Category Archives: State Crime

The endless proxy war, by design

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While privately conceding that its ally Ukraine is not “capable of winning the war,” the Biden administration keeps fueling it.

By Aaron Maté

Source: Aaron Maté Substack

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has presented the White House with a geopolitical crisis that it played a critical role in creating. In February 2014, Victoria Nuland, a current senior State Department official and former Dick Cheney advisor, was caught on tape plotting the installation of a new Ukrainian government – a plan, she stressed, that would involve Biden and his then-top aide, and current National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan. Weeks later, the democratically elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted and replaced by Washington-backed leaders – including a prime minister selected by Nuland.

The regime change in Kiev made Biden the most influential US political figure in Ukraine, as underscored by the lucrative Burisma board seat gifted to his son Hunter. While the Biden family and other well-connected players profited, Ukraine fell into civil war. In the eastern Donbas region, Kremlin-backed Ukrainian rebels took up arms against a fascist-infused coup government that cracked down on Russian culture and countenanced murderous assaults on dissidents. Rather than promote the 2015 Minsk II accords — the agreed-upon formula for ending the Donbas conflict – the US fueled the fight with a weapons and training program that turned Ukraine into a NATO proxy. Influential US politicians left no doubt about their intentions. As the Donbas war raged, lawmakers declared that they were using Ukraine to “fight Russia over there” (Adam Schiff) and vowed to “make Russia pay a heavier price,” (John McCain). In February of this year, Russia invaded to bring the eight-year fight to an end, leaving Ukraine to pay the heaviest price of all.

The Biden administration shunned multiple opportunities to prevent the Russian assault. When Russia submitted draft peace treaties in December 2021, the White House refused to even discuss the Kremlin’s core demands: a pledge of neutrality for Ukraine, and the rollback of NATO military forces in post-1997 member states that neighbor Russia. At the final round of talks on implementing Minsk II in early February, the “key obstacle,” the Washington Post reported, “was Kyiv’s opposition to negotiating with the pro-Russian separatists.” Siding with Ukraine’s far-right, which had threatened to overthrow Volodymyr Zelensky if he signed a peace deal, the US made no effort to encourage diplomacy. Emboldened to escalate its war on the Donbas, the Ukrainian government then massively increased shelling on rebel-held areas in the days immediately preceding Russa’s February 24th invasion.

Looking back at the pre-invasion period, Jack Matlock, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union under Bush I, now concludes that “if Ukraine had been willing to abide by the Minsk agreement, recognize the Donbas as an autonomous entity within Ukraine, avoid NATO military advisors, and pledge not to enter NATO,” then Russia’s war “probably would have been prevented.”

For Washington, preventing the war would have interfered with longstanding objectives. As US policymakers have openly recognized, Ukraine’s historical, geographical, and cultural links to Russia could be used as a tool to achieve regime change in Moscow, or, at minimum, leave it “weakened.”

As Ukraine enters another winter of war, this time facing an intensified Russian assault, the Biden administration is apparently in no mood to end a crisis that it helped start.

The US-Nazi Connection since World War II: From Inspiring the Third Reich to Supporting the Neo-Nazis of Ukraine

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

The mafia in Washington, London, Brussels and Tel Aviv would do anything to keep their “Unipolar World Order” project in place, in fact, there are getting desperate to hold on to whatever remaining powers they have left even if it means collaborating with its worst enemies. There is a well-known ancient proverb “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” that rings true today especially since Washington, the CIA, the Military-Industrial Complex, along with Mossad and NATO have supported well-known terrorists including the Islamic State (ISIS), Al Qaeda, and other groups to overthrow governments they don’t approve of especially in the Middle East. However, their support of terrorists who were their enemies at one time or another did not start with their regime change wars against Syria or Libya, the idea of supporting its enemies began during and after World War II when the US government recruited Ukrainian Nazis to counter their new enemy, the Soviet Union. What a strange turn of events knowing that the Soviets who fought the Nazis with their American and European allies during the war were seen as a new threat. Washington and the rest of their mafia cohorts used the Nazis back then as they are now using jihadi terrorists today in their war for world domination no matter what the costs are in the long-term.

So who were the Nazis and why was Washington interested in recruiting them in the first place? For starters, the Nazis had members involved in several scientific and technological disciplines that the US government was interested in and would later utilize them to produce all sorts of weapons of war and psychological operations for its future military operations, but we will get into further details shortly. However, the Nazis did follow a far-right fascist ideology that was authoritarian that coincided with ultranationalist principals that rejected anarchy, communism, democracy, republicanism, socialism and other forms of government that was seen as a threat to their rising power. And as insane as this sounds, the Nazis also used scientific racism, or what we can call eugenics to manipulate human gene pools by separating certain groups of people between those who are considered inferior to advancing those who were deemed superior.  Then there is the element of antisemitism that was prevalent within the Third Reich. Nazism has led to genocide, torture, forced sterilizations, imprisonment of its opposition, deportations and other atrocities among those who did not fit the profile of being an ultra-nationalist especially if you did not have the racial qualities that they demanded for their movement. 

If we look back into the history of fascism, its roots were based in Europe as historians have claimed that Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte ‘aka’ Napoleon III who ruled France with an iron fist from 1848 to 1852 had the elements of a fascist/Nazi state. 

America’s Extermination of Red Savages was Adolf Hitler’s Inspiration 

Adolf Hitler, Germany’s new chancellor took the lead in imposing fascist policies in his country when he came to power. Hitler’s allies also known as the Axis Alliance, Benito Mussolini of Italy and Hirohito of Imperial Japan had similar policies.   

So, what inspired this sort of ideology?  Where did the Nazis get their inspiration from?  It’s a known fact that Adolf Hitler admired America’s ways of dealing with certain groups in their short history from the Jim Crow laws against African Americans to the indigenous populations who were sent to prison camps during the American Indian wars.  John Toland’s ‘Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography’ states that “Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history,” and that “He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”  So, when did the idea of a ‘concentration camp’ came into effect? It was under US President and Democrat, Andrew Jackson who introduced “emigration depots” as part of his Indian Removal Act of 1830 where tens of thousands of Indigenous peoples who were forced into what was called ‘prison camps’ and they included the Seminoles, Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee, and other tribal nations mainly in the Southern part of the United States and that included Alabama and Tennessee. 

One other element of how the US model of governance that influenced Nazi Germany was the Jim Crow Laws.  James Q. Whitman, a legal scholar and author of ‘Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law’ wrote an introduction on how the Nazis viewed American race laws:

In the opening minutes, Justice Minister Gurtner presented a memo on American race law, which had been carefully prepared by officials of the ministry for purposes of the gathering; and the participants returned repeatedly to the American models of racist legislation in the course of their discussions.  It is particularly startling to discover that the most radical Nazis present were the most ardent champions of the lessons that American approaches held for Germany.  Not, as we shall see, in this transcript the only record of Nazi engagement with American race law.  In the late 1920’s and early 1930’s many Nazis, not least Hitler himself, took a serious in the racist legislation of the United States.  Indeed in Mein Kampf Hitler praised America as nothing less than “the one state” that had made progress toward the creation of a healthy racist order of the kind the Nuremberg Laws were intended to establish. 

