Violent riots in Algeria take first toll
Press TV – January 8, 2011
An 18-year-old youth has been killed in riots in Algeria, becoming the first casualty since the outbreak of clashes over soaring food prices and rampant unemployment in the African country.
Azzedine Lebza was hit by a bullet in Ain Lahdjel in the M’Sila region, 300 kilometers (180 miles) southeast of Algiers and died instantly as youths clashed with police in the capital and several other towns, AFP reported on Saturday.
But Algerian authorities have not yet confirmed the death.
Citizens in the North African country started to protest nationwide when the government announced price increases for basic commodities such as oil and sugar at the beginning of this year.
The official APS news agency said protesters ransacked government buildings, bank branches and post offices in “several eastern cities” overnight, including Constantine, Jijel, Setif and Bouira.
On Friday afternoon, rioting youths set shops on fire in the capital and clashed with police in several other cities.
Meanwhile, police fired tear gas and water cannons at young people hurling stones and glass bottles at security forces.
The General Union of Algerian Traders and Artisans said consumer prices had increased 20% to 30% in recent days, especially the prices of sugar and oil.
The prices of flour, cooking oil, and sugar have doubled in Algeria over the past few months.
According to the International Monetary Fund, about 75 percent of Algerians are under the age of 30, and 20 percent of the youth are unemployed.
The still-unfolding riots have raised the specter of a political turmoil reminiscent of the 1990s that triggered 10 years of civil strife.
Monsanto and the big fat lie of food safety
By M. Gray | Food Freedom | November 7, 2010
Vandana Shiva doesn’t mince words. Food safety is food fascism:
“Risk Assessment in the hands of centralized corruptible agencies is no protection for consumers as the disease and health epidemic in the U.S. linked to over processed, industrial foods show. Even while the U.S. is at the epicenter of the food related public health crises, the U.S. government is trying to export its Food laws which deregulate the industry and over regulate ordinary citizens and small enterprise. This deregulation of the big and toxic and over regulation of the small and ecological is at the core of Food Fascism …”
The Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, is equally straightforward:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
What’s the truth?
Michael Taylor, the Monsanto executive who gave this country rBGH, deregulated GMOs, and kept GMOs all unlabeled, thanks to Obama, is “The Food Safety Czar” at the FDA.
That Czar, “[t]he person who may be responsible for more food-related illness and death than anyone in history,” has been using “food safety” as a weapon against small local farms and local food co-ops. (For any who missed the Rawesome Raid, here’s the video on youtube.)
The consequences of the lie can no longer be hidden. They are showing up in Missouri, South Dakota, Pennsylvania, Georgia, New York, Michigan, Ohio, Vermont, California, Massachusetts, Maine, Wisconsin, and most recently in Washington.
The places being shut down are providing the most wholesome and nutritious food available and their tests come back clean, but the places are closed down regardless, often with no means of reopening. The problem is they are not within a just or even rational legal framework but one run by Monsanto, a company which devised a means to sue farmers for labeling their milk honestly, as rBGH-free.
Requirements farmers are being asked to meet include such violations of civil and human rights as keeping the names, addresses and phone numbers of customers and limits of on how much milk they can produce (If the milk is safe, on what basis does the state limit how much can be produced? And what other food has limits on production?). They face closings over missing a single page of pasteurization information, and shutting down of a food club with demands for paper work and names of customers even without charges being filed.
There are no “food safety” violations here, only the violation of a corporation shutting people down who are providing safe food and cutting off people depending on them for that food.
The list of raids since Obama came in is incomplete. It comes on top of SWAT team raids that occurred under Bush – also without reasonable cause, and repeatedly against a single farmer, and sometimes without any cause.
Food (especially milk products), equipment and personal computers are seized by state agents without a warrant and destroyed (sometimes running into hundreds of thousands of dollars of losses) which is followed by destruction of the farmers’ own food, stored for the family for the year. None is replaced and the farmer is not compensated.
