Multinational Agrichemical Corporations and the Great Food Transformation
By Birsen Filip | Mises Wire | November 5, 2022
In July 2022, the Canadian government announced its intention to reduce “emissions from the application of fertilizers by 30 percent from 2020 levels by 2030.” In the previous month, the government of the Netherlands publicly stated that it would implement measures designed to lower “nitrogen pollution some areas by up to 70 percent by 2030,” in order to meet the stipulations of the European “Green Deal,” which aims to “make the EU’s climate, energy, transport and taxation policies fit for reducing net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 percent by 2030, compared to 1990 levels.”
In response, Dutch “farm and agriculture organizations said the targets were not realistic and called for a protest,” which led farmers and their supporters to rise up across the country. The artificially designed Green Deal is one of the goals of Agenda 2030, which was adopted by 193 member states of the United Nations (UN) in 2015.
In addition to the UN, Agenda 2030 is also supported by a number of other international organizations and institutions, including the European Union, the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the Bretton Woods Institutions, which consist of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). It is also endorsed by some of the most powerful agrichemical multinational corporations in the world, such as BASF, Bayer, Dow Chemical, DuPont, and Syngenta, which, together, control more than 75 percent of the global market for farm inputs. In recent years, “the acquisition of Syngenta by ChemChina, and the merger of Bayer and Monsanto” have “reshaped the global seed industry.” Additionally, “DuPont de Nemours was formed by the merger of Dow Chemical and DuPont in 2017.” However, “within 18 months of the merger the company was split into three publicly traded companies with focuses on the following: agriculture with Corteva, materials science with Dow and specialty products with DuPont.”
In recent years, all of these corporations have issued statements suggesting that the agriculture sector will undergo major changes over the upcoming three decades, and that they are committed to doing their parts to accelerate the transition to so called green policies. Accordingly, they advocate for governments to redirect public finance away from conventional farming and toward regenerative agriculture and alternative protein sources, including insect farming and lab-grown meats.
Moreover, BASF, Syngenta and Bayer are members of “the European Carbon+ Farming Coalition,” which includes a number of “organizations and stakeholders along the food value chain,” such as “COPA-COGECA, Crop In, European Conservation Agriculture Federation (ECAF), European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT) Food, HERO, Planet Labs,” “Swiss Re, University of Glasgow, Yara, Zurich and the World Economic Forum.” Originally, this “coalition emerged as a partnership between the World Economic Forum’s 100 Million Farmers platform and its CEO Action Group for the European Green Deal.”
Its objective is to “decarbonise the European food system” by accelerating the transformation of farming and agricultural practices. More specifically, the European Carbon+ Farming Coalition seeks to attain “zero gross expansion in the area of land under cultivation for food production by 2025, reduction in total territories used for livestock of about one-third by 2030, and a consequent freeing up of nearly 500 million hectares of land for natural ecosystem restoration by the same date.” According to the WEF, in addition to benefitting the environment, such changes will also be economically advantageous, as “changing the way we produce and consume food could create USD 4.5 trillion a year in new business opportunities.”
In order to accelerate the transformation of farming over the coming decades, BASF calls for requiring “farmers to decrease their environmental impact” by reducing “CO2 emissions per ton of crop by 30 percent,” and applying “digital technologies to more than 400 million hectares of farmland.” BASF also supports the wide use of a number of new products, including “nitrogen management products,” herbicides, “new crop varieties,” “biological inoculants and innovative digital solutions,” so as to make farmers “more carbon efficient and resilient to volatile weather conditions.” It is estimated that such changes would “contribute significantly to the BASF Group target of €22 billion in sales by 2025.”
Meanwhile, Syngenta, the world’s second-largest agrochemical enterprise (after Bayer), which is owned by a Chinese state-owned company called ChemChina, focuses on “carbon neutral agriculture” under the pretense of “combatting climate change.” More precisely, it supports “providing technologies, services, and training to farmers,” as well as the further development of new gene-edited seeds that would lower the emission of CO2. According to Syngenta, “gene-edited crops” will be widely used and cultivated across the globe “by 2050.”
This company also promotes “a transformation toward regenerative agriculture,” which is claimed to “lead to more food grown on less land; reduced agricultural greenhouse gas emissions; increased biodiversity; and enhanced soil health,” though there is scant scientific evidence or long-term data to back up these assertions. Nonetheless, Syngenta argues that the world needs “governments and media … to encourage widespread adoption” of regenerative practices by as many farmers as possible.
Bayer also advocates for regenerative agriculture to help “farmers significantly reduce the amount of greenhouse gas their operations emit, while also removing carbon from the atmosphere.” It further claims that it is necessary “to shift to a regenerative approach and make crops more resilient to climate impacts.” Additionally, much like Syngenta, Bayer supports the development of “new gene editing technologies” in order to reduce “the environmental footprint of global agriculture.” Looking ahead, Bayer foresees that, “in agriculture, biotechnology will be a critical enabler” that will be used to “feed the 10 billion people that will be on the planet by 2050 while at the same time fighting the impact of climate change.”
