Dandelion Salad

Part II: Fossil fuels for fossil thoughts By Rand Clifford

Sent to me by Jason Miller from Thomas Paine’s Corner. Thanks, Jason.

By Rand Clifford

8/10/08

Part I

Molders of public opinion work in such insidious ways that their actual methods and means usually go unnoticed. While inculcation of propaganda, lies, and disinformation do much of the shaping, simple omission has profound effect—might even be the favorite because it is, after all, nothing. It’s hard to imagine nothing ever accomplishing so much, but consider that for most people under common awareness manipulation, whatever corporate media (CorpoMedia) omits, to a large extent doesn’t exist.

Flag-draped coffins streaming home in the dead of night from our war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan are under media blackout, and so mean as little to most Americans as the actual reasons for the invasions, or even the hideous war crimes themselves. By its nature, omission is all but limitless; its application by CorpoMedia has grown to enormous proportions as celebrities and sports overpower hard news. So this article focuses on omission of—the calculated disappearing of a single thing that for thousands of years has profoundly benefitted the health and well-being of people all over the world, and today offers so much more: Cannabis hemp.

6/26/08, the Economist newspaper published: Better Living Through Chemurgy. http://www.truthabouttrade.org/content/view/11985/54/ A decent article overall, at the end of paragraph one it points out that chemurgy is an ugly word; subtle implications being that there might actually be something ugly about chemurgy itself? Chemurgy is a branch of applied chemistry focused on preparing industrial products and consumer goods from agricultural raw materials. The term first appeared in William J. Hale’s 1934 book The Farm Chemurgic. The National Farm Chemurgic Council was formed a year later to foster greater industrial use of agricultural raw material—something ugly in ravenous petrochemical empire eyes….

The Economist article lauds American scientist George Washington Carver for developing hundreds of industrial products from peanuts…then comes disinformation: “In the 1930s, Henry Ford started using parts made from agricultural materials, and even built an ‘all-soy car’”. Sorry, not “all-soy”—Ford made a car in 1941 of mostly resin-stiffened hemp fiber, with hemp plastic windows, and powered by hemp ethanol. Soy resins were used, but it has always been known as Ford’s Hemp Car. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxlj6fgQ-ZU

Ford loved American farms, which by the mid-twenties were in an economic crisis that would worsen into the great depression. Ford knew that creating new markets for farm products was essential, and with his political and financial backing, the Farm Chemurgy movement started taking off. Ford also knew that with widespread cultivation, hemp could be an economic powerhouse—and that ethanol from hemp, or any other fermentable vegetable matter, was the fuel of the future, something widely agreed upon at the time in the automotive industry.

A favorite quote of Ford’s: “There’s enough alcohol in one year’s yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for one hundred years.” His first Model-T was designed to run on hemp alcohol.

Rudolf Diesel designed the diesel engine to be powered by vegetable oils, such as from hemp seed; at the 1900 world’s fair he ran his new engine on peanut oil.

To the stupendous misfortune of virtually everything but Big Oil, the chemurgy movement was stifled by Big Oil. A new National Energy Program was the subject of many bills in Congress, focused on utilizing part of Americas vast agricultural capacity for production of alcohol fuels. Big Oil responded with withering lobby power, including slogans such as the government’s proposed energy program “robbing taxpayers to make farmers rich”. Then, as now, whatever Big Oil wants, Big Oil gets. Ford’s vision of cheap, clean and renewable biofuels spooked early oil barons into keeping oil prices in the range between $1 and $4 per barrel—prices so low that no other energy sources could compete. But once they were sure the competition had been killed off, the price of oil began to soar. They were not only able to eliminate competition from alcohol fuels…but were instrumental in diddling government into effectively banning hemp cultivation—an incredible robbing of the people to protect entrenched corporate profits that still endures.

Food, fuel, fiber, paper, plastics, medicines…cannabis hemp could turn sunshine, water and carbon dioxide into many thousands of pollution-free products with today’s technology. Nothing else grows so prodigiously. Hemp can be grown in all 50 states, needs no petrochemical inputs, actually improves the soil, and could be a powerful resource for mitigating global warming. However, it’s becoming obvious that the elite want catastrophic global warming to help further their population reduction plans—more on this in a moment.

Chemurgy attracting such renewed attention is certainly encouraging. Though after reading more than a dozen new articles on the subject, I saw no mention of hemp…until I hit an article written by a hero regarding modern hemp awareness, Jack Herer. His book on “Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy”: The Emperor Wears No Clothes has seen many printings since its debut in 1985. A true modern classic, Herer’s book points out that not only has the word “hemp” been removed from all high school textbooks…he found that the Smithsonian Institution had also removed “hemp” from all exhibits, replacing it with “other fibers”—even though at the time referred to in the exhibits, hemp made up about 80% of the fibers used, while the fibers mentioned by name, such as cotton and jute, played minor roles. Herer questioned a museum curator about the absence of “hemp”, and was told: “Children don’t need to know about hemp anymore, it confuses them.” Well, when it comes to CorpoMedia, it seems a similar decision has been made for the entire population. The fact that the National Congress of State Legislators has passed sweeping pro-hemp legislation, and the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture also vigorously support commercial production of hemp—as well as more than 15 states, most recently Vermont, having passed pro-hemp legislation…prime omission material for CorpoMedia. Same thing as Congressman Ron Paul’s “Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2007″ which has been comatose in the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security since April 20, 2007.After all, what standard, PAC-fed politico from the world’s leading trafficker of heroin and cocaine wants to appear “soft on drugs”? http://www.druggingamerica.com/ciadrugs/index_cia_right.html

