Hunger Profiteers, Granny Killers, and Skin-Deep Morality

By Colin Todhunter

Source: Dissident Voice

Today, a fifth (278 million) of the African population are undernourished, and 55 million of that continent’s children under the age of five are stunted due to severe malnutrition.  

In 2021, an Oxfam review of IMF COVID-19 loans showed that 33 African countries were encouraged to pursue austerity policies. Oxfam and Development Finance International also revealed that 43 out of 55 African Union member states face public expenditure cuts totalling $183 billion over the next few years. 

As a result, almost three-quarters of Africa’s governments have reduced their agricultural budgets since 2019, and more than 20 million people have been pushed into severe hunger. In addition, the world’s poorest countries were due to pay $43 billion in debt repayments in 2022, which could otherwise cover the costs of their food imports. 

Last year, Oxfam International Executive Director Gabriela Bucher stated that there was a terrifying prospect that in excess of a quarter of a billion more people would fall into extreme levels of poverty in 2022 alone. That year, food inflation rose by double digits in most African countries.  

By September 2022, some 345 million people across the world were experiencing acute hunger, a number that has more than doubled since 2019. Moreover, one person is dying of hunger every four seconds. From 2019 to 2022, the number of undernourished people grew by 150 million

Billions of dollars’ worth of arms continue to pour into Ukraine from the NATO countries as US neocons pursue their goal of regime change in Russia and balkanisation of that country. 

Yet people in those NATO countries are experiencing increasing levels of hardship. The US has sent almost 80 billion dollars to Ukraine, while 30 million low-income people across the US are on the edge of a ‘hunger cliff’ as a portion of their federal food assistance is taken away. In 2021, it was estimated that one in eight children were going hungry in the US. In England, 100,000 children have been frozen out of free school meals.  

Due to the disruptive supply chain effects of the conflict in Ukraine, speculative trading that drives up food prices, the impact of closing down the global economy under the guise of COVID and the inflationary impacts of pumping trillions of dollars into the financial system between September 2019 and March 2020, people are being driven into poverty and denied access to sufficient food. 

Matters are not helped by issues that have long plagued the global food system: cutbacks in public subsidies to agriculture, WTO rules that facilitate cheap, subsidised imports which undermine or wipe out indigenous agriculture in poorer countries and loan conditionalities, resulting in countries ‘structurally adjusting’ their agri sectors thereby eradicating food security and self-sufficiency – consider that Africa has been transformed from a net food exporter in the 1960s to a net food importer today.  

Great game food geopolitics continue and result in elite interests playing with the lives of hundreds of millions who are regarded as collateral damage. Policies, underpinned by neoliberal dogma masquerading as economic science and necessity, which are designed to create dependency and benefit a handful of multi-billionaires and global agribusiness corporations who, ably assisted by the World Bank, IMF and WTO, now preside over an increasingly centralised food regime. 

Many of these corporations have engaged in rampant profiteering at a time when people across the world are experiencing rising food inflation. For instance, 20 corporations in the grain, fertiliser, meat and dairy sectors delivered $53.5 billion to shareholders in the fiscal years 2020 and 2021. At the same time, the UN estimates that $51.5 billion would be enough to provide food, shelter and lifesaving support for the world’s 230 million most vulnerable people. 

As a paper in the journal Frontiers noted in 2021, these corporations form part of a powerful alliance of multinational corporations, philanthropies and export-oriented countries who are subverting multilateral institutions of food governance. Many who are involved in this alliance are co-opting the narrative of ‘food systems transformation’ as they anticipate new investment opportunities and seek total control of the global food system. 

This type of ‘transformation’ is more of the same wrapped in a climate emergency narrative in an attempt to move food and farming further towards an ecomodernist techno-dystopia controlled by big agribusiness and big tech, as described in the article “The Netherlands: Template for Ecomodernism’s Brave New World.” 

A ‘brave new world’ where a concoction of genetically engineered items, synthetic food and ultra-processed products will do more harm than good – but will certainly boost the bottom line of the pharmaceutical corporations.  

While securing further dominance over the global food system and undermining food security in the process, global agribusiness frames this as ‘feeding the world’. 

The model these corporations promote not only creates food insecurity but also produces death and illness.   

Former Professor of Medicine Dr Paul Marik recently stated

If you believe the narrative, Type 2 diabetes is a progressive metabolic disease that’ll result in cardiac complications. You’re going to lose your legs. You’re going to have kidney disease, and the only treatment is expensive pharma drugs. That is completely false. It’s a lie.

It is projected that by the end of this decade half of the world’s population are going to be obese and over 20% to 25% will have Type 2 diabetes.   

According to Marik, the bottom line is Type 2 diabetes is a metabolic disease due to bad lifestyle and really bad eating habits: 

“We eat all the time. We snack all the time. This is part of the food industry’s goal. Processed food, starch, becomes an addiction. Most of us are glucose addicted and it’s, in fact, more addictive than cocaine. It creates this vicious cycle of insulin resistance.” 

He adds that if you’re insulin resistant, this prevents leptin and the other hormones acting on your brain, so you’re continually hungry: 

“If you are continually hungry, you eat more, which causes more insulin resistance. It causes this vicious cycle of overeating carbohydrates…” 

This is the nature of the modern food system. Cheap processed ingredients, low-nutrient value, highly addictive and maximum profits. A system that is being imposed or has already been imposed on countries whose populations once had healthy, unadulterated diets (see Obesity, malnutrition and the globalisation of bad food – theecologist.org). 

Over the past 60 years in Western nations, there have been fundamental changes in the quality of food. In 2007, nutritional therapist David Thomas in “A Review of the 6th Edition of McCance and Widdowson’s the Mineral Depletion of Foods Available to Us as a Nation” noted a precipitous change towards convenience and pre-prepared foods containing saturated fats, highly processed meats and refined carbohydrates, often devoid of vital micronutrients yet packed with a cocktail of chemical additives including colourings, flavourings and preservatives. 

Aside from the negative impacts of Green Revolution cropping systems and practices, Thomas proposed that these changes are significant contributors to rising levels of diet-induced ill health. He added that ongoing research clearly demonstrates a significant relationship between deficiencies in micronutrients and physical and mental ill health. 

Increasing prevalence of diabetes, childhood leukaemia, childhood obesity, cardiovascular disorders, infertility, osteoporosis and rheumatoid arthritis, mental illnesses and so on have all been shown to have some direct relationship to diet, specifically micronutrient deficiency, and pesticide use

It is clear that we have a deeply unjust and unsustainable food system that causes environmental devastation, illness and malnutrition, among other things. People often ask: So, what’s the solution? The solutions have been made clear time and again and involve a genuine food transition towards agroecology.  

Unlike the co-opted version of ‘food transition’ being promoted, agroecology offers concrete, practical solutions to many of the world’s problems that move beyond (but which are linked to) agriculture. Agroecology challenges the prevailing moribund doctrinaire economics of a neoliberalism that drives a failing system. Well-known academics like Raj Patel and Eric Holtz-Gimenez have written extensively on the potential of agroecology. And its benefits are clear

In finishing, let us consider the skin-deep morality pedalled throughout the COVID period. During COVID, the official narrative was underpinned by emotive slogans like ‘protect lives’ and ‘keep safe’. Those who refused the COVID jab were labelled ‘granny killers’ and ‘irresponsible’. All presided over by government politicians who too often failed to obey their own COVID rules.  

Meanwhile, while having terrorised the public with a health crisis narrative, they continue to collude with powerful agrifood corporations that destroy health courtesy of their practices. They continue to facilitate a system that serves the needs of global agricapital and ruthless investors like BlackRock’s Larry Fink who secure massive profits from a monopolistic food system (Fink also invests in the pharma sector – one of the biggest beneficiaries of a sickening global food regime) that by its very nature creates illness, malnutrition and hunger.    

The COVID narrative was imbued with the notion of moral responsibility. The people who sold it to the masses have no morality. Like the UK’s former health minister and COVID rule breaker Matt Hancock (see Matt Hancock’s Car Crash Interview), they are willing to sell their soul (or influence) to the highest bidder – in Hancock’s case, a £10,000 wage demand for a day’s ‘consultancy’ as a sitting politician or a few hundred thousand to bolster his ego, bank balance and image on a celebrity TV programme.  

In a corrupted and corrupting society, the rewards could be even higher for the likes of Hancock when he leaves office (a health minister who helped traumatise the population while doing nothing to hold the health-damaging agribusiness corporations to account). But with a long line of well-rewarded fraudsters to choose from, we already know that.

Biotech Giants Using GMOs to Build Food Tyranny

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Pouring Poison and Planting Seeds of Dependency

By Colin Todhunter

Source: Off-Guardian

Do you remember the iconic Union Carbide image from the 1950s or early 1960s? The one with the giant hand coming from the sky, pouring pesticides onto Indian soil.

The blurb below the image includes the following:

Science helps build a new India – India has developed bold new plans to build its economy and bring the promise of a bright future to its more than 400 million people. But India needs the technical knowledge of the western world. For example working with Indian engineers and technicians, Union Carbide recently made available its fast scientific resource to help build a chemicals and plastics plant near Bombay. Throughout the free world, Union Carbide has been actively engaged in building plants for the manufacture of chemicals, plastics, carbons, gases and metals.”

In the bottom corner is the Union Carbide logo and the statement ‘A HAND IN THINGS TO COME’.

This ‘hand of god’ image has become infamous. Union Carbide’s ‘hand in things to come’ includes the gas leak at its pesticides plant in Bhopal in 1984. It resulted in around 560,000 injured (respiratory problems, eye irritation, etc), 4,000 severely disabled and 20,000 dead.

As for the chemical-intensive agriculture it promoted, we can now see the impacts: degraded soils, polluted water, illness, farmer debt and suicides (by drinking pesticides!), nutrient-dense crops/varieties being side-lined, a narrower range of crops, no increase in food production per capita (in India at least), the corporate commodification of knowledge and seeds, the erosion of farmers’ environmental learning, the undermining of traditional knowledge systems and farmers’ dependency on corporations.

Whether it involves the type of ecological devastation activist-farmer Bhaskar Save outlined for policy makers in his 2006 open letter or the social upheaval documented by Vandana Shiva in the book The Violence of the Green Revolution, the consequences have been far-reaching.

And yet – whether it involves new genetic engineering techniques or more pesticides –  there is a relentless drive by the agritech conglomerates to further entrench their model of agriculture by destroying traditional farming practices with the aim of placing more farmers on corporate seed and chemical treadmills.

These corporations have been pushing for the European Commission to remove any labelling and safety checks for new genomic techniques. The European Court of Justice ruled in 2018 that organisms obtained with new genetic modification techniques must be regulated under the EU’s existing GMO laws. However, there has been intense lobbying from the agriculture biotech industry to weaken the legislation, aided financially by the Gates Foundation.

Since 2018, top agribusiness and biotech corporations have spent almost €37 million lobbying the European Union. They have had 182 meetings with European Commissioners, their cabinets and director generals. More than one meeting a week.

In recent weeks, Syngenta (a subsidiary of ChemChina) CEO Erik Fyrwald has come to the fore to cynically lobby for these techniques.

But before discussing Fyrwald, let us turn to another key agribusiness figure who has been in the news. Former Monsanto chairman and CEO Hugh Grant recently appeared in court to be questioned by lawyers on behalf of a cancer patient in the case of Allan Shelton v Monsanto.