Similar to Bayer, BASF, and Syngenta, DuPont also seeks to contribute to decreasing “dependence on fossil fuels, and protecting life and the environment.” Its response primarily focuses on facilitating the production and consumption of alternative protein sources that can reproduce “the texture and appearance of meat fibers, and can be used to extend or replace meat or fish.” DuPont pointed out that “in 2016, Americans consumed about 26 kg of beef per capita, at least half of which was eaten in the form of a hamburger. Replacing just half of America’s burger meat with SUPRO® MAX protein,” which has a carbon footprint that is up to eighty times lower than dairy and meat proteins, is equivalent to removing “more than 15 million mid-sized cars from the road.”
Some of the world’s most powerful multinational agrichemical corporations have benefitted immensely from international trade agreements that put their interests ahead of those of small – and medium – size farms, as well as the masses, when it comes to transforming the food and agriculture sectors. In particular, the World Trade Organization’s agreement on trade – related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS), which was adopted in 1994, played a major role in destroying the livelihoods of many farmers, while proving lucrative to agrichemical giants like BASF, Bayer, Dow Chemical, DuPont, and Syngenta. This is mainly because TRIPS has allowed for the patenting of seeds and plants.
As a result, native herbs and plants in a number of different countries, many of which had previously been farmed for generations, became the sole properties of powerful agrichemical multinational corporations. After plants and herbs have been patented, local farmers are forbidden from engaging in the traditional and longstanding practices of saving and replanting their own seeds. Instead, they are required to pay the patent holding corporations for the same seeds that they had previously produced, saved, replanted, and exchanged at no cost.
Powerful agrichemical multinational corporations have also furthered their own interests and agendas by exerting unprecedented influence over research and development in the food industry, while ignoring any findings demonstrating that their business practices were harmful to the natural environment. In particular, some of these major agrichemical corporations have focused their efforts and resources on studying “genetically modified organisms (GMOs), the creation of stronger pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, and defending the performance of these products.”
They have also supported the expansion of GMO crops with the knowledge that their cultivation involves “the application of larger quantities” of “synthetic fertilizers and pesticides,” which has led to large amounts of toxic chemicals contaminating soil and water sources. Basically, these agrichemical corporations have been largely responsible for creating many of same environmental problems that they now claim need to be urgently solved through Agenda 2030.
There is a real possibility that the radical and large-scale transformations of the entire food industry and human eating habits being pushed by the social engineers of Agenda 2030 are leading the masses toward a dramatic decrease in living standards. Lessons from the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century revealed that it is very difficult to fix big mistakes attributed to the large-scale central planning of social engineers, because doing so often requires “major social transformation” or “remodelling the whole of society,” which can result in widespread unforeseen consequences or events, major destructive outcomes, and “inconvenience to many people,” in the words of Karl R. Popper.
The intense and coordinated international effort to facilitate an artificially designed transformation of the global food industry, based on Agenda 2030, is a testimony to the fact that we are witnessing the pendulum of civilization swinging back in many advanced societies, where striving to achieve a comfortable life could rapidly be replaced by a struggle for bare necessities in a lower level of existence, which is not supposed to occur in advanced societies.
The masses need to be made to realize that the social engineers of Agenda 2030 are “false prophets,” who are misguiding them to the point where they will be “haunted by the specter of death from starvation.” This may well lead to the emergence of “irreconcilable dissensions within society,” whereby food riots, conflicts, and violence could inevitably “result in a complete disintegration of all societal bonds,” as Ludwig von Mises put it.
Birsen Filip holds a PhD in philosophy and master’s degrees in economics and philosophy. She has published numerous articles and chapters on a range of topics, including political philosophy, geo-politics, and the history of economic thought, with a focus on the Austrian School of Economics and the German Historical School of Economics. She is the author of the upcoming book The Early History of Economics in the United States: The Influence of the German Historical School of Economics on Teaching and Theory (Routledge, 2022). She is also the author of The Rise of Neo-liberalism and the Decline of Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
Under the influence: Sunak and the Net Zero zealots who surround him
By Stephen McMurray | TCW Defending Freedom | December 1, 2022
Who are the people fuelling the British government’s obsession with Net Zero, an obsession that is fast leading to the country’s economic destruction – to ‘zero energy supplies, zero growth, zero food and zero hope’ as Stephen McMurray put it in TCW yesterday. The first part of his investigation into the elite and privileged group exerting their influence over Prime Minister Rishi Sunak concentrated on the ‘Friends of COP26’. Today his focus turns on the influence of the climate zealot MPs, peers and Sunak’s family ties.
AS noted, various Friends of COP26 have links to the UK government, but there is another group of Net Zero promoters linked to the UK parliament who may also have undue influence over Rishi Sunak. These are Peers for the Planet, members of the House of Lords who have even established their own limited company. They, too, wrote a letter to Sunak urging him to attend COP27. They have also previously written to him to push him to follow the Net Zero agenda.
Peers for the Planet is funded by various organisations, one of which is the Laudes Foundation. One of the members of the Laudes advisory council is Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, member of the WEF Global Future Council on the Future of Production and a Friend of COP26.
Baroness Haymanis the co-chair of Peers for the Planet. She is a shareholder in Standard Chartered Bank and Alphabet, Google’s parent company. She is also chairperson for the charity Malaria No More, the former president of which was the Net Zero obsessive and promoter of the Great Reset, King Charles III. In 2019 Malaria No More UK received a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for more than $8million dollars.
Baroness Hayman has shares in LVMH Moet Hennessy SA, the Louis Vuitton company that specialises in luxury goods, wine and spirits. (The winemaking business is one of the worst industries for carbon emissions.) The company also owns luxury hotels.
