by the bear, which is already in weakened condition. Finally the bear just lays its head down on the tundra and dies within a few feet of the walrus herd.
The Rothschilds and the Rockefellars never die such deaths and they never grieve or mourn the deaths of the impoverished humans or wildlife everywhere that die as a result of their liquidation of the planet into their investment portfolios.
Stan Moore
29 April 2009, 4:48 pmStan:
Here’s narconews on “Nafta flu” & Smithfield.
30 April 2009, 5:46 amld:
I could not agree more with the socio-environmental critique of capitalist agribusiness and livestock farming being proffered here, but to my mind there seems to be a distressing gap between the critique on offer and the (implicit) strategy for bypassing and then overtaking this system (for lack of a better term) that is predicated on the dual exploitation and degradation of labor and nature. Now, let me wind out this claim in more detail. I have followed Stan Goff’s fascinating ideological evolution over the years and the interesting and much-needed dialogue and analysis that Stan has forged more recently with DeAnander and others, and I understand where it is coming from and I am broadly sympathetic to it… after all, I more or less consider myself a green Marxist. I grasp the idea that the best thing for eco-feminist-left forces to be doing right now in the US (and other overdeveloped capitalist metropoles) is to be building up concrete competencies in relocalization practices, and to be carving out quasi-independent spaces where increasingly institutionalized expressions of these practices can flourish. (Of course, CSA’s are a paradigmatic example of such an institutionalized expression.) I get the notion that head-on confrontation with the capitalist state and seizing its bureaucratic instruments is both utterly fantastical given prevailing political conditions, as well as politically undesirable, given well-warranted criticisms of Leninist centralism and whatnot. And accordingly I comprehend the nub of the (implicit) strategy, that the way out is to multiply and transpose the accumulated localization competencies and institutions as the growth-addicted system of imperial accumulation progressively unravels, transforming society from inside out, as it were.
But I have some serious reservations about the green localist movement as presently constituted. While I concede the dire need for building up practical skills in biodynamic agriculture and solar retrofitting and myriad other post-carbon techniques, and for strengthening the local networks in which these technologies can be advanced and deployed, I fear that in these circles there is a paucity of theoretical discussion going on, the end result being an unreflective fetishization of technological and scale issues, with insufficient attention paid to social-relational issues. (Please do not misunderstand this as an attack on Stan or De or other Feral Scholar heavies, for the conscious focus on issues of property and power is precisely one of the notable strengths of Feral Scholar). What the inchoate and decentralized movement badly requires is an ongoing exchange between thousands of organic intellectuals who all share a general framework but each bring unique expertise to the table, but this is exactly what is not occuring. Without such theoretical discussion, the movement in its infinite variety is ripe for dilution by foundation-funded NGO’s and petty bourgeois (excuse the old-fashioned verbiage) environmental entrepreneurs, etc. etc.
Anyway, time does not permit to go on with this at the moment, but I intend to return to the topic within the next 24 hours.
30 April 2009, 7:13 amr graves:
thanks for the lists, de. i’ve heard good things about delany, any of his books in particular you recommend?
30 April 2009, 7:34 amskol:
The Real News on Swine Flu - Pepe Escobar is a regular contributor there, fyi.
30 April 2009, 2:24 pmDeAnander:
@r.graves
For Delaney I would start with the recent retrospective anthology _Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand_ [oops! editorial booboo — the title is actually _Aye, And Gomorrah, and Other Stories_] which collects his best-known short stories and novellas. in later years he started writing some pretty (imho) self-indulgent and disappointing S&M gay pornboiler stuff, but much of the early work is pure gold. I believe he had a personal literary friendship with Joanna Russ (a wonderful early feminist SF writer) and that his radical perspectives on gender owed much to discussions with radical feminists in the late 60’s and early 70’s, but I’m speculating here. probably wikipedia can clarify the early influences; for whatever reasons, he wrote some wonderful, poetic/cynical, noirish, visually and prosodically gorgeous tales with a lot of subversive spin on gender, race, class, commerce, etc.
