A devastating new report from Survival International – launched on International Women’s Day, March 8 – exposes how Adivasi (Indigenous) women in India are being brutally persecuted for defending their lands against a massive corporate and governmental mining rush.
Amongst its key findings:
– This mining rush, including plans to increase coal production to one billion tonnes a year, is massively concentrated in six central states that are home to 57 million Adivasi people, who rely on their land for their livelihoods and sacred sites.
– Adivasi women are playing a central role in resisting this destruction of their land by mining, and are being beaten, arrested, raped, imprisoned and killed because of it. Their attackers almost always act with impunity.
– Government agencies, police and the security forces are intimately involved in these attempts to terrorise Adivasi women.
– Draconian anti-terrorism laws are used to silence dissent, and any who resist are falsely labelled as members of the Maoist armed insurgency. Since Narendra Modi came to power, the number of women charged with “sedition” has nearly trebled.
– Hidme Markam: At an International Women’s Day event in Chhattisgarh in 2021, Adivasi activist Hidme Markam was bundled into a vehicle and taken into custody, where she remains. Her arrest was punishment for her active, public stance on resisting the mining of a site sacred to her Koya Adivasi people. She had previously said: “Villagers who protest against the government handing over these lands to corporations are being jailed. We have lost faith in the government but will continue to fight to save our sacred lands and our forests.”
– Kuni Sikaka: a Dongria Kondh woman targeted for her role in defending her people’s sacred mountain, Kuni Sikaka was arrested and paraded in front of local media as a “surrendered insurgent.”
– Soni Sori: Adivasi activist and leader Soni Sori has been incarcerated, tortured, sexually abused and faced barrages of defamation and harassment for galvanising Adivasi women to resist the violation of their lands, rights and bodies. Soni was a teacher and activist when she was arrested as an ‘insurgent’ and imprisoned, enduring horrific torture and sexual violence in prison. On her eventual release, Soni was attacked by men who rubbed caustic paste on her face, burning and scarring her. Soni continues to fight for an end to the violation of Adivasi rights and lives.
– Madkam Hidme: Security forces dragged Madkam Hidme into the forest in front of her distraught mother. Her body was returned, beaten and wrapped in plastic, a few days later. The police claim she was ‘encountered’ in the forest, and released a photo of her in crisply ironed, spotless black overalls with a gun at her side – killed, they said, after a “fierce gun battle.”
Dr. Jo Woodman of Survival International said today: “Across central India tens of thousands of Adivasi people are defying the corporate takeover of their lands with incredible bravery. Women are at the forefront of this resistance, and are being abused, imprisoned and killed for their courage on a truly horrific scale.
“The repression they face isn’t crushing their spirit – on the contrary, resistance is growing. But there’s an urgent need for support from around the world to join Adivasi people in opposition to this illegal and immoral assault on their lands and lives.”
The post New Report Exposes Brutal Persecution of Adivasi Women Defending Their Land first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
It’s a no-brainer. Every day should be women’s appreciation day. Sure, we have these Hallmark milestones in the country – Black History Month, Native American Culture Month and now, March, Women’s History Month.
[Death toll in Bangladesh garment factory fire rises – CBS News November 25, 2012 ]
My own roots are embedded with strong independent women mentors. For my Scottish grandmother, she came over to Canada as a teen and worked all her life as a cook, nanny, hospital nutritionist. She played the stock market on low wages and set up her only child with some decent funds.
My mother was a single mother with my half-sister. She went from Vancouver — where her husband was a playboy with a gambling problem who had the “mafia” after him — to Flagstaff, then to Hermosa Beach, and then she married my father. Mona, my mom, was the central force of several military wives groups in places like Paris, France, Munich, Germany and Tucson.
My aunt Edna came from England to Massachusetts with two other women from the old country. They opened up an ice-cream shop in Northampton, and then eventually got deep into the restaurant field setting up a high end eatery called The Whale Inn.
I went there on vacations, recalling the stories of Liz Taylor and one of her husbands having a marriage reception there.
I absorbed stories of my German great grandmother Elfrieda who, as a midwife in North Dakota and Minnesota, delivered hundreds of babies. Another relative, an aunt, survived the allied bombing of Dresden with her five children. She helped an entire neighborhood live by scurrying them into an abandoned warehouse cellar she had used for potatoes and cauliflower.
The first women’s day in the USA – February 28, 1909 — occurred a year after the Manhattan garment workers’ strikes when 15,000 women marched for better wages and working conditions. Most of them were teenage girls who worked 12-hour days. Then, in 1911, in one factory, Triangle Shirtwaist Company (where female employees were paid $15 a week in sweatshop conditions: low level lighting, in tight conditions at sewing machines) 145 female workers were killed in a fire. This pushed lawmakers to finally pass legislation meant to protect factory workers through stringent safety measures.
[Triangle Factory Fire Photograph by Granger]
Fast-forward to today: I’m teaching a memoir writing class at OCCC-Waldport with mostly women in attendance. Memoirs are different than autobiographies, and this publishing arena is now greatly populated by women memoirists. All three “textbooks” I use in the class were written by women. Additionally, Mary Karr’s The Liars Club, and Cheryl Strayed’s, Wild, are two memoirs we reference.
Time and time again, memoir writing classes I’ve facilitated in Texas, Washington and here have been predominately attended by women who for all intents and purposes are the keepers of the family history.
Throughout my career as educator and journalist, I have seen more and more women take the lead in many fields. One magazine article I published focused on the graduating class at Washington State University’s veterinarian sciences program. All those DVM graduates were women.
The dean of the school stated there is an active recruiting campaign to get “more men into the field.” Imagine that, women undertaking vet sciences, which in 1950 was almost exclusively a male-dominated field.
The reasons for the shift in gender representation are complicated, but one truism stands: Veterinarian sciences is largely a pet field, one where communication with pet owners is vital. It is a field where the patient is actually the human. From field, to barn, to yard, to house, to bed – that’s the shift in the veterinarian field, as illustrated by our dogs and cats.
It begs the question: Are men as empathetic and responsive to the patient’s owner’s psychological and spiritual needs as women?
One of my areas of study, marine sciences, has seen a break in the male domination to sometimes a 50-50 representation of women in some grad programs.
But there are still rough waters: In 2019, on World Oceans Day, the theme was “gender and the ocean.” According to Robin Nelson, a biological anthropologist at Santa Clara:
We frame science as this idea that folks with the best ideas, folks who are willing to work hard, are those who are going to succeed. But absent safeguards protecting vulnerable scientists, she said, those folks who could be super talented, wonderful scientists get pushed out of our fields.
Peter Girguis, an oceanographer at Harvard University, echoes this:
In the absence of gender equality, we’re doing mediocre science.
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter proclaimed “Women’s History Week” in March to coincide with International Women’s Day. Seven years later, Congress declared all of March to be “Women’s History Month.”
There are problems with “a month,” as Kimberly A. Hamlin, an associate professor of history at Miami University in Ohio and author of Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener, states:
But Women’s History Month unintentionally reinforces the prevailing idea that when women do something, it is called ‘women’s history,’ and when men do something it is called ‘history.’ Women’s History Month also allows state school boards and curricular committees to feel as though they are including women without doing enough to update textbooks and state standards, ultimately undermining the very goals that reformers and historians aimed to achieve with the designation.
I clearly remember when I was the only “guy” in the women’s literature class I took at the University of Arizona where I eventually received a BA and BS. I learned so much about women in history, not just female writers.
We are talking 102 years ago when the 19th amendment granted some women the right to vote (a number of other laws prohibited Native American women, Black women, Asian American women, and Latinx women from voting, among others).
In that lit class, I learned a bit of historical misstatement: What was deemed the first expedition to sail around the globe on a voyage to study and sample the world’s oceans occurred in 1872. Of the 243 people on board the Challenger, not one was a woman.
However, it wasn’t the first. Nearly a century before the Challenger voyage, a woman — Jeanne Baret — sailed around the world on a scientific expedition of her own. She disguised herself as a male assistant on a 1766 voyage led by a French explorer to document plants and ecosystems in distant countries. Baret is the first woman on record to have circumnavigated the globe.
“7 Countries With Horrific Sweatshop Situations”
+–+
To continue with the piece above, which will be in the local rag, out here in Lincoln Co, Oregon (Central Coast — Newport News Times), I have to put in some work of a feminist and radical, Linda Ford:
Elizabeth McAlister, in jail since April, remains steadfast, modest and unassuming. She hesitates to give interviews. She did write after her arrest about why she resists the Empire’s weapons: ‘We came to Kings Bay Submarine Base animated by the absurd conviction that we could make some impact on slowing if not ending, the mad rush to the devastation of our magnificent planet.’
Such sentiments, such absurd convictions, that anyone can interfere in the Empire’s global destruction, have to be punished. Such female dissenters have to be jailed and silenced. There should be no more silence surrounding America’s women politicals. Whether considered terrorist threats because, like Aafia Siddiqui, they are part of a group deemed an enemy race; or considered terrorist threats because, like Elizabeth McAlister, they resist and expose America’s global domination—such women will be made political prisoners of the Empire.
— “Women Politicals of the American Empire” by Linda Ford (DV)
“In The Eye of the Beholder: USA History of Imprisoning Women Politicals” (DV) Part One of review and discussion of Linda G. Ford’s Women Politicals in America: Jailed Dissenters from Mother Jones to Lynne Stewart
and
“Long Live the Armed Struggle!” (DV) Part Two of book review, and … The Revolution Will Not Be Televised or plugged onto Twitter, or in the Streets with Your Placards, or Sending in ‘Save the Whale’ Postcards
I was born a protester … My mother had to go to the school a lot and talk to the principal.
— Dorli Rainey (In conversation with author Paul Haeder)
I am being jailed because I have advocated change for equality, justice, and peace. … I stand where thousands of abolitionists, escaped slaves, workers and political activists have stood for demanding justice, for refusing to either quietly bear the biting lash of domination or to stand by silently as others bear the same lash.
— Marilyn Buck, at her 1990 sentencing (epigram in Linda Ford’s book, Women Politicals in America: Jailed Dissenters from Mother Jones to Lynne Stewart)
*Quote from, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. In Spokane, WA, 19 years old. She went to lumber camps in Montana and Washington, speaking at IWW meetings. She stated she fell in love with her country.
+–+
This is not a blanket endorsement of all women, all of those of the female persuasion not having baby blood on their hands. In capitalism, the male dominated death machine is easily transferred to the other sex.
[ Women in Defense, a career development and networking organization affiliated with the National Defense Industrial Association, a leading industry group. ]
Offensive-polluting-skin peeling-depleted uranium fed-bunker busting-napalm spreading-TNT concussions Industries, described by the misnomer as Defense Industries (Edward Bernays would be smiling), they have garnered the woke label with their CEOs in pant suits and skirts: Definitely do not ask these women over to babysit — that is, if the baby is not blue-eyed, blond, white or of the red-white-and-blue variety.
As of Jan. 1, the CEOs of four of the nation’s five biggest defense contractors — Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defense arm of Boeing — are now women. And across the negotiating table, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer and the chief overseer of the nation’s nuclear stockpile now join other women in some of the most influential national security posts, such as the nation’s top arms control negotiator and the secretary of the Air Force. (How Women Took Over the Killing Machine, AKA, MIC!)
It’s a watershed for what has always been a male-dominated bastion, the culmination of decades of women entering science and engineering fields and knocking down barriers as government agencies and the private sector increasingly weigh merit over machismo.
And, as Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson told POLITICO, it’s also the result of “quieting that little voice in your head that doubts whether you can do that next job or take on that special assignment.”
But turn yourself blue trying to convince the Norte Americanos that war is bad, that when Nazi’s get supported by the USA in places like, err, Ukraine, that THAT in itself is really that region’s issue, and that missiles and guidance systems and bioweapons and cluster bombs, the lot of it, guided by these hailed women above, well, they do the bloody work the same, whether the CEO is male or female. Though, I have to say, all this macho stuff pushed down the Marvel Comic Book bred Norte Americanos, for decades, you know, the Charlie’s Angels jujutsu and now the Black Double Oh Seven, it has done the job of convincing redneck women that their role in this game is to, well, kill babies descriminately and indescriminately.
Because they are baby killers!
Yet, feminists should not view this “rise” of women as a win. Feminism, as the most recent wave of imperial-feminist articles shows, is increasingly being co-opted to promote and sell the U.S. military-industrial complex: a profoundly violent institution that will never bring liberation to women — whether they are within its own ranks or in the countries bearing the greatest brunt of its brutality. As Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney and assistant professor at George Mason University, put it in an interview with In These Times, women’s inclusion in U.S. military institutions “makes the system subjugating us stronger and more difficult to fight. Our historical exclusion makes it [appear] desirable to achieve [inclusion] but that’s a lack of imagination. Our historical exclusion should push us to imagine a better system and another world that’s possible.” — (“Against the Feminist-Washing of US Militarism“)
Here, the real heroes, a la women:
[Global Witness report points out that women who act as social leaders are the main victims of murder for carrying out their work. / Photo: Global Witness NGO ]
Finally, put a dress on this person. A little bit of eyeliner. High heels. Hmm, replace one criminal, a male, with a female criminal, and we still have criminalty:
“Exclusive: The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed
How US military spending keeps rising even as the Pentagon flunks its audit.”
“Holding U.S. Treasurys? Beware: Uncle Sam Can’t Account For $21 Trillion.”
Or not:
Meet the first female 3-star general in the US military]
The post Women’s History Month is About the Human Race first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
This is a little soft-shoe pissed off blathering from me, so apologies up front. No big news on the Ukraine Invasion front, or the Gates Owning All the Farms front, or the Climate-Wall Street-Chronic Illness front. Nothing related to the MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Congressional-MEDIA-Academia-Think-Tank) front. Just plain old burnt toast and spilled milk from a radical who has to still be in the job market at the tender age of 65.
Never in my imagination, just five years ago even, would I have figured I’d be here, that is, stuck in the USA, blessed to be in a relationship (it’s good, but again, people in my life do need me somewhat sane to handle varying degrees of their own trauma), and pigeon-holed as a malcontent who is also unemployable.
The fact that people in the fields I venture into are less than middling, and the fact that lives hang in the balance tied to vax mandates, and forced boosters, and proof of mRNA life (I hear people, through the fog of the propaganda madmen, that mRNA a la Pfizer and Moderna, is better than the J & J, Janssen, which is not the same vax, but is now being discontinued. Imagine, J & J was a single dose experimental jab, but the Mengele actors in the CDC and Big Pharma move the goal posts daily so J & J single dose, has to be seconded to be a full-vax record — after a five month lapse between the two. However, the J & J is cancelled, no more manufacturing, so anyone trying to stay away from mRNA now, after their one shot of J & J has to submit to a completely different platform for this SARS-CoV2 mass experimentation game).
These are experimental. The blasphemy is, a, forced vaccinations on everyone, no discussion about the alternatives, or the safety; then, forcing these on youth, age six months; then, the lack of choice of all the vaxxes around the world, including China’s and Cuba’s; then, complete liability for death and injury for the big Pharma thugs; then, of course, we, the taxpayer foot the bill for R & D, for the salaries of these thieves, and then we buy the vials, and when they are contaminated, or when they expire, we end up watching 30 million doses down the drain, and then we, the taxpayer, foot the bill for the replacements. Money and more money, that is the planne pandemic.
Pre-Planned Demic — forced vaccinations for college students, and then, how many for kids going to kindergarten, K12, have to be vaxxxed? Then, the HPV, and I have written about that here —
“My Fate as a Social Worker Sealed by a Vaccine named Gardasil”
“Death by a Thousand Cuts: When the Cures of Big Pharma are Worse than the Diseases”
I got screwed, blued and tatooed by the powers that be. Big Pharma, Planned Parenthood and the nonprofit industrial complex. Try that out for size!
So, what is in the discontinued Johnson & Johnson (J&J)/Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine?
Ingredients:
The J&J/Janssen COVID-19 vaccine contains a piece of a modified virus that is not the virus that causes COVID-19. This modified virus is called the vector virus. The vector virus cannot reproduce itself, so it cannot cause COVID-19. This vector virus gives instructions to cells in the body to create an immune response. This response helps protect you from getting sick with COVID-19 in the future. After the body produces an immune response, it gets rid of all of the vaccine ingredients just as it would discard any information that cells no longer need. This process is a part of normal body functioning.
Full list of ingredients: The J&J/Janssen COVID-19 vaccine contains the following ingredients:
A harmless version of a virus unrelated to the COVID-19 virus: Recombinant, replication-incompetent Ad26 vector, encoding a stabilized variant of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike (S) protein. Provides instructions the body uses to build a harmless piece of a protein from the virus that causes COVID-19. This protein causes an immune response that helps protect the body from getting sick with COVID-19 in the future.
Sugars, salts, acid, and acid stabilizer:
- Polysorbate-80
- 2-hydroxypropyl-β-cyclodextrin
- Trisodium citrate dihydrate
- Sodium chloride (basic table salt)
- Citric acid monohydrate (closely related to lemon juice)
- Ethanol (a type of alcohol)
These work together to help keep the vaccine molecules stable while the vaccine is manufactured, shipped, and stored until it is ready to be given to a vaccine recipient.
Alas, I teach a class at the community college here, OCCC. One student asked first day of class who was vaccinated and boosted. I massaged that into, “Well, we have to wear masks, per college requirements, but there is not vax mandate. Best we not ask people personal questions about their health issues and decisions.”
My marching orders were that if I asked once and then twice for a student to mask, and if they refused, the course would be cancelled.
That is the absurdity of this entire dress rehersal for bigger and more systematic totalitarian methods of control. The mob, the bandwagon, the transfer of Fauci’s credentials to infer credibility. Pissing matches now on which vax and booster you get.
I do not know if many DV readers get the totality of this Western Mentality for Ordering People Around at work, school, in public, everywhere. Again, pre-SARS-CoV2, and conccurently — people I have gotten jobs for are working 14 hour shifts, in sub-freezing warehouses, moving frozen goods/foods along frozen floors with forklifts sliding all over the place. Imagine, coming home and still five hours after the shift frozen fingers and core temperature still not normal. Forced drug screening, forced background checks, forced credit checks, checks on prior evictions, driving record checks, physicals, all medications listed, reference checks, in-case-of-emergency references, and more, including being paid every two weeks, on a fucking Visa card.
Toil, weathering, mean as cuss bosses and supervisors, repetitive deadening work. No talking on the job. Keep those headphones and ear buds off. I’ve challenged the honchos driving up in Mercedes and Teslas how the hell do they look at themselves in the mirror at night or in the morning without seeing a monster of exploitation. Big jacked up $60,000 pickups while my clients have to take rotten and rotting public buses, many lines of which stop a mile or two away from the facility.
Work, baby, the great resignation, sure. But, here we are now — who owns us? How do we put that roof over our heads and that john in the corner and kitchen next to the bed?
“America’s Largest Landlord Just Got Bigger: Blackstone Buys 17,000 Houses For $6 Billion” by Tyler Durden
Wall Street won’t rest until it become the biggest – and perhaps only – landlord in the US.
At least that’s the impression one gets by observing the behavior of the two Wall Street “black” giants, Blackrock and Blackstone. As a reminder, the WSJ sparked widespread outrage recently when it exposed what most industry insiders had known for a long time, namely that Blackrock (and other institutional investors) have been ravenously gobbling up US real estate. Now it’s Blackstone’s turn.
On Tuesday, the WSJ reported that Blackstone – which already is not only America’s largest landlord but also the world’s largest real estate company with a $325 billion portfolio – has agreed to buy single-family rental company Home Partners of America for $6 billion, betting the demand for suburban housing will stay hot even as the pandemic eases. Home Partners owns more than 17,000 houses in the United States; the company buys, rents out and eventually offers its tenants a chance to buy them. Now all those functions will be done by the largest US private equity firm.
And so, I, like millions, are at the whim of the followers, the sheeple, for sure, and we play their game, and STILL, we can’t be in their sandboxes. All those state and city and county and even nonprofit jobs tied to state, city, county contracts (grants) I apply for caveat the application in big bold notations — Upon hire, the candidate must submit proof of full Covid-19 vaccination. That means, of course, those agencies have the power to go straight to CDC/STATE records of the shot sheet. Not a paper copy of the CDC shot record, but the proof has had to be recorded into the data field; i.e. computer.
I was going to cross that bridge if and when I got any sense of being offered a job, but, alas, there are not job offers for schmucks like me. That is, of course, the lamentation here. But as always, I attempt to make my little Paul’s World tie into a larger frame, some universal set of lessons.
- age
- gender
- politics
- over-educated
- too many different jobs over time
- moving too many times
- too confident
- too willing to discussion many aspects of the job in the Q & A
- too much on the internet, easily searchable vis Google
- blacklisted through checking off, “no, it is not okay to contact previous employer”
- more
There are so many reasons why “they” don’t hire folks like “me.” Strike up the ageism and sexism band, for sure. I am 65, a male, and the jobs I am attempting to get are in the social services/education/editing/writing arena.
Educational navigator, state and county jobs, even city jobs. The writing is on the wall, in a rural county, and, when I do get interviews, it’s four to six women on Zoom. I’ve had 12 people in a room for one job interview I actually drove 40 miles to attend in person. I was asked to apply by the ED. Very good back and forth, and they liked me, thought I was smart, a fit, but not a perfect fit. The rejection letter from the Executive Director was all complimentary. But, again, here I am, on the job market. Many times an interview is couched with “we are a tight-knit family, a very close team so how do you think you’d be part of that?”
I’ve had to ask several time, at the end of interviews when they ask me if I have questions, what ways do the people on the team work with people like me, an obvious outsider, to be part of a team that they call family? Really, what makes it easy for a male with education to fit into a tight knit team, which from the outside seems like a clique?
I am a great interview, and I am able to put on many faces, in addition to bringing up interesting connections to my long work experience and my education to each respective job I’ve applied for.
And, that small-knit female group is not wanting to have an outsider, someone who doesn’t look like them. These people, to be blunt, are seated inside a nanny mentality, and drawn into paperwork world while following procedures to the letter. They are not giving and creative souls, not in any real sense. Also, they seem to be pretty one-dimensional. I get through the screening, then the interview, then the email a week or weeks later, which is a form letter, that states in mealy mouthed terms, I was rejected:
PAUL — Thank you for interviewing for the position of Permanency Workers (Social Services Specialist 1) Newport . Although you have not been selected for the position, we enjoyed learning about your background and experience in greater detail.
Again, thank you for your time and interest. We encourage you to apply for other opportunities in the future.
Thank you.”
Yep, my mother told me I should have continued at the U of Arizona and got the medical degree. Even a law degree. That was way back when, at 19 years of age and having the gift of gab, the gift of testing to a high level, above 89 or 90. Gifts . . . now, at 65, feeling, well, embarassed that, a, I have to look for work with no retirement, in this shit hole country, and in any shit hole state (you name it). Democratic or Republican governor, the scum rises to the top. With so much scum below them. And, b, I am pissed off and in this predictament. And, c, that I even feel this way — useless, a throw-away, disposable, nothing (I don’t feel these for many minutes in a day, but still, feeling this shit is like hot lead down one’s gullet).
One of the questions from the above committee of three was around “Many people perceive the CPS (child protective services) has having a lot of power. Rightly or wrongly, how would you deal with this perception?”
Well, of course, I know a few things or two about CPS and foster care and removing children from families. And, I thought I could give the CPS a bit of perspective, AND, while the gender police want to top load professions that are traditionally not full of women with women, you would think those female-filled social services centers would want a few wise males in their ranks.
That’s just hopeful thinking. Well, here, from an old article, Atlantic, from a CPS worker:
It seems there is always some sort of story in the media regarding one form of child abuse or neglect or another. Recently, I came across two such stories, one about a working mother who allowed her 9-year-old daughter to play unsupervised at a playground near her work and was subsequently arrested and her daughter put into foster care; and another, actually, about the mass shut-off of water services in an underprivileged Detroit neighborhood which brought up the fact that many don’t complain about the issue due to fears of having their children immediately removed from their homes as lack of water service is, allegedly, grounds for this in the city. These stories always hit home for me. Besides being a parent, I previously worked for Children’s Protective Services in Ohio.
Opinions usually fell into one of two predictable camps: as a CPS worker you were either accused of doing too little to protect the children involved, or of being too invasive, at best another mindless bureaucrat and at worst a power-happy sadist that got off on telling others how to raise their kids. In truth, both are often correct. I’ve seen them personally. And it’s a problem. Most workers, however, fall somewhere along the wide spectrum in between, and where they fall will be influenced more by their local inter-and-intra-agency culture than any statute.
Thinking of the mother of the 9-year-old, I realize I am not privy to the details of the case. I understand there is a lot I don’t know. Things like, does this mom have a history of abusing or neglecting this child or other children? Did the child have any special needs that made her especially vulnerable to being unsupervised? Did the child have any other signs of abuse like severe bruising or physical injuries, or of neglect such as obvious malnutrition or chronic head lice, or any other incalculable number of things? These would no doubt make a huge impact on my opinion of the situation, but as it stands what I read is this: a 9-year-old girl was left with a cellular phone at a playground near her mother’s workplace with adequate shade and access to water. Upon learning that her mother was not present, an adult called the police. So far, I vilify neither the caller for calling nor the police for responding. It is what happens next that I strongly question.
Apparently, the best answer to this case was to remove the child from her mother’s custody, put her in foster care, and arrest the mother. I’ll be blunt: this is insane.
Well, of course, I handled ALL the questions well, but then, the rejection. All those rejections. All those terrible people lifted through the prostitution called politics of bureaucracies. There are so many mean, dog-eat-dog, I-got-mine-too-bad-you-don’t-got-yours fucking Americanos. Yankee or Stars and Bars, most are cut from the same shit-hole Mayflower cloth. There are some mean folks I have met in Child Protective Services. In Portland, in Seattle, in Spokane, in El Paso!
This is the shape of things to come, for many of us, who are self-avowed radicals, willing to say and write and publish things that are definitely outside the bold lines of the center fold of American meanness. American group think. American belonging in the bandwagon. Infantalized. Disneyfied. Now, get stuck in a rural arena, with few opportunities, and this is the weekly routine —
- change up the resume
- write a new cover letter
- do an on-line application
- sometimes complete these timed tests, many of which are psycho personality tests — sick stuff
- attest at the end of the application, before hitting submit, that all stuff is truthful, and that they, the prospective employer, has the right to go back into all manner of work and legal and living history
And it is almost impossible during this process, and while consuming corporate, commercial, un-News news, to not get jaded, cynical, pissed off and, well, dejected. Since all the stories are about the beautiful people, the celebrities, all the crap around thespian stars and sports stars. All the felonies committed by politicians, corporate heads, even those in positions of state-county-city government.
There are so many undeserving folk in positions of big and minimal power. Yep, we know that. And to hear any manner of these people who get quoted or get the limelight for me is to hear monsters who have zero idea how the 80 percent live.
Nepotism, favoritism, cancelling, xenophobia, bandwagoning, credentialism, and other -isms rule the day. Then, to see folks circling their wagons interviewing me only because they may be checking off something on their diversity list — “get a white old male in the mix to look like we are diversity mavens” — to have at least three people in the pool. I have had my application stopped because not enought applicants hit the pool. Imagine that.
Then, there’s this blasphemy — more and more staffing firms, the bane of humanity, controlling the hiring process. That culprit, Indeed, has gotten into staffing. LinkedIn? All of them, rotten to the core, and many jobs are now conduited through those chosen people’s job screening-prepping-hiring headhunter systems that are all relying upon algorithms and Salesforce techniques:
Contracting is Worker Exploitation — (source). I have written about this in the past. Broken records abound:
Staffing agencies perpetuate this ugly cycle because they make a hefty profit exploiting contractors. Staffing agency recruiters will lie about the length of the contract and specific requirements, they’ll alter resumes without your knowledge, and make little to no effort to find another assignment once a contract ends. Some of these staffing agencies are so unprofessional, they’ve sent me emails meant for other people they’re trying to recruit. Staffing agencies are the worst. They don’t disclose how much they charge a company for a contractor’s services to maximize their profits. For example, for one of my recent contracting gigs, the company paid the staffing agency $60 an hour. I received $40 an hour while the staffing agency received $20 an hour for every hour of my work. The staffing agency received $800 a week for doing practically nothing, while I did all the work. These are the risks of contracting work, but it doesn’t make it right or ethical.
+–+
“This Is One of the Most Important Legal Battles for Labor in Decades” (In These Times)
Over the last few decades, a growing number of American workers have effectively lost many of their labor rights because of the way their bosses structure the employment relationship. These workers are contractors who are hired by one company but work for another: the Hyatt Hotel housekeepers who actually work for Hospitality Staffing Solutions, the Microsoft tech workers who actually work for a temp agency called Lionbridge Technologies, and the Amazon warehouse workers who actually work for Integrity Staffing Solutions. These workers often perform the same work at the same place as other workers, frequently on a permanent basis.
But because their employers have entered into complicated contracts with each other, these workers have been unable to exercise their labor rights. If the workers can only bargain with the staffing company and not the lead company where they actually work, they are negotiating with the party that often has no power to change the terms of their employment. For that reason, workers have fought for a more inclusive definition under the National Labor Relations Act of what constitutes an employer — and when two employers are joint employers.
Here, in my neck of the woods, the Lincoln County School District, again, sell outs at the top, and the bizarre superintendent and her VPs and thug principals in league with her meglamania, the District gives shit about workers:
Educational Staffing Solutions (New Jersey, Tennessee) is a staffing firm specializing in placing highly qualified staff in daily, long-term, and permanent K-12 school district positions, including paraprofessionals, substitute teachers, and other support staff. The company innovates education staffing to provide dynamic solutions to schools and professional opportunities to passionate educators. ESS provides its employees with the ability to work for schools across the country and competitive training, flexible work schedules, and professional development. The company’s partner schools receive personalized solutions, hands-on management, technology, and program reporting and analytics. ESS was founded in 2000, and its headquarter is located in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, United States. The firm’s expert professionals serve more than 3 million students with a pool of 60,000 substitute and permanent employees throughout the United States. ESS provides healthcare benefits and other perks to its employees.
So these schools, public schools, have sold out their food services to profiteers (Sodexo, et al), given up cleaning to the janitorial profiteers (Sodexo; Bon Apetite), contracted out the buses (Student First, et al), and their hiring of staff, teachers, administrators, too, sold out to the profit gougers. Staffing firms and those all-American welfare cheats who look, sound, smell like, well, good people. This is what the average person has to confront.
A national labor phenomenon known as “The Great Resignation,” or “The Big Quit,” began to take hold in January 2021 and has since grown. Millions of workers in the United States have turned the turmoil caused by the coronavirus pandemic into opportunities to rethink their professions and reframe their lives.
The trend is especially pronounced in the accommodation and food services sector, which experienced more than 5 percent worker attrition each month from June to October of last year.
Online, people flooded a Reddit forum called “r/antiwork” for commiseration and solidarity; by year’s end, the page had reached 1.5 million members. In the streets, thousands of unionized workers in manufacturing, health care, and higher education went on strike last fall for fair pay and protections. (source)
So, with two master’s degrees, and three dozen years teaching, and some of that including substituting K12 in Washington and Texas, I have to face jobs where $14.89 an hour, no benefits, on-call, at will, are the options. But add to this paltry pay: a substitute teacher needs to pay a fee to get a substitute certification, which is $350 in Oregon. I even had to take a civics test, here in Oregon, a test that was so fucking easy that, well, another fee to pay in order to get a shitty $14.89 an hour.
Here, some of my work with students, K12:
“Professor Pablo and Fourth Grade Enlightenment in Lincoln City“
And, then, being banned from teaching, another story, here at DV —
“Take Down this Blog, or Else!” — No job interview, no job offer, targeting by city, county, state honchos, watched by the pigs, shadowed by all the sub humans
You will not hear VP Harris or Jill Biden talking about this blasphemy, or Henry Giroux or Chris Hedges writing about this stuff. Believe you me, this is below them, to be blunt. I am part of a legion of older folk caught in several levels or circles of THEIR hell: the arbitrators, the people in high and mid office, making some of the worst decisions ever. We are at the whim of lock-step fearful folk. We are at the beck and call of the most uncreative people on earth. I have seen the antithesis of education, of journalism, of social work, of college teaching in my many decades of wandering the planet as a writer who should have gone the route of med school or law.
I’m sixty-five and really part of the growing throw-away contingency of millions in this Western Culture who are just the flesh and blood (and data mines) in a pipeline for more rich and super rich and almost rich people to take their pound of flesh — fees, penalties, late charges, triple taxation, tickets, surcharges, foreclosures, evictions, repossessions, code infractions, add-ons.
Oh, cry for me, United Snakes of America. Evictions, uh? They — the landlords, the BlackRocks, the BlackStones, the Banks and the Insurance and the Real Estate monsters, they are the Stinkin’ Badges!
I’ve written about this before, so again, broken DVD/record:
Never forget who we are:
In 2019, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren blasted Blackstone for “shamelessly” profiting from the U.S. foreclosure crisis, arguing that Wall Street’s investment in single-family homes was a “huge loss for America’s renters.” (source)
Never mind, though, old Elizabeth states she is through and through a capitalist. Haha, rhetoric, yakking, and not a fucking thing is done. Huge loss for America’s renters? This is life and death, again, these people at the top are clueless, intentionally, or just because they do not know what it is to be us.
But then, forgetting is in the water:
And, you can’t get Whoopied when you got no millions:
Unemployment, on the dole, on the fiddle, under the table, riff-raff, deplorable, welfare king, trash, undesirable, vermin, dreg of society, scum, outcast — terms thrown at me and my people. Hell, just look at the Chosen People’s movie channels — all those narratives, those Hulu and Netflix and Amazon series and movie crap, how they depict (they never really depict real struggle) us commoners, those of us who still have a few good years left to be “contributors,” but for many reasons, will never get the third, fourth, tenth chance. Watch closely how they depict the working class. Take notes. We are dregs, man. Broken, mean, thieves, fornicators, dumb, and deplorables.
Remote Area Medical? Shit, we are an underperforming country, intentional, vis-a-vis the corporate whores, the lot of them:
Scale this shit up. Dental clinics, care homes, medical clinics. Free, of course. Reroute that Biden-Trump-Bush-Obama-Clinton war money to what we need: Stan Brock, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom:
A debate over healthcare has been raging nationwide, but what’s been lost in the discussion are the American citizens who live day after day, year after year without solutions for their most basic needs. Remote Area Medical documents the annual three-day “pop-up” medical clinic organized by the non-profit Remote Area Medical (RAM) in Bristol, Tennessee’s NASCAR speedway. Instead of a film about policy, Remote Area Medical is a film about people, about a proud Appalachian community banding together to try and provide some relief for friends and neighbors who are simply out of options.
Fucking amazing Stan Brock — they don’t make people like him anymore!
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Russians are coming! So says the Australian mainstream media.
To be honest, I don’t know what the Murdoch press is saying as my equilibrium depends on my not reading it. The other major media chain, Nine Entertainment, is in full neo-Cold War mode.
Nine Entertainment, as its name implies, has been best known for televising sport. In 2018 it took over Fairfax Media. A family media dynasty was established when John Fairfax bought the Sydney Herald in 1841. When Nine bought Fairfax it acquired the sole ‘serious’ papers of Australia’s largest cities, the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) and the Melbourne Age, the national Australian Financial Review and the national capital’s Canberra Times. This was some haul with respect to the potential to influence public and policy-making opinion.
Fairfax’ finest hour was when it published the hard-hitting weekly National Times, from 1971 to 1986, that period mostly under the benign chairmanship of patrician James Fairfax. Chaos then ensued, then corporatisation. The loss of classified advertising revenue and the slow take-up of digital media by the then CEO with no media nous led to long term cost-cutting and significant retrenchment of seasoned journalists. The distinct character of the Age was abolished. A proud but reduced staff saw the cynical selloff in 2018 by the then CEO and complicit Board.
The Fairfax/Nine masthead is ‘Independent. Always.’. A loyal old-timer claims that this latter-day label was devised as a marketing ploy. These days it’s a joke, yet with no embarrassment shown by editorial and management.
Fairfax/Nine still has good and committed journalists. But its World coverage? A shocker. Straight down the line Atlanticist bilge. Fairfax/Nine retains correspondents in Washington DC and London and they faithfully toe ‘the correct line’.
The DC correspondent, Matthew Knott, lived through the Trump Presidency, implicitly decried it, but didn’t look behind it or see the continuities. Once Trump goes, we’ll be back to truth and beauty. Knott readily bought into the Russiagate myth. Knott reminisces in December 2021 upon returning to Australia. Nice guy but … Remarkably, comments on the latter article indicate that some readers valued his reportage.
These correspondents seem universally jejune, read nothing out of the square, seemingly no history whatsoever. In the tough days of the (first) Cold War, establishment-linked journalists (aka the Australian Denis Warner) knew what role they played, whereas their successors are babes in the woods.
The recent London-based journalists (Nick Miller, Bevan Shields, Latika Bourke) have been perennially abject. Thus we have them toeing the line on Putin’s ‘bullying’ (5.9.14), Russian interference in the West’s appropriate dismantling of Syria (16.4.18), Russiagate (17.7.18), the Browder/Magnitsky steam train (23.3.18, 1.12.18), the downing of MH17 (20.10.14, 3.6.15, 24.5.18, 8.3.20, 10.3.20, 11.3.20, 1.9.20, 10.9.21), the Skripal novichok ‘poisonings’ (8.3.18, 16.4.18, 10.10.18, 3.9.20, 5.2.21), the Navalny circus (3.9.20, 28.1.21, 5.2.21), and Russia’s ‘imminent invasion’ of Ukraine (29.1.22).
Their reporting of British politics itself has been lamentable (Corbyn was a bogey). They misrepresent key details on the Julian Assange affair (20.11.19, 23.9.20), have ignored the long background, not least Sweden’s political complicity and Britain’s profound judicial complicity, and have generally remained indifferent to his torture and to the monumental significance of the Assange trial to journalistic integrity.
However, Fairfax/Nine’s DC and London correspondents are padding for the main game. The main dish for its readers is the reprinting of articles from American and English mainstream media – the New York Times, the Washington Post, The UK Telegraph, Reuters, Bloomberg, AP, etc., etc. Unadulterated propaganda. Independent Always indeed.
I speculate on the mentality of the relevant editors behind this slavish reproduction of slop. Are they under instruction from senior editorial and management? Do they actually believe this stuff they reproduce? Do they think that these sources are models of probity? Were they born yesterday? Is it easier and cheaper than doing one’s own research?
A peak of the steady drip was on 27 January 2022 when no less than four articles appeared on the problem that Russia and its evil leader Putin poses for ‘freedom-loving’ peoples.
Thus we get Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, UK Telegraph, on German appeasement of Russia. Andrew Kramer (no SMH link), New York Times, on just what dastardly means Russia will deploy in its imminent invasion. Jeff Mason and Humeyra Pamuk, Reuters, on the further brutal sanctions envisioned by the ringmaster Biden if Russia pulls any naughty business. And Jeremy Warner, UK Telegraph, on how Putin’s destabilisation of Ukraine could lead to global chaos in the markets!
I made an online comment to the latter article noting that if ‘the markets’ were so responsive to fake news then why pay any attention to them? The comment didn’t appear, exposing how sensitive they are to reflections on their own stupidity. Can’t they take a joke?
