Well, as it turns out, the battle doesn’t always go to the strongest. David still has a few rocks in his arsenal after all. In an article at Shareable (“Setting the Record Straight on the Legality of Seed Libraries,” Aug. 11), Neal Gorenflo, the Sustainable Economies Law Center and Center for a New American Dream report on an impressive job of legal research he did into the language and judicial interpretation of similar statutes and regulations around the country, and finds there are significant potential loopholes to be exploited.

I generally argue, along with C4SS comrade Charles Johnson, that an ounce of circumvention or evasion is worth a pound of working within the system to change the law:

If you put all your hope for social change in legal reform … then … you will find yourself outmaneuvered at every turn by those who have the deepest pockets and the best media access and the tightest connections. There is no hope for turning this system against them; because, after all, the system was made for them and the system was made by them. Reformist political campaigns inevitably turn out to suck a lot of time and money into the politics—with just about none of the reform coming out on the other end.

Far more can be achieved, he says, at a tiny fraction of the cost, by “bypassing those laws and making them irrelevant to your life.”

Lobbying against draconian copyright laws like the IP chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and ACTA has done a lot of good, but encryption, proxies and improvements in file-sharing technology have done far more. Before ACTA had even come to a vote, several Firefox extensions became available that can simply bypass domain names seized by the federal government and go straight to their numeric IP address. That’s how people access Wikileaks’ various national sites and mirrors around the world.

In other words, to paraphrase a famous quote, treat the law as damage and route around it.

But sometimes the best way of doing that is by using the law itself as a weapon. The Wobblies and other radical unions have a name for this: “work-to-rule.” Considering the stupidity of the rule-making process in authoritarian hierarchies, there’s no finer way to sabotage an entire company than by obeying workplace rules literally. The same applies to government laws and regulations. A law may have been passed with the obvious intent of protecting proprietary capitalist seed companies from free and open source competition. But regardless of intent, once a policy is put into writing it is limited by its own language. Like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters, the destructor is subject to the limitations of the form it’s embodied in.

And as the authors find, the actual language and subsequent judicial interpretation of seed regulations around the country comes in pretty handy as a monkey wrench. Taken literally, virtually all such rules apply at most to the distribution of seed through commercial sale, trade or barter — that is, when a reciprocal exchange of value for value has taken place that involves an explicit or implied contract. Although those who take seed from the Mechanicsburg library are encouraged to return it out of their crops, in order to perpetuate the library, there is no contractual obligation to do so. The only requirement for seed distributors as such in Pennsylvania is to pay a $25 licensing fee. The authors suggest the seed library might do just this, continue to operate as before, and wait for the state (no doubt spurred by the seed companies behind it) to make the next move. And if it does, see what happens when it’s tested in court.

(Shareable has created an open Hackpad for anyone who wants to share the results of their own research into particular state seed regulations).

Of course if this fails and the courts back up the seed companies’ interests, it will be time to take the circumvention a step further (I’m speaking only for myself here, not the authors — they suggest combining the experiment above with lobbying, about which I’m “meh” at best). The file-sharing movement’s response to the shutdown of Napster was to take on a more dispersed, genuinely P2P character, eventually abandoning hosting on fixed servers altogether. With brick-and-mortar seed libraries shut down, organic gardeners might use apps or sharing websites to match up people with matching seed supplies and needs and let them take care of the rest. If the corporate state pushes back hard enough, it might be necessary to relocate the sharing sites to servers in countries outside the DRM Curtain and for seed sharers to deal with one another under cover of encrypted email.

They point to another interesting bit of information. The IRS has acknowledged that time banks are distinct from taxable barter exchanges for much the same reason he argues the time bank is exempt from seed regulations. There is no contractual quid pro quo; although there is an informal “exchange” of favor for favor, there is no legal obligation to return a favor. Now, as the capital goods required to produce a growing share of our consumption needs become smaller and cheaper, and affordable and scalable to individual households or multi-family sharing networks, it follows that a large share of our total production to meet our own subsistence needs will drop out of the cash nexus and off the state’s radar screen, and into self-provisioning through the informal and gift economies. Even on a larger community scale, where some more definite coordination is required through something like Tom Greco’s mutual credit-clearing networks, the system can likely operate under cover of a darknet with transaction costs of enforcement exceeding the benefits.