30 April 2009, 4:48 pmStan:
@ ld. Interesting that you should say that. Several of us here have been having the conversation about not having the conversation recently; and we are putting together a monthly meet-up to get serious about … I don’t know what to call it, environmental economics. That is, how does the human economy as it is differ from the ecological economy; and how might that be re-modeled. Very serious at the outset about getting at money, as a subject, that is, as what Hornborg called an ecosemiotic phenomenon, as an anti-communitarian solvent if you will. We even managed to involve someone Hornborg cites from time to time, Carole Crumley, who’s teaching at UNC right now, but headed for Sweden (Hornborg’s haunts) in short order.
Crumley asks penetrating questions about “landscapes,” which she sees as a dialectic between nature and power. Love this note by her on gardens:
30 April 2009, 5:11 pmGerry.Agnosia:
‘Ey-ya Stan,
Speaking of local groups, I was wondering if you knew of or had any involvement with the NC Powerdown Triangle Peak Oil Group?
http://www.meetup.com/NCPowerdown/
As a bus rider, its hard for me to keep up with their dynamic meet-ups between Raleigh/Chapel Hill/Durham/Carrboro, but I’m happy to see that there are folks in the local scene actually DOING THINGS.
Also, I was wondering if you had any great local cultural/activist/arts events during this upcoming Spring and Summer you’d suggest? I’m sad to say that I’ve lived here my whole life and have only gone to the State Fair.
30 April 2009, 5:51 pmHenry:
A balanced and expert view of the swine flu pandemic:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/04/29/Swine-Flu.aspx
One of the interesting asides is the fact that the large number of deaths during the 1918 pandemic was due to strep complications, and not to the flu virus itself. Pre-antibiotic times, of course.
1 May 2009, 12:39 pmStan Moore:
A nice commentary on factory farms and flu viruses was posted today at:
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2009/05/01-11
submitted by Stan Moore
1 May 2009, 4:54 pmStan Moore:
and another new commentary on factory farming by someone with a farming background is posted today at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/rhames/05012009.html
also submitted by S.M.
1 May 2009, 4:59 pmStan Moore:
I’ve heard estimates that hundreds of millions of people could be killed in a worldwide pandemic caused by flu viruses spread by factory farms, such as in Mexico.
Since the U.S. Military sent inspection teams to Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction that would not have likely had nearly that level of impact, can we expect the U.S. military to send biowarfare specialists to Mexico (or even North Carolina, Arkansas, etc.) to do threat assessments in those places? If a factory farm was found guilty of spreading such viruses, would that make the proprietors “terrorists” and subject to detention and/or additional punishment?
Or would they secretly go and gather samples for potential military use?
It is tragic that such questions can be rationally proposed in the first place.
Stan Moore
2 May 2009, 5:32 amStan:
Just a heads up. Conspiracy theories are beginning to crop up (no pun intended), ie, it is a bio-war agent (along with HIV & Ebola) that also makes vaccine companies rich. These things put the conpiracy message inside a package that is 95% plausible and even confirmed empirically, then make the key conspiracy leap. That is, raise a question that has no answer (yet), then jump to the conclusion that only a conspiracy can answer it.
My theory is that the conspiracy theories are a conspiracy to undermine critics.
2 May 2009, 6:08 amStan:
Just kidding.
I don’t think anyone has said that this is a mass-killer pandemic. So far, the mortality rate is relatively low. Circumspection and avoidance of hyperbole is one way to avoid getting thrown off the track of what this means, ie, that CAFOs and a bunch of other delocalized practices are pregnant with unintended consequences.
I have been getting bombarded on my personal emails with conspiracy stuff for some time now, as well as a lot of “survival” fantasists. The stuff we talk about here puts us on a kind of depopulated margin, where we stand out. When I was writing for FTW, the danger of Illuminati-plot/survivalism etc was ever-present. Seems important to inoculate against it (again, no pun intended), and to constantly clarify that we are trying to discern structural matters. A lot of conspiracy theories are underwritten by narcisissistic paranoia and-or by the desire to find order (even if it is the order of Illuminati, et al) and the possibility of control.
The world is controllable (by the special nearly onipotent elite); but I am superhumanly standing against it.