My purpose is to chronicle this neglected history of Nazi efforts to mine American race law for inspiration during the making of the Nuremberg Laws, and to ask what it tells us about Nazi Germany, about the modern history of racism, and especially about America     

The Nazis saw US race laws as a suitable policy that they can implement on various groups such as the Jews who were a wealthy and powerful class of people which many Germans despised at the time, became non-citizens.  Native Americans, Filipinos, African Americans, and others were also considered non-citizens even if they lived in the US or its colonized territories.  But there was one aspect of US race laws that interested the Nazis and that was the anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited interracial marriages in about 30 US states where those who broke the law in the US received a severe criminal punishment.  US-inspired race laws were imposed on German society with the establishment of the Nuremberg laws that was passed on September 15th, 1935.  

Operation Paperclip: Why the US Government Recruited Nazis After WWII

The rumor of a nuclear war is more prevalent today more than ever before since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has taken place.  Ukraine’s actor, oh, excuse me, I meant President, Volodymyr Zelensky has called for “preventive strikes” to deter Russia from using nuclear weapons although he backtracked the claims shortly after, but he did call for for the West to hit Russia with nuclear weapons for preventative measures which was extremely dangerous rhetoric coming out of his mouth.  Speaking of nuclear weapons, do you know who originally proposed the idea of placing nuclear bombs on ballistic missiles in the first place?  It was an idea that was derived from Nazi rocket scientists who was hired by the US government during World War II.  The original program was called Uranprojekt or the “Uranium Project” for the purpose of developing nuclear technology to build weapons and reactors.  

In the last years of World War II, US intelligence agencies and the Military-Industrial Complex secretly transferred more than 1,600 Nazi scientists and their families from Germany who were experts in various fields that included rocket science, aerodynamics, chemical weapons, and medicine in what was called Operation Paperclip.  There were Nazis working for the US military who also prepared intelligence briefs creating fear and panic that the Soviets were going to take over the world which was over-exaggerated.  But what the US government feared most was that the Soviet Union under Operation Osoaviakhim with more than 2,500 former Nazi scientists and engineers who were recruited in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany (SBZ) and the Soviet sector of Berlin would be one step ahead of the US government in weapons development and other areas. 

One important historical fact about America’s Nazi Scientists was the recruitment of Wernher von Braun or known by his full name as Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun who was a member of the Nazi Party and the Allgemeine SS or the “General SS” which was a major branch of Nazi Germany’s paramilitary forces.  Wernher von Braun was also the head of developing rocket technology who is considered the pioneer of rocket and space technology in the US.  He was also the chief architect of the Saturn V super heavy-lift launch vehicle that allegedly helped launch the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon.  

Nazi scientists also helped the US government and the CIA develop chemical and biological weapons programs that included the use of sarin gas and other dangerous weapons of war including VX (nerve agent) and of course, the most used biological weapon during the Vietnam war, Agent Orange.  So, in other words, the US government hired Nazi scientists for their knowledge of creating weapons of mass destruction that has inflicted damage on various populations around the world since then.  During the Vietnam war, the US military unleashed Agent Orange on the Vietnamese population causing more than 3 million people to develop birth defects and other health related problems to this day.  The Nazi scientists were indeed evil geniuses when it came to developing advanced weapons of war and that was something that the US military and the intelligence community were solely interested in and that was and still is a scary thought.      

America’s Frankenstein: The Neo-Nazis of Ukraine

As we know from the valuable lessons of history that the US government and the CIA had supported and trained Ukrainian Nazis since 1946.  The CIA had organized “Stay Behind” operations with the OUN-B (neo-Nazi Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) in Eastern Europe and other areas to assist Ukrainian nationalist who were sent to destabilize Soviet Ukraine with covert operations such as using commandos to assassinate Soviet officials, to sabotage infrastructure and to commit acts of terrorism. 

The history of the US government and its CIA operatives shows that it supported Ukrainian war criminal Stephan Bandera to advance the Ukrainian underground movement to destabilize Soviet Ukraine, so the CIA and their Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) and the Office of Special Operations (OSO) planned covert operations with the OUN-B and provided support to the anti-Soviet Ukraine Insurgent Army (UPA) for psychological warfare within the Soviet sphere of influence.   The CIA declassified their historical account of their association with Ukrainian Nationalists who collaborated with the Nazis during the Cold War in ‘Cold War Allies: The Origins of CIA’s Relationship with Ukrainian Nationalists’ by Kevin C Ruffner detailed how the “CIA reestablished and expanded its contacts with the Ukrainians and others for covert action against the Communists and as wartime assets to be used behind Red Army lines as guerrillas, saboteurs, and resistance leaders.”  The historical account went further and stated that “The sometimes brutal war record of many emigre groups became blurred as they became more critical to the CIA.”

Fast forward to November 2013 were there were large-scale protests which was known as the Euromaidan against the policies of President Victor Yanukovych who made the decision to have closer ties with Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union instead of proceeding with the idea of having a political and economic relationship with the European Union by rejecting their free-trade agreement.  Then in February 2014, what is known as the Maidan Revolution took place that ended up in violent clashes between the protesters and the government’s security forces in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv which led to a coup against the democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych.  Soon after, the Russo-Ukrainian war began and the birth of the Neo-Nazi inspired Azov Battalion was established as they became the resistance against basically, anything Russian.   

On January 22nd of this year, Yahoo News who is part of the mainstream media published an article titled ‘CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades’ basically admitted that the CIA was secretly training Ukrainian forces since 2015:

While the covert program, run by paramilitaries working for the CIA’s Ground Branch — now officially known as Ground Department — was established by the Obama administration after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, and expanded under the Trump administration, the Biden administration has further augmented it, said a former senior intelligence official in touch with colleagues in government

According to Yahoo News, an unnamed former senior intelligence official said that “If the Russians invade, those [graduates of the CIA programs] are going to be your militia, your insurgent leaders,” and that “we’ve been training these guys now for eight years. They’re really good fighters. That’s where the agency’s program could have a serious impact.”  One must wonder how many were actually radicalized neo-Nazis. 