So technology itself is taking a growing share of our productive lives outside the purview of the corporate-state nexus, and transferring them instead into the realm of voluntary association and mutual aid that Kropotkin, in his Britannica article on Anarchism, set forth as the defining characteristics of anarchy. By seizing on the advantages offered by such technologies, we can evade corporate domination and build the world of our own desires.

Libraries for sharing traditional and heirloom seed varieties are a growing phenomenon nationwide, intended as a way to preserve biodiversity and the collective heritage of many millions of hours of selective breeding against the lockdown a handful of giant agribusiness corporations has imposed on our entire food chain.

A public library in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania celebrated Earth Day this year by launching its own seed library project. This didn’t sit well with the state Ag Department, which is investigating the seed library, citing possible violations of the Seed Act of 2004. The department’s duties, under the terms of the Act, include “keeping mislabeled seeds, invasive plant species, cross-pollinated varietals, and poisonous plants out of the state.” Pursuant to that authority, the department told the library, “all seeds had to be tested for purity and germination rates.” A Cumberland County commissioner explained, presumably with a straight face: “Agri-terrorism is a very, very real scenario. Protecting and maintaining the food sources of America is an overwhelming challenge …”

According to the librarian in charge of the seed program,  the library can meet the state’s demands for demonstrating the purity and germination rates of its seeds with a few simple steps: “We can only have current-year seeds … and they have to be store-purchased because those seeds have gone through purity and germination rate testing. People can’t donate their own seeds because we can’t test them as required by the Seed Act. Also, when people contribute, they usually just bring a handful of seeds. The purity and germination rate tests take several hundred seeds, so we don’t even have enough to test.”

So heirloom seed libraries are just fine as long as the seeds are obtained through commercial distributors and no seeds from previous years are involved. Hmmm … If I didn’t know better, I’d think the state regulations were custom tailored to criminalize circumventing corporate agribusiness’s monopoly on the entire food chain. Purely coincidental, I’m sure.

It’s also odd what doesn’t count as one of the forms of “agricultural terrorism” the Seed Act is supposed to protect us against. For all its concerns about mislabeled seeds and cross-pollinated varietals, the Pennsylvania State Agriculture Department is remarkably unconcerned with things like, say, farmers having their heirloom crops contaminated by pollen from Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds (including the so-called “terminator gene,” designed to produce sterile offspring so farmers can’t save seed).

Worse yet, it’s unconcerned with Monstanto’s further terroristic practices, like sending out Pinkerton goons (yeah, those Pinkertons — the armed mercenaries who used to fight pitched battles against striking workers) to harass farmers whose crops are contaminated for “stealing” Monsanto’s patented genetic material. That’s like suing someone you shot for stealing your bullets. Monsanto also threatens and strongarms grocers who label milk with and without recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), on the grounds that free commercial speech is “product disparagement.”

Pennsylvania’s state government carries out actions of its own that some would regard as terroristic, like sending out (at the behalf of chain grocers) agents to set up sting and entrapment operations to shut down Amish farmers’ membership-based food buying clubs, and sending SWAT teams to terrorize sellers of raw milk.

Since their beginnings, the USDA and state departments of agriculture have heavily subsidized, and acted as the enforcement arm of, the corporate agribusiness crime syndicate, terrorizing people who presume to feed themselves without paying tribute to their corporate crime lords. If, as the late Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler said, the US Marines were the overseas strongarm operation for the big US banks, then the USDA and Pennsylvania DA are strongarm operations for Monsanto, Cargill and ADM.

In light of this record Butler presumably shocked a good many people when in 1935 — as a  second world war was looming — he wrote in the magazine Common Sense:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism [corporatism]. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

That same year he published a short book with the now-famous title War Is a Racket, for which he is best known today. Butler opened the book with these words:

War is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

He followed this by noting: “For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.”