2 May 2009, 6:20 amGerry.Agnosia:
[Double post. Apologies]
‘Ey-ya Stan,
Coming from someone who has migrated from the conspiracy theorist and survivalist spectrums, let me just say that you tagged one of the ‘Elephants in the Room’ of these movements pretty dang accurately; I.E. — The narcissistic paranoia that they proudly hoist as banners of “awareness” that they will somehow wave gallantly to either awaken society from the ‘Sleep of Sheep’ or protect themselves with from these same ‘Sheeple’ when the time comes.
Another term that is often thrown around in various survival communities is ‘The Golden Horde’.
This term refers to the belief that whoever left alive after SHTF that didn’t prepare before it will roam around in caravans, attempting to pillage and destroy those who were able to spend thousands of dollars of money on gold coins, freeze dried food, guns and tactical gear.
The EitR here is that it was subtlely [or more often than not, extremely unsubtly] laid bare that the ‘Golden Horde’ was composed of people of color. *sigh*
I remember at a sort of survival meet I went to at a gun show, a friend and I got into a conversation about the abnormality of a young black guy like me being interested in the sub-culture. Mid-conversation, he made a statement that has stuck with me since: (To paraphrase:) “For a lot of folks, survivalism is the belief that blacks and Latinos will be seeking revenge against whitey for their perceived oppression once the comforts of society run out for everyone.”
He had made the statement half-jokingly, but after he said it, the visible discomfort of everyone else in the group [including me] could be seen due to realizing it’s truth.
Yet another term thrown around in survivalist circles is ‘the Thin Veneer’… The belief that underlying society’s loose cohesion, in the heart of every person lies savageness, tribalism and evil. Many believe that these elements will explode, again after society’s comforts have been made unsustainable for everyone, and only the survivalist and his Para-Military group will be able to hold onto civility and good. [Aye, this fantasy makes me cringe that much more after realizing its similarity to fascist appeals to masculine control and Malthusian post-collapse theories… Stan has written more beautifully on this subject elsewhere than I could probably attempt to here. :-P]
I guess what I’m saying in this strange rant is how survivalist philosophy and conspiracy theories are full of racism, sexism, logical fallacies and exclusionism… Not just of those the fantasy-holders see as “Sheeple”, but really of the billions of other people outside the U.S., many of whom deal with plights of their own on a daily basis worse than the survivalist could dream of with his Multi-Cam BDUs, $500 Kifaru B.O.B. filled with the ultra-light weight comforts of home, gas piston AR-15 with more bells and whistles on it than an entire SWAT team’s rifles combined and custom Kimber 1911 pistol… [Egh… Did I mention how steeped in consumerism and technological fetishism survivalism is?]
Once again, I want to thank the writings of DeAnander and Stan for giving me that firm but necessary awakening of my own from the sick fantasies I just spent the morning trying to describe. If some of my posts seem full of bits of self-deprecation it is only because I wretch and celebrate when I consider where I was and where I am now in terms of my personal goals, perceptions and outlook… Not that I have all the answers — If anything I have WAY more questions than answers than ever — But I definitely feel as if I’m empowered to accomplish genuine GOOD in this world rather than living in the existential funk of Murphy’s Law and ‘the Thin Veneer’ as guides to life.
~END RANT~
2 May 2009, 9:34 amDeAnander:
Probably the best essay I know of on Conspiracy Theories — quoted at length by me at ET.
The wonderful thing about the Conspiracy Theory meme is that it can so easily discredit real muckraking efforts uncovering the real collusion of powerful interests to defraud and exploit the “lower orders”. The actual conspiracies of power (such as, naming only a few, Operation Northwoods, the Tuskegee Experiment, the Wannsee Conference, PNAC’s various nuttiness leading up to the cabinet-war on Iraq) are just as weird in their way, as some Boys’ Own Mag story about Fu Manchu and the Illuminati. The people who come up with these criminal schemes certainly benefit by putting about the notion that such conspiracies never happen and are the province of disturbed people wearing Reynolds-wrap beanies
How to navigate this terrain of mistrust, disinformation, outright lies, coercion, bribery, embezzlement, fraud, and — yes — collusion and conspiracy to commit all the above… it’s a difficult question for all of us.