Chemurgy without hemp is almost like fire without heat. Hemp alone could produce more products than all other touted chemurgic candidates combined! Any serious mention of chemurgy should boldly list hemp as the absolute superstar, but as usual…there’s the political stench of Big Oil and its petrochemical empire. Their latest subterfuge involves giving “biofuels” a bad name. By using their legendary clout to help ramrod ethanol from corn, they have not only contrived the outrageous “food-versus-fuel” controversy, but also greatly expanded the massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico fed by petrochemical runoff from all the new acres of corn—all the while enhancing their profits with soaring use of petrochemical fertilizers and other petrochemical inputs. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/5924145.html It takes as much if not more fossil energy to produce a gallon of corn ethanol as the energy available from that gallon. The energy equation is helped somewhat by corn byproducts, but the bottom line in this heavily taxpayer subsidized boondoggle is: corn is one of the very worst crops we could choose for making ethanol, and hemp is probably the very best; incredible political complications muddy this reality, but under the mud things are very clear.

So why not utilize hemp for biofuels, the most perfect solution available for not only the fuel AND food crisis, but also as a premier scrubber of greenhouse gas? This monumental question has the simplest of answers: entrenched profit, and agenda. Hemp would force profits of Big Oil and its Petrochemical Empire to leak down to farmers…to the people—anathema to the elite. Wealth must flow up, they insist, not down, so THEIR government (CorpoGov) keeps hemp buried with the “marijuana” contrivance, while CorpoGov (and Wall Street) reap trillions from the trafficking of heroin and cocaine, denying average people of the most valuable of crops to supposedly protect them from the “menace of marijuana”. Could there be a better example of hypocrisy as a cornerstone of CorpoGov? Could there by a better example of the sense of it all than Ron Paul’s federal hemp farming legislation being mummified in the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security? In all other industrialized nations this has been an agricultural consideration, meaning ALL other industrialized nations now benefit from hemp farming. But here in the home of Big Oil….

If instead of the obscene prohibition of more than 70 years, American farmers had been “allowed” to grow hemp, we might not be facing the intentional scuttling of America to make way for the elite’s New World Order. Perhaps America’s wealth would not be concentrated in so few hands, and Big Oil with their Petrochemical Empire would not so dominate CorpoMedia and Corpogov. Perhaps the Industrial Military Complex would not be the domestic and global monster it has become, and with goading White House psychopathology, might not have us at the brink of WWIII with imminent attack on Iran. You’ve seen the propaganda about Iran being the most evil incarnation this side of Nazi Germany…but along with Prescott Bush, who helped finance Hitler? http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar

And who can say that BushCo under direction of Dick Cheney is not as bad as they’ve ever come? Look closely at the reality of 9/11, especially what it has set in motion, by design. If sheer human suffering is the benchmark…with their terminal legacy of depleted uranium munitions, along with all the outright murders—including 3,000 of their own citizens in one fateful day in September, doesn’t it seem that BushCo/Cheney are treading beyond the brutality that capitalist propaganda whores falsely attribute to “Uncle Joe” Stalin?

Back to hemp: if we rally the intelligence, dedication, and some of the spirit that got America going in the first place…nothing like hemp offers so much in reducing Big Oil and their Empire of CorpoGov and Industrial Military Complex and Global Predatory Capitalism. This is the only reason hemp remains banned in America…. Regional economies, wealth enriching its actual producers, healing of the planet’s life-support systems—even if we find the spirit, do we still have time?

Back to global warming: the sheer wealth and propaganda utilized by Big Oil to make it seem like what is happening is not really happening, that should be a dead giveaway. If global warming caused primarily by runaway consumption of fossil fuels were not happening—were not dramatically accelerating as climate science professionals plus irrefutable evidence say, why would so much elite wealth be thrown at denying it? A main reason is that, for the elite, global warming is a maximum ally. How else could their planned 90% reduction of human population be so effortlessly achieved?

Such is the essence of Part II….

Rand Clifford is a writer living in Spokane, Washington, with his wife Mary Ann, and their Chesapeake Bay retriever, Mink. Rand’s novels CASTLING, TIMING, VOICES OF VIRES, and PRIEST LAKE CATHEDRAL are published by StarChief Press: http://www.starchiefpress.com

see

Fossil fuels for fossil thoughts By Rand Clifford (Part II)

King Hemp Part I: From DEA Deadly Birdseed, Toward Power to the People By Rand Clifford

King Hemp: Part 2: Battle Lines: Natural, Or Synthetic…Life, Or Death? By Rand Clifford

King Hemp Part 3: We Got Mugged, So Let’s Get Hemp Back By Rand Clifford

King Hemp IV: Rope and Dope By Rand Clifford

King Hemp V: Industrial Disease By Rand Clifford