Shelton has non-Hodgkin lymphoma and is one of the 100,000-plus people in the US claiming in lawsuits that exposure to Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller and its other brands containing the chemical glyphosate caused their cancer.

His lawyers argued that Grant was an active participant and decision-maker in the company’s Roundup business and should be made to testify at the trial.

Why not? After all, he did make a financial killing from peddling poison.

Bayer acquired Monsanto in 2018 and Grant received an estimated $77 million post-sale payoff. Bloomberg reported in 2017 that Monsanto had increased Grant’s salary to $19.5 million.

By 2009, Roundup-related products, which include genetically modified seeds developed to withstand glyphosate-based applications, represented about half of Monsanto’s gross margin.

Roundup was integral to Monsanto’s business model and Grant’s enormous income and final payoff.

Consider the following quote from a piece that appeared on the Bloomberg website in 2014:

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Hugh Grant is focused on selling more genetically modified seeds in Latin America to drive earnings growth outside the core US market. Sales of soybean seeds and genetic licenses climbed 16%, and revenue in the unit that makes glyphosate weed killer, sold as Roundup, rose 24%.”

In the same piece, Chris Shaw, a New York-based analyst at Monness Crespi Hardt & Co, is reported as saying “Glyphosate really crushed it” – meaning the sales of glyphosate were a major boost.

All fine for Grant and Monsanto. But this has had devastating effects on human health. ‘The Human Cost of Agrotoxins. How Glyphosate is killing Argentina’, which appeared on the Lifegate website in November 2015, serves as a damning indictment of the drive for “earnings growth” by Monsanto. Moreover, in the same year, some 30,000 doctors in that country demanded a ban on glyphosate.

The bottom line for Grant was sales and profit maximisation and the unflinching defence of glyphosate, no matter how carcinogenic to humans it is and, more to the point, how much Monsanto knew it was.

Noam Chomsky underlines the commercial imperative:

… the CEO of a corporation has actually a legal obligation to maximize profit and market share. Beyond that legal obligation, if the CEO doesn’t do it, and, let’s say, decides to do something that will, say, benefit the population and not increase profit, he or she is not going to be CEO much longer –  they’ll be replaced by somebody who does do it.”

Syngenta’s CEO is cut from the same cloth as Grant. While Monsanto’s crimes are well documented, Syngenta’s transgressions are less well publicised.

In 2006, writer and campaigner Dr Brian John claimed:

GM Free Cymru has discovered that Syngenta, in its promotion of GM crops and foods, has been involved in a web of lies, deceptions and obstructive corporate behaviour that would have done credit to its competitor Monsanto.”

Some weeks ago, Fyrwald called for organic farming to be abandoned. In view of the food crisis, brought on by the war in Ukraine, he claimed rich countries had to increase their crop production – but organic farming led to lower yields. Fyrwald also called for gene editing to be at the heart of the food agenda in order to increase food production.

He stated:

“The indirect consequence is that people are starving in Africa because we are eating more and more organic products.”

In response, Kilian Baumann, a Bernese organic farmer and president of the Swiss Small Farmers’ Association, called Fyrwald’s arguments “grotesque”. He claimed Fyrwald was “fighting for sales”.

Writing on the GMWatch website, Jonathan Matthews says the Russian invasion of Ukraine seems to have emboldened Fyrwald’s scaremongering.

Matthews states:

Fyrwald’s comments reflect the industry’s determination to undermine the European Union’s Farm to Fork strategy, which aims by 2030 not just to slash pesticide use by 50% and fertilizer use by 20% but to more than triple the percentage of EU farmland under organic management (from 8.1% to 25%), as part of the transition towards a ‘more sustainable food system’ within the EU’s Green Deal.”

He adds:

Syngenta view[s] these goals as an almost existential threat. This has led to a carefully orchestrated attack on the EU strategy.”

The details of this PR offensive have been laid out in a report by the Brussels-based lobby watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO): A loud lobby for a silent spring: The pesticide industry’s toxic lobbying tactics against Farm to Fork.

Mathews quotes research that shows GM crops have no yield benefit. He also refers to a newly published report that draws together research clearly showing GM crops have driven substantial increases – not decreases – in pesticide use. The newer and much-hyped gene-edited crops look set to do the same.

Syngenta is among the corporations criticised by a report from the UN for “systematic denial of harms” and “unethical marketing tactics”. Matthews notes that selling highly hazardous pesticides is actually at the core of Syngenta’s business model.

According to Matthews, even with the logistical disruptions to maize and wheat crops caused by the war in Ukraine, there is still enough grain available to the world market to meet existing needs. He says the current price crisis (not food crisis) is a product of fear and speculation.

Matthews concludes:

If Erik Fyrwald is really so concerned about hunger, why isn’t he attacking the boondoggle that is biofuels, rather than going after organic farming? The obvious answer is that the farmers being subsidised to grow biofuels are big consumers of agrichemicals and, in the US case, GMO seeds – unlike organic farmers, who buy neither.”

Fyrwald has a financial imperative to lobby for particular strategies and technologies. He is far from an objective observer. And he is far from honest in his appraisal – using fear of a food crisis to push his agenda.

Meanwhile, the sustained attacks on organic agriculture have become an industry mainstay, despite numerous high-level reports and projects indicating it could feed the world, mitigate climate change, improve farmers’ situations, lead to better soil, create employment and provide healthier and more diverse diets.

There is a food crisis but not the one alluded to by Fyrwald –  denutrified food and unhealthy diets that are at the centre of a major public health crisis, a loss of biodiversity which threatens food security, degraded soils, polluted and depleted water sources and smallholder farmers, so vital to global food production (especially in the Global South), squeezed off their land and out of farming.

Transnational agribusiness has lobbied for, directed and profited from policies that have caused much of the above. And what we now see is these corporations and their lobbyists espousing (fake) concern (a cynical lobbying tactic) for the plight of the poor and hungry while attempting to purchase EU democracy to the tune of €37 million. Cheap at the price considering the financial bonanza that its new patented genetic engineering technologies and seeds could reap.

Various scientific publications show these new techniques allow developers to make significant genetic changes, which can be very different from those that happen in nature. These new GMOs pose similar or greater risks than older-style GMOs.

By attempting to dodge regulation as well as avoid economic, social, environmental and health impact assessments, it is clear were the industry’s priorities lie.

Unfortunately, Fyrwald, Bill Gates, Hugh Grant and their ilk are unwilling and too often incapable of viewing the world beyond their reductionist mindsets that merely regard seed/chemical sales, output-yield and corporate profit as the measuring stick of success.

What is required is an approach that sustains indigenous knowledge, local food security, better nutrition per acre, clean and stable water tables and good soil structure. An approach that places food sovereignty, local ownership, rural communities and rural economies at the centre of policy and which nurtures biodiversity, boosts human health and works with nature rather than destroying these.

Fyrwald’s scaremongering is par for the course – the world will starve without corporate chemicals and (GM) seeds, especially if organics takes hold. This type of stuff has been standard fare from the industry and its lobbyists and bought career scientists for many years.

It flies in the face of reality, not least how certain agribusiness concerns have been part of a US geopolitical strategy that undermines food security in regions across the world. These concerns have thrived on the creation of dependency and profited from conflict. Moreover, there is the success of agroecological approaches to farming that have no need for what Fyrwald is hawking.

Instead, the industry continues to promote itself as the saviour of humanity – a hand of god powered by a brave new techno-utopian world of corporate science, pouring poison and planting seeds of corporate dependency with the missionary zeal of Western saviourism.

Why Don’t People “Trust The Science?” Because Scientists Are Often Caught Lying

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

There has been an unfortunate shift in Western educational practices in the past few decades away from what we used to call “critical thinking.” In fact, critical thinking was once a fundamental staple of US colleges and now it seems as though the concept doesn’t exist anymore; at least not in the way it used to. Instead, another form of learning has arisen which promotes “right thinking”; a form of indoctrination which encourages and rewards a particular response from students that falls in line with ideology and not necessarily in line with reality.

It’s not that schools directly enforce a collectivist or corporatist ideology (sometimes they do), it’s more that they filter out alternative viewpoints as well as facts and evidence they do not like until all that is left is a single path and a single conclusion to any given problem. They teach students how to NOT think by presenting thought experiments and then controlling the acceptable outcomes.

For example, a common and manipulative thought experiment used in schools is to ask students to write an “analysis” on why people do not trust science or scientists these days. The trick is that the question is always presented with a built-in conclusion – That scientists should be trusted, and some people are refusing to listen, so let’s figure out why these people are so stupid.

I have seen this experiment numerous times, always presented in the same way. Not once have I ever seen a college professor or public school teacher ask students: “Should scientists today be trusted?”

Not once.

This is NOT analysis, this is controlled hypothesis. If you already have a conclusion in mind before you enter into a thought experiment, then you will naturally try to adjust the outcome of the experiment to fit your preconceived notions. Schools today present this foolishness as a form of thinking game when it is actually propaganda. Students are being taught to think inside the box, not outside the box. This is not science, it is anti-science.

Educational programming like this is now a mainstay while actual science has taken a backseat. Millions of kids are exiting public schools and universities with no understanding of actual scientific method or science in general. Ask them what the equations for Density or Acceleration are, and they’ll have no clue what your are talking about. Ask them about issues surrounding vaccination or “climate change”, and they will regurgitate a litany of pre-programmed responses as to why the science cannot be questioned in any way.

In the alternative media we often refer to this as being “trapped in the Matrix,” and it’s hard to think of a better analogy. People have been rewarded for so long for accepting the mainstream narrative and blindly dismissing any other information that when they are presented with reality they either laugh at it arrogantly or recoil in horror. The Matrix is so much more comfortable and safe, and look at all the good grades you get when you say the right things and avoid the hard questions and agree with the teacher.

Given the sad state of science in the West these days surrounding the response to covid as well as the insane and unscientific push for forced vaccinations, I thought it would be interesting to try out this thought exercise, but from an angle that is never allowed in today’s schools:

Why don’t people trust the science and scientists anymore?

This is simple: Because many scientists have been caught lying and misrepresenting their data to fit the conclusions they want rather than the facts at hand. Science is often politicized to serve an agenda. This is not conspiracy theory, this is provable fact.

That’s not to say that all science is to be mistrusted. The point is, no science should be blindly accepted without independent examination of ALL the available facts. This is the whole point of science, after all. Yes, there are idiotic conspiracy theories out there when it comes to scientific analysis, but there are a number of scams in the world of science as well.

The usual false claim is that the average person is ignorant and that they don’t have the capacity to understand scientific data. I do find it interesting that this is the general message of the trust-science thought experiment. It fits right in line with the mainstream and government narrative that THEIR scientists, the scientists they pay for and that corporations pay for, are implicitly correct and should not be questioned. They are the high priests of the modern era, delving into great magics that we dirty peasants cannot possibly grasp. It is not for us to question “the science”, it our job to simply embrace it like a religion and bow down in reverence.

Most people have the capacity to sift through scientific data as long as it’s transparent. When the facts are obscured or spun or omitted this causes confusion, and of course only the establishment scientists can untangle the mess because they are the ones that created it. Let’s look at a couple of examples directly related to human health…

GMO Crops And The Corporate Money Train

The propaganda surrounding Genetically Modified Organisms is relentless and pervasive, with the overall thrust being that they are perfectly safe and that anyone who says otherwise is a tinfoil hat crackpot. And certainly, there a hundreds if not thousands of studies which readily confirm this conclusion. So, case closed, right?