Under such an FDA regime, “food safety” has lost all meaning. It is a farce of paperwork and a complex, irrelevant (to true safety of food) regulations which allow for governmental discretion in how standards must be met or maliciously assuring they can never be met, and in how penalties are applied. It is an arrangement that keeps doors wide open to willful government injustices. Lost in this complicated, pretense-filled, science-sounding bureaucratic system is the fact that “food safety” has nothing whatever to do with the actual safety of the food.
When it comes to literal food safety, the FDA, tasked to protect food, has illegally allowed antibiotics, hormones and slaughterhouse waste (all banned for years in Europe) to enter the food supply, along with pesticides and GMOs, with none ever having been tested for safety in humans. And those toxic items remain there today despite decades of studies (by scientists outside the FDA) proving their danger conclusively. How many people have died from this exposure, and not from acute infections but from chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease and more?
Those toxic substances are all corporate products and the bases of the immense profits to Monsanto, agribusiness in general, the food industry, and especially to the pharmaceutical industry which both sells the toxins and many of the food “additives” and then, after the food is consumed, swoops in like a vulture to pick the bones clean from perhaps the most profitable aspect of all – the steadily increasing diseases it and its brother corporations are assuring.
America does produce safe food but it is produced outside of the industrial [model] based on drugs chemicals, animal confinement, and GMOs. It comes only from the farms Monsanto is working to shut down.
That the FDA is concerned with “food safety” is a fiction propped [up] by propaganda. This is perhaps best exemplified by the raids occurring now, most of them involving raw milk.
The “food safety” stage was set by a long standing government smear campaign around raw milk’s alleged threat to health, giving the public the impression that the FDA was on the job protecting them from dangerous pathogens on farms. The public was unaware of how often the government accused farmers of producing milk with salmonella or another pathogen, shut the farmer down for a few weeks, and put that scare-mongering news in the media. But when the tests came back clean, that did not make the news. In the meantime, the farmer’s reputation was damaged and weeks of income were lost. Farmers, to defend themselves, began taking samples at the same time the government did, and having independent labs quickly confirm the milk was safe, undermining the government ruse.
In any case, the false accusations did not dampen the rapidly growing demand for raw milk. Perhaps because the milk is clean and the rigmarole of testing wasn’t offering a means to shut down dairy farmers Monsanto is now shutting them and food buying clubs down anyway, dropping all pretense of cause.
This becomes yet more absurd and unjust since the reality is that raw milk is the cleanest milk in the country whereas pasteurized milk in supermarkets contains pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, pus and GMOs. And pathogens. For while the FDA is accusing raw milk of being unsafe, in truth, the FDA is ignoring 5 to 20% of pasteurized milk in supermarkets, coming from the dairy industry, can be cultured for the Crohn’s bacterium. It is contaminated with a disease bacterium. The FDA has known this for more than a decade and done nothing about it, not even informing researchers and doctors searching for the cause that pasteurized milk is a likely source.
And to make the FDA’s actions more ludicrous in terms of “food safety,” the raw milk they are trying to get rid of is sought after by many in order to treat Crohn’s disease.
“Food safety” under Monsanto is Orwellian regulations enlarged to the specter of a Howitzer, easy to swing around and aim at small farms and food co-ops providing incontrovertibly safe, nutritious food, in order to shut them down. But somehow the big gun is permanently jammed when it comes pointing at giant corporate facilities sending out contaminated food to millions, sickening and even killing people. Those facilities, despite deaths, have not been closed for a single day.
The FDA (Monsanto) claims it can’t deal with the big corporate offenders without more fire power, so it wants a much, much bigger weapon and total discretion to act whenever and however it decides. The farmers and local food producers, wide-eyed, call out to the country, “Look who their target has been! Look who their target is now!” Given Monsanto overriding existing legal constraints to shut down people doing everything right, their intent is clear as is their drive. With the force and scope of what the “food safety” bills contain, Monsanto would be freed up to obliterate small farming and all local food systems in the US.