2 May 2009, 1:00 pmDeAnander:
Afterthought: perhaps the most revolutionary meme in my toolkit right now is the gut-level conviction that the world is not controllable: that both the biotic world and human societies are far too complex, living, interactive, fractal, wayward, mysterious, and self-organising to be micromanaged, Enclosed, disciplined, driven, commanded, or owned. This meme cuts across the traces of both the would-be controllers of the world and those who believe that the wannabe controllers actually succeed and do control the world. Is this a train of thought worth pursuing? I think it connects to Schells’ _The Unconquerable World_, for a start: the notion that the world is, and always has been, unconquerable; that the mailfist tactics of oppressors may yield short-term profit but always long-term dysfunction, blowback, and futility. Or in other words, empires always overshoot and fall; peasant cultures which respect the land and manage it rather than dominating it, persist for millennia.
2 May 2009, 1:04 pmDeAnander:
Swine of the Times (Harpers Mag)
Too many amazing quotes — I’d have to reprint the whole thing. Just go read it, eh? Two things jump out at me: women used as “sexual stimulators” for both female and male swine (mechanised ag meets prostitution inside the gulag atmosphere of the CAFO/CABO); and the fact that Henry Ford’s first assembly line was inspired by an abbatoir. Somehow that line of thought holds true all the way to the concentration camps where industrial pesticides from IG Farben were used on ex-citizens of Germany who had been declared insufficiently “standardised” for acceptance into an advance, mass-produced, industrialised modern nation.
Control, Enclosure, imprisonment, micromanagement, conformity, monoculture, authority, techno-hubris… and fragility, fragility, fragility, utter dependence on cheap-cheap-cheap energy.
2 May 2009, 1:15 pmStan Moore:
Lest anyone get me wrong, the sources I have seen stating the potential of mass casualties from a swine flu epidemic have been public health agency officials. The media has been using the term “pandemic” almost since Day 1. I don’t watch television, so only know what I see in print on mainstream news outlets online. I have seen no mention of government conspiricies to introduce flu. I simply compared the treatment of known non-threats (WMD in Iraq) to known real potential threats (factor farm - induced viruses) and raised the question why “terrorism” is treated as a greater threat than viruses.
Now that mass fatalities have not emerged quickly, the sensationalism of the media seems to be subsiding. But the potential threat persists. Note Ralph Nadar’s piece about “The Lethargy Virus” on http://www.counerpunch.org today. Nader reviews his history of making such issues part of his presidential campaigns, which never gained traction even as Jon Stewart pooh-poohed his concerns over public health.
But if a cluster of victims is identified anywhere in the world within the next week, especially with fatalities, the uproar will emerge again.
Stan Moore
2 May 2009, 4:11 pmStan Moore:
There is a good analysis by Michel Chossudovsky on media misinformation on the current flu “pandemic” at the following link:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13433
It is hard to know if the sensationalism of health agencies and the media are calculated. Even Obama, when first addressing the situation, told the public he had declared a “health emergency”, while simultaneously telling the public “not to panic”. I guess that is a way to cover all the bases simultaneously and to get the most political mileage out of a situation. I wonder if any president at any time in history would ever tell the public: “It’s TIME TO PANIC!” That might be the word that comes out from the bunker after the entrance is sealed…
Stan Moore
2 May 2009, 5:48 pmStan:
The news has been compelled now by industry pressure to refer to the flu as H1N1, that is, anything but “swine” flu.
Meme-warfare from above. Successful in this case… so far.
4 May 2009, 9:44 amDeAnander:
W/reference to fragility and Dunbar’s number and stuff like that:
Here’s Taleb on the vulnerability of size:
Since “economy of scale” is the credo of industrial capitalism on all levels — which is why we now have CAFOs, megaschools, megajails, megamalls, megafarms, megabanks, and so on — a sweeping critique of excessive size of human organisations, as maladaptive and inherently risky, seems to me necessary and timely.