Not quite. Here is where critical thinking is so useful and where reality escapes the indoctrinated – Who paid for these studies, and do they have a vested interest in censoring negative data on GMOs?

Well, in the vast majority of cases GMO studies are funded by two sources – GMO industry giants like Monsanto, Dupont and Syngenta, or, government agencies like the FDA and EPA. Very few studies are truly independent, and this is the problem. Both the government and corporations like Monsanto have a vested interest in preventing any critical studies from being released on GMO’s.

Monsanto has been caught on numerous occasions hiding the dangerous health effects of its products, from Agent Orange to the RGBH growth hormone used in dairy cows. They have been caught compiling illegal dossiers on their critics. The industry has been caught multiple times paying off academics and scientists to produce studies on GMOs with a positive spin and even to attack other scientists that are involved in experiments that are critical of GMOs. Research shows that at least half of all GMO studies are funded by the GMO industry, while the majority of the other half are funded by governments.

There has also long been a revolving door between GMO industry insiders and the FDA and EPA; officials often work for Monsanto and then get jobs with the government, then go back to Monsanto again. The back scratching is so egregious that the government even created special legal protections for GMO companies like Monsanto under what is now known as the Monsanto Protection Act (Section 735 of Agricultural Appropriations Bill HR 993) under the Obama Administration in 2013. This essentially makes GMO companies immune to litigation over GMOs, and the same protections have been renewed in different bills ever since.

Beyond the revolving door, the government has approved many GMO products with little to no critical data to confirm their safety. Not only that, but in most cases the government has sovereign immunity from litigation, even if they’ve been negligent. Meaning, if any of these products is proven to cause long term health damage the government cannot be sued for approving them unless there are special circumstances.

If they could be held liable, you would be damn sure the FDA would be running every conceivable test imaginable to make sure GMOs are definitively safe without any bias attached, but this is not the case. Instead, the government actively propagandizes for GMO companies and uses hired hatchet men to derail any public criticism.

I, for one, would certainly like to know for sure if GMOs are harmful to the human body in the long term, and there is certainly science to suggest that this might be the case. There have been many situations in which specific GMO foods were removed from the market because of potentially harmful side effects. Endogenous toxins of plants with modified metabolites are a concern, along with “plant incorporated protectants” (plants designed to produce toxins which act as a pesticides).

There is data that tells us to be wary, but nothing conclusive. Why? Because billions of dollars are being invested by corporations into research designed to “debunk” any notion of side effects. If the same amount of funding was put into independent studies with no bias, then we might hear a different story about the risks of GMOs. All the money is in dismissing the risks of GMOs; there’s almost no money in studying them honestly.

The science appears to be rigged to a particular outcome or narrative, and that is lying. Science is supposed to remain as objective as possible, but how can it be objective when it is being paid for by people with an agenda? The temptation to sell out is extreme.

Covid Vaccines And The Death Of Science

I bring up the example of GMO’s because I think it is representative of how science can be controlled to produce only one message while excluding all other analysis. We don’t really know for sure how dangerous GMOs are because the majority of data is dictated by the people that profit from them and by their friends in government. The lack of knowing is upheld as proof of safety – But this is not scientific. Science and medicine would demand that we err on the side of caution until we know for sure.

The same dynamic exists in the world of covid vaccines. Big Pharma has a vested interest in ensuring NO negative information is released about the mRNA vaccines because there is a perpetual river of money to be made as long as the vax remains approved for emergency use by the FDA. It may be important to note that the FDA has said it will take at least 55 YEARS to release all the data it has on the Pfizer covid vaccines, which suggests again that there is a beneficial collusion between the government and corporate behemoths.

In the meantime, anyone that questions the efficacy or safety of the vax is immediately set upon by attack dogs in the media, most of them paid with advertising dollars from Big Pharma. These attacks are not limited to the alternative media; the establishment has also gone after any scientist or doctor with questions about vaccine safety.

There are clear and openly admitted ideological agendas surrounding covid science which have nothing to do with public health safety and everything to do with political control. When you have the head of the World Economic Forum applauding the covid pandemic as a perfect “opportunity” to push forward global socialist centralization and erase the last vestiges of free markets and individual liberty, any rational person would have to question if the covid science is also being rigged to support special interests.

Luckily, the covid issue is so massive that it is impossible for them to control every study. Instead, the establishment ignores the studies and data they don’t like.

The virus is being hyped as a threat to the majority of the public and as a rationale for 100% vaccination rates, by force if needed. Yet, the median Infection Fatality Rate of covid is only 0.27%. This means that on average 99.7% of the population at any given time has nothing to fear from the virus. This is confirmed by dozens of independent medical studies, but when was the last time you heard that number discussed by mainstream government scientists like Anthony Fauci?

I’ve never heard them talk about it. But how is it scientific to ignore data just because it doesn’t fit your political aims? Again, deliberate omission of data is a form of lying.

What about the multiple studies indicating that natural immunity is far superior in protection to the mRNA vaccines? What about the fact that the countries with the highest vaccination rates also have the highest rates of infections and their hospitalizations have actually increased? What about the fact that the states and countries with the harshest lockdown and mask mandates also have the highest infection rates? What about the fact that the average vaccine is tested for 10-15 years before being approved for human use, while the covid mRNA vaccines were put into production within months? That is to say, there is NO long term data to prove the safety of the covid vax.

These are easily observable scientific facts, but we never hear about them from corporate scientists or government scientists like Fauci? Instead, Fauci argues that criticism of his policies is an attack on him, and attacking him is the same as “attacking science.” In other words, Fauci believes HE IS the science.

And doesn’t that just illustrate how far science has fallen in the new millennium. Real scientists like Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR test, call Fauci a fraud, but they are ignored while Fauci is worshiped. I can’t even get into climate change “science” here, I would have to write an entire separate article about the fallacies perpetrated by global warming academics (did you know that global temperatures have only increased by 1 degree Celsius in the past century? Yep, just 1 degree according to the NOAA’s own data, yet, institutions like the NOAA continue to claim the end of the world is nigh because of global warming).

The stringent bottleneck on science today reminds me of the Catholic church under Pope Innocent III when church authorities forbade common people from owning or reading a bible. These laws remained in effect well into the 13th century. Instead, the peasants were to go to church and have the texts read to them by specific clergy. Often the bible readings were done in Latin which most people did not speak, and interpreted however the church wished.

It was only the invention of the printing press in the 1400s that changed the power dynamic and allowed bibles to be widely distributed and information to spread without church oversight. Much like the creation of the internet allows the public to access mountains of scientific data and methodologies at their fingertips. The free flow of information is an anathema according to the establishment; they argue that only they have the right to process information for public consumption.

Cultism requires excessive control of data and the complete restriction of outside interpretations. As information becomes openly available the public is then able to learn the whole truth, not just approved establishment narratives.

Science is quickly becoming a political religion rather than a bastion of critical thought. Conflicting data is ignored as “non-science” or even censored as “dangerous.” Government and corporate paid studies are treated as sacrosanct. Is it any wonder that so many people now distrust the science? Any reasonable person would have questions and suspicions. Those who do not have been indoctrinated into a cult they don’t even know they are a part of.

PARALLELS BETWEEN GMO COVID VACCINE AND GMO CROPS – LESSONS NOT LEARNED

By Jon Rappoport

Source: Waking Times

“Although gene therapy has never cured a disease across the board, it’s extraordinarily safe and effective, because we say it is.”

The COVID vaccine is a gene treatment. RNA is injected into the body, for the purpose of forcing cells to manufacture a protein. The promise? Protection against a purported virus.

The first generation of Monsanto crops followed the same pattern. Genes were injected into plants. Like a vaccine, its purpose was protection; in this case, against Monsanto’s own herbicide poison, Roundup.

The overall health of the crops and the human body were reduced. The nutritive value of the crops diminished; super-weeds on the GMO farms flourished. The huge number of adverse effects from the vaccine testify to expanding human damage.

The Monsanto genes in the plants drifted. They were found in non-GMO plants, in soil bacteria, and human gut bacteria.

The RNA in the vaccine and/or its products appear to have shed and drifted from person to person, given the large numbers of reports from unvaccinated women who, after coming into contact with vaccinated persons, experienced interrupted patterns of menstruation, bleeding, and miscarriages.

As I wrote the other day, Pfizer’s own warnings about its COVID vaccine include pregnant women coming into the proximity of vaccinated persons (“inhalation, skin contact” mentioned).

Both GMO crops and the GMO vaccine are imposed, top-down, on the population, from corporate giants who are reaping massive profits. Continuing propaganda campaigns are designed to convince famers and the general population to accept and celebrate the dangerous GMO crops and the GMO vaccine.

Governments protect and run interference for the companies who produce the GMO crops and the vaccine.

Bill Gates is an ardent supporter, publicist, and funder of GMO crops and GMO vaccines. He keeps asserting, like a psychotic baron living in a castle on top of a mountain, that the crops and the vaccine will save the world.

Many critics of the GMO vaccine are unaware of (or have forgotten about) the dangers of GMO crops. And many critics of GMO crops fail to realize (or are afraid to criticize) the dangers of the COVID GMO vaccine.

Huge numbers of people in the general public blithely accept the (fake) science surrounding GMO crops and the GMO vaccine. “The experts must know what they’re talking about.”

The patents on both GMO crops and the GMO vaccine are jealously guarded by the corporations who control them. In both cases, ignorant people are calling for these patents to be made into open-source information—unaware that both technologies are highly dangerous and destructive.

The general field of genetics research—of which these crops and vaccines are products—is filled with liars, who claim their experimental work is safe and foolproof, when in fact the literature is rife with examples of ripple effects. The introduction of genes into organisms creates many unpredictable changes in genomes. “We have everything under control”—the battle cry of vaccine and crop researchers.

Agriculture and the human body are both viewed, from the ivory tower, as deficient and diseased, in need of genetic alteration.

Overall, genetic tinkering is a disaster already happening.

Ethical scientists who want to put moratoria on this research are being sidelined and ignored.

Manic technocrats see genetic modification as the massive gateway into a Brave New World, where humans are divided into gen-rich and gen-poor classes, from birth. From before birth.

Here are two mind-bending quotes from admired experts:

Lee Silver, Princeton University molecular biologist, predicts our future:

“The GenRich—who account for ten percent of the American population—all carry synthetic genes. All aspects of the economy, the media, the entertainment industry, and the knowledge industry are controlled by members of the GenRich class…”

“Naturals work as low-paid service providers or as laborers. [Eventually] the GenRich class and the Natural class will become entirely separate species with no ability to crossbreed, and with as much romantic interest in each other as a current human would have for a chimpanzee.”

“Many think that it is inherently unfair for some people to have access to technologies that can provide advantages while others, less well-off, are forced to depend on chance alone, [but] American society adheres to the principle that personal liberty and personal fortune are the primary determinants of what individuals are allowed and able to do.”

“Indeed, in a society that values individual freedom above all else, it is hard to find any legitimate basis for restricting the use of repro-genetics. I will argue [that] the use of reprogenetic technologies is inevitable. [W]hether we like it or not, the global marketplace will reign supreme.”