Colbert has done a show on the armed FBI raid in LA, and Olbermann did a show on a proposed Miami law that would use “food safety” to criminalize donating to the homeless. Word is starting to get out that something serious is occurring around food and Americans’ rights to produce it and use it freely. Monsanto would probably agree, since it has been appearing in court (as FDA’s “food safety” division) to try to remove human rights around food and health.
Realizing that who is behind FDA “food safety” (Monsanto of documentary fame) begins to lift the veil from the FDA’s claims that it must have more power to go after corporate violators, to reveal the Howitzer beneath, one which Monsanto is using only against hard-working people providing exactly what the country says it wants – a local food economy, safe food, local jobs, food security, and little carbon footprint.
Vandana Shiva says this partnership between the state and corporations is corporate rule. Is that the truth about “food safety”?
Obama’s Electric Vehicle Fetish
Cars for the Elite
By ROBERT BRYCE | November 11, 2010
Imagine an American president who, during a press conference, extols the importance of cars made by Mercedes Benz or BMW. The reaction, particularly on Fox News, is easily envisioned: outraged cries of “elitist” and “out of touch” would persist for days or even months afterward.
That, in essence, is exactly what President Barack Obama did last Wednesday. Obama acknowledged the thumping that the Democrats took at the polls on November 2, and went on to discuss the need for more all-electric vehicles, at one point saying “There’s a lot of agreement around the need to make sure that electric cars are developed here in the United States.”
Fine. Both Mercedes and BMW manufacture cars in the U.S. But here are two essential points: Those two automakers each control about the same percentage of the domestic car market that automotive analysts believe electric cars will have by 2020. Second, and perhaps more important: the same people who buy Benzes and Beemers – the wealthy – are the ones most likely to buy a new electric car.
Obama’s electric vehicle fetish reflects much of the inanity of our discussions about energy. The idea that oil is bad, and that we must therefore throw vast sums of money at efforts aimed at fueling our automotive fleet with something else – anything else – ignores both economic realities and the myriad problems inherent with EVs.
First, the economic realities. Earlier this year, Deloitte Consulting released a report on EVs which found that the most likely buyers are people with household incomes “in excess of $200,000” and “who already own one or more vehicles.” Furthermore, Deloitte expects those buyers to be “concentrated around southern California where weather and infrastructure allow for ease of EV ownership.”
Deloitte concluded that the US now has about 1.3 million consumers who “fit the demographic and psychographic profiles” of expected EV buyers. It went on, saying that mass adoption of the EV “will be gradual” and that by 2020, perhaps 3 percent of the US car market could be amenable to EVs. The report also says that the keys to “mass adoption are 1) a reduction in price; and 2) a driving experience in which the EV is equivalent to the internal combustion engine.”
Think about those numbers. Out of 300 million Americans, perhaps 1.3 million of them – with many of those living in areas in or around Los Angeles and San Diego — are likely to buy an EV.
Deloitte’s projections are exactly the same as those recently put forward by Johnson Controls Inc., a company that makes batteries for cars and is building two new plants in order to supply the EV market. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Johnson Controls’ research “found that the pool of US customers for whom an electric car makes financial sense – those who travel many miles a year, but on short trips – is very small, about three percent of drivers.”
Hmmm. Three percent of drivers? In both 2009 and 2010, Mercedes and BMW each controlled about 2 percent of the US auto market.
Why will EVs be playthings for the rich? The answer is simple: the history of the EV is a century of failure tailgating failure. Consider this quote: In 1911, the New York Times declared that the electric car “has long been recognized as the ideal solution” because it “is cleaner and quieter” and “much more economical” that gasoline-fueled cars.
Whenever you hear about the wonders of the new hybrid-electric Chevrolet Volt, which at $41,000 per copy costs as much as a new Mercedes-Benz C350, consider this assessment by a believing reporter: “Prices on electric cars will continue to drop until they are within reach of the average family.” That line appeared in the Washington Post on Halloween, 1915.