The highlight of Fairfax/Nine’s sterling contribution to the infowar was an Editorial of 20 January. Some highlights:
- when Russian-backed separatists shot down a Malaysian Airlines jet over its territory
- Russian media is inventing stories about atrocities against Ukraine’s large Russian-speaking minority
- [Putin’s] reluctance to co-operate with an investigation into the crash
- his illegal annexation of Crimea
- This is the same man who sends his agents to the West to kill political dissidents with poison nerve gas and radioactive tea.
All these gems and more in 600 words! It may be only a coincidence that the aforementioned Bevan Shields, the ‘exceptionally talented journalist and editor’, has only recently been appointed Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald.
On the home front, Fairfax/Nine’s Eryk Bagshaw and Anthony Galloway work non-stop in condemning China per se, with its presumed evil ambitions through authoritarian means to dominate the Eastern Hemisphere, on its way to global dominance.
Master of Ceremonies on matters international at Fairfax/Nine is longtime hack Peter Hartcher. The much-experienced Hartcher has never been the same after a stint as North American correspondent. Hartcher recently enthused about the satrap Australian government’s preposterous ‘deal’ to build and utilise nuclear-powered submarines (AUKUS) – that will give China its comeuppance, he claims.
More recently, Hartcher was pumping up the British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss’s hysterical proposition that China and Russia might wage war simultaneously. This aroused Australia’s sometime Prime Minister and master wordsmith Paul Keating, after a previous spat with Hartcher, to label Truss’ claim as ‘nothing short of demented’, that Britain ‘suffers delusions of grandeur and relevance deprivation’ and that Hartcher was ‘the press gallery’s most celebrated beat-up merchant’. Quite.
I have written multiple letters to the SMH letters editors complaining about the preponderance of fake news in its World coverage. None have been published. No letters from anyone have been published on such coverage, and I can’t believe that I’m the only one offended and nonplussed by being treated as an idiot. Attempts to comment critically online on such coverage is also met with comprehensive censorship. They must know what they’re doing.
The ABC, the national broadcaster, is similarly afflicted. Its daily coverage of ‘the imminent Russian invasion’ provides no background whatsoever. Nothing about the decades-long NATO encirclement, nor the US-led February 2014 coup in Ukraine, nor the slaughter of Russophone Ukrainians in the Donbas (especially the burning of the Odessa trade union building in May 2014), Russia’s accommodation of the large numbers of Ukrainians fleeing war, Kiev’s marginalisation of the official status of the Russian language, etc.
As with Fairfax/Nine, there is no mention of the senior German General saying ‘cool your jets’, of the Croatian President saying ‘count us out’, and of Ukraine’s President Zelensky himself demanding essentially ‘for the sake of Ukraine’s economy and society, shut up!’
Indicative is that ABC heavies haven’t confronted that their erstwhile heroine Hillary Clinton might not be heroic and that there might be something more deeply problematic about the US polity than the seeming aberration of Donald Trump.
As with the print media, critical feedback is ignored.
The ABC has suffered long term budget cuts and pressure to ‘conform’ from a succession of reactionary governments (not least under pressure from the Murdoch media and the Institute of Public Affairs, a corporate-funded pressure group) which seems to have been internalised. It’s a mindset of cultural cringe to English language Anglo-America in the face of a curious, ultimately unknowable and potentially malevolent Other.
Israel has always been a litmus test with the Australian media. A peep of criticism of that illustrious apartheid state and the feedback systems are bombarded with outrage by the cheer squad. Occasionally, an editorial in Fairfax/Nine lets through a damning article – as in the recent kerfuffle over the Director of the iconic summer Sydney Festival inviting sponsorship from the Israeli government for an Israeli participant.
However, the local Zionist lobby always gets its right of reply, in the process highlighting that its members are the only contributors who have the privilege of writing complete bullshit. Here are representative print contributions, in response to the Palestine revolt against their ongoing oppression (May 2021), and in response to the boycott of the Sydney Festival (December 2021).
I have never understood how commercial media can put propaganda before profit. Perhaps there’s a captive audience in Australia for Fairfax/Nine print media because the only alternative (save for Western Australia) is the odious Mr Murdoch.
A rare voice of sanity in Australia on international issues is the online site Pearls & Irritations, created by a longtime senior federal public servant. It provides a venue for people to write intelligently on China, in particular, and for ex-ambassadors and senior public servants and others who can’t find a voice in the Australian mainstream print media duopoly or the public broadcaster.
The American-Anglo crazies don’t care about the integrity or sovereignty of Ukraine (think Serbia and Kosovo) or the welfare of Ukrainians. They don’t care whether Europe freezes. They only care for the ultimate dismantling of an independent Russia, a renewed Yeltsinisation of that country and of countries within its current sphere of influence.
Our respectable media is happy to oblige by providing a compromised ‘journalism’ masquerading as intelligence. Why do we continue to tolerate this shit?
The post Cringeworthy Media Down Under first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Following the announcement of Leena Nair’s (no relation) appointment as CEO of Chanel last month, media and fans were quick to laud the announcement as a step forward in diversity and inclusion (D&I) efforts by global brands given she would be one of the industry’s only women of colour in the exclusive ranks of leadership.
However, Ms Nair’s appointment as the first Indian woman to lead a Western luxury brand is a long overdue opportunity to reflect on the fact that D&I developments – even ones as seemingly significant as this – are still a means to camouflage the main issue at hand: that the global fashion industry still largely adheres to White Western prescriptions about beauty, aesthetic, and lifestyle, thereby reinforcing Western cultural superiority, which in turn furthers its economic dominance.
D&I has become a buzzword in the fashion industry in recent years and more so after the surge of wokeness triggered by the events of the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020. Western firms are eager to showcase diversity to capitalise on the movement, and they are successful since many fashion consumers (both Western and non-Western) are oblivious to these motives and perceive D&I as a cause for celebration.
For example, Chanel is a brand most known for popularizing the ‘little black dress’, a garment that is seen as a fashion staple today. Yet its origins are nothing to celebrate: a uniform meant to hold women of colour in place to replace traditional and ethnic clothes, both in the West and across colonies. The appointment of a non-White CEO will not change that nor the more important issue, which is Chanel’s abiding philosophical primacy of promoting Western design and fashion sensibilities across the non-Western world.
As a global company, Chanel clearly has the right to influence markets across the world as it sees fit, but we should not be swayed by D&I developments that have been meticulously selected to fit into a politically acceptable framework that cannot be challenged. At the same time we should also confront the inconvenient truth that the promotion of D&I in the fashion industry enables Western-owned firms to blend fashion and culture in ways that many non-Whites do not notice, helping sustain a business strategy of flooding non-Western markets with cheaply produced Western fashion while also extending White and Western culture to every corner of the world, thereby maintaining and perpetuating the aura of superiority around White people and their culture – this has been termed the ‘colonization of the mind’ and creates cultural subservience.
Western fashion culture as modernising
Historically, fashion was utilised as a status symbol in countries across the world to separate the hierarchy between classes, including between the colonised and the coloniser. However, after the industrial revolution, when the West had colonised much of the world, fashion houses maintained this power dynamic for profit growth by encouraging the rising middle class in the West and its colonies to buy a little taste of luxury and supposed modernity in the globalised world: they introduced entry-level status symbols.
A Gucci belt, Chanel earrings, or a Louis Vuitton wallet—all with prominent labels and accessible costs (if still expensive)—allowed once-colonized peoples to dress like the “wealthy and powerful” of the West. Wearing Western fashion is therefore connected with progress, causing disdain for traditional clothing. Traditional dress conventions were traded for Western styles, and this is happening more vigorously now. Stilettoes and bikinis are modern and a sign of liberty, but hijabs and traditional outfits are seen as restrictive and oppressive.
Telling someone what they should look like frequently necessitates telling them what they should not look like: people must first feel inferior when wearing non-Western clothing to spend money on Western styles. Luxury fashion is built on the emotional scaffolding of human aspiration. Looking fair and not dark is part of the reflection of self.
Neo-Colonial Economics
Western fashion houses’ business strategy, like that of colonial enterprises of the past, has always been to capitalise on the world’s least expensive and weakest regions. In the past, the best fabrics and accessories for high fashion was obtained from the colonies. Not much has changed. Why have luxury brands relocated their production to Cambodia, Myanmar, and now Ethiopia, when China’s expenses increased? It isn’t due to improved industry or infrastructure.
Simply put, these are the least expensive frontiers for the exploitation of cheap labour and resources that are still available.
According to McKinsey & Company’s Global Fashion Index 2020, the worldwide fashion industry is dominated by 20 corporations that account for 97 per cent of global economic profit in the retail sector. No surprise. They are all Western brands.
When we examine the fashion sector as a whole, we can see that the supply networks of the top Western apparel businesses follow the same trade routes as they did 150 years ago, during the height of European colonial exploitation. To put it another way, the fashion industry continues to abuse institutions and leverage cheap resources in nations still recovering from colonialism’s effects. And they have ingeniously made some of them their customers and biggest markets.
Many people are aware of supply chain abuses, but how do these brands escape controversy? By focusing on and promoting D&I activities in the West, away from the harsh and exploitative tactics that keep the business alive in African and Asian nations. And not to mention the almost irreversible impacts of local culture and fashion being discarded as part of the wider trend of the acculturation and Westernisation of the world.
Token gestures
This leads to tokenism. “The practise of making simply a perfunctory or symbolic attempt to perform a certain item, notably by hiring a small number of persons from under-represented groups to provide the illusion of equality,” according to the Cambridge dictionary.
This is found everywhere in the fashion industry, from the catwalks to the seasonal adoption of “ethnic chic” by designers. Tokenism also encourages non-Westerners and non-Whites to abandon their traditions to seek employment in Western fashion houses.
These non-Western designers, models, hairdressers, make-up artists and so on had to intentionally or unconsciously pursue Whiteness to obtain favour from Westerners and advance their careers. It is so accepted that most people do not even react to the awkward and condescending advertisements of leading fashion houses such as Gucci and D&G, which routinely depict non-Whites in outrageous settings and poses that seek to play on their non-Whiteness as if they are captive performers in a circus.
Consider the late Virgil Abloh. He was the first black artistic director at Louis Vuitton. His appointment at LV, like Leena’s, is still seen as a watershed event in fashion and a sign that the industry was making a determined effort to adapt. His hiring, however, was not a sign of structural change, but rather highlighted difficulties that have long plagued fashion and other creative sectors.
Even his own “Black-owned brand” was made up of overwhelmingly White people. As a result, “streetwear” appeared “cool” because white creatives utilised a Black designer as its calling card (despite years of criticising Black culture). It did not change the fact that the brand was still controlled behind the scenes by White and Western commercial interests.
What the world needs is for consumers to be more aware of the rise of a new fashion consciousness in the non-Western world, one which is not so intrinsically linked with global economic domination of established Western brands, but rather the reclamation of fashion as a reflection of their diverse cultures – dictated by them and not the West.
But this change will not happen overnight. A country’s fresh fashion statement can only be defined through an appreciation of its long history of traditional culture, pride in its traditions, developing novel consumer ideals and resisting the onslaught of Western cultural domination – but not going so far as to reject it.
A long way to go
While Abloh and Ms Nair’s appointments were no doubt due to their hard work, undisputed talents and abilities, they were also effectively spun to be seen as a cause for celebration – and this is not a sign of systemic change. Stamping this as a landmark moment for global racial equality in the industry, without acknowledging the pointed economic interests behind it and its negative cultural impacts, is plain dishonest.
It is in many ways impossible – and even perhaps unfair – to ask Western fashion brands that have clung to fashion’s entrenched elitism and White soft power, to change their business model, one which preys on non-Western consumers indoctrinated by the superiority of all things Western. Non-Westerners can however cease imitating the West and begin expressing their own fashion sensibilities and culture. Why can’t traditional attire become the standard business dress in international business centres or be exhibited on European fashion runways and not be seen as a touch of “ethnic” colour or flair? China’s redefining of “Made in China” as a sign of pride rather than shame can be emulated in the rest of the non-Western world.
The actual breakthrough will occur when non-Western people all over the globe comprehend the nature of the Western fashion trends they follow, ask why they follow them at the risk of rejecting their own culture, and see that doing so perpetuates global White economic power.
Image credit: stylishlyme.com
The post The Global Fashion Brands: More than the Little Black Dress first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Farmerless farms manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented genetically engineered seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food. Data platforms, private equity firms, e-commerce giants and AI-controlled farming systems.
This is the future that big agritech and agribusiness envisage: a future of ‘data-driven’ and ‘climate-friendly’ agriculture that they say is essential if we are to feed a growing global population.
The transformative vision outlined above which is being promoted by the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation amounts to a power grab. Whether through all aspects of data control (soil quality, consumer preferences, weather, etc), e-commerce monopolies, corporate land ownership, seed biopiracy and patenting, synthetic lab-made food or the eradication of the public sector’s role in ensuring food security and national food sovereignty, the aim is for a relative handful of corporations to gain full control of the entire global food system.
Smallholder peasant farming is to be eradicated as the big-tech giants and agribusiness impose their ‘disruptive’ technologies.
This vision is symptomatic of a reductionist mindset fixated on a narrow yield-output paradigm that is unable or more likely unwilling to grasp an integrated social-cultural-economic-agronomic systems approach to food and agriculture that accounts for many different factors, including local/regional food security and sovereignty, diverse nutrition production per acre, water table stability and boosting rural development based on thriving local communities.
Instead, what is envisaged will lead to the further trashing of rural economies, communities and cultures. A vision that has scant regard for the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food and the right of people to define their own food and agriculture systems.
But is any of this necessary or inevitable?
There is no global shortage of food. Even under any plausible future population scenario, there will be no shortage as evidenced by scientist Dr Jonathan Latham in his paper The Myth of a Food Crisis (2020). Furthermore, there are tried and tested approaches to addressing the challenges humanity faces, not least agroecology.
Reshaping agrifood systems
An organic-based, agrifood system could be implemented in Europe and would allow a balanced coexistence between agriculture and the environment. This would reinforce Europe’s autonomy, feed the predicted population in 2050, allow the continent to continue to export cereals to countries which need them for human consumption and substantially reduce water pollution and toxic emissions from agriculture.
That is the message conveyed in the paper Reshaping the European Agro-food System and Closing its Nitrogen Cycle: The potential of combining dietary change, agroecology, and circularity (2020) which appeared in the journal One Earth.
The paper by Gilles Billen et al follows a long line of studies and reports which have concluded that organic agriculture is vital for guaranteeing food security, rural development, better nutrition and sustainability.
For instance, in the 2006 book The Global Development of Organic Agriculture: Challenges and Prospects, Neils Halberg and his colleagues argue that there are still more than 740 million food insecure people (at least 100 million more today), the majority of whom live in the Global South. They say if a conversion to organic farming of approximately 50% of the agricultural area in the Global South were to be carried out, it would result in increased self-sufficiency and decreased net food imports to the region.
In 2007, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) noted that organic models increase cost-effectiveness and contribute to resilience in the face of climatic stress. The FAO concluded that by managing biodiversity in time (rotations) and space (mixed cropping), organic farmers use their labour and environmental factors to intensify production in a sustainable way and that organic agriculture could break the vicious circle of farmer indebtedness for proprietary agricultural inputs.
Of course, organic agriculture and agroecology are not necessarily one and the same. Whereas organic agriculture can still be part of the prevailing globalised food regime dominated by giant agrifood conglomerates, agroecology uses organic practices but is ideally rooted in the principles of localisation, food sovereignty and self-reliance.
The FAO recognises that agroecology contributes to improved food self-reliance, the revitalisation of smallholder agriculture and enhanced employment opportunities. It has argued that organic agriculture could produce enough food on a global per capita basis for the current world population but with reduced environmental impact than conventional agriculture.
In 2012, Deputy Secretary General of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Petko Draganov stated that expanding Africa’s shift towards organic farming will have beneficial effects on the continent’s nutritional needs, the environment, farmers’ incomes, markets and employment.
A meta analysis conducted by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and UNCTAD (2008) assessed 114 cases of organic farming in Africa. The two UN agencies concluded that organic agriculture can be more conducive to food security in Africa than most conventional production systems and that it is more likely to be sustainable in the long term.
The 2009 report Agriculture at a Crossroads by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, produced by 400 scientists and supported by 60 countries, recommended agroecology to maintain and increase the productivity of global agriculture. It cites the largest study of ‘sustainable agriculture’ in the Global South, which analysed 286 projects covering 37 million hectares in 57 countries, and found that on average crop yields increased by 79% (the study also included ‘resource conserving’ non-organic conventional approaches).
There are numerous other studies and projects which testify to the efficacy of organic farming, including those from the Rodale Institute, the Oakland Institute, the UN Green Economy Initiative, the Women’s Collective of Tamil Nadu, Newcastle University and Washington State University. We also need look no further than the results of organic-based farming in Malawi.
In Ethiopia, agroecology has been scaled up across the entire Tigray region, partly due to enlightened political leaders and the commitment of key institutions. But Cuba is the one country in the world that has made the biggest changes in the shortest time in moving from industrial chemical-intensive agriculture to organic farming.
Professor of Agroecology Miguel Altieri notes that, due to the difficulties Cuba experienced as a result of the fall of the USSR, it moved towards organic and agroecological techniques in the 1990s. From 1996 to 2005, per capita food production in Cuba increased by 4.2% yearly during a period when production was stagnant across the wider region.
By 2016, Cuba had 383,000 urban farms, covering 50,000 hectares of otherwise unused land and producing more than 1.5 million tons of vegetables. The most productive urban farms yield up to 20 kg of food per square metre, the highest rate in the world, using no synthetic chemicals. Urban farms supply 50 to 70% or more of all the fresh vegetables consumed in cities such as Havana and Villa Clara.
It has been calculated by Altieri and his colleague Fernando R Funes-Monzote that if all peasant farms and cooperatives adopted diversified agroecological designs, Cuba would be able to produce enough to feed its population, supply food to the tourist industry and even export some food to help generate foreign currency.
Serving a corporate agenda
However, global agribusiness and agritech firms continue to marginalise organic, capture public bodies and push for their chemical-intensive, high-tech approaches. Although organic farming and natural farming methods like agroecology offer genuine solutions for many of the world’s pressing problems (health, environment, employment, rural development, etc), these approaches challenge corporate interests and threaten their bottom line.
In 2014, Corporate Europe Observatory released a critical report on the European Commission over the previous five years. The report concluded that the commission had been a willing servant of a corporate agenda. It had sided with agribusiness on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and pesticides. Far from shifting Europe to a more sustainable food and agriculture system, the opposite had happened, as agribusiness and its lobbyists continued to dominate the Brussels scene.
Consumers in Europe reject GM food, but the commission had made various attempts to meet the demands from the biotech sector to allow GMOs into Europe, aided by giant food companies, such as Unilever, and the lobby group FoodDrinkEurope.
The report concluded that the commission had eagerly pursued a corporate agenda in all the areas investigated and pushed for policies in sync with the interests of big business. It had done this in the apparent belief that such interests are synonymous with the interests of society at large.
Little has changed since. In December 2021, Friends of the Earth Europe (FOEE) noted that big agribusiness and biotech corporations are currently pushing for the European Commission to remove any labelling and safety checks for new genomic techniques. Since the beginning of their lobbying efforts (in 2018), these corporations have spent at least €36 million lobbying the European Union and have had 182 meetings with European commissioners, their cabinets and director generals: more than one meeting a week.
According to FOEE, the European Commission seems more than willing to put the lobby’s demands into a new law that would include weakened safety checks and bypass GMO labelling.
Corporate influence over key national and international bodies is nothing new. From the World Bank’s ‘enabling the business of agriculture’ and the influence of foreign retail on India’s NITI Aayog (the influential policy commission think tank of the Government of India) to the Gates Foundation’s role in opening up African agriculture to global food and agribusiness oligopolies, democratic procedures at sovereign state levels are being bypassed to impose seed monopolies and proprietary inputs on farmers and to incorporate them into a global agrifood chain dominated by powerful corporations.
But there are now also new players on the block. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others are closing in on the global agrifood sector while the likes of Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva and Cargill continue to cement their stranglehold.
The tech giants entry into the sector will increasingly lead to a mutually beneficial integration between the companies that supply products to farmers (pesticides, seeds, fertilisers, tractors, etc) and those that control the flow of data and have access to digital (cloud) infrastructure and food consumers. In effect, multi-billion dollar agrifood data management markets are being created.
In India, Walmart and Amazon could end up dominating the e-retail sector. These two US companies would also own India’s key consumer and other economic data, making them the country’s digital overlords along with Google and Facebook.
The government is facilitating the dominance of giant corporations, not least through digital or e-commerce platforms. E-commerce companies not only control data about consumption but also control data on production, logistics, who needs what, when they need it, who should produce it, who should move it and when it should be moved.
These platforms have the capacity to shape the entire physical economy. We are seeing the eradication of the marketplace in favour of platforms owned by global conglomerates which will control everything from production to logistics, including agriculture and farming.
The farmer will be told how much production is expected, how much rain is anticipated, what type of soil quality there is, what type of (GM) seeds and proprietary inputs are required and when the produce needs to be ready.
E-commerce platforms will become permanently embedded once artificial intelligence begins to plan and determine all of the above.
In April 2021, the Indian government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Microsoft, allowing its local partner CropData to leverage a master database of farmers. The MoU seems to be part of the AgriStack policy initiative, which involves the roll out of ‘disruptive’ technologies and digital databases in the agricultural sector.
CropData will be granted access to a government database of 50 million farmers and their land records. As the database is developed, it will include farmers’ personal details, profile of land held, production data and financial details.
In addition to facilitating data harvesting and a data management market, the Indian government is trying to establish a system of ‘conclusive titling’ of all land in the country, so that ownership can be identified and land can then be valued, bought or taken away.
The plan is that, as farmers lose access to land or can be identified as legal owners, predatory global institutional investors will buy up and amalgamate holdings, facilitating the further roll out of high-input, corporate-dependent industrial agriculture.
This is an example of stakeholder-partnership capitalism, much promoted by the likes of the World Economic Forum, whereby a government facilitates the gathering of such information by a private player which can then, in this case, use the data for developing a land market (courtesy of land law changes that the government enacts) for institutional investors at the expense of smallholder farmers who will find themselves displaced.
By harvesting information – under the benign-sounding policy of data-driven agriculture – private corporations will be better placed to exploit farmers’ situations for their own ends.
Imagine a cartel of data owners, proprietary input suppliers and retail concerns at the commanding heights of the global economy, peddling toxic industrial (and lab-engineered) ‘food’ and the devastating health and environmental impacts associated with it.
As for elected representatives and sovereign state governments, their role will be highly limited to technocratic overseers of these platforms and the artificial intelligence tools that plan and determine all of the above.
But none of this is set in stone or inevitable. The farmers victory in India in getting the corporate-friendly farm laws repealed show what can be achieved, even if this is only viewed as a spanner in the works of a global machine that is relentless.
New world order
And that machine comprises what journalist Ernst Wolff calls the digital-financial complex that is now driving the globalisation-one agriculture agenda. This complex comprises many of the companies mentioned above: Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Amazon and Meta (Facebook) as well as BlackRock and Vanguard, transnational investment/asset management corporations.
These entities exert control over governments and important institutions like the European Central Bank (ECB) and the US Federal Reserve. Indeed, Wolff states that BlackRock and Vanguard have more financial assets than the ECB and the Fed combined.
To appreciate the power and influence of BlackRock and Vanguard, let us turn to the documentary Monopoly: An Overview of the Great Reset which argues that the stock of the world’s largest corporations are owned by the same institutional investors. This means that ‘competing’ brands, like Coke and Pepsi, are not really competitors, since their stock is owned by the same investment companies, investment funds, insurance companies and banks.
Smaller investors are owned by larger investors. Those are owned by even bigger investors. The visible top of this pyramid shows only two companies: Vanguard and Black Rock.
A 2017 Bloomberg report states that both these companies in the year 2028 together will have investments amounting to 20 trillion dollars. In other words, they will own almost everything worth owning.
The digital-financial complex wants control over all aspects of life. It wants a cashless world, to destroy bodily integrity with a mandatory vaccination agenda linked to emerging digital-biopharmaceutical technologies, to control all personal data and digital money and it requires full control over everything, including food and farming.
If events over the last two years have shown us anything, it is that an unaccountable authoritarian global elite knows the type of world it wants to create, has the ability to coordinate its agenda globally and will use deception and duplicity to achieve it. And in this brave new Orwellian world where capitalist ‘liberal democracy’ has run its course, there will be no place for genuinely independent nation states or individual rights.
The independence of nation states could be further eroded by the digital-financial complex’s ‘financialisation of nature’ and its ‘green profiling’ of countries and companies. If we take the example of India, again, the Indian government has been on a relentless drive to attract inflows of foreign investment into government bonds (creating a lucrative market for global investors). It does not take much imagination to see how investors could destabilise the economy with large movements in or out of these bonds but also how India’s ‘green credentials’ could be factored in to downgrade its international credit rating.
And how could India demonstrate its green credentials and thus its ‘credit worthiness’? Perhaps by allowing herbicide-resistant GMO commodity crop monocultures that the GM sector misleadingly portrays as ‘climate friendly’.
As for concepts such as localisation, food sovereignty, self-reliance and participatory democracy – key tenets of agroecology – these are mere inconveniences to be trampled on.
Olivier De Schutter, former UN special Rapporteur on the right to food, delivered his final report to the UN Human Rights Council in 2011, based on an extensive review of scientific literature. He concluded that by applying agroecological principles to the design of democratically controlled agricultural systems we can help to put an end to food crises and address climate variabilities and poverty challenges.
De Schutter argued that agroecological approaches could address food needs in critical regions and double food production within 10 years. However, he notes there is insufficient backing for organic-based farming which seriously hinders progress.
But it is not just a case of insufficient backing. Global agribusiness and agritech corporations have leveraged themselves into strategic positions and integral to their strategy has been attacks on organic farming as they attempt to cast it as a niche model which cannot feed the world. From the false narrative that industrial agriculture is necessary to feed a growing population to providing lavish research grants and the capture of important policy-making institutions, these firms have secured a thick legitimacy within policy making machinery.
These conglomerates regard organic approaches as a threat, especially agroecology which adheres to a non-industrial, smallholder model rooted in local independent enterprises and communities based on the principle of localisation. When people like De Schutter assert the need for a “democratically controlled” agroecology, this runs counter to the reality of large agribusiness firms, their proprietary products and their globalisation agenda based on long supply chains, market dependency, dispossession and the incorporation of farms and farmers into their agrifood regime. And as we can see, ‘democracy’ has no place in the world of the digital-financial complex.
The 2015 Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology argues for building grass-root local food systems that create new rural-urban links, based on truly agroecological food production. It says that agroecology should not be co-opted to become a tool of the industrial food production model; it should be the essential alternative to it.
The declaration stated that agroecology is political and requires local producers and communities to challenge and transform structures of power in society, not least by putting the control of seeds, biodiversity, land and territories, waters, knowledge, culture and the commons in the hands of those who feed the world.
According to Pat Mooney of the ETC Group, this involves developing healthy and equitable agroecological production systems, building short (community-based) supply chains and restructuring and democratising governance systems that could take 25 years to accomplish: in effect a ‘long food movement’.
We are currently living through epoch-defining changes and the struggle for the future of food and agriculture is integral to the wider struggle over the future direction of humanity. There is a pressing need to transition towards a notion of food sovereignty based on agroecological principles and the local ownership and stewardship of common resources.
The post Living in Epoch-Defining Times: Food, Agriculture and the New World Order first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The progressive citizen groups, that in the sixties and seventies, drove through Congress the key environmental, worker, and consumer legislation, since unmatched, must feel nostalgic. Those were the years when legislation throwing cruel companies on the defensive was signed by arch-corporatist, President Richard Nixon, because he read the political tea leaves.
These bills included the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and environmental laws, the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for worker health and safety, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and worker pension protection, among others.
Alas, Richard Nixon was the last Republican president to be afraid of liberals. When grade B actor Ronald Reagan flew into Washington, he opened all doors to Big Business. A cruel man with a smile, Reagan gave an actor’s cover to the greatest collapse into the corporate power pits in American history.
Here is a checklist showing the takeovers of our government at all levels by the corporate supremacists for whom enough is never enough when it came to profits and power.
1. Regulatory agencies curbing corporate ravages were essentially shut down. Reaganites thought companies should regulate themselves when it comes to the health, safety, and economic well-being of the American people; which is to say, the corporate rule took over the rule of law.
2. Labor unions were weakened by timid leadership, anti-labor policies, acceleration of job exports, and the major shift by the Democratic Party to solicit money from rapidly expanding corporate political action committees (PACs).
3. Congress abandoned its role of checks and balances and gave much of its constitutional power to the imperial, autocratic presidency. This concentration of power and secrecy in the White House seriously weakened the power of civic groups that had been able to start their reform drives in Congress.
4. The consequences of corporatizing Congress allowed the tax system to be filled with escapes and lower rates for the super-rich and global corporations. It allowed presidents to get corporatist judges confirmed to dominate the courts. It permitted total inaction on the necessity of strengthening our federal corporate criminal laws, including antitrust enforcement and laws, so out of date that they became out of mind by the supposed enforcers in the Executive Branch.
5. A spineless Congress fell to its knees before the military-industrial complex so much so that the bloated unaudited ‘defense’ budget zoomed over 50% of discretionary spending by the federal government. The military empire grew without congressional oversight.
6. Meanwhile, the corporate giants became dominant in weakening the private pillars of American law. They turned freedom of contracts into fine-print consumer servitude, while coercing consumers into also giving up key rights and remedies under the law of torts should they incur wrongful injuries.
A manipulated credit economy took away consumers’ control over their own money, subjecting them to penalties, ultimatums, and punitive credit scores.
7. Without challenge to their marketing, corporations commercialized childhood, directly selling to kids junk foods and junk drinks that set off the deadly obesity epidemic and its health-damaging results. They sold violent programming and exploited the weaknesses of children, circumventing parental authority and discipline.
In the Internet Age, corporations can be described as raising our children, getting their personal information for free, and selling this collected data to advertisers. They are trapping these youngsters in the peonage of click-on contracts they never see through in their daily screen hours.
Whether in reality or virtual reality, corporations have become electronic child molesters with few pursuing sheriffs.
8. Corporate globalization has erected mechanisms such as corporate-managed trade agreements that operate to pull down our standards for workers, consumers, and the environment to the lower levels of developing countries, many of them under dictatorial regimes.
9. Decades after warnings by scientists of rising global warming, the fossil fuel giants, while on the defensive, still have the economy in their clutches, slowing their substitutes of conservation and renewable energy.
10. Corporate welfare is larger, more varied, and more automatic than ever. Subsidies, handouts, giveaways, and bailouts are now routinely enacted by little-challenged, government-guaranteed capitalism at the federal and state levels!
Big corporations even control the wealth owned by the people such as the public lands, public airwaves, and trillions of dollars in pension and mutual funds.
11. Voting rights and electoral accuracies are being undermined in many states by legislation.
12. Medicare is being corporatized (over 40% of elderly beneficiaries are under corporate plans). Billing fraud is greater than ever (reaching $360 billion in 2021 just in the healthcare industry). Traditional defined benefit pension plans are disappearing, with the unstable 401K as a replacement if workers are lucky enough to have any retirement savings plans at the workplace.
Clearly, the situation in our political economy is getting worse by the year. To be sure, progressive groups have maintained some successes such as the near abolition of most uses of deadly asbestos, lead out of paint and gasoline, safer cars, better labelling, more recalls, removals of unsafe or ineffective drugs, and reduction of air and water pollutants. Civil rights and children protection laws still have some teeth. But civic groups are winning some skirmishes, while losing the battle and the war to the entrenched corporate state. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt told Congress in 1938 – whenever private power takes control of the government, that is fascism.
These citizen groups and their supporters must now step back and develop a ten-year Plan to overpower the corporate state with a democratic state. The people, however passive now, are largely on their side. Originally, in their state chartering days of the early 19th century, corporations were expected to be our servants not our masters. The reverse is now true.
This plan will require thousands of new organizers, lobbyists, strategists, and all the skills used by big corporations. It will also require systematically connecting with enlightened billionaires, already worried about our country’s slide into the abyss, for a budget of at least $10 billion over ten years.
Otherwise, ongoing skirmishes will continue the lower the expectations by progressive civic groups to a point of self-delusion.
The post Think Big to Overcome Losing Big to Corporatism first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
They never call that Conflic$ of $ntere$t
Doctors are urging everyone to get vaccinated and boosted as cases of the Omicron coronavirus variant are popping up in more states, but the vaccine may also need to change to keep up with the mutations of the virus.
“It is, probably, one of our worst-case scenarios in terms of the combination of mutations that exist in one variant,” said Dr. Stephen Hoge, president of Cambridge-based Moderna. (source)
Again, this discussion around SARS-CoV2’s origins, and I mean, LAB origins, is so stunted that I have zero faith in the ability of people running the show and those following the show, and those who bombast and tell me to follow the science, to really have the guts and mental acumen to think outside their pathetic boxes. So, getting the low down from Moderna is not only bizarre, more than the fox watching the hens, but deeper. Here, a wrap up:
Our novel coronavirus is a LAV — live attenuated virus — derived from the work being done at University of North Carolina, the only place on earth trying to make a LAV for SARS-like viruses, which are also obviously not going to be fully acclimated to the human genome like the human influenza virus, which seems to have been with us at least since the Trojan War thousands of years ago.
Until SARS-CoV-2 is understood as a LAV that’s deattenuating towards a highly-pathogenic chimeric coronavirus that’s going through gatekeeping mutations and has no intention whatsoever of following the assumptions drawn from observing natural evolution or even the paths of the H1N1 LAVs which melted back into their original endogenous human hosts – humanity is going to continue to be standing on its head as it attempts to battle this pandemic, and misunderstanding the basic fundamental nature of what its up against.
It’s something we seem to be particularly good at, since all the way back in 1977 when the first H1N1 LAV emerged to a mass global panic, a massive push was made to create and distribute vaccines against what was thought to be a potentially pandemic strain. But it turns out that one of the ways a LAV isn’t a natural virus, is that when you attempt to vaccinate against it, neurological side-effects appear to proliferate among the vaccinated population, as the virus blows through this attempt at protection.
Because unfortunately for all of us, this isn’t the first time we’ve all been down the horrific rabbit-hole of trying to rush out an incredibly profitable vaccine against an enigmatic mystery virus that’s really a military LAV that deattenuated faster than expected. A vaccine which only provides only weak and temporary protection – but also causes wide-spread side-effects because it turns out the pharmaceutical companies were lying about their vaccine studies, and knowingly risked the lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of Americans so they could make as much money as quickly as possible: (Source)
Now, watch an old swine flu paranoia story, 60 Minutes:
So, follow the “other” science, and follow the protests. Marketed as life-saving public health measures, lockdowns triggered death and economic devastation on a global scale while doing little to slow the spread of Covid-19. Now, they’re back with a vengeance. — Grayzone.
That Moderna —this one —
Digital Health Pass: IBM and Moderna Hook Up to Capitalize on COVID Reset
Not that Whitney Webb is listened to by the mainstream and left-stream Media —
Moderna attempted to offset the bad press over having to delay the Crigler-Najjar drug with claims that they had developed a new nanoparticle delivery system called V1GL that “will more safely deliver mRNA.” The claims came a month after Bancel had touted another delivery system called N1GL to Forbes. In that interview, Bancel told Forbes that the delivery system they had been using, licensed to them by Acuitas, “was not very good” and that Moderna had “stopped using Acuitas tech for new drugs.” However, as will be explored in detail in this report as well as Part II of this series, it appears that Moderna continued to rely on the Acuitas-licensed technology in subsequent vaccines and other projects, including its COVID-19 vaccine. (Whitney Webb)
Former Moderna employees and those close to their product development were doubtful at the time that these new and supposedly safer nanoparticle delivery systems were of any consequence. According to three former employees and collaborators close to the process who spoke anonymously to STAT, Moderna had long been “toiling away on new delivery technologies in hopes of hitting on something safer than what it had.” All of those interviewed believed that “N1GL and V1GL are either very recent discoveries, just in the earliest stages of testing—or else new names slapped on technologies Moderna has owned for years.” All spoke anonymously due to having signed nondisclosure agreements with the company, agreements that are aggressively enforced.
And so we have the constant un-News from the billionaire class, Big Pharma, and the bought-out (prostituted) media. It is worth looking at this piece’s subheading,
Turns out you can’t vaccinate your way out of highly-transmissible RNA viruses in crowded commercial settings, but it also turns out that humans have a little issue trying to play God, and as so here we are.
…tied to this point by the writer, using Harvard To the Big House as his moniker:
It’s probably worth a brief moment to consider that every major industrial poultry farm on earth is stuffed to the wattles with potential viral hosts which are unable to self-segregate when they get sick like they are in wild populations, and so despite the fact that modern poultry farms have vaccination programs with 100% genomic coverage, 100% compliance, and 100% surveillance – a perfect experimental situation with far more controllability that human societies – the emergence highly-pathogenic influenza strains that easily cull half the flock in a matter of days and sometimes result in 100% mortality are a constant threat. (Bottling-Up the Quasispecies Origins of SARS-CoV-2’s Enigmatic Furin-Cleavage Site)
It’s worth reading this piece, and try to not multitasking why reviewing it, since there are genomics and virology and basic and mid-genetics cited. But you all are caring, smart and patient readers. I know. The reality is, there are no jobs in Oregon now that do not require the jab, and, for me, 64, over-educated, overly socialistic, well, how can I get a job when, well, this is what is typical of Indeed and other staffing sites put down right up front before a job description:
The State of Oregon requires all executive branch employees to complete their COVID-19 vaccination series or have an approved exception to the requirement due to a medical condition or sincerely held religious belief. Successful candidates for this position must submit vaccination documentation or be approved for an exception prior to their first day of employment. Failure to provide proof of full documentation or receipt of an approved exception will lead to withdrawal of the job offer. For more information, visit our policy listed here.
And what is a “vaccination” series, then? Is it two-three-four or every-three months a jab mentality? Is my age, 64, the kicker? Do I get to opt out of two-three-infinity shots? How easy is it to get an exception for whatever course of jabbing the state of Oregon requires, per the “Chosen Few” in the VaX Biz$, such as, well, here, December 4, 2021, DV covers one of these fellows, still alive, chosen, this elite “chosen few” — ‘Meet the “Godfather of Vaccines”’: Stanley A. Plotkin? (see Mickey Z!)
Is this existential the entire disaster and disaster mismanagement/management? A thought experiment? Ground-truthing? Or, something else?
The consciousness that biodiversity collapse is anthropogenically caused and in many cases avoidable prompts frequent use of the rhetoric of disaster to portray the human-induced shock to earth’s ecosystems. Amid such environmental distress, the collapse of biodiversity,global warming, melting glaciers, peak extraction of natural resources, structural poverty, intense pollution, high impact industries, and large zones of monocropping anticipate the scenario of a planet becoming orphaned of life. The main risks are created and increased inconsequently by men, in their infinite saga of nature domination (of which they are part, even when they do not realize it). The culture of immediacy pushes society to forget the past and to not care about the future. (Disasters, pandemic and repetition: a dialogue with Maurice Blanchot’s literature)
Look, I was on a Zoom call two days ago. Again, environmental topic; i.e., delta-wetlands “expert” zooming 41 folk. Amazingly flat, dead, and the Q & A, almost like putting in a number for the DMV. I don’t think the people running the show really get the colonization of science and outdoors sciences by this stupidity? In the Oregon-State? Making more and more people suspicious of each other, the Omicron Paranoia.