In 2018, Reuters published a commentary by Josh Cohen ‘Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem’ that explains Ukraine’s problem with the Nazis filling the ranks of its National Militia.  Cohen said that in “a January 28 demonstration, in Kiev, by 600 members of the so-called “National Militia,” a newly-formed ultranationalist group that vows “to use force to establish order,” illustrates this threat.”  Cohen added that the National Militia has recruited members from the Nazi-affiliated Azov Battalion:

Many of the National Militia’s members come from the Azov movement, one of the 30-odd privately-funded “volunteer battalions” that, in the early days of the war, helped the regular army to defend Ukrainian territory against Russia’s separatist proxies. Although Azov uses Nazi-era symbolism and recruits neo-Nazis into its ranks, a recent article in Foreign Affairs downplayed any risks the group might pose, pointing out that, like other volunteer militias, Azov has been “reined in” through its integration into Ukraine’s armed forces. While it’s true that private militias no longer rule the battlefront, it’s the home front that Kiev needs to worry about now

Cohen obviously is following the mainstream media narrative when he said that Putin seized Crimea which in fact, it was the Russian-speaking Crimean people who voted in a referendum to reunite with the Russian federation.  But to his credit, Cohen does mention the fact that the Azov Battalion and the Right Sector are held in high-regards since they fought Russian-backed separatists.  Cohen also mentioned the Azov battalion’s children’s training camps:   

When Russian President Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea four years ago first exposed the decrepit condition of Ukraine’s armed forces, right-wing militias such as Azov and Right Sector stepped into the breach, fending off the Russian-backed separatists while Ukraine’s regular military regrouped. Though, as a result, many Ukrainians continue to regard the militias with gratitude and admiration, the more extreme among these groups promote an intolerant and illiberal ideology that will endanger Ukraine in the long term. Since the Crimean crisis, the militias have been formally integrated into Ukraine’s armed forces, but some have resisted full integration: Azov, for example, runs its own children’s training camp, and the careers section instructs recruits who wish to transfer to Azov from a regular military unit

Although Cohen’s claims expose Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis, he also follows the Western establishment and the mainstream media’s narrative that “the Kremlin’s claims that Ukraine is a hornets’ nest of fascists are false: far-right parties performed poorly in Ukraine’s last parliamentary elections, and Ukrainians reacted with alarm to the National Militia’s demonstration in Kiev” which are all lies.  Cohen’s statement is false, in fact, it’s a contradiction when he wrote at the beginning of his article that the “National Militia’s members were recruited from the Azov movement” but not to worry because “Azov has been “reined in” through its integration into Ukraine’s armed forces” at least according to Cohen who sourced his misinformation from Foreign Affairs magazine which is a publication owned by the Council of Foreign Relations, a favorite of of the US political establishment. 

So, does the US government, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the CIA support Ukrainian Neo-Nazis in their ongoing war efforts against Russia today?  Well, the answer to that question should be obvious by now.     

Biotech Giants Using GMOs to Build Food Tyranny

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By Colin Todhunter

Source: Off-Guardian

The article below was written the day before India’s state-run biotech regulator, the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), approved genetically modified (GM) mustard for commercial cultivation. This decision was taken on 26 October 2022.

The regulatory clearance for GM mustard means the crop is fit for environmental release. However, the Supreme Court has yet to rule on the matter and government stated a while back that it would wait until that ruling is in.

What follows provides insight into the deceptions and scientific fraud that underpin this decision as well as the consequences for food and agriculture.

We are currently seeing rising food prices due to a combination of an engineered food crisis for geopolitical reasons, financial speculation by hedge funds, pension funds and investment banks and profiteeringby global grain trade conglomerates like Cargill, Louis Dreyfus, ADM and Bunge.

In addition, agri firms like Bayer, Syngenta (ChemChina) and Corteva cynically regard current circumstances as an opportunity to promote their agenda and seek commercialisation of unregulated and improperly tested genetically engineered (GE) technologies.

These companies have long promoted the false narrative that their hybrid seeds and their GE seeds, along with their agrichemicals, are essential for feeding a growing global population. This agenda is orchestrated by vested interests and career scientists – many of whom long ago sold their objectivity for biotech money – lobby groups and disgraced politiciansand journalists.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to deflect and sway opinion, these industry shills also try to depict their critics as being Luddites and ideologically driven and for depriving the poor of (GE) food and farmers of technology.

This type of bombast disintegrates when confronted with the evidence of a failing GE project.

As well as this kind of emotional blackmail, prominent lobbyists like Mark Lynas– unable or unwilling to acknowledge that genuine food security and food sovereignty can be achieved withoutproprietary products – trot out other baseless and absurd claims that industry critics are Kremlin stooges, while displaying their ignorance of geopolitics.

Indeed, who would you turn to for an analysis of current US-Russia relations? An advocate for GE foods and pesticides who makes inaccurate claims from his perch at the Gates Foundation-funded Cornell Alliance for Science. Or a renowned academic like Professor Michael Hudson whose specialist field covers geopolitics.

But it would not be the first time that an industry activist like Lynas has ventured beyond his field of claimed expertise to try to score points.

However, dirty tricks and smears are par for the course because the agri biotech emperor has been shown to have no clothes time and again – GE is a failing, often detrimental technology in search of a problem. And if the problem does not exist, the reality of food insecurity will be twisted to serve the industry agenda, and regulatory bodies and institutions supposedly set up to serve the public interest will be placed under intense pressure or subverted.

The performance of GE crops has been a hotly contested issue and, as highlighted in a 2018 piece by PC Kesavan and MS Swaminathan in the journal Current Science, there is sufficiently strong evidence to question their efficacy and the devastating impacts on the environment, human health and food security, not least in places like Latin America.

A new report by Friends of the Earth (FoE) Europe shows that big global biotech corporations like Bayer and Corteva, which together already control 40% of the global commercial seed market, are now trying to cement complete dominance. Industry watchdog GMWatch notes these companies are seeking to increase their control over the future of food and farming by extensively patenting plants and developing a new generation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

These companies are moving to patent plant genetic information that can occur naturally or as a result of genetic modification. They claim all plants with those genetic traits as their “invention”. Such patents on plants would restrict farmers’ access to seeds and impede breeders from developing new plants as both would have to ask for consent and pay fees to the biotech companies.

Corteva has applied for some 1,430 patents on new GMOs, while Bayer has applications for 119 patents.

Mute Schimpf, food campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe, says:

Big biotech’s strategy is to apply for wide patents that would also cover plants which naturally present the same genetic characteristics as the GMOs they engineered. They will be lining their pockets from farmers and plant breeders, who in turn will have a restricted access to what they can grow and work with.”

For instance, GMWatch notes that Corteva holds a patent for a process modifying the genome of a cell using the CRISPR technique and claims the intellectual property rights to any cells, seeds and plants that include the same genetic information, whether in broccoli, maize, soy, rice, wheat, cotton, barley or sunflower.

The agri biotech sector is engaged in a corporate hijack of agriculture while attempting to portray itself as being involved in some kind of service to humanity.

And this is a global endeavour, which is also currently being played out in India.

GM MUSTARD

A recent report on the Down to Earth website stated that the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), India’s apex regulatory body, might approve the commercial cultivation of GM mustard. In response, concerned citizens have written to the government, objecting to the potential approval of unsafe, unneeded and unwanted GMOs.

The decision whether to allow the commercialisation of what would be the first GE food crop in India has been dragging on for years. COVID delayed the process, but a decision on GM mustard now appears to be close.

However, serious conflicts of interest, sleight of hand and regulatory delinquency – not to mention outright fraud – could mean the decision coming down in favour of commercialisation.

The bottom line is government collusion with global agribusiness, which is trying to hide in the background, despite much talk of Professor Pental and his team at Delhi University being independent developers of GM mustard (DMH 11).

GM mustard presents an opportunity to make various herbicide tolerant (HT) mustard hybrids using India’s best germ plasm, which would be an irresistible money spinner for the seed and chemical manufacturers.

In 2016, campaigner Aruna Rodrigues petitioned India’s Supreme Court seeking a moratorium on the release of any GMOs into the environment pending a comprehensive, transparent and rigorous biosafety protocol in the public domain conducted by agencies of independent expert bodies, the results of which are made public.

In her writ, Rodrigues stated:

In 2002, Proagro Seed Company (now Bayer), applied for commercial approval for exactly the same construct that Prof Pental and his team are now promoting as HT Mustard DMH 11. The reason today matches Bayer’s claim then of 20% better yield increase (than conventional mustard). Bayer was turned down because the ICAR [Indian Council of Agricultural Research] said that their field trials did not give evidence of superior yield.”

The petition says that 14 years later invalid field trials and unremittingly fraudulent data now supposedly provide evidence of a superior yield of 25%.

Rodrigues continues:

HT DMH 11 is the same Bayer HT GMO construct – a herbicide tolerant GMO of three alien genes. It employs, like the Bayer construct, pollen sterilisation technology BARNASE, with the fertility restorer gene BARSTAR (B & B system) (modified from the original genes sourced from a soil bacterium) and the herbicidal bar gene in each GMO parental line. The employment of the B & B system is to facilitate the making of hybrids as mustard is largely a self-pollinating crop (but outcrosses at rates of up to 20%). There is no trait for yield. HT DMH 11 is straightforwardly an herbicide tolerant (HT) crop, though this aspect has been consistently marginalised by the developers over the last several years.”

In order to produce a hybrid, two parent lines had to be genetically modified. Barnase and barstar technology was used in the parent lines. And the outcome is three GMOs: the two parents and the offspring, DMH 11, which will be ideal for working with glufosinate (Bayer’s ‘Liberty’ and ‘Basta’).

According to Rodrigues:

… the plan is that the official route for the first-time release of a HT crop and a food crop will be through HT DMH 11 and/or its two HT parental lines by stealth. Since the claimed YIELD superiority of HT DMH 11 through the B & B system over non-GMO varieties and hybrids is quite simply NOT TRUE…”

In her numerous affidavits submitted to India’s Supreme Court, Rodrigues has set out in some detail why GE crops are a threat to human health and the environment and are unsuitable for India. She briefly communicated some of her concerns in a 2020 interview titled GMO Issue Reaches Boiling Point in India: Interview with Aruna Rodrigues.

Moreover, various high-level reports have advised against introducing GM food crops to India: The ‘Jairam Ramesh Report’ of February 2010, imposing an indefinite moratorium on Bt Brinjal; The ‘Sopory Committee Report’ (August 2012); The ‘Parliamentary Standing Committee’ (PSC) Report on GM crops (August 2012); and The ‘Technical Expert Committee (TEC) Final Report’ (June-July 2013).

These reports conclude that GM crops are unsuitable for India and that existing biosafety and regulatory procedures are inadequate. Appointed by the Supreme Court, the TEC was scathing about the regulatory system prevailing in India, highlighting its inadequacies and inherent serious conflicts of interest. The TEC recommended a 10-year moratorium on commercial release of GM crops. The PSC also arrived at similar conclusions.

According to eminent lawyer Prashant Bhushan, these official reports attest to just how negligent India’s regulators are and to a serious lack of expertise on GM issues within official circles.

Aruna Rodrigues long ago noted the abysmal state of GMO regulatory oversight in the country and the need for the precautionary principle to be applied without delay. But not much has changed and the regulatory position basically remains the same.

Rodrigues asserts that the two parent lines and the hybrid DMH-11 require full independent testing, which has not occurred. And it has not occurred because of a conflict of interest and regulatory delinquency.

Rodrigues notes:

India is suddenly faced with the deregulation of GMOs. This is disastrous and alarming, without ethics and a scientific rationale.”

GM mustard is said to out-yield India’s best cultivars by 25-30%. The choice of the correct ‘comparators’ is an absolute requirement for the testing of any GMO to establish whether it is required in the first place. But Rodrigues argues that the choice of deliberately poor ‘comparators’ is at the heart of the fraud.

In the absence of adequate and proper testing and sufficient data, no statistically valid conclusions of mean seed yield (MSY) of DMH 11 could be drawn anyhow. Yet they were drawn by both the regulators and developers who furthermore self-conducted and supervised the trials. Without valid data to justify it, DMH 11 was allowed in pre-commercial large scale field trials in 2014-15.

For an adequate basis for a comparative assessment of MSY, Rodrigues argues it was absolutely necessary for the comparison to include the cross (hybrid) between the non-modified parental lines (nearest isogenic line), at the very start of the risk assessment process and throughout the subsequent stages of field testing, in addition to other recommended ‘comparators’. None of this was done.

Deliberately poor non-GMO mustard varieties were chosen to promote prospects for DMH 11 as a superior yielding GMO hybrid, which then passed through ‘the system’ and was allowed by the regulators, a classic non-sequitur by both the regulators and Dr Pental.

The fraud continued, according to Rodrigues, by actively fudging yield data of DMH 11 by 15.2% to show higher MSY. In her various Supreme Court petitions, she has offered a good deal of evidence to show how it was done.

Rodrigues says:

It matters not a jot if HT DMH 11 is not approved. What does matter is that its two HT (GMO) parental lines are: HT Varuna-barnase and HT EH 2-barstar will be used ‘for introgressing the bar-barnase and bar- barstar genes into new set of parental line to develop next generation of hybrids with higher yields” (according to the developer and regulator).”

She says this extraordinary admission confirms that the route to any number of ‘versions’ of HT mustard DMH 11 is invested in these two GMOs as parents – India will have hundreds of low-yielding HT mustard hybrids, using India’s best mustard cultivars at great harm to farmers and contaminating the country’s seeds and mustard germ plasm irreversibly.

In effect, according to Rodrigues, India faces a three-in-one regulatory jugglery in a brazen display of collusion to fraud the nation by regulatory institutions of governance.

Moreover, HT mustard DMH 11 will make no impact on the domestic production of mustard oil, which was a major reason why it was being pushed in the first place. The argument was that GM mustard would increase productivity and this would help reduce imports of edible oils.

Until the mid-1990s, India was virtually self-sufficient in edible oils. Then import tariffs were reduced, leading to an influx of cheap (subsidised) edible oil imports that domestic farmers could not compete with. This effectively devastated the home-grown edible oils sector and served the interests of palm oil growers and US grain and agriculture commodity company Cargill.

It came as little surprise that in 2013 India’s then Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar accused US companies of derailing the nation’s oil seeds production programme.

Whether in India, Europe or elsewhere, the industry’s agenda is to use GE technology to secure intellectual property rights over all seeds (and chemical inputs) and thus gain total control over food and farming. And given what has been set out here – they seek to achieve this by all means necessary.

What Is To Be Done?

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By Paul Edwards

Source: Information Clearing House

Not an original title for a piece that will assert we are in a unique moment in world history?  No, Lenin used it to expose the cruelty and villainy of the empire that ruled Russians like a slave master.  Claiming we are in a “unique moment” is not original, either.  We Americans, with our caudal appendage, Europe, have been told time and again we are in “unique moments”, unmatched in its peril, so that it’s now routine to say it of every asinine Presidential election. 

I have spent a lifetime reading and listening to the best minds in journalism and reportage bemoan, attack, mourn, and decry the encyclopedia of lunacies and disasters our system has inflicted on our country, the world, and ourselves, its naive, ignorant people.

Since the Gulf War, and the rolling chain of shameful absurdities that followed—Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, et.al.—in the idiotic dirty joke of the bumbling “War on Terror”, I have seen the mainstream press devoured by the Capitalist Monster to the point where all voices of integrity have been marginalized and expelled, then denounced and vilified by the diseased whores who slunk into their places.

Now, with America’s ridiculous, transparent, and contemptible falsity so obvious in every aspect of governance at home and abroad, I have seen the entire press converted into an organ of crude and dishonest propaganda for the Capitalist War Machine that is coldly, inhumanly  dictating our demise.  The viciously dishonest and relentlessly stupid storm of juvenile horseshit disseminated by all mainstream outlets— print, tv, and internet—is an ethical crime of diabolical dimensions.  Our government, with its cadre of vacuous, degraded simpletons, men and women of no intellectual size, depth, or scope, profoundly ignorant yet arrogant in their smarmy inadequacy, is restricting and distorting knowingly all truth that conflicts with the malign intentions of the War Lobby to pursue nuclear war with Russia until they get it.  And, of course, they need a second enemy and so must tell China what it can and can’t do. Where do these moronic fuckers get the brass to try that shameless madness with Xi and his power? 

And this is done while the few strong voices of courage and integrity that, against all the power of money and corruption of The Empire, continue to try to provide an educating effect through reason and evidence, are exiled and suppressed from platforms of influence.

I have long wondered at their dedication and staying power in the face of the cynical, unwarranted abuse they get, including, of course, from their supposed colleagues who, collectively, aren’t worth the powder to blow them to hell, as my Dakota Grandpa used to say.  I can only assume they are held together, in place, by the unbreakable fiber of integrity in them that they have no choice but to honor.  

And yet, though those few and proud speak out against false America and denounce it where denunciation is richly warranted, I feel, even in their most blistering analyses that there is a conviction, a certainty, an honest, incontestable statement of truth, that is missing.  I had hoped to hear it expressed by those who have great credibility, and great reputations, profiles and followings, but I have been disappointed.

My list of heroes is not long.  I acknowledge them as the heirs to the great ones before: Ed Murrow, Eric Sevareid, David Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, Sy Hersh, David Halberstam.  I include among the present greats Chris Hedges, John Pilger, Aaron Mate, Michael Brenner, Max Blumenthal, Patrick Lawrence, Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange.

All of them have done honest, deeply informed work to counter the rampant imbecility and cruelty of the American government and its stenographers, the press.  The one conclusion none has plainly stated, that all have suggested, is neither obscure nor complicated.

It is this: America can not be reformed or improved under Capitalism. Its corrupt, rotten burlesque democracy must and will be destroyed.  Not by any action of the torpid, gelded, stupid people.  It will come, and soon, by financial chaos and meltdown, or by nuclear war.

We are told that unless bold action is taken, unless we find the moral courage to act, unless we come together, get money out of politics, vote for better candidates, unless we do this, that, or the other thing, disaster will follow.  Sadly, that is all nonsense.   In fact, it makes no difference what we do: America, as a viable state, is finished.

This is intolerably painful to admit.  Every instinct of self-preservation, every human yearning for safety and justice rejects it.  All our training, our education, our immersion in bullshit propaganda screams against it but, admitted or not, it is fact, it is truth, and collapse of America’s baselessly arrogant, obscene, punishing oppression of the compliant world, already tenuous and strained, is coming.   And soon…

It is said to be easier for people to imagine the end of the world, than the end of Capitalism.  This will end soon when it will no longer be necessary to imagine either, because both will have happened.  In the same way that socio-political truth has been screened out by official deceit, environmental truth has been obscured and denied by our own and the world’s rulers.   What Capitalism has done to humans is trivial beside what it’s done to the earth and all living things.  In this, too, we are told that if we can just do this or that the world will recover and all will be well.  It won’t.   No matter what we do.  And that will almost certainly be what we have done up to now: nothing. 

Humans, mostly, are large, dull children.  They have a great need to feel loved, protected, pardoned, saved.  That’s why they were given religions by elites that have always owned them.  All dogmatic religions are bullshit by definition, their fatuous fraud shown up by every advance of knowledge from Galileo to the Webb Telescope.  

I, like all my kind, wish for mercy and grace, but I don’t look for it in a ludicrous infantile fantasy, or in deluded hope where there is clearly none.  Both religion and science, in the hands of priests and hustlers, have set us up for unavoidable misery and suffering, and arranged for the suicide of our species and the murder of the living world.  There is nothing you can do about this.  We have the ability to love those we hold dear, and the world we have known.  Let that be enough, for it is all you will ever have.

Dictatorship in Disguise: Authoritarian Monsters Wreak Havoc on Our Freedoms

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.” — They Live 

We’re living in two worlds.

There’s the world we see (or are made to see) and then there’s the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media.

Indeed, what most Americans perceive as life in America—privileged, progressive and free—is a far cry from reality, where economic inequality is growing, real agendas and real power are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak and corporate obfuscation, and “freedom,” such that it is, is meted out in small, legalistic doses by militarized police and federal agents armed to the teeth.

All is not as it seems.

Monsters with human faces walk among us. Many of them work for the U.S. government.

This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film They Live, which was released in November 1988 and remains unnervingly, chillingly appropriate for our modern age.

Best known for his horror film Halloween, which assumes that there is a form of evil so dark that it can’t be killed, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic bent that speaks to the filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our government.

Time and again, Carpenter portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out of touch with reality, technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.

In Escape from New York, Carpenter presents fascism as the future of America.

In The Thing, a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic of the same name, Carpenter presupposes that increasingly we are all becoming dehumanized.

In Christine, the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a demon-possessed car, technology exhibits a will and consciousness of its own and goes on a murderous rampage.

In In the Mouth of Madness, Carpenter notes that evil grows when people lose “the ability to know the difference between reality and fantasy.”

And then there is Carpenter’s They Live, in which two migrant workers discover that the world is not as it seems. In fact, the population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.

It is only when homeless drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.

When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them.

Likewise, billboards blare out hidden, authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering viewers to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”

When viewed through Nada’s Hoffman lenses, some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the people’s subconscious include: NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONFORM, SUBMIT, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WATCH TV, NO IMAGINATION, and DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.

This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture.

A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.

In this way, the subtle message of They Live provides an apt analogy of our own distorted vision of life in the American police state, what philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to as dictatorship in democracy, “the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.”

We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.

Tune out the government’s attempts to distract, divert and befuddle us and tune into what’s really going on in this country, and you’ll run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: what we are dealing with today is an authoritarian beast that has outgrown its chains and will not be restrained.

Through its acts of power grabs, brutality, meanness, inhumanity, immorality, greed, corruption, debauchery and tyranny, the government has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, disease, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.

We have let the government’s evil-doing and abuses go on for too long.

