Seed Police?

Last year, William Engdahl peaked the curiosity of inquiring minds with his text Seeds of Destruction - The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation. Can the development of patented seeds (genetically modified organisms - GMO) for most of the world’s major sustenance crops such as rice, corn, wheat, and feed grains such as soybeans ultimately be used in a horrible form of biological warfare?

The explicit aim of the eugenics lobby funded by wealthy elite families such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman and others since the 1920’s, has embodied what they termed ‘negative eugenics,’ the systematic killing off of undesired bloodlines.

Comes now Vanity Fair with an investigation of stringent, sweeping, and unsettling intimidation practices by Monsanto in the U.S.;

Most Americans know Monsanto because of what it sells to put on our lawns -- the ubiquitous weed killer Roundup. What they may not know is that the company now profoundly influences -- and one day may virtually control -- what we put on our tables. For most of its history Monsanto was a chemical giant, producing some of the most toxic substances ever created, residues from which have left us with some of the most polluted sites on earth. Yet in a little more than a decade, the company has sought to shed its polluted past and morph into something much different and more far-reaching -- an "agricultural company" dedicated to making the world "a better place for future generations."[...]For centuries—millennia—farmers have saved seeds from season to season: they planted in the spring, harvested in the fall, then reclaimed and cleaned the seeds over the winter for re-planting the next spring. Monsanto has turned this ancient practice on its head.

Monsanto developed G.M. seeds that would resist its own herbicide, Roundup, offering farmers a convenient way to spray fields with weed killer without affecting crops. Monsanto then patented the seeds. For nearly all of its history the United States Patent and Trademark Office had refused to grant patents on seeds, viewing them as life-forms with too many variables to be patented. “It’s not like describing a widget,” says Joseph Mendelson III, the legal director of the Center for Food Safety, which has tracked Monsanto’s activities in rural America for years.Indeed not. But in 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court, in a five-to-four decision, turned seeds into widgets, laying the groundwork for a handful of corporations to begin taking control of the world’s food supply. In its decision, the court extended patent law to cover “a live human-made microorganism.” In this case, the organism wasn’t even a seed. Rather, it was a Pseudomonas bacterium developed by a General Electric scientist to clean up oil spills. But the precedent was set, and Monsanto took advantage of it. Since the 1980s, Monsanto has become the world leader in genetic modification of seeds and has won 674 biotechnology patents, more than any other company, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.

From where I sit, this dot-connecting spade work does far more to bolster Engdahl's contentions than to repudiate them. Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear.

Oh, and while I was at it, I happened upon this earlier article at Greenpeace discussing Monsanto's foray into "life as intellectual property" - Monsanto files patent for new invention: the pig

The Black Desk 2.0: Welcome to the Real Face of the FBI

medium |   A new Intercept article by George Joseph and Murtaza Hussain reports on never-before-seen documents obtained from the FBI via Freedom of Information Act by the civil rights groups Color of Change and the Center for Constitutional Rights. The FOIA request for FBI files pertaining to Black Lives Matter activism was answered with a stack of heavily-redacted documents revealing evidence of police stakeouts at the homes and vehicles of activists, as well as the use of police informants, with no mention of any potential crimes suspected of the people they were monitoring.

One such document is a report provided “for coordination with Monsanto” describing a single Black Lives Matter activist’s plans to fly from New York City to Ferguson for a 2014 protest against racially motivated police brutality. The document covers the protesters’ plans to begin their demonstration at a Monsanto factory, as well as money raised for protest materials and bail money, without a single visible mention of potential crimes or violence.

“Coordination with Monsanto.” To protect them from Black Lives Matter protesters.

Welcome to the real face of the FBI.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has enjoyed an obscene resurgence in popularity among purportedly left-wing Americans lately as the current administration locks horns with them over the imperialist Russiagate psyop, but the FBI has never been the friend of anyone other than establishment power structures. The FBI does not exist to protect and serve the American people, and it certainly doesn’t exist to protect the rights of black Americans to protest the violence of an increasingly militarized police force. The FBI exists to protect Monsanto, and all the other seats of real corporatist power in the United States.

hunger - a global justice problem?

The Atlantic | A year ago I sat in a room at the Earth Institute at Columbia surrounded by executives from big food companies. One of them, I believe from Unilever, clicked to a slide that read "The solution to global hunger is to turn malnutrition into a market opportunity." The audience—global development practitioners and academics and other executives—nodded and dutifully wrote it down in their notebooks; I shuddered. The experience stayed with me and I haven't gotten over it. Last month, I had a flashback.

On a Tuesday evening I sat in a room on the 44th floor of a building in the financial district of lower Manhattan with representatives from General Mills, Monsanto, Dean Foods, Deutsche Bank, and the Rainforest Alliance. We were there to speak to institutional investors—the hedge fund managers, bankers, and others who invest in big food companies—about sustainability and food. In particular, we were there to talk about how sustainability and hunger issues may give these companies both exposure to risk and access to opportunity.