Estuaries are not only federally designated as Essential Fish Habitat, they’re a Habitat Area of Particular Concern (HAPC). The HAPC designation is for high priority areas for conservation, management, or research because they are important to ecosystem function, sensitive to human activities, stressed by development, or are rare. Habitat types within estuaries vary substantially and consist of either natural (seagrass, large woody debris, natural rock, etc.) or man-made structures. Research from OSU over the last two decades indicates that (1) the fish communities in Oregon estuaries are changing, and (2) natural estuary habitats, particularly seagrasses, play an outsized role in the feeding and growth of juveniles fishes, particularly in years of poor ocean conditions. Given that ocean conditions on the west coast are changing, maintaining healthy natural habitats may become even more important in the future.
Interesting to read Alison McDowell’s latest, Wrench in the Gears. She opened up the Pandora’s box of blockchain connections to military-money-medical madness two years ago.
Check her work — She’s burnt out, and now, reenergized with Texas, where she was recently. Texas at the petri dish for all of the 5G/6G world of digital wallets, digital medicine, digital Gulag.
I am convinced Texas is in the crosshairs of a program of blockchain human capital predation that has been in the works at least since the 1950s. They’re coming in the back door with digital identity tied to electronic government, precision medicine, personalized learning, and equity-based workforce re-skilling tied to the Dallas Federal Reserve. Academic institutions pumped up with government life science grants and defense sector partnerships are in on it, as well as back-slapping non-profits waiting on their next philanthrocapitalist cardboard check. I have seen the web of this agenda. I have mapped a good bit of it. I’ve been caught up in it too, in the enormity of it. Now I finally think I’ve mustered up the psychic energy and clarity to deconstruct it and lay the parts out for all to see. Teasing apart the Texas blockchain web might help me regain my sense of purpose, which started to slip away these past few months. (Source)
Interesting fellow, just interviewed on a Covid-19 series, and that’s not available yet for public dissemination, but here he is in an older video. Covid-Revealed. His talk here on this 13 hour series is pretty clarifying. He does know his virus history, and he is anti-Empire, and this is usually not something these doctors who question the lack of treatments, the mRNA vax, etc. question. Many of the experts fighting the vaccination narrative and the rise of the corona paranoia yammer about socialism, how the WEF and Fourth Industrial Revolution is about global socialism. WHICH it is NOT. The rich — filthy Eichmann Types below them — are not gaming the system to have truly socialism for-by-because of the people, bottom up. Try and find the series, Covid Revealed. Of course, I am watching free, but with a time-frame, and then it is for sale! Capitalism, uh?
Here, Zach Bush, January 2021, on viromes and viruses. The entire kitchen sink of microbiome.
With the Branch Covidians and their Draconian Digital Dungeon, we who resist this maximum jab-jab-jab mentality — forced medical procedures — are to be put where? Repurposed Indian Boarding Schools? FEMA camps? Think about that. No job, no home, no unemployment, no humanity!
Gov. Sisolak apologizes for Nevada’s role in relocating Native American children
“They ripped babies from the arms of my ancestors and brought them thousands of miles to this campus,” Stacey Montooth, executive director of the Nevada Indian Commission and a direct descendant of a Stewart student, said. “The intent was to absolutely remove all aspects of Native American culture, but I’m still here.
“Keep in mind, it was not Uncle Sam’s priority to keep track of the Native people they sent here. There were bounties put out on little Indian children. … In 2021, we’d call it kidnapping.”
An estimated 20,000 students from at least 200 tribal nations attended Stewart between 1890 and 1980, including plenty from far-flung tribes based in New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho. The boarding school was just one of more than 350 such institutions once propped up by the federal government.
Some families sent their children to the school to get an education, but many were snatched off the road unbeknownst to their parents, according to Bobbi Rahder, director of the Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum. (Source)
Interesting, Zach Bush looks at the political fight, the elections, as imflammation, looking at how as the candidates move closer toward the election their bodies, and their souls, are actually worn and show major breakdown of their mind-body connection. He discusses bacteria, looks at the sterilization aspect of modern medicine at war with viruses and not understanding the human microbiome — 10 to the 15th power the number of viruses in our body. Lining up for vaccines to rely on antibodies? It is not right, and it’s all tied to germ theory not being right. Listen to him, and it’s easy, and goes to biodiversity on many levels, and the air pollution, the cyanide taken into the human cell. Listen hard to the one above and then this one. It isn’t so difficult.
And to beat a dead Covid-19 horse to death, I highly recommend this interview, 25 minutes. You will understand the breadth of this fellow, Zach Bush, and he is coming at viruses, sustainability, terrain disease theory, humanity — birth and dying — from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Oh, I wish I was teaching college again, my courses on critical writing-thinking, from composition 101 to literature.
I have broached so many topics tied to systems thinking, directly relatable to students who are not majoring in English or journalism, per se, but those topics were fodder and incubators for deep knowledge and outside the thousand boxes thinking.
I am locked on Highway 101. The local college is Oregon Coast Community College, and the same people are teaching writing classes, for credit, who have been teaching that for years. There are no advanced classes or special topics classes, such as — critical thinking, research and expression in a time of conflict, runaway consumerism, media and educational control. You know, opening up the discussion with people majoring in say, nursing, or early childhood ed, or aquarium sciences. This society has for decades turned humanity into robots, silo-loving pencil pushers, err, knowledge workers on a laptop. That is exactly why we have a country of broken ideas, unrealized discussions, and flabbergasted people of all shapes and forms.
Zach Bush, on what we are — Homo Virome Sapiens!
The post The Oil Companies Tell Us About Climate Change and Big Pharma Tells Us About Variants first appeared on Dissident Voice.The revolution that we are in the midst of — the massive paradigm shift that is one of the biggest scientific discoveries of human kind — is that human health does not reside within the human cell. Human health is dictated by the biodiversity that is at the center of our vitality, the biodiversity of the microbiome.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his 1938 message to Congress warned that when private power becomes stronger than the democratic state itself, we have Fascism. There are many ways to witness the intensifying domination toward a corporate state. One way is to compare exposé books in the 1960s and the present.
Within a span of five years, there were three books in the sixties that put forces in motion leading to significant reordering of our society’s priorities. They were Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962), my Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), and The Other America by Michael Harrington (1962).
The message of these bestselling books was expanded by authors going on national TV and radio shows. They spoke around the country, before large audiences at colleges/universities and even high schools. An aroused citizenry prompted congressional hearings, legislation, and the establishment of federal agencies to deal with the problems of toxic chemicals, unsafe motor vehicles, and deep poverty in the U.S.
By stark contrast, now the volume of muckraking indictments of corporate crime, fraud, and tyranny is at least ten-fold that of the nineteen sixties. Books and blogs, documentaries and podcasts are pouring out daily with far less impact and in many cases no effect, for change.
Take a look at 65 recent searing books about corporate violence and malfeasance, crushing influence over our electoral and political systems, and expanding immunities from law enforcement and public accountability.
- Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Crisis of Underenforcement by John Coffee
- Mass Tort Deals: Backroom Bargaining in Multidistrict Litigation by Elizabeth Burch
- Why Not Jail?: Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction by Rena Steinzor
- Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe
- Closing Death’s Door: Legal Innovations to End the Epidemic of Healthcare Harm by Michael J. Saks and Stephan Landsman
- Who Poisoned Your Bacon Sandwich?… by Guillaume Coudray
- The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption… by Carey Gillam
- The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business by David Courtwright
- Frankie: How One Woman Prevented a Pharmaceutical Disaster by James Essinger and Sandra Koutzenko
- Killer Airbags by Jerry Cox
- Making the World Safe for Coke by Susan Greenhalgh
- Big Dirty Money by Jennifer Taub
- Business and Human Rights by Ellen Hertz
- Industrial-Strength Denial by Barbara Freese
- Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act by Nicholson Baker
- Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations by Brandon L. Garrett
- Capital Offenses: Business Crime and Punishment in America’s Corporate Age by Samuel W. Buell
- Profiteering, Corruption and Fraud in U.S. Health Care by John Geyman
- Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power by David Dayen
- Global Banks on Trial by Pierre-Hugues Verdier
- Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception by David Michaels
- Murder, Inc.: How Unregulated Industry Kills or Injures Thousands of Americans Every Year…And What You Can Do About It by Gerald Goldhaber
- Paradise Lost at Sea: Rethinking Cruise Vacations by Ross A. Klein
- Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy by Matt Stoller
- Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in An Age of Fraud by Tom Mueller
- Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom by Katherine Eban
- GMOs Decoded: A Skeptic’s View of Genetically Modified Foods by Sheldon Krimsky and Marion Nestle
- GM: Paint it Red: Inside General Motors’ Culture of Failure by Nicholas Kachman
- The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives by Jesse Eisinger
- Watchdog: How Protecting Consumers Can Save Our Families, Our Economy, and Our Democracy by Richard Cordray
- First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat by Christopher Shaw
- Un-American: A Soldier’s Reckoning of Our Longest War by Erik Edstrom
- Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn
- Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America by Eyal Press
- Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? by Alexander Keyssar
- Public Citizens by Paul Sabin
- The United States of War by David Vine
- The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions by Chuck Collins
- Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis
- The Case Against George W. Bush by Steven C. Markoff
- Tax the Rich: How Lies, Loopholes, and Lobbyists Make the Rich Even Richer by Erica Payne and Morris Pearl
- Salt Wars: The Battle Over the Biggest Killer in the American Diet by Dr. Michael Jacobson
- Unrig: How to Fix Our Broken Democracy by Daniel G. Newman
- Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits by James D. Zirin
- Stealing Our Democracy by Don Siegelman
- Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor by Steven Greenhouse
- All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator by Monique El-Faizy and Barry Levine
- Money, Power, and the People: The American Struggle to Make Banking Democratic by Christopher Shaw
- Troubled Water: What’s Wrong with What We Drink by Seth M. Siegel
- Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Democracy by Mike German
- United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America… by Mickey Huff and Nolan Higdon
- The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu
- The End of Ice by Dahr Jamail
- Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator by Dr. Gregory Jaczko
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
- America, Democracy & You: Where Have All the Citizens Gone? by Ronald R. Fraser
- Unsettled (on Purdue Pharma and the Sackler Family) by Ryan Hampton
- Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas
- China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine by Rosemary Gibson and Janardan Prasad Singh
- Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World by Nomi Prins
- Attention All Passengers: The Airlines’ Dangerous Descent and What You Can Do To Reclaim Our Skies by William McGee
- Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science by Carey Gillam
- The CEO Pay Machine: How it Trashes America and How to Stop It by Steven Clifford
- World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer
- The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, …. and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald
Despite the many books on corporate crooks, there have been no corporate crime law reforms, no additional prosecutions of these CEOs, not even comprehensive congressional or state legislative hearings. The corporate crooks at the top of giant companies still get away with profiting from their corporate crime wave. None of the top Wells Fargo executives or Opioid’s promoters or the sellers of dangerous products and chemicals are facing prosecution. You have to steal a loaf of bread or get caught with a miniscule amount of heroin or cocaine to be incarcerated.
The massive fatality toll annually (about 400,000) from preventable problems in hospitals and clinics gets exposed yet nobody stirs in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, state departments of health, or the state legislatures. That’s almost 8000 Americans losing their lives a week!
Profiteering, corruption, and fraud in the health industry are documented by many specialists, including Dr. John Geyman’s many books, but the exposés do not result in any calls for law and order by the politicians or even hearings in Congress.
Access to justice by victims faces increasingly closed courtroom doors and limits on tort laws for wrongful injury.
Meanwhile, the institutions we are expected to rely on to make a difference, with too few exceptions, are asleep at the wheel. These include the legal, medical, and accounting professions, the law enforcement agencies (there is no corporate crime index in the U.S. Justice Department), the toady legislatures, the corporate-owned media, the timid, often compromised labor unions, college campuses, and the silent corporatized organized religious institutions.
Our democracy is in serious decay. The information is readily available about what to do about it, while citizens argue among themselves, having been divided and ruled by corporate propaganda and politicians indentured to corporate supremacists.
Most active people seem unable to coalesce over their common interests at the community level. Remember, less than one percent of citizens stepping forward can turn the tide! (See breakingthroughpower.org)
For some reflections on our Auto Safety work over the past 55 years later visit here.
The post Critical Exposés Everywhere as the Corporate State Worsens first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” — John Muir
“All things are connected like the blood that unites us. We do not weave the web of life, we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.” – Chief Seattle
The proof is in the pudding, or in this case, the soda pop! It’s complicated, but also not. When a second country to me, Mexico, is colonized by Capitalism, the results are as clear as what the billionaire class, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation class, call for — more slow death, more vulnerabilities, more money thrown at, well, shit. In this case, sugar. Fructose. Things go better with diabetes — soda.
Yes, BMGF has tens of millions invested in sugar, PepsiCo, Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Monsanto, etc. They are here for philanthropy pimping, for sure.
A picture is worth a million deaths. And, this is from rightwing, commercial loving, anti-socialism, BBC…. [‘Coca-Cola controls 73% of the Mexican fizzy drinks market, compared with only 42% in the US.’ Photograph: Alamy]
Here, a few mainstream media mush stories —
- The surprising story of how the former president of Mexico helped make Coca-Cola such a huge part of Mexican life that it’s used in religious ceremonies and as medicine
- How one of the most obese countries on earth took on the soda giants
- The Mexicans dying for a fizzy drink
- Then, a not so mushy scientific piece — Prevalence of NAFLD in Guatemala following exposure to a protein-energy nutrition intervention in early life
And, it is the Covid-19 narrative, man, that is cutting the brain cells of people — talk about stopping a global crisis! Defunding those stock holders and the millionaires and billionaires making money on NAFLD, cancer, diabetes: sugary death.
The global prevalence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is approximately 25%, with Hispanic populations at greatest risk. We describe the prevalence of NAFLD in a cohort of Guatemalan adults and examine whether exposure to a protein-energy supplement from conception to two years is associated with lower prevalence of NAFLD.
This is the value of human life to the Warren Buffets, the Soros Klan, the Gates and Bezos Klans, Zuckerberg, and you then can name all those investment funds. All those retirement funds. All those investment portfolio holders. ALL of us, who have a thread of money tied to well, sugar, Coke, Pepsi, Booze, Sweetened foods. Hell, add the oil (food) and salt (food) purveyors. And we are in a time of Covid-19. It is blasphemy.
How many sugar tax bills have been shuttled by the thugs of concentrated sugars, High Fructose Corn Syrup, etc.? How many Yankees and others say that capitalism is about wonderful choices, and kids and families have a “choice” not to drink sugar drinks. Buck up and eat healthy!
This is how they think, the dirty marketers, the swines of swindles. I’ve seen sugar tax bills die in El Paso (89 percent Hispanic) and in Washington/Seattle, and in Oregon, too. Medical people, including doctors, nurses, hospitals, insurance mavens — they all invest in sugar, diabetic death.
This is emblematic of the problem — white woman, head of medicine, Mexico — [“Dr Mercedes Juan López, Mexico’s health secretary, argued against the soda tax. Photograph: Carlos Tischler/Demotix/Corbis”] If this is not part of the Eichmann Racist Evil, emanating from your heart, then you, reader, are not human!
We know it is all about Covid-19, that is, STAT, global lockdown, the end of us all, that coronaviral flu — Yet, we can harken back to Edward Bernays and his hawking cigarettes for women, pregnant ones, too. Now, Mister Frued’s Nephew Harbinger of the Worst of the Worst Propagandists, Swindler Swine Facilitator. Then, or death president, one of the dozens, Ray-gun —
Oh, hell, how about that Mexican president — “Vicente Fox, former president of Mexico, was once a Coca-Cola delivery worker.”
Okay, okay, it goes way back, selling sweet death — The Future President’s Future ex-Wife —
And, alas, if a K12 teacher, teaching social studies, history, or, hell, biology, were to go into the ill-effects of refined and non-refined sugar on the child, how HFCS is a huge issue tied to not just overweight childhood syndrome, or obesity, but all these dozens of chronic illnesses adult, and the brain fog, fatigue, hunger pangs, and how it feeds the medical fraud system called Medicine, well, that lesson would be Cancel Culture Central since, hmm, Pizza Hut (Pepsi) and Taco Bell (Pepsi) and Minute Maid (Coke) and so many other “programs, or giveaways” are tied to supporting the Swine Swindling Capitalists’ right to hook anyone on their nefarious services, products, poisons.
If you want to get rid of premature death (Covid-Coke, anyone?), then you go full communist-socialist-communitarian-It Takes a Village on the purveyors of slow, agonizing death, no? Mandatory seat belts and chairs upright and trays put away on those aluminum and plastic cigars of death, airplanes, and if you resist that, you are deep-sixed from travel on the airlines, but god forbid we put brakes and seat belts on our children’s health, and their future lives. God forbid we force food makers to make food, no poison delivery systems!
So, Fourth Industrial Revolution is real, but the anti-global confrontation of these colluding problems, it is wrong. Anything that prefigures not helping youth, and having a democratic socialist-communist form of local and national governments to clean up the air, water, education, medicine, aging, life, this is not about big brother screening your TV choices, though we know TV and Holly-Dirt has done a miraculous job of brainwashing and inciting stupidity and murderous thinking. Working globally is the only answer. Democratically. Yet, we will continue to have story after story, report after report, showing how nefarious the global capitalist, transnational penury, the trans-capital thievery, the few that own the man, unless we burn it all down.
FRUCTOSE CONSUMPTION HAMPERS GASOTRANSMITTER PRODUCTION by Elena Fauste Cristina Donis María Isabel Panadero Paola Otero Carlos Bocos, Facultad de Farmacia, Universidad San Pablo-CEU, CEU Universities, Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, Spain.
Gasotransmitters are gaseous molecules enzymatically produced by mammalian cells with a wide range of molecular and cellular effects. They are permeable to cell membranes and their levels, although low, must be strictly regulated since they work as messengers, are involved in signal transduction cascades and have specific targets in the cell (1). The first gasotransmitter described was nitric oxide (NO) as a regulator of vascular tone and macrophage activation, and later two others gases were added to the list: carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen sulde(H2S) (2). Recently, ammonia (NH3) has also been proposed as a new gasotransmitter (3). Gasotransmitter concentrations must be regulated within a specifc range as they are toxic for the cell at high levels.
Indeed, it has been proven that NO, CO and H2S inhibit cytochrome coxidase (CcOx) (4-6) and hyper ammonemia causes brain damage (7). According to the World Health Organization (WHO), non-communicable diseases are the main cause of death worldwide, with all of them sharing modifiable risk factors such as smoking, unhealthy diets, sedentarism and excessive alcohol consumption (8). In fact, unhealthy diets such as the Western diet (high in added sugars, salt and saturated fats (9)) have been related to a higher likelihood to undergo metabolic diseases such as obesity, diabetes type 2,cardiovascular diseases and hypertension (10).
Fructose, as high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) or sucrose, has been used as added sugar in sweetened beverages, processed foods and juices due to its higher water solubility and sweetening power (11), and it has been related to the increase in obesity (12), metabolic syndrome (13), non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD)(14) and insulin resistance (15). In the last decades, we and others have studied the mechanisms involved in fructose-induced metabolic disturbances and, in recent years, their connection with gasotransmitter metabolism and signaling has also become more and more evident.
Nope, you will not get this in the Build Backwards Better or Republican/Libertarian Reap Thy Profits Anyway You Can projects or media or the CDC, FDA, and the like. It’s mainstream media’s most contrary-to-business-as-usual story, and legacy media and the new media, they all require subservience to the overlords, the marketers, the advertisers, and if you look loosely, what sells on TV or on-line? Drugs, booze, food (sic), sugary stuff, treatments, insulin, blood glucose monitors, and diet pills and, well, you get the Double Bacon Cheeseburger Slathered with Eight-by-Eight-by-Eight addictive secret ingredients — 8 scoops of sugar, 8 scoops of fat, and 8 pinches of salt. Nope. How dare we even talk about messing with Swine Swindlers of Capitalism and their legions of shysters, snake oil salesmen/ women, and reaping of profits anyway they can retailers. It’s everywhere, those poisons, and Coke is just emblematic and axiomatic of the disease of consumer-rape, with just one system (soda pop), when there are thousands of systems of extracting life from the planet that do the same diseased dirty work.
More stuff I read, which again, is not on the smorgasbord table of the mainstream and off-stream mush served 24/7!
- “Why does Bayer Crop Science Control Chemicals in Brexit Britain” – Rosemary Mason
- “Does Glyphosate Acting as a Glycine Analogue Contribute To ALS” – Stephanie Seneff
- “Afterthoughts on Diaspora” – Kenneth Surin
- “How to Deal with Those Bleeping Ideas: Free Speech in the Classroom.”- Phil Venditti
- “The New Genetics and Natural versus Artificial Genetic Modification” – Mae-Wan Ho
- “Autism, Dysbiosis, and the Gut-Brain Axis” – Alex Vasquez
- “Might cholesterol sulfate deficiency contribute to the development of autistic spectrum disorder?” – Stephanie Seneff
- “Open Letter- The UK Media is silent about the Corporation that collaborated with the Nazis in Auschwitz” – Rosemary Mason
- “COVID-19 and Pesticides – A Deadly Combination” – Rosemary Mason
Now, of course, the fact there are no great water systems in Mexico, no reliable (writ large) plumbing, no graywater, storm water or sewage water collection and treatment plants, those are not the real issues capitalism wants to tackle — hint-hint! The fact that there are no free water wells, water delivery systems, no, this is not a problem to the Nestle and Pepsi and Jolly Green Giants laying waste to Mexico’s aquifers and water supplies. All of these deficits and thefts brought to us/them by Neoliberalism, the Swine Swindlers, those who let the top soda pop and beer and booze outfits run across lands globally and steal watersheds globally, not the problem. Repeat — Capitalism is STEALING and DEALING in poisons. And, then, this process is polluting bodies, at a very young age, and that is in the baby’s bottle, early, that bubbly dark stuff, Coca Cola. But, then, the dirty water, microbe-born, death waters, black pools of the twin plants, all the hard poisons leeching into Mexico’s water supplies, not the problem. No, let’s serve Coke instead of H2O, that is, fixing our human right to water. The problem, in Swine Swindlers’ hands, in their minds, is that there is not enough free unfettered take-it-all-if-you-can, capitalism, in order to hook more kids on sugary death-sicles!
But we have Killer Coke/Minute Maid to thanks:
You’ve seen this graphic above, and this one, too — that is the disease of Swindling Swines of Capitalism:
And, sure, tons of college campuses, including all those I taught at, had campaigns against Killer Coke, and in my case, I was the instigator of this as a part-time/adjunct/freeway flyer faculty member. These are teachable moments, not grand strategies to actually hobble Killer Coke and the Swine Swindlers of Capitalism. But, here, old Coke tries to buy off not just the schools and college/university campuses, but the activists — “How Coca Cola Tried to Buy Off Ray Rogers and End the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke”
It’s worth putting down the entire short piece here, quoting the above source:
Quoting — ‘For the past fifteen years, Ray Rogers has spearheaded the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke.
Rogers says it’s a campaign to hold Coca-Cola Company, its bottlers and subsidiaries accountable and “to end the gruesome cycle of violence and collaboration with paramilitary thugs, particularly in Colombia.”
“These atrocities include the systematic intimidation, kidnapping, torture and murder of union leaders and members of their families in efforts to crush their unions,” Rogers says. “In countries like Colombia and Guatemala, a strong union can mean the difference between life and death for people who dare to challenge corporate and political abuses.
In 2006, a Financial Times story labeled Rogers Coca Cola’s “fiercest foe.” Rogers and the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke are featured in a full-length documentary, The Coca-Cola Case.
Rogers says that in 2010, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce agreed to pay him $15,000 to be the keynote speaker at a luncheon in Washington, D.C. since his strategies and campaigns in fighting big business have been “so alarming and effective.”
Rogers says that Coca-Cola, a major sponsor of the U.S. Chamber, pressured the Chamber to rescind the invitation and Ray was paid a $3,000 cancellation fee which went to support the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke.
Rogers reports that in 2016 and 2017, Coca-Cola’s then CEO Muhtar Kent suggested he and Rogers should meet privately to discuss how they could resolve their differences.
“Two lengthy, no holds barred, but cordial private meetings at Coca-Cola’s office in New York City happened in May 2016 and January 2017,” Rogers’ Corporate Campaign reported last month. “Both Rogers and Kent, unbeknownst to each other, brought gifts. In the first meeting, Rogers presented Kent a container of Trader Joe’s dark chocolate coffee beans and a bottle of pomegranate juice and Ray was given a lovely handbag made by a woman in Brazil, who as part of a collective, made a living recycling Coke can flip tops as artwork ornaments in creating designer-type handbags. In the second meeting, Ray presented dark chocolate and natural juice and received bottles of extra virgin olive oil produced from Kent’s olive orchards.”
“Numerous discussions also took place with another high level Coca-Cola representative through April 2017.”
“It was made clear to Rogers that if he would ‘get off Coke’s Back’ and end the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke, he would have plenty of money to carry on whatever work he decided to do and that Coke would be willing to fund a large no-kill animal shelter in NY City which Ray wanted as his reward to end the campaign.”
“Rogers made it clear that he could not be hired by, bought off or co-opted by Coca-Cola. The only way the campaign would end, he told Coke, is if justice was served relating to Coke’s complicity in well-documented human rights abuses in Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico and the U.S. Those issues have yet to be resolved.”
Coca-Cola did not return calls seeking comment for this story.’
+–+ end story
So, above, you can’t find the trailer of The Coca-Cola Case anywhere, and you can’t stream it, and YouTube has scrubbed it. HMMM. These links are dead in the sugary ocean!
- “‘The Coca-Cola Case,’ a legal thriller about the soft-drinks titan…“
(The New York Times — May 20, 2010) - “The Coca-Cola Case is a fascinating portrayal of corporate irresponsibility and greed… Remember that slogan — Have a Coke and a smile? Well, this doc will leave you UN-smiling.“
(Rabble.ca — April 8, 2010) - “Coca-Cola does not want this particular documentary to gain a significant viewership.“
(theSheaf.com (University of Saskatchewan) — February 11, 2010) - “You’ll never look at Coca-Cola the same…“
(GreenMuze — February 7, 2010) - “the explosive new film…“
(The Boston Herald — February 5, 2010) - “Killer Coke? Controversial film The Coca-Cola Case draws fire from soft-drink giant.“
(Canwest News Service — January 21, 2010)
Here is the Trailer on iTunes! Now how does this all relate to Big Pharma/Big Medicine/Big Finance/Big Food/Big Retail/ Big Ag?
How many times in one day do we need to make the analogy of Capitalism as Cancerous Disease? Or, Capitalism as Pollution? Capitalism as War Lord? Capitalism as Survival of the Fittest? Capitalism as Eugenics 201?
Or, Capitalism as the Value of Nothing Being A Lot?
How about, Capitalism as Inflammatory Disease? Check it out, even though on George Soros’ Democracy Now:
Yes, the Covid-19 story is not handled well, in part of this DN piece, for sure, but again, so much bandwidth, man, the bandwidth — the ideas of this book are powerful, and old for us lefties, us commies.
Boldly original, Inflamed takes us on a medical tour through the human body. Unlike a traditional anatomy book, this groundbreaking work illuminates the hidden relationships between our biological systems and the profound injustices of our political and economic systems. Decolonizing heals what has been divided, reestablishing our relationships with the Earth and one another. (source)
A better analysis of vaccinations versus immunization, germ theory versus terrain medicine theory, go here:
Again, highly refined and deep analysis of the Vaccination Pogrom — “Vaccination: Most Deceptive Tool of Imperialism.” Read and follow the end notes/bibliography.
The real underlying cause of deaths in epidemics is the dysfunctional health care system brought about by chronic socio-economic underdevelopment characteristic of a semi-feudal and semi-colonial society victimized by imperialism, not the loss of vaccine confidence due to the “Dengvaxia scare”.
Corporate hijacking of the health care system with the complicity of government, international institutions, mainstream medicine and various cohorts deprived the people of their right to health. Profit has become the primary driving factor in addressing a public health problem, not public welfare.
Deregulation, privatization and liberalization, the hallmarks of corporate globalization, the new face of imperialism, have practically wiped-out whatever remaining affordable basic needs and social services, especially health services, are available to the majority of the population. Worse, under the guise of economic development, big business juggernaut in mining, plantations, coal, dams and other environmentally destructive and socially disruptive mega-projects have devastated community-empowering and truly sustainable, poverty alleviating, health promoting and climate resilient initiatives.
The concomitant and worsening assaults (including extrajudicial killings) on fundamental human rights have subjected marginalized people to extreme physical, biological, psychological and social stress and have repeatedly been forced to be displaced from their land, homes, crops and other means of survival. Under these circumstances, infectious disease epidemics and other serious health problems are bound to arise and worsen. The root cause of epidemics in this country is imperialism. Liberation is the answer, not vaccination.
Here is Raj’s latest documentary, a good one, in fact — I watched it through CAGJ (Community Alliance for Global Justice strengthens the global food sovereignty movement through community education and mobilization), “After a special virtual screening of The Ants & the Grasshopper, CAGJ held a Q&A session with co-director and co-producer Raj Patel. About the film : “Anita Chitaya has a gift; she can help bring abundant food from dead soil, she can make men fight for gender equality, and she can end child hunger in her village. Now, to save her home from extreme weather, she faces her greatest challenge: persuading Americans that climate change is real. Traveling from Malawi to California to the White House, she meets climate sceptics and despairing farmers. Her journey takes her across all the divisions shaping the US, from the rural-urban divide, to schisms of race, class and gender, to the thinking that allows Americans to believe they live on a different planet from everyone else. It will take all her skill and experience to help Americans recognize, and free themselves from, a logic that is already destroying the Earth.” Raj Patel co-directed and co-produced the film with Steve James, among others; James is renowned for his 1992 documentary Hoop Dreams. Learn more about the film:
So, for vapid, checked-out, colonized, Swine Swindling Bastards and Bitches, the reality is sugar is just ONE of a million ways the Capitalist Criminals hook death, disease, penury, fear, miseducation, agnotology and violence into the mass population. Taxing Coke and sugary drinks? Hmm, how about building water systems, and Socialism, and working on the problems from a holistic and systems approach, as in disease prevention (this is anti-capitalist in every sense of these Swine Swindlers’ brains), is the only way. And abolishing poisons writ large.
Back to the BBC story! Ending this piece with facts!
Mexicans are the thirstiest consumers of sugary drinks in the world. Each gets through an estimated 163 litres (36 imperial gallons) on average per person every year – 40% more than an average American (who drinks 118 litres, or 26 gallons).
And this, says the government and the health campaigners, is a serious problem.
All too often, the headlines coming from Mexico focus on the country’s bloody drugs war – which has claimed over 100,000 lives in the past decade. Type 2 diabetes, on the other hand, kills 70,000 per year.
So acute is the problem that two years ago, in January 2014, Mexico introduced a national tax on sugary drinks and junk food – a 10% tax on every litre of sugar-sweetened drinks and an 8% tax on high-calorie food.
The effect of these on children is a particular concern – according to Mexico’s Health Ministry, the country leads the world in childhood obesity.
“About 10% of kids are being fed soda from zero to six months of age,” says Dr Salvador Villalpando, a childhood obesity specialist at the Federico Gomez children’s hospital in Mexico City.
“By the time they reach two it’s about 80%.”
Finally, before sending in this diatribe, or finalizing it, the breaking news, November 23, just proves my point on the sickness and triple sickness of Swines Swindling the World for Profits at the Expense of Our Slow Death —
They miss the point, though, in this anti-monopoly vs. pro-monopoly gambit:
The Biden administration on Tuesday sued to block the proposed merger of two sugar industry giants, arguing that that acquisition would erase competition and raise prices at a time when global supply chains are already under pressure.
The civil antitrust lawsuit, filed in federal court in Delaware, aims to stop the United States Sugar from buying Imperial Sugar. The corporations are rivals in the “already cozy” sugar industry, said Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, in a press release.
U.S. Sugar is a Delaware corporation that’s privately held and headquartered in Florida. Imperial Sugar is owned by Louis Dreyfus, a global agricultural conglomerate based in the Netherlands. The deal is valued at about $315 million.
“As a result, fragile supply chains would be further strained, and American families would pay more for sugar and many staple food and beverage products,” the lawsuit says.
“This is a straightforward case: the merger of two direct competitors that will result in a highly concentrated market and lead to higher prices for a product that is vital to our country’s food supply,” the complaint adds.
“Simply put: this case is not a close call.”
Read the the stories on Commondreams or AP, any place, and you will not get a third rail, a different perspective, one that not only lambasts capitalism’s dirty hooked-on-poisons-food secret, but one that actually states that all sugar consumption, according to those docs and scientists pushing the Covid-19 Is the Worst Thing Ever story, is bad-bad. A little bit of heroin once in a while, nah. A little pregnant, nah.
Oh, that sugar! Oh that Columbus. Oh that 1619 Project, shedding light:
Khalil Gibran Muhammad in The 1619 Project (pages 70-77) brings attention the vast scale of slavery in sugar plantations, centered in Louisiana, where the working conditions were arguably even worse. Christopher Columbus brought sugar cane stalks on his second voyage and that it was the presence of slave labor that shifted sugar from a luxury commodity to what it is now.
In Europe at that time, refined sugar was a luxury product, the backbreaking toil and dangerous labor required in its manufacture an insuperable barrier to production in anything approaching bulk. It seems reasonable to imagine that it might have remained so if it weren’t for the establishment of an enormous market in enslaved laborers who had no way to opt out of the treacherous work.
…
The enslaved population soared, quadrupling over a 20-year period to 125,000 souls in the mid-19th century. New Orleans became the Walmart of people-selling. The number of enslaved labor crews doubled on sugar plantations. And in every sugar parish, black people outnumbered whites. These were some of the most skilled laborers, doing some of the most dangerous agricultural and industrial work in the United States.
![Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, The New York Public Library. "Sugar cane plantation; [Jamaica.]" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed April 27, 2016. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-94a7-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99](https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Sugar_1050x700.jpg)
Or, update the slavery to obesity and slow sweet death —
Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues that fructose (too much) and fiber (not enough) appear to be cornerstones of the obesity epidemic through their effects on insulin.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The UK government’s Behavioural Insights Team helped to push the public towards accepting the COVID narrative, restrictions and lockdowns. It is now working on ‘nudging’ people towards further possible restrictions or at least big changes in their behaviour in the name of ‘climate emergency’. From frequent news stories and advertisements to soap opera storylines and government announcements, the message about impending climate catastrophe is almost relentless.
Part of the messaging includes blaming the public’s consumption habits for a perceived ‘climate emergency’. At the same time, young people are being told that we only have a decade or so (depending on who is saying it) to ‘save the planet’.
Setting the agenda are powerful corporations that helped degrade much of the environment in the first place. But ordinary people, not the multi-billionaires pushing this agenda, will pay the price for this as living more frugally seems to be part of the programme (‘own nothing and be happy’). Could we at some future point see ‘climate emergency’ lockdowns, not to ‘save the NHS’ but to ‘save the planet’?
A tendency to focus on individual behaviour and not ‘the system’ exists.
But let us not forget this is a system that deliberately sought to eradicate a culture of self-reliance that prevailed among the working class in the 19th century (self-education, recycling products, a culture of thrift, etc) via advertising and a formal school education that ensured conformity and set in motion a lifetime of wage labour and dependency on the products manufactured by an environmentally destructive capitalism.
A system that has its roots in inflicting massive violence across the globe to exert control over land and resources elsewhere.
In his 2018 book The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequalities and its solutions, Jason Hickel describes the processes involved in Europe’s wealth accumulation over a 150-year period of colonialism that resulted in tens of millions of deaths.
By using other countries’ land, Britain effectively doubled the size of arable land in its control. This made it more practical to then reassign the rural population at home (by stripping people of their means of production) to industrial labour. This too was underpinned by massive violence (burning villages, destroying houses, razing crops).
Hickel argues that none of this was inevitable but was rooted in the fear of being left behind by other countries because of Europe’s relative lack of land resources to produce commodities.
This is worth bearing in mind as we currently witness a fundamental shift in our relationship to the state resulting from authoritarian COVID-related policies and the rapidly emerging corporate-led green agenda. We should never underestimate the ruthlessness involved in the quest for preserving wealth and power and the propensity for wrecking lives and nature to achieve this.
Commodification of nature
Current green agenda ‘solutions’ are based on a notion of ‘stakeholder’ capitalism or private-public partnerships whereby vested interests are accorded greater weight, with governments and public money merely facilitating the priorities of private capital.
A key component of this strategy involves the ‘financialisation of nature’ and the production of new ‘green’ markets to deal with capitalism’s crisis of over accumulation and weak consumer demand caused by decades of neoliberal policies and the declining purchasing power of working people. The banking sector is especially set to make a killing via ‘green profiling’ and ‘green bonds’.
According to Friends of the Earth (FoE), corporations and states will use the financialisation of nature discourse to weaken laws and regulations designed to protect the environment with the aim of facilitating the goals of extractive industries, while allowing mega-infrastructure projects in protected areas and other contested places.
Global corporations will be able to ‘offset’ (greenwash) their activities by, for example, protecting or planting a forest elsewhere (on indigenous people’s land) or perhaps even investing in (imposing) industrial agriculture which grows herbicide-resistant GMO commodity crop monocultures that are misleadingly portrayed as ‘climate friendly’.
Offsetting schemes allow companies to exceed legally defined limits of destruction at a particular location, or destroy protected habitat, on the promise of compensation elsewhere; and allow banks to finance such destruction on the same premise.
This agenda could result in the weakening of current environmental protection legislation or its eradication in some regions under the pretext of compensating for the effects elsewhere. How ecoservice ‘assets’ (for example, a forest that performs a service to the ecosystem by acting as a carbon sink) are to be evaluated in a monetary sense is very likely to be done on terms that are highly favourable to the corporations involved, meaning that environmental protection will play second fiddle to corporate and finance sector return-on-investment interests.
As FoE argues, business wants this system to be implemented on its terms, which means the bottom line will be more important than stringent rules that prohibit environmental destruction.
Saving capitalism
The envisaged commodification of nature will ensure massive profit-seeking opportunities through the opening up of new markets and the creation of fresh investment instruments.
Capitalism needs to keep expanding into or creating new markets to ensure the accumulation of capital to offset the tendency for the general rate of profit to fall (according to writer Ted Reese, it has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s). The system suffers from a rising overaccumulation (surplus) of capital.
In the form of COVID ‘relief’, there has been a multi-trillion bailout for capitalism as well as the driving of smaller enterprises to bankruptcy. Or they have being swallowed up by global interests. Either way, the likes of Amazon and other predatory global corporations have been the winners.
New ‘green’ Ponzi trading schemes to offset carbon emissions and commodify ‘ecoservices’ along with electric vehicles and an ‘energy transition’ represent a further restructuring of the capitalist economy, resulting in a shift away from a consumer oriented demand-led system.
It essentially leaves those responsible for environmental degradation at the wheel, imposing their will and their narrative on the rest of us.
Global agribusiness
Between 2000 and 2009, Indonesia supplied more than half of the global palm oil market at an annual expense of some 340,000 hectares of Indonesian countryside. Consider too that Brazil and Indonesia have spent over 100 times more in subsidies to industries that cause deforestation than they received in international conservation aid from the UN to prevent it.
These two countries gave over $40bn in subsidies to the palm oil, timber, soy, beef and biofuels sectors between 2009 and 2012, some 126 times more than the $346m they received to preserve their rain forests.
India is the world’s leading importer of palm oil, accounting for around 15% of the global supply. It imports over two-thirds of its palm oil from Indonesia.