And since the Volt is being built by GM, ponder this news item which declared that the carmaker has found “a breakthrough in batteries” that “now makes electric cars commercially practical.” The batteries will provide the “100-mile range that General Motors executives believe is necessary to successfully sell electric vehicles to the public.” That story was published in the Washington Post on September 26, 1979.
The problem today is the same as it was in 1911, 1915, and 1979: the paltry energy density of batteries. On a gravimetric basis, gasoline has 80 times the energy density of the best lithium-ion batteries. Of course, electric-car supporters will immediately retort that electric motors are about four times more efficient than internal combustion engines. But even with that four-fold advantage in efficiency, gasoline will still have 20 times the energy density of batteries. And that is an essential advantage when it comes to automobiles, where weight, storage space, and of course, range, are critical considerations.
Despite the all-electric automobile’s long history of failure, despite the fact that EVs will likely only be driveway jewelry for the wealthy, the Obama administration is providing more than $20 billion in subsidies and tax breaks for the development and production of cars that use electricity instead of oil.
Indeed, the administration keeps throwing money at EVs despite a January 2009 report published by the Department of Energy’s Office of Vehicle Technologies, which said that despite the enormous investments being made in plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles and lithium-ion batteries, four key barriers stand in the way of their commercialization: cost, performance, abuse tolerance, and life. The key problem, according the DOE analysts, was—predictably—the battery system. The report concludes that lithium-based batteries, which it calls “the most promising chemistry,” are three to five times too expensive, are lacking in energy density, and are “not intrinsically tolerant to abusive conditions.”
Remember when Barack Obama, the presidential candidate, berated the Bush administration for not paying attention to the science? In December 2008, shortly after being elected to the White House, he declared, “It’s time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America’s place as the world leader in science and technology.”
Restoring America’s leadership in science and technology is a worthy goal. But by attempting to pick winners in the car business — arguably the world’s single most competitive industry — the Obama administration is forgetting history and the panoply of problems that have kept EVs in the garage since the days of Thomas Edison. It’s time to unplug this subsidy-dependent industry and let the free market work.
I Am So Tired of Malthus
By Willis Eschenbach | Watts Up With That? | September 8, 2010
Daily we are deluged with gloom about how we are overwhelming the Earth’s ability to sustain and support our growing numbers. Increasing population is again being hailed as the catastrophe of the century. In addition, floods and droughts are said to be leading to widespread crop loss. The erosion of topsoil is claimed to be affecting production. It is said that we are overdrawing our resources, with more people going hungry. Paul Ehrlich and the late Stephen Schneider assure us that we are way past the tipping point, that widespread starvation is unavoidable.
Is this true? Is increasing hunger inevitable for our future? Are we really going downhill? Are climate changes (natural or anthropogenic) making things worse for the poorest of the poor? Are we running out of food? Is this what we have to face?
Fortunately, we have real data regarding this question. The marvelous online resource, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistics database called FAOSTAT, has data on the amount of food that people have to eat.
Per capita (average per person) food consumption is a good measure of the welfare of a group of people because it is a broad-based indicator. Some kinds of measurements can be greatly skewed by a few outliers. Per capita wealth is an example. Since one person can be a million times wealthier than another person, per capita wealth can be distorted by a few wealthy individuals.
But no one can eat a million breakfasts per day. If the per capita food consumption goes up, it must perforce represent a broad-based change in the food consumption of a majority of the population. This makes it a good measure for our purposes.
The FAOSTAT database gives values for total food consumption in calories per day, as well as for protein and fat consumption in grams per day. (Fat in excess is justly maligned in the Western diet, but it is a vital component of a balanced diet, and an important dietary indicator.) Here is the change over the last fifty years:
Figure 2. Consumption of calories, protein, and fat as a global average (thin lines), and for the “LDCs”, the Least Developed Countries (thick lines) . See Appendix 1 for a list of LDCs.