It was not your average sustainable food panel discussion. Reflecting back on it, three things jump out at me. The first was a false premise that is taken for fact. The false premise:

Both Deutsche Bank and Monsanto made it clear that they are basing their business strategy on answering a simple question: How will we feed the world in 2050, when the population reaches over 9 billion and global warming puts massive strains on our resources? The answer for Deutsche Bank: increase yields by investing in industrial agriculture in the developing world, with an emphasis on technology; put lots of capital into rural land to shift subsistence and local market agricultures to commodity export agriculture. The answer for Monsanto: increase yields by decreasing resource dependence using genetically modified crops.

At first glance, these answers make both Monsanto and Deutsche Bank look virtuous. But they rest on a false premise: "There will be over 9 billion people by 2050. We have less than 7 billion today, and people go hungry. We need to increase food production if we are going to feed them." Indeed, there will be over 9 billion people by 2050, and indeed, with less than 7 billion today, people still go hungry. But we don't need to increase crop yields to feed these people. In 2008, globally, we grew enough food to feed over 11 billion people. We grew 4,000 calories per day per person—roughly twice what people need to eat.

the agribusiness coup in paraguay: Monsanto’s latest assault on democracy

foodfirst | Curuguaty in the department of Canindeyú, Paraguay near the Brazilian border, to evict a group of peasants peacefully occupying a parcel of land. Upon arrival, another group of police snipers ambushed the officers and peasants, killing seventeen people: 6 police officers and 11 peasants, with dozens of people seriously injured.

The consequences of this baffling incident? The impeachment of the weak government of president Fernando Lugo by the right-wing controlled congress; a hard blow to the left, social movements and peasants, accused by the landed elite of instigating peasant occupations; the increased power of translational agribusiness firms like Monsanto; the continued persecution and eviction of peasants from their land; and finally, the stage set for the right’s triumphal return to power in the 2013 presidential elections.

On October 21, 2011, the Ministry of Agriculture, headed by Enzo Cardozo, illegally approved Bollgard BT cotton, a product of Monsanto, for commercial planting in Paraguay. Peasants and environmental organizations immediately protested. The cotton seed’s genetic material is crossed with the gene Bacillus thurigensis (Bt), a toxic bacterium that kills certain pests, such as the larvae of the weevil, a beetle that lays its eggs in the plant’s cocoon.

The National Service of Plant Health, Quality and Seeds (SENAVE), a government agency headed by Miguel Lovera, had not included the Bt variety in the official record of seed cultivars, since reports from the Ministries of Heath and Environment had not been submitted, as required by law.

national institute of food and agriculture

The Scientist | Historically short-shrifted by federal funding bodies, academic agricultural research was recently promised redemption: a federal funding agency of its very own that will award competitive grants in a fashion similar to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). But will the new agency, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), be able to put public-sector agricultural science on an equal footing with biomedical research?

NIFA, to be administrated by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), was modeled after the government's other large science funding agencies -- the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy, and especially the NIH. Its mission is to fund research addressing several pressing issues ranging from increasing sustainable food production to bioenergy, food safety, and global climate change while encouraging a renaissance in agricultural research at universities across the country.

Unlike university-based biomedical research, however, which in general has enjoyed robust funding in the recent past, academic agricultural research has withered under a USDA that has traditionally meted out small, non-competitive grants to land grant universities, often at the behest of US legislators trying to direct funds to their home districts or states. The result is an intellectual landscape where much of the knowledge surrounding plant science and agriculture resides not in universities but in industry, locked behind the walls of large agribusinesses.

"We're starting at a different point with NIFA than the one at which we find ourselves at NIH," said Keith Yamamoto, a University of California, San Francisco, molecular biologist who serves as an advisor to the NIH and led the agency's recent efforts to revamp its peer-review process. "The current tilt in the fundamental knowledge about plants, their growth, and development is on the industry side and I would say that it's precisely because of the lack of resources on the public side," he told The Scientist. "It's the basic, fundamental information that needs to be in the realm of the public sector."

The disparity between private and public agriculture research becomes apparent when one considers data from the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Lists of recent patent holders in technology classes related to biomedicine -- surgery, drugs, prosthesis, etc. -- are replete with universities, which typically hold patents generated by publicly-funded research. Agricultural patents from 2004-2008, however, are overwhelmingly held by large agribusinesses such as Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta. In the USPTO's "Multicellular Living Organisms and Unmodified Parts Thereof and Related Processes" technology class (which includes genetically modified organisms), six companies -- Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Monsanto Technology, Stine Seed Farm, DuPont, Syngenta, and Mertec -- were awarded a total of 255 patents in 2008, while the Regents of the University of California system, which held the most patents in that technology class out of any university or university system last year, was awarded only six. Other technology classes relating to agriculture, such as "Plant Protecting and Regulating Compositions" and "Planting," have been devoid of university-held patents over the past 4-5 years.

That balance must be corrected, experts say, and NIFA may be key. "What's been missing so long in USDA is the forcing of competitive research ideas," said Martin Apple, president of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents who has been involved with the formation of NIFA since Congress created it in the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008. "The ace in the hole at NIFA is peer-reviewed research."

the insurrection of the seeds

opendemocracy |  Don Halcomb is a 63-year-old farmer who grows corn, soybeans, wheat and barley on his 7,000-acre family farm in Adairville, Kentucky. According to a report in the New York Times he’s expecting his profits to vanish this year because crop prices are falling and seeds and fertilizer are increasingly expensive, their costs driven up by Monsanto, Dupont and other agribusiness giants.