Butler went on to describe who bears the costs of war — the men who die or return home with wrecked lives, and the taxpayers — and who profits — the companies that sell goods and services to the military. (The term military-industrial complex would not gain prominence until 1961, when Dwight Eisenhower used it in his presidential farewell address. See Nick Turse’s book The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives.)

Writing in the mid-1930s, Butler foresaw a U.S. war with Japan to protect trade with China and investments in the Philippines, and declared that it would make no sense to the average American:

We would be all stirred up to hate Japan and go to war — a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.

Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit — fortunes would be made.  Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers.  Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.…

But what does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children?

What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits?

Noting that “until 1898 [and the Spanish-American War] we didn’t own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America,” he observed that after becoming an expansionist world power, the U.S. government’s debt swelled 25 times and “we forgot George Washington’s warning about ‘entangling alliances.’ We went to war. We acquired outside territory.”

It would have been far cheaper (not to say safer) for the average American who pays the bills to stay out of foreign entanglements. For a very few this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people — who do not profit.

Butler detailed the huge profits of companies that sold goods to the government during past wars and interventions and the banks that made money handling the government’s bonds.

The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits — ah! that is another matter — twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent — the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let’s get it.

Of course, it isn’t put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and ‘we must all put our shoulders to the wheel,’ but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket — and are safely pocketed.

And who provides these returns? “We all pay them — in taxation.… But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.”

His description of conditions at veterans’ hospitals reminded me of what we’re hearing today about the dilapidated veterans’ health care system. Butler expressed his outrage at how members of the armed forces are essentially tricked into going to war — at a pitiful wage.

Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the “war to end all wars.” This was the “war to make the world safe for democracy.” No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a “glorious adventure.”

Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month.

Butler proposed ways to make war less likely. Unlike others, he had little faith in disarmament conferences and the like. Rather, he suggested three measures: (1) take the profit out of war by conscripting “capital and industry and labor” at $30 a month before soldiers are conscripted; (2) submit the question of entry into a proposed war to a vote only of “those who would be called upon to do the fighting and dying”; (3) “make certain that our military forces are truly forces for defense only.”

It’s unlikely that these measures would ever be adopted by Congress or signed by a president, and of course conscription is morally objectionable, even if the idea of drafting war profiteers has a certain appeal. But Butler’s heart was in the right place. He was aware that his program would not succeed: “I am not a fool as to believe that war is a thing of the past.”

Yet in 1936 he formalized his opposition to war in his proposed constitutional “Amendment for Peace.” It contained three provisions:

• The removal of the members of the land armed forces from within the continental limits of the United States and the Panama Canal Zone for any cause whatsoever is prohibited.
• The vessels of the United States Navy, or of the other branches of the armed service, are hereby prohibited from steaming, for any reason whatsoever except on an errand of mercy, more than five hundred miles from our coast.
• Aircraft of the Army, Navy and Marine Corps is hereby prohibited from flying, for any reason whatsoever, more than seven hundred and fifty miles beyond the coast of the United States.

He elaborated on the amendment and his philosophy of defense in an article in Woman’s Home Companion, September 1936.

It’s a cliche of course to say, “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” but on reading Butler today, who can resist thinking it? As we watch Barack Obama unilaterally and illegally reinsert the U.S. military into the Iraqi disaster it helped cause and sink deeper into the violence in Syria, we might all join in the declaration with which Butler closes his book:

TO HELL WITH WAR!

Postscript: In 1934 Butler publicly claimed he had been approached by a group of businessmen about leading half a million war veterans in a coup against President Franklin D. Roosevelt with the aim of establishing a fascist dictatorship. This is known as the “Business Plot.” A special committee set up by the U.S. House of Representatives, which heard testimony from Butler and others, reportedly issued a document containing some confirmation. The alleged plot is the subject of at least one book, The Plot to Seize the White House, and many articles.