We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.

Despite the fact that we are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack; 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane; 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack, and 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist , we have handed over control of our lives to government officials who treat us as a means to an end—the source of money and power.

As the Bearded Man in They Live warns, “They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.”

We have bought into the illusion and refused to grasp the truth.

From the moment we are born until we die, we are indoctrinated into believing that those who rule us do it for our own good. The truth is far different.

The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, pandemics, mass shootings, etc.).

They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being.

They want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.

Most of all, they want us to continue to march in lockstep with their dictates as fearful, controlled, pacified zombies.

This brings me back to They Live, in which the real zombies are not the aliens calling the shots but the populace who are content to remain controlled.

When all is said and done, the world of They Live is not so different from our own. As one of the characters points out, “The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain.”

We, too, are focused only on our own pleasures, prejudices and gains. Our poor and underclasses are also growing. Injustice is growing. Inequality is growing. A concern for human rights is nearly nonexistent. We too have been lulled into a trance, indifferent to others.

Oblivious to what lies ahead, we’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.

So where does that leave us?

The characters who populate Carpenter’s films provide some insight.

Underneath their machismo, they still believe in the ideals of liberty and equal opportunity. Their beliefs place them in constant opposition with the law and the establishment, but they are nonetheless freedom fighters.

When, for example, John Nada destroys the alien hypno-transmitter in They Live, he delivers a wake-up call for freedom. As Nada memorably declares, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.”

In other words: we need to get active and take a stand for what’s really important.

Stop allowing yourselves to be easily distracted by pointless political spectacles and pay attention to what’s really going on in the country.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the real battle for control of this nation is taking place on roadsides, in police cars, on witness stands, over phone lines, in government offices, in corporate offices, in public school hallways and classrooms, in parks and city council meetings, and in towns and cities across this country.

All the trappings of the American police state are now in plain sight.

Wake up, America.

If they live (the tyrants, the oppressors, the invaders, the overlords), it is only because “we the people” sleep.

How “Food Shortages” & Economic Collapse Protects the Status Quo

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Engineered Food & Poverty Crises Secure Continued US Dominance

By Colin Todhunter

Source: Off-Guardian

In March 2022, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of a “hurricane of hunger and a meltdown of the global food system” in the wake of the crisis in Ukraine.

Guterres said food, fuel and fertiliser prices were skyrocketing with supply chains being disrupted and added this is hitting the poorest the hardest and planting the seeds for political instability and unrest around the globe.

According to the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, there is currently sufficient food and no risk of global food supply shortages.

We see an abundance of food but skyrocketing prices. The issue is not food shortage but speculation on food commodities and the manipulation of an inherently flawed global food system that serves the interests of corporate agribusiness traders and suppliers of inputs at the expense of people’s needs and genuine food security.

The war in Ukraine is a geopolitical trade and energy conflict. It is largely about the US engaging in a proxy war against Russia and Europe by attempting to separate Europe from Russia and imposing sanctions on Russia to harm Europe and make it further dependent on the US.

Economist Professor Michael Hudson recently stated that ultimately the war is against Europe and Germany. The purpose of the sanctions is to prevent Europe and other allies from increasing their trade and investment with Russia and China.

Neoliberal policies since the 1980s have hollowed out the US economy. With its productive base severely weakened, the only way for the US to maintain hegemony is to undermine China and Russia and weaken Europe.

Hudson says that, beginning a year ago, Biden and the US neocons attempted to block Nord Stream 2 and all (energy) trade with Russia so that the US could monopolise it itself.

Despite the ‘green agenda’ currently being pushed, the US still relies on fossil fuel-based energy to project its power abroad. Even as Russia and China move away from the dollar, the control and pricing of oil and gas (and resulting debt) in dollars remains key to US attempts to retain hegemony.

The US knew beforehand how sanctions on Russia would play out. They would serve to divide the world into two blocks and fuel a new cold war with the US and Europe on one side with China and Russia being the two main countries on the other.

US policymakers knew Europe would be devastated by higher energy and food prices and food importing countries in the Global South would suffer due to rising costs.

It is not the first time the US has engineered a major crisis to maintain global hegemony and a spike in key commodity prices that effectively trap countries into dependency and debt.

In 2009, Andrew Gavin Marshall described how in 1973 – not long after coming off the gold standard – Henry Kissinger was integral to manipulating events in the Middle East (the Arab-Israeli war and the ‘energy crisis’). This served to continue global hegemony for the US, which had virtually bankrupted itself due to its war in Vietnam and had been threatened by the economic rise of Germany and Japan.

Kissinger helped secure huge OPEC oil price rises and thus sufficient profits for Anglo-American oil companies that had over-leveraged themselves in North Sea oil. He also cemented the petrodollar system with the Saudis and subsequently placed African nations, which had embarked on a path of (oil-based) industrialisation, on a treadmill of dependency and debt due to the spike in oil prices.

It is widely believed that the high-priced oil policy was aimed at hurting Europe, Japan and the developing world.

Today, the US is again waging a war on vast swathes of humanity, whose impoverishment is intended to ensure they remain dependent on the US and the financial institutions it uses to create dependency and indebtedness – the World Bank and IMF.

Hundreds of millions will experience (are experiencing) poverty and hunger due to US policy. These people (the ones that the US and Pfizer et al supposedly cared so much about and wanted to get a jab into each of their arms) are regarded with contempt and collateral damage in the great geopolitical game.

Contrary to what many believe, the US has not miscalculated the outcome of the sanctions placed on Russia. Michael Hudson notes energy prices are increasing, benefiting US oil companies and US balance of payments as an energy exporter. Moreover, by sanctioning Russia, the aim is to curtail Russian exports (of wheat and gas used for fertiliser production) and for agricultural commodity prices to therefore increase. This too will also benefit the US as an agricultural exporter.

This is how the US seeks to maintain dominance over other countries.

Current policies are designed to create a food and debt crisis for poorer nations especially. The US can use this debt crisis to force countries to continue privatising and selling off their public assets in order to service the debts to pay for the higher oil and food imports.

This imperialist strategy comes on the back of ‘COVID relief’ loans which have served a similar purpose. In 2021, an Oxfam review of IMF COVID-19 loans showed that 33 African countries were encouraged to pursue austerity policies. The world’s poorest countries are due to pay $43 billion in debt repayments in 2022, which could otherwise cover the costs of their food imports.

Oxfam and Development Finance International have also revealed that 43 out of 55 African Union member states face public expenditure cuts totalling $183 billion over the next five years.

The closure of the world economy in March 2020 (‘lockdown’) served to trigger an unprecedented process of global indebtedness.

Conditionalities mean national governments will have to capitulate to the demands of Western financial institutions. These debts are largely dollar-denominated, helping to strengthen the US dollar and US leverage over countries.

The US is creating a new world order and needs to ensure much of the Global South remains in its orbit of influence rather than ending up in the Russian and especially Chinese camp and its belt road initiative for economic prosperity.

Post-COVID, this is what the war in Ukraine, sanctions on Russia and the engineered food and energy crisis are really about.