“We’re producing our crops at a loss now,” he told the Times, “You can’t cut your costs fast enough…It’s just like any other industry that consolidates. They tell the regulators they’re cost-cutting, and then they tell their customers they have to increase pricing after the deal’s done.”

The ‘deal’ cited by Halcomb concerns Monsanto’s recent announcement that it plans to merge with Bayer, one the world’s largest producers of agricultural chemicals and biotechnology products, spiking fears that the new conglomerate will raise the cost of inputs even further. Less competition equals more room for large corporations to dictate their prices and raise their profit margins, producing a virtual monopoly on seeds which will prevent farmers from diversifying and encourage the trend towards highly-vulnerable agricultural monocultures.

It’s a fearful image that’s been exercising my imagination in recent weeks, evoking some powerful theological memories in the process. Yes, I did say ‘theological’, though perhaps ‘spiritual’ is a better word, so what’s the connection between spirituality and seeds?

GMO as a Weapon of Biowarfare?

Can the development of patented seeds (genetically modified organisms - GMO) for most of the world’s major sustenance crops such as rice, corn, wheat, and feed grains such as soybeans ultimately be used in a horrible form of biological warfare?

The explicit aim of the eugenics lobby funded by wealthy elite families such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman and others since the 1920’s, has embodied what they termed ‘negative eugenics,’ the systematic killing off of undesired bloodlines. Margaret Sanger, a rapid eugenicist, the founder of Planned Parenthood International and an intimate of the Rockefeller family, created something called The Negro Project in 1939, based in Harlem, which as she confided in a letter to a friend, was all about the fact that, as she put it, ‘we want to exterminate the Negro population.’

A small California biotech company, Epicyte, in 2001 announced the development of genetically engineered corn which contained a spermicide which made the semen of men who ate it sterile. At the time Epicyte had a joint venture agreement to spread its technology with DuPont and Syngenta, two of the sponsors of the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault. Epicyte was since acquired by a North Carolina biotech company. Astonishing to learn was that Epicyte had developed its spermicidal GMO corn with research funds from the US Department of Agriculture, the same USDA which, despite worldwide opposition, continued to finance the development of Terminator technology, now held by Monsanto.

In the 1990’s the UN’s World Health Organization launched a campaign to vaccinate millions of women in Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines between the ages of 15 and 45, allegedly against Tentanus, a sickness arising from such things as stepping on a rusty nail. The vaccine was not given to men or boys, despite the fact they are presumably equally liable to step on rusty nails as women.

Because of that curious anomaly, Comite Pro Vida de Mexico, a Roman Catholic lay organization became suspicious and had vaccine samples tested. The tests revealed that the Tetanus vaccine being spread by the WHO only to women of child-bearing age contained human Chorionic Gonadotrophin or hCG, a natural hormone which when combined with a tetanus toxoid carrier stimulated antibodies rendering a woman incapable of maintaining a pregnancy. None of the women vaccinated were told.

It later came out that the Rockefeller Foundation along with the Rockefeller’s Population Council, the World Bank (home to CGIAR), and the United States’ National Institutes of Health had been involved in a 20-year-long project begun in 1972 to develop the concealed abortion vaccine with a tetanus carrier for WHO. In addition, the Government of Norway, the host to the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault, donated $41 million to develop the special abortive Tetanus vaccine.

Is it a coincidence that these same organizations, from Norway to the Rockefeller Foundation to the World Bank are also involved in the Svalbard seed bank project? According to Prof. Francis Boyle who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 enacted by the US Congress, the Pentagon is ‘now gearing up to fight and win biological warfare’ as part of two Bush national strategy directives adopted, he notes, ‘without public knowledge and review’ in 2002. Boyle adds that in 2001-2004 alone the US Federal Government spent $14.5 billion for civilian bio-warfare-related work, a staggering sum.

Rutgers University biologist Richard Ebright estimates that over 300 scientific institutions and some 12,000 individuals in the USA today have access to pathogens suitable for biowarfare. Alone there are 497 US Government NIH grants for research into infectious diseases with biowarfare potential. Of course this is being justified under the rubric of defending against possible terror attack as so much is today.

Many of the US Government dollars spent on biowarfare research involve genetic engineering. MIT biology professor Jonathan King says that the ‘growing bio-terror programs represent a significant emerging danger to our own population.’ King adds, ‘while such programs are always called defensive, with biological weapons, defensive and offensive programs overlap almost completely.’

F. William Engdahl is the author of Seeds of Destruction, the Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation just released by Global Research. He also the author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, Pluto Press Ltd.. To contact by e-mail: info@engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

William Engdahl is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). His writings can be consulted on www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net and on Global Research.

how will we feed the world in 2050?

Video - Oliver Food Glorious Food!