4 May 2009, 12:16 pmStan Moore:
I think Taleb is right while also being wrong in his assumptions. Yes, large organizations are more likely to suffer unexpected problems because of their complexity. Our entire civilization is like that — we are too large and too complex throughout civilization for our own good. My problem with Taleb is that he appears unaware that everyone is not consciencious in an ethical sense, as he appears to be. Taleb pursues risk analysis as a matter of excellence and morality, but those who are determined to be wealthy at all costs excue excellence and morality and ethics and actually pursued high risk strategies as a means of attaining and expanding their wealth in the absence of those qualities. The entire game of hedge funds, subprime mortgages, etc. was designed from its inception to skirt regulation, avoid scrutiny, enhance secrecy and conspiracy, and then create such a huge mess of deliberate financial engineering that society would be forced to pay the creators of the mess to stay in business and get scrubbed clean, even as that process is also rigged and a sham for the benefit of the same group of malfeasants.
If everyone acted as Taleb suggested, they would have made an honest living, but not and exhorbitant one. Creating complexity is a goal that allows for vagaries and deceptions. That is well known to corporations, the government, the military and especially to the wealthy elite.
Just this week I posted an essay on wildlife discussons about the question of whether peer review itself is a problem in science. The question was a rhetorical one. An esteemed wildlife expert of national renown read my essay at my request and commented on it at my request and confirmed that peer review in the biological sciences is “in meltdown” (his words). And he noted that no one seems to care. Our whole society is in meltdown because the mentality of excellence through honesty and hard work has given way to getting by at all costs, getting something for nothing, staying quiet despite malfeasance and dishonesty, and not rocking the boat. No one wants to settle for an honest living, and this is true of nations and empires first and foremost — the more ambitious and greedy the more this is true.
All sectors have similar mindsets, agriculture, automotive manufacturing, the space program, the military, the congress, etc. If you can be bought of, you are happier than you would be just doing your job. If you can put sixty thousand pigs in a barn and let them shit themselves until germs are as thick as meat, you do it because what counts only is the financial bottom line. And even in that context, you have to shift your operations to low-wage areas in country and outside the country to maximize your profits. It is a matter of increased complexity just to organize your assets and methods to produce hams and bacon at such a scale.
But such systems are prone to meltdown eventually. They are short term operations and our Empire should take as its anthem, Neil Young and his song which says “it’s better to burn out than to fade away”. Because that is exactly what is happening and the energy equation guarantees that those living today will see the transition from glory to despair and from affluence to depauperization.
It was fun there for a while, though.
Stan Moore
4 May 2009, 1:18 pmHenry:
Re: “a sweeping critique of excessive size of human organisations, as maladaptive and inherently risky, seems to me necessary and timely.”
I would suggest re-reading “Small is Beautiful,” by E.F. Schumacher.
Also, “In the Absence of the Sacred,” by Jerry Mander.
See also, “Rethinking our Centralized Monetary System: The Case for a System of Local Currencies”
Chris Cook’s blog at http://nordicenterprisetrust.wordpress.com/
4 May 2009, 2:00 pmHenry:
Good resources page:
http://journeytoforever.org/at_link.html
4 May 2009, 2:39 pmld:
Deanander: So, if scale economies and large organizations are the tendential outcomes of the capital accumulation process, then why go after scale as a thing in itself, why not go after the environmental and human mediations of capital? (Sorry for sounding like a vulgar Marxist… and yes, I realize that once existing state socialism was all about enormous scale economies and hugely large organizations that were ecologically and socially disastrous and self-undermining… but capital rules the roost now, or failingly tries to do so, so it should be target of our critique.) As I tried to suggest earlier, when the focus is on scale (and technology) divorced from their property and power underpinnings, that’s precisely when fuzzy analysis and weird alliances enter the picture, that’s when the localization movement makes peace with hard money cranks and survivalist gun nuts and small business fantasists and the like.
Stan Moore: So what are you saying, human beings are more ethically depraved today than in the past?