As shocking as Lee Silver’s assessment is, it’s mild when put up against the pronouncement of Gregory Stock, former director of the program in Medicine, Technology, and Society at the UCLA School of Medicine:

“Even if half the world’s species were lost [during genetic experiments], enormous diversity would still remain. When those in the distant future look back on this period of history, they will likely see it not as the era when the natural environment was impoverished, but as the age when a plethora of new forms—some biological, some technological, some a combination of the two—burst onto the scene. We best serve ourselves, as well as future generations, by focusing on the short-term consequences of our actions rather than our vague notions about the needs of the distant future.”

But don’t worry, be happy. Anthony Fauci, who has a direct pipeline to God, tells us the COVID vaccine is extraordinarily safe and effective. That’s all we need to know. I’ll take the Pfizer, the Moderna, and two AstraZeneca to go. Gift wrap? No, they’re for me. Just put the vials and syringes in a brown bag. I’ll shoot up while I watch the news on CNN. Their experts are reassuring…

Gates Unhinged: Dystopian Vision for the Future of Food

By Colin Todhunter

Source: Off-Guardian

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

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

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

FAILED GREEN REVOLUTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aside from various studies that have reported on the health impacts of chemical-dependent crops (Dr Rosemary Mason’s many reports on this can be accessed on the academia.edu website), ‘New Histories of the Green Revolution’ (2019) debunks the claim that the Green Revolution boosted productivity; ‘The Violence of the Green Revolution’ (1991) details (among other things) the impact on rural communities; Bhaskar Save’s open letter to Indian officials in 2006 discusses the ecological devastation of the Green Revolution and in a 2019 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology and Agricultural Sciences, Parvez et al note that native wheat varieties in India have higher nutrition content than the Green Revolution varieties (many such crop varieties were side-lined in favour of corporate seeds that were of lower nutritional value).

These are just a brief selection of peer-reviewed and ‘grey’ literature which detail the adverse impacts of the Green Revolution.

GMO VALUE CAPTURE

As for GM crops, often described as Green Revolution 2.0, these too have failed to deliver on the promises made and, like the 1.0 version, have often had devastating consequences.

The arguments for and against GMOs are well documented, but one paper worth noting appeared in the journal Current Science in 2018. Along with PC Kesavan, MS Swaminathan – regarded as the father of the Green Revolution in India – argued against introducing GM crops to India and cited various studies about the failings of the GMO project.

Regardless, the industry and its well-funded lobbyists and bought career scientists continue to spin the line that GM crops are a marvellous success and that the world needs even more of them to avoid a global food shortage. GM crops are required to feed the world is a well-worn industry slogan trotted out at every available opportunity. Just like the claim of GM crops being a tremendous success, this too is based on a myth.

There is no global shortage of food. Even under any plausible future population scenario, there will be no shortage as evidenced by scientist Dr Jonathan Latham in his recent paper ‘The Myth of a Food Crisis’.

However, new gene drive and gene editing techniques have now been developed and the industry is seeking the unregulated commercial release of products that are based on these methods.

It does not want plants, animals and micro-organisms created with gene-editing to be subject to safety checks, monitoring or consumer labelling. This is concerning given the real dangers that these techniques pose.

Many peer-reviewed research papers now call into question industry claims about the ‘precision’, safety and benefits of gene-edited organisms and can be accessed on the GMWatch.org website.

It really is a case of old wine in new bottles.

And this is not lost on a coalition of 162 civil society, farmers and business organisations which has called on Vice-President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans to ensure that new genetic engineering techniques continue to be regulated in accordance with existing EU GMO standards.

The coalition argues that these new techniques can cause a range of unwanted genetic modifications that can result in the production of novel toxins or allergens or in the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes. The open letter adds that even intended modifications can result in traits which could raise food safety, environmental or animal welfare concerns.

The European Court of Justice ruled in 2018 that organisms obtained with new genetic modification techniques must be regulated under the EU’s existing GMO laws. However, there has been intense lobbying from the agriculture biotech industry to weaken the legislation, aided by the Gates Foundation.

The coalition states that various scientific publications show that new techniques of genetic modification allow developers to make significant genetic changes, which can be very different from those that happen in nature.

In addition to these concerns, a new paper from Chinese scientists, ‘Herbicide Resistance: Another Hot Agronomic Trait for Plant Genome Editing’, says that, in spite of claims from GMO promoters that gene editing will be climate-friendly and reduce pesticide use, what we can expect is just more of the same – GM herbicide-tolerant crops and increased herbicide use.

The industry wants its new techniques to be unregulated, thereby making gene-edited GMOs faster to develop, more profitable and hidden from consumers when purchasing items in stores. At the same time, the costly herbicide treadmill will be reinforced for farmers.

None of this is meant to imply that new technology is bad in itself. The issue is who owns and controls the technology and what are the underlying intentions. By dodging regulation as well as avoiding economic, social, environmental and health impact assessments, it is clear that the industry is first and foremost motivated by value capture and profit and contempt for democratic accountability.

This is patently clear if we look at the rollout of Bt cotton in India which served the bottom line of Monsanto but brought dependency, distress and no durable agronomic benefits for many of India’s small and marginal farmers. Prof A P Gutierrez argues that Bt cotton has effectively placed these farmers in a corporate noose.

Monsanto sucked hundreds of millions of dollars in profit from these cotton farmers, while industry-funded scientists are always keen to push the mantra that rolling out Bt cotton in India uplifted their conditions.

Those who promote this narrative remain wilfully ignorant of the challenges (documented in the 2019 book by Andrew Flachs – ‘Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India‘) these farmers face in terms of financial distress, increasing pest resistance, dependency on unregulated seed markets, the eradication of environmental learning, the loss of control over their productive means and the biotech-chemical treadmill they are trapped on (this last point is precisely what the industry intended).

When assessing the possible impacts of GMO agriculture, it was with good reason that, in their 2018 paper, Swaminathan and Kesavan called for:

able economists who are familiar with and will prioritise rural livelihoods and the interests of resource-poor small and marginal farmers rather than serve corporate interests and their profits”.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

Whether through all aspects of data control (soil quality, consumer preferences, weather, etc), e-commerce monopolies, corporate land ownership, seed biopiracy and patenting, synthetic food or the eradication of the public sector’s role in ensuring food security and national food sovereignty (as we could see in India with new farm legislation), Bill Gates and his corporate cronies seek to gain full control over the global food system.

Smallholder peasant farming is to be eradicated as the big-tech giants and agribusiness impose lab-grown food, GM seeds, genetically engineered soil microbes, data harvesting tools and drones and other ‘disruptive’ technologies.

We could see farmerless industrial-scale farms being manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented GM seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food.

The displacement of a food-producing peasantry (and the subsequent destruction of rural communities and local food security) was something the Gates Foundation once called for and cynically termed “land mobility”.

Technocratic meddling has already destroyed or undermined agrarian ecosystems that draw on centuries of traditional knowledge and are increasingly recognised as valid approaches to secure food security, as outlined in Food Security and Traditional Knowledge in India in the Journal of South Asian Studies, for instance.

But is all of this inevitable?

Not according to the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, which has just released a report in collaboration with the ETC Group: ‘A Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045‘.

The report outlines two different futures. If Gates and the global mega-corporations have their way, we will see the entire food system being controlled by data platforms, private equity firms and e-commerce giants, putting the food security (and livelihoods) of billions at the mercy of AI-controlled farming systems.

The other scenario involves civil society and social movements – grassroots organisations, international NGOs, farmers’ and fishers’ groups, cooperatives and unions – collaborating more closely to transform financial flows, governance structures and food systems from the ground up.

The report’s lead author, Pat Mooney, says that agribusiness has a very simple message: the cascading environmental crisis can be resolved by powerful new genomic and information technologies that can only be developed if governments unleash the entrepreneurial genius, deep pockets and risk-taking spirit of the most powerful corporations.

Mooney notes that we have had similar messages based on emerging technology for decades but the technologies either did not show up or fell flat and the only thing that grew were the corporations.

He says:

In return for trillions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies, the agribusiness model would centralise food production around a handful of untested technologies that would lead to the forced exodus of at least a billion people from hundreds of millions of farms. Agribusiness is gambling on other people’s food security.”

Although Mooney argues that new genuinely successful alternatives like agroecology are frequently suppressed by the industries they imperil, he states that civil society has a remarkable track record in fighting back, not least in developing healthy and equitable agroecological production systems, building short (community-based) supply chains and restructuring and democratising governance systems.

As stated in the report, the thrust of any ’Long Food Movement’ strategy is that short-termism is not an option: civil society groups need to place multiple objectives and actions on a 25-year roadmap and not make trade-offs along the way – especially when faced with the neoliberal-totalitarianism of Gates et al who will seek to derail anything or anyone regarded as a threat to their aims.

The report ‘A Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045’ can be accessed here.

For Whom the Bell Tolls: A Report on the State of Planet Earth at Year’s End 2020

By Robert J. Burrowes

In 1624, English poet John Donne penned his famous poem ‘No Man Is an Island’, sublimely evoking the reality of human unity: ‘Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.’ Therefore, he concluded his poem, ‘never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.’

This report does two things.

First, in the hope of generating greater consideration of the human condition and the state of the planet, I have presented in straightforward language and point form, a reasonable summary of the nature and extent of our predicament as well as citing the relevant scientific and/or other evidence that explains each problem in more detail.

And second, the article outlines a powerful series of actions and strategies that individuals as well as community groups, neighborhoods and action groups can take as part of a global effort to restore agency to human individuals as well as to fight to avert human extinction.

Introduction

Tragically, in 2020, the bell tolled for all of humanity, in more ways than one, as we suffered the greatest political, economic, social and environmental upheaval in human history when the global elite initiated its long-planned coup – presented by the World Economic Forum as ‘The Great Reset’ – to take complete control of the entire human population in order to reduce it to techno-slavery in service of elite ends.

See ‘Planned Surveillance and Control by Global Technocrats: A Big-Picture Look at the Current Pandemic Beneficiaries’Big Brother in Disguise: The Rise of a New, Technological World Order‘Beware the Transhumanists: How “Being Human” is being Re-engineered by the Elite’s Covid-19 Coup’ and watch the interview of Catherine Austin Fitts for the film ‘Planet Lockdown’.

This was done under cover of the threat supposedly posed by a virus – labeled SARS-CoV-2 – which has not been scientifically demonstrated to exist, as a lengthening list of scholars were pointing out throughout the year. See ‘ZERO Evidence that COVID Fulfills Koch’s 4 Germ Theory Postulates – Dr. Andrew Kaufman & Sayer Ji’ and, for the latest explanation, COVID-19: The virus does not exist – it is confirmed!’

Unfortunately but as planned, the elite-directed response to the so-called ‘pandemic’ subsequently declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020, caused virtually all national governments to immediately shut down their national economies, imprison their populations in their homes (variously under ‘lockdown’, quarantine and curfew policies) and implement other politically, socially, economically and environmentally destructive practices which are killing millions of people, inflicting enormous suffering on billions more, and accelerating the four primary paths to human extinction: nuclear war, biodiversity collapse, the deployment of 5G and the climate catastrophe. See ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup to Destroy Humanity that is also Fast-Tracking Four Paths to Human Extinction’.

Of course, there are other possible paths to human extinction in the near term, particularly when considered in conjunction with the four threats just mentioned. These include the cascading impacts triggered by destruction of the Amazon rainforest (which is now imminent) particularly given its critical role in the global hydrological cycle, the rapidly spreading radioactive contamination of Earth, and geoengineering for military purposes (which has been occurring for decades and continues).