Independent | The finite resources of the Earth will be be stretched as never before in the coming 40 years because of the unprecedented challenge of feeding the world in 2050, leading scientists have concluded in a report to be published next week.

Food production will have to increase by between 70 and 100 per cent, while the area of land given over to agriculture will remain static, or even decrease as a result of land degradation and climate change. Meanwhile the global population is expected to rise from 6.8 billion at present to about 9.2 billion by mid-century.

The Government-appointed advisers are expected to warn that "business as usual" in terms of food production is not an option if mass famine is to be avoided, and to refer to the need for a second "green revolution", following the one that helped to feed the extra 3 billion people who have been added to the global population over the past 50 years.

In the hard-hitting report, commissioned by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, the scientists will warn that the era of cheap food is over, and that governments around the world must prepare to follow the leads of China and Brazil by investing heavily in research and the development of new agricultural techniques and practices.

The authors of the Foresight report, Global Food and Farming Futures, will argue that to boost crop yields to the level needed to provide enough food for all by 2050 every scientific tool must be considered, including the controversial use of genetically modified (GM) crops – which have been largely rejected by British consumers.

They will suggest that the public needs to be better convinced of the benefits of GM food, and will advocate an educational campaign to improve acceptance of what they see as one of a set of innovative technologies that can contribute to and improve food security in the coming century. "We say very clearly that we should not tie our hands behind our backs by dismissing GM," said one of the report's authors.

The scientists are expected to recommend that GM technology should be shifted away from the private sector to one that is mostly funded and deployed by publicly funded bodies, in order to avoid what is seen as the stranglehold of large agribusiness companies such as Monsanto.

To combat the huge amounts of food waste – up to 40 per cent of food bought in developed countries ends up being thrown away – the scientists are also expected to recommend changes to legislation covering "sell by" dates. Relaxing these restrictions, the scientists will argue, could help to reduce the enormous amount of edible food discarded by British consumers.

They also want to see a massive injection of funds into agricultural research, to reverse the decline of public funding in recent decades as a result of successive governments viewing agriculture as low priority in times when food was cheap and plentiful.

The report's conclusions and recommendations mirror closely those of a French study published last week on how to feed the world in 2050. The report by two leading research institutes, in a project entitled Agrimonde, found that nothing short of a food revolution is needed to avoid mass famine. "A few years ago the world and Europe was producing too much food, and food was getting cheaper and cheaper. Now world agriculture lies at the heart of major worldwide challenges, and [this report] tells us why business as usual is not an option," said Patrick Caron, one of the Agrimonde authors.

Like the UK's Foresight report, the French study found there is no overwhelming obstacle to feeding a global population of 9.2 billion people, provided food yields are boosted, waste is cut both after harvesting and in the kitchen, and food distribution is improved.

However, the French study also suggested there are two possible routes to feeding the world. One involves unsustainable improvements in crop yields which do not take into account the detrimental impact on the environment, while the other is a sustainable route which will involve people in the developed world consuming less and decreasing their average food intake.

"The world can properly feed 9 billion people by 2050, but it will depend on what's on our plates and what is wasted from our plates," said Sandrine Paillard, who contributed to the Agrimonde study.

People in the developed world could decrease their food consumption – as measured by daily energy intake – by an average of 25 per cent and still have a healthy diet, she said.

ain't nobody pay $300K to hear Granny Goodness run her filthy pie hole!!!

globalresearch |  In the first phase of the 2016 Presidential election cycle, according to the New York Times, 158 wealthy donors provided half of all campaign contributions, 138 of them backing Republicans, 20 backing Democrats. No candidate can easily compete without huge amounts of money. And if you get it from small donors, as Bernie Sanders has done the most of, you’ll be largely shut out of free media coverage, and belittled in the bit of coverage you’re granted. The media coverage, the debate questions, and the topics discussed are determined by the interests of the wealthy in this national oligarchy.

Then there’s the corrupt foundation money and speaking fees flowing into the Clinton family from wealthy sources in the U.S. and abroad. While most Americans are unable to sit through a full presidential debate, Wall Street, Big Pharma, and corporate technology interests have shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars supposedly just to hear Hillary or Bill Clinton speak.

According to a new report by Consortium News, Hillary Clinton took in $11.8 million in 51 speaking fees between January 2014 to May 2015. Bill Clinton delivered 53 paid speeches to bring in $13.3 million during that same period. That’s over $25 million total, largely if not entirely from wealthy parties with a strong interest in influencing U.S. government policy.

This system of rewarding former politicians is one of the great corrupting forces in Washington, DC, but the revolving door that brings such politicians back into power makes it many times worse.

According to the Washington Post, since 1974 the Clintons have raised at least $3 billion, including at least $69 million just from the employees and PACs of banks, insurance companies, and securities and investment firms.

According to the International Business Times, the Clintons’ foundation took in money from foreign nations while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, nations such as Saudi Arabia for which she then waived restrictions on U.S. weapons sales. (Also on that list: Algeria, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar.) I brought this up on a recent television program, and one of the other guests protested that I was not, at that moment, criticizing Donald Trump. But, even if we assume Trump is the worst person on earth, what has he done that is worse than taking a bribe to supply Saudi Arabia with the weapons that have since been used to slaughter children in Yemen? And what does Trump have to do with bribery? He’s self-corrupted. He’s in the race because of the financial barrier keeping decent people out. But he hasn’t been bribed to act like a fascist.