The other co-chair of Peers for the Planet is Baroness Worthington, who has her own company, Worthington and Associates, which provides clients with ‘climate change communications and philanthropy advice’. She is also a director of Jupiter Green Investment Trustfocusing on ‘green solutions’.
Another group is the all-party Parliamentary Renewable and Sustainable Energy Group (PRASEG) comprising 125 MPs who are pushing for Net Zero. The chair of this group is Conservative MP Bim Afolami. Last year members attended the COP26 conference where, according to Mr Afolami: ‘It was a pleasure to join the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation [founded by Sir Chris Hohn, for whose hedge fund Sunak worked] to host senior politicians including the Chair of the Select Committee for BEIS, the Shadow Secretary of State for BEIS, the PPS to the COP26 President and leading authorities on climate change and geopolitics from Chatham House and the Climate Change Committee. We discussed the UK’s role in scaling global renewable energy and the challenges of encouraging a swift and just energy transition.’ Baroness Hayman was also in attendance.
It is surely inconceivable that Rishi Sunak, with his background in government and banking, would not be influenced by all these people, with their links to banking, investment funds, the World Economic Forum, Big Tech and Bill Gates. There are simply far too many powerful, influential people pushing the madness of Net Zero for him to ignore. However, he could also be under the influence of those closer to home.
Sunak’s sister, Raakhi Williams, has worked extensively for the Department of International Development and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development office. It was in this latter role that she was one of the chief organisers of COP26.
In a talk she later gave to schoolchildren she stated that she led the Adaptation-Loss Damage Day at the conference, pushing the need for climate reparations.
Her husband is Peter Williams, CEO of the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction who has consulted for the World Bank and the Gates Foundation and is dedicated to following the UNs sustainable development goals and, of course, pushing the Net Zero agenda. The board of the IIRR is filled with people with a background in banking.
The person in Rishi Sunak’s family who could assert the most influence over him is his father-in-law, N R Narayana Murthy, referred to by some as ‘India’s Bill Gates’. He is the billionaire founder of the IT company Infosys. Sunak’s wife Akshata is a shareholder and one of the wealthiest women in the UK. Infosys is part of the Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders who wrote an open letter to the world leaders at COP27 emphasising how important it was to continue the push towards Net Zero and provide financial incentives to renewable energy companies.
Murthy is a regular at World Economic Forum conferences and co-chaired the forum in 2005 with Bill Gates amongst others.
Infosys formed an alliance with Microsoft to train IT specialists, with Bill Gates meeting Murthy at Infosys’s Bangalore premises in 2002. The company later joined forces with the Gates Foundation to fund a project to help teach computer science to children around the world.
Murthy has been on the advisory board of numerous organisations including the Ford Foundation, the UN Foundation and Unilever. Kate Hampton, Friend of COP26 and the CEO of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, the charity arm of Sunak’s old hedge fund, was also on the advisory board of Unilever, and another Friend of COP26, Paul Polman, was its former CEO. Moreover, Sunak’s wife also worked there at one point.
Unilever was one of the main sponsors of COP26. They were also involved in COP27. They say, ‘An important part of Unilever’s own climate work is using our voice and influence for good. At COP27, we’re asking governments to take more ambitious climate action and start building resilience for the future by setting out stronger national plans with more ambitious targets that accelerate action and ensuring a fair and just transition to a net zero future by unlocking finance and investment for decarbonisation and resilience in developing countries . . .’
In other words, they are pushing for climate reparations.
Interestingly when Sunak was Chancellor he hired an ex-CEO of Unilever, Vindi Banga, to be the Chair of UK Government Investments (UKGI). Banga was a leader at the World Economic Forum’s Sustainable Development Impact Summit. UKGI is supposed to be responsible for managing government assets in the best interests of the UK public. On the surface it would seem odd, therefore, that Banga is a partner in the private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier and Rice (CD&R) who like to acquire British Companies for themselves. However, when you realise that Sunak thinks foreign investors buying up British companies is a good thing, it makes more sense.
CD&R were recently involved in the acquisition of the Morrisons supermarket group. This was controversial because Morrisons owns 339 petrol stations and, as CD&R own a company called Motor Fuel Group which has 921 petrol stations, it was thought that this could lead to a lack of competition and higher petrol prices.
Why would Mr Banga, an advocate of sustainable development i.e. Net Zero, be buying petrol stations? Perhaps it’s because CD&R’s Motor Fuel Group is going to spend $400million transforming petrol stations into EV charge stations and the more stations they acquire the more the public who own petrol cars will be forced off the road.
In conclusion, whether Sunak’s decision to go to COP27 was because he was cajoled by Friends of COP26, condemned by his buddies in the banking fraternity, harassed by MPs or peers, berated by his sister and brother-in-law or chastised by his father-in-law, it is clear that he is under the influence of Net Zero zealots from every angle.
The only people who he doesn’t seem to listen to are the citizens of the United Kingdom who are daily becoming more aware that the climate crisis is one big global money-making scheme for billionaires, bankers and investors, orchestrated by globalists like the World Economic Forum using the mainstream media to promulgate decades of fear-mongering propaganda based on dodgy computer modelling, voodoo science and preposterous predictions.