To me, that simple chart represents an amazing accomplishment. What makes it amazing is that from 1960 to 2000, the world population doubled. It went from three billion to six billion. Simply to stay even, we needed to double production of all foodstuffs. We did that, we doubled global production, and more. The population in the LDCs grew even faster, it has more than tripled since 1961. But their food consumption stayed at least even until the early 1990s. And since then, food consumption has improved across the board for the LDCs.
Here’s the bad news for the doomsayers. At this moment in history, humans are better fed than at any time in the past. Ever. The rich are better fed. The middle class is better fed. The poor, and even the poorest of the poor are better fed than ever in history.
Yes, there’s still a heap of work left to do. Yes, there remain lots of real issues out there.
But while we are fighting the good fight, let’s remember that we are better fed than we have ever been, and take credit for an amazing feat. We have doubled the population and more, and yet we are better fed than ever. And in the process, we have proven, once and for all, that Malthus, Ehrlich, and their ilk were and are wrong. A larger population doesn’t necessarily mean less to eat.
Of course despite being proven wrong for the nth time, it won’t be the last we hear of the ineluctable Señor Malthus. He’s like your basic horror film villain, incapable of being killed even with a stake through the heart at a crossroads at midnight … or the last we hear of Paul Ehrlich, for that matter. He’s never been right yet, so why should he snap his unbeaten string?
APPENDIX 1: Least Developed Countries
Africa (33 countries)
Angola
Benin
Burkina Faso
Burundi
Central African Republic
Chad
Comoros
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Djibouti
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Ethiopia
Gambia
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Lesotho
Liberia
Madagascar
Malawi
Mali
Mauritania
Mozambique
Niger
Rwanda
São Tomé and Príncipe
Senegal
Sierra Leone
Somalia
Sudan
Togo
Tanzania
Uganda
Zambia
Eurasia (10 countries)
Afghanistan
Bangladesh
Bhutan
Cambodia
East Timor
Laos
Maldives
Myanmar
Nepal
Yemen
Americas (1 country)
Haiti
Oceania (5 countries)
Kiribati
Samoa
Solomon Islands
Tuvalu
Vanuatu
LATE VICTORIAN HOLOCAUSTS BY MIKE DAVIS
BOOK REVIEW
Critics of globalization point out with some justice that poor people around the world suffer far more than the citizens of industrialized nations during downturns in the global economy. Peasants in developing countries can find their lives hanging in the balance during a rise in food prices or a decline in the global market value of the goods they produce. Never was this more true than during the hey-day of the European imperialism in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Aggressive trade practices and the ruthless use of military force effectively subdued nations in Asia, Africa, and South America and brought these countries into a global trade system. By the 1870s, and certainly by the turn of the century, many European countries, above all Great Britain, had created the world’s first global market economy. Financial markets in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and elsewhere were linked by telegraph to places where raw materials were produced for European consumption, while established trade routes were patrolled by European navies (particularly the Royal Navy). The economic power of the extensive British Empire was unparalleled and the inner workings of the global system dominated by London determined the fate of innumerable people around the world.
It is with the workings of the British economic system and their impact on indigenous populations in India, China, and elsewhere that Mike Davis’ book Late Victorian Holocausts is concerned. Davis’ point of departure is a simple question. Why is it that widespread hunger in Western Europe disappeared in the nineteenth century while famine and disease raged throughout multiple places in what today we would call the “Third World”? Davis provides a simple answer: European imperialism (especially British imperialism) created a global economic system through which the food and wealth of conquered nations (i.e. colonies) was siphoned off for the benefit of wealthy and powerful Europeans, while those in the colonies were left to starve and die. The result was mass death (what Davis calls “holocausts”) on an unprecedented scale in India, China, Brazil and other places, that was most intense during the El Niño drought years of 1876-77 and 1888-1902.
This imperial global economic system was certainly not a “free” market in any sense of the word. It was in fact bolstered by a long series of tariffs and unfavorable trade relationships that were forced by Europeans upon the peoples they conquered. Colonies were in turn subjected to economic pressure dictated by and manipulated from financial centers in Western Europe. It was these economic forces, as well as brutal gunboat diplomacy, that Davis argues created the Third World as we know it today.