The Wall Street Journal reports that during the same period, Bill Clinton was bringing in big speaking fees from companies, groups, and a foreign government with interests in influencing the U.S. State Department. Eight-digit donors to the Clintons’ foundations include Saudi Arabia and Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk. Seven digit donors include: Kuwait, Exxon Mobil, Friends of Saudi Arabia, James Murdoch (son of Rupert), Qatar, Boeing, Dow, Goldman Sachs, Wal-Mart and the United Arab Emirates. Those chipping in at least half a million include Bank of America, Chevron, Monsanto, Citigroup, and the Soros Foundation. And they don’t even get a speech!

why american policy sucks

La Vida Locavore | Out of curiosity I decided to see who was spending the most on lobbying in America. And Oh My Goodness - NO WONDER our policy sucks. No wonder it's nearly impossible to pass health care reform that provides all Americans with affordable care, a global warming bill that doesn't suck, and the Employee Free Choice Act. No wonder we're in these two stupid wars. I know everyone's aware of the problems lobbying poses to our country, but good lord, if people saw the sheer magnitude of it (and the comparatively paltry amounts spent in the people's interest) they would be outraged. So here goes. Here's the list of the top 100 (ranked by amount spent on lobbying in Q109). Enjoy.

I pulled up all of the reports for first quarter 2009 but over 20,000 items came up (and the report only shows the first 3000). OK, try again - all reports for over $1 million for first quarter 2009. This time a little over 100 came up (including AIG, who spent $1,250,000 on lobbying during that period).

So here's how to read this list: These are the amounts spent by the corporations listed. However, many (if not most) of these corporations ALSO contract out to private lobbying firms, so the amounts you see here MIGHT not be the total amount they spent on lobbying in Q109. For example, Monsanto spent $2,094,000 for its in house lobbying but then contracted out to Arent Fox LLP; Lesher, Russell & Barron, Inc. ($60,000); Ogilvy Government Relations ($60,000); Parven Pomper Strategies ($40,000); Sidley Austin LLP; TCH Group, LLC ($50,000); The Nickles Group, LLC ($63,000); The Washington Tax Group, LLC ($40,000); and Troutman Sanders Public Affairs Group ($30,000) - for a total of $2,437,000 in first quarter 2009.
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As long as money controls American politics, it's a plutocracy. As long as corporations have personhood, it's a government by the richest machines.

The Dominant Institution Of Our Time Was Created In The Image Of A Psychopath

tripzine |  Much of the Hermetica circulated in Latin, and the word "incorporation" appears quite notably in the lexicons and basic operations of alchemy. Its Latin root incorporatus describes a process of embodiment or giving of material form.

A typical goal in the creation of a servitor was to substantiate the proxy mechanism until the form itself became embodied and self-perpetuating, albeit under the control of the alchemist. One finds this goal reflected in a motto of Hermeticism: solve et coagula. This denotes an alchemist reaching into the ephemeral and numinous "above", then transmuting part of that essence into a substantiated form in the mundane world "below".

The synthesis here concerns how Elizabethans architected plans for building commerce based on international trade and colonization, i.e. through a globalization process...

Elizabethans employed what they understood to be the rhyme and reason of the world. They went out and created a form suitable to achieve their goal. Translating back through the centuries, our modern legal process of incorporation literally refers to the creation of a "legal person" as a fiction, serving as a proxy mechanism for its owners. Arguably, this form is created much like a servitor, applying the formula solve et coagula, giving material form to an essence. The sigil corresponds to logo and trademark, and the charter symbolizes daemonic essence.

There you have an outline for a qualitative model, submitted for your approval. [Description follows of a quantitative model, based on a "proxy mechanism" that applies attention economic theory in the four domains listed above — edited out for space.]

Political Evolution

Let's review the evolution of political system, vis-a-vis corporate governance. Elizabethan England made a bold proclamation in the name of humanism. They effectively said: "Fucke Spain & thee Catholycks. Yn the cominge yeres of Newe World Order, rules of the game changeth and none of their bloodie golde shall matter not one wit." The English reckoned that if Church and cojones were removed from the political equation, the Crown and its people could prosper. They invented corporations to implement that plan and serve the Crown. That worked remarkably well.

Americans came along and objected to corporations, wishing to empower individual sovereignty based on property rights. They reckoned that if the Crown were removed from the political equation, then representation of individuals could reign over corporations instead. Their experiment died within a few decades, and arguably the United States became the first flag of convenience.

Socialists noted problems due to corporations in both England and the US. They reckoned that if individual property rights were removed from the political equation, societies could reign over corporations instead. They attempted to organize politics to mimic the corporate structure itself, which has so far proven to be problematic.

Where do we stand now?

Humanists of all varieties have struggled to control corporations for the better part of four centuries. They failed. They lacked a fundamental understanding of the problem. Game over. Direct confrontation of the corporate form does not work, because such efforts inevitably become sublated.