Until the mid-1990s, India was virtually self-sufficient in edible oils. Under pressure from the World Trade Organization (WTO), import tariffs were reduced, leading to an influx of cheap (subsidised) edible oil imports that domestic farmers could not compete with. This was a deliberate policy that effectively devastated the home-grown edible oils sector and served the interests of palm oil growers and US grain and agriculture commodity company Cargill, which helped write international trade rules to secure access to the Indian market on its terms.
Indonesia leads the world in global palm oil production, but palm oil plantations have too often replaced tropical forests, leading to the killing of endangered species and the uprooting of local communities as well as contributing to the release of potential environment-damaging gases. Indonesia emits more of these gases than any country besides China and the US, largely due to the production of palm oil.
The issue of palm oil is one example from the many that could be provided to highlight how the drive to facilitate corporate need and profit trumps any notion of environmental protection or addressing any ‘climate emergency’. Whether it is in Indonesia, Latin America or elsewhere, transnational agribusiness – and the system of globalised industrial commodity crop agriculture it promotes – fuels much of the destruction we see today.
Even if the mass production of lab-created food, under the guise of ‘saving the planet’ and ‘sustainability’, becomes logistically possible (which despite all the hype is not at this stage), it may still need biomass and huge amounts of energy. Whose land will be used to grow these biomass commodities and which food crops will they replace? And will it involve that now-famous Gates’ euphemism ‘land mobility’ (farmers losing their land)?
Microsoft is already mapping Indian farmers’ lands and capturing agriculture datasets such as crop yields, weather data, farmers’ personal details, profile of land held (cadastral maps, farm size, land titles, local climatic and geographical conditions), production details (crops grown, production history, input history, quality of output, machinery in possession) and financial details (input costs, average return, credit history).
Is this an example of stakeholder-partnership capitalism, whereby a government facilitates the gathering of such information by a private player which can then use the data for developing a land market (courtesy of land law changes that the government enacts) for institutional investors at the expense of smallholder farmers who find themselves ‘land mobile’? This is a major concern among farmers and civil society in India.
Back in 2017, agribusiness giant Monsanto was judged to have engaged in practices that impinged on the basic human right to a healthy environment, the right to food and the right to health. Judges at the ‘Monsanto Tribunal’, held in The Hague, concluded that if ecocide were to be formally recognised as a crime in international criminal law, Monsanto could be found guilty.
The tribunal called for the need to assert the primacy of international human and environmental rights law. However, it was also careful to note that an existing set of legal rules serves to protect investors’ rights in the framework of the WTO and in bilateral investment treaties and in clauses in free trade agreements. These investor trade rights provisions undermine the capacity of nations to maintain policies, laws and practices protecting human rights and the environment and represent a disturbing shift in power.
The tribunal denounced the severe disparity between the rights of multinational corporations and their obligations.
While the Monsanto Tribunal judged that company to be guilty of human rights violations, including crimes against the environment, in a sense we also witnessed global capitalism on trial.
Global conglomerates can only operate as they do because of a framework designed to allow them to capture or co-opt governments and regulatory bodies and to use the WTO and bilateral trade deals to lever influence. As Jason Hickel notes in his book (previously referred to), old-style colonialism may have gone but governments in the Global North and its corporations have found new ways to assert dominance via leveraging aid, market access and ‘philanthropic’ interventions to force lower income countries to do what they want.
The World Bank’s ‘Enabling the Business of Agriculture’ and its ongoing commitment to an unjust model of globalisation is an example of this and a recipe for further plunder and the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few.
Brazil and Indonesia have subsidised private corporations to effectively destroy the environment through their practices. Canada and the UK are working with the GMO biotech sector to facilitate its needs. And India is facilitating the destruction of its agrarian base according to World Bank directives for the benefit of the likes of Corteva and Cargill.
The TRIPS Agreement, written by Monsanto, and the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, written by Cargill, was key to a new era of corporate imperialism. It came as little surprise that in 2013 India’s then Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar accused US companies of derailing the nation’s oil seeds production programme.
Powerful corporations continue to regard themselves as the owners of people, the planet and the environment and as having the right – enshrined in laws and agreements they wrote – to exploit and devastate for commercial gain.
Partnership or co-option?
It was noticeable during a debate on food and agriculture at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow that there was much talk about transforming the food system through partnerships and agreements. Fine-sounding stuff, especially when the role of agroecology and regenerative farming was mentioned.
However, if, for instance, the interests you hope to form partnerships with are coercing countries to eradicate their essential buffer food stocks then bid for such food on the global market with US dollars (as in India) or are lobbying for the enclosure of seeds through patents (as in Africa and elsewhere), then surely this deliberate deepening of dependency should be challenged; otherwise ‘partnership’ really means co-option.
Similarly, the UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) that took place during September in New York was little more than an enabler of corporate needs. The UNFSS was founded on a partnership between the UN and the World Economic Forum and was disproportionately influenced by corporate actors.
Those granted a pivotal role at the UNFSS support industrial food systems that promote ultra-processed foods, deforestation, industrial livestock production, intensive pesticide use and commodity crop monocultures, all of which cause soil deterioration, water contamination and irreversible impacts on biodiversity and human health. And this will continue as long as the environmental effects can be ‘offset’ or these practices can be twisted on the basis of them somehow being ‘climate-friendly’.
Critics of the UNFSS offer genuine alternatives to the prevailing food system. In doing so, they also provide genuine solutions to climate-related issues and food injustice based on notions of food sovereignty, localisation and a system of food cultivation deriving from agroecological principles and practices. Something which people who organised the climate summit in Glasgow would do well to bear in mind.
Current greenwashed policies are being sold by tugging at the emotional heartstrings of the public. This green agenda, with its lexicon of ‘sustainability’, ‘carbon neutrality’, ‘net-zero’ and doom-laden forecasts, is part of a programme that seeks to restructure capitalism, to create new investment markets and instruments and to return the system to viable levels of profitability.
The post Saving Capitalism or Saving the Planet? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Note: I try and keep the plates spinning in Newport-Lincoln County, where I live, write and work. So, this piece came out in the rag, The Newport News Times, a Wednesday and Friday newspaper sucking wind for sure, but still, a newspaper. This is what the community standards can take, so after this piece, I’ll comment, take out the machetes, and blaze through what it really means, Banning Books (ideas/curricula/discussion/debate/protest/public displays/thinking) .
Banning Books – An American Tradition that Should be Stopped
I cut my teeth in El Paso as a graduate TA teaching English – writing, composition, remedial reading, literature – in the early 1980s. That’s when librarians were robust, gutsy and on the front lines of free speech. They helped develop library materials and organize talks around Banned Books Week (September 26 – October 2).
I also peddled stories and books as a fiction writer, and I was the Sunday book reviewer for the El Paso Times. My raison d’être was to make sure my writing and everyone else’s was made available to me, my students and my colleagues.
Throughout the next forty years, I’ve headed up talks and readings celebrating diverse voices and works from people outside the Eurocentric dominant force in our traditional K12 and higher education arenas. Books by Caribbean, Mexican, South American, Central American, Native American, Iranian or Ethiopian writers were not just curiosities. For many of my students, reading Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Sherman Alexie or Zora Neal Hurston created a deep and long-lasting interest in their own cultures, in education, in lifelong reading and in bringing into focus the power of their own identifies reflected in others’ writing.
This year’s banned book week is tantamount to motivating as many people as possible to understand active and passive censorship.
There are entire lists of books removed from high school libraries. There are all kinds of books that are targets of school boards, parents groups, religious groups and political advocacy committees. As a writer, I know my published words are not always appreciated by a variety of readers. I write with many hats on, and in that capacity, I am able to cross the Rubicon many times: from poetry, to fiction, to essays, to polemics, to blogs, to traditional journalism, and more.
I’ve faced down bigotry and hate for books I have put on my syllabi. I have had people walk out of my readings and those of more important people like Winona LaDuke or Tim O’Brien. Walking out is one’s right, and so are bigoted diatribes.
However, stopping the publication of books and demanding books be removed is not a right. I was teaching at a state community college in Washington when I faced a student who demanded I give her an alternative text for – The Fight Club. Ironically, we looked at various themes in that book, and the writer, Chuck Palahniuk, was coming to town and opening himself up to talking with my students.
That English class included other books that got under the skin of other students and/or their parents (mind you, this was a college class, not a religious school). Bringing writers to campus and having students read their books is part and parcel what educators must do to open minds and create critical thinking.
College deans, department heads, provosts and even presidents must protect that right of freedom to read.
Yes, students in high school have a right to have a history teacher assign Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. Or a film teacher has a right to assign her under-18-year-old students, I Am Not Your Negro and Exterminate All the Brutes to delve into filmmaker Raoul Peck’s work.
Reading Fahrenheit 451 and then comparing Raymond Bradbury’s work to François Truffaut’s 1966 version or the 2018 adaptation directed by Ramin Bahrani is vital to learning. Today, cancel culture rests in identarian politics.
Misinformation campaigns around the 1619 Project or what “critical race theory” are ongoing. This muddies the water of opening up critical thinking skills for both educators and students.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman posits the future would look similar to the one depicted in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World. Postman explains that the only way to avoid this fate is to see and question what we’re seeing rather than blindly trusting the media.
Others predict a world unfolding closer to 1984, the George Orwell’s classic. Others might choose to riff with and analyze Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. All those books have been put on some school district’s banned book list: driven by a fervor seated in xenophobia, lack of understanding of what literature is, and deeply held conservative beliefs.
Cancelling out books is akin to burning them. We all know where that led the world. This year’s theme — “Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us.”
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All right, then, end of the Op-Ed for the newspaper that is in a pretty typically odd community, though Newport does have that “dichotomy”: lots of professors and researchers at the Oregon State University Hatfield Marine Sciences center, and the NOAA team posted here, and, those people from Oregon who have a few college degrees who ended up with summer homes here, now turned into full-time homes AND then the service economy, the logging industry, the fishing industry. You have to look at that, too, which is the divide in America, partially self-directed, and certainly directed by the elites, the billionaire class, the military-media-propaganda overlords.
When you see red vs blue, when you see cultural wars and the religious zealotry of the Christians, and when you have K12 so flagged and flogged, so vapid of real learning, real community- based learning, real critical thinking, then we get these divides. And, while the beautiful people, the managerial class, those in the upper income brackets far away from us, in the 80 Percent, well, they may have some Buddhist retreat or outward bound or special science camp to send their young ones, the reality is they especially, and those of us in the 80 percent, have adults and then youth and then each new brood epigenetically forced into sheeplehood and ignorance of who the enemy is, as Ralph Nader put down here:
If you think elementary, middle, and high school students know too little history, geography, and government, try asking them about the corporations that command so many hours of their day, their attention, what they consume, and their personal horizons.
Howard Zinn published A Young People’s History of the United States (2009), to go with his best-selling pioneering work, A People’s History of the United States (1980), but he didn’t do justice to all the modern corporate controls of just about every facet of American life, including educational institutions.
Today, school children are engulfed by corporate apps and software, textbooks biased toward the corporate definitions of an economy, and myths about “free markets.” For years free school materials and videos produced or sponsored by business groups, including the coal and nuclear industries, have flooded elementary classes. Our report: Hucksters in the Classroom: A Review of Industry Propaganda in Schools by Sheila Harty (1979), documented this mercantile assault on education. Students even take tests designed by corporate institutions. (DV– “Teach Youngsters about Corporatism’s Harms”)
Yes, this lack of disclosure and exposure around how curricula and school junk and colleges and university endowments are predicated on what the rich, the powerful, the gigantic, the corporations, the MIC want included and not included in teaching, books, materials, etc., it might even been worse than that.
To the left of this piece is a list of DV-recommended books. I’ve read many, and I’ve written two of them. Few people I know, however, read books, and those they do, are insipidly bad, soap opera porn, feel good and how to do/be/see/eat/cook/make money books.
Fiction, and hardcore deeply researched and lived books on China, on Mexico, on all those countries that are shit-holes in the eyes of Biden/Trump/Lesser Evils, they aren’t read by the so-called managers of democracy, the administration, the honchos-as appointed to all those governmental positions. The books aren’t read by the generals or the CEOs.
The books on really the core of the problems globally and locally are not read by the people who need to be taken to the woodshed for a real tutelage of the mind by the people who live in, say, North Korea, and know the language and have books with 80 pages works cited and endnotes.
The Zuckerberg, the USA Today, the ticker-tape of Fox-UnNews and CNN (Clinton/CIA UnNews Network) and then all the followers in media looking for less gray, fewer second and third page jumps, they are part of the problem of killing knowledge, curiosity, deep thinking and robust public arena smart dialogue.
Echo chambers, sure, the have always been there, especially if you end up in groups like the Chamber of Commerce or any group that pushes a group-think and allegiance to a narrow (usually pro Capitalist/pro Business/pro USA/ pro Empire mentality.
It only gets worse, this banned books concept. The reality is that the Newport News Times would NEVER run a piece, a long one, on people (let’s give them degrees and long titles and decent worldviews) who might be looking into lockdowns, the legality of lockdwons/lockups, the origin of DARPA jabs, the history of USA bio-poison-toxin weaponry research). NEVER.
Putting my byline on that too, as a journalist, would subject me to threats, death threats, deplatforming, and probably termination. I’d not get gigs teaching (there are not many) at the local community college. Even if I wrote the piece as traditional long-form journalism, pulling in too-man-to-count experts on virology, on vaccines, on medical procedures, on the history and politics of medicine and bioweaponry research and the illegal doings of the Big Pharma. Nope.
So, that is a form of banned books, vis-a-vis the gatekeepers, those community standards, all those aspects of Edward Bernays and Josef Goebbels concocted 9 Forms of propaganda, the one that marketers really utilize, BandWagon. 
I’ll list more of those techniques below. But, again, it is what isn’t taught, what isn’t allowed, what isn’t debated, what isn’t filmed/acted/written about that is what signifies as a ban. Think of all the books that were written, and alas, those are now gone, gone, gone.
The person who controls the spigot, the information channels, the medium for the messages, controls the narrative. Having Americans unlearn all the bad things, all the insipidly racist, retrograde, misogynistic, xenophobic, anti-people of color shit that comes across the desks of teachers, educational planners, curriculum designers and then into the folders and Google Chromebooks, that is a huge task.
Bad habits die hard, or long.
We need a 12-step program for re-centering this generation so they can breed the next and they the next of real thinkers. And I am not just come fly on the wall, or Pollyanna. I have fought hard in the colleges and universities and newsrooms and social work domains for a real sense of social justice, but also deep knowledge based thinking, and what I have come across is the dumb-downing of everything.
Sure, we can listen to Henry Giroux and Chris Hedges, but again, they’re two elites in their fields (millionaires with a small “m”). They never interview or have on their shows lesser known or unknown people on who might set the record straight.
While Hedges goes after/attacks the celebrity culture, he is still colonized by it in some form, always going to the person with laurels and with titles and books.
Yes, this a good interview, but I guarantee few like me will watch is, and the elites will never watch it:
Then, sure, Giroux and Hedges get to some facts, but again, they go for the Republican Party and the Conservatives and Rightwing Racists as their whipping posts.
They are far from knowledgeable around how poorly placed those Democrats are, those mandate fuckers, all those incredibly bad nightmarish Democratic Governors are.
CH: Welcome to On Contact. Today, we discuss the age of manufactured ignorance with the scholar, Henry Giroux.
HG: Power, when it’s invisible, becomes all the more powerful, to use that term. But I think there are two issues here for me about neoliberalism in relation to your question, that are really central. One is it operates off the assumption that there’s no such thing as social problems, that there are only individual problems. And this notion that we’re ultimately and individually responsible for everything that happens to us literally depoliticizes people because it makes incapable of translating private issues into larger, systemic considerations. So there’s this question of this really putrid notion of market-based individuals, and this inability to translate and bring together, and connect issues that would give people a full understanding of the world in which they live in, what they may be able to do about it. Particularly as it affects their everyday lives.
Show:
Yes, so much more could be written about what isn’t in the curriculum, how British Petroleum (BP, the new marketing tool after the blowout of millions of gallons of crude in the Gulf of Mexico — Deep Horizon, anyone?) designed the geology and other sciences curriculum in California. Monsanto gives money to Washington State University, so you think those departments are going to have an easy time of challenge Round-up and GMOs?
Come on — I was in Spokane, wrote about this stupidity, and alas, this is a form of censorship that takes place and never makes the news like Michael Pollan did:
A book chosen by a Washington State University committee as appropriate food for thought for all incoming freshmen will not be distributed at summer orientation after a member of the board of regents raised concerns about the work’s focus on problems associated with agribusiness.
WSU’s president said the decision to halt the “common reading” program was related to the university’s financial crisis.
In “Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,” author Michael Pollan discusses the social, political, moral and environmental implications of the food people eat.
A selection committee picked the book for this year’s WSU common reading program, which provides freshmen with a work that crosses academic disciplines and can be incorporated into study throughout the year. (source)
UPDATE: Washington State University reinstates freshman reading of ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’
Imagine, all those books taken off the shelves of public libraries. This is not just a ban To Kill a Mockingbird moment.
This is not silly, either, and Banned Books week does what it does, for sure, but, again, would Ward Churchill be invited to campus to read from one of his books, or the essay that got him un-tenured?
…what I think we’re witnessing fifty years on is consolidation of precisely the kind of entity extolled by then-U/Cal Berkeley president Clark Kerr in his 1963 book, The Uses of the University. For those unfamiliar with the tract, Kerr likened what he preferred to call “multiversities” to governmentally/corporately-owned factories—albeit, “knowledge factories”—wherein managers such as himself employed to oversee a worker force—the faculty—whose job it was to convert raw material—that is, students—into the finished product or products desired by the owners, all with maximal efficiency. Sound familiar? (Churchill)
Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2019
View the Censorship by the Numbers infographic for 2019The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 377 challenges to library, school, and university materials and services in 2019. Of the 566 books that were targeted, here are the most challenged, along with the reasons cited for censoring the books:
George by Alex Gino
Reasons: challenged, banned, restricted, and hidden to avoid controversy; for LGBTQIA+ content and a transgender character; because schools and libraries should not “put books in a child’s hand that require discussion”; for sexual references; and for conflicting with a religious viewpoint and “traditional family structure”
Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan KuklinReasons: challenged for LGBTQIA+ content, for “its effect on any young people who would read it,” and for concerns that it was sexually explicit and biased
A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo by Jill Twiss, illustrated by EG KellerReasons: challenged and vandalized for LGBTQIA+ content and political viewpoints, for concerns that it is “designed to pollute the morals of its readers,” and for not including a content warning
Sex is a Funny Word by Cory Silverberg, illustrated by Fiona Smyth
Reasons: challenged, banned, and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content; for discussing gender identity and sex education; and for concerns that the title and illustrations were “inappropriate”
Prince & Knight by Daniel Haack, illustrated by Stevie Lewis
Reasons: challenged and restricted for featuring a gay marriage and LGBTQIA+ content; for being “a deliberate attempt to indoctrinate young children” with the potential to cause confusion, curiosity, and gender dysphoria; and for conflicting with a religious viewpoint
I Am Jazz by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings, illustrated by Shelagh McNicholas
Reasons: challenged and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content, for a transgender character, and for confronting a topic that is “sensitive, controversial, and politically charged”
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Reasons: banned and challenged for profanity and for “vulgarity and sexual overtones”
Drama written and illustrated by Raina Telgemeier
Reasons: challenged for LGBTQIA+ content and for concerns that it goes against “family values/morals”
Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
Reasons: banned and forbidden from discussion for referring to magic and witchcraft, for containing actual curses and spells, and for characters that use “nefarious means” to attain goals
And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson illustrated by Henry Cole
Reason: challenged and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content
And so it goes. Imagine all the ideas stopped and flailed and all the books never written but should have been written. Imagine all the ignorance peddled by marketers, publishers, media, government, corporations. Imagine all the harm done with these lies. Wars and genocide, started and perpetrated because of knowledge and thinking bans. You think Turkey wants the Armenian Genocide in their k12 history books. Israel and the Nakba in their books? The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing in those Japanese books? Right!
Planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence used to be taught by yours truly around the consumer/retail war, the Story of Stuff. Planned and perceived obsolescence is now really agnotology, and the erasing of people, the caste systems being set loose and the Fourth Industrial Digital Gulag Revolution. No little newspaper like the one in my county will deal with these topics. Why should it when the reality is giant schools like WSU try a ban, or the papers of record, the big ones, throughout the land, to include the NYT and WaPo are in so many ways rotten to the core, in the service of the Military Congressional Industrial Complex and the billionaires and giant corporations.
Onward, to the propaganda, those Mad Men/Mad Women and the USA and EU and Capitalists Murder Incorporated!
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Note: I try and keep the plates spinning in Newport-Lincoln County, where I live, write and work. So, this piece came out in the rag, The Newport News Times, a Wednesday and Friday newspaper sucking wind for sure, but still, a newspaper. This is what the community standards can take, so after this piece, I’ll comment, take out the machetes, and blaze through what it really means, Banning Books (ideas/curricula/discussion/debate/protest/public displays/thinking) .
Banning Books – An American Tradition that Should be Stopped
I cut my teeth in El Paso as a graduate TA teaching English – writing, composition, remedial reading, literature – in the early 1980s. That’s when librarians were robust, gutsy and on the front lines of free speech. They helped develop library materials and organize talks around Banned Books Week (September 26 – October 2).
I also peddled stories and books as a fiction writer, and I was the Sunday book reviewer for the El Paso Times. My raison d’être was to make sure my writing and everyone else’s was made available to me, my students and my colleagues.
Throughout the next forty years, I’ve headed up talks and readings celebrating diverse voices and works from people outside the Eurocentric dominant force in our traditional K12 and higher education arenas. Books by Caribbean, Mexican, South American, Central American, Native American, Iranian or Ethiopian writers were not just curiosities. For many of my students, reading Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Sherman Alexie or Zora Neal Hurston created a deep and long-lasting interest in their own cultures, in education, in lifelong reading and in bringing into focus the power of their own identifies reflected in others’ writing.
This year’s banned book week is tantamount to motivating as many people as possible to understand active and passive censorship.
There are entire lists of books removed from high school libraries. There are all kinds of books that are targets of school boards, parents groups, religious groups and political advocacy committees. As a writer, I know my published words are not always appreciated by a variety of readers. I write with many hats on, and in that capacity, I am able to cross the Rubicon many times: from poetry, to fiction, to essays, to polemics, to blogs, to traditional journalism, and more.
I’ve faced down bigotry and hate for books I have put on my syllabi. I have had people walk out of my readings and those of more important people like Winona LaDuke or Tim O’Brien. Walking out is one’s right, and so are bigoted diatribes.
However, stopping the publication of books and demanding books be removed is not a right. I was teaching at a state community college in Washington when I faced a student who demanded I give her an alternative text for – The Fight Club. Ironically, we looked at various themes in that book, and the writer, Chuck Palahniuk, was coming to town and opening himself up to talking with my students.
That English class included other books that got under the skin of other students and/or their parents (mind you, this was a college class, not a religious school). Bringing writers to campus and having students read their books is part and parcel what educators must do to open minds and create critical thinking.
College deans, department heads, provosts and even presidents must protect that right of freedom to read.
Yes, students in high school have a right to have a history teacher assign Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. Or a film teacher has a right to assign her under-18-year-old students, I Am Not Your Negro and Exterminate All the Brutes to delve into filmmaker Raoul Peck’s work.
Reading Fahrenheit 451 and then comparing Raymond Bradbury’s work to François Truffaut’s 1966 version or the 2018 adaptation directed by Ramin Bahrani is vital to learning. Today, cancel culture rests in identarian politics.
Misinformation campaigns around the 1619 Project or what “critical race theory” are ongoing. This muddies the water of opening up critical thinking skills for both educators and students.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman posits the future would look similar to the one depicted in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World. Postman explains that the only way to avoid this fate is to see and question what we’re seeing rather than blindly trusting the media.
Others predict a world unfolding closer to 1984, the George Orwell’s classic. Others might choose to riff with and analyze Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. All those books have been put on some school district’s banned book list: driven by a fervor seated in xenophobia, lack of understanding of what literature is, and deeply held conservative beliefs.
Cancelling out books is akin to burning them. We all know where that led the world. This year’s theme — “Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us.”
+–+
All right, then, end of the Op-Ed for the newspaper that is in a pretty typically odd community, though Newport does have that “dichotomy”: lots of professors and researchers at the Oregon State University Hatfield Marine Sciences center, and the NOAA team posted here, and, those people from Oregon who have a few college degrees who ended up with summer homes here, now turned into full-time homes AND then the service economy, the logging industry, the fishing industry. You have to look at that, too, which is the divide in America, partially self-directed, and certainly directed by the elites, the billionaire class, the military-media-propaganda overlords.
When you see red vs blue, when you see cultural wars and the religious zealotry of the Christians, and when you have K12 so flagged and flogged, so vapid of real learning, real community- based learning, real critical thinking, then we get these divides. And, while the beautiful people, the managerial class, those in the upper income brackets far away from us, in the 80 Percent, well, they may have some Buddhist retreat or outward bound or special science camp to send their young ones, the reality is they especially, and those of us in the 80 percent, have adults and then youth and then each new brood epigenetically forced into sheeplehood and ignorance of who the enemy is, as Ralph Nader put down here:
If you think elementary, middle, and high school students know too little history, geography, and government, try asking them about the corporations that command so many hours of their day, their attention, what they consume, and their personal horizons.
Howard Zinn published A Young People’s History of the United States (2009), to go with his best-selling pioneering work, A People’s History of the United States (1980), but he didn’t do justice to all the modern corporate controls of just about every facet of American life, including educational institutions.
Today, school children are engulfed by corporate apps and software, textbooks biased toward the corporate definitions of an economy, and myths about “free markets.” For years free school materials and videos produced or sponsored by business groups, including the coal and nuclear industries, have flooded elementary classes. Our report: Hucksters in the Classroom: A Review of Industry Propaganda in Schools by Sheila Harty (1979), documented this mercantile assault on education. Students even take tests designed by corporate institutions. (DV– “Teach Youngsters about Corporatism’s Harms”)
Yes, this lack of disclosure and exposure around how curricula and school junk and colleges and university endowments are predicated on what the rich, the powerful, the gigantic, the corporations, the MIC want included and not included in teaching, books, materials, etc., it might even been worse than that.
To the left of this piece is a list of DV-recommended books. I’ve read many, and I’ve written two of them. Few people I know, however, read books, and those they do, are insipidly bad, soap opera porn, feel good and how to do/be/see/eat/cook/make money books.
Fiction, and hardcore deeply researched and lived books on China, on Mexico, on all those countries that are shit-holes in the eyes of Biden/Trump/Lesser Evils, they aren’t read by the so-called managers of democracy, the administration, the honchos-as appointed to all those governmental positions. The books aren’t read by the generals or the CEOs.
The books on really the core of the problems globally and locally are not read by the people who need to be taken to the woodshed for a real tutelage of the mind by the people who live in, say, North Korea, and know the language and have books with 80 pages works cited and endnotes.
The Zuckerberg, the USA Today, the ticker-tape of Fox-UnNews and CNN (Clinton/CIA UnNews Network) and then all the followers in media looking for less gray, fewer second and third page jumps, they are part of the problem of killing knowledge, curiosity, deep thinking and robust public arena smart dialogue.
Echo chambers, sure, the have always been there, especially if you end up in groups like the Chamber of Commerce or any group that pushes a group-think and allegiance to a narrow (usually pro Capitalist/pro Business/pro USA/ pro Empire mentality.
It only gets worse, this banned books concept. The reality is that the Newport News Times would NEVER run a piece, a long one, on people (let’s give them degrees and long titles and decent worldviews) who might be looking into lockdowns, the legality of lockdwons/lockups, the origin of DARPA jabs, the history of USA bio-poison-toxin weaponry research). NEVER.
Putting my byline on that too, as a journalist, would subject me to threats, death threats, deplatforming, and probably termination. I’d not get gigs teaching (there are not many) at the local community college. Even if I wrote the piece as traditional long-form journalism, pulling in too-man-to-count experts on virology, on vaccines, on medical procedures, on the history and politics of medicine and bioweaponry research and the illegal doings of the Big Pharma. Nope.
So, that is a form of banned books, vis-a-vis the gatekeepers, those community standards, all those aspects of Edward Bernays and Josef Goebbels concocted 9 Forms of propaganda, the one that marketers really utilize, BandWagon.
I’ll list more of those techniques below. But, again, it is what isn’t taught, what isn’t allowed, what isn’t debated, what isn’t filmed/acted/written about that is what signifies as a ban. Think of all the books that were written, and alas, those are now gone, gone, gone.
The person who controls the spigot, the information channels, the medium for the messages, controls the narrative. Having Americans unlearn all the bad things, all the insipidly racist, retrograde, misogynistic, xenophobic, anti-people of color shit that comes across the desks of teachers, educational planners, curriculum designers and then into the folders and Google Chromebooks, that is a huge task.
Bad habits die hard, or long.
We need a 12-step program for re-centering this generation so they can breed the next and they the next of real thinkers. And I am not just come fly on the wall, or Pollyanna. I have fought hard in the colleges and universities and newsrooms and social work domains for a real sense of social justice, but also deep knowledge based thinking, and what I have come across is the dumb-downing of everything.
Sure, we can listen to Henry Giroux and Chris Hedges, but again, they’re two elites in their fields (millionaires with a small “m”). They never interview or have on their shows lesser known or unknown people on who might set the record straight.
While Hedges goes after/attacks the celebrity culture, he is still colonized by it in some form, always going to the person with laurels and with titles and books.
Yes, this a good interview, but I guarantee few like me will watch is, and the elites will never watch it:
Then, sure, Giroux and Hedges get to some facts, but again, they go for the Republican Party and the Conservatives and Rightwing Racists as their whipping posts.
They are far from knowledgeable around how poorly placed those Democrats are, those mandate fuckers, all those incredibly bad nightmarish Democratic Governors are.
CH: Welcome to On Contact. Today, we discuss the age of manufactured ignorance with the scholar, Henry Giroux.
HG: Power, when it’s invisible, becomes all the more powerful, to use that term. But I think there are two issues here for me about neoliberalism in relation to your question, that are really central. One is it operates off the assumption that there’s no such thing as social problems, that there are only individual problems. And this notion that we’re ultimately and individually responsible for everything that happens to us literally depoliticizes people because it makes incapable of translating private issues into larger, systemic considerations. So there’s this question of this really putrid notion of market-based individuals, and this inability to translate and bring together, and connect issues that would give people a full understanding of the world in which they live in, what they may be able to do about it. Particularly as it affects their everyday lives.
Show:
Yes, so much more could be written about what isn’t in the curriculum, how British Petroleum (BP, the new marketing tool after the blowout of millions of gallons of crude in the Gulf of Mexico — Deep Horizon, anyone?) designed the geology and other sciences curriculum in California. Monsanto gives money to Washington State University, so you think those departments are going to have an easy time of challenge Round-up and GMOs?
Come on — I was in Spokane, wrote about this stupidity, and alas, this is a form of censorship that takes place and never makes the news like Michael Pollan did:
A book chosen by a Washington State University committee as appropriate food for thought for all incoming freshmen will not be distributed at summer orientation after a member of the board of regents raised concerns about the work’s focus on problems associated with agribusiness.
WSU’s president said the decision to halt the “common reading” program was related to the university’s financial crisis.
In “Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,” author Michael Pollan discusses the social, political, moral and environmental implications of the food people eat.
A selection committee picked the book for this year’s WSU common reading program, which provides freshmen with a work that crosses academic disciplines and can be incorporated into study throughout the year. (source)
UPDATE: Washington State University reinstates freshman reading of ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’
Imagine, all those books taken off the shelves of public libraries. This is not just a ban To Kill a Mockingbird moment.
This is not silly, either, and Banned Books week does what it does, for sure, but, again, would Ward Churchill be invited to campus to read from one of his books, or the essay that got him un-tenured?
…what I think we’re witnessing fifty years on is consolidation of precisely the kind of entity extolled by then-U/Cal Berkeley president Clark Kerr in his 1963 book, The Uses of the University. For those unfamiliar with the tract, Kerr likened what he preferred to call “multiversities” to governmentally/corporately-owned factories—albeit, “knowledge factories”—wherein managers such as himself employed to oversee a worker force—the faculty—whose job it was to convert raw material—that is, students—into the finished product or products desired by the owners, all with maximal efficiency. Sound familiar? (Churchill)
Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2019
View the Censorship by the Numbers infographic for 2019The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 377 challenges to library, school, and university materials and services in 2019. Of the 566 books that were targeted, here are the most challenged, along with the reasons cited for censoring the books:
George by Alex Gino
Reasons: challenged, banned, restricted, and hidden to avoid controversy; for LGBTQIA+ content and a transgender character; because schools and libraries should not “put books in a child’s hand that require discussion”; for sexual references; and for conflicting with a religious viewpoint and “traditional family structure”
Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan KuklinReasons: challenged for LGBTQIA+ content, for “its effect on any young people who would read it,” and for concerns that it was sexually explicit and biased
A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo by Jill Twiss, illustrated by EG KellerReasons: challenged and vandalized for LGBTQIA+ content and political viewpoints, for concerns that it is “designed to pollute the morals of its readers,” and for not including a content warning
Sex is a Funny Word by Cory Silverberg, illustrated by Fiona Smyth
Reasons: challenged, banned, and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content; for discussing gender identity and sex education; and for concerns that the title and illustrations were “inappropriate”
Prince & Knight by Daniel Haack, illustrated by Stevie Lewis
Reasons: challenged and restricted for featuring a gay marriage and LGBTQIA+ content; for being “a deliberate attempt to indoctrinate young children” with the potential to cause confusion, curiosity, and gender dysphoria; and for conflicting with a religious viewpoint
I Am Jazz by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings, illustrated by Shelagh McNicholas
Reasons: challenged and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content, for a transgender character, and for confronting a topic that is “sensitive, controversial, and politically charged”
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Reasons: banned and challenged for profanity and for “vulgarity and sexual overtones”
Drama written and illustrated by Raina Telgemeier
Reasons: challenged for LGBTQIA+ content and for concerns that it goes against “family values/morals”
Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
Reasons: banned and forbidden from discussion for referring to magic and witchcraft, for containing actual curses and spells, and for characters that use “nefarious means” to attain goals
And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson illustrated by Henry Cole
Reason: challenged and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content
And so it goes. Imagine all the ideas stopped and flailed and all the books never written but should have been written. Imagine all the ignorance peddled by marketers, publishers, media, government, corporations. Imagine all the harm done with these lies. Wars and genocide, started and perpetrated because of knowledge and thinking bans. You think Turkey wants the Armenian Genocide in their k12 history books. Israel and the Nakba in their books? The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing in those Japanese books? Right!
Planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence used to be taught by yours truly around the consumer/retail war, the Story of Stuff. Planned and perceived obsolescence is now really agnotology, and the erasing of people, the caste systems being set loose and the Fourth Industrial Digital Gulag Revolution. No little newspaper like the one in my county will deal with these topics. Why should it when the reality is giant schools like WSU try a ban, or the papers of record, the big ones, throughout the land, to include the NYT and WaPo are in so many ways rotten to the core, in the service of the Military Congressional Industrial Complex and the billionaires and giant corporations.
Onward, to the propaganda, those Mad Men/Mad Women and the USA and EU and Capitalists Murder Incorporated!
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
If you think elementary, middle, and high school students know too little history, geography, and government, try asking them about the corporations that command so many hours of their day, their attention, what they consume, and their personal horizons.
Howard Zinn published A Young People’s History of the United States (2009), to go with his best-selling pioneering work, A People’s History of the United States (1980), but he didn’t do justice to all the modern corporate controls of just about every facet of American life, including educational institutions.
Today, school children are engulfed by corporate apps and software, textbooks biased toward the corporate definitions of an economy, and myths about “free markets.” For years free school materials and videos produced or sponsored by business groups, including the coal and nuclear industries, have flooded elementary classes. Our report: Hucksters in the Classroom: A Review of Industry Propaganda in Schools by Sheila Harty (1979), documented this mercantile assault on education. Students even take tests designed by corporate institutions.
Eleven-year olds have asked me “What is a corporation?” Teenagers ask, “What’s corporate crime?” or “What’s a company union?” These are the same youngsters who click on the handcuffing fine-print contracts of internet companies that own social media apps such as Instagram and TikTok. These are the same youngsters who are lied to daily by corporations about harmful junk foods and drugs, and whose parents overwhelmingly work in anti-union offices and factories.
Forget about students knowing or learning about “The Commons,” although they listen to music broadcast on the public airwaves and probably have visited a national park. (For more on The Commons see: Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons by David Bollier). Students haven’t studied “corporate welfare,” even though taxpaying parents subsidize these government giveaways, handouts, and bailouts to demanding, mismanaged, or criminal corporations with power.
Schools forever have separated students from giant slices of reality – historical and contemporary. Much of this ignored or distorted reality shapes present conditions, such as the various controls of the many by the few. But today’s corporate plutocracy is at a different level of penetration altogether. Shucking past taboos, corporate marketeers hard sell directly to children bypassing or undermining parental authority. What they sell is obesity, diabetes, promiscuity, dangerous addictions and violence in their merciless “entertainment programs” and narratives about armed force, however illegal it may be.
In terms of sheer time, range of exposure, and planned peer group pressures, corporations are raising our children day and night. Big companies do strategic planning about everything affecting our children. There are no longer adequate limits and boundaries on corporatism or protections of commercial-free zones.
It’s getting worse. Eyewear for “augmented reality” from Facebook and rapidly expanding “artificial intelligence” induce dependency and more sedentary living. People from Bill Joy to Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk have strongly warned about these emerging technologies and the consequential loss of freedom and democracy.
I’d like to invite some open-minded educators to consider a six-hour curricula for late middle school through high school students on the modern global corporation. Hour One could be called “Big Corporations are Different from You and Me” illuminating this fast-dominating “artificial person” with all the rights of real humans yet structurally escaping from responsibility, a status of “privileges and immunities” under corporate law[lessness].
Hour Two could be devoted to the history of corporate power so heavily characterized by the costs of their amassing wealth – costs to workers, communities, small businesses, voters, consumers, patients, our governing ways, and, yes, students. Having been told repeatedly about how companies “built America,” students should learn about all the “NOs.” Corporations were operationally entrenched against the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, union organizing, the minimum wage, universal health insurance, early solar energy, mass transit, public campaign financing, and governmental institutions accountable to the citizenry. The most recent big “NOs” are against consumer, labor, and environmental justice and, of course, waging peace instead of forever wars of mayhem and profit have filled volumes of documentation.
Hour Three might run students through all the attempts and reforms by the American people to reign in the destructive, unjust excesses of large companies and their controlling ideology of corporatism. What were the results from all those widespread protests, regulatory actions, prosecutions, and electoral reforms? What are the successes of the peace movement, environmental groups and initiatives by workers, consumers, creators, and defenders of The Commons, (such as the public lands and public airwaves), investors and savers for justice and the common good? What happened to the corporate tax system, the drive for shareholder rights and corporate democracy and, most importantly, the rule of law over corporate power?
Hour Four, Hour Five, and Hour Six – well, to be continued. That is, if we hear from people interested enough in having this proposal described further.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A novel coronavirus, deadly and unnecessary lockdowns, civil unrest, political division, economic crises, a rise in mental health issues — the list goes on and on and on. Since March 2020, most of the world has suffered immensely in one way or another. But, amidst the madness, there is room for gratitude. More specifically, I’m suggesting we should be grateful for who and what has been exposed over the past 18 months or so.
