By TARIQ ALI

It was symbolic that 2006 ended with a colonial hanging— most of it (bar the last moments) shown on state television in occupied Iraq. It has been that sort of year in the Arab world. After a trial so blatantly rigged that even Human Rights Watch—the largest single unit of the US Human Rights industry— had to condemn it as a total travesty. Judges were changed on Washington’s orders; defense lawyers were killed and the whole procedure resembled a well-orchestrated lynch mob. Source: CounterPunch.org, Weekend Edition, December 30 / 31, 2006

Posted by stan as News at 7:50 PM PST

…a food praxis intelligence pamphlet

Published January 2007, for Insurgent American

By Stan Goff

This 44-page pamphlet is available to anyone who can use it, with the request that the source (author and url) is cited. Food and Finance is an examination of the history of finance capital since WWII and how it is connected to the so-called Green Revolution in agriculture to increase the power of transnational capital and deepen the dependency of everyone from the third world peasant to the residents of US suburbs.

(You’ll find a link to a pdf of the pamphlet in the Analysis section.)

Robert Biel, author of The New Imperialism - Crisis and Contradictions in North/South Relations, writes:

About the Green Revolution, it’s quite interesting because since I wrote about it in my book I’ve started doing some farming on an allotment, so I can probably have a slightly more practical understanding of some of these issues. It seems to me the fundamental thing in US policy was social engineering. From a propaganda point of view it was supposed to demonstrate that hunger could be abolished without radical social change. Hence it would appeal to existing third-world elites, but it was also aiming to create a new elite, i.e., a middle stratum who would be beholden to US policy. The hidden agenda was to control the South through controlling food. One way this could be done was by the US exporting its own ’surplus’ food (the ‘food as a weapon’ strategy referred to by Kissinger), replacing traditional staple crops with wheat. The Green Revolution was complementary to this, in that it encouraged food to be produced in situ, so the problem was to ensure that it didn’t slip out of US control. The solution was [a] to market hybrid seeds which don’t reproduce true to type so that it’s impossible to save seed from one year to the next and you have to keep importing it [b] to produce strains which demand heavy use of machinery, fertiliser and pesticide, which the US can supply. The less obvious aspect which I think I’m understanding better now is the ‘dominating knowledge’ aspect. The traditional farmer gets a buzz out of experimenting, and I think this must be an innate human trait. Traditional systems keep alive a diversity of different strains of genetic material, so if faced with an unexpected challenge they can in a sense ‘breed their way out of trouble’.

My colleague who’s researching among pastoralists in East Africa has observed how, when faced with a threat of cattle-rustling, they managed to breed, in a very short period of time, a type of cow which is faithful to its owner but extremely savage towards strangers, and if by chance someone manages to rustle it, it will simply walk back to its original owner at the first opportunity! This encapsulates the traditional grassroots approach. Perhaps the most reactionary task of the Green Revolution was to undermine this autonomous popular command over the development of knowledge, and to replace it with dependence; and of course to replace a low-input organic agriculture with a high-input one which is unsustainable in the long term. On the other hand, the good news is that, although the direct link with tradition is hard to reconstitute, if the hypothesis is correct that love of experimentation is an inherent human trait, it will become resurgent whenever conditions permit. Thus Cuba, having been forced to do without inputs previously supplied by the USSR, has regenerated its agriculture in a remarkable way.

-Robert Biel
January 2, 2007

Posted by stan as Analysis at 10:40 AM PST

The chapter Insurgency-Counterinsurgency in The Insurgent’s Handbook and the Introduction to the book Sex & War both by Stan Goff are now available. Enjoy!

Posted by BrianR as Books at 3:02 PM PST

As we mention on the page Support this Site, your donations are going to the expense of running this site and its forums. The goal of this post is to describe what we’ll be doing with your money.

Right now, basic web hosting for this site is around $120 a year. That’s pretty cheap. But for IA to grow and be able to financially support Stan and myself, it will take a lot of traffic. By traffic I mean the number of visitors to the site on a daily basis. For a website to sustain lots of web traffic, it requires high quality dedicated web server hardware and lots of bandwidth. (I’d be happy to elaborate the techie details. Please contact me if you like to hear more of my geek speak.)

My goal is to raise enough money for one year of high quality dedicated web server hosting. One estimate of this cost is $500 a month. That comes to $6000 a year.

I think saving for a year in advance is better than going month to month, especially for the first year. Lots of people suggest that ventures like ours can take two years to begin breaking even. If we can raise enough money for our webhosting in advance we won’t have to take the money from our meager living resources. As of right now, I’ve donated 85 hours of my time, the cost of domain name registration, and web hosting costs. I don’t expect to recoup all of my donated time.