To confront a corporation with any significant force, one must stop thinking like a speciesist. Following the psychological imperative from the study of autopoiesis and dissipative structures, one must contextualize the problem first. To contest a firm such as Nike or Monsanto, one must recognize that they are merely instances of a particular form. To fight the WTO, one must recognize that it is merely a temporary mechanism of that same form. To fight a particular action by a particular corporation, one must recognize that action as a well-defined reflex of the corporate form.

So, I present a media-theoretic model: the qualitative and quantitative anatomy of a transnational. Perhaps it may become useful for developing strategies and forecasts to gain advantages over corporations. I have several ways to apply this theory, but that's a topic for another article altogther...

Questions? Complaints? Suggestions?

wetikonomy

Reality Sandwich | In Part One of this article, I contemplated a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul that I call malignant egophrenia and indigenous people call wetiko which is undermining the evolutionary development of our species. Wetiko/malignant egophrenia (heretofore referred to as wetiko) is nonlocal, in that it is an inner disease of the spirit, soul and psyche that explicates itself through the canvas of the outside world. Certain people, groups of people, corporate bodies, or nation-states embody and act out this psychological malady in the world. Specific situations in the world, such as the destruction of the Amazon rainforest by myriad multi-national corporations, or Monsanto instituting terminator seeds as it tries to gain control of the production of the food supply, are real-life enactments, both literally and symbolically, of this self-destructive, inner process. Certain potent symbols in our shared waking dream are literally showing us this inner, vampiric dynamic, a stupefying process in which we get bled dry of what really counts.

Seen as a symbolic entity, the global financial system, for example, is the revelation of wetiko disease displayed graphically and schematically in its architecture, operations and overall design, so that anyone with a trained eye can discern the telltale signs and spore prints of this maleficent psycho-pathology getting down to business. The global economy (which can appropriately be referred to as the ‘wetikonomy'), displays the fear-based, linear logic of wetiko disease as it reduces everything to the bottom line of dollars and cents. We are living inside of a horrifying, abstract economic structure that itself is a living symbol and re-presentation of the out-of-control insanity of the wetiko virus. The global financial system is one of the most rapid vectors and pathways through which the virus of wetiko is going pandemic in our world.

The economy as an entity is a projection of the collective human psyche, but particularly of the "Big Wetikos," who hold a disproportionate power in crafting its operating system and in running its day-to-day operations in the world. In the wetikonomy, money has become indispensable for our biological survival, as well as our psychological well being and need for social prestige. This results in the drive for acquiring money becoming hardwired into the most primal centers of our lower, animal nature. This can generate a dependency that can easily lead to a treadmill that spirals downwards towards degeneracy, a true ‘rat race' in which we become addicted to chasing after ‘the buck,' as we increasingly worship Mammon (the God of the love of money; Interestingly, the esteemed economist John Maynard Keynes considered the love of money a form of mental illness). Our need for money becomes the ‘hook' through which the Big Wetikos, who control the supply and value of money, can ‘yank our leash' and manipulate humanity. To say it differently, the economy is engineered by a few, the "Big Wetikos," who then utilize their creation to manipulate the collective human psyche and in so doing influence and warp it in a wetiko-like way.

Using the global financial and monetary system as our case study, we can see and understand how the wetiko virus operates in the psyche and in the world, which are both interactive and co-creative reflections of each other. The invention of money was a breakthrough in human affairs, an innovation in which real wealth is allowed to be symbolically re-presented by something else. Money is a construct, something made up, which adds convenience in the trading of goods and services that have value. The wetiko-created fiat money system, however, is the doorway through which a deviant distortion in this co-operative process of exchanging value amongst ourselves emerges. The wetikonomy's fiat-currency is not backed by real value, but rather, is a system in which, as if by magic, money is created out of thin air. Having fallen through the rabbit hole, we now live in a world where money materializes simply by decree (fiat) of an elite cabal of Big Wetikos, who can exchange the tokens of value they have conjured up for the time and natural resources of everyone else. The wetiko-economy is basically a legitimized counterfeiting operation. The Big Wetikos use their military and police state ‘enforcement' resources to ensure that others cannot accumulate and circulate capital outside of their system. As if that isn't bad enough, in a further diabolic sleight of hand, this virtual fiat currency, backed by nothing real and having no intrinsic value in and of itself, is then equated with debt, thus making it worse than nothing. This total inversion of our concept of value itself is a glaring symbol in our midst primal screaming that there is something terribly amiss with our financial system. There is indeed something wrong with a virtual, bubble economy that is decoupled from the real economy and is dictated and manipulated by the few at the expense of the many.

creative chemistry controlling our food

On March 11 a new documentary was aired on French television - a documentary that Americans won’t ever see. The gigantic bio-tech corporation Monsanto is threatening to destroy the agricultural biodiversity which has served mankind for thousands of years.

Fist tap Dale.