5 May 2009, 1:24 amld:
Gerry.Agnosia: Thanks for that ethnographic portrait of nativist survivalism. Just because we don’t share corporate liberals’ sneering arrogance towards such types, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have our own harsh critiques of their own (to put it mildly) “shortcomings.” And that’s the thing about the relocalization/post-carbon society “movement” in the US. Given the country’s history of internal colonialism, its present balance of political forces, and so on, it’s no surprise that there are more paranoid (white male) individualists than anarcho-communists who identify with the inchoate “movement” — and that the biggest sector is made up of pragmatically-oriented but theoretically-bereft greens who are cognitively ill-equipped to even notice the political distinctions between the right-wing and the left-wing of the “movement,” as it were. I hazard to say that many of the greens would not have much of a clue as to why Stan’s e-mailbox fills up with conspiracy crank crap, or even decode the racial undertones of that very crap.
5 May 2009, 1:43 amStan:
De can certainly answer for herself on this one, but I feel compelled to say something as well. Dunbar’s number, or something similar to what it purports, carries with it the implication that scale, in and of itself, can inhere with problems. It’s the point that Marx never got to. DB suggests that when we exceed that number in our social formations — regardless of what textual mission centers the formation — the organization will require a layer of administration/management.
Capital accumulation is a specified subset of this dynamic.
Administration-management itself inheres with tendencies, in particular the tendency toward what De and I have called dog-waggery, and the tendency to overgrow and encrust social formations with rules instead of organic norms. The germs of heirarchy, contract, and law are all there.
Interesting thesis from DeLanda is that the management systems adopted most widely by industry were adopted from the military.
At any rate, my own experience with ideology and practice (and I use the first term in my usual way) is that pragmatically (?), no, practically-bereft theory carries the tendency to overreach and elaborate into a complexity that exceeds the ability of a theory to account for emergent realities. It loses its predictive value at the same time that its generalities are picked apart at the edges by local specificity.
The folks I am talking to these days — and working with, literally, we did a labor-trade group on Sunday that made a large and beautiful garden in one couple’s front yard (in some of the most compacted soil I’ve seen) — are not inchoate but searching. That searching, however, is being done more and more intentionally as part of actual work. Theoretical musings are not work. And praxis includes mapping… some of these folks have mapped, geographically, demographically, historically, and economically, Northeast Central Durham to a point where the quality of their knowledge of the area approaches what we’d have called in the military “sound, timely, tactical intelligence.”
The subject of property in this is very, very specific, as in actual property with a geographic coordinate. And the topic of speculation is whether we can get land through land trusts and take it off the market… create some of our own facts on the ground, as it were. This is a strategic conversation, without laying out a Strategy to which all must bend the knee.
After the garden work, people had food and beer, and we passed around books we wanted to temporarily trade. Mine in curculation are The Power of the Machine and The Silent Majority. We are talking about “land reform” and the semiotic character of money; but we are also exchanging tips on soil pH, comfrey, water catchment, blueberries, mulch, and tomatoes.
5 May 2009, 6:04 amld:
Stan, thanks for your reports and reflections. They’re always stimulating even when (or especially when) I respectfully disagree, and I know you don’t have loads of free time on your hands. Anyway, I’ll try to make time for my own response later.
5 May 2009, 6:23 amld:
Speaking of The Silent Majority (which frankly was new to me), did you see Mike Davis’ post-election essay “Obama at Manassas” in the New Left Review? Political shifts in the Sun Belt suburbs apparently play a central role in his analysis. Sorry if this was brought up earlier on this blog. http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2769
5 May 2009, 7:08 amStan:
Thanks!
5 May 2009, 8:04 pmStan:
-Dr. Michael Greger, Humane Society of the U.S.
8 May 2009, 5:58 amBruce F:
Food, Inc. (The Movie) opens June 12th
http://robertkennerfilms.com/films/files/detail_current.php
13 May 2009, 1:12 pmMichael Anderson:
And now, from sheer vanity wedded with economics; drug resistant bacteria from people coming back from cosmetic surgery in India and Pakistan!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/aug/12/new-superbug-drug-resistant-mrsa
A massive dose of unintended consequences.
13 August 2009, 2:17 am