6 Reasons to Feel Grateful During Covid
1. EXPOSED: Science and Medicine
If you ever had a doubt that these two “institutions” were hotbeds of corruption and greed, the response to Covid-19 surely cleared things up for you. Everything — from social distancing to masks to vaccines to variants to other treatments being demonized and beyond — was a poorly constructed lie.
2. EXPOSED: Corporations
The biggest money grab in history, #woke opportunism, support for mandates, and so much more. All their rainbow flags and BLM banners can’t change who they are (and have always been).
3. EXPOSED: Government
It’s a well-worn script: A crisis unfolds and elected officials — across the ideological spectrum — exploit it to enhance their power. If you were unsure whether or not any politician could be trusted, you now have your answer.
4. EXPOSED: The #woke Left
The same clowns who once marched against Monsanto are now shilling for Moderna. Plus: Censorship, support for mandates, hypocrisy, thought control, groupthink… need I go on?
5. EXPOSED: Media and Social Media
All media outlets and social media platforms — regardless of their ostensible “narrative” — are nothing more than AI-assisted stenographers to power.
6. EXPOSED: The General Population
Before Covid, did you ever wonder how your friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, etc., would respond to a genuine (or manufactured) crisis? Well… take a good look around. Most of them, it seems, will follow orders and respect authority without question. They’ll willingly abdicate their autonomy, enthusiastically volunteer to be lab rats, and ruthlessly turn on anyone who doesn’t march in lockstep. They will embrace totalitarianism and surrender their freedoms in exchange for the illusion of safety. So, yeah… now you know.
I’m thankful that so many people and institutions in my life have clarified who they are and how they behave under duress. To connect with like-minded and open-minded comrades, you are required to move on from those seeking to harm you or, at least, hold you back. You know exactly who they are because they’ve openly exposed that they do not have your best interests at heart.
In order to move forward in a positive and powerful way, it’s essential to know where you stand in relation to others. If you wish to continue growing, learning, and evolving, you must be willing to see and accept what’s going on. Translation: You must reclaim the subversive pleasure of thinking for yourself. #gratitude.
The post 6 Reasons to Feel Grateful During Covid first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
I like to get down to brass tacks, into the muck, since I have been in on all aspects of academia and journalism, environmental activism, literary arts, and social work. I’m not pulling some trump card here, but in my more than six decades of confronting these amazingly dead-from-the-head-up members of the 80 percent, and those of the 20 percent, I have seen the complete shut down of discourse, critical thinking and shame.
They really do not care about their people. They really do not care about their patients. They really do not care about their troopers. They really do not care about their students. They really do not care about the homeless, the women in Afghanistan, the Blacks Lives, and all the other BIPOC folk. Crocodile tears and thespian performances do not equate to caring for people. This country, and the West in general, is one giant stage of actors and actresses.
It doesn’t matter if it is Kamala Harris, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, Macron-Johnson-Trudeau, no matter who is in the acting part, they do not care about the homeless, the disabused, the marginalized.
It could be Howard Stern one moment giving nationwide bits of perverted advice, or it could be the head of the teachers’ union, Randi Weingarten, or it could be the head of the CDC, Microsoft, Apple, FDA, CIA, ICE, ATF, FBI, NAACP, ACLU, no matter, but they all have their limits toward basic freedoms and rights. One day a hero, but the next day scum.
I am talking about the mandates, the hard rule of outcasting, caste creation, and new stitched-on scarlet letters (a la digital dashboards). What is going on while the divide and conquer chatter and discord unfolds on corporate media and in the boardrooms of major and minor companies, in schools, universities, state, county, city agencies, and with the feds, while we watch sports, await Broadway opening up, line up for cruise ships, and eat-drink-&-be-merry in La-La Land.
The reality is clear — there are so many ways to disenfranchise the lot of us: Those who want to stop the mandated experimental jabs, the mandates for useless masks, the absurdity of social distancing and quarantines. Those of us who want robust discourse. Those of us who want to look at the evidence. Those of us who want to uncover the subterfuge. There are great pieces of journalism and deep and passionate opinion pieces on all of this — DARPA, WEF, Fauci, gain of function, Event 201, Dark Winter, and Fourth Industrial Revolution. More. However, when you get into the day to day weeds, with our jobs, our workplaces, with those administrators, things are not looking great.
I had the sickly unhealthy luxury of getting in on a huge national web call/Zoom with a major Human Resources management service, talking about what the thousands of companies they represent can do to force employees to go under the knife, err, jab. These people — your bloody neighbors, the soccer moms, the camping dads, the aunts who take the kids to museums, the grandfathers who have backyard gardens — are none other than the complete embodiment of Eichmann. The Eichmann Syndrome.
These are the $400,000 a year professional managerial class (sic) people running the HR departments, looking at the three major airlines (swooning over them) for the jab mandates — everything from weekly testing AND a $200 a month additional premium to health insurance, to allowing for a religious exemption for a vaccine (sic) but with unpaid forced leave. Whirlpool, man, bribing a $1000 for each employee now to go under the jab.
These HR people are looking at distinguishing jabbed from unjabbed, and they are utilizing all those HR tools in their toolboxes, thankful of the monopolies and big corporations for blazing the trail to take away the right to a livelihood, to informed consent, to travel, to basic human interchanges. They are writing the rules now as I write this around those of us who “get Covid and have to leave work,” but they are sly Eichmanns, as they are nuancing of the new normal of FMLA (family and medical leave act) laws, paid time off for recovery or hospitalization around Covid. They want to make it impossible to live on planet earth without subjugating oneself to the jab . . . and I mean, JABS, since booster x has a human biophysical life of three months, so bring on the Covid 18-pack. The bottom line is, today, September 14 will be harkening in a very different world in a month.
The lawyers are working long and hard to force the jab, to force employees to bend and falter, in order to kick out as many miscreants as possible. This is what your large HR groups are talking about as we debate Saudi Arabia, or 9/11, and as we look at the Continuous Wars, and as we look at cops down under pounding grannies’ heads for coming out to protest.
Typical HR booklets: Case Study: Protecting & Defending Intellectual Property; 5 Measures to Battle Construction Site Theft; Cybertheft & Participant Accounts: A Fiduciary Responsibility?; 6 Best Practices for Fraud Prevention; From Seed to Sale On-Demand Webinar Series: COVID-19 and Cannabis Operations. You get the picture: all about protecting the company, the rich folk, the administrators, stockholders, et al.
Yet the partisan pattern persists throughout, with Democratic majorities favoring vaccine passports in nearly every situation (from 53 percent for indoor drinking and dining to 77 percent for international travel) and at least a plurality of Republicans opposing them (from 48 percent for international travel to 65 percent for indoor drinking and dining). Stores are the only venue where more Democrats oppose vaccine passports (40 percent) than favor them (37 percent).
Sensing a political minefield, the Biden administration has so far deflected the issue of vaccine passports, vowing only to provide guidance for nongovernment initiatives in the days ahead.
“The government is not now nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said Tuesday. “There will be no federal vaccinations database and no federal mandate requiring everyone to obtain a single vaccination credential.”
Yet the Yahoo News/YouGov poll suggests the White House could, in theory, play some role in the process. Asked whether “the U.S. government” — as opposed to U.S. businesses — should require “Americans to provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination before participating in certain higher risk activities (travel, concerts, sports games, etc.),” more Americans say yes (46 percent) than no (37 percent).
It’s as if people somehow thought the neoliberals, the democrats, the polite ones, the freaks of nanny statism, would somehow just stick to LGBTQA and transgender bathrooms issues (not). It is the tyranny of stupidity, and I have mentioned this in many pieces here and elsewhere, when you deny authority, when you question the paradigms, when you go up against administrators, college presidents, social services nonprofit CEO poverty pimps, well, the price is more than ostracizing and triangulating. It is the social isolation of the castes these people have set out, in their professional managerial class power.
You don’t need to lecture someone like me on the dirty dirt of republicans, at the governor level, on down. They are despicable. Yes, I am with groups who are against mandates, forced medical experiments on people that contain right wing religious freaks, and cops and fire fighters. These — right wing religious zealots, cops/pigs and overpaid firefighters — they are contrary to almost everything I have fought for, and they have been the despicable ones, too.
This is not a provocative image, pre-Covid:
But it is now. Imagine this image: But, of course, the dude on the right, well, he has zero concept of communism, but alas, these are strange times — leftists fighting the Draconian measures aligning with, well, cops and dudes like that — “the final variant is called communism.” Funny stuff, since the variants are all about capitalism, and the final conclusion to all this is about the point zero zero one percent riding roughshod over us, with the help of their elites and the Eichmanns. Those communist countries like Cuba and China have, well, non-mRNA true vaccines. But, little do they know, these AmeriKKKans.
This person below, well, both, are really part and parcel of the fascism that has been unleashed in USA in several iterations, and following US Patriot Act and the forced shoe donning at airports, we as a country are insipidly inane and accepting of all the wrong kinds of authority. Now, with the dementia democrats in office, the blue bloods, we are now forced to fall under their thumbs, and follow the science religion of a very suspect, dead-end route.
HR So, this meeting I snuck into, with HR fantastics swooning over Walmart’s vaccine policies and the “joints for vaccination” schemes, they are the people I have been warning my students and homeless clients and veterans and others about in order to learn from and defeat. This Rochelle is a monster in so many ways, and Fauci is too. We can’t even get one day of a Lancet article by two former FDA heads without Saint Fauci chiming in —
The current evidence on COVID-19 vaccines does not appear to support a need for booster shots in the general public right now, according to an international group of vaccine scientists, including some from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization.
The current evidence on COVID-19 vaccines does not appear to support a need for booster shots in the general public right now, according to an international group of vaccine scientists, including some from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization.
“Current evidence does not, therefore, appear to show a need for boosting in the general population, in which efficacy against severe disease remains high,” the scientists write in a new opinion piece, published Monday in the medical journal The Lancet.
The authors of the paper include two senior FDA vaccine leaders, Dr. Philip Krause and Marion Gruber, who will be stepping down in October and November, the FDA announced late last month. No further details were released about their retirements, although they sparked questions about whether the departures would affect the agency’s work.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Two senior leaders in the US Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine review office are stepping down, even as the agency works toward high-profile decisions around Covid-19 vaccine approvals, authorizations for younger children and booster shots.
But Fauci is now attacking these two who wrote in the Lancet their concerns, and they are not anti-vaccination folk. Speaking of the Lancet: —
A shocking admission by the editor of the world’s most respected medical journal, The Lancet, is saying that medical research is UNRELIABLE AT BEST IF NOT COMPLETELY BOGUS! Lancet editor, Richard Horton “… states bluntly that major pharmaceutical companies falsify or manipulate tests on the health, safety and effectiveness of their various drugs by taking samples too small to be statistically meaningful or hiring test labs or scientists where the lab or scientist has blatant conflicts of interest such as pleasing the drug company to get further grants.”
This statement ties in perfectly with the article we have had on our website and been recommending for almost five years now from the World’s Leading Expert on Medical Research, Dr. John Ioanidis from Greece. Dr. Ioannidis told the Atlantic Monthly in an article titled “Lies, Damn Lies, and Medical Science” that 90% of medical research is tainted if not outright bogus due to influence from the industry. (source)
But the HR consultants who charge millions for their services (sic) to companies on what to do with employees, with all the vagaries of those darned dirty and messy real people, now under the Covid Stain of Fascism, they all got their jabs because they are compliant, and they make individually amazing amounts of money for their, well, services. These are the dream hoarders, the true believers in taking as many rights away from people vis-à-vis workplace rules, regulations, laws, steps, credos, trainings, and more, to the point of creating entire legions of, well, the untouchables, the unhireables, terminated for noncompliance. These are mean folk, Hillary and Obama and Biden loving folk:
Obama, the dance man, 60th b-day party, during Covid Maskless Madness?
This is it for the great masses, as the screws get screwed down tighter and harder each minute. The news is vapid, and the depth of coverage on almost anything is boiler plate or pre-ordained by the commercial media honchos. And this is the final nail in the coffin for teachers,
To all of my American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union brothers and sisters across America I call upon you RIGHT NOW to immediately LEAVE THE AFT in protest as a moral obligation.
Randi Weingarten HAS FIRED ALL UNVACCINATED STAFF IN ALL AFT FACILITIES ACROSS THE COUNTRY.
So that’s not teachers, that’s secretaries, accountants, lawyers, custodians, doormen, etc…
I personally can and will NEVER return to the AFT as long as Randi is president and as long as this segregationist policy is in place.
The issue of AFT membership is no longer about what AFT does and doesn’t do FOR US as educators, it is now much bigger than that. IF you continue to pay dues to the AFT you are financially supporting a blatantly discriminatory and corrupt multi-million dollar organization.
Please stop supporting them right now. Vote with your money AND LEAVE THE AFT NOW! This is bigger than whether or not YOU still have a PCR testing option at your job or not. This is about choosing your side — do you stand with rank-&-file workers who choose to make their own medical decisions? OR do you stand with the biosecurity state?
Giving even one DIME to the AFT is supporting the biosecurity state. End that support right now!
Please spread this far and wide to all AFT members. We will post at our webaite very soon.
All the best;
I don’t know what else to say, since so much of what is behind the biosecurity state, the mandates, all of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is tied to high tech and surveillance capitalism, much of which comes from the bowels of military, Israel, the chosen few.
In the final act of the 2011 film “Contagion,” people wore bar-coded wristbands to prove they had been inoculated against the deadly, pandemic virus. But in 2021, of course, the vaccinated will be able to use a blockchain-powered smartphone app, according to IBM and Salesforce.
The two tech giants are partnering up to help businesses and public spaces smoothly reopen as newly authorized COVID-19 vaccines become more available by integrating IBM’s Digital Health Pass with Salesforce’s web-based employee management platform.
“At the start of the pandemic, many organizations deployed simple COVID-19 screenings, such as self-reported health surveys, to support re-entry to workplaces and other institutions,” said Paul Roma, general manager of IBM Watson Health.
And this is not about health safety, about a shot passport. This is about moving everything into those HR digital libraries, containing background checks, drug screenings, mortgage records, all addresses lived at, court records, education records, criminal records, defaults on loans, credit reports, and, no, not too far fetched, an entire digital library of things written-snapped-photographer-tweeted-downloaded on the World Wide Web. And yet, again, just one little hour listening to the HR wonks talk about all the great things companies can do to coerce, cajole, conspire, contain, and co-opt their employees into doing anything: first the jab, and next some cool nanoparticle atomized air product, to calm the masses, to get more productivity, to erase emotions, what have you.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Photo by Jarr1520;
Strategy of reward and punishment
In the newly coined so-called War on Covid, the arsenal is eclectic. There is not only science, in the form of experimental RNA vaccines hastily developed by giants of the pharmaceutical industry, but also semi-authoritarian or full-blown authoritarian government measures imposed and legally validated by declarations of states of emergencies. The panoply of edicts include mandatory face masks indoor and sometime outdoor, depending on the country; enforced or unenforced social distancing recommendations; limitation of public or even private gatherings; and more drastic measures like lock-downs and curfews.
The crescendo of assaults on personal liberties eased up for a few months, but governments are now using, because of the spread of the Delta variant, the threats of reinstating their coercion as an insidious blackmail to force people to get vaccinated. In other words, if one has the temerity to refuse the salvation brought by Big Pharma’s vaccines, life shall be so extremely problematic and isolated as almost to make one a social pariah. In France President Macron is defining a new ideology that could be called semi-authoritarian neoliberalism, while in the Philippines neofascist Duarte is entirely blunt in his approach. Regardless, both politicians have the same goal: to get their entire population vaccinated. They use a strategy of psychological warfare based on reward and punishment, a bit similar to that used on lab mice.
Photo by Robert Muller
In the case of Macron, the reward for the good and fully vaccinated French citizens is that they will carry, as a badge of honor, a Pass Sanitaire. The misfits, refuseniks, pesky bad citizens who still refuse to see the light and comply, will receive punishments. These bad French apples will be deprived from travel except in their own vehicles, and from cultural events like concerts, movies and museum exhibits.
Duarte’s fascist approach, if more brutal, is in a sense a bit more honest. It is still about manipulating his population with the rewards versus punishments principle, but there are many sticks and basically no carrots. Case in point: Duarte is seriously considering locking up in their homes those Filipinos who refuse to be vaccinated. One can only wonder what will happen to the vast homeless population in the Philippines.
Photo by Grey Area
Vaccines, the universal silver bullet
Covid management styles and policies have been diverse in tone and strategies, but it seems that governments worldwide are all watching, then mimicking, at times, each other’s minor achievements to avoid major failures. Only one question is on their minds, which seems to be the universal governmental panacea, independently of ideology: how do we get the entire population vaccinated?
In the more sophisticated media manipulation of Western democracies, the secondary questions are as follows. How do we convince the citizenry that the coercive measures put in place nearly 18 months ago, in a quasi entirely undemocratic fashion by decrees etc., were gently forced on people for their own good rather than in an attempt to avoid a global economic collapse? And further, how do we persuade them that these measures will be entirely lifted one day to go back to an almost mythological happy pre-Covid world?
In other words, how can leaders, with varying degrees of incompetence and undisclosed ties to giant global corporate interests, make people believe that they are acting for the common good rather than to avoid a global stock market crash? Altruism and the collective social good rarely guide the paths of politicians anywhere, and citizens in large numbers have finally caught on to this reality.
People have become more doubtful about what they are told, either directly by their elected officials, or through mainstream media outlets via so-called experts charged with propagating — yes, like propaganda — the government narrative with powerful bullhorns, and sort of carpet-bombing people’s brains with a relentless coverage of the immense danger of Covid, especially the brand new Delta variant, and the great virtue of vaccines as being almost 92 percent accurate silver bullets against the pandemic.
Unfortunately, a one-note intrusive narrative eventually has an undesired effect on a fragment of the population. This is precisely what is going on in France since Macron made the choice, which could be fatal to his political future, to jam through parliament, in the middle of the summer holidays, a law infamously called Pass Sanitaire, to blackmail French people into mandatory vaccination. Many opponents perceive it as a pass to submission, and they have decided to make their voices heard, loud and clear, in the streets. Will this movement of dissent be long lived, contagious to other countries, or ultimately twisted and hijacked for a political purpose? This is so far a question in limbo. The large scale protests, however, were unexpected.
Illustration by Mike Finn
A smoke screen to mask climate collapse
A year ago the Covid-19 pandemic accounted for about 75 percent of the media coverage across the board worldwide. This alone, if a virus could have been granted the Person of the Year award from Time Magazine, would have assured it the coveted price. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won person of the year in 2020, but if it had been Creature of the Year, SARS-CoV-2 would have won. As matter of fact, one can easily argue that without the Covid crisis, Donald Trump would have likely been reelected. In political, sociological, and economic affairs, the microorganism has been a game changer.
So far, Covid has not been a seed of much needed social change but instead has been used as a nasty new tool for disaster capitalism to thrive by changing some fundamental economic parameters, as well as serve as a powerful device to concentrate wealth. What could be better for capitalism than to convince taxpayers that their money needs to be injected by the trillions into corporate conglomerates? Across the world, in all the COVID-19 stimulus funding schemes, the lion share went to corporations while private citizens got the crumbs. Wall Street should have crashed but didn’t, because vast amounts of public funds were pumped into the global financial markets. Airlines that were saved from bankruptcy by a Covid bail out should have been nationalized; instead Air France, for example, remained a private company with an overpaid CEO while France’s government became a bigger share holder.
The bait and switch worked on a global scale. It worked with the financial aspect, just like it worked in the semantic of fear. For the media, it’s all about key words. Some might have noticed that at first it was COVID-19, then it became simply Covid, but now, probably because the word’s traction is wearing off, governments or corporate-controlled outlets have switched to Delta variant. It is today’s winner in the fear factor department, and it is repeated ad nauseam. This element of constant fear has established a nice level of docility in a majority of the global population, as well as a numbing anxiety focused on the narrow topic of the pandemic, and the easy vaccine fix proposed by governments.
The cloud of anxiety has obstructed from many the clarity that WE, as a species, face a threat much greater than a virus. How gullible many of us might be to believe that a pandemic, which so far has killed a quarter of the number of victims of the Spanish flu 100 years ago, is more of an existential threat than the unfolding climate collapse? It is pathetic and ironic for governments and their media servants to use a pandemic as a smoke screen for a much bigger problem, especially when a substantial potion of Earth is currently being consumed by fires.
Photo by Glenn Lewis
Last time I checked, 800 wild fires were burning in Italy, Turkey was scorched, the US northwest was still burning, Greece was baking with a 45 degree Celsius temperature, Siberia had been burning for months, and there were killer floods in Germany and China. Meanwhile, the so-called climate experts on mainstream media hardly connected these climate crisis events. They barely connected the dots between extreme weather events and catastrophic climate change by softly saying “isolated extreme weather events could be a manifestation of global climate change.” It shouldn’t be “could be” but are; it shouldn’t be “climate change” but climate crisis. The global fear of Covid is highly lucrative. By contrast a fear of climate collapse — or actually a recognition of its imminence — would lead people to reject the global capitalist system that is driving our species into the abyss. It would lead human societies away from consumption and toward zero-growth economies and population models that would deal capitalism a fatal blow.
Photo by Ian Sanderson
We have more or less collectively experienced, since March 2020, a life of fear and a sort of lingering collective anxiety. Fear is usually correlated with a reduction of critical thinking and greatly diminished opposition against the abuse of authority.
The protests in France show that fear can lose ground. Citizens do not have to surrender their fundamental rights of freedom and liberty to the whim of governmental authority based on semi-valid cognitive notions, or purely arbitrary ones, at times absurd, which appear to serve an agenda foreign to the common good. Popular resistance, whatever forms it may take in France and elsewhere, is always a viable option. At critical times in history it even becomes a civic duty.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
I am of the opinion that people have the right to decide whether to accept vaccines or not, especially since these are experimental vaccines … My concern is I know there are risks but we don’t have access to the data … We don’t really have the information we need to make a reasonable decision.
— Dr. Robert Malone, “Inventor of mRNA Interviewed About Injection Dangers“
No, it is not the sky is falling overreach. Any leftist worth her or his understanding of Capitalism’s History, of the entire project of this country’s Indian Removal campaign, the entire force of slavery then and slavery now, and the dirty murderers in every aspect of American government and corporate prostitution of government/politicos, knows this new normal policing of the Internet is just another variation on a theme of USA Surveillance Central: snitches, Scarlet Letters, superstitious Skull and Bones antihuman Ivy Elites, House Committee on Unamerican Activities (HCUA), COINTELPRO, CIA Murder Inc., Confessions of Economic Hit Men, Chicago School, Edward Bernays School of Pulling the Wool Over the Sheeple’s Eyes.
Batty Bioweapons, 5G, and Star Wars
Note that the YouTube interview of me has been scrubbed, and Andy Libson thinks it’s Artificial Intelligence doing it, though I am surfing the internet all the time for jobs, and many remote jobs are in the pipeline, and there are humans doing $20 an hour gigs surfing the internet with those tools of oppression provided them to, well, scour the internet of ideas! Here, Andy’s email to me:
Hey Paul,
I thought this might happen…and it did!If you want you can post your episode up on bitchute.I actually wonder if they got all bent out of shape about the comments. Who knows with these creatures.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/jZU9I0A83CI7/
Here, a partial blurb from that Fascist YouTube:
Date: Tue, Jul 6, 2021 at 12:54 AM
| Hi What’s Left?, |
| Our team has reviewed your content, and, unfortunately, we think it violates our medical misinformation policy. We’ve removed the following content from YouTube: |
| Video: Haeder’s Reimagining Sanity – Batty Bioweapons, 5G, Star Wars |
 |
| We know that this might be disappointing, but it’s important to us that YouTube is a safe place for all. If content breaks our rules, we remove it. If you think we’ve made a mistake, you can appeal and we’ll take another look. Keep reading for more details. |
It is childish, all “vice principal thuggery like”, suspensions for not standing during the pledge of allegiance, or expulsions for defending oneself with fists when a bunch of thugs jump you in the high school bathroom. The nanny state on growth hormones, and this just is a long line of compliancy, the school system John Taylor Gatto discussed. One hundred and fifty years in the making, until today: Zoom Doom Schools, adult teachers as children, children as infants, wasted thoughts, busy work, coloring and snack-snack-snack, all that school loyalty, mascots on underwear, administrators who sound like two-bit car salespersons: the rise of Consumo Pithecus and Retailosapiens:
Twentieth-century scientific schooling is best described as the social experiment of inculcating into children what Gatto calls the “seven lessons of school teaching.” These lessons of mass forced schooling merit lengthy quotation:
- It confuses the students. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school. Apart from the tests and trials, this programming is similar to the television; it fills almost all the “free” time of children. One sees and hears something, only to forget it again.
- It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.
- It makes them indifferent.
- It makes them emotionally dependent.
- It makes them intellectually dependent.
- It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).
- It makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, because they are always supervised.
Or, as Rockefeller’s General Education Board summed up in a 1906 document on scientific schooling:
In our dreams … people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk…. The task we set before ourselves is very simple…. We will organize children … and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.
This is the new normal since we’ve had 150 years of Gestapo schooling, even before the words, Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police) were put together in order to exact obedience. You can hear Glen Greenwald’s most recent analysis of the cancel culture, and worse, the libeling and destruction of human beings with a counter thought, contrarian, outside the main paradigm, critical of systems, left, right or center under this fascist state, USA:
On this special edition of System Update, Glenn Greenwald dives into the latest online war to erupt in the Liberal media ecosystem to explore the underlying pathologies driving liberal and Democratic Party discourse. He focuses on two reputation-destroying cancers in particular that have become dreadfully commonplace: baselessly accusing people of being paid Russian agents, and weaponizing accusations of sexual misconduct.
The irony of my hour and 49 minutes with Andy, Eduardo and Kenny, on their three-year-old show, What’s Left, is that I bar no holds, and actually critique the entire mess that is the echo chamber, the Jimmy Dore’s, Bill Maher’s, Jon Stewart’s, SNL’s, all of them who think they are giving to humankind in their endless prattling and rattling. Millionaires, like Joe Rogan? Really. Oh, the work they don’t do to have $ thrown at them. All the prognosticators, all those making hay commenting on the commenters and the news (sic) and the political whoring that is DC/K-Street/Big Media/DoD/Three Branches of the Poison Tree called Government! It is endless, meaningless, and worthless in the scheme of things, but should never be 86-ed off any platform.
Do we get taken off Word Press for the stories Dissident Voice runs, the fun word play I have with life in the Matrix? Gestapoization connected to YouTube, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook, this concept too much for the worldwide net? Do those algorithms and deep boring AI tools go looking for these sorts of juxtaposed concepts by writers, to tally up and then eventually remove?
I’m attempting to get Andy, Eduardo and Kenny to get me in on interviewing THEM at What’s Left, and, the irony is, we can’t talk about bans by YouTube, or discuss this Internet Gestapoization without, well, getting the bloody YouTube video banned, culled, taken down, First Amendment Ripped! Here’s what I just email What’s Left:
So, how many times has this happened to What’s Left, Andy? I will be writing a piece on this ASAP, but give me a sense of the times you all got taken down, by YouFuckYourselfTube, so I can frame some of what I write about ties into your work. What are the takedowns about? Just “medical misinformation”?Andy — We’ve had 4 episodes removed.1. What’s Left came about why?
Andy — About saying the the previous prez election was stolen. And that the “insurrection” was a setup and a fraud. (Yours) … I think it’s the idea that it is a bioweapon. That is my guess at least.2. What are some of the more compelling topics and issues you all have covered? Why?
Andy — They were about talking about vaccines and maintaining that they were gene therapy techniques and were dangerous. And we were skeptical of them even being vaccines.3. What topics would you like to cover in the future?
+–+4. What’s your background, quickly (I did see your interview on Left Lockdown Skeptics)?
5. As a socialist, for you and Kenny and Eduardo, what has all of this Facebook and YouTube and Twitter lockdowning, censoring, etc., done to your framing, your perspective?
6. Are you three educators? This sort of culling of discussion and debate and information flow back and forth being culled by ruthless people, the elites and their foot soldiers, it seems like something you all would talk about in HS current events, communications classes, history, no? What would you tell students who might ask you why all the websites and podcasts and videos are coming down.7. Here you go, Green Peace gets Exxon, but this is business as usual for the elites. And, Green Peace will be sued. Discuss?
8. So much for peaceful protests — how do you frame a story like this to your compadres and students? “In Iowa, a federal judge has sentenced climate activist Jessica Reznicek to eight years in prison for damaging parts of the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 and ’17. U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger also ordered Reznicek to pay nearly $3.2 million in restitution. In 2016, Jessica Reznicek and fellow activist Ruby Montoya set fire to five pieces of heavy machinery being used to construct the Dakota Access pipeline.”
Harkens to Bidder 70, Tim DeChristopher — “Tim DeChristopher disrupted an illegitimate Bureau of Land Management oil and gas auction in December of 2008, by posing as Bidder 70 and outbidding oil companies for parcels around Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in Utah. For his act of civil disobedience, DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in federal prison. Held for a total of 21 months, his imprisonment earned him an international media presence as an activist and political prisoner of the United States government.”
9. Define what it means to be a human/man in 2021 — your perspective.
10. What does community mean to you?
11. Each of us has the elevator (masked and only two aboard under Covid-19 Craziness) speech on what is socialism, what is communism. What’s yours?
12. Where do you see USA in 20 years?
13. Where do you see the world in 20 years?
14. Are you a pacifist, and if so, why, and if not, then what, and why?
15. Biggest influencers in your life to have gotten you where you are now?
16. And, exactly where are you know? Define!
That’s the idea, at least, to drill down and peel back all the obfuscation and over and covert propagandization and disenfranchisement of real leftists, for sure — revolutionaries, socialists, communists.
Getting knocked off of YouTube pales in comparison to the issues of the day, of the hour, of the second, but it does have reverberations. All the people looking into the fascist states around the world and the fascist corporations and the thugs of the World Economic Forum and World Health Organization kind, well, those stories will be culled, and if you do an Internet search, not only are stories put to the 20th page of a Google search, there are 19 pages of fake articles, faux forums and other variations of mass media mush that hit you/us with countervailing articles (sic) on the very topic you might be writing about and posting/publishing.
They are at war with the people, with ideas, with free thinking, with free learning, with freedoms. The elites and their handmaids of oppression, subjugation and repression are working 24/7, each nanobit and nanosecond we breathe:
- global heating
- ocean inundation
- water crises
- rolling black outs
- anti-microbial resistance
- dumbdowning
- censorship
- jailing whistleblowers
- murder environmental, unionization, cultural, racial activists
- 2,700 billionaires and 36,000,000 millionaires running through every aspect of life, of communities, families, regions like wildfire, pathogens, cancers, viruses, armies
- ocean harvest collapses
- bioaccumulation of 10,000 chemicals
- poisoned waters, poisoned landscapes, poisoned air, poisoned food, poisoned thoughts
- civil society being hog-tied and disappeared
- patriarchy as ham-fisted murderers of the military industrial complex kind
- Hollywood (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, too) as the arbiters of the lies, the propagandists, the chosen few — Lies Incorporated
- any given minute, read the news feeds of your choice and see the perversions the elites and the mainstream feed the minds of Westerners
- digital gulags
- educational gulags
- economic gulags
- environmental gulags
- personal gulags
- agricultural gulags
- health system gulags
- pharmacological gulags
- legal gulags
- AI & Surveillance gulags
It all adds up — polluted skies, polluted thoughts, polluted discourse, or lack of discourse, that is!
Finally, the inventor of the mRNA process, Dr. Robert Malone, has been not just scrubbed from YouTube, but from Wikipedia. This is how Gestapo works:
… the adult public are basically research subjects that are not being required to sign informed consent due to EUA waiver. But that does not mean that they do not deserve the full disclosure of risks that one would normally require in an informed consent document for a clinical trial.
And now some national authorities are calling on the deployment of EUA vaccines to adolescents and the young, which by definition are not able to directly provide informed consent to participate in clinical research — written or otherwise.
The key point here is that what is being done by suppressing open disclosure and debate concerning the profile of adverse events associated with these vaccines violates fundamental bioethical principles for clinical research. This goes back to the Geneva convention and the Helsinki declaration.12 There must be informed consent for experimentation on human subjects. (Source; Source)
Pulitzer or Izzy or Project Censored awards? Those don’t matter in these Mad Hatter times of faux news, invented news, spurious news, demented news. It’s just another day in the “if it bleeds, it leads” gambit of mainstream and askew stream news. We have to keep digging, keep interviewing, keep researching. The ultimate arc of social justice and freedom is truth.
The post “Pulled from YouTube”: Mantra of Our Age first appeared on Dissident Voice.The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you’re going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing — for the sheer fun and joy of it — to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.
— I. F. Stone, quoted from, The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, Paul Rogat Loeb
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Sold under the pretence of a quest for optimising well-being and ‘happiness’, capitalism thrives on the exploitation of peoples and the environment. What really matters is the strive to maintain viable profit margins. The prevailing economic system demands ever-increasing levels of extraction, production and consumption and needs a certain level of annual GDP growth for large firms to make sufficient profit.
But at some point, markets become saturated, demand rates fall and overproduction and overaccumulation of capital becomes a problem. In response, we have seen credit markets expand and personal debt increase to maintain consumer demand as workers’ wages have been squeezed, financial and real estate speculation rise (new investment markets), stock buy backs and massive bail outs and subsidies (public money to maintain the viability of private capital) and an expansion of militarism (a major driving force for many sectors of the economy).
We have also witnessed systems of production abroad being displaced for global corporations to then capture and expand markets in foreign countries.
The old normal
Much of what is outlined above is inherent to capitalism. But the 1980s was a crucial period that helped set the framework for where we find ourselves today.
Remember when the cult of the individual was centre stage? It formed part of the Reagan-Thatcher rhetoric of the ‘new normal’ of 1980s neoliberalism.
In the UK, the running down of welfare provision was justified by government-media rhetoric about ‘individual responsibility’, reducing the role of the state and the need to ‘stand on your own two feet’. The selling off of public assets to profiteering corporations was sold to the masses on the basis of market efficiency and ‘freedom of choice’.
The state provision of welfare, education, health services and the role of the public sector was relentlessly undermined by neoliberal dogma and the creed that the market (global corporations) constituted the best method for supplying human needs.
Thatcher’s stated mission was to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit by rolling back the ‘nanny state’. She wasted little time in crushing the power of the trade unions and privatising key state assets.
Despite her rhetoric, she did not actually reduce the role of the state. She used its machinery differently, on behalf of business. Neither did she unleash the ‘spirit of entrepreneurialism’. Economic growth rates under her were similar as in the 1970s, but a concentration of ownership occurred and levels of inequality rocketed.
Margaret Thatcher was well trained in perception management, manipulating certain strands of latent populist sentiment and prejudice. Her free market, anti-big-government platitudes were passed off to a section of the public that was all too eager to embrace them as a proxy for remedying all that was wrong with Britain. For many, what were once regarded as the extreme social and economic policies of the right became entrenched as the common sense of the age.
Thatcher’s policies destroyed a fifth of Britain’s industrial base in just two years alone. The service sector, finance and banking were heralded as the new drivers of the economy, as much of Britain’s manufacturing sector was out-sourced to cheap labour economies.
Under Thatcher, employees’ share of national income was slashed from 65% to 53%. Long gone are many of the relatively well-paid manufacturing jobs that helped build and sustain the economy. In their place, the country has witnessed the imposition of a low taxation regime and low-paid and insecure ‘service sector’ jobs (no-contract work, macjobs, call centre jobs – many of which soon went abroad) as well as a real estate bubble, credit card debt and student debt, which helped to keep the economy afloat.
However, ultimately, what Thatcher did was – despite her rhetoric of helping small-scale businesses and wrapping herself in the national flag – facilitate the globalisation process by opening the British economy to international capital flows and allowing free rein for global finance and transnational corporations.
Referring to the beginning of this article, it is clear whose happiness and well-being counts most and whose does not matter at all as detailed by David Rothkopf in his 2008 book Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making. Members of the superclass belong to the megacorporation-interlocked, policy-building elites of the world and come from the highest echelons of finance, industry, the military, government and other shadow elites. These are the people whose interests Margaret Thatcher was serving.
These people set the agendas at the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg, G-7, G-20, NATO, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization.
And let us not forget the various key think tanks and policy making arenas like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institute and Chatham House as well as the World Economic Forum (WEF), where sections of the global elite forge policies and strategies and pass them to their political handmaidens.
Driven by the vision of its influential executive chairman Klaus Schwab, the WEF is a major driving force for the dystopian ‘great reset’, a tectonic shift that intends to change how we live, work and interact with each other.
The new normal
The great reset envisages a transformation of capitalism, resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance as livelihoods and entire sectors are sacrificed to boost the monopoly and hegemony of pharmaceutical corporations, high-tech/big data giants, Amazon, Google, major global chains, the digital payments sector, biotech concerns, etc.
Under the cover of COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions, the great reset is being rolled out under the guise of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ in which smaller enterprises are to be driven to bankruptcy or bought up by monopolies. Economies are being ‘restructured’ and many jobs and roles will be carried out by AI-driven technology.
The WEF says the public will ‘rent’ everything they require: stripping the right of ownership under the guise of a ‘green economy’ underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.
At the same time new (‘green product’) markets are being created and, on the back of COVID, fresh opportunities for profit extraction are opening up abroad. For instance, World Bank Group President David Malpass has stated that poorer countries will be ‘helped’ to get back on their feet after the various lockdowns that have been implemented in response to the Covid-19 crisis. This ‘help’ will be on condition that neoliberal reforms and the undermining of public services are implemented and become further embedded.
Just a month into the COVID crisis, the IMF and World Bank were already facing a deluge of aid requests from developing countries. Scores of countries were asking for bailouts and loans. Ideal cover for rebooting the global economy via a debt crisis and the subsequent privatisation of national assets and the further ‘structural adjustment’ of economies.
Many people waste no time in referring to this as some kind of ‘Marxist’ or ‘communist’ takeover of the planet because a tiny elite will be dictating policies. This has nothing to do with Marxism. An authoritarian capitalist elite – supported by their political technocrats – aims to secure even greater control of the global economy. It will no longer be a (loosely labelled) ‘capitalism’ based on ‘free’ markets and competition (not that those concepts ever really withstood proper scrutiny). Economies will be monopolised by global players, not least e-commerce platforms run by the likes of Amazon, Walmart, Facebook and Google and their multi-billionaire owners.
Essential (for capitalism) new markets will also be created through the ‘financialisation’ and ownership of all aspects of nature, which is to be colonised, commodified and traded under the fraudulent notion of protecting the environment.
The so-called ‘green economy’ will fit in with the notion of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’. A bunch of billionaires and their platforms will control every aspect of the value chain. Of course, they themselves will not reduce their own consumption or get rid of their personal jets, expensive vehicles, numerous exclusive homes or ditch their resource gobbling lifestyles. Reduced consumption is meant only for the masses.
They will not only control and own data about consumption but also control and own data on production, logistics, who needs what, when they need it, who should produce it, who should move it and when it should be moved. Independent enterprises will disappear or become incorporated into the platforms acting as subservient cogs. Elected representatives will be mere technocratic overseers of these platforms and the artificial intelligence tools that plan and determine all of the above.
The lockdowns and restrictions we have seen since March 2020 have helped boost the bottom line of global chains and the e-commerce giants and have cemented their dominance. Many small and medium-size independent enterprises have been pushed towards bankruptcy. At the same time, fundamental rights have been eradicated under COVID19 government measures.