The whole scheme is then enforced by banking cartels refusing to loan money to anyone not buying into their apocalyptic vision, gleefully advocating that businesses which don’t comply should go bankrupt and forcing governments to legislate businesses and the public into submission. Meanwhile, behind the scenes they are investing in everything ‘green’ they can get their hands on to enrich themselves even further whilst the country hurtles towards economic and social Armageddon.
When someone is driving under the influence it is prudent to remove them from the vehicle and take away their access to it. Something similar needs to happen to Rishi Sunak and this political class of Net Zero apostles of the climate cult before we are driven over the edge and into the abyss from which there is no return.
Secret Service Has Hunter Biden Gun Docs They Denied Possessing
Samizdat – 02.12.2022
Hunter Biden, son of the incumbent US president, is infamous for his involvement in many scandals, including substance abuse, commercial sex, infidelity, tax fraud and, probably, corruption at the highest level. Yet he always got away. However, the “gun incident” may change this.
The Secret Service admitted the existence of documents connected to Hunter Biden’s alleged illegal ownership of a gun, even though they previously denied possessing the files.
According to media reports, representatives of the Secret Service approached a firearms shop owner where Hunter Biden had illegally bought a gun, and demanded the paperwork connected to this transaction. The gun shop owner refused to comply, suspecting that the Secret Service officers wanted to hide Hunter’s ownership of the firearm.
This incident did not go unnoticed. Conservative activist group Judicial Watch sued the government agency for all materials concerning Hunter Biden`s ownership of a gun. The government watchdog group also highlighted the oddity of the Secret Service changing its stance on the case several times.
Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch President, marks the fact that “The Secret Service’s changing story on records raises additional questions about its role in the Hunter Biden gun incident.”
The gun incident Tom Fitton is referring to occurred in year 2018. Hunter Biden’s former sister-in-law, who became his lover, took his gun from a cupboard and threw it in a garbage can. She claims that her lover was mentally unstable at that moment and she was afraid for her life. Later she tried to retrieve the gun, but it was already at the police disposal. Approximately at this time, Secret Service officers approached the gun shop owner with demands to dispose of the paperwork, framing Hunter Biden.
When law enforcement started to wonder about the origins of the gun, it was suspected that Hunter Biden had lied in order to buy it. He answered in the negative when asked about past substance abuse and substance addiction. But five years ago he was fired from the US Navy due to a positive test for cocaine and he admits in his memoires that he continued to abuse substances at least up to 2018.
Intentional misrepresentation of information while buying firearms is a criminal offense according to US law. Yet he was not charged.
In April 2021 the Secret Service responded to a watchdog request, promising to provide necessary documents on this case. However, a year later in October 2022 this governmental organization stated that the previous response was a mistake and that it doesn’t have any records relevant to the “Hunter Biden’s Gun Incident.”
Hunter Biden is currently in the crosshairs for being allegedly involved in many murky affairs but always gets away.
For instance, Hunter was connected to some companies that were accused of corruption. The most notorious case is his membership in the board of Ukraine’s Burisma Group. His father then-Vice-President Joe Biden pressured then-president of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko to fire top prosecutor, who was investigating Burisma activities.
However, the gun incident may reverse the momentum. According to results of the November midterms, Republicans received a majority in House of Representatives. They have already promised to launch a full-scale investigation on Hunter Biden’s activities. What is more important federal agents think that they have enough evidence to criminally charge Hunter Biden for illegal gun ownership.
US brings culture wars to Afghanistan
Reflections on Events in Afghanistan
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | DECEMBER 1, 2022
The time has come to pick up threads from my blog of January 27 titled The West co-opts the Taliban. Indeed, the wheel has come full circle: the three-day conclave in Oslo on January 23-25 between a core group of Western diplomats with Taliban officials failed to work out a reasonable a modus vivendi. The pendulum has since swung to the other extreme.
Afghanistan has once again become the cockpit of big power rivalries due to developments intrinsic to Afghan situation, a regime change in Pakistan and the shifts in regional politics in Central Asia due to the fallouts from the collective West’s proxy war with Russia in Europe.
To recapitulate, Russia and China brilliantly undercut the US’ attempt in Oslo to co-opt the Taliban government as its partner. The terms of partnership were not acceptable to the Taliban, especially the leeway that the US and British intelligence sought to stage covert operations from Afghan soil.
Russia and China created space for Taliban to negotiate with the US by simply offering them the prospect of a beneficial relationship. The US’s core objective was to use Afghanistan as a staging post for its containment strategies against Russia, China and Iran.
Since then, the US estimates that with Russia bogged down in Ukraine and China remaining extra-cautious in consorting with Moscow, a window of opportunity is available for it to proactively work toward promoting regime changes in Central Asia and roll back the Russian influence in the region.
Attempts were made in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan but the regimes in those countries were vigilant. The failed attempts once again drew attention to the importance of Afghanistan as a high ground in the geopolitics of the Central Asian region. Hence the need to regain control over Kabul.
This is a truly collective effort by the Western intelligence, with the US, UK, France and Germany in the lead role. Unsurprisingly, the West’s focus has shifted to the northern regions of Afghanistan bordering the ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia.
With a pro-Western regime in power in Pakistan, the US gets a free hand to work with the non-Taliban groups. The Western powers assess that the so-called National Resistance Front (NRF) led by the Panjshiri leader Ahmed Massoud provides a congenial platform for advancing their regional agenda.