THE “FREE MARKET” AS A MECHANISM OF MASS MURDER
Davis’ primary focus in fleshing out his story is the crown jewel of Britain’s colonial empire: India. Drought was the precipitating cause of the hardship faced by the Indian people. However, Davis demonstrates with statistics and anecdotes that it was the unregulated “free market” system imposed on India by Britain that led to the deaths of tens of millions in the mid-1870s and late 1880s.
How did death and human suffering on such a massive scale happen? Following the English conquest of India in the early nineteenth century, economic relationships in the sub-continent underwent revolutionary changes. Thousands of miles of railroad track were laid. Telegraph wire was strung between outlying areas and the capitol city of Bombay (Mumbai today). Central grain collection depots were created and Indian grain was exported in massive quantities to the British Isles. Also, Indian subsistence farmers were gradually forced out in favor of large land enclosures. Within these new enclosures cash crops like cotton were planted, which supplied the textile mills of Lancashire, but which could not feed the Indian peasants who farmed the land. Finally, the tax burden upon the Indian peasantry was increased exorbitantly to pay for these “improvements”. British authorities needed the revenue to finance war in neighboring Afghanistan.
The innovations imposed by the British on India re-directed the trajectory of Indian commerce and especially food production toward Great Britain and away from the local village markets where the food was needed. Rail lines and the adjacent grain depots enabled British authorities to stockpile grain and keep it under guard away from the people who needed it most, while telegraph lines dictated the price of grain on world commodities markets to local producers. When grain prices rose across the board in global trading, peasants could not afford to buy food.
In the face of these crippling economic forces, British colonial authorities did nothing, primarily because they would not “tamper” with the operation of the liberal “free” market that Britain had created. The Viceroy of India during the famine years of the 1870s was Lord Lytton, a mentally unbalanced English noble. Davis recounts that in the midst of widespread famine and the deaths of millions all around him, Lytton maintained a strict laissez-faire attitude toward famine relief. As Lytton wrote at the time, “there is to be no interference of any kind on the part of the Government with the object of reducing the price of food,” a policy proposal Lytton termed “humanitarian hysterics” and “cheap sentiment”. (p. 31)
Lytton and his fellow administrators preferred instead to blame the “laziness” of famine victims themselves for causing their own dire fate. Citing Lord Temple, “Nor will; many be inclined to grieve much for the fate which they brought upon themselves, and which terminated lives of idleness and too often of crime”. (p. 41) The task of saving life, therefore, was “beyond our power to undertake,” claimed Temple and Lytton, and it was “a mistake to spend so much money to save a lot of black fellows”. (p. 37)
British officials were thus completely unwilling to intervene in the operation of the “free” market despite seeing death on a massive scale all around them. Overall at least 7.1 million people, and perhaps as many as 10.3 million people, died during the famine years of 1876-1878. (p. 111) Furthermore, despite death on this scale and falling production caused by drought, British officials in India still managed to export 6.4 million cwt. of wheat to Great Britain. (p. 31)
LIFE AND DEATH FOLLOWS THE MARKET CYCLE
The years following 1879 were a time when the world market continued to expand. Monsoonal rains settled back into a normal pattern and grain production around the world rose considerably. These were also years when Britain and other colonial powers expanded their reach into the interior of the subjugated countries they held. In India, even more land is brought under cultivation. These lands are then connected to the market by expanded telegraph and rail lines. Then in 1888-89 and 1891-92, the bottom again fell out of the system as El Niño drought gripped the temperate regions of Asia once more.
The resulting death from famine and disease, caused by the very same factors operating in India and elsewhere in the 1870s, was unfathomably huge. By 1902 in India alone between 12.2 and 29.3 million people perished. In China, where the British, Americans, and other European powers controlled practically all trade using military force, between 19.5 and 30 million people died. In Brazil another 2 million perished over the same time span. (p. 7).