Politicians in countries throughout the world have been using the rhetoric of the WEF’s great reset, talking of the need to ‘build back better’ for the ‘new normal’. They are all on point. Hardly a coincidence. Essential to this ‘new normal’ is the compulsion to remove individual liberties and personal freedoms given that, in the ‘green new normal’, unfettered consumption will no longer be an option for the bulk of the population.
It has long been the case that a significant part of the working class has been deemed ‘surplus to requirements’ – three decades ago, such people were sacrificed on the altar of neo-liberalism. They lost their jobs due to automation and offshoring. They have had to rely on meagre state welfare and run-down public services.
But what we are now seeing is the possibility of hundreds of millions around the world being robbed of their livelihoods. Forget about the benign sounding ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ and its promised techno-utopia. What we are witnessing right now seems to be a major restructuring of capitalist economies.
With AI and advanced automation of production, distribution and service provision (3D printing/manufacturing, drone technology, driverless vehicles, lab grown food, farmerless farms, robotics, etc), a mass labour force – and therefore mass education, mass welfare, mass healthcare provision and entire systems that were in place to reproduce labour for capitalist economic activity – will no longer be required. As economic activity is restructured, labour’s relationship to capital is being transformed.
In a reorganised system that no longer needs to sell the virtues of excessive individualism (consumerism), the levels of political and civil rights and freedoms we have been used to will not be tolerated.
Neoliberalism might have reached its logical conclusion (for now). Making trade unions toothless, beating down wages to create unimaginable levels of inequality and (via the dismantling of Bretton Woods) affording private capital so much freedom to secure profit and political clout under the guise of ‘globalisation’ would inevitably lead to one outcome.
A concentration of wealth, power, ownership and control at the top with large sections of the population on state-controlled universal basic income and everyone subjected to the discipline of an emerging biosecurity surveillance state designed to curtail liberties ranging from freedom of movement and assembly to political protest and free speech.
Perception management is, of course, vital for pushing through all of this. Rhetoric about ‘liberty’ and ‘individual responsibility’ worked a treat in the 1980s to help bring about a massive heist of wealth. This time, it is a public health scare and ‘collective responsibility’ as part of a strategy to help move towards near-monopolistic control over economies by a handful of global players.
And the perception of freedom is also being managed. Once vaccinated many will begin to feel free. Freer than under lockdown. But not really free at all.
The post From 1980s Neoliberalism to the ‘New Normal’ first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The television series Star Trek has appeared in several iterations with a few handfuls of movies thrown in that have fired the imaginations of viewers of all ages for nigh 55 years. In particular, Star Trek captured the viewership of many progressives because Star Trek was much more than science-fiction intrigues or the swashbuckling adventures of humans exploring outer space.
The flavor of the universe was now different. Star Trek: The Original Series (ST:TOS) was set in the 23rd century on a planet Earth where poverty and wars were atavistic remnants of an inglorious past.
The Star Trek series presented a future where humans had overcome so much of the negative baggage that had plagued humankind. The progressivist fancy is rooted in tales of morality where the galaxy provides a most interesting backdrop. Humanity’s strengths and foibles are explored. And there is the diversity of the cast of ST:TOS — a big deal for the 1960s. Included among the bridge complement is an African female communications officer, a Russian navigator, an Asian as senior helmsman, and an alien as the chief science officer. The crew regardless of origin, for the most part, were very collegial.
Not a Perfect Progressivism
There might be some druthers. For example, the Enterprise’s Dr McCoy occasionally engaged in irreverent banter with the Vulcan science officer, targeting his alien demeanor and green-bloodedness. And depending on how one defines sexism, the nubile women on TOS were invariably shown wearing tiny mini-skirts and skimpy attire, and frequently women found that captain James Kirk had glommed onto both their shoulders, ostensibly in an attempt to exude 1960’s machismo.
Exploiting sexuality would seem to apply to the skintight catsuit that Jeri Ryan had to wear as the character Seven of Nine. Ryan was fine with it: “I have no problem with the costume…. And it… got the desired effect.” A bevy of female characters appearing on Star Trek are considered beautiful. Is that objectification or is it a facet of the human condition? Ask yourself if you prefer seeing a physically attractive male actor versus a plain Jim with a beer belly or a physically attractive female actor versus a plain Jane with flaccid underarms. The ratings for ST:VOY spiked after the voluptuous Ryan joined the cast.
There is also a rigid hierarchy that can cause friction at times among crew. This is very apparent in the ST:VOY episode “The Omega Directive.” Starship Voyager captain Kathryn Janeway sees fit to keep the entire crew uninformed about the presence of Omega molecules because protocol forbids it. Of course, the entire crew is curious and speculating; an in-the-dark commander Chakotay tells Janeway that she is not always a reasonable woman; Seven of Nine is in conflict with Janeway’s order to destroy the Omega molecules; ensign Harry Kim is upset at Seven’s deployment of crew to set up a chamber to safely contain the Omega molecules; Seven and the doctor argue about access to a patient suffering from Omega particle exposure in sick bay; Seven upsets the patient.”
And although all may appear dandy on screen, what goes on behind cameras may be a stark departure from the Hollywood-created fiction.
The Demise and Rise of Star Trek
ST:TOS never properly found its ratings footing in the 1960s. Season 3 had a new man at the reins, producer Fred Freiberger. TOS was made on a sharply reduced budget, scheduled in a terrible time slot (Fridays at 10 PM, a “death slot” in those days), and it had experienced a dramatic turnover in the quality of the writers room. Thus, season 3 ratings were dismal (… or not). NBC would cancel TOS at the end of season 3, a move generally considered one of the biggest blunders in entertainment history.
Star Trek, however, went on to become a sensation in syndication. Reruns would spread domestically and internationally. An animated series ran for two seasons. The resurgent popularity eventually spawned movies with the TOS cast.
Next up: flash forward to the 24th century and ST: The Next Generation. The cast is still diverse; miniskirts are less common; sentience is accepted in whatever form; the Trekverse doesn’t use money; and replicators have eliminated scarcity. Three more series followed TNG in a similar progressivist vein: ST: Deep Space 9, ST: Voyager, and ST: Enterprise.
Then, after a four-year run, just as the series ST:ENT was seemingly finding its footing with engaging story lines, the plug was pulled. Star Trek producer Rick Berman pointed to “franchise fatigue” as the reason for a drop in viewership. Actor Connor Trinneer, who played the chief engineer Trip on the show, cited poor scheduling by the UPN network and the departure of a corporate supporter in 2001 as leading to the show’s eventual demise with the final episode airing in May 2005.
An attempt was made to resurrect the ST:TOS brand in 2009 — same characters but played by different actors. The movie Star Trek was highly successful at the box office. This can be attributed to pent-up demand from long-time Trekkies, interest from sci-fi aficionados, as well as good promotion that attracted younger, curious fans. However, the writers, director, and producers had not captured the essence of Star Trek, especially the progressivism.
Writer David Gerrold who worked on Star Trek: The Next Generation gave his thoughts about the first two JJ Abrams Star Trek films:
… a lot of the movies being produced by the studios have fallen into the blockbuster trap of we have to have big moments, big blockbuster, CGI, exciting moments. And so what gets sacrificed is the emotional growth of the characters. There is no emotional through line. For me that is the problem in the JJ pictures is that they [are] very exciting but they don’t get us back to the heart and soul of the original Star Trek which is that Kirk has an interesting problem to solve that forces him to deal with a moral dilemma of the prime directive, being a Starfleet captain, and following the rules. And if you look back there was a severe limit on what Kirk could do because he was a Starfleet captain.
Moreover, because of corporate intricacies, there was a stipulation that the movies had to differ at least 25 percent from the original source material. Based on the initial box office success, two more movies would follow. But the numbers of movie-goers would diminish, and a fourth movie could not muster sufficient corporate backing. Given that we now live in the age of COVID-19, cinemas regaining popularity might be a fraught proposition.
Fan Films
Franchise fatigue? Yet when considering the comics, paperbacks, magazines, memes, action figures, model ships, cosplay, the number of people attending ST conventions, cameos and mentions in other TV series (e.g., Stargate, Family Guy, Big Bang, etc), and the plethora of ST fan films produced over the years, one would surmise that ST has always been in vogue.
An article in the culture section of GQ, “This Is How Star Trek Invented Fandom,” posed two questions that point to a disconnect in Roddenberry’s progressivist Trekverse and the corporate world within which Star Trek finds itself immersed:
Star Trek Las Vegas is perhaps the largest meeting of pop culture’s most famous fandom and certainly its priciest. The questions hover above the convention like a cloud of Tachyon particles: to whom does Star Trek really belong? How much, exactly, is that worth?
Despite the unwavering popularity of ST conventions and the ongoing making of fan films, currently produced ST television series had mirrored the vacuity of outer space. The fans were out there and clamoring for ST, but the corporate number crunchers were wary about what the eventual bottom line would be.
The long on-air gap between production of new Star Trek episodes or series spurred some among its fan base to create new fan episodes. Among these fan films were ST: New Voyages and then the 11 episodes of ST: Continues, both of which told stories of the further adventures of Kirk and crew.
A novel fan film is Star Trek: Aurora, a two-episode CGI animation about the experiences of a Vulcan and a human who crew a cargo ship in the Trekverse. It was exceedingly well done, with appealing characters and fascinating storylines.
Then along came a documentary-style ST fan film, Prelude to Axanar, which drew a large audience on Youtube — over 5 million viewers. Subsequently, a Kickstarter to produce a Star Trek: Axanar movie raised over a million dollars. That was too much popularity for CBS. That corporation, apparently, feared dollars flowing into pockets not its own. CBS launched a lawsuit for copyright violations and issued “onerous” guidelines for fan-film productions based on the Star Trek brand. Is that any way to treat your fans? The strict guidelines raised quite a kerfuffle among fandom, and CBS felt compelled to trot out an official to offer explanation.
No film and the failure to reimburse all donors to ST: Axanar has placed creator Alec Peters at the center of controversy since.
NuTrek
The world of television continues, but it faces new challenges from streaming services, such as Netflix. This has caused a ripple through the marketplace. CBS introduced its own streaming service, CBS All Access, and sought to revive and profit from its dormant Star Trek brand. Thus, in September 2017, Star Trek would reappear with a new TV series, titled Star Trek: Discovery.
Following the disappointing 2009 Star Trek movie, I wrote of a hope that:
… any future TV series will preserve the dynamism but also engage its audience with episodes exploring, for example, the depths of humanity, moral dilemmas surrounding the Prime Directive and cherished principles of the Federation, and progress toward egalitarianism in the future. In this way, Star Trek might recapture the progressivist attraction of the earlier series and appeal to the sanguinity of many viewers.
Yet, the ST:Disco series has stirred up extreme consternation among many Star Trek fans, often called Trekkies.
Marina Sirtis, who played Counselor Deanna Troi on ST:TNG, opined about subsequent Star Trek series:
I actually think that Star Trek got it right in our show and in the original show because the shows were about something. They weren’t just entertainment… They were little morality plays and that is what Star Trek lost after we were done. And it ought to go back to that.
I will agree with Sirtis insofar as the new iterations of Star Trek — created by Alex Kurtzman — have spectacularly missed the mark on what drew so many devoted fans to Star Trek in the first place. Many Trekkies reject these newer iterations as being Star Trek and refer to it instead as NuTrek. Or sometimes the difference between pre-2009 and subsequent Trek as “Old Trek” versus “New Trek.”
To be fair, the musical scores in NuTrek are excellent, the special effects are first rate, exotic shooting locales are used, and the acting is professional. But the core progressivist tenets of the Trekverse established under Roddenberry have been obliterated under Kurtzman.
The half century of Star Trek canon, built up by six previous Star Trek TV series and 10 movies, was swept aside through intentionality and ignorance. Continuity between the ST iterations has been irrevocably ruptured. Right away, longtime fans would notice that a popular alien species, the Klingons, had completely morphed into what appeared to be an unrecognizable species. This is despite the physical differences between the TOS Klingons and later Klingons, who had developed prominent forehead ridges, having been satisfactorily and cleverly explained in ST:ENT — seemingly all for naught now.
At the time ST:Disco was about to be launched, fans of Star Trek were informed by executive producer Akiva Goldsman that ST:Disco would take place in the prime timeline, preserving the canon therein. Yet during season 3, ST:Disco had officially declared the Kelvin-timeline movies canon.
Wokism on Steroids
Another criticism of NuTrek is that wokism and identity politics were now being rammed down the throats of viewers, although Roddenberry’s Trekverse saw humanity as having evolved beyond this.
Wokism even claimed the “acclaimed” author Walter Mosley, a Black man, who was onboard as a writer for Star Trek: Discovery until he quit after he was “chastised” by human resources for using the N-word on the job.
The Hollywood Reporter interviewed Mosley:
Mosley went on to explain that the individual in HR said that while he was free to use that word in a script, he “could not say it.” Mosley then clarified, “I hadn’t called anyone it. I just told a story about a cop who explained to me, on the streets of Los Angeles, that he stopped all n—ers in paddy neighborhoods and all paddies in n—er neighborhoods, because they were usually up to no good. I was telling a true story as I remembered it.”
Mosley wrote that he is unaware who complained about his use of the word. “There I was, a black man in America who shares with millions of others the history of racism. And more often than not, treated as subhuman,” he continued. “If addressed at all that history had to be rendered in words my employers regarded as acceptable.”
Contrast this approach with that in the ST:TOS episode “The Savage Curtain.” When the attractive lieutenant Uhura approaches, Abraham Lincoln is moved to exclaim, “What a charming Negress.”
Fearing that his wording may have been inappropriate, the former president apologizes: “Oh. Forgive me, my dear. I know that in my time, some used that term as a description of property.”
Uhura replies, “But why should I object to that term, sir? You see, in our century, we’ve learned not to fear words.”
To this, Lincoln states, “The foolishness of my century had me apologizing when no offense was given.”
Too often missing from woke consideration is intentionality. It is necessary to discern what were the intentions of a person using a word that some people consider inappropriate. Thus, Walter Mosley found himself attacked despite not having sinister intentions. Uhura recognized the innocuous terminology of Lincoln and was not offended. It was just a word anyway. Lincoln was engaged by Uhura instead of attacked for what some might have deemed been inappropriate wording. A willingness to engage in respectful discussion along with the attempt to understand are required to change minds and improve the human vocabulary. To attack a person without attempting dialogue risks a backlash from a person who might otherwise have been found to be well-intentioned or, at least, not ill-intentioned.
Any Vulcan will inform you of the simple logic that, in human parlance, honey is far likelier to attract bees than vinegar.
*****
Robert Meyer Burnett, who is best known for directing, co-writing, and editing the feature film Free Enterprise, has also been extremely critical of the writing and storytelling in NuTrek. In his Robservations he asks, “What is Star Trek: Picard about and Who Really Created It?” and “What exactly is Star Trek Storytelling?” Yes, Burnett is extremely disappointed in the writing and storytelling of NuTrek. But he doesn’t just point out the flaws with writing, he also proposes how it could have been better written to appeal to viewers.
This is not to say everything was artful and hunky-dory in the pre-Bad Robot (read JJ Abrams) and pre-Secret Hideout (read Alex Kurtzman) ST. There are some clunker episodes such as “And the Children Shall Lead” in TOS, “Code of Honor” in TNG, and “These are the Voyages” in ENT. There are inconsistencies with canon, albeit usually not blatant and usually not intentional. And it is granted that in the TOS era, the special effects and technology to produce aliens and creatures was sorely lacking by today’s standards. For instance, in TOS’s “Arena,” captain Kirk fights the Gorn which is obviously a man in a lizard suit.
Nonetheless, NuTrek does have its fans. I appreciate that there are people who derive enjoyment from viewing NuTrek. One Youtube channel that is somewhat predisposed toward NuTrek but makes a reasoned case for its leaning is Ketwolski. Ketwolski acknowledged problems early on with ST:Disco. However, he contends that by the conclusion of season 3 that Disco has grown its beard; that “thematically, it was all very, very connected…”
In his review and breakdown of ST:Picard season 1, a NuTrek series based on the ST:TNG captain Jean Luc Picard a few decades hence, Ketwolski described parts of the finale as “frustrating,” “very weird,” and noted how the plot lines were disjointed. But he concludes, “Overall, I can say that Star Trek: Picard is the best first season of any Star Trek show to date, and that is quite the feat.”
Burnett disagrees: “I’ve been a Star Trek fan pretty much all my life. It’s pretty much my favorite thing.” But he feels baffled and perplexed looking at ST:Picard.
Burnett posed a question to himself about ST:Picard: “What is the element that I cannot stand about this show?” To which he replied, “The callousness with which it approaches life, humanoid life specifically.” He pointed to an example in episode 4 that left him “gobsmacked,” that of Picard walking into a Romulan bar “to stir up shit” that resulted in a Romulan migrant being beheaded. The message being that it is okay to murder your enemy — which, he said, is “straight up antithetical to Star Trek.” To adduce that this iteration of ST is “painfully stupid on every level,” Burnett noted that the sign at the Romulan bar was written in English.
NuTrek’s Absence of Likeable Characters
Probably the biggest gripe about NuTrek is the inferior writing and storytelling. The creator, writers, and showrunners do not seem to have a handle on what ST has been about and why it attracted such a fervent fanbase. This is despite clinging to the species and characters that comprised previous Star Trek. Thus Klingons and Romulans are recycled. We are presented with a bastardized captain Picard and the iconic Spock, as first played by Leonard Nimoy, has been reduced to a caricature. Thus the contradiction that what is labeled NuTrek is relying on previous Star Trek without grasping the ethos of Star trek.
I do not complain about the actors or the acting in NuTrek. But I am thoroughly unimpressed with the writing and storytelling. It must be quite difficult for actors to perform in an appealing manner to viewers when the script they base their acting upon is one of inferior writing with poorly developed characters or on previously developed characters that have been pretzeled into incoherent aberrations. While the crew of the spaceship Discovery is still diverse, the characters are all so unlikeable.
This is particularly so with the lead character of Michael Burnham who is played by actor Sonequa Martin-Green. Much of the fandom concurs about disenchantment with this character. Michael Burnham is often referred to as a Mary Sue; which has come to mean something along the lines of a young woman too extraordinarily capable at everything. (The male equivalent has come to be called Marty Stu.)
A Youtube channel, Trekpertise, asked the question: “Is Michael Burnham a Mary Sue?” Trekpertise concluded she wasn’t, and this conclusion was much pilloried in the comments section (albeit some especially devastating critiques seem to have been removed).
Many NuTrekkers dismissed complaints about the Michael Burnham protagonist as racism. This is an ad hominem argument, and it does not hold water. Racists are highly unlikely to be attracted to Star Trek because of its embrace of diversity. Then there are the facts that Uhura was a Black bridge officer in ST:TOS, Geordi La Forge was the Black chief engineer in ST:TNG, and Avery Brooks played the Black captain in ST:DS9. One excellent DS9 episode, in particular, “Far Beyond the Stars,” stirred abhorrence for the mental weakness and anti-humanism of racism.
A comment by W PlasmaHam reads:
It seems as if the ultimate goal of this [Trekpertise] video was to defend Burnham by asserting that all criticism was motivated by race, gender, or dislike of a serialized format. I feel that such an argument is quite dismissive of legitimate criticism towards her. It appears that the majority of people in the comments agree that Burnham is a flat or unlikable character, even those who say that Mary Sue accusations are unfounded. Will you address those? Because it feels as if you took a quite easy approach to analyzing her character.
To which Trekpertise replied:
That wasn’t the purpose of this video. The purpose of this video is too illustrate that the Mary Sue criticism isn’t applicable to Michael Burnham, or indeed any other character in film and TV. It belongs to the fanzines of the 1970s. There is plenty else to discuss with Michael Burnham.
Even Ketwolski answered the question of whether Michael Burnham is a Mary Sue with a tempered: “Yes! kinda.”
Early on there was the intriguing and mildly charismatic Saru, a Kelpian who represents a new species introduced by ST:Disco. However, the writers would later have Saru neutered (figuratively) by Michael Burnham. The writers also saw fit to promote ensign Tilly in one fell swoop to number one. A fan favorite character, Spock, was also diminished beside the perfection of his sister-through-adoption, Burnham.
Is NuTrek a Copycat?
The writing is so egregious that several seeming instances of plagiarism are apparent in ST:Disco. For example, some scenes appear to have been lifted from the films Die Hard, Total Recall, and The Day After Tomorrow.
Is it Disco paying homage? But there is no acknowledgement of the idea emanating from elsewhere.
A comment by OneBagTravel opined that “… these similarities is that they’re not just ideas being borrowed, they’re visuals nearly shot for shot stolen. It’s far too blatant to just say it’s coincidental.”
The criticism of plagiarism by Disco, however, started right off the bat when a lawsuit was launched against CBS and ST:Disco over the alleged stealing of the idea of a mycelial network traversed by a giant tardigrade across space-time and other similarities from the game “Tardigrades” created by Anas Abdin. The lawsuit was dismissed because Abdin had to “prove” the idea theft by CBS.
This points to NuTrek sadly lacking creativity and imagination.
How Popular is NuTrek?
In 2009, J.J. Abrams directed the science fiction action film Star Trek, written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. Rotten Tomatoes had critics rate it 94% and fans 91%; it had a gross in the US of $257.7M.
The next film was titled Star Trek into Darkness. Again the ratings were favorable at Rotten Tomatoes: critics rated it 84% and fans 89%; it grossed $228.8M in the US.
The third film was Star Trek Beyond. Rotten Tomatoes had critics rate it 86% and fans 80%; the gross in USA had dropped to $158.8M — still a significant number.
The NuTrek TV series present a different picture. For ST:Disco there is a notable distinction between the ratings of critics and fans:
- ST:Disco Season 1; Rotten Tomatoes had critics rate it 82% and fans 50%
- ST:Disco Season 2; Rotten Tomatoes had critics rate it 81% and fans 36%
- ST:Disco Season 3; Rotten Tomatoes had critics rate it 90% and fans 46%
- Short Treks: fans only at 37%
This notable distinction between the ratings of critics and fans also applies to ST:Picard:
- ST:Picard Season 1; Rotten Tomatoes had critics rate it 87% and fans 56%
A NuTrek animation series also completed its first season:
- ST:Lower Decks Season 1; Rotten Tomatoes had critics rate it 65% and fans 44%
Of interest is a series called The Orville that is contemporaneous with NuTrek. It was created by the Star Trek fan Seth MacFarlane who was enamored with ST’s morality, writing, and characters. Although campier than ST, The Orville has captured the essence of ST’s progressivism and crew camaraderie. Work on season 3 of The Orville is, reportedly, underway, having been disrupted by the pandemic. For The Orville, the fan and critic ratings are the obverse of that for NuTrek in season 1. It was loved by both fans and critics in season 2:
- The Orville Season 1; Rotten Tomatoes had critics rate it 30% and fans 94%
- The Orville Season 2; Rotten Tomatoes had critics rate it 100% and fans 94%
The numbers indicate that The Orville, obviously an homage to Star Trek, is quite popular with viewers.
Intellectual Property and the Rights of Fans
Intellectual property rights accord priority to the owner of an idea over the benefits that could accrue to the wider society from access to the idea. Intellectual property rights have been used to hamstring the greater good for humanity, as well a ST fan films.
Yet Jeff Macharyas argued,
There has been no other TV show in history that could be considered as “open source” as Star Trek. In true open source fashion, fans have used the universe originally created by Gene Roddenberry in 1964 as “the source code” for fan-made films, cartoons, games, etc. If one considers the characters, settings and general plots of Star Trek, then it’s easy to understand how Star Trek has been a true open source universe.
Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, would seem to agree. He wrote in the foreword to Star Trek: The New Voyages (1976):
Television viewers by the millions began to take Star Trek to heart as their own personal optimistic view of the Human condition and future. They fought for the show, honored it, cherished it, wrote about it–and have continued to do their level best to make certain that it will live again.
…We were particularly amazed when thousands, then tens of thousands of people began creating their own personal Star Trek adventures. Stories, and paintings, and sculptures, and cookbooks. And songs, and poems, and fashions. And more. The list is still growing. It took some time for us to fully understand and appreciate what these people were saying. Eventually we realized that there is no more profound way in which people could express what Star Trek has meant to them than by creating their own very personal Star Trek things.
Ella von Holtum, affiliated with the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Iowa, examined “Freedom of Expression and Intellectual Property in Fan Fiction of the early 1980s.” She summarized some learning points:
- Intellectual Property and Freedom of Expression exert very different forces upon cultural productions
- Intellectual Property applies economic principles to the realm of creative expression
- Freedom of Expression does not contribute to an oppressive power dynamic, and supports the work of all creators
- Intellectual Property should not be invoked in discussions about creative products – it simply doesn’t apply, and demonstrates deeply harmful effects
Gene Roddenberry passed away in 1991. Unfortunately, Roddenberry had sold the rights to Star Trek to Paramount for one-third of future profits.
In the meantime, as far as Star Trek is concerned, the corporatocracy determines what will be produced and when it can be viewed. The only power of the fans is to tune in or not to tune in; in the end, this is a mighty power. It is the fans who will determine whether a show is profitable or not. The corporations may control what is made available for viewing, but the public decides what they will view.
Hope for a Star Trek Future?
The world is far from achieving the morality of 23rd or 24th century Star Trek.
Nonetheless, Star Trek is important because it presents a vision of what the future could be, something people could aspire to. Becoming an astrophysicist, astronaut, scientist, film industry writer, social justice campaigner, etc. To work toward the abolishment of poverty, racism, the penal system and war. However, we don’t need to wait for the 23rd century. We can start right now in the 21st century. It is a matter of will and determination. China didn’t wait for the 23rd century. It took action and demonstrated that absolute poverty can be eliminated now.
In the Star Trek future, Earth is united under one government. Humans of all ethnicities and nationalities are as one. That doesn’t mean Star Trek is free from propaganda. For instance, prominent human characters in the Trekverse tend to be American, although countries are a thing of the past. In the film Star Trek: First Contact, Zefram Cochrane invents the first warp drive spaceship in Montana, leading to first contact with Vulcans. Captain Kirk is from Iowa. Captain Pike who preceded Kirk is from California.
The TOS episode “The Omega Glory,” features the Yangs (Yankees) and Kohms (Communists), the Pledge of Allegiance, and the flag of the United States. This patriotic reverence for Americana takes place in a distant solar system on the planet Omega IV. However, this is not surprising for a series produced by an American TV network for an American audience.
Moreover, it is well known that Hollywood and US propaganda go hand-in-hand. And it is also well documented that the CIA influences Hollywood and the media in general.
*****
Twenty-first century Earth is a planet riven by militarism and violence, imperialism, hegemony, factionalism, classism, racism, prejudice, poverty, inequality and inequity. It is the moneyed classes that control the media. It is the moneyed classes that will determine what appears in mass media. Warring is normalized as patriotic, and that may well explain the militarism and warring among planetary factions that is so prevalent in NuTrek. The rich thus become richer by launching wars to be fought by the poor who are speciously told they fight for honor and country.
In NuTrek, the United Federation of Planets is no longer governing, and Earth, one of the founding members, is no longer a member. The principles of the Federation lie at the core of what Star Trek is about: “liberty, equality, peace, justice, and progress, with the purpose of furthering the universal rights of all sentient life. Federation members exchange knowledge and resources to facilitate peaceful cooperation, scientific development, space exploration, and mutual defense.” Yet NuTrek even goes as far as to depict the much more distant future as regressivist, factional, battle-scarred, wracked by poverty, and dealing with energy scarcity. This is what the crew of the USS Discovery encounter after exiting a time vortex to emerge in the 32nd century.
What is this message from NuTrek? Clearly, the 32nd century is not aspirational. This is why NuTrek is anathema to so many Trekkies.
Finally, midway through season 3 of Disco, I gave up on watching what I hoped would be Star Trek because I finally reached the inescapable conclusion that NuTrek up to now (i.e., Disco, Picard, and Lower Decks) was not Star Trek. I had watched (and rewatched) every episode of every ST production until this moment. Nonetheless, I will hope that future ST series will reconnect to serious grappling with moral dilemmas, the advancement of the human condition, the positivity of what is to come, and the writing of thoughtful scripts with developed characters (some of who are appealing) in line with previous ST series (i.e., before NuTrek).
Poor audience ratings and criticisms have plagued NuTrek from the start. Surely those criticisms have been heard by the corporate suits, but will they respond to what the fans want? Netflix didn’t pick up ST:Picard for international distribution. ST:LD went without an international distributor well into its season. Clearly streaming services weren’t fighting each other for NuTrek.
The financial markets became bearish for ViacomCBS in late March, as the stock began to precipitously plummet.
Yet, NuTrek is filming a fourth season of the much reviled ST:Disco and a second season of the already tired retread ST:Picard, which tries to slip in many cameos for Patrick Stewart’s former colleagues with mixed results; e.g., Data, the android who doesn’t age, has appreciably aged. NuTrek didn’t even bother in a few cases to hire actors who previously had played the ST characters, so viewers were expected to overlook the incongruencies.
Haters
Knowing that there is a hardcore Trekkie fanbase seems to have jaundiced some in the NuTrekverse to a possibly negative reaction. Did Jason Isaacs who played captain Lorca in season 1 of Disco take this fanbase for granted when he said:
I don’t mean to sound irreverent when I say I don’t care about the die-hard Trek fans. I only ‘don’t care’ about them in the sense that I know they’re all going to watch anyway. I look forward to having the fun of them being outraged, so they can sit up all night and talk about it with each other.
An antipathy has arisen among a section of NuTrekkers toward those who do not share their appreciation for NuTrek. They frequently call critics of NuTrek “haters.” While some of these people probably would admit to hating NuTrek, most people do not respond well to be called a hater.
What I hate is ad hominem, so I am unimpressed when people resort to the tactic of disparaging other people through name-calling. Calling others “haters” is illogical, regressivist, and antithetical to the Trekverse as conceived by Roddenberry.
A glimmer of hope?
Season 2 of Disco saw captain Pike of the USS Enterprise injected into that series for one season. Afterwards, fans clamored for more of Pike and the Enterprise, and such a series is, reportedly, in the works. It offers a ray of hope for the fans. But given the NuTrek track record, don’t hold your breath.
Next: In Part 2, B.J. Sabri will discuss Star Trek from an expanded political viewpoint.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The television series Star Trek has appeared in several iterations with a few handfuls of movies thrown in that have fired the imaginations of viewers of all ages for nigh 55 years. In particular, Star Trek captured the viewership of many progressives because Star Trek was much more than science-fiction intrigues or the swashbuckling adventures of humans exploring outer space.
The flavor of the universe was now different. Star Trek: The Original Series (ST:TOS) was set in the 23rd century on a planet Earth where poverty and wars were atavistic remnants of an inglorious past.
The Star Trek series presented a future where humans had overcome so much of the negative baggage that had plagued humankind. The progressivist1 fancy is rooted in tales of morality where the galaxy provides a most interesting backdrop. Humanity’s strengths and foibles are explored. And there is the diversity of the cast of ST:TOS — a big deal for the 1960s. Included among the bridge complement is an African female communications officer, a Russian navigator, an Asian as senior helmsman, and an alien as the chief science officer. The crew regardless of origin, for the most part, were very collegial.
Not a Perfect Progressivism
There might be some druthers. For example, the Enterprise’s Dr McCoy occasionally engaged in irreverent banter with the Vulcan science officer, targeting his alien demeanor and green-bloodedness. And depending on how one defines sexism, the nubile women on TOS were invariably shown wearing tiny mini-skirts and skimpy attire, and frequently women found that captain James Kirk had glommed onto both their shoulders, ostensibly in an attempt to exude 1960’s machismo.
Exploiting sexuality would seem to apply to the skintight catsuit that Jeri Ryan had to wear as the character Seven of Nine. Ryan was fine with it: “I have no problem with the costume…. And it… got the desired effect.” A bevy of female characters appearing on Star Trek are considered beautiful. Is that objectification or is it a facet of the human condition? Ask yourself if you prefer seeing a physically attractive male actor versus a plain Jim with a beer belly or a physically attractive female actor versus a plain Jane with flaccid underarms. The ratings for ST:VOY spiked after the voluptuous Ryan joined the cast.
There is also a rigid hierarchy that can cause friction at times among crew. This is very apparent in the ST:VOY episode “The Omega Directive.” Starship Voyager captain Kathryn Janeway sees fit to keep the entire crew uninformed about the presence of Omega molecules because protocol forbids it. Of course, the entire crew is curious and speculating; an in-the-dark commander Chakotay tells Janeway that she is not always a reasonable woman; Seven of Nine is in conflict with Janeway’s order to destroy the Omega molecules; ensign Harry Kim is upset at Seven’s deployment of crew to set up a chamber to safely contain the Omega molecules; Seven and the doctor argue about access to a patient suffering from Omega particle exposure in sick bay; Seven upsets the patient.”
And although all may appear dandy on screen, what goes on behind cameras may be a stark departure from the Hollywood-created fiction.
The Demise and Rise of Star Trek
ST:TOS never properly found its ratings footing in the 1960s. Season 3 had a new man at the reins, producer Fred Freiberger. TOS was made on a sharply reduced budget, scheduled in a terrible time slot (Fridays at 10 PM, a “death slot” in those days), and it had experienced a dramatic turnover in the quality of the writers room. Thus, season 3 ratings were dismal (… or not). NBC would cancel TOS at the end of season 3, a move generally considered one of the biggest blunders in entertainment history.
Star Trek, however, went on to become a sensation in syndication. Reruns would spread domestically and internationally. An animated series ran for two seasons. The resurgent popularity eventually spawned movies with the TOS cast.
Next up: flash forward to the 24th century and ST: The Next Generation. The cast is still diverse; miniskirts are less common;2 sentience is accepted in whatever form; the Trekverse doesn’t use money; and replicators have eliminated scarcity.3 Three more series followed TNG in a similar progressivist vein: ST: Deep Space 9, ST: Voyager, and ST: Enterprise.
Then, after a four-year run, just as the series ST:ENT was seemingly finding its footing with engaging story lines, the plug was pulled. Star Trek producer Rick Berman pointed to “franchise fatigue” as the reason for a drop in viewership. Actor Connor Trinneer, who played the chief engineer Trip on the show, cited poor scheduling by the UPN network and the departure of a corporate supporter in 2001 as leading to the show’s eventual demise with the final episode airing in May 2005.
An attempt was made to resurrect the ST:TOS brand in 2009 — same characters but played by different actors. The movie Star Trek was highly successful at the box office. This can be attributed to pent-up demand from long-time Trekkies, interest from sci-fi aficionados, as well as good promotion that attracted younger, curious fans. However, the writers, director, and producers had not captured the essence of Star Trek, especially the progressivism.
Writer David Gerrold who worked on Star Trek: The Next Generation gave his thoughts about the first two JJ Abrams Star Trek films:
… a lot of the movies being produced by the studios have fallen into the blockbuster trap of we have to have big moments, big blockbuster, CGI, exciting moments. And so what gets sacrificed is the emotional growth of the characters. There is no emotional through line. For me that is the problem in the JJ pictures is that they [are] very exciting but they don’t get us back to the heart and soul of the original Star Trek which is that Kirk has an interesting problem to solve that forces him to deal with a moral dilemma of the prime directive, being a Starfleet captain, and following the rules. And if you look back there was a severe limit on what Kirk could do because he was a Starfleet captain.
Moreover, because of corporate intricacies, there was a stipulation that the movies had to differ at least 25 percent from the original source material. Based on the initial box office success, two more movies would follow. But the numbers of movie-goers would diminish, and a fourth movie could not muster sufficient corporate backing. Given that we now live in the age of COVID-19, cinemas regaining popularity might be a fraught proposition.
Fan Films
Franchise fatigue? Yet when considering the comics, paperbacks, magazines, memes, action figures, model ships, cosplay, the number of people attending ST conventions, cameos and mentions in other TV series (e.g., Stargate, Family Guy, Big Bang, etc), and the plethora of ST fan films produced over the years, one would surmise that ST has always been in vogue.
An article in the culture section of GQ, “This Is How Star Trek Invented Fandom,” posed two questions that point to a disconnect in Roddenberry’s progressivist Trekverse and the corporate world within which Star Trek finds itself immersed:
Star Trek Las Vegas is perhaps the largest meeting of pop culture’s most famous fandom and certainly its priciest. The questions hover above the convention like a cloud of Tachyon particles: to whom does Star Trek really belong? How much, exactly, is that worth?
Despite the unwavering popularity of ST conventions and the ongoing making of fan films, currently produced ST television series had mirrored the vacuity of outer space. The fans were out there and clamoring for ST, but the corporate number crunchers were wary about what the eventual bottom line would be.
The long on-air gap between production of new Star Trek episodes or series spurred some among its fan base to create new fan episodes. Among these fan films were ST: New Voyages and then the 11 episodes of ST: Continues, both of which told stories of the further adventures of Kirk and crew.
A novel fan film is Star Trek: Aurora, a two-episode CGI animation about the experiences of a Vulcan and a human who crew a cargo ship in the Trekverse.4 It was exceedingly well done, with appealing characters and fascinating storylines.
Then along came a documentary-style ST fan film, Prelude to Axanar, which drew a large audience on Youtube — over 5 million viewers. Subsequently, a Kickstarter to produce a Star Trek: Axanar movie raised over a million dollars. That was too much popularity for CBS. That corporation, apparently, feared dollars flowing into pockets not its own. CBS launched a lawsuit for copyright violations and issued “onerous” guidelines for fan-film productions based on the Star Trek brand. Is that any way to treat your fans? The strict guidelines raised quite a kerfuffle among fandom, and CBS felt compelled to trot out an official to offer explanation.
No film and the failure to reimburse all donors to ST: Axanar has placed creator Alec Peters at the center of controversy since.
NuTrek
The world of television continues, but it faces new challenges from streaming services, such as Netflix. This has caused a ripple through the marketplace. CBS introduced its own streaming service, CBS All Access,5 and sought to revive and profit from its dormant Star Trek brand. Thus, in September 2017, Star Trek would reappear with a new TV series, titled Star Trek: Discovery.
Following the disappointing 2009 Star Trek movie, I wrote of a hope that:
… any future TV series will preserve the dynamism but also engage its audience with episodes exploring, for example, the depths of humanity, moral dilemmas surrounding the Prime Directive and cherished principles of the Federation, and progress toward egalitarianism in the future. In this way, Star Trek might recapture the progressivist attraction of the earlier series and appeal to the sanguinity of many viewers.
Yet, the ST:Disco series has stirred up extreme consternation among many Star Trek fans, often called Trekkies.
Marina Sirtis, who played Counselor Deanna Troi on ST:TNG, opined about subsequent Star Trek series:
I actually think that Star Trek got it right in our show and in the original show because the shows were about something. They weren’t just entertainment… They were little morality plays and that is what Star Trek lost after we were done. And it ought to go back to that.
I will agree with Sirtis insofar as the new iterations of Star Trek — created by Alex Kurtzman — have spectacularly missed the mark on what drew so many devoted fans to Star Trek in the first place. Many Trekkies reject these newer iterations as being Star Trek and refer to it instead as NuTrek. Or sometimes the difference between pre-2009 and subsequent Trek as “Old Trek” versus “New Trek.”
To be fair, the musical scores in NuTrek are excellent, the special effects are first rate, exotic shooting locales are used, and the acting is professional. But the core progressivist tenets of the Trekverse established under Roddenberry have been obliterated under Kurtzman.