Apart from the Massoud clan’s decades-old links with the French intelligence, Ahmed Massoud himself was trained in Sandhurst. The Panjshiris are irreconcilably opposed to Pashtun rule and also have ethnic affinities with Tajikistan.
Enter Emmanuel Macron. France has a score to settle ever since Russia’s Wagner Group summarily replaced the French Legion as the provider of security to the Francophone countries in the Sahel region. Macron hopes to turn the table against Russia in Central Asia (and the Caucasus.)
In this shadow play, Macron sees as quasi-ally the president of Tajikistan Imomali Rahmon. Now, Rahmon’s motivations are never easy to fathom and are rather complicated in this case, but he does see that there is a lot of money that the West is prepared to spend to foster the NRF and Massoud, and this western venture is for sure going to be for the long haul.
Rahmon’s trump card is that Tajikistan is the gateway to Panjshir and it can provide a transit corridor for the flow of Western money, men and materials to boost the NRF’s capability to wage an armed struggle and emerge quickly as a credible political entity regionally.
Dushanbe hosted the so-called Herat Security Dialogue earlier this week to facilitate a meet-up between the NRF (Massoud) and sundry other disgruntled Afghan politicians hostile toward Taliban rule and domiciled in the West, with the US and European intelligence officials mentoring the event.
Clearly, the venture aims to broad-base the NRF by bringing on board all anti-Taliban elements. Interestingly, a sideshow at Dushanbe was that the Afghans networked with hand-picked invitees from regional states as well, including Russia and Iran, largely self-styled “liberals” who are willing to subserve the West’s agenda.
In a nutshell, the venture aims to build up another Afghan resistance movement to oust the Taliban from power. The ground is being prepared for a new civil war where the West hopes to emerge victorious eventually but without having to put “boots on the ground.”
However, this incoming civil war is going to be very unlike all previous ones in Afghan history. For, this is being projected as a culture war — a struggle for dominance between groups within the Afghan society arising from their different beliefs or practices — although quintessentially it is yet another grab for political power with foreign help.
It bears similarity with the culture wars playing out in America during the past two decades and more between the liberal secular society and a conservative opposition that rooted its worldview in divine scripture. Today, in America it is playing out in vicious fights over abortion, gay rights, religion in public schools and the like.
The culture war in Afghanistan too will inevitably expand from issues of religion and family culture to take over politics almost totally, creating a dangerous sense of winner-take-all conflict over the future of the country, as has happened in America.
The paradox here is that it is taking place in the cause of Democracy, whereas, democracy at its core is an agreement that we will not kill each other over our differences, but instead we’ll talk through those differences howsoever long it may take. Massoud’s NRF, on the contrary, is wedded to violence to overthrow the Taliban government which has been in power only briefly.
Fundamentally, there is a dangerous misconception here since politics at its core is nothing but an artifact of culture. And culture underwrites politics in all countries. To be sure, the Taliban will see the incoming civil war promoted by the West as an existential threat to their way of life, to the things they hold sacred. That is to say, the Taliban’s resistance to the NRF will be rooted in fear of extinction. They will fight to the death for a way of life.
Why is the West doing this to Afghanistan after having destroyed that country’s social fabric through the past two decades perpetrating such horrific war crimes? At the very least, first return that country’s money in western banks and allow the Afghan nation a decent respite to lick its war wounds, before inciting another civil war.
Abdul Latif Pedram, a rare progressive-minded Afghan politician known for his integrity, wrote in a tweet “I was invited to the security meeting of Herat (at Dushanbe), but I did not participate in the meeting due to the presence of corrupt people.”
Indeed, it is an insult to the Afghan people that the westerners continue to treat them like mute cattle. Pedram added that the invitees to the Dushanbe meeting were all associated with the corrupt regime that the Taliban replaced, and are bankrupt in ideas to improve the tragic situation in his country.
Zelensky’s $1 trillion ‘reconstruction’ pipe dream
By Drago Bosnic | December 1, 2022
It’s safe to say the world has gotten used to mind-blowing statements coming from the detached Kiev regime, as this has become their common theme. Apart from boastful claims of supposed “victories” of the Neo-Nazi junta forces against the Russian military, talks of how much financial assistance is necessary is the usual topic in Kiev. The regime frontman Volodymyr Zelensky is never tired of demanding yet another few billion dollars (euros and pounds are good enough, too) per month to support the political West’s favorite puppet regime. However, his most recent statements make every other demand look entirely “reasonable”. Namely, the Kiev regime frontman now wants over $1 trillion for the supposed “reconstruction” of the country.
During a video address on November 29, Zelensky stated that it would cost more than $1 trillion to “rebuild” Ukraine. If the number sounds astounding, that’s quite expected, given that it’s over five times the country’s 2021 GDP. However, even this sounds laughable when the second requirement is listed – this “reconstruction” plan would come into effect only after the military superpower with over 6,000 thermonuclear warheads next door is somehow “defeated”. Many have ignored Zelensky’s mind-boggling statements regarding this matter, but he keeps insisting that this is precisely what the Kiev regime needs.
“The reconstruction of our country will become the most momentous economic, technological, and humanitarian project of our time. Even now, we engage dozens of our partner countries to rebuild Ukraine,” Zelensky said during his late-night video address on Tuesday, according to a report translated by Newsweek. “The total volume of work amounts to over a trillion dollars,” he added.