Far worse, however, is the path to extinction that looms before us when we consider the impact of all seven of these paths in combination with the vast range of other threats noted below.

These interrelated threats have generated a shocking series of ‘points of no return’ (‘tipping points’) that we have already crossed, the mutually reinforcing set of negative feedback loops that we have already triggered (and which we will continue to trigger) which cannot be reversed in the short-term, as well as the ongoing synergistic impact of the various ‘extinction drivers’ (such as ongoing extinctions because dependent species have lost their resource species) we have set in motion and which cannot be halted irrespective of any remedial action we might take. Hence, taking into account all of the above factors, the prospects of averting human extinction are now remote, at best.

One acknowledgment of the depth of our crisis, which takes into account just two variables and preceded declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic precipitating the elite coup putting us on the path to technotyranny, was the fact that the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was moved to 100 seconds to midnight in January 2020, the closest it has ever been to ‘doomsday’ (and more severe than both the previous year and in 1953 when the Soviet Union first exploded a thermonuclear weapon matching the US capacity and raising the spectre of nuclear war). See ‘It is Now 100 Seconds to Midnight’.

Of course, as implied above, information about the deeper strands of what is taking place and strategies to address these, only have utility in one context. They depend, fundamentally, on how one perceives what is happening and this is shaped by one’s perception of how the world in which we live actually works. If, on the one hand, someone is inclined to perceive the world as it has been traditionally presented via elite agents, then the ‘virus’ is a serious threat to individual lives for the reasons presented by governments and the corporate media and we must respond as directed.

If, on the other hand, someone has a critique of the global elite and the way in which current events are just the latest manoeuver in a centuries-long series of events designed to consolidate elite control at the expense of the rest of us, then it is the deeper agenda behind what is happening that is the focus of attention.

Given that the evidence in support of the latter position is overwhelming, and that the forces arrayed against us are very powerful, humanity faces the greatest challenge to its existence since Homo sapiens first walked the Earth.

So let me identify some of the more crucial backward steps humanity took during 2020 and what we can do about them.

Some Key Lowlights of 2020

1. As briefly reported above, the global elite implemented its long-planned coup to take complete control of human life in order to eliminate or marginalize a substantial proportion of the population while perverting the identity and will of the rest of us to serve elite ends. While there is significant resistance to this coup, strategic resistance to it in any meaningful form is yet to emerge.

Given that most people have fallen victim to the elite propaganda – see ‘The Psychology of the COVID-19 Coup: The Elite, their Victims and those who Resist’ and ‘Why Do Most People Believe Propaganda and False Flag Attacks? – as well as being distracted by sideshows (such as the ‘fight’ over the outcome of the US presidential election: see ‘What to Expect in 2021: Madness, Mayhem, Manipulation and More Tyranny’) and are also not considering the massive ‘collateral damage’ that is taking place under cover of Covid-19, the resistance that is occurring (dismissed, one way or another, by those supporting the elite coup) remains insufficient if humanity is to successfully defend human identity, freedom, dignity and volition and, even more vitally, to avert our own extinction.

As James Corbett noted in a recent video:

‘If you are advocating for lockdowns, you are complicit in tearing families apart. You are complicit in inflicting untold suffering on millions of people around the world. You are complicit in casting the poorest and most vulnerable in our societies into even further grinding poverty. You are complicit in murder.’ Watch What NO ONE is Saying About The Lockdowns.

To highlight just a few of the severe economic impacts, official responses supposedly to Covid-19 have vastly exacerbated poverty and starvation (leading to millions of deaths), destroyed millions of small businesses, dramatically increased unemployment, enabled a monumental wealth transfer from poor to rich (with the wealth of US billionaires increasing by nearly a trillion dollars during the year, and the world’s 2,189 billionaires – obviously excluding the immensely wealthier Rothschilds and Rockefellers – amassing fortunes totaling around $US10.2 trillion) and is leading to the greatest and most rapid rise in homelessness in world history.

See, for example, WFP chief warns of “hunger pandemic” as Global Food Crises Report launched’‘Why Lockdowns Don’t Work and Hurt the Most Vulnerable. Bankruptcies, Poverty, Despair’‘US Unemployed Rising, Evictions, Mortgages Crisis Brewing, Small Business Collapsing: Economic Consequences of a 2nd “Mitigation” Bill’‘Planned Surveillance and Control by Global Technocrats: A Big-Picture Look at the Current Pandemic Beneficiaries’‘Net Worth of US Billionaires Has Soared by $1 Trillion to Total of $4 Trillion Since Pandemic Began’‘Riding the storm: Market turbulence accelerates diverging fortunes’ and ‘Windfall profits and deadly risks: How the biggest retail companies are compensating essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic’.

Key threats posed by the elite coup include the fact that, if it comes to pass, the ‘compulsory’ vaccination along with the digital certificate that will go with it will leave us as nothing more than robotized organisms monitored and controlled by the elite’s agents.

For example, Robert F. Kennedy Jr has explained in ‘Gates’ Globalist Vaccine Agenda: A Win-Win for Pharma and Mandatory Vaccination’:

Vaccines, for Bill Gates, are a strategic philanthropy that feed his many vaccine-related businesses (including Microsoft’s ambition to control a global vaccination ID enterprise) and give him dictatorial control of global health policy.

Gates’ obsession with vaccines seems to be fueled by a conviction to save the world with technology.

But even more importantly, Professor Vandana Shiva has evocatively explained why the world patent granted by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) to Microsoft on 26 March 2020 titled ‘1. WO2020060606 – Cryptocurrency System Using Body Activity Data’, has given Microsoft (that is, Bill Gates) extraordinary power over our lives and is ‘robbing us of our deep humanity’. In essence:

The patent is dramatically changing the meaning of being human…. It is redefining us as ‘mines’ for data – robbing us of our autonomy, our sovereignty, and control over our bodies and minds…. It is erasing our humanity – as sovereign, living beings, spiritual, conscious, intelligent beings, making our decisions and choices with wisdom and ethical values about the impacts of our actions on the natural and social world of which we are a part; and to which we are inextricably related. We are being reduced to being ‘users’ of tasks assigned to us by the extractive digital mega machine. A ‘user’ is a consumer without choice in the digital empire. Human creativity and consciousness disappear in the world imagined in #patent060606.’ See ‘My Earth Journey in defence of Biodiversity, Life and Freedom over 5 decades’.

Separately from this, the adverse physical and psychological health impacts of official responses to Covid-19 have been heavily documented as well, including by the United Nations and World Health Organization, despite their complicity in the coup. For example, there has been a dramatic increase in the violence inflicted within the family home, especially by men and women against children – see Why Violence?’ – and by the more usually acknowledged men against women. See UN chief calls for domestic violence “ceasefire” amid “horrifying global surge”.

In addition, there has been official acknowledgment of the elevated levels and rates of fear (usually labeled ‘stress’ or ‘anxiety’) and the increased levels of loneliness, depression, harmful alcohol and drug use, and self-harm along with suicides – see ‘Mental health and COVID-19’ – although they have been officially underestimated to conceal the true extent of the harm being done which was, of course, planned as part of the strategy to preoccupy the population and weaken resistance to the coup.

In some cases below, I have made reference to how the elite-generated responses to the non-existent virus and fake pandemic have exacerbated existing adverse circumstances and, for example, led to the ‘sitting duck’ murder of indigenous activists trapped in their homes by lockdown restrictions.

2. The global elite, using key elite fora such as the Group of 30, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group and the World Economic Forum, and despite much rhetoric to the contrary, continued to plan, generate and exacerbate the many ongoing wars, deepening exploitation within the global economy, climate and environmental destruction, and the killing and exploitation of fellow human beings in a multitude of contexts, in pursuit of greater elite profit, power and privilege. See, for example, ‘Who Is Really in Control of US Foreign Policy?’Giants: The Global Power Elite and ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

3. International organizations (such as the United Nations, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund) and national governments and corporations used military forces, legal systems, police forces and prison systems – see ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’ – around the world to serve the global elite by defending its interests against the bulk of the human population, including those individuals and organizations courageous enough to challenge elite profit, power and privilege who are being killed in record numbers. (See more in point 39 below).

4. $US1.92 trillion was officially spent worldwide on military weapons to kill fellow human beings and other lifeforms, and to destroy the biosphere. This is the highest official (because the figures are taken from ‘open sources’) annual military expenditure ever recorded and the third consecutive year in which an increase occurred. Spending $732 billion, the United States accounted for more than one-third of global military expenditure. See ‘SIPRI Yearbook 2020: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security; Summary’.

In addition to direct military spending, national governments spent billions more on such items as interest on national debt accrued through military expenditure, and medical, hospital, housing and other costs associated with rehabilitation of injured, and support of incapacitated, veterans.

Apart from military spending, weapons transfers worldwide remained high, key weapons control agreements such as that to limit strategic nuclear weapons (‘New START’) were rapidly approaching expiry with attempts to renew them stalled by the US, and there were many other regional and national military conflicts including new ones such as those in Nagorno-Karabakh and Ethiopia. See ‘Fate Of Armenian-Azerbaijani War Is Being Decided In Battle Of Shusha’ and ‘Alarm as Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict becomes internationalised’.

In relation to the military spending of the United States, as noted previously, so out-of-control is this spending that the US government has now spent at least $US21trillion on its military in the past 20 years for which it cannot even account! That’s right, $US1trillion each year above the official US national budget for killing is ‘lost’. See Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported‘Has Our Government Spent $21 Trillion Of Our Money Without Telling Us?’ and ‘The Pentagon Can’t Account for $21 Trillion (That’s Not a Typo)’.

There has been no progress reported in accounting for this ‘lost’ expenditure during the past year.

5. Under the direction of the global elite (as explained above), the United States government and its NATO allies continued their perpetual war across the planet wreaking devastation on many countries and regions, particularly in the Middle East and Africa, at staggering cost in terms of civilian and military lives lost, refugees displaced, national heritage destroyed, financial expenditure and environmental damage. See, for example, The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, From Columbus to the Islamic StateTowards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear WarDirty Wars: The World is a BattlefieldCosts of War and ‘Understanding NATO, Ending War’.

As a result, whether in the US-sponsored and supplied Saudi Arabian war against Yemen where the UNHCR reports ‘Yemen is facing a humanitarian catastrophe…. Civilians bear the brunt of the crisis, with 22.2 million Yemenis now in need of humanitarian assistance’ – see ‘The world cannot afford to let Yemen slip into the abyss’ – the result of the US use of depleted uranium on top of its other extraordinary military destruction of Iraq over the past 30 years – see ‘Depleted Uranium and Radioactive Contamination in Iraq: An Overview’ – the complete dismemberment of Libya as a result of NATO’s bombing of that country and the subsequent assassination of its leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 – see ‘Endless War and Chaos in Libya’ – the systematic killing of children by CIA-trained death squads in Afghanistan as just one feature of the US war on that country – see ‘The CIA’s Afghan Death Squads: A U.S.-Backed Militia That Kills Children May Be America’s Exit Strategy From Its Longest War’ – or the ongoing US occupation of Syrian territory and control of its resources – see ‘Endless US Rape, Occupation and Plunder of Syria’ – the United States and its NATO allies have continued their efforts to destroy entire countries at staggering cost to their populations and environments, not because these countries posed a threat to security outside their borders but in order to maintain geopolitical control and to facilitate the theft of their resources (including oil) at great profit to the global elite. See, for example, ‘Hillary Emails Reveal NATO Killed Gaddafi to Stop Libyan Creation of Gold-Backed Currency’.