The half century of Star Trek canon, built up by six previous Star Trek TV series and 10 movies, was swept aside through intentionality and ignorance. Continuity between the ST iterations has been irrevocably ruptured.6 Right away, longtime fans would notice that a popular alien species, the Klingons, had completely morphed into what appeared to be an unrecognizable species. This is despite the physical differences between the TOS Klingons and later Klingons, who had developed prominent forehead ridges, having been satisfactorily and cleverly explained in ST:ENT — seemingly all for naught now.
At the time ST:Disco was about to be launched, fans of Star Trek were informed by executive producer Akiva Goldsman that ST:Disco would take place in the prime timeline, preserving the canon therein. Yet during season 3, ST:Disco had officially declared the Kelvin-timeline movies canon.
Wokism on Steroids
Another criticism of NuTrek is that wokism and identity politics were now being rammed down the throats of viewers, although Roddenberry’s Trekverse saw humanity as having evolved beyond this.
Wokism even claimed the “acclaimed” author Walter Mosley, a Black man, who was onboard as a writer for Star Trek: Discovery until he quit after he was “chastised” by human resources for using the N-word on the job.
The Hollywood Reporter interviewed Mosley:
Mosley went on to explain that the individual in HR said that while he was free to use that word in a script, he “could not say it.” Mosley then clarified, “I hadn’t called anyone it. I just told a story about a cop who explained to me, on the streets of Los Angeles, that he stopped all n—ers in paddy neighborhoods and all paddies in n—er neighborhoods, because they were usually up to no good. I was telling a true story as I remembered it.”
Mosley wrote that he is unaware who complained about his use of the word. “There I was, a black man in America who shares with millions of others the history of racism. And more often than not, treated as subhuman,” he continued. “If addressed at all that history had to be rendered in words my employers regarded as acceptable.”
Contrast this approach with that in the ST:TOS episode “The Savage Curtain.” When the attractive lieutenant Uhura approaches, Abraham Lincoln is moved to exclaim, “What a charming Negress.”
Fearing that his wording may have been inappropriate, the former president apologizes: “Oh. Forgive me, my dear. I know that in my time, some used that term as a description of property.”
Uhura replies, “But why should I object to that term, sir? You see, in our century, we’ve learned not to fear words.”
To this, Lincoln states, “The foolishness of my century had me apologizing when no offense was given.”
Too often missing from woke consideration is intentionality. It is necessary to discern what were the intentions of a person using a word that some people consider inappropriate. Thus, Walter Mosley found himself attacked despite not having sinister intentions. Uhura recognized the innocuous terminology of Lincoln and was not offended. It was just a word anyway. Lincoln was engaged by Uhura instead of attacked for what some might have deemed been inappropriate wording. A willingness to engage in respectful discussion along with the attempt to understand are required to change minds and improve the human vocabulary. To attack a person without attempting dialogue risks a backlash from a person who might otherwise have been found to be well-intentioned or, at least, not ill-intentioned.
Any Vulcan will inform you of the simple logic that, in human parlance, honey is far likelier to attract bees than vinegar.
Robert Meyer Burnett, who is best known for directing, co-writing, and editing the feature film Free Enterprise, has also been extremely critical of the writing and storytelling in NuTrek. In his Robservations he asks, “What is Star Trek: Picard about and Who Really Created It?” and “What exactly is Star Trek Storytelling?” Yes, Burnett is extremely disappointed in the writing and storytelling of NuTrek. But he doesn’t just point out the flaws with writing, he also proposes how it could have been better written to appeal to viewers.
This is not to say everything was artful and hunky-dory in the pre-Bad Robot (read JJ Abrams) and pre-Secret Hideout (read Alex Kurtzman) ST. There are some clunker episodes such as “And the Children Shall Lead” in TOS, “Code of Honor” in TNG, and “These are the Voyages” in ENT. There are inconsistencies with canon, albeit usually not blatant and usually not intentional. And it is granted that in the TOS era, the special effects and technology to produce aliens and creatures was sorely lacking by today’s standards. For instance, in TOS’s “Arena,” captain Kirk fights the Gorn which is obviously a man in a lizard suit.
Nonetheless, NuTrek does have its fans. I appreciate that there are people who derive enjoyment from viewing NuTrek. One Youtube channel that is somewhat predisposed toward NuTrek but makes a reasoned case for its leaning is Ketwolski. Ketwolski acknowledged problems early on with ST:Disco. However, he contends that by the conclusion of season 3 that Disco has grown its beard; that “thematically, it was all very, very connected…”
In his review and breakdown of ST:Picard season 1, a NuTrek series based on the ST:TNG captain Jean Luc Picard a few decades hence, Ketwolski described parts of the finale as “frustrating,” “very weird,” and noted how the plot lines were disjointed. But he concludes, “Overall, I can say that Star Trek: Picard is the best first season of any Star Trek show to date, and that is quite the feat.”
Burnett disagrees: “I’ve been a Star Trek fan pretty much all my life. It’s pretty much my favorite thing.” But he feels baffled and perplexed looking at ST:Picard.
Burnett posed a question to himself about ST:Picard: “What is the element that I cannot stand about this show?” To which he replied, “The callousness with which it approaches life, humanoid life specifically.” He pointed to an example in episode 4 that left him “gobsmacked,” that of Picard walking into a Romulan bar “to stir up shit” that resulted in a Romulan migrant being beheaded. The message being that it is okay to murder your enemy — which, he said, is “straight up antithetical to Star Trek.” To adduce that this iteration of ST is “painfully stupid on every level,” Burnett noted that the sign at the Romulan bar was written in English.
NuTrek’s Absence of Likeable Characters
Probably the biggest gripe about NuTrek is the inferior writing and storytelling. The creator, writers, and showrunners do not seem to have a handle on what ST has been about and why it attracted such a fervent fanbase. This is despite clinging to the species and characters that comprised previous Star Trek. Thus Klingons and Romulans are recycled. We are presented with a bastardized captain Picard and the iconic Spock, as first played by Leonard Nimoy, has been reduced to a caricature. Thus the contradiction that what is labeled NuTrek is relying on previous Star Trek without grasping the ethos of Star trek.
I do not complain about the actors or the acting in NuTrek. But I am thoroughly unimpressed with the writing and storytelling. It must be quite difficult for actors to perform in an appealing manner to viewers when the script they base their acting upon is one of inferior writing with poorly developed characters or on previously developed characters that have been pretzeled into incoherent aberrations. While the crew of the spaceship Discovery is still diverse, the characters are all so unlikeable.
This is particularly so with the lead character of Michael Burnham who is played by actor Sonequa Martin-Green. Much of the fandom concurs about disenchantment with this character. Michael Burnham is often referred to as a Mary Sue; which has come to mean something along the lines of a young woman too extraordinarily capable at everything. (The male equivalent has come to be called Marty Stu.)
A Youtube channel, Trekpertise, asked the question: “Is Michael Burnham a Mary Sue?” Trekpertise concluded she wasn’t, and this conclusion was much pilloried in the comments section (albeit some especially devastating critiques seem to have been removed).
Many NuTrekkers dismissed complaints about the Michael Burnham protagonist as racism. This is an ad hominem argument, and it does not hold water. Racists are highly unlikely to be attracted to Star Trek because of its embrace of diversity. Then there are the facts that Uhura was a Black bridge officer in ST:TOS, Geordi La Forge was the Black chief engineer in ST:TNG, and Avery Brooks played the Black captain in ST:DS9. One excellent DS9 episode, in particular, “Far Beyond the Stars,” stirred abhorrence for the mental weakness and anti-humanism of racism.7
A comment by W PlasmaHam reads:
It seems as if the ultimate goal of this [Trekpertise] video was to defend Burnham by asserting that all criticism was motivated by race, gender, or dislike of a serialized format. I feel that such an argument is quite dismissive of legitimate criticism towards her. It appears that the majority of people in the comments agree that Burnham is a flat or unlikable character, even those who say that Mary Sue accusations are unfounded. Will you address those? Because it feels as if you took a quite easy approach to analyzing her character.
To which Trekpertise replied:
That wasn’t the purpose of this video. The purpose of this video is too illustrate that the Mary Sue criticism isn’t applicable to Michael Burnham, or indeed any other character in film and TV. It belongs to the fanzines of the 1970s. There is plenty else to discuss with Michael Burnham.
Even Ketwolski answered the question of whether Michael Burnham is a Mary Sue with a tempered: “Yes! kinda.”8
Early on there was the intriguing and mildly charismatic Saru, a Kelpian who represents a new species introduced by ST:Disco. However, the writers would later have Saru neutered (figuratively) by Michael Burnham. The writers also saw fit to promote ensign Tilly in one fell swoop to number one. A fan favorite character, Spock, was also diminished beside the perfection of his sister-through-adoption, Burnham.9
Is NuTrek a Copycat?
The writing is so egregious that several seeming instances of plagiarism are apparent in ST:Disco. For example, some scenes appear to have been lifted from the films Die Hard, Total Recall, and The Day After Tomorrow.
Is it Disco paying homage? But there is no acknowledgement of the idea emanating from elsewhere.
A comment by OneBagTravel opined that “… these similarities is that they’re not just ideas being borrowed, they’re visuals nearly shot for shot stolen. It’s far too blatant to just say it’s coincidental.”
The criticism of plagiarism by Disco, however, started right off the bat when a lawsuit was launched against CBS and ST:Disco over the alleged stealing of the idea of a mycelial network traversed by a giant tardigrade across space-time and other similarities from the game “Tardigrades” created by Anas Abdin. The lawsuit was dismissed because Abdin had to “prove” the idea theft by CBS.
This points to NuTrek sadly lacking creativity and imagination.
How Popular is NuTrek?
In 2009, J.J. Abrams directed the science fiction action film Star Trek, written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. Rotten Tomatoes had critics rate it 94% and fans 91%; it had a gross in the US of $257.7M.
The next film was titled Star Trek into Darkness. Again the ratings were favorable at Rotten Tomatoes: critics rated it 84% and fans 89%; it grossed $228.8M in the US.
The third film was Star Trek Beyond. Rotten Tomatoes had critics rate it 86% and fans 80%; the gross in USA had dropped to $158.8M — still a significant number.
The NuTrek TV series present a different picture. For ST:Disco there is a notable distinction between the ratings of critics and fans:
- ST:Disco Season 1; Rotten Tomatoes had critics rate it 82% and fans 50%
- ST:Disco Season 2; Rotten Tomatoes had critics rate it 81% and fans 36%
- ST:Disco Season 3; Rotten Tomatoes had critics rate it 90% and fans 46%
- Short Treks: fans only at 37%
This notable distinction between the ratings of critics and fans also applies to ST:Picard:
- ST:Picard Season 1; Rotten Tomatoes had critics rate it 87% and fans 56%
A NuTrek animation series also completed its first season:
- ST:Lower Decks Season 1; Rotten Tomatoes had critics rate it 65% and fans 44%
Of interest is a series called The Orville that is contemporaneous with NuTrek. It was created by the Star Trek fan Seth MacFarlane who was enamored with ST’s morality, writing, and characters. Although campier than ST, The Orville has captured the essence of ST’s progressivism and crew camaraderie. Work on season 3 of The Orville is, reportedly, underway, having been disrupted by the pandemic. For The Orville, the fan and critic ratings are the obverse of that for NuTrek in season 1. It was loved by both fans and critics in season 2:
- The Orville Season 1; Rotten Tomatoes had critics rate it 30% and fans 94%
- The Orville Season 2; Rotten Tomatoes had critics rate it 100% and fans 94%
The numbers indicate that The Orville, obviously an homage to Star Trek, is quite popular with viewers.
Intellectual Property and the Rights of Fans
Intellectual property rights accord priority to the owner of an idea over the benefits that could accrue to the wider society from access to the idea. Intellectual property rights have been used to hamstring the greater good for humanity, as well a ST fan films.
Yet Jeff Macharyas argued,
There has been no other TV show in history that could be considered as “open source” as Star Trek. In true open source fashion, fans have used the universe originally created by Gene Roddenberry in 1964 as “the source code” for fan-made films, cartoons, games, etc. If one considers the characters, settings and general plots of Star Trek, then it’s easy to understand how Star Trek has been a true open source universe.
Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, would seem to agree. He wrote in the foreword to Star Trek: The New Voyages (1976):
Television viewers by the millions began to take Star Trek to heart as their own personal optimistic view of the Human condition and future. They fought for the show, honored it, cherished it, wrote about it–and have continued to do their level best to make certain that it will live again.
…We were particularly amazed when thousands, then tens of thousands of people began creating their own personal Star Trek adventures. Stories, and paintings, and sculptures, and cookbooks. And songs, and poems, and fashions. And more. The list is still growing. It took some time for us to fully understand and appreciate what these people were saying. Eventually we realized that there is no more profound way in which people could express what Star Trek has meant to them than by creating their own very personal Star Trek things.
Ella von Holtum, affiliated with the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Iowa, examined “Freedom of Expression and Intellectual Property in Fan Fiction of the early 1980s.” She summarized some learning points:
- Intellectual Property and Freedom of Expression exert very different forces upon cultural productions
- Intellectual Property applies economic principles to the realm of creative expression
- Freedom of Expression does not contribute to an oppressive power dynamic, and supports the work of all creators
- Intellectual Property should not be invoked in discussions about creative products – it simply doesn’t apply, and demonstrates deeply harmful effects
Gene Roddenberry passed away in 1991. Unfortunately, Roddenberry had sold the rights to Star Trek to Paramount for one-third of future profits.10
In the meantime, as far as Star Trek is concerned, the corporatocracy determines what will be produced and when it can be viewed. The only power of the fans is to tune in or not to tune in; in the end, this is a mighty power. It is the fans who will determine whether a show is profitable or not. The corporations may control what is made available for viewing, but the public decides what they will view.
Hope for a Star Trek Future?
The world is far from achieving the morality of 23rd or 24th century Star Trek.
Nonetheless, Star Trek is important because it presents a vision of what the future could be, something people could aspire to. Becoming an astrophysicist, astronaut, scientist, film industry writer, social justice campaigner, etc. To work toward the abolishment of poverty, racism, the penal system11 and war. However, we don’t need to wait for the 23rd century. We can start right now in the 21st century. It is a matter of will and determination. China didn’t wait for the 23rd century. It took action and demonstrated that absolute poverty can be eliminated now.
In the Star Trek future, Earth is united under one government. Humans of all ethnicities and nationalities are as one. That doesn’t mean Star Trek is free from propaganda. For instance, prominent human characters in the Trekverse tend to be American, although countries are a thing of the past. In the film Star Trek: First Contact, Zefram Cochrane invents the first warp drive spaceship in Montana, leading to first contact with Vulcans. Captain Kirk is from Iowa. Captain Pike who preceded Kirk is from California.
The TOS episode “The Omega Glory,” features the Yangs (Yankees) and Kohms (Communists), the Pledge of Allegiance, and the flag of the United States. This patriotic reverence for Americana takes place in a distant solar system on the planet Omega IV. However, this is not surprising for a series produced by an American TV network for an American audience.
Moreover, it is well known that Hollywood and US propaganda go hand-in-hand. And it is also well documented that the CIA influences Hollywood and the media in general.
Twenty-first century Earth is a planet riven by militarism and violence, imperialism, hegemony, factionalism, classism, racism, prejudice, poverty, inequality and inequity. It is the moneyed classes that control the media. It is the moneyed classes that will determine what appears in mass media. Warring is normalized as patriotic, and that may well explain the militarism and warring among planetary factions that is so prevalent in NuTrek. The rich thus become richer by launching wars to be fought by the poor who are speciously told they fight for honor and country.
In NuTrek, the United Federation of Planets is no longer governing, and Earth, one of the founding members, is no longer a member. The principles of the Federation lie at the core of what Star Trek is about: “liberty, equality, peace, justice, and progress, with the purpose of furthering the universal rights of all sentient life. Federation members exchange knowledge and resources to facilitate peaceful cooperation, scientific development, space exploration, and mutual defense.” Yet NuTrek even goes as far as to depict the much more distant future as regressivist, factional, battle-scarred, wracked by poverty, and dealing with energy scarcity. This is what the crew of the USS Discovery encounter after exiting a time vortex to emerge in the 32nd century.
What is this message from NuTrek? Clearly, the 32nd century is not aspirational. This is why NuTrek is anathema to so many Trekkies.
Finally, midway through season 3 of Disco, I gave up on watching what I hoped would be Star Trek because I finally reached the inescapable conclusion that NuTrek up to now (i.e., Disco, Picard, and Lower Decks) was not Star Trek. I had watched (and rewatched) every episode of every ST production until this moment. Nonetheless, I will hope that future ST series will reconnect to serious grappling with moral dilemmas, the advancement of the human condition, the positivity of what is to come, and the writing of thoughtful scripts with developed characters (some of who are appealing) in line with previous ST series (i.e., before NuTrek).
Poor audience ratings and criticisms have plagued NuTrek from the start. Surely those criticisms have been heard by the corporate suits, but will they respond to what the fans want? Netflix didn’t pick up ST:Picard for international distribution. ST:LD went without an international distributor well into its season. Clearly streaming services weren’t fighting each other for NuTrek.
The financial markets became bearish for ViacomCBS in late March, as the stock began to precipitously plummet.
Yet, NuTrek is filming a fourth season of the much reviled ST:Disco and a second season of the already tired retread ST:Picard, which tries to slip in many cameos for Patrick Stewart’s former colleagues with mixed results; e.g., Data, the android who doesn’t age, has appreciably aged. NuTrek didn’t even bother in a few cases to hire actors who previously had played the ST characters, so viewers were expected to overlook the incongruencies.
Haters
Knowing that there is a hardcore Trekkie fanbase seems to have jaundiced some in the NuTrekverse to a possibly negative reaction. Did Jason Isaacs who played captain Lorca in season 1 of Disco take this fanbase for granted when he said:
I don’t mean to sound irreverent when I say I don’t care about the die-hard Trek fans. I only ‘don’t care’ about them in the sense that I know they’re all going to watch anyway. I look forward to having the fun of them being outraged, so they can sit up all night and talk about it with each other.
An antipathy has arisen among a section of NuTrekkers toward those who do not share their appreciation for NuTrek. They frequently call critics of NuTrek “haters.” While some of these people probably would admit to hating NuTrek, most people do not respond well to be called a hater.
What I hate is ad hominem, so I am unimpressed when people resort to the tactic of disparaging other people through name-calling. Calling others “haters” is illogical, regressivist, and antithetical to the Trekverse as conceived by Roddenberry.
A glimmer of hope?
Season 2 of Disco saw captain Pike of the USS Enterprise injected into that series for one season. Afterwards, fans clamored for more of Pike and the Enterprise, and such a series is, reportedly, in the works. It offers a ray of hope for the fans. But given the NuTrek track record, don’t hold your breath.
Next: In Part 2, B.J. Sabri will discuss Star Trek from an expanded political viewpoint.
- To define: “What Is Progressivism?“
- This is definitely not to imply that wearing a miniskirt is negative; it would just seem to indicate that the gams of female characters were now being downplayed in favor of their other attributes.
- Manu Saadia, Star Trek fan and contributing writer for Fusion.net, has written a book that delves into the utopian economics of the Trek universe: Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek. Review.
- The second episode is titled “Mudd in Your I.”
- Subsequent to a corporate merger, it has now been renamed Paramount+.
- Why didn’t Secret Hideout (Kurtzmann’s production company) hire a super knowledgeable Trekkie or two to check the scripts for canon and continuity errors? If Secret Hideout did do this, then it has a bad HR department. But I suspect that Secret Hideout intended to rip up ST canon and continuity.
- Having added an adjective denoting preponderent skin pigmentation in this essay was very frustrating, and so some level offensive, to this writer because fans of ST do not see race; they just see humans. And it is hoped that all humans would recognize that we all are that: humans.
- For additional argumentation for Michael Burnham being a Mary Sue, view “Michael Burnham is The Best at Everything (Part 1),” “Michael Burnham is The Best at Everything (Part 2),” and “Michael Burnham is The Best at Everything (Part 3).”
- Spock’s sister having suddenly appeared out of the NuTrek ether — canon be damned again.
- James van Hise, The Man Who Created Star Trek: Gene Roddenberry (Pioneer Books: 1992): 58. Via https://archive.org/
- They still have the brig on starships, but the dignified treatment of internees is light years beyond the gulags of Abu Ghraib, Alcatraz, Attica, and Guantanamo.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
David Gelles, the New York Times reporter, likes to report about corporate plutocrats raking it in while stifling or endangering their workers. We’ve all seen those large advertisements by big companies praising the sacrifices of their brave workers during this Covid-19 pandemic. When workers ask for living wages, most of these bosses say “No” but take plenty of dough for themselves.
Gelles reports that Boeing, after its criminal negligence brought down two 737 MAX planes and killed 346 people, went into a corporate tailspin. The company laid off 30,000 workers and its sales and stocks plummeted as it reported a $12 billion loss. No matter, the new Boeing boss, David Calhoun, managed to pay himself about $10,500 an hour, forty hours a week, plus benefits and perks.
“Executives are minting fortunes, while laid-off workers line up at food banks,” writes Gelles. Carefully chosen Boards of Directors rubberstamp lavish compensation packages, as they haul in big money themselves for attending a few Board meetings.
It gets worse. Hilton Hotel had many rooms empty due to the Covid-19 pandemic. But CEO Chris Nassetta made sure his pockets weren’t empty. He was paid $55.9 million in compensation in 2020 or more than a million dollars a week!
Gelles goes on to report that with “the cruise industry at a standstill…,” the Norwegian Cruise Line, “doubled the pay of Frank Del Rio, its chief executive, to $36.4 million.” That is more than $700,000 per week. He must have worked overtime counting empty ships and red ink.
T-Mobile’s merger with Sprint got government antitrust approval with the assurance that more jobs would be created with cost savings. Instead, they’re starting layoffs while awarding CEO Mike Sievert over a million dollars a week. Sometimes, CEOs make more dollars from their company than the entire company itself makes in profits. Companies that lay off workers pay their top executives huge amounts, and still have the avarice to demand and get federal stimulus grants.
On March 22, the New York Times reported a new analysis by IRS researchers and academics about tax evasion by the richest 1% of U.S. households. Taken as a whole, these super-rich don’t even report a fifth of their income, according to this study. The ultra-wealthy get away with this heist by offshoring to tax havens and pass-through businesses. Adding to this unlawful evasion is their upper-class power over Congress to rig the tax laws so they can avoid even more taxes.
The Republicans, by starving the IRS budget and audit staff over the past decade, have aided and abetted enormous tax evasions. Curiously, the cowardly Democrats have not made this an issue in their campaigns against the GOP. Hundreds of billions of dollars a year are at stake.
Trump, of course, made matters worse. ProPublica found the IRS audited the poor at around the same rate as the richest Americans.
Big Corporations make out like no mere individuals. Earlier this month, the New York Times told its readers that The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) study revealed: “55 of the nation’s largest corporations paid no federal income tax on more than $40 billion in profits last year.” These companies even received $3.5 billion in rebates from the Treasury Department, so zany are the fine-print tax bonanzas.
Twenty-six corporations paid no federal income taxes since 2017, according to the ITEP study. These included Nike and FedEx.
Corporations get lots of these tax breaks by arguing before Congress that they need them to invest and create jobs. Repeatedly, these promises turn out to be false. Some have called them lies, citing profits totaling over 7 trillion dollars in the past decade being shredded in buybacks of the companies’ own stock.
Apple, whose quasi-monopoly reaps huge quarterly profits, just announced another $90 billion in stock buybacks. Apple doesn’t know what to do with its cash from vastly overpriced computers and iPhones. Apple, not surprisingly, pays very little in federal income taxes to Uncle Sam – despite the U.S. being the land of its birth and source of ample R & D corporate welfare paid for by U.S. taxpayers.
CEO Tim Cook, arguably the most miserly CEO plutocrat in America, turns a deaf ear to health, labor, and environmental specialists pleading with him to address the solid waste of its junked electronic products and pay its serf-labor in China a living wage. These two expenditures would not consume 10 percent of Apple’s enormous profits. To which, Emperor Cook says no dice.
Testifying before the Senate Finance Committee, Kimberly A. Clausing, a U.S. Treasury official, said according to the Washington Post, that while other wealthy nations typically raise roughly 3 percent of GDP through corporate taxes, in the United States that share fell to just 1 percent following the 2017 Trump tax cut−all while corporate profits, as a share of U.S. GDP, were setting records.
The usual progressive members of Congress issue denunciations of this whole corporate, ultra-rich tax escape racket. Nearly 7 in 10 Americans believe corporations pay too little in taxes, according to Gallup polling. Unfortunately, nothing happens in Congress to address this injustice.
When are the American people going to move on to Congress and their Big Boy paymasters? When the plutocratic class evades taxes, either there are fewer public services, more public deficits, or higher taxes on the middle class. As Joe Biden says – they must pay “their fair share.” People, use your civic muscle to make your members of Congress act and do it, now!
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
David Gelles, the New York Times reporter, likes to report about corporate plutocrats raking it in while stifling or endangering their workers. We’ve all seen those large advertisements by big companies praising the sacrifices of their brave workers during this Covid-19 pandemic. When workers ask for living wages, most of these bosses say “No” but take plenty of dough for themselves.
Gelles reports that Boeing, after its criminal negligence brought down two 737 MAX planes and killed 346 people, went into a corporate tailspin. The company laid off 30,000 workers and its sales and stocks plummeted as it reported a $12 billion loss. No matter, the new Boeing boss, David Calhoun, managed to pay himself about $10,500 an hour, forty hours a week, plus benefits and perks.
“Executives are minting fortunes, while laid-off workers line up at food banks,” writes Gelles. Carefully chosen Boards of Directors rubberstamp lavish compensation packages, as they haul in big money themselves for attending a few Board meetings.
It gets worse. Hilton Hotel had many rooms empty due to the Covid-19 pandemic. But CEO Chris Nassetta made sure his pockets weren’t empty. He was paid $55.9 million in compensation in 2020 or more than a million dollars a week!
Gelles goes on to report that with “the cruise industry at a standstill…,” the Norwegian Cruise Line, “doubled the pay of Frank Del Rio, its chief executive, to $36.4 million.” That is more than $700,000 per week. He must have worked overtime counting empty ships and red ink.
T-Mobile’s merger with Sprint got government antitrust approval with the assurance that more jobs would be created with cost savings. Instead, they’re starting layoffs while awarding CEO Mike Sievert over a million dollars a week. Sometimes, CEOs make more dollars from their company than the entire company itself makes in profits. Companies that lay off workers pay their top executives huge amounts, and still have the avarice to demand and get federal stimulus grants.
On March 22, the New York Times reported a new analysis by IRS researchers and academics about tax evasion by the richest 1% of U.S. households. Taken as a whole, these super-rich don’t even report a fifth of their income, according to this study. The ultra-wealthy get away with this heist by offshoring to tax havens and pass-through businesses. Adding to this unlawful evasion is their upper-class power over Congress to rig the tax laws so they can avoid even more taxes.
The Republicans, by starving the IRS budget and audit staff over the past decade, have aided and abetted enormous tax evasions. Curiously, the cowardly Democrats have not made this an issue in their campaigns against the GOP. Hundreds of billions of dollars a year are at stake.
Trump, of course, made matters worse. ProPublica found the IRS audited the poor at around the same rate as the richest Americans.
Big Corporations make out like no mere individuals. Earlier this month, the New York Times told its readers that The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) study revealed: “55 of the nation’s largest corporations paid no federal income tax on more than $40 billion in profits last year.” These companies even received $3.5 billion in rebates from the Treasury Department, so zany are the fine-print tax bonanzas.
Twenty-six corporations paid no federal income taxes since 2017, according to the ITEP study. These included Nike and FedEx.
Corporations get lots of these tax breaks by arguing before Congress that they need them to invest and create jobs. Repeatedly, these promises turn out to be false. Some have called them lies, citing profits totaling over 7 trillion dollars in the past decade being shredded in buybacks of the companies’ own stock.
Apple, whose quasi-monopoly reaps huge quarterly profits, just announced another $90 billion in stock buybacks. Apple doesn’t know what to do with its cash from vastly overpriced computers and iPhones. Apple, not surprisingly, pays very little in federal income taxes to Uncle Sam – despite the U.S. being the land of its birth and source of ample R & D corporate welfare paid for by U.S. taxpayers.
CEO Tim Cook, arguably the most miserly CEO plutocrat in America, turns a deaf ear to health, labor, and environmental specialists pleading with him to address the solid waste of its junked electronic products and pay its serf-labor in China a living wage. These two expenditures would not consume 10 percent of Apple’s enormous profits. To which, Emperor Cook says no dice.
Testifying before the Senate Finance Committee, Kimberly A. Clausing, a U.S. Treasury official, said according to the Washington Post, that while other wealthy nations typically raise roughly 3 percent of GDP through corporate taxes, in the United States that share fell to just 1 percent following the 2017 Trump tax cut−all while corporate profits, as a share of U.S. GDP, were setting records.
The usual progressive members of Congress issue denunciations of this whole corporate, ultra-rich tax escape racket. Nearly 7 in 10 Americans believe corporations pay too little in taxes, according to Gallup polling. Unfortunately, nothing happens in Congress to address this injustice.
When are the American people going to move on to Congress and their Big Boy paymasters? When the plutocratic class evades taxes, either there are fewer public services, more public deficits, or higher taxes on the middle class. As Joe Biden says – they must pay “their fair share.” People, use your civic muscle to make your members of Congress act and do it, now!
The post Tim Cook, Apple, and Runaway Limitless Corporate Greed first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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.
Aside from various studies that have reported on the health impacts of chemical-dependent crops (Dr Rosemary Mason’s many reports on this can be accessed on the academia.edu website), New Histories of the Green Revolution (2019) debunks the claim that the Green Revolution boosted productivity; The Violence of the Green Revolution (1991) details (among other things) the impact on rural communities; Bhaskar Save’s open letter to Indian officials in 2006 discusses the ecological devastation of the Green Revolution and in a 2019 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology and Agricultural Sciences, Parvez et al note that native wheat varieties in India have higher nutrition content than the Green Revolution varieties (many such crop varieties were side-lined in favour of corporate seeds that were of lower nutritional value).
These are just a brief selection of peer reviewed and ‘grey’ literature which detail the adverse impacts of the Green Revolution.
GMO value capture
As for GM crops, often described as Green Revolution 2.0, these too have failed to deliver on the promises made and, like the 1.0 version, have often had devastating consequences.
The arguments for and against GMOs are well documented, but one paper worth noting appeared in the journal Current Science in 2018. Along with PC Kesavan, MS Swaminathan – regarded as the father of the Green Revolution in India – argued against introducing GM crops to India and cited various studies about the failings of the GMO project.
Regardless, the industry and its well-funded lobbyists and bought career scientists continue to spin the line that GM crops are a marvellous success and that the world needs even more of them to avoid a global food shortage. GM crops are required to feed the world is a well-worn industry slogan trotted out at every available opportunity. Just like the claim of GM crops being a tremendous success, this too is based on a myth.
There is no global shortage of food. Even under any plausible future population scenario, there will be no shortage as evidenced by scientist Dr Jonathan Latham in his recent paper “The Myth of a Food Crisis“.
However, new gene drive and gene editing techniques have now been developed and the industry is seeking the unregulated commercial release of products that are based on these methods.
It does not want plants, animals and micro-organisms created with gene-editing to be subject to safety checks, monitoring or consumer labelling. This is concerning given the real dangers that these techniques pose.
Many peer-reviewed research papers now call into question industry claims about the ‘precision’, safety and benefits of gene-edited organisms and can be accessed on the GMWatch.org website.
It really is a case of old wine in new bottles.
And this is not lost on a coalition of 162 civil society, farmers and business organisations which has called on Vice-President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans to ensure that new genetic engineering techniques continue to be regulated in accordance with existing EU GMO standards.
The coalition argues that these new techniques can cause a range of unwanted genetic modifications that can result in the production of novel toxins or allergens or in the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes. The open letter adds that even intended modifications can result in traits which could raise food safety, environmental or animal welfare concerns.
The European Court of Justice ruled in 2018 that organisms obtained with new genetic modification techniques must be regulated under the EU’s existing GMO laws. However, there has been intense lobbying from the agriculture biotech industry to weaken the legislation, aided by the Gates Foundation.
The coalition states that various scientific publications show that new techniques of genetic modification allow developers to make significant genetic changes, which can be very different from those that happen in nature.
In addition to these concerns, a new paper from Chinese scientists, ‘Herbicide Resistance: Another Hot Agronomic Trait for Plant Genome Editing’, says that, in spite of claims from GMO promoters that gene editing will be climate-friendly and reduce pesticide use, what we can expect is just more of the same – GM herbicide-tolerant crops and increased herbicide use.
The industry wants its new techniques to be unregulated, thereby making gene-edited GMOs faster to develop, more profitable and hidden from consumers when purchasing items in stores. At the same time, the costly herbicide treadmill will be reinforced for farmers.
None of this is meant to imply that new technology is bad in itself. The issue is who owns and controls the technology and what are the underlying intentions. By dodging regulation as well as avoiding economic, social, environmental and health impact assessments, it is clear that the industry is first and foremost motivated by value capture and profit and contempt for democratic accountability.
This is patently clear if we look at the rollout of Bt cotton in India which served the bottom line of Monsanto but brought dependency, distress and no durable agronomic benefits for many of India’s small and marginal farmers. Prof A P Gutierrez argues that Bt cotton has effectively placed these farmers in a corporate noose.
Monsanto sucked hundreds of millions of dollars in profit from these cotton farmers, while industry-funded scientists are always keen to push the mantra that rolling out Bt cotton in India uplifted their conditions.
Those who promote this narrative remain wilfully ignorant of the challenges (documented in the 2019 book by Andrew Flachs – Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India) these farmers face in terms of financial distress, increasing pest resistance, dependency on unregulated seed markets, the eradication of environmental learning, the loss of control over their productive means and the biotech-chemical treadmill they are trapped on (this last point is precisely what the industry intended).
When assessing the possible impacts of GMO agriculture, it was with good reason that, in their 2018 paper, Swaminathan and Kesavan called for:
able economists who are familiar with and will prioritise rural livelihoods and the interests of resource-poor small and marginal farmers rather than serve corporate interests and their profits.
What can be done?
Whether through all aspects of data control (soil quality, consumer preferences, weather, etc), e-commerce monopolies, corporate land ownership, seed biopiracy and patenting, synthetic food or the eradication of the public sector’s role in ensuring food security and national food sovereignty (as we could see in India with new farm legislation), Bill Gates and his corporate cronies seek to gain full control over the global food system.
Smallholder peasant farming is to be eradicated as the big-tech giants and agribusiness impose lab-grown food, GM seeds, genetically engineered soil microbes, data harvesting tools and drones and other ‘disruptive’ technologies.
We could see farmerless industrial-scale farms being manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented GM seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food.
The displacement of a food-producing peasantry (and the subsequent destruction of rural communities and local food security) was something the Gates Foundation once called for and cynically termed “land mobility”.
Technocratic meddling has already destroyed or undermined agrarian ecosystems that draw on centuries of traditional knowledge and are increasingly recognised as valid approaches to secure food security, as outlined in Food Security and Traditional Knowledge in India in the Journal of South Asian Studies, for instance.
But is all of this inevitable?
Not according to the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, which has just released a report in collaboration with the ETC Group: ‘A Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045‘.
The report outlines two different futures. If Gates and the global mega-corporations have their way, we will see the entire food system being controlled by data platforms, private equity firms and e-commerce giants, putting the food security (and livelihoods) of billions at the mercy of AI-controlled farming systems.
The other scenario involves civil society and social movements – grassroots organisations, international NGOs, farmers’ and fishers’ groups, cooperatives and unions – collaborating more closely to transform financial flows, governance structures and food systems from the ground up.
The report’s lead author, Pat Mooney, says that agribusiness has a very simple message: the cascading environmental crisis can be resolved by powerful new genomic and information technologies that can only be developed if governments unleash the entrepreneurial genius, deep pockets and risk-taking spirit of the most powerful corporations.
Mooney notes that we have had similar messages based on emerging technology for decades but the technologies either did not show up or fell flat and the only thing that grew were the corporations.
He says:
In return for trillions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies, the agribusiness model would centralise food production around a handful of untested technologies that would lead to the forced exodus of at least a billion people from hundreds of millions of farms. Agribusiness is gambling on other people’s food security.
Although Mooney argues that new genuinely successful alternatives like agroecology are frequently suppressed by the industries they imperil, he states that civil society has a remarkable track record in fighting back, not least in developing healthy and equitable agroecological production systems, building short (community-based) supply chains and restructuring and democratising governance systems.
As stated in the report, the thrust of any ’Long Food Movement’ strategy is that short-termism is not an option: civil society groups need to place multiple objectives and actions on a 25-year roadmap and not make trade-offs along the way – especially when faced with the neoliberal-totalitarianism of Gates et al who will seek to derail anything or anyone regarded as a threat to their aims.
• The report ‘A Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045’ can be accessed here.
The post Gates Unhinged: Dystopian Vision for Agrifood Must Not Succeed first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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.
Aside from various studies that have reported on the health impacts of chemical-dependent crops (Dr Rosemary Mason’s many reports on this can be accessed on the academia.edu website), New Histories of the Green Revolution (2019) debunks the claim that the Green Revolution boosted productivity; The Violence of the Green Revolution (1991) details (among other things) the impact on rural communities; Bhaskar Save’s open letter to Indian officials in 2006 discusses the ecological devastation of the Green Revolution and in a 2019 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology and Agricultural Sciences, Parvez et al note that native wheat varieties in India have higher nutrition content than the Green Revolution varieties (many such crop varieties were side-lined in favour of corporate seeds that were of lower nutritional value).
These are just a brief selection of peer reviewed and ‘grey’ literature which detail the adverse impacts of the Green Revolution.
GMO value capture
As for GM crops, often described as Green Revolution 2.0, these too have failed to deliver on the promises made and, like the 1.0 version, have often had devastating consequences.
The arguments for and against GMOs are well documented, but one paper worth noting appeared in the journal Current Science in 2018. Along with PC Kesavan, MS Swaminathan – regarded as the father of the Green Revolution in India – argued against introducing GM crops to India and cited various studies about the failings of the GMO project.
Regardless, the industry and its well-funded lobbyists and bought career scientists continue to spin the line that GM crops are a marvellous success and that the world needs even more of them to avoid a global food shortage. GM crops are required to feed the world is a well-worn industry slogan trotted out at every available opportunity. Just like the claim of GM crops being a tremendous success, this too is based on a myth.
There is no global shortage of food. Even under any plausible future population scenario, there will be no shortage as evidenced by scientist Dr Jonathan Latham in his recent paper “The Myth of a Food Crisis“.
However, new gene drive and gene editing techniques have now been developed and the industry is seeking the unregulated commercial release of products that are based on these methods.
It does not want plants, animals and micro-organisms created with gene-editing to be subject to safety checks, monitoring or consumer labelling. This is concerning given the real dangers that these techniques pose.
Many peer-reviewed research papers now call into question industry claims about the ‘precision’, safety and benefits of gene-edited organisms and can be accessed on the GMWatch.org website.
It really is a case of old wine in new bottles.
And this is not lost on a coalition of 162 civil society, farmers and business organisations which has called on Vice-President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans to ensure that new genetic engineering techniques continue to be regulated in accordance with existing EU GMO standards.
The coalition argues that these new techniques can cause a range of unwanted genetic modifications that can result in the production of novel toxins or allergens or in the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes. The open letter adds that even intended modifications can result in traits which could raise food safety, environmental or animal welfare concerns.