If you would like to donate towards the cause of saving for this resource, then subscribe to Insurgent American by using the PayPal link on the right side bar or by mailing a check or money order to Brian Russell, P.O. Box 1721, Carrboro, NC, 27510.

Another way you could donate towards our Tech resources is by giving us dedicated web hosting. If you run a serious web host with 24-7 collocation/managed hosting facilities, please contact me.

Please know that I’m working very hard on this site because I believe in Stan Goff, his ideas, and that we can change the world for the better. I want to see this site succeed so it can help creative people live modestly doing what they love, not amass great quantities of wealth.

The Internet has given us a resource to remove all the middle men. If we build our own place we can work directly with others and support ourselves fairly.

Thank you for your support and trust,
-BrianR

Posted by BrianR as Site at 6:53 PM PST

For the end of the year… Thirty-six separate commentaries from throughout the year.

2006: My Year with the Liberals
By Stan Goff

Spouting off on everything from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Anorexia nervosa, from gay marriage to vice-presidential gun safety, a middle-aged Army veteran without qualifications or credentials takes caustic potshots at the rich and infamous.

Note: To purchase this pdf book please goto StanGoff.com and click on the ’support this site’ link on the top right hand side of the page. Thank you! -BrianR

Posted by stan as Books at 4:24 PM PST

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by stan as News at 3:26 PM PST

That’s what I’m asking for as support for this site, and for myself. For the last five days I have been researching and writing a piece for this site on how the Green Revolution was designed and deployed as a weapon of imperialism. It’s already 25 pages long, and it connects a lot of dots for an analysis that supports feminism, re-localization, and permaculture as strategic political practices.

For the past three years, I have supported myself and my family through the largesse of people in the movement against the war. I have had some writing gigs and speaking gigs. I sold books out of boxes. I had a couple of consulting jobs on the side. I’m 55, and I don’t have any advanced degrees. Aside from intellecutal sharecropping and political organizing, the only skills I possess are those from the military. As of February 2007, I will have no means of support. But I can study, think, and write to pass that study and thinking along for other people to study and think a bit further.

This site is committed to the belief that the credentialing of intellectuals within the Academy — while it does not take anything away from those with academic credentials — is an aspect of an intellectual division of labor that keeps organic intellectuals — and there are quite a few of us — out. Out of jobs, and out of public discourse. We need subscribers, quite a few, at $10 a month (or 34 cents a day) to allow us to develop this web site full time, but more importantly, to continue doing what credentialed academics do… without the institutional constraints: Study, think, and write.

We will also gladly accept larger contriubutions. (See the “subscribe” button on the right.)

I have a strong work ethic; and if necessary I’ll take whatever work I have to in February. I’m not standing here with a sign threatening to starve. I’ll work for minimum wage if that’s what it takes to pay bills.

But I’d rather spend the 8 hours a day pulling together ideas, history, and current events as analyses that support “feminism, re-localization, and permaculture as strategic political practices.” Almost everything we have on Insurgent American is open to the public. We are not managers, and we are not capitalists. We are not trying to establish a value-for-value exchange system, but one of mutual support, that bends toward the construction of communities. We have valuable things here, no doubt. But I am appealing to you for plain straightforward support, the price of half-a-cup of bad coffee each day, that might allow me to do this work, and for Brian (the technical shaker and mover here) and other contributors to make this happen.

You’d also be supporting those who can use this site, but who cannot afford to support it monetarily… because the site will develop at a rate corresponding to the time we have to invest in it. We appreciate you dropping by. Please support us; and please use this practical strategic resource.

Thanks.

Stan Goff

Posted by stan as Site at 9:02 PM PST

By Sharmila Joshi

50% of the world’s food for direct consumption is produced by women and women do two-thirds of the world’s work. Yet global development projects from the 1940s onwards viewed women as little more than mothers feeding babies. As a result, the socio-economic status of women actually declined, thanks to development programmes

Posted by stan as Analysis at 10:03 PM PST

While everyone praises Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and his original intent of helping poor women in Bangladesh, some critics say microcredit is being misconstrued as a way of ending poverty.

Debate on Democracy Now!

Posted by stan as Feature at 7:50 AM PST

… will be interviewed on First Voices Radio, a Native American politics program, Thursday Dec 21, at 10am EST - WBAI 99.5 FM. Web streaming available. Subject: chains of causality and forms of genocide

Posted by stan as Feature at 9:00 PM PST