Moreover, of course, the perpetually-profitable perpetual war, by definition, has no end. But the elite has no problem frightening most people into supporting its perpetual wars using manufactured excuses that are dutifully promulgated by its corporate media. And, with a gullibly terrified human population disinclined to question authority, this isn’t a problem. See ‘The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth’. The same unconvincing formula invariably works each time. For a fuller and insightful explanation of this point, see Edward Curtin’s article ‘The war hoax redux’.

Additional costs associated with war and military spending include the simple fact that by deliberately exaggerating the risk posed by the threat of war, additional expenditure is endlessly ‘justified’ to an unsuspecting and gullible public – see ‘Scary “R” Us: The Exaggerated Threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Part 7 of “Elephants in the room” series’ – they impose a staggering cost on the global environment – see The Ecological Impact of Militarism’ – and they destroy human rights and freedoms including, obviously, the right to life of those individuals killed.

Additional dangers associated with perpetual war by the US include the risk of accidental nuclear war, nuclear war triggered by a cyber attack – see Nuclear weapons agency breached amid massive cyber onslaught’ – and ‘simply’ that endless confrontation with, and provocation of, other major powers Russia and China will, one day, explode into a high-tech ‘world’ war. See Trump’s Pernicious Military Legacy: From the Forever Wars to the Cataclysmic Wars’.

6. Not content with the devastating impact of the military violence it is inflicting already, during 2020 the global elite continued to plan and develop ways to cause more destruction in future. This included ongoing work by US military agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), accelerated by initiatives in relation to the elite coup, to advance mind-controlled weapons – see ‘The Government Is Serious About Creating Mind-Controlled Weapons’ – autonomous systems and artificial intelligence technologies that will undermine nuclear deterrence and increase the likelihood of nuclear escalation – see ‘A Stable Nuclear Future? The Impact of Autonomous Systems and Artificial Intelligence’ – and further development by the United States to create its Space Force, a sixth branch of the US military forces, just three manifestations of this. See ‘The Big Push for Nukes in Space’. In addition, DARPA continues to sponsor research on ‘extinction gene drive’ technology for use against an ‘enemy’ race as explained in item 35 below.

In its turn, Russian military advances include development and deployment of a hypersonic weapon that travels at Mach 27 and which makes the US missile defense installations in Europe ‘obsolete’. See Avangard changes everything: What Russia’s hypersonic warhead deployment means for the global arms race.

And, according to US sources, China now has the largest navy in the world while expanding its arsenal of ground-based conventional ballistic and cruise missiles and planning to double its nuclear arsenal. See Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2020 and Pentagon Releases Annual China Military Power Report’.

But other initiatives receiving renewed attention – ‘hypervelocity guns, particle beams and laser weapons onboard orbiting battle platforms with onboard nuclear reactors or “super” plutonium systems providing the power for the weapons’ – also enhance the threat that ‘Modern society would go dark’ in the words of Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell. Why? Because ‘any war in space would be the one and only. By destroying satellites in space massive amounts of space debris would be created that would cause a cascading effect and even the billion-dollar International Space Station would likely be broken into tiny bits. So much space junk would be created… that we’d never be able to get a rocket off the planet again because of the minefield of debris orbiting the Earth at 15,000 mph’. See ‘Trump Signs Measure Enabling Establishment of a U.S. Space Force’.

Of course, technological ‘advances’ in weaponry reflect retrograde steps in policy with the US Air Force Global Strike Command (AFGSC) – which includes 20 B-2 stealth bombers, 76 B-52 bombers and 450 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles together capable of delivering thousands of nuclear warheads – along with the U.S. Navy’s submarine-launched Trident ballistic missiles, now ‘capable of extinguishing essentially all life on Earth within a matter of hours.’ See ‘The Air Force’s Global Strike Command Is Preparing For A Delivery Of New Nuclear Weapons’.

7. Following the US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in 2002 and after withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the ‘Iran nuclear deal’) and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (which limited the deployment of intermediate range nuclear weapons) in 2018, the US government further and unilaterally signaled its intention to dismantle the little that remained of attempts during the Cold War and since that time to contain the threat of nuclear war by further acting in violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 – see ‘Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies’ and ‘US Weaponizing Space in Bid to Launch Arms Race’ – and demonstrating its disinterest in extending New START: the sole remaining restraint on U.S.-Russian nuclear arsenals that caps deployed offensive strategic nuclear weapons to no more than 1,550 each. See ‘US, Russia Trade Blame for Failed New START Negotiations’. There is some prospect that the incoming US president will seek to renew the treaty which expires on 5 February 2021.

If you are in any doubt regarding the devastating consequences of nuclear war, you will find Professor Steven Starr’s thoughts – see ‘Nuclear Darkness, Global Climate Change and Nuclear Famine: The Deadly Consequences of Nuclear War’ – illuminating. In addition, the description by Lynn Eden in ‘City on Fire’ (based on her book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation) is compelling.

8. Another substantial proportion of global private financial wealth – conservatively estimated by the Tax Justice Network in 2010 to already total between $US21 and $US32 trillion – has been invested virtually tax-free through the world’s still-expanding black hole of more than 80 ‘offshore’ tax havens (such as the City of London Corporation, Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, Nauru, St. Kitts, Antigua, Tortola, Switzerland, the Channel Islands, Monaco, Cyprus, Gibraltar and Liechtenstein).

Tax havens, or ‘secrecy jurisdictions’, are locations around the world where wealthy individuals, criminals and terrorists, as well as governments and government agencies (such as the CIA), banks, corporations, hedge funds, international organizations (such as the Vatican) and crime syndicates (such as the Mafia), can stash their money so that they can avoid laws, regulation and oversight and, very often, evade tax. See ‘Elite Banking at Your Expense: How Secretive Tax Havens are Used to Steal Your Money’.

‘Countries are losing over $427 billion in tax each year to international corporate tax abuse and private tax evasion.’ $245 billion is lost through corporate tax abuse and $182 billion is lost as wealthy individuals evade tax. While wealthier countries lost more tax it was only equal to 8% of their annual health budgets; for lower income countries the losses were equal to more than half their health budgets. See $427bn lost to tax havens every year: landmark study reveals countries’ losses and worst offenders.

As the latest report of the Tax Justice Network ‘The State of Tax Justice 2020’ concluded: ‘A global tax system that loses over $427 billion a year isn’t a broken system, it’s a system programmed to fail.’

Controlled by the global elite, Wall Street and other major banks manage this monstrous diversion of wealth under Government protection. (This means that any effort to contain this diversion by introducing robustly-enforced tax laws, including wealth and excess taxes, are thwarted.) ‘Their business is fraud and grand theft.’ But tax havens offer more than tax avoidance. ‘Almost anything goes on.’ It includes ‘bribery, illegal gambling, money laundering, human and sex trafficking, arms dealing, toxic waste dumping, conflict diamonds and endangered species trafficking, bootlegged software, and endless other lawless practices.’ See ‘Trillions Stashed in Offshore Tax Havens’.

Moreover, the losses noted above are just financial wealth. Additionally, a large share of the real estate, yachts, racehorses, gold bricks and many other assets that count as non-financial wealth are also owned via offshore structures that make it impossible to identify their owners. See Tax Justice Network.

9. The world’s major corporations continued to inflict enormous ongoing violence (in a myriad of ways) in their pursuit of endless profit at the expense of living beings (human and otherwise) and Earth’s biosphere by producing and marketing a wide range of life-destroying products ranging from nuclear weapons and nuclear power to fossil fuels, junk food, pharmaceutical drugs (including health-destroying and sometimes life-destroying vaccinations: see, for example, ‘Vaxxed-Unvaxxed – The Science’), synthetic poisons and genetically mutilated organisms (GMOs).

These corporations include the following: weapons manufacturers, major banks and their ‘industry groups’ like the International Monetary Conference, asset management firms, investment companies, financial services companies, fossil fuel (coal, oil and gas) corporations, technology corporations, media corporations, major marketing and public relations corporations, agrochemical (pesticides, seeds, fertilizers) giants, pharmaceutical corporations (with their handmaidens in the medical and psychiatric industries: see ‘Defeating the Violence in Our Food and Medicine’ and ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’), biotechnology (genetic mutilation) corporations, mining corporations, nuclear power corporations, food multinationals and water corporations. You can see a list of the major corporations in this article: ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

10. More than two billion people continued to live under military occupation (such as the people of Kashmir, Kurdistan, Palestine, Tibet, West Papua and Western Sahara), dictatorship (such as the people of Cambodia, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, North Korea and Saudi Arabia) or threat of genocidal assault (such as the Rohingya of Myanmar) invariably with the global elite sponsoring the oppressive local elite that exercises power. For details of just one of a great many examples, see ‘500 Years is Long Enough! Human Depravity in the Congo’.

11. 36,000,000 human beings (mainly in Africa, Asia and Central/South America) were starved to death in 2020. That is, more than one person each second died because they did not have enough eat. See ‘How Many People Die from Hunger Each Year’.

Are we serious about ending these totally unnecessary deaths? Not even remotely, as thoughtfully explained by Professor George Kent in his report as deputy editor of World Nutrition. See ‘Are We Serious About Ending Hunger?’

As Professor Kent notes: currently, around the world, ‘around 800 million people suffer from hunger’ and that ‘global efforts to end hunger have not been serious’: There has been ‘no substantial commitment of resources, no management group to control the process, no realistic timeline, and no means for mid-course corrections on the way to the goal. There [have been] no contracts with agencies that would work toward achievement of the goal…. hoping for the end of hunger won’t work. Hope is not a strategy.’ Moreover, ‘The UN system offers little more than vague aspirations.’

‘Over the decades, the stated global goal of ending hunger was not achieved, repeatedly. Instead of strengthening the effort, the response has been to reduce the aspirations. That is a clear indicator of the lack of seriousness.’

By one estimate: ‘World hunger can be eliminated with an additional $265 billion per year.’ See ‘How Many People Die from Hunger Each Year’. That is, redirecting 13.8% of official current military spending would end world hunger and starvation on Earth.

But complicated by official responses to Covid-19 (that is, the elite coup), earlier in the year World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director David Beasley warned of one outcome:

If we don’t prepare and act now to secure access, to avoid funding shortfalls and disruptions to trade, we could be facing multiple famines of biblical proportions within a short few months… our analysis shows that 300,000 people could starve to death every single day over a three-month period. See WFP chief warns of “hunger pandemic” as Global Food Crises Report launched’.

Beyond this, food availability for many vulnerable people was exacerbated by locust infestations in parts of Africa, the Middle East and South Asia as yet another manifestation of ongoing climate and environmental degradation. See ‘360 Billion Locusts And Growing – A Plague Of “Biblical Proportions” Is Destroying Crops Across The Middle East And Africa’.

While this crisis was partly averted, it was done at great cost to the environment: at least 834,000 litres of pesticide and 12,675kg of bio-pesticide were procured and administered through the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) alone. See ‘Desert locust crisis’.