Back in 2014, Michael Hudson stated that the US has been able to dominate most of the Global South through agriculture and control of the food supply. The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has transformed countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops.

The oil sector and agribusiness have been joined at the hip as part of US geopolitical strategy.

The dominant notion of ‘food security’ promoted by global agribusiness players like Cargill, Archer Daniel Midland, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus and supported by the World Bank is based on the ability of people and nations to purchase food. It has nothing to do with self-sufficiency and everything to do with global markets and supply chains controlled by giant agribusiness players.

Along with oil, the control of global agriculture has been a linchpin of US geopolitical strategy for many decades. The Green Revolution was exported courtesy of oil-rich interests and poorer nations adopted agri-capital’s chemical- and oil-dependent model of agriculture that required loans for inputs and related infrastructure development.

It entailed trapping nations into a globalised food system that relies on export commodity mono-cropping to earn foreign exchange linked to sovereign dollar-denominated debt repayment and World Bank/IMF ‘structural adjustment’ directives. What we have seen has been the transformation of many countries from food self-sufficiency into food deficit areas.

And what we have also seen is countries being placed on commodity crop production treadmills. The need for foreign currency (US dollars) to buy oil and food entrenches the need to increase cash crop production for exports.

The World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) set out the trade regime necessary for this type of corporate dependency that masquerades as ‘global food security’.

This is explained in a July 2022 report by Navdanya International – Sowing Hunger, Reaping Profits – A Food Crisis by Design – which notes international trade laws and trade liberalisation has benefited large agribusiness and continue to piggyback off the implementation of the Green Revolution.

The report states that US lobby and trade negotiations were headed by former Cargill Investors Service CEO and Goldman Sachs executive – Dan Amstutz – who in 1988 was appointed chief negotiator for the Uruguay round of GATT by Ronald Reagan. This helped to enshrine the interests of US agribusiness into the new rules that would govern the global trade of commodities and subsequent waves of industrial agriculture expansion.

The AoA removed protection of farmers from global market prices and fluctuations. At the same time, exceptions were made for the US and the EU to continue subsidising their agriculture to the advantage of large agribusiness.

Navdanya notes:

“With the removal of state tariff protections and subsidies, small farmers were left destitute. The result has been a disparity in what farmers earn for what they produce, versus what consumers pay, with farmers earning less and consumers paying more as agribusiness middlemen take the biggest cut.”

‘Food security’ has led to the dismantling of food sovereignty and food self-sufficiency for the sake of global market integration and corporate power.

We need look no further than India to see this in action. The now repealed recent farm legislation in India was aimed at giving the country the ‘shock therapy’ of neoliberalism that other countries have experienced.

The ‘liberalising’ legislation was in part aimed at benefiting US agribusiness interests and trapping India into food insecurity by compelling the country to eradicate its food buffer stocks – so vital to the nation’s food security – and then bid for food on a volatile global market from agribusiness traders with its foreign reserves.

The Indian government was only prevented from following this route by the massive, year-long farmer protest that occurred.

The current crisis is also being fuelled by speculation. Navdanya cites an investigation by Lighthouse Reports and The Wire to show how speculation by investment firms, banks and hedge funds on agricultural commodities are profiting off rising food prices. Commodity future prices are no longer linked to actual supply and demand in the market but are based purely on speculation.

Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus and investment funds like Black Rock and Vanguard continue to make huge financial killings, resulting in the price of bread almost doubling in some poorer countries.

The cynical ‘solution’ promoted by global agribusiness to the current food crisis is to urge farmers to produce more and seek better yields as if the crisis is that of underproduction. It means more chemical inputs, more genetic engineering techniques and suchlike, placing more farmers in debt and trapped in dependency.

It is the same old industry lie that the world will starve without its products and requires more of them. The reality is that the world is facing hunger and rising food prices because of the system big agribusiness has instituted.

And it is the same old story – pushing out new technologies in search of a problem and then using crises as justification for their rollout while ignoring the underlying reasons for such crises.

Navdanya sets out possible solutions to the current situation based on principles of agroecology, short supply lines, food sovereignty and economic democracy – policies that have been described at length in many articles and official reports over the years.

As for fighting back against the onslaught on ordinary people’s living standards, support is gathering among the labour movement in places like the UK. Rail union leader Mick Lynch is calling for a working class movement based on solidarity and class consciousness to fight back against a billionaire class that is acutely aware of its own class interests.

For too long, ‘class’ has been absent from mainstream political discourse. It is only through organised, united protest that ordinary people will have any chance of meaningful impact against the new world order of tyrannical authoritarianism and the devastating attacks on ordinary people’s rights, livelihoods and standards of living that we are witnessing.

The US is pushing the situation towards a clash of major nuclear powers

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By Valery Kulikov

Source: New Eastern Outlook

With its actions in recent months, the United States is blatantly pushing the international situation towards a clash of major nuclear powers. This is true of Washington’s blatantly provocative moves against both Russia and China.

US officials continue to inflame the situation, intimidating their own and the world public with “imaginary nuclear threats” from Russia by spreading fake information. For example, during a speech at the UN General Assembly, US President Biden cited non-existent quotes from Putin. Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called it at least “indecent” that US President Joe Biden falsely quoted Russian leader Vladimir Putin when he “attributed” to the Russian President saying that “our country threatens the world with nuclear weapons”. According to her, someone took advantage of the White House head’s inability to reflect on difficult subjects.

The anti-Russian actions of Joe Biden and members of his administration are now harshly criticized by numerous politicians and media both within and outside the US. The US President was harshly criticized in particular by Fox News political observer Tucker Carlson, who said that Biden was guilty of wanting to destroy Russia for the sake of American hegemony in the world.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly reminded the Russian and international public in his recent speeches that Washington is pushing Kiev to move hostilities to Russian territory and has recently even resorted to nuclear blackmail. “Washington, London and Brussels are directly pushing Kiev to transfer hostilities to our territory, and they are already openly saying that Russia must be defeated by all means on the battlefield, followed by the deprivation of economic, political, cultural and any kind of sovereignty, and the complete pillaging of our country,” the Russian leader said in a televised address on September 21. “We are talking not only about Western-encouraged shelling of the Zaporozhye NPP, which threatens a nuclear disaster, but also about statements by some high-ranking representatives of some NATO states about the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons, against Russia,” Putin explained.

As highlighted in an article by Russia’s Ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov published in The National Interest magazine, Washington’s actions are pushing the situation towards a clash of major nuclear powers. Western countries appear to be testing Russia’s mettle. “Today it is obvious that the United States is directly involved in the military actions of the Kiev regime. Washington is openly building up the supply of lethal weapons to Ukraine and provides it with intelligence. They jointly plan military operations against the Russian Armed Forces. Ukrainians are being trained to use NATO military hardware in a fight,” the article notes.

Following US media reports in late September that the US was allegedly developing plans to hit the Russian military and political leadership and the Kremlin, the Russian Embassy in Washington commented on the hoaxes, stressing that this was someones’ delusion. The Russian Embassy expressed the hope that such delusional reasoning does not reflect the official position of the US military establishment, as Washington must be well aware of the escalating nature of such reckless rhetoric.

The fact that the US is actively working for an armed clash with Russia is evidenced not only by numerous policies, but also by documents.

The Swedish newspaper Nya Dagbladet, for example, published what it admitted was a “shocking document” about how the US was planning an armed conflict with Russia and an energy crisis in Europe in January. The source of this information was a “leak” from the RAND Corporation, the leading US think-tank responsible for making recommendations to the White House. The report, which was obtained by a Swedish publication, states in particular that one of the reasons for an armed clash between the West and Russia would be its push for military intervention in Ukraine in response to the aggressive foreign policy pursued by the Kiev regime under instructions from Washington. According to the pervasive key objective of this cynical strategy, as described in the document, one of the most important US objectives has been to destroy cooperation not only between Germany and Russia, but also between Berlin and Paris, dragging both of these Western European countries into the conflict in Ukraine.

As the European media is already reporting, although there are still hopes and opportunities to stop the Western-initiated conflict with Russia, they are being increasingly dashed by unprecedented propaganda, the spread of war hysteria through the media and the fanatical insanity of Western politicians. All this shows that military decisions have long been made and there is less and less realistic possibility of stopping the conflict. This has been seriously illustrated by the active calls by the US and its NATO allies for their citizens to urgently leave Russian territory, which, in a well-known historical analogy, is usually done on the eve of the outbreak of a serious armed conflict.

On September 28, the US Embassy in Moscow, for example, called on compatriots to urgently leave the territory of the Russian Federation. In particular, one of the recent reports published on the Embassy’s website said: “US citizens should not travel to Russia and those residing or travelling in Russia should depart Russia immediately while limited commercial travel options remain”.

The Polish Foreign Ministry on September 27 also advised its citizens “leave [Russian] territory using the available commercial and private means”. At the same time, Polish citizens are warned that “in case of a drastic deterioration of the security situation, the closure of borders or other unforeseen circumstances, evacuation may prove significantly impeded or even impossible”. At the same time, according to the Deputy Minister of Interior and Administration Błażej Poboży, an inspection of bomb shelters, even those that are not in the possession of the city authorities, has been launched on the territory of Poland.

The Italian Embassy in Moscow, Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkēvičs, the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry and several other NATO foreign ministries also advised fellow citizens to leave Russia on September 29.

Although the Latvian authorities admit that the situation on the Latvian-Russian border is stable, calm and under strict control, the country introduced an emergency situation for the next three months. At the same time, the North Atlantic Alliance Command reported the deployment of two HIMARS MLRSs by the US in Latvia, ostensibly in preparation for the NAMEJS exercise.  The exact same MLRSs are already being actively used by the US in military operations in Ukraine to shell Donbas territory by the Kiev regime under the guidance of US military advisors.

While the current US leadership has long acted adventurously and irresponsibly towards the people of eastern Ukraine and the Russian Federation, supporting and fomenting hostilities with its arms deliveries, it must understand that a nuclear conflict, if it occurs, cannot remain a regional issue. And if, through the fault of the White House, the conflict with Moscow descends into nuclear war, such war would be global. It will primarily destroy the United States, as well as the countries where NATO armaments are located and from where the security of Russia and Russian citizens will be threatened. And Washington should be clear that this risk is higher than what the current US political elite expects.

Peering Into the Crystal Ball, We See… Instability Leading to Collapse

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

We can only choose one: open, dynamic stability (evolution) or autocracy (instability and collapse).

When the fundamentals of life change, every organism must evolve or die. This is equally true of human organizations, societies and economies.

Evolution requires conserving what still works and experimenting until something comes along that works better. We call the fundamentals changing selective pressure and the process of experimenting with mutations / variations natural selection.

In genetic and epigenetics, this process is automatic. In human organizations, those in power influence the choice of what is conserved or replaced and what it’s replaced with. Those who benefit from the current arrangement will fight to conserve it as is, while those being weakened by selective pressure and those hoping to gain advantages with a new arrangement will fight for replacing the old with the new.

Longtime correspondent Ron G. recently shared an insightful economic characterization of this dynamic: wealth defense vs wealth creation. Those holding the system’s wealth have few incentives to risk changing the system, as those changes could undermine or erode their wealth. They have incentives to limit evolutionary forces that threaten their wealth as a means of defending their wealth.

Those who have lost wealth and those with little wealth have incentives to change the system to favor wealth creation.

We can describe the first as orthodoxy–evolution threatens the stability of the status quo, so limit evolution to the margins–and heretics being the second option that tosses out the status quo in favor of a more advantageous variation.

This isn’t either / or, of course. As Ron points out, corporations have incentives to both conserve stability and embrace variations that increase revenues and profits by expanding the markets for the company’s products. In Ron’s words: “The function of orthodoxy or corporate policy / rigor is to mitigate variations that would decrease stability.”

In other words, there’s a danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water. Dynamic equilibrium is based on a constant flux of variations and experiments–that is, low-level instability–continually modifying the system to maintain core stability.

Without this constant flux of low-level instability, sources of instability pile up, unnoticed and uncorrected, until they become consequential enough to destabilize the entire system. The system implodes, crashes, unravels, etc.

We can understand this flux of variations and experiments as evolutionary churn, and this churn requires two things: a steady flow of mutations / variations to feed the process of experimentation, and transparency so advantageous variations aren’t suppressed. In a transparent evolutionary system, data and information about each variation and experiment flows freely between all nodes in the system.

You see the problem. Those benefiting from the status quo are threatened by variations that could replace whatever is defending their wealth. Those in power benefit from the status quo, so their Job One is to suppress evolution by limiting transparency and variations, which include dissent.

Theoretically, those in power favor evolutionary advances that enhance their power and wealth, but anything that powerful is generally a two-edged sword: modified slightly, it could disrupt the entire status quo and fatally undermine their power.

So the safe bet is to suppress all evolutionary churn except those improvements which can be used to further cement their power. These are by definition autocratic.

You see the delicious irony: autocrats suppress evolutionary churn and transparency as threats, but evolutionary churn and transparency are the essential forces maintaining the system’s dynamic equilibrium. Once the system’s dynamic equilibrium decays, systemic instability builds up and eventually brings the entire system crashing down.

Because this process is obscured by authoritarian suppression of transparency, “nobody saw it coming.”

As those in power adopt ever stronger authoritarian measures to limit the potential threats of evolutionary churn and transparency, they accelerate the fatal instabilities building up within their self-serving, kleptocratic social, political and economic systems.

By suppressing the evolutionary churn and transparency that maintain the system’s dynamic equilibrium, they doom their regime to collapse.

The crystal ball isn’t cloudy, it’s crystal-clear: rising instability leading to collapse. “Nobody saw it coming” except those who understand evolution requires evolutionary churn and transparency.

Collapse is a perfectly good evolutionary solution. Stability is either dynamic or it’s not actually stable; it’s merely a simulacrum of stability sliding toward instability and ruin.

The better option is to embrace evolutionary churn and transparency and accept the trade-off: we can only choose one: open, dynamic stability (evolution) or autocracy (instability and collapse). Choose wisely, for once systems collapse there’s no turning back the clock.