THE “FREE” MARKET AND THE MAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD
Mike Davis demonstrates beyond a doubt that the economic structure of exploitative globalization is not a new phenomenon in the world. The lives of millions of people who formerly had survived in localized economies based on subsistence farming were wiped out “in the process of being forcibly incorporated” into the modern world system. (p. 9) Davis reminds us that markets are never free and they never operate according to “iron laws” of economics. Rather, markets are created and often the power underpinning their operation is fiscal manipulation and simple brute force.
Great Britain’s global imperial economy was a case in point. It was never a “free” market. England imposed unfavorable trade terms and high tariff walls on India, China and on all of the other countries in its empire. Local economies forced open by the British were sucked dry of their vital raw materials and in return peasants were forced to buy expensive British manufactured goods. This practice was put into place throughout the colonial world by France, Portugal, Spain, Germany and other colonial powers. If anything, the economies of European colonies were more captive markets than free markets.
The latter point is perhaps the most important conclusion of Late Victorian Holocausts; specifically, that what we call the Third World today was a product of European and, to a lesser extent, American economic exploitation. The incorporation of formerly powerful countries like China and India into the global economy by Great Britain and others effectively destroyed indigenous production. Contrary to conventional wisdom, until around 1850, India and China had actually held their own against Europeans when it came to industrial production. The localized production of wealth and industry, however, was halted and then reversed by the imposition of the global economic system. It is for this reason, Davis concludes, that India’s per capita income did not increase between 1757 and 1947; and in fact declined by more than 50% between 1850 and 1900. (p. 311).
Progressive ‘Green’ Counterinsurgency
21rst Century Removal of Indigenous Peoples
By Atheo | Aletho News | July 5, 2010
The energy industry is aligning with government of the Philippines in reducing the burden of suppression of the insurgency in Mindanao.
Divide and rule tactics pitting Christians and Muslims against one another have failed to cement state power. Military occupation has proved ineffective. The intractable conflict with the rebels has persisted for decades despite the presence of US military advisers as well as generous provision of the latest, most lethal, weapons.
During the Vietnam war, the US used napalm and agent orange in an attempt to isolate and expose the Viet Cong. Now a new and progressive method of fracturing the links between the insurgency and the population in which the insurgents move is appearing.
Tropical rainforests can now be cleared and converted into biodiesel. All the while, the stripped areas can be replanted with palm oil plantations. Local, newly dispossessed, people can be readily hired to provide plantation labor. What’s more, consumers in Europe will have to pay the premium cost of the biodiesel because the mandates for biodiesel sales are already established.
All these benefits for transnational investors accrue from meeting carbon reduction goals!
For countless centuries slash and burn agriculture provided a sustainable subsistence in harmony with the environment in tropical rain-forests due to ample rotation cycles. But this practice is simply impossible to exploit for the export of cash crops.
Forests are now being converted into energy farms around the world at an unprecedented rate.
Proposed changes to the Brazilian Forest Code, if accepted, will double deforestation in the Amazon. As a result of lobbying by the alternative energy sector, 85 million hectares of the Amazon could be destroyed. An area equivalent to the size of England and France together and more than the total that has been destroyed until now.
Also by Atheo:
January 9, 2012
Three Mile Island, Global Warming and the CIA
November 13, 2011
US forces to fight Boko Haram in Nigeria
September 19, 2011
Bush regime retread, Philip Zelikow, appointed to Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board
March 8, 2011
Investment bankers salivate over North Africa
January 2, 2011
Top Israel Lobby Senator Proposes Permanent US Air Bases For Afghanistan
October 10, 2010
A huge setback for, if not the end of, the American nuclear renaissance
February 25, 2010
Look out for the nuclear bomb coming with your electric bill
February 7, 2010
The saturated fat scam: What’s the real story?