Repackaging The Dispossessive Strategies Of Imperialism As ‘Feeding The World’

counterpunch  |  We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agrifood chain. The high-tech/data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose a certain type of agriculture and food production on the world.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also involved (documented in the recent report ‘Gates to a Global Empire‘ by Navdanya International), whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, promoting a much-heralded (but failed) ‘green revolution’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic food and new genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating the aims of the mega agrifood corporations.

Of course, those involved in this portray what they are doing as some kind of humanitarian endeavour – saving the planet with ‘climate-friendly solutions’, helping farmers or feeding the world. This is how many of them probably do genuinely regard their role inside their corporate echo chamber. But what they are really doing is repackaging the dispossessive strategies of imperialism as ‘feeding the world’.

Failed Green Revolution

Since the Green Revolution, US agribusiness and financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have sought to hook farmers and nation states on corporate seeds and proprietary inputs as well as loans to construct the type of agri infrastructure that chemical-intensive farming requires.

Monsanto-Bayer and other agribusiness concerns have since the 1990s been attempting to further consolidate their grip on global agriculture and farmers’ corporate dependency with the rollout of genetically engineered seeds, commonly known as GMOs (genetically modified organisms).

In her latest report, ‘Reclaim the Seed’, Vandana Shiva says:

“In the 1980s, the chemical corporations started to look at genetic engineering and patenting of seed as new sources of super profits. They took farmers varieties from the public gene banks, tinkered with the seed through conventional breeding or genetic engineering, and took patents.”

Shiva talks about the Green Revolution and seed colonialism and the pirating of farmers seeds and knowledge. She says that 768,576 accessions of seeds were taken from farmers in Mexico alone:

“… taking the farmers seeds that embodies their creativity and knowledge of breeding. The ‘civilising mission’ of Seed Colonisation is the declaration that farmers are ‘primitive’ and the varieties they have bred are ‘primitive’, ‘inferior’, ‘low yielding’ and have to be ‘substituted’ and ‘replaced’ with superior seeds from a superior race of breeders, so called ‘modern varieties’ and ‘improved varieties’ bred for chemicals.”

It is now clear that the Green Revolution has been a failure in terms of its devastating environmental impacts, the undermining of highly productive traditional low-input agriculture and its sound ecological footing, the displacement of rural populations and the adverse impacts on village communities, nutrition, health and regional food security.

Coronavirus Criminalization

off-guardian  |  Asymptomatic false-positive diagnosis is unforgivable, but one without testing for other common causes is even worse. Misdiagnosing what would have been death from old age or some other usual event with an asymptomatic false-positive Covid test is falsifying the cause of death and is literally criminal. Natural deaths seem no longer a thing. Bad science, shoddy medicine, central directives to certify COVID-19 where there is any doubt, and poor data gathering mean the crime is perfect.

The WHO cooks definitions of Pandemic, Adverse Events Following Immunisation (AEFIs), PCR tests and herd immunity like a criminal cartel.

Tossing a coin is far more diagnostically accurate than community Covid PCR testing on well persons. Ideally, there should have been a parallel influenza test for each Covid test. My experience of patients’ hospital discharge letters reveals not one influenza test result was recorded.

Our police, who under their own oath should police the criminal common law with our consent are now acting like the vigilantes of commerce. They enforce unnatural statutory law, regulations and guidelines. Where does that leave non-commercial, natural human interests? They tackle unmasked, healthy people as if they were undetonated bombs.

Since when did the spread of a cold or flulike illness become a crime? Since when did a well person become a potential suspect? The police never used to become involved in the politesse of a cough, fever or cold.

In 2019 it used to be a badge of honour to keep coming, sniffling into the office. Now it seems a crime against humanity. I am waiting for the first bona fide coryzal assault case, where the brain-washed magistrate will accept that the victim reasonably apprehended a harm from a defendant’s sniffle.

What material difference is there between terrorists and the actions of the WHO, Gates and our government?

Well, those three seem like mere terrorists, but not also another’s freedom fighter. Our government preach of how ‘hateful extremists exploit the pandemic,’ but there is no mention of themselves. Moreover, it is the questioning norm which is smeared as terrorists. What if the vaccines are killing more than Covid. Do we convict Drs. Whitty and Fauci for crimes against humanity?

In stark contrast to my first patient, I speak with my last patient, she is socioeconomically vulnerable.

In March 2020 she complained of a lump in her throat. Her urgent scan was cancelled due to ‘Covid measures’. In February 2021 she complained of multiple lumps in her throat and difficulty swallowing.

This is the mountain of disease concealed under the magic carpet of Covid. Coronavirus Regulations-sponsored NHS medical negligence is often grossly negligent, bordering on criminal.

The game is to keep the patient away and out of your zone of accountability. Like hands-free patient ping-pong.

One might conclude life on earth is impossible without Big Pharma. It has moulded the world in its own vision. The vaccine passport is likewise an inappropriate response. Particularly when viewed through the lens of another continuously, unpredictably mutating, elderly-targeting respiratory virus. Would anyone else find the prospect of a flu vaccine passport troubling?

It is not coincidence that Monsanto GMOs abduct the food chain, Farmer Gates pushes a Pharma lifestyle, and gene modification is both’s central pièce de résistance.