Of course, spraying pesticides on ‘more than 1.3 million hectares of locust infestations… across ten countries this year’ didn’t solve the problem with the threat to ‘agricultural livelihoods and the food security of millions of people’ simply re-emerging late in the year. See Desert Locust “re-invasion” threatens millions across Horn of Africa.

This was inevitable as humans endlessly try to ‘patch up’ symptoms of damage to the environment and climate that has been inflicted over decades and now requires integrated solutions that violate the endless demand for corporate profit.

12. 18,250,000 children were killed by adults in wars, by starving them to death, by denying them clean drinking water, as a result of gun deaths, and in a large variety of other ways.

13. 8,000,000 children were trafficked into sexual slavery; executed in sacrificial killings after being kidnapped; bred to be sold as a ‘cash crop’ for sexual violation, to produce child pornography (‘kiddie porn’) and ‘snuff’ movies (in which children are killed during the filming); ritually tortured and murdered as well as raped by dogs trained for the purpose. See ‘Humanity’s “Dirty Little Secret”: Starving, Enslaving, Raping, Torturing and Killing our Children’.

14. Hundreds of thousands of individuals were kidnapped or tricked into slavery, which now denies 46,000,000 human beings (more than at any time in human history) the right to live the life of their choice, condemning many individuals – especially women and children – to lives of sexual slavery (perhaps in a forced ‘marriage’), forced labor or as child soldiers. Needless to say, the global elite continues to expand this highly profitable business while its compliant governments do no more than mouth an occasional objection to the practice while doing nothing effective to actually end it, as is patently evident following disclosures about the involvement of high-profile public figures and major industries in the slave trade.

See The Global Slavery Index’. For one recent account of the life of a modern slave, see ‘My Family’s Slave’. For an account of the involvement of public figures in sex slavery, see ‘Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein: what you need to know’ and the other articles listed at the end of this one. And for an account of the fashion industry’s complicity in the slave trade (which ranks second after computers and mobile phones for industry involvement), see ‘Fashion identified as one of five key industries implicated in modern slavery’.

15. Well over 100,000 people (particularly Falun Gong practitioners) in China, where an extensive state-controlled program is conducted, were subjected to forced organ removal for the trade in human organs. Watch ‘Hard to Believe’ and Fighting China’s Forced Organ Harvesting and see Bloody Harvest and The Slaughter.

16. 8,700,000 people were displaced by war, persecution or famine. There are now 79,500,000 people – 1% of the world population – who have been forcibly displaced worldwide and remain precariously unsettled, usually in adverse circumstances. 40% of those who are displaced are children, and more than 4,000,000 displaced people are stateless. 17 people in the world are forcibly displaced every minute. Notably, official responses to the supposed ‘pandemic’ in 2020 seriously exacerbated the adverse circumstances of displaced people further reducing their capacity to meet basic needs. See ‘Figures at a Glance’ and ‘UNHCR releases supplementary COVID-19 appeal to meet exceptional refugee needs in 2021’.

17. Millions of people were made homeless in their own country as a result of war, persecution, ‘natural’ disasters (many of which, including hurricanes/cyclones and wildfires, were actually generated by dysfunctional human behavior rather than nature), internal conflict, poverty or as a result of elite-driven national economic policies. The last time a global survey was attempted – by the United Nations back in 2005 – an estimated 100 million people were homeless worldwide. In addition, as many as 1.6 billion people lack adequate housing (living in slums, for example). See ‘Global Homelessness Statistics’.

18. Highlighting the unheralded biodiversity crisis on Earth, as a result of habitat destruction and degradation as well as a multitude of other threats, 73,000 species of life (plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects, reptiles and microbes) on Earth were driven to extinction with the worldwide loss of many of these species now at catastrophic levels. Tragically, many additional species are now trapped in a feedback loop which will inevitably precipitate their extinction as well because of the way in which ‘co-extinctions’, ‘localized extinctions’ and ‘extinction cascades’ work once initiated and as has already occurred in almost all ecosystem contexts. See the (so far) six-part series ‘Our Vanishing World’. Have you seen a flock of birds of any size recently? A butterfly?

19. Separately from species extinctions, Earth continued to experience ‘a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization. We describe this as a “biological annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.’ Moreover, local population extinctions ‘are orders of magnitude more frequent than species extinctions. Population extinctions, however, are a prelude to species extinctions, so Earth’s sixth mass extinction episode has proceeded further than most assume.’ See ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines’ and ‘Our Vanishing World: Wildlife’.

20. Wildlife trafficking, worth up to $20 billion in 2020, is pushing many endangered species to the brink of extinction. Illegal wildlife products include jewelry, traditional medicine, clothing, furniture, and souvenirs, as well as some exotic pets, most of which are sold to unaware/unconcerned consumers in the West although China is heavily implicated too. For just one example: every 15 minutes an elephant is killed for its tusks. See Stop Wildlife Trafficking.

21. 6.5 million hectares of pristine forest were cut or burnt down for purposes such as the following: acquiring timbers used in construction, clearing land to establish cattle farms so that many people can eat cheap hamburgers, clearing land to establish palm oil plantations so that many people can eat processed (including junk) foods based on this oil, clearing land to establish palm oil and soybean plantations so that some people can delude themselves that they are using a ‘green biofuel’ in their car (when, in fact, these fuels generate a far greater carbon footprint than fossil fuels), mining (much of it illegal) for a variety of minerals (such as gold, silver, copper, coltan, cassiterite and diamonds), logging to produce woodchips so that some people can buy cheap paper (including cheap toilet paper), oil drilling, dam construction, tourism and clothing. Separately from this, the climate catastrophe is destroying forests, as are fires.

See ‘Our Vanishing World: Rainforests’‘Estimating the global conservation status of more than 15,000 Amazonian tree species’‘Tropical forests’ lost decade: the 2010s’‘How much rainforest is being destroyed?’Global Forest Watch and New data show world lost a Switzerland-size area of primary rainforest in 2019.

One outcome of this destruction is that 40,000 tropical tree species are now threatened with extinction. In addition, rainforest destruction is also the key driver of species extinctions globally with one million species of life on Earth threatened with extinction, as reported in the recent ‘Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’.

Another outcome is that ‘the precious Amazon is teetering on the edge of functional destruction and, with it, so are we’. How long do we have? ‘The tipping point is here, it is now.’ Professor Thomas E. Lovejoy and his fellow researcher Carlos Nobre elaborate this point: ‘Bluntly put, the Amazon not only cannot withstand further deforestation but also now requires rebuilding as the underpinning base of the hydrological cycle if the Amazon is to continue to serve as a flywheel of continental climate for the planet and an essential part of the global carbon cycle.’ See ‘Amazon Tipping Point: Last Chance for Action’.

22. Vast quantities of soil were washed away as we destroyed the rainforests, and enormous quantities of both inorganic constituents (such as heavy metals like cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, nickel and zinc) and organic pollutants (particularly synthetic chemicals in the form of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides) were dumped into the soil as well, thus reducing its nutrients and killing the microbes and earthworms within it. We also contaminated enormous quantities of soil with radioactive waste. See Soil-net‘Glyphosate effects on soil rhizosphere-associated bacterial communities’ and ‘Disposing of Nuclear Waste is a Challenge for Humanity’.

To briefly elaborate the evidence in relation to earthworms: Given ‘recent reports of critical declines of microbes, plants, insects and other invertebrates, birds and other vertebrates, the situation pertaining to neglected earthworms’ was evaluated in an extensive investigation recently undertaken by Robert J. Blakemore. His research demonstrated an 83.3 percent decline in earthworms in agrichemical farms – that is, those that use pesticides, herbicides and synthetic fertilizers – compared with farms utilizing organic methods. Why? Because ‘it is impossible to replace or artificially engineer the myriad beneficial processes and services freely provided by earthworms’ which includes extensive burrows in pastures enriched with soil organic matter that allow ingress of air & water and provide living space for other soil organisms. Moreover, given that ecological services overall have been given a median value of US$135 trillion per year, which is almost double the global economic GDP of around $75 trillion – see ‘Changes in the global value of ecosystem services’ and ‘Valuing nature and the hidden costs of biodiversity loss’ – Blakemore reaches an obvious conclusion: ‘Persistence with failing chemical agriculture makes neither ecological nor economic sense.’ See ‘Critical Decline of Earthworms from Organic Origins under Intensive, Humic SOM-Depleting Agriculture’.

Given that this multifaceted destruction of the soil fundamentally threatens the global grain supply, when the ability to grow, store and distribute grains at scale is a defining element of civilization, as Professor Guy McPherson eloquently explains it: ‘A significant decline in grain harvest will surely drive this version of civilization to the abyss and beyond.’ See ‘Seven Distinct Paths to Loss of Habitat for Humans’.

23. When nuclear power plants were first being constructed, they were envisaged to have a maximum lifespan of 40 years because the radioactive emissions made the metal parts of the plant brittle causing safety problems. However, Professor Karl Grossman explains, with the passage of time the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission ‘has extended the operating licenses of nuclear power plants from 40 years to 60 years and then 80 years, and is now considering 100 years’. Crazy? As Robert Alvarez notes: It is ‘an act of desperation in response to the collapse of the nuclear program in this country and the rest of the world’. See ‘Inviting Nuclear Disaster’.

Despite the lower cost, far greater safety and lack of radioactive waste products from renewable energy, nuclear power corporations continue their efforts to resist closure of their industry, in various ways. These range from developing ‘floating mini-nukes’, towed to and anchored off coastlines ‘for up to 24 years’ to power developing nations – see ‘Floating “mini-nukes” could power countries by 2025, says startup’ – using nuclear power as the energy source to support ‘a sustained lunar presence and allow Mars to be more easily explored’ but, of course, with resource mining planned and production of nuclear weapons a possibility – see ‘U.S. Plans to Build a Nuclear Plant on the Moon Is a Major Challenge to Other Great Powers’ – and using nuclear power to travel to Mars quickly (partly to minimize astronaut exposure to extraordinary cosmic radiation) and then using it for various purposes once there but, essentially, to ‘allow humans to live for long periods in harsh space environments’. See ‘The Thermal Nuclear Engine That Could Get Us to Mars in Just 3 Months’ and ‘US Eyes Building Nuclear Power Plants for Moon and Mars’.

Of course, the hazards (and insanity) of doing this are monumental, as Professor Grossman has documented. See ‘The Big Push for Nukes in Space’ and The Case Against Nuclear Power: The U.S. Space Force and the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear war in space. And there is more information on this and related subjects on the website of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.

Moreover, apart from their obvious problems as mentioned above and illustrated in the next item below as well, nuclear power plants are vulnerable to cyber attack too. See ‘6 Things to Know about the 2020 Cyberattack and Nuclear Power Plants’.

24. Despite an extensive and ongoing coverup by the Japanese government and nuclear corporations, as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), vast amounts of radioactive waste were dumped into the biosphere from the TEPCO nuclear power plant at Fukushima in Japan including by discharge into the Pacific Ocean. This is killing an incalculable number of fish and other marine organisms and indefinitely contaminating expanding areas of that ocean. See ‘Fukushima: A Nuclear War without a War: The Unspoken Crisis of Worldwide Nuclear Radiation’‘2019 Annual Report – Fukushima 8th Anniversary’‘Eight years after triple nuclear meltdown, Fukushima No. 1’s water woes show no signs of ebbing’ and ‘Fukushima’s Three Nuclear Meltdowns Are “Under Control” – That’s a Lie’.