January 5, 2010
Biodiesel flickers out leaving investors burned
December 26, 2009
Mining the soil: Biomass, the unsustainable energy source
December 19, 2009
Carbonphobia, the real environmental threat
December 4, 2009
There’s more to climate fraud than just tax hikes
May 9, 2009
Obama, Starving Africans and the Israel Lobby
Featured Video
10 Hard Facts About the Holocaust
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
How Taiwan Became an Issue
By Joseph Solis-Mullen | The Libertarian Institute | August 22, 2024
Given that official Washington seems increasingly determined to fight Beijing over Taiwan, concerned Americans are right to wonder: how did the question of Taiwan come to be of such purported importance to these global powers? … continue
Blog Roll
Recent Comments
Richard Jones on Bird Flu Outbreak 40 Miles Fro… loongtip on Bird Flu Outbreak 40 Miles Fro… loongtip on Scott Ritter says he was … loongtip on Eilat port faces worst crisis… loongtip on British minister dreams of kid… loongtip on Kiev awards major mining proje… loongtip on UK believes it can seize any t… loongtip on Pirates of the Caribbean loongtip on Australian festival boycotted… loongtip on Kiev seeks to ban Russian musi… seversonebcfb985d9 on Somaliland and the ‘Grea… John Edward Kendrick on Kidnapped By the Washington…
Aletho News- Bird Flu Outbreak 40 Miles From Wisconsin Lab Sparks Concern About Gain-of-Function Experiments
- The West vs. the Rest
- Figures behind massacre of starving Gazans now shaping US Gaza plan
- “Real men go to Tehran” — The Zion-Con fantasy of regime change in Iran
- Why are EU leaders suddenly being nice to Russia?
- South Korean court sentences former president Yoon to five years in prison over martial law bid
- France Escalates Warmongering by Expanding Intelligence Support for Ukraine
- Venezuela Has Right to Have Relations With China, Russia, Cuba, Iran – Acting President
- Attacks in the Black Sea aim to destabilize relations between Russia and the Turkic world
- US Sending Troops to Middle East Over Trump’s Threats Against Iran – Reports
- If Americans Knew
- How an Israeli Firm Spreads Lies and Chaos Around the World
- ADL ‘Helping’ Ted Cruz and Ben Shapiro ‘Take Down’ Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, CEO Suggests
- Israel is Destroying Hope for the Future: Reproductive Violence in Gaza
- J Street is the new AIPAC in the Democratic Party
- The fate of Gaza’s disappeared remains unknown
- The U.S. has announced ‘Phase 2’ of the Gaza ceasefire. Here’s why it doesn’t matter for Palestinians.
- 30 tons of rubble for every resident of Gaza – Not a ceasefire Day 98
- ‘My leg went to heaven before me’: Israeli war extinguishes Gaza childhoods
- Founders of deadly GHF ‘shaping’ new US-backed administration for Gaza: Report
- Genocide isn’t a mistake. Which is why the media can’t tell you the truth about Gaza
- No Tricks Zone
- Philosopher Schopenhauer: Climate Science Certainty Stems From Stupidity, Ignorance
- New Study: Species Extinction Rates Declining Since 1980 – ‘Climate Change Is Not An Important Threat’
- Denmark Places Climate Protection Above Animal Welfare, Poisoning And Culling Cows
- New Study: Greenland Was 3-7°C Warmer And Far Less Glaciated Than Today 6000-8000 Years Ago
- German Media Report That Current Frigid Weather Can Be Explained By Arctic Warming!
- Berlin Blackout Shows Germany’s $5 Trillion Green Scheme Is “Left-Green Ideological Pipe Dream”
- Modeling Error In Estimating How Clouds Affect Climate Is 8700% Larger Than Alleged CO2 Forcing
- Berlin’s Terror-Blackout Enters 4th Day As Tens Of Thousands Suffer In Cold Without Heat!
- Expect Soon Another PIK Paper Claiming Warming Leads To Cold Snaps Over Europe
- New Study: Human CO2 Emissions Responsible For 1.57% Of Global Temperature Change Since 1750
Aletho News 