When Gates becomes America’s biggest owner of farmland one has confirmatory triangulation that Mother Nature is no longer boss. Most of us only need basic sanitation, an active life, family love and a natural diet to remain well.

There Is A Pattern Here: And Clinton - Despite Her Efforts - Only Served To Point It Out In Her Interview...,

I am insufficiently informed as to how the Russian internal economy works at this point to fully parse Hitlery's assertions.  But, even without that information it is possible to infer some things.

Resource economies are not unusual among developing nations, and Russia has had less than thirty years to date in order to redevelop and modernize its’ infrastructure. Why would anyone expect a fully industrialized economy without the financial basis upon which to build one? Perhaps those leftist economists have expected too much in the face of the kinds of sanctions regimes leveled upon them to prevent just such an economy as they are claiming he is unwilling to create? In light of the present situation, they may now be more forgiving of having invested in guns rather than butter. It is they, after all, who are possessed of hypersonic weapons that we have no defense from.

Investments of any sort are subject to a cost benefit analysis; industrialization costs money, and one might forgive them for declining what the IMF has to offer in view of what has been required of those who take them up on their loans in the past. That may have rendered full integration into the Western economy on their terms unwise in the face of the kinds of hostility that have faced them since the fall of the Soviet Union. Slower growth appears to have benefited them, and Putin appears to have tamed his oligarch problem in the process.

The Russian economy that evolved under Putin from the basket case that US shock therapy left is now sufficiently diversified to handle all of the shocks that the west has leveled upon it. That would imply that it is not being handled in such a way as to sow chaos and mine it for the benefit of oligarchs, as it was initially designed to do by Larry Summers’ Harvard boys. 

Present day Ukraine would be a perfect example of how that paradigm works out; Kolomoisky is clearly not a Putin, and it was not Russia that Bidens’, Kerrys’, Pelosi’s, Clinton’s and Romney’s kids were invested in. It sounded like Clinton was trying to make that case, but it has been her own cadre of political wrecking balls that have left the kinds of devastation which would normally result from such actions. If there is a “mean neighbor” out there trying to strip Ukraine of its’ assets, one might first look at the efforts made on behalf of Shell and Monsanto to do precisely that in 2014 rather than the Gazprom that has done yeoman’s work in stabilizing Russia’s foreign exchange.

“…just like boosting defense contractor revenues was not the primary reason for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.” 

It was a nice bonus, but Iraq, Libya, Iran and Venezuela were never in a position to eliminate the petro-dollar/reserve currency as handily as Russia presently is. Nevertheless, there appear to be a lot of bankers who have found other nations gold and foreign reserves to be irresistible. The proposed playbook WRT Russia appears to be identical. Russia has not featured the cast of characters that we routinely find pirating them away while they are common as dirt here in our own failing Monopoly board paradigm. 

The irony is that Hillary is like a broken clock in that clip.

First, one of the consistent critiques of the Putin regime by Russian leftists is that his government has spent the past twenty years or so transitioning to a so-called “semi-peripheral, resource-based” economy. That is – export lower-end goods, such as natural resources and low-processed materials, and import higher-end products. [E.g. export raw material for fertilizer, import finished fertilizer.] Then take the euro and dollar surplus thus received, and instead of investing it internally (as would have been done in the Soviet era) export it back to the West both as oligarchic wealth and as central bank deposits abroad, thus also creating a shortage of euros and dollars internally and artificially depressing the exchange rate (further inflating private fortunes – in rubles). Komolov has done multiple presentations and papers on this, and other left-wing or left-leaning economists have as well.

So in a sense, yes, the Putin regime, instead of building up the internal economy and industry, either dismantled it or let it go fallow so as to pour everything into this semi-peripheral scheme. But that was not a “failure” of policy – it was the policy, designed to benefit specific groups. Putin, thus, from the standpoint of the socio-economic elites that back him, has been an incredibly successful president. One might even call him the Russian Obama or some such, if framed in those terms.
This, incidentally, is exactly how a bourgeois republic of any kind is supposed to work, after adjusting for local nuances.

Secondly, she notes that “Putin now wants to take what Ukraine has”. Well, to be sure, when the war is finally over, or at least when the situation is stabilised, then yes, one would fully expect the oligarchs close to the government to engage in vigorous redistribution of formerly Ukrainian assets (land, port facilities, mines, whatever), not to mention in competing for fat reconstruction contracts. This was not the primary reason for going to war, of course, just like boosting defence contractor revenues was not the primary reason for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. But it is a nice bonus, and again, exactly the way imperialism (as in, highest form of capitalism) is supposed to function. Incidentally, she also very quickly elides when it comes to listing what is it exactly that Ukraine “has” that Putin “wants – because Ukraine, too, had downshifted into a peripheral-type resource-export economy over the past three decades, so essentially Russia is not getting any new industry or technology or whatnot; Russia is getting more of the same resources, plus an infusion of cheap labour, plus, of course, some security enhancements offset by countervailing nonsense happening elsewhere such as Finland wishing to join NATO.

[For fun, look up the length of the Finnish-Russian land border and then consider that this is the stretch that NATO will now have to “defend” against “Russian aggression”…]