But the challenges to be overcome in safely handling and, ultimately, safely storing the radiation hazards (such as the three melted nuclear reactors and the spent fuel rods) and the radioactive waste from the Fukushima disaster are monumental, as touched on in this article outlining the 40-year plan that the Japanese government hopes will delude us into believing will deal with the many components of this perpetual radioactive nightmare. See Japan revises Fukushima cleanup plan, delays key steps.

In addition, one critical legacy of the US military’s 67 secretive and lethal nuclear weapons tests on the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958 is the ‘eternally’ radioactive garbage left behind and now leaking into the Pacific Ocean. See ‘The Pentagon’s Disastrous Radioactive Waste Dump in the Drowning Marshall Islands is Leaking into the Pacific Ocean’.

Is other nuclear waste safely stored? Of course not! See, for example, ‘NRC admits San Onofre Holtec nuclear waste canisters are all damaged’‘USA’s Hanford nuclear site could suffer the same fate as Russia’s Mayak – or worse’ and, for a more comprehensive report, ‘The World Nuclear Waste Report 2019: Focus Europe’.

Of course, the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe in 1986 continues to inflict extensive damage on the biosphere which you can learn more about from the research by Professor Kate Brown, author of Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future – see ‘Chernobyl Radiation Cover-Ups & Deadly Truth’‘UN and Western countries covered up the facts on the huge health toll of Chernobyl radiation’ and ‘Unreported Deaths, Child Cancer & Radioactive Meat: The Untold Story of Chernobyl’ – as well as the investigatory work of Alison Katz of Independent WHO: ‘Chernobyl Health Cover-Up, Lies by UN/WHO Exposed’.

In addition, there are up to 70 ‘still functional’ nuclear weapons as well as nine nuclear reactors lying on the ocean floor as a result of accidents involving nuclear warships and submarines. These are leaking an unknown amount of radiation into the oceans. See ‘Naval Nuclear Accidents: The Secret Story’‘A Nuclear Needle in a Haystack: The Cold War’s Missing Atom Bombs’ and, for one specific example (the former Soviet submarine Komsomolets), see ‘Soviet nuclear submarine emitting radiation “100,000 times normal level” into sea, scientists find’.

But not content with the existing radioactive threats to life, in 2020 the US approved the use of radioactive materials in roadbuilding! See Phosphogypsum Use in Roadbuilding Previously Prohibited Due to Risks of Cancer, Genetic Damage.

25. Despite largely successful efforts by the elite-controlled IPCC to delude people into believing that the global mean temperature has increased by only 1°C, in fact, since the pre-industrial era (prior to 1750) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have already caused the global temperature to rise by more than 2°C above this baseline (in February 2020). This occurred despite the Paris climate agreement in 2015 when politicians pledged to hold the global temperature rise to well below 2°C above the pre-industrial level and pledged to try to limit the temperature rise to 1.5°C above this level. See ‘2°C crossed’.

Among a lengthy list of adverse outcomes, this has caused the melting of Arctic permafrost and undersea methane ice clathrates resulting in an incalculable quantity of methane (CH₄) being uncontrollably released into the atmosphere, including during 2020, with the quantity being released getting ever closer to ‘exploding’. According to one study, ‘Global warming triggered by the massive release of carbon dioxide may be catastrophic, but the release of methane from hydrate may be apocalyptic.’ See ‘Methane Hydrate: Killer cause of Earth’s greatest mass extinction’ and also ‘Anomalies of methane in the atmosphere over the East Siberian shelf: Is there any sign of methane leakage from shallow shelf hydrates?’‘7,000 underground gas bubbles poised to “explode” in Arctic’‘Release of Arctic Methane “May Be Apocalyptic,” Study Warns’ and ‘Understanding the Permafrost-Hydrate System and Associated Methane Releases in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf’.

Highlighting some other manifestations in 2020 of this accelerating climate catastrophe, Dr Jeff Masters and Dana Nuccitelli noted that it was the wildest Atlantic hurricane season on record (doubling the average), an ‘apocalyptic wildfire season’ (that ran all year), that the most expensive disaster was a $US32billion flood in China, and that 2020 is likely to be the hottest year in human history. See ‘The top 10 weather and climate events of a record-setting year’.

Complicating efforts to tackle this catastrophe are factors not normally considered impacting the climate, such as the jetwash from aircraft. According to Wesley Schouw and Professor Gunter Pauli, the climate catastrophe ‘is also driven by shifts in the patterns of global atmospheric circulation which are influenced by persistent, large-scale vortices caused by the wake turbulence left by commercial air traffic. Because this traffic is highly concentrated along the most frequently traveled routes, the vortices aircraft create have transformed into semi-permanent atmospheric circulation which have widespread effects on how the atmosphere traps and releases heat. It is also possible that these changes alter the loss of water from the atmosphere. This would endanger all life on earth, not just the human population.’ See ‘Jetwash-induced vortices and climate change’.

Anyway, the combined impact of all drivers of the climate catastrophe have led to a situation in which humans in particular locations are already being increasingly forced to contend with heat and humidity beyond human tolerance. This is precipitating increasing levels of heat-induced stress, organ failure and therefore deaths, contrary to models indicating that such impacts lie decades in the future. See The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance.

Tragically, however, as noted by Dr Andrew Glikson, with climate projections now ‘disturbingly consistent’ in indicating a ‘shift in state of the climate toward +4 degrees and even +6 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels’, climate scientists are caught in a quandary: ‘In private conversations, many scientists express far greater concern at the trend of global warming than they do in public. However, faced with social and psychological barriers, as well as threats of losing positions and jobs, in business, public service and academia, a majority keeps silent.’ This is especially tragic, given that ‘The pace of current global warming exceeds those of the last 2.6 million years by an order of magnitude, with calamitous consequences for biological systems.’ See An Orwellian climate while Rome burns’.

And noting that ‘We currently occupy the warmest Earth with Homo sapiens present beyond the much-vaunted 2°C “guardrail” above the 1750 baseline’, Professor Guy McPherson reports that ‘There is no known way to stabilize or reduce the global-average temperature of Earth.’ He goes on to describe ‘a few means by which Earth could lose all habitat for Homo sapiens, a process that is already under way’. And concludes that ‘Human extinction likely was triggered when Earth exceeded 2°C above the 1750 baseline.’ For the details, see ‘Near-Term Loss of Habitat for Homo sapiens’.

Moreover, given ill-informed elite responses to the fake pandemic, the extinction of all life on Earth (not just human life) may have already been precipitated: ‘The rapidity of change associated with loss of aerosol masking [due to the industrial shutdown] precludes retention of habitat for human animals anywhere on Earth. In addition, the catastrophic meltdown of the world’s nuclear power facilities poses an additional threat to all life on Earth.’ See ‘The Means by Which COVID-19 Could Cause Extinction of All Life on Earth’.

Of course, as Professor McPherson concedes, he may be wrong. It’s just that the evidence offered by an increasing number of scientists on different aspects of the crisis now indicates that it will be many scientists who will need to be wrong for near-term extinction not to occur. Watch Edge of Extinction: Maybe I’m Wrong.

26. Human use of fossil fuels to power aircraft, shipping and vehicles as well as for industrial production and to generate electricity (among other purposes) released 34 billion metric tons (34 gigatons) of carbon dioxide into Earth’s biosphere, a 7% decrease on 2019 due to the elite shutdown of the global economy. The biggest reductions occurred in the USA and Europe with China’s monstrous CO₂ emissions only marginally less than 2019. See Global Carbon Project’.

Of course carbon dioxide was also released in response to certain ‘land-use changes’, such as rainforest destruction which led to 16 billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions, and human-caused tragedies such as extensive wildfires during the year. Taking into account CO₂ removals, primarily from vegetation regrowth due to abandonment of agricultural lands, total CO₂ emissions from human activities (from fossil CO₂ and land-use change) were about 40 billion tonnes in 2020, compared to 43 billion tonnes in 2019. Hence, the expected growth rate in atmospheric CO₂ concentration in 2020 (2.5 ppm) is near the 2019 growth rate, despite slightly lower anthropogenic emissions due to elite-driven policies slowing the global economy.

According to the observatory at Mauna Loa, the monthly average atmospheric CO₂ concentration had reached 413ppm by year’s end. See ‘Monthly Average Mauna Loa CO₂.

So while the land and ocean sinks absorbed 54% of CO₂ emissions from the atmosphere in 2020, exacerbating ocean acidification among other problems, atmospheric CO₂ concentrations in 2020 are now 50% above the pre-industrial (1750) level of 275ppm.

As one measure of their contempt for the utterly inadequate goals of the Paris climate agreement in 2015, and with government approval, ‘437 of the 935 companies featured in the [Global Coal Exit List] are planning either new coal plants, new coal mines or new coal transport infrastructure’. Since 2015, ‘the world’s installed coal-fired capacity has increased by 137 GW, an amount equal to the operating coal plant fleets of Germany, Russia and Japan combined. And over 500 GW of new coal-fired capacity is still in the pipeline’ with more than half of that in China. See ‘NGOs Release the 2020 Global Coal Exit List: 935 Companies that Banks, Investors and Insurers Need to avoid’.

27. 72 billion land animals (mainly chickens, ducks, pigs, rabbits, geese, turkeys, sheep, goats and beef cattle) were killed for food. In addition, between 37 and 120 billion fish were killed on commercial farms with another 2.7 trillion fish caught and killed in the wild. See ‘How Many Animals Are Killed for Food Every Day?’

In addition, according to Humane Society International, about 100 million animals (particularly mink, foxes, raccoon dogs and rabbits) were bred and slaughtered in fur farms geared to supplying the fashion industry. In addition to farming, millions of wild animals were trapped and killed for fur, as were hundreds of thousands of seals. See ‘How Many Animals Do Humans Kill Each Year?’

Apart from that, more than 100 million animals were killed for laboratory purposes in the United States alone and there were other animal deaths in shelters, zoos and in blood sports. See ‘How Many Animals Are Killed Each Year?’

Obviously, the primary ‘blood sport’ is hunting. In the United States, over 100 million animals are reported killed by hunters each year. See ‘Facts – Wildlife’. ‘This figure does not include millions of animals killed illegally by poachers, animals who are injured, escape, and die later, or orphaned animals who die after their mothers are killed.’ See ‘How Many Animals Do Humans Kill Each Year?’ But, worldwide, killing of animals and birds hunted for the purpose exacts a staggering toll on wildlife. For another example, see ‘Our Vanishing World: Birds’.

But there are many other ‘blood sports’, such as cockfighting and bullfighting, often involving gambling, each of which exacts a shocking death and injury toll on the unfortunate birds and animals forced to ‘fight’.

While practiced in many countries, in the Philippines the practice is 6,000 years old and legal, with cockfighting having the status of a national sport, generating billions of dollars annually and killing 30 million roosters each year. See ‘Cockfighting in the Philippines: The billion dollar industry and national obsession’.

In relation to another ancient practice – bullfighting – ‘thousands of bulls are barbarically slaughtered in bullrings around the world’ each year. As one would expect, centuries of the practice have enabled ‘bullfighters’ to learn countless ways to rig the fight in their favor and this is done shamelessly. See ‘Bullfighting’. Particularly popular in Spain and Mexico, bullfighting is still practiced in many countries despite activist efforts inducing a declining popularity in some places.

28. Farming of animals for human consumption released 7.1 gigatