self-sufficiency

Intel is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most personal computers. Because of suspicions that Intel chips facilitate US spy-ware, like many other countries, Russia is seeking a way around this.

22 June, 2014 (Tony Cartalucci - LocalOrg) - Russia's ITAR-TASS News Agency reported in an article titled, "Russia wants to replace US computer chips with local processors" that: Russia's Industry and Trade Ministry plans to replace US microchips Intel and AMD, used in government's computers, with domestically-produced micro processor Baikal in a project worth dozens of millions of dollars, business daily Kommersant reported Thursday.

Breaking the back of multinational monopolies is a matter of national security. 

Image: The NSA is not an indep­endent agency nor does it merely answer to those in Wash­ington. It is a manifest­ation of an over­reaching corporat­ocracy that will stop at nothing to expand its various monopolies. The key to defeating the NSA is not attacking it directly but by under­mining and replacing the corporate interests that created it and direct it in the first place.

It also stated:

The Baikal chips will be installed on computers of government bodies and in state-run firms, which purchase some 700,000 personal computers annually worth $500 million and 300,000 servers worth $800 million. The total volume of the market amounts to about 5 million devices worth $3.5 billion.

In addition to the obvious financial benefits for Russia of locally manufacturing processors, there are several other dimensions within which the move will be beneficial, including in terms of national security.

Long has it been reported that US-manufactured processors may have vulnerabilities engineered into them, at the request of US intelligence agencies including the National Security Agency (NSA). Australia's Financial Review revealed in 2013 in an article titled, "Intel chips could let US spies inside: expert, that:

One of Silicon Valley's most respected technology experts, Steve Blank, says he would be "surprised" if the US National Security Agency was not embedding "back doors" inside chips produced by Intel and AMD, two of the world's largest semiconductor firms, giving them the possibility to access and control machines.

The claims come after The Australian Financial Review revealed that computers made by Chinese firm Lenovo are banned from the "secret" and "top secret" networks of the intelligence and defence services of Australia, the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand because of concerns they are vulnerable to being hacked.

Internationally renowned security research engineer Jonathan Brossard, who unveiled what Forbes described as an "undetectable and incurable" permanent back door at last year's prestigious Black Hat conference, told the Financial Review that he had independently concluded that CPU back doors are "attractive attack vectors".

If correct, the allegations would raise the stakes in a growing cyber cold war, and fuel claims that US snooping leaves the Chinese in the shade.

The move by Russia would help protect government assets from foreign spying and cyber attacks enabled by the potential vulnerabilities described in the Financial Review. And because of the large scale of production that will be needed to supply the Russian government's annual demand, the possibility of Russian-made processors being used outside of state agencies and firms could help secure Russia's wider national IT infrastructure as well.

Dependence on foreign technology has created a potential threat to Russia's IT infrastructure. Technological self-sufficiency, then, can clearly be seen as a priority for national security. Developing independent technology requires an emphasis on education, research, and development, but the price of neglecting these areas renders a nation at the mercy of those that haven't.

Image: Just as manu­facturing your own processors affords you added security for IT infra­structure, locally produced, organic agri­culture affords you food security.

The West's geopolitical primacy has been enabled by the various corporate-financier monopolies that exist upon Wall Street and in the City of London. Breaking the back of these monopolies requires nations to develop alternatives that undermine and ultimately displace these monopolies from within their borders. Russia's decision to produce processors domestically is one example of this. Nation's focusing on domestic food security by encouraging local, organic farming undermines and displaces the West's big-agri monopolies and in particular their attempts to monopolize the very code of life itself through the proliferation of patented GMOs.

And while governments should be focused on national-level solutions to undermine and displace foreign monopolies threatening national security, on the local level there are steps regular people can take to protect their communities and themselves - including boycotting and replacing Fortune 500 monopolies with local solutions, and the creation of local institutions and organizations that are composed and serve the interests of the people that created them.

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Observations on how we are being backed into a corner

The propaganda against the 1/4 acre block started a few decades ago. - appearing as opinion pieces in newpapers. I believe this propaganda was aimed at very ordinary people in or suburbs with traditional blocks. It was to prepare them to relinquish their lifestyle and for their children not to expect it in the normal course of events. I don't think it was aimed at rich people as they are different - a special case. The very rich can actually do the opposite to "urban consolidation." The rich can buy the next door property in Toorak, bulldoze the house and annexe the land for their own pleasure in the form of a tennis court or swimming pool.

The propaganda seems to have been on behalf of those who wanted to effect radical change in values and rights for the sake of population growth, which for various reasons they derived benefit from - usually financial.

Why this is important

The 1/4 acre block affords some local self sufficiency to the ordinary person. 50 years ago it was quite common for people to keep chickens in the suburbs- some still do but I don't think it's as usual. There is probably an economic reason for this . Vegetable gardens were common then and they may be trying to make a return now.

Recently in Sydney I visited a cousin who has built her eco friendly dream home in the suburb of Ryde. The garden was for low rainfall, the house worked on passive temperature control and in the corner of this living arrangement was a chicken house with inhabitants. Area of block- 1/4 acre approx.

As oil depletion continues I believe self sufficiency will become more important. The more land per family we lose the less self sufficient we can be.

How dare we be talked into denying children the rights that we grew up with?

I believe the people of Melbourne are losing their land by stealth and propaganda. I also wonder how people can, on the one hand, be talked into having more children, and, on the other hand, talked into letting go of those children's rights.

In 2007 I made a submission to the Melbourne 2030 review. I made some of the points below. (Now Melbourne 2030 is out of date, of course. They are trying to bring in something even worse. )

Urban temperatures rising, trees and water disappearing

Urban temperatures are higher than those in the country, and made worse by air conditioners. I worry about the reduced ability of land to absorb water with increased concrete bitumen, housing and impermeable surfaces in general. I can see this affecting the water table and possibly having ramifications with regard to street trees and other trees and vegetation on public land. We should be preserving trees to keep the city cool and moist instead of infilling and concreting everything.

I would have thought with all the apartments and townhouses shooting up in the bastardized process known as suburban infill, that we would want to keep backyards full of trees etc. Never mind that I'll never own a $1.8M 3BR house in Hawthorn East, I'm just glad someone owns it so that there aren't twenty people in 6 townhouses there instead.

So God bless those rich people in their big houses!! (Unless of course they are developers and politicians telling the rest of us to go and live in high-rise infills.)

Even if I have hardly any garden at all, I want to protect other people's gardens. They are part of the environment and even if the garden is not mine- I benefit if I walk past or live near it. I breathe the oxygen that its greenery exudes. I am cooled by the transpiration of the leaves. Even if I live in a one bedroom apartment in the same street, I am better off if this house and garden remain than if this house in turn is bulldozed for another block of apartments. I can see what the obvious counter argument is to this - homelessness - but that problem is circular; the root cause of homelessness is rapid population growth.

Urban wildlife is yet another issue - one I feel so deeply about that I can hardly even write of it. Gardens provide some habitat for native animals, birds reptiles, and insects. The more the city is consolidated, the more predictable every space within it becomes and there will be little room for any species other than humans, dogs and cats. And, even then, the dogs must be on leads and the cats must be kept indoors. It would make more sense if we made friends with the neighbourhood possums, but the government has designated them as pests.

If we continue with population growth at 2% per annum- we stand to lose the few advantages we still have very quickly. If we have a population growth rate of 1% per annum we will still lose it but at half the speed.

I do not think that Australian politicians have a moral or any other right to do this to us.

Good news! WTO negotiations may collapse as nations push for self-sufficiency.

In a syndicated piece in The Australian Financial Review, “CAP on trade fuels food fears", London-based writer, Geoff Kitney, expresses British horror at the prospect of France leading the EU and European agriculture from July 1 this year. I guess he thinks that the national syndicators of mad cow disease could do a much better job.

He describes the French as “seizing on the global scare about dwindling food supplies” to call on the EU to use its ‘common agricultural policy’ (CAP) to motivate European farmers to raise production and make Europe self-sufficient in food.

I don’t know about you, but ‘global scare’ strikes me as a bit of a frivolous way to describe widespread starvation and food riots, whilst ensuring national self-sufficiency sounds to me like the right way to go.

Kitney sounds as if the prospect of declining oil reserves hasn't sunk in, or perhaps he just doesn’t understand the oil-food connection.

According to Kitney, naughty Germany has backed up the French position, saying food supplies are key, even if that means higher prices. And, not content to ensure adequate food supplies:

“Germany went further, suggesting that as food supplies became more scarce, it was important that the EU demanded higher environmental and health standards from countries such as India, china and the US if they wanted to sell in the European market.”

Shock! Horror! That could mean an end to cheap imports, mobile capital and slave labour. How will the rich survive if they can’t exploit poor and dirty conditions off-shore? How will they get to own all the seeds in the world if the EU rejects GM and the patenting of genes? Heavens, the next thing they will be banning child labour – and then the birth rate will fall in the third world. What’s an economic rationalist to do if nations begin thinking rationally for their citizens?

“Little wonder”, [writes Kitney], “that there is such a sense of urgency to get an agreement now before the rising tide of protectionist fear overwhelms the WTO negotiations.”

He goes on to say that the WTO cannot just at the moment “boost food production and lower food prices” but describes how it will be working on stopping all this democratic nonsense about self-sufficiency.

Whilst the [unfortunately well-fed] WTO negotiators will be “working overtime at its headquarters on the foreshores of Lake Geneva” the UN Human Rights Council will be holding a special session just down the road to look at the global food crisis “from a human rights perspective.”

What a novel approach!

Kitney relates that Olivier De schutter, the new UN rapporteur on the 'right to food' has expressed concern that protectionism in the 'rich' countries is making the products of the poor countries uncompetitive.

Unfortunately, it seems that the UN never really looks at the hard problem of land-stealing in the third world, which has meant that perfectly viable economies became basket cases in the 19th C and, just as they were getting some control over the situation, the economic hit-men of globalism went in under the shock-doctrine and turned them into slave-dictatorships, coordinating the international privatisation of public land and utilities and rewriting constitutions. (See Review of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine)

We certainly cannot trust the WTO to look after democracy and the environment. The UN, whilst made up of many excellent local and regional organisations, seems to act on a global level as a monolith dancing to the tune of the WTO, the World Bank, and the USA. Whilst national systems may not be perfect, they are a step towards relocalisation. In an oil poor world we need to get control back over our immediate surroundings and governments.