Zelensky mentioned the figure while talking about his hopes that the country would host the World’s Fair in 2030. Another interesting aspect of the plan was that foreign governments and corporations could become “permanent sponsors of specific regions, cities or economic sectors”. Apart from being unrealistic, Zelensky’s ideas are also boiling down to the direct colonization of Ukraine. By giving control of different regions of the country to “permanent sponsors”, the Neo-Nazi junta frontman is effectively fracturing what’s left of the country and giving it to foreign corporate interests in a free-for-all exploitation scheme.
According to Western-backed, Latvia-based news outlet “Meduza”, Zelensky is hoping to develop a system that will allow “partner countries” to become “patrons” of Ukrainian regions, cities or businesses. “We’re already seeing interest [in the program] from France, Great Britain, The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Turkey, Poland, Portugal, Czechia, Slovenia, Latvia, Estonia, Switzerland, Slovakia, Austria, Greece, Canada, the U.S., Japan, and Australia. And that’s not an exhaustive list,” he said.
Interestingly, the mind-blowing $1 trillion figure was mentioned by Zelensky at least once before, but it somehow went under the radar of most mainstream media. The first time he mentioned it publicly was on September 6, when he was invited to virtually “ring” the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Zelensky used this unique opportunity to float the idea and initially appealed for “at least” $400 billion in foreign funds. “The general project of Ukrainian reconstruction will be the largest economic project in Europe of our time. The largest for several generations. Its volume is already estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars,” he stated at the time and then added: “And with the necessary modernization of the Ukrainian infrastructure, taking into account security needs, it is more than a trillion dollars and in a fairly short term – less than ten years.”
As previously mentioned, the country’s GDP was just over $200 billion in 2021, according to official data from the World Bank. This effectively means that the Kiev regime is demanding others invest half a decade’s worth of Ukrainian “peacetime” GDP. Although this may seem like a dumbfounding request, what’s even more staggering is the fact that at least one US-based think tank already backed the proposal. The renowned Washington DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) openly supported the idea, claiming that “it would provide strategic benefits to the United States.”
In a November 22 report titled “United States Aid to Ukraine: An Investment Whose Benefits Greatly Exceed its Cost”, CSIS authors argued the following: “In practice, Ukraine cannot continue to fight and to recover without continuing aid from the US and other powers. Moreover, if the war drags on as it well may do, the total costs of both the war and recovery states could easily rise well over $500 billion. A truly long war could put the total cost of the war and recovery to a trillion dollars or more.” The report further states: “So far, there has been only limited domestic political resistance in the United States to continuing civil and military aid to Ukraine.”
This clearly implies that the authors think the US government should always insist on more financial “assistance” to the Kiev regime and push back against anyone trying to focus on mounting domestic issues. Given just how corrupt the Neo-Nazi junta is, it’s hardly surprising there’s a lack of enthusiasm for this idea among many in the US. The recent FTX-Kiev regime-DNC scandal, along with the fact that Washington DC cannot account for over $20 billion in previous “aid” provided to the Neo-Nazi junta, all serve as a testament to the skepticism many Americans feel in this regard. Considering the current state of the US (and global) economy, who could possibly blame them.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
College Graduates Are the New Favored Class of Democratic Largesse
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | November 28, 2022
When Americans make lists of the persecuted, downtrodden groups in our society, college graduates rarely top the ranking. But President Joe Biden is offering one bribe after another to convert college graduates into perpetual dependents of the Democratic Party. Biden’s handouts helped prevent a “red wave” of Republican victories on Election Day and he appears hellbent on forcing taxpayers to pay any price to continue buying votes for his party.
Federal subsidies for higher education have been one of the least recognized boondoggles of recent decades. Federal-backed loans for higher education took off in the 1960s and have skyrocketed in this century. Almost $2 trillion in federal student loans are owed by 46 million people.
Federal aid spurred tuition increases that make it far more difficult for unsubsidized students to afford higher education. A student’s financial “need” is defined largely by tuition fees. Every tuition increase means an increase in federal aid for students—and thus an increase in the federal aid for the college. A 2012 study by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity concluded that financial aid “inevitably puts upward pressure on tuition. Higher tuition reduces college affordability, leading to calls for more financial aid, setting the vicious cycle in motion all over again.” A 2015 Federal Reserve analysis “found that for every new dollar made available in federally subsidized student loans, schools…rose their rates by 65 cents.”
Federal policies have helped turn young people into a debtor class perpetually clamoring for relief from its burdens. Rather than seeing the federal government as a potential peril to their rights and liberties, some debt-burdened young adults view it as the “Great Liberator”—presuming the right candidate is elected.
Rather than ending the perverse incentives embedded in federal aid, Biden “solved” the problem by canceling borrowers’ obligation to repay their subsidized loans. On August 24, Biden invoked an obscure provision of the post-9/11 Heroes Act to justify hundreds of billions of dollars of handouts to people who had taken out federal college loans. The Heroes Act permits the Education Department “to waive or modify student loan payments in times of national emergency.” Individuals earning less than $125,000 could have up to $20,000 in federal debt automatically erased; couples earning $250,000 could see a $40,000 forgiveness windfall.
Biden had previously admitted that the law would not justify blanket forgiveness of college loans, but he and his advisors decided to force Americans to pay any price for Democrat votes in the midterm congressional elections. The Department of Education justified Biden’s decree as “a program of categorical debt cancellation directed at addressing the financial harms caused by the COVID-19 pandemic,” including “cancellation for borrowers who have been financially harmed because of the COVID- 19 pandemic.” But college graduates were doing much better financially than other Americans who get stuck with the bill for their schooling. Their unemployment rate was less than two percent at that time.
Former Education Department lawyer Hans Bader estimates that the total cost of Biden’s student loan write-offs could exceed a trillion dollars. A Wall Street Journal editorial headlined “Biden’s Half-Trillion-Dollar Student-Loan Forgiveness Coup” derided his decision as “easily the worst domestic decision of his Presidency.” The Journal pointed out that Biden based the loan cancellation for more than 40 million borrowers “on no authority but his own” power as president. “This is a college graduate bailout paid for by plumbers and FedEx drivers,” the Journal noted. As former OMB director David Stockman observed, “Student debt is overwhelmingly an investment in professional credentialization that should never have been an obligation of the taxpayers in the first place.” ZeroHedge quipped on Twitter: “Have colleges raised tuition by $10,000 yet or are they waiting a few days first?”
There was no rationale for blanket cancellation of student debts that would not justify blanket cancellation of almost any debt citizens owed to the government. At the same time that Biden played Santa Claus with student loan forgiveness, his administration was hiring 87,000 new IRS agents and employees to squeeze more money out of working Americans.
The handouts helped buy Democrats their biggest boost among voters — a 28% advantage over Republicans in voters age 18 to 29 in the mid-term elections. Two days after the election, Biden tweeted, “I want to thank the young people of this nation” who voted for “student debt relief.” Jon Cooper, a former top Biden campaign operative, tweeted, “Young people: You saved our butts. THANK YOU.”
Two days after the election, federal judge Mark Pittman struck down the bailout as an unconstitutional decree: “In this country, we are not ruled by an all-powerful executive with a pen and a phone. Instead, we are ruled by a Constitution that provides for three distinct and independent branches of government.” Pittman rejected the “emergency” basis of the order in part because Biden had proclaimed in September on “60 Minutes” that “the pandemic is over.” The following week, a federal appeals court in St. Louis unanimously voted to impose a nationwide “injunction considering the irreversible impact the Secretary’s debt forgiveness action would have” on “Americans who pay taxes to finance the government.”
Some activists believe Biden intentionally swindled young voters with a bait-and-switch scheme. Briahna Joy Gray, who was the press secretary for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, asked, “Did Biden RIG student debt forgiveness to fail, just to help him in midterms?” She explained on Twitter: “They used the promise of student debt cancellation to induce young voter turn out—knowing it wasn’t going anywhere [because] they relied on faulty legal authority. Hard to convince me the Biden admin didn’t do this intentionally.” A student activist group called the Debt Collective is circulating a petition: “I refuse to pay a debt the President promised to cancel.”
Biden came up with a Solomonic solution—sawing taxpayers in half—to placate his enraged supporters. He announced on Twitter, “Republican special interests and elected officials sued to deny this relief even for their own constituents. It isn’t fair to ask tens of millions of borrowers eligible for relief to resume their student debt payments while the courts consider the lawsuit.” On November 22, Biden announced that he was extending the moratorium on repaying student debt until August 2023. That moratorium began in March 2020 during the first COVID lockdowns and has already cost taxpayers $155 billion, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. When Biden announced his loan forgiveness decree in August, he promised, “The student-loan payment pause is gonna end. It is time for the payments to resume.” Biden betrayed that promise, apparently believing that no one should be obliged to fulfill their legal obligation as long as there was a snowball’s chance in hell that some judge would uphold his scheme. Extending the loan payment moratorium could give a crucial boost to Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, locked in a tight December 6 run-off election.
What happens when the latest moratorium extension ends in August 2023? Biden may be formally kicking off his re-election campaign at that time. And what better way to buy support than by extending a handout to one of his most important constituencies? In the 2022 mid-term elections, “52 percent of voters with college degrees supported Democrats while 42 percent of voters without degrees did so,” The Washington Post reported.
Protecting former students from the federal debts they voluntarily accepted has become one of the great human rights issues of our times. Michael Pierce, chief of the Student Borrower Protection Center, is calling for Biden to “make it clear that the student loan system will remain shut off as long as these partisan legal challenges persist. Borrowers’ fate is in Biden’s hands.”
And this is the ultimate problem for democracy. Student loan bailouts have extended Biden’s power over a huge swath of American voters. Each new federal benefit program extends political control over both the recipients and anyone forced to finance the handouts. Speaking to an AFL-CIO convention earlier this year, Biden shouted, “I don’t want to hear anymore of these lies about reckless spending. We’re changing people’s lives!” “Changing” means controlling—but only for their own good, or at least for the re-election of their benefactors
French philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenal warned, “Redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, than a redistribution of power form the individual to the state.” If Biden’s loan repayment moratorium is extended through 2024, “a typical medical student who graduated in 2019 would effectively have $107,000 forgiven and a law school graduate would have $65,000 forgiven… New doctors receive almost ten times the benefit of the average borrower and $107,000 more than someone who never attended college,” the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reported. Even The Washington Post editorial page slammed Biden’s student debt forgiveness decree as a “regressive, expensive mistake.”
But the inequity is irrelevant if the handouts enable Biden and his Democratic colleagues to perpetuate their grip on power. As legal fights over loan bailouts continue, Americans will continue to be assailed by claptrap about ex-students as a holy class of martyrs—or at least oppressed victims. But most of the self-proclaimed “best and brightest” are not smart enough to recognize how they have been converted into tools for Leviathan.
Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books.
Pentagon cannot account for $20 billion worth of weapons in Ukraine while another $19 billion for Taiwan is missing
By Drago Bosnic | November 30, 2022
As if ongoing corruption scandals, including the FTX-Kiev regime-DNC connection, weren’t enough, the troubled Biden administration is now faced with another one. According to the latest reports, the US government is unable to account for the approximately $20 billion worth of weapons it sent to the Kiev regime. The US Congress has become a place of heated debates as Republicans warn there will be “impending audits” after they take full control of the House of Representatives in January. Major news media, such as Fox News, claim that the US government under Biden inspected only 10% of approximately 22,000 weapons it sent to the Kiev regime from late February to November.
The GOP wants audits to determine what is going on with the massive amounts of weapons the US is sending and how much of it is ending up “where it’s supposed to be.” Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has vowed to “hold our government accountable” for spending US taxpayers’ dollars for the sake of the corrupt Kiev regime. Other members of the US Congress have been asking for audits for months, while Senator Rand Paul asked on Twitter: “Didn’t someone try to legislatively mandate a special inspector general to scrutinize Ukrainian spending? Oh, that’s right, it was my amendment and most Democrats AND Republicans opposed any semblance of oversight.”
Back in May, the Biden administration promised it would pledge more than $54 billion in the military, financial and humanitarian “aid” to the Kiev regime. Various estimates of the full amount of funds the political West sent (and is still sending) put the actual number much higher (more than $65 billion back in May). Since Russia launched its counteroffensive on February 24, the US provided the bulk of those funds, far more than all of its vassals and satellite states combined, according to data cited by Summit News. On multiple occasions, the US government and the Pentagon indirectly admitted they weren’t able to track Ukraine-bound funds and resources after they reached the Polish-Ukrainian border.
On the other hand, representatives of some of the US vassals and satellite states in Europe have expressed frustration with the GOP’s requests for accountability of where the funds earmarked for the Kiev regime are ending up. These European officials “hope that such measures would not lead to cutting off funding to Ukraine and ultimately to victory for Russia.” Others, such as the United Kingdom Parliament member Tobias Ellwood, have been more direct and accused the Republicans of “playing into Putin’s hands” by asking for audits and imposition of stricter control, oversight and accountability regarding the funds for the Kiev regime.
Yet, weapons deliveries to the Kiev regime are hardly the only issue the US is faced with at present. Weapons the Biden administration promised to deliver to China’s breakaway island province of Taiwan have been considerably delayed and slowed as a result of the US commitment to arming the Neo-Nazi junta. It is estimated that Washington DC approved approximately $20 billion in arms sales to the government in Taipei since 2017. In late August, a Defense News report claimed there was a $14 billion backlog in weapons sales to Taiwan. However, the latest data indicates that the number has now drastically increased to nearly $19 billion in delayed deliveries, according to a new estimate by The Wall Street Journal.
“US government and congressional officials fear the conflict in Ukraine is exacerbating a nearly $19 billion backlog of weapons bound for Taiwan, further delaying efforts to arm the island as tensions with China escalate,” the WSJ report begins. “The US has pumped billions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February, taxing the capacity of the government and defense industry to keep up with a sudden demand to arm Kiev in a conflict that isn’t expected to end soon,” the authors added in an admission rarely seen in mainstream media.
The information indicates that the US might not be able to respond effectively to a potential escalation of tensions in Taiwan. “The flow of weapons to Ukraine is now running up against the longer-term demands of a US strategy to arm Taiwan to help it defend itself against a possible invasion by China, according to congressional and government officials familiar with the matter,” WSJ report states.
Somewhat ironically, many Washington DC and Taipei officials have consistently used the Ukraine crisis as a reference point to reinforce the narrative that the US “must urgently equip the island with everything it needs.” However, very few of them have admitted that the US Military Industrial Complex doesn’t have the production capacity necessary to concurrently arm the Kiev regime and the government in Taipei. This is especially true given the aforementioned issues with tracking weapons and other funds earmarked for the Neo-Nazi junta in Kiev.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
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Book Review
The Greatest Threat to World Peace? A Review of Daniele Ganser’s ‘USA: The Ruthless Empire’
Review by Marilyn Langlois | November 10, 2023
If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .
If you scoff at the notion that the US, a republic founded on principles of freedom and democracy, has morphed into a world empire, perpetrating assassinations, coups d’état, acts of terror and illegal warfare . . .
If you want to promote peace but haven’t yet explored deceptive events that precipitate US warmongering . . .
. . . here is a volume that will clear the air and paint an honest picture of the significant, not-so-rosy impact US foreign policy and actions have had in the world around us.
USA: The Ruthless Empire, by Swiss historian and peace researcher Daniele Ganser, is the newly published English language translation of his book Imperium USA, originally written in German and published in 2020. Here is a summary of key points — including some lesser-known ones — along with remedies for a more peaceful future, that are covered in the book. … continue
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