The European Court of Justice ruled in 2018 that organisms obtained with new genetic modification techniques must be regulated under the EU’s existing GMO laws. However, there has been intense lobbying from the agriculture biotech industry to weaken the legislation, aided by the Gates Foundation.
The coalition states that various scientific publications show that new techniques of genetic modification allow developers to make significant genetic changes, which can be very different from those that happen in nature.
In addition to these concerns, a new paper from Chinese scientists, ‘Herbicide Resistance: Another Hot Agronomic Trait for Plant Genome Editing’, says that, in spite of claims from GMO promoters that gene editing will be climate-friendly and reduce pesticide use, what we can expect is just more of the same – GM herbicide-tolerant crops and increased herbicide use.
The industry wants its new techniques to be unregulated, thereby making gene-edited GMOs faster to develop, more profitable and hidden from consumers when purchasing items in stores. At the same time, the costly herbicide treadmill will be reinforced for farmers.
None of this is meant to imply that new technology is bad in itself. The issue is who owns and controls the technology and what are the underlying intentions. By dodging regulation as well as avoiding economic, social, environmental and health impact assessments, it is clear that the industry is first and foremost motivated by value capture and profit and contempt for democratic accountability.
This is patently clear if we look at the rollout of Bt cotton in India which served the bottom line of Monsanto but brought dependency, distress and no durable agronomic benefits for many of India’s small and marginal farmers. Prof A P Gutierrez argues that Bt cotton has effectively placed these farmers in a corporate noose.
Monsanto sucked hundreds of millions of dollars in profit from these cotton farmers, while industry-funded scientists are always keen to push the mantra that rolling out Bt cotton in India uplifted their conditions.
Those who promote this narrative remain wilfully ignorant of the challenges (documented in the 2019 book by Andrew Flachs – Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India) these farmers face in terms of financial distress, increasing pest resistance, dependency on unregulated seed markets, the eradication of environmental learning, the loss of control over their productive means and the biotech-chemical treadmill they are trapped on (this last point is precisely what the industry intended).
When assessing the possible impacts of GMO agriculture, it was with good reason that, in their 2018 paper, Swaminathan and Kesavan called for:
able economists who are familiar with and will prioritise rural livelihoods and the interests of resource-poor small and marginal farmers rather than serve corporate interests and their profits.
What can be done?
Whether through all aspects of data control (soil quality, consumer preferences, weather, etc), e-commerce monopolies, corporate land ownership, seed biopiracy and patenting, synthetic food or the eradication of the public sector’s role in ensuring food security and national food sovereignty (as we could see in India with new farm legislation), Bill Gates and his corporate cronies seek to gain full control over the global food system.
Smallholder peasant farming is to be eradicated as the big-tech giants and agribusiness impose lab-grown food, GM seeds, genetically engineered soil microbes, data harvesting tools and drones and other ‘disruptive’ technologies.
We could see farmerless industrial-scale farms being manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented GM seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food.
The displacement of a food-producing peasantry (and the subsequent destruction of rural communities and local food security) was something the Gates Foundation once called for and cynically termed “land mobility”.
Technocratic meddling has already destroyed or undermined agrarian ecosystems that draw on centuries of traditional knowledge and are increasingly recognised as valid approaches to secure food security, as outlined in Food Security and Traditional Knowledge in India in the Journal of South Asian Studies, for instance.
But is all of this inevitable?
Not according to the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, which has just released a report in collaboration with the ETC Group: ‘A Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045‘.
The report outlines two different futures. If Gates and the global mega-corporations have their way, we will see the entire food system being controlled by data platforms, private equity firms and e-commerce giants, putting the food security (and livelihoods) of billions at the mercy of AI-controlled farming systems.
The other scenario involves civil society and social movements – grassroots organisations, international NGOs, farmers’ and fishers’ groups, cooperatives and unions – collaborating more closely to transform financial flows, governance structures and food systems from the ground up.
The report’s lead author, Pat Mooney, says that agribusiness has a very simple message: the cascading environmental crisis can be resolved by powerful new genomic and information technologies that can only be developed if governments unleash the entrepreneurial genius, deep pockets and risk-taking spirit of the most powerful corporations.
Mooney notes that we have had similar messages based on emerging technology for decades but the technologies either did not show up or fell flat and the only thing that grew were the corporations.
He says:
In return for trillions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies, the agribusiness model would centralise food production around a handful of untested technologies that would lead to the forced exodus of at least a billion people from hundreds of millions of farms. Agribusiness is gambling on other people’s food security.
Although Mooney argues that new genuinely successful alternatives like agroecology are frequently suppressed by the industries they imperil, he states that civil society has a remarkable track record in fighting back, not least in developing healthy and equitable agroecological production systems, building short (community-based) supply chains and restructuring and democratising governance systems.
As stated in the report, the thrust of any ’Long Food Movement’ strategy is that short-termism is not an option: civil society groups need to place multiple objectives and actions on a 25-year roadmap and not make trade-offs along the way – especially when faced with the neoliberal-totalitarianism of Gates et al who will seek to derail anything or anyone regarded as a threat to their aims.
• The report ‘A Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045’ can be accessed here.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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.
Aside from various studies that have reported on the health impacts of chemical-dependent crops (Dr Rosemary Mason’s many reports on this can be accessed on the academia.edu website), New Histories of the Green Revolution (2019) debunks the claim that the Green Revolution boosted productivity; The Violence of the Green Revolution (1991) details (among other things) the impact on rural communities; Bhaskar Save’s open letter to Indian officials in 2006 discusses the ecological devastation of the Green Revolution and in a 2019 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology and Agricultural Sciences, Parvez et al note that native wheat varieties in India have higher nutrition content than the Green Revolution varieties (many such crop varieties were side-lined in favour of corporate seeds that were of lower nutritional value).
These are just a brief selection of peer reviewed and ‘grey’ literature which detail the adverse impacts of the Green Revolution.
GMO value capture
As for GM crops, often described as Green Revolution 2.0, these too have failed to deliver on the promises made and, like the 1.0 version, have often had devastating consequences.
The arguments for and against GMOs are well documented, but one paper worth noting appeared in the journal Current Science in 2018. Along with PC Kesavan, MS Swaminathan – regarded as the father of the Green Revolution in India – argued against introducing GM crops to India and cited various studies about the failings of the GMO project.
Regardless, the industry and its well-funded lobbyists and bought career scientists continue to spin the line that GM crops are a marvellous success and that the world needs even more of them to avoid a global food shortage. GM crops are required to feed the world is a well-worn industry slogan trotted out at every available opportunity. Just like the claim of GM crops being a tremendous success, this too is based on a myth.
There is no global shortage of food. Even under any plausible future population scenario, there will be no shortage as evidenced by scientist Dr Jonathan Latham in his recent paper “The Myth of a Food Crisis“.
However, new gene drive and gene editing techniques have now been developed and the industry is seeking the unregulated commercial release of products that are based on these methods.
It does not want plants, animals and micro-organisms created with gene-editing to be subject to safety checks, monitoring or consumer labelling. This is concerning given the real dangers that these techniques pose.
Many peer-reviewed research papers now call into question industry claims about the ‘precision’, safety and benefits of gene-edited organisms and can be accessed on the GMWatch.org website.
It really is a case of old wine in new bottles.
And this is not lost on a coalition of 162 civil society, farmers and business organisations which has called on Vice-President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans to ensure that new genetic engineering techniques continue to be regulated in accordance with existing EU GMO standards.
The coalition argues that these new techniques can cause a range of unwanted genetic modifications that can result in the production of novel toxins or allergens or in the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes. The open letter adds that even intended modifications can result in traits which could raise food safety, environmental or animal welfare concerns.
The European Court of Justice ruled in 2018 that organisms obtained with new genetic modification techniques must be regulated under the EU’s existing GMO laws. However, there has been intense lobbying from the agriculture biotech industry to weaken the legislation, aided by the Gates Foundation.
The coalition states that various scientific publications show that new techniques of genetic modification allow developers to make significant genetic changes, which can be very different from those that happen in nature.
In addition to these concerns, a new paper from Chinese scientists, ‘Herbicide Resistance: Another Hot Agronomic Trait for Plant Genome Editing’, says that, in spite of claims from GMO promoters that gene editing will be climate-friendly and reduce pesticide use, what we can expect is just more of the same – GM herbicide-tolerant crops and increased herbicide use.
The industry wants its new techniques to be unregulated, thereby making gene-edited GMOs faster to develop, more profitable and hidden from consumers when purchasing items in stores. At the same time, the costly herbicide treadmill will be reinforced for farmers.
None of this is meant to imply that new technology is bad in itself. The issue is who owns and controls the technology and what are the underlying intentions. By dodging regulation as well as avoiding economic, social, environmental and health impact assessments, it is clear that the industry is first and foremost motivated by value capture and profit and contempt for democratic accountability.
This is patently clear if we look at the rollout of Bt cotton in India which served the bottom line of Monsanto but brought dependency, distress and no durable agronomic benefits for many of India’s small and marginal farmers. Prof A P Gutierrez argues that Bt cotton has effectively placed these farmers in a corporate noose.
Monsanto sucked hundreds of millions of dollars in profit from these cotton farmers, while industry-funded scientists are always keen to push the mantra that rolling out Bt cotton in India uplifted their conditions.
Those who promote this narrative remain wilfully ignorant of the challenges (documented in the 2019 book by Andrew Flachs – Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India) these farmers face in terms of financial distress, increasing pest resistance, dependency on unregulated seed markets, the eradication of environmental learning, the loss of control over their productive means and the biotech-chemical treadmill they are trapped on (this last point is precisely what the industry intended).
When assessing the possible impacts of GMO agriculture, it was with good reason that, in their 2018 paper, Swaminathan and Kesavan called for:
able economists who are familiar with and will prioritise rural livelihoods and the interests of resource-poor small and marginal farmers rather than serve corporate interests and their profits.
What can be done?
Whether through all aspects of data control (soil quality, consumer preferences, weather, etc), e-commerce monopolies, corporate land ownership, seed biopiracy and patenting, synthetic food or the eradication of the public sector’s role in ensuring food security and national food sovereignty (as we could see in India with new farm legislation), Bill Gates and his corporate cronies seek to gain full control over the global food system.
Smallholder peasant farming is to be eradicated as the big-tech giants and agribusiness impose lab-grown food, GM seeds, genetically engineered soil microbes, data harvesting tools and drones and other ‘disruptive’ technologies.
We could see farmerless industrial-scale farms being manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented GM seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food.
The displacement of a food-producing peasantry (and the subsequent destruction of rural communities and local food security) was something the Gates Foundation once called for and cynically termed “land mobility”.
Technocratic meddling has already destroyed or undermined agrarian ecosystems that draw on centuries of traditional knowledge and are increasingly recognised as valid approaches to secure food security, as outlined in Food Security and Traditional Knowledge in India in the Journal of South Asian Studies, for instance.
But is all of this inevitable?
Not according to the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, which has just released a report in collaboration with the ETC Group: ‘A Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045‘.
The report outlines two different futures. If Gates and the global mega-corporations have their way, we will see the entire food system being controlled by data platforms, private equity firms and e-commerce giants, putting the food security (and livelihoods) of billions at the mercy of AI-controlled farming systems.
The other scenario involves civil society and social movements – grassroots organisations, international NGOs, farmers’ and fishers’ groups, cooperatives and unions – collaborating more closely to transform financial flows, governance structures and food systems from the ground up.
The report’s lead author, Pat Mooney, says that agribusiness has a very simple message: the cascading environmental crisis can be resolved by powerful new genomic and information technologies that can only be developed if governments unleash the entrepreneurial genius, deep pockets and risk-taking spirit of the most powerful corporations.
Mooney notes that we have had similar messages based on emerging technology for decades but the technologies either did not show up or fell flat and the only thing that grew were the corporations.
He says:
In return for trillions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies, the agribusiness model would centralise food production around a handful of untested technologies that would lead to the forced exodus of at least a billion people from hundreds of millions of farms. Agribusiness is gambling on other people’s food security.
Although Mooney argues that new genuinely successful alternatives like agroecology are frequently suppressed by the industries they imperil, he states that civil society has a remarkable track record in fighting back, not least in developing healthy and equitable agroecological production systems, building short (community-based) supply chains and restructuring and democratising governance systems.
As stated in the report, the thrust of any ’Long Food Movement’ strategy is that short-termism is not an option: civil society groups need to place multiple objectives and actions on a 25-year roadmap and not make trade-offs along the way – especially when faced with the neoliberal-totalitarianism of Gates et al who will seek to derail anything or anyone regarded as a threat to their aims.
• The report ‘A Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045’ can be accessed here.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and an assortment of high-profile figures and policy makers are pushing for unregulated gene-editing technologies, the rollout of bio-synthetic food created in laboratories, the expanded use of patented seeds and the roll back of subsidies and support for farmers in places like India.
These neoliberal evangelists despise democracy and believe that state machinery and public money should only facilitate the ambitions of their unaccountable mega-corporations.
Corporations are jumping on the ‘sustainability’ bandwagon by undermining traditional agriculture and genuine sustainable agrifood systems and packaging this corporate takeover of food as some kind of humanitarian endeavour.
The watchdog organisation Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) notes that the European Commission has committed to a fundamental shift away from industrial agriculture. With a 50 percent pesticide reduction target and a 25 percent organic agriculture goal by 2030, CEO argues that business as usual is no longer an option. In effect, this creates an existential crisis for corporate seed suppliers and pesticide manufacturers like Bayer, BASF, Corteva (DowDupont) and Syngenta (ChemChina).
However, these corporations are fighting back on various fronts, not least by waging an ongoing battle to get their new generation of genetic engineering techniques excluded from European regulations. They do not want plants, animals and micro-organisms created with gene-editing techniques like CRISPR-Cas to be subject to safety checks, monitoring or consumer labelling. This is concerning given the real dangers that these techniques pose.
For example, a new paper published in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe, authored by Dr Katharina Kawall, indicates the negative effects on ecosystems that can result from the release of gene-edited plants. These unintended effects come from the intended changes induced by genome editing, which can affect various metabolic processes in the plants.
The new paper adds to a growing body of peer-reviewed research that calls into question industry claims about the ‘precision’, safety and benefits of gene-edited organisms.
Recent research by the Greens and the European Free Alliance in the European Parliament indicates that 86 percent of Europeans who have heard of genetically engineered (GE) food want products containing GE organisms to be labelled as such. Some 68 per cent of respondents that have heard of new genetic engineering methods demand that food produced with these techniques, such as CRISPR, to be labelled as GE. Only three percent agreed with the industry’s proposal to exempt these products from safety testing and labelling.
Regardless, with the help of 1.3 million euros from the Gates Foundation, the industry is paving the way for deregulation by widespread lobbying of policy makers and promoting these technologies on the basis of them protecting the climate and ‘sustainability’. Through greenwashing, the industry hopes its ‘save-the-planet’ products can dodge regulation and gain public acceptance in an era of ‘climate emergency’.
Not for the first time, the lobbying that the Gates Foundation is engaging in displays complete contempt for democratic processes or public opinion. In 2018, The European Court of Justice ruled that new genetic engineering technologies should be regulated. As described by Marie Astier and Magali Reinert in the French publication Reporterre, Gates is very much at the centre of trying to bypass this ruling.
Of course, it is not just the European agrifood sector that is being targeted by Bill Gates and global agrifood players. India has very much been in the news in recent months due to the ongoing mass protest involving farmers who want three recent farm acts repealed.
Environmentalist Vandana Shiva has described on numerous occasions how the Gates Foundation through its ‘Ag One’ initiative is pushing for one type of agriculture for the whole world. A top-down approach regardless of what farmers or the public need or want. The strategy includes digital farming, in which farmers are monitored and mined for their agricultural data, which is then repackaged and sold back to them.
Along with Bill Gates, this is very much the agrifood model that Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva and Cargill have in mind. The tech giants recent entry into the sector will increasingly lead to a mutually beneficial integration between the companies that supply products to farmers (pesticides, seeds, fertilisers, tractors, drones, etc) and those that control the flow of data (on soil, weather, pests, weeds, land use, consumer preferences, etc) and have access to digital (cloud) infrastructure. A system based on corporate concentration and centralisation.
Those farmers who remain in the system will become passive recipients of corporate directives and products on farms owned by the Gates Foundation (now one of the largest owners of farmland in the US), agribusiness and financial institutions/speculators.
The three pieces of farm legislation in India (passed by parliament but on hold) are essential for laying the foundation for this model of agriculture. The legislation is The Farmers Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act and The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act.
The foreign and home-grown (Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani) billionaires who have pushed for these laws require a system of contract farming dominated by their big tech, big agribusiness and big retail interests. Smallholder peasant agriculture is regarded as an impediment to what they require: industrial-scale farms where driver-less tractors, drones and genetically engineered seeds are the norm and all data pertaining to land, water, weather, seeds and soils is controlled by them.
It is unfortunate that prominent journalists and media outlets in India are celebrating the legislation and have attempted to unjustifiably discredit farmers who are protesting. It is also worrying that key figures like Dr Ramesh Chand, a member of NITI (National Institute for Transforming India) Ayog, recently stated that the legislation is necessary.
When these figures attack farmers or promote the farm acts, what they are really doing is cheerleading for the destruction of local markets and independent small-scale enterprises, whether farmers, hawkers, food processers or mom and pop corner stores. And by implication, they are helping to ensure that India is surrendering control over its food.
They are doing the bidding of the Gates Foundation and the global agrifood corporations which also want India to eradicate its buffer food stocks. Some of the very corporations which will then control stocks that India would purchase with foreign exchange holdings. At that stage, any notion of sovereign statehood would be bankrupt as India’s food needs would be dependent on attracting foreign exchange reserves via foreign direct investment or borrowing.
This would represent the ultimate betrayal of India’s farmers and democracy as well as the final surrender of food security and food sovereignty to unaccountable global traders and corporations.
The farm legislation is regressive and will eventually lead to the country relying on outside forces to feed its population. This in an increasingly volatile world prone to conflict, public health scares, unregulated land and commodity speculation and price shocks.
MSP, malnutrition and helping farmers
Consider that India has achieved self-sufficiency in food grains and has ensured that, in theory at least, there is enough food available to feed its entire population. Yet hunger and malnutrition are still major issues.
Initial results from the National Family Health Survey round 5 (NFHS-5) released in January indicate a stagnation or deterioration in most factors related to the nutrition status of the Indian population. These findings have not accounted for the effects of the COVID-19 lockdown, which could see severe long-term adverse impacts on poverty, health and nutrition.
The survey findings suggest that people’s ability to access good quality diets has been impacted by the economic slowdown in recent years and a subsequent deterioration in poverty and consumption. Such a conclusion might not be too far off the mark given the findings of the consumption expenditure survey of the National Statistical Office (2017-18).
In a December 2019 article, economist S Subramanian writes:
Employing the modest Rangarajan Committee poverty line… we find that the… proportion of the population in poverty, has climbed up from 31% to 35%, thus inverting a long trend of declining poverty ratios. If the poverty line is raised by 20% to a less modest but still modest level, then we find… [poverty]… rises precipitously from 42% to 52%.
Supporters of the farm legislation are fond of saying the impact will be higher income for farmers and greater efficiency in food distribution. They fail to acknowledge that the neoliberal policies they have backed over the years have driven many farmers out of agriculture, into debt or to the edge of bankruptcy. They are now pushing for more of the same under the banner of helping farmers.
These policies mainly stem from India’s foreign exchange crisis in the 1990s. In return for up to more than $120 billion in World Bank loans at the time, India was directed to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, reduce subsidies, run down public agriculture institutions and offer incentives for the growing of cash crops to earn foreign exchange.
The plan involves shifting at least 400 million from the countryside into cities. We have seen the running down of the sector for decades, spiralling input costs, withdrawal of government assistance and the impacts of cheap, subsidised imports which depress farmers’ incomes. The result is an acute agrarian crisis.
Through the new farm laws, the Modi government is now trying to accelerate the planned depopulation of the countryside by drastically reducing the role of the public sector in agriculture to that of a facilitator of private capital.
There is a solution to poverty, hunger and rural distress. But it is being side-lined in favour of a corporate agenda.
The Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE) notes that minimum support prices (MSP) via government procurement of essential crops and commodities should be extended to the likes of maize, cotton, oil seed and pulses. At the moment, only farmers in certain states who produce rice and wheat are the main beneficiaries of government procurement at MSP.
RUPE says that since per capita protein consumption in India is abysmally low and has fallen further during the liberalisation era, the provision of pulses in the public distribution system (PDS) is long overdue and desperately needed. RUPE argues that the ‘excess’ stocks of food grain with the Food Corporation of India are merely the result of the failure or refusal of the government to distribute grain to the people.
(For those not familiar with the PDS: central government via the Food Corporation of India (FCI) is responsible for buying food grains from farmers at MSP at state-run market yards or mandis. It then allocates the grains to each state. State governments then deliver to the ration shops.)
If public procurement of a wider range of crops at the MSP were to occur – and MSP were guaranteed for rice and wheat across all states – it would help address hunger and malnutritional as well as farmer distress.
Instead of rolling back the role of the public sector and surrendering the system to foreign corporations, there is a need to further expand official procurement and public distribution. This would occur by extending procurement to additional states and expanding the range of commodities under the PDS.
Of course, some will raise a red flag here and say this would cost too much. But as RUPE notes, it would cost around 20 per cent of the current handouts (‘incentives’) received by corporations and their super-rich owners which do not benefit the bulk of the wider population in any way.
Furthermore, if policy makers were really serious about ‘sustainability’ and boosting the rural economy, they would reject the fake high-tech corporate controlled ‘sustainability’ agenda and a reliance on rigged and unstable global markets. They would embrace an approach to agriculture based on agroecological principles, short supply chains and local markets. If the last 12 months have shown anything, it is that decentralised regional and local community-owned food systems are now needed more than ever.
But a solution that would genuinely serve to help address rural distress and malnutrition does not suit the agenda of the Gates Foundation and its corporate entourage.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and an assortment of high-profile figures and policy makers are pushing for unregulated gene-editing technologies, the rollout of bio-synthetic food created in laboratories, the expanded use of patented seeds and the roll back of subsidies and support for farmers in places like India.
These neoliberal evangelists despise democracy and believe that state machinery and public money should only facilitate the ambitions of their unaccountable mega-corporations.
Corporations are jumping on the ‘sustainability’ bandwagon by undermining traditional agriculture and genuine sustainable agrifood systems and packaging this corporate takeover of food as some kind of humanitarian endeavour.
The watchdog organisation Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) notes that the European Commission has committed to a fundamental shift away from industrial agriculture. With a 50 percent pesticide reduction target and a 25 percent organic agriculture goal by 2030, CEO argues that business as usual is no longer an option. In effect, this creates an existential crisis for corporate seed suppliers and pesticide manufacturers like Bayer, BASF, Corteva (DowDupont) and Syngenta (ChemChina).
However, these corporations are fighting back on various fronts, not least by waging an ongoing battle to get their new generation of genetic engineering techniques excluded from European regulations. They do not want plants, animals and micro-organisms created with gene-editing techniques like CRISPR-Cas to be subject to safety checks, monitoring or consumer labelling. This is concerning given the real dangers that these techniques pose.
For example, a new paper published in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe, authored by Dr Katharina Kawall, indicates the negative effects on ecosystems that can result from the release of gene-edited plants. These unintended effects come from the intended changes induced by genome editing, which can affect various metabolic processes in the plants.
The new paper adds to a growing body of peer-reviewed research that calls into question industry claims about the ‘precision’, safety and benefits of gene-edited organisms.
Recent research by the Greens and the European Free Alliance in the European Parliament indicates that 86 percent of Europeans who have heard of genetically engineered (GE) food want products containing GE organisms to be labelled as such. Some 68 per cent of respondents that have heard of new genetic engineering methods demand that food produced with these techniques, such as CRISPR, to be labelled as GE. Only three percent agreed with the industry’s proposal to exempt these products from safety testing and labelling.
Regardless, with the help of 1.3 million euros from the Gates Foundation, the industry is paving the way for deregulation by widespread lobbying of policy makers and promoting these technologies on the basis of them protecting the climate and ‘sustainability’. Through greenwashing, the industry hopes its ‘save-the-planet’ products can dodge regulation and gain public acceptance in an era of ‘climate emergency’.
Not for the first time, the lobbying that the Gates Foundation is engaging in displays complete contempt for democratic processes or public opinion. In 2018, The European Court of Justice ruled that new genetic engineering technologies should be regulated. As described by Marie Astier and Magali Reinert in the French publication Reporterre, Gates is very much at the centre of trying to bypass this ruling.
Of course, it is not just the European agrifood sector that is being targeted by Bill Gates and global agrifood players. India has very much been in the news in recent months due to the ongoing mass protest involving farmers who want three recent farm acts repealed.
Environmentalist Vandana Shiva has described on numerous occasions how the Gates Foundation through its ‘Ag One’ initiative is pushing for one type of agriculture for the whole world. A top-down approach regardless of what farmers or the public need or want. The strategy includes digital farming, in which farmers are monitored and mined for their agricultural data, which is then repackaged and sold back to them.
Along with Bill Gates, this is very much the agrifood model that Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva and Cargill have in mind. The tech giants recent entry into the sector will increasingly lead to a mutually beneficial integration between the companies that supply products to farmers (pesticides, seeds, fertilisers, tractors, drones, etc) and those that control the flow of data (on soil, weather, pests, weeds, land use, consumer preferences, etc) and have access to digital (cloud) infrastructure. A system based on corporate concentration and centralisation.
Those farmers who remain in the system will become passive recipients of corporate directives and products on farms owned by the Gates Foundation (now one of the largest owners of farmland in the US), agribusiness and financial institutions/speculators.
The three pieces of farm legislation in India (passed by parliament but on hold) are essential for laying the foundation for this model of agriculture. The legislation is The Farmers Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act and The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act.
The foreign and home-grown (Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani) billionaires who have pushed for these laws require a system of contract farming dominated by their big tech, big agribusiness and big retail interests. Smallholder peasant agriculture is regarded as an impediment to what they require: industrial-scale farms where driver-less tractors, drones and genetically engineered seeds are the norm and all data pertaining to land, water, weather, seeds and soils is controlled by them.
It is unfortunate that prominent journalists and media outlets in India are celebrating the legislation and have attempted to unjustifiably discredit farmers who are protesting. It is also worrying that key figures like Dr Ramesh Chand, a member of NITI (National Institute for Transforming India) Ayog, recently stated that the legislation is necessary.
When these figures attack farmers or promote the farm acts, what they are really doing is cheerleading for the destruction of local markets and independent small-scale enterprises, whether farmers, hawkers, food processers or mom and pop corner stores. And by implication, they are helping to ensure that India is surrendering control over its food.
They are doing the bidding of the Gates Foundation and the global agrifood corporations which also want India to eradicate its buffer food stocks. Some of the very corporations which will then control stocks that India would purchase with foreign exchange holdings. At that stage, any notion of sovereign statehood would be bankrupt as India’s food needs would be dependent on attracting foreign exchange reserves via foreign direct investment or borrowing.
This would represent the ultimate betrayal of India’s farmers and democracy as well as the final surrender of food security and food sovereignty to unaccountable global traders and corporations.
The farm legislation is regressive and will eventually lead to the country relying on outside forces to feed its population. This in an increasingly volatile world prone to conflict, public health scares, unregulated land and commodity speculation and price shocks.
MSP, malnutrition and helping farmers
Consider that India has achieved self-sufficiency in food grains and has ensured that, in theory at least, there is enough food available to feed its entire population. Yet hunger and malnutrition are still major issues.
Initial results from the National Family Health Survey round 5 (NFHS-5) released in January indicate a stagnation or deterioration in most factors related to the nutrition status of the Indian population. These findings have not accounted for the effects of the COVID-19 lockdown, which could see severe long-term adverse impacts on poverty, health and nutrition.
The survey findings suggest that people’s ability to access good quality diets has been impacted by the economic slowdown in recent years and a subsequent deterioration in poverty and consumption. Such a conclusion might not be too far off the mark given the findings of the consumption expenditure survey of the National Statistical Office (2017-18).
In a December 2019 article, economist S Subramanian writes:
Employing the modest Rangarajan Committee poverty line… we find that the… proportion of the population in poverty, has climbed up from 31% to 35%, thus inverting a long trend of declining poverty ratios. If the poverty line is raised by 20% to a less modest but still modest level, then we find… [poverty]… rises precipitously from 42% to 52%.
Supporters of the farm legislation are fond of saying the impact will be higher income for farmers and greater efficiency in food distribution. They fail to acknowledge that the neoliberal policies they have backed over the years have driven many farmers out of agriculture, into debt or to the edge of bankruptcy. They are now pushing for more of the same under the banner of helping farmers.
These policies mainly stem from India’s foreign exchange crisis in the 1990s. In return for up to more than $120 billion in World Bank loans at the time, India was directed to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, reduce subsidies, run down public agriculture institutions and offer incentives for the growing of cash crops to earn foreign exchange.
The plan involves shifting at least 400 million from the countryside into cities. We have seen the running down of the sector for decades, spiralling input costs, withdrawal of government assistance and the impacts of cheap, subsidised imports which depress farmers’ incomes. The result is an acute agrarian crisis.
Through the new farm laws, the Modi government is now trying to accelerate the planned depopulation of the countryside by drastically reducing the role of the public sector in agriculture to that of a facilitator of private capital.
There is a solution to poverty, hunger and rural distress. But it is being side-lined in favour of a corporate agenda.
The Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE) notes that minimum support prices (MSP) via government procurement of essential crops and commodities should be extended to the likes of maize, cotton, oil seed and pulses. At the moment, only farmers in certain states who produce rice and wheat are the main beneficiaries of government procurement at MSP.
RUPE says that since per capita protein consumption in India is abysmally low and has fallen further during the liberalisation era, the provision of pulses in the public distribution system (PDS) is long overdue and desperately needed. RUPE argues that the ‘excess’ stocks of food grain with the Food Corporation of India are merely the result of the failure or refusal of the government to distribute grain to the people.
(For those not familiar with the PDS: central government via the Food Corporation of India (FCI) is responsible for buying food grains from farmers at MSP at state-run market yards or mandis. It then allocates the grains to each state. State governments then deliver to the ration shops.)
If public procurement of a wider range of crops at the MSP were to occur – and MSP were guaranteed for rice and wheat across all states – it would help address hunger and malnutritional as well as farmer distress.
Instead of rolling back the role of the public sector and surrendering the system to foreign corporations, there is a need to further expand official procurement and public distribution. This would occur by extending procurement to additional states and expanding the range of commodities under the PDS.
Of course, some will raise a red flag here and say this would cost too much. But as RUPE notes, it would cost around 20 per cent of the current handouts (‘incentives’) received by corporations and their super-rich owners which do not benefit the bulk of the wider population in any way.
Furthermore, if policy makers were really serious about ‘sustainability’ and boosting the rural economy, they would reject the fake high-tech corporate controlled ‘sustainability’ agenda and a reliance on rigged and unstable global markets. They would embrace an approach to agriculture based on agroecological principles, short supply chains and local markets. If the last 12 months have shown anything, it is that decentralised regional and local community-owned food systems are now needed more than ever.
But a solution that would genuinely serve to help address rural distress and malnutrition does not suit the agenda of the Gates Foundation and its corporate entourage.
The post Four Words Gates and His Pals Despise: Democracy and Minimum Support Price first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
CNBC recently produced a 17-min video about direct air capture (DAC) and corporations, specifically big oil, funding R&D operations. The video discusses the basic technology, as well as some pitfalls. Direct air capture is in early stages of developing technology to remove atmospheric CO2.
By implication, the oil giants are clearly aware of what’s at stake (a) the planet is stressed almost beyond limits (b) there’s some money to be made trying to fix it (c) it’s a great PR gig. But, the problem is much bigger and more complex than oil and gas betting on early stage development of technology to capture the same emissions they created in the first instance. Direct air capture is complex and expensive with sizeable infrastructure requirements, explained in further detail hereinafter, a real eye-opener.
Ironically, expectantly, without doubt, big oil is bellying up to this task with eyes wide open. They have a lot to gain and very little to lose. In point of fact, it’s a win-win for these provocateurs of insane atmospheric levels of CO2 emissions, the highest of the Holocene Epoch, our unique Goldilocks Era, not too hot, not to cold suddenly coming to a crescendo of excessive exploitation within only a couple hundred years of the entire 12,000-year history.
It’s worth noting that ever since the Drake Well in 1859, the first commercial oil well in the United States, big oil’s interest in the planet has been adversarial, especially in actual practice. As a consequence, the planet’s atmosphere and ecosystems need a thorough overhaul: (1) remove CO2 via direct air capture (2) carbon capture and sequestration of CO2 at the point of production 3) construction of renewable energy facilities.
It’s a sizeable task that’s nearly impossible to fully comprehend and, in fact, impossible to wrap arms around because it’s the planet; it’s really big! The scale of infrastructure that’s required to make a significant difference is beyond a Marshall Plan prototype, which would be a blip on direct air capture’s radar.
It’s questionable that it can come together fast enough in the face of a very risky 1.5°C global overshoot. That probability increases, as the Paris ‘15 signatories have not met voluntary commitments to cut emissions. They’re mostly putting up zeros, so far. In addition to abject failure by the signatories, concerns about global warming ratcheted upwards subsequent to Paris ’15. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) drew a line in the sand at 1.5°C beyond which risk factors for planet viability turn a whole lot worse.
Exxon/Mobil and Microsoft are funding carbon air capture R&D projects. These entrepreneurial interests have likely been piqued by acceptance of the fact, finally, that exhaust fumes from industry and transport are a heavy burden on the planet. Already, major ecosystems are starting to collapse, for example, the Great Barrier Reef, the poster-child of global warming, has experienced unprecedented bleaching, three events in only five years, losing over one-half of its quintessence to global warming in only 25 years, categorized “in critical condition” by UNESCO.
Exxon Mobil and Global Thermostat have a joint development agreement for “breakthrough” technology that removes CO2 directly from the atmosphere via direct air capture (DAC). Currently, technical developments appear to be very costly, at least 50 times more per metric ton at $330-800 per ton of CO2 than natural climate solutions. However, as part of the process, captured/processed CO2 is a marketable byproduct and can be sold for numerous purposes; e.g., pumped into an operating oil well to enhance oil recovery, which, of course, is where CO2 initiated in the first instance. This is a preferred modus operandi for some oil operations, which unfortunately also leads to endless production of fossil fuels in a perpetual madness that enhances oil-driven vehicles, air pollution, and global warming, spewing more CO2 into the atmosphere, which allegedly is recaptured, but is it really? Oh, almost forgot, and lots more ocean absorbing of CO2. Along the way, oil PR departments claim, “green energy” with signage on full public display. Meanwhile, direct air capture or the impression of such opens a window to perpetual drilling, as big oil continues to spud 50,000 new wells every year.
There are currently 15 operational DAC plants in the world. Carbon Engineering, a Canadian company, has a plant under construction in the Permian Basin in partnership with Oxy Low Carbon, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum (Oxy’s PR department must be thrilled over its “Oxy Low Carbon” designation). The plant will open in 2024 at the rate of 1,000,000 metric tons of captured CO2 per year versus 4,200,000 metric tons of CO2 emitted worldwide per hour… yes, per hour. The Oxy Low Carbon facility is energy-intensive, powered by natural gas and renewables. The captured CO2 can be injected into the ground, sequestered or converted into a synthetic fuel and sold on the market.
Carbon Engineering’s investors include Bill Gates, BP, and Chevron. Their goal is to build plants around the world. As such, the company claims it needs the technological skill and experience of major oil, which has infrastructure and technology expertise.
Another up and coming player in carbon removal is Climeworks, operating 14 direct air capture plants across Europe and currently building its largest facility in Iceland. Current operations capture 2,000mt CO2/year. They have an Iceland plant named Orca under construction powered by geothermal energy that will capture 4,000mt CO2/year. The captured CO2 is permanently sequestered underground. Costs to operate the plant run $600-800/metric ton CO2, which hopefully drops to $100-200/mt within 10 years. In addition to sequestering CO2, Climeworks sells some of its captured product; e.g., a greenhouse in Switzerland is a customer, using it to grow vegetables. Climeworks hopes to capture 1% of global CO2 emissions by 2025.
For direct air capture to really truly work, to do the job, meaningfully saving the planet, it’ll need lots of support by the nations of the world. Commercial interests agree on that basic supposition. The job is too big, too important, and too urgent for piecemeal work by several individual upstart operations.
Direct air capture is not a magic bullet. According to Lucas Joppa, Chief Environmental Officer of Microsoft:
You have to deploy all carbon removal opportunities to their maximum capacity. That is the only way that we will reach our overall societal climate targets. DAC is going to be an important part of how we reach a net zero carbon economy, but there are a lot of engineering challenges ahead of it, and we need to be clear-eyed about that. Otherwise there’s going to be a lot of dashed hopes and missed targets as we go from 2020 to 2030 and 2040 and 2050. (CNBC)
Of course, corporate funding is an encouraging factor, but there is a darker side to this story. Since 1950 when worldwide CO2 emissions registered 5.99B tons, emissions have increased 5-fold within only 70 years, skyrocketing to 36.42B tons in 2019 versus 23B tons at the turn of the century, or up 58% in only 20 years. That’s serious acceleration, and it readily fulfills an extraordinarily sharp upward thrusting growth curve. It’s even more remarkable given the fact that 4,200,000 mt of CO2 is emitted per hour worldwide. That makes the Oxy Low Carbon plant at 1,000,000mt/year look awfully low.
In reality, direct air capture is enormously challenging (1) massive volumes of air have to be pulled to truly make it work (2) a chemical solution, like potassium hydroxide, is required to capture CO2 (3) more chemicals are added with a resulting solution heated to make white pellets of 50% CO2 (4) in turn, pellets are heated again to 900°C to concentrate CO2 into a gas that can be sequestered underground. Whew!
According to renowned physicist Klaus Lackner, director of the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions, in order to stay abreast of current emissions: “If you built a hundred million trailer-size units you could actually keep up with current emissions.”
Here’s more of that New Yorker interview:
Lackner has calculated that an apparatus the size of a semi trailer could remove a ton of carbon dioxide per day, or three hundred and sixty-five tons a year. The world’s cars, planes, refineries, and power plants now produce about thirty-six billion tons of CO2 annually, so, he told me, ‘if you built a hundred million trailer-size units you could actually keep up with current emissions.’ He acknowledged that the figure sounded daunting.
Umm, in reference to Lackner’s hundred million units necessary to “keep up with current emissions,” what about the CO2 that’s already up there? Moreover, Lackner’s acknowledgement of “the figure sounds daunting” is quite true and quite intimidating, as one hundred million (100,000,000) 55-foot units end-to-end circumnavigate the planet 42 times. Do the math!
Ergo, direct air capture requires, desperately needs, frankly depends upon a coordinated herculean effort by every major nation of the planet. How’s that for scale? Hopefully, Paris ’15 is not a leading indicator of responsiveness by countries to a much bigger project than their failure to reduce emissions at the source.
In all, a cynic might suppose there’s something cagey going on with the world’s biggest corporations, over-weighted by oil producers, now feigning green. Yes, it seems too far out of character to be genuine. Is it possible that boards of directors of oil and gas operators believe they can keep on draining the world’s oil, unimpeded, as long as direct air capture is in the works or as long as the public deems it to be in the works, or is this an overly cynical viewpoint? Answer: Yes and no.
Postscript: The following message exposes dregs of society in acts of absurdity and folly: Under an obscure treaty, big polluters are suing governments for billions of dollars when they shut down coal plants and oil rigs ($50B so far of taxpayer’s money). You can help stop this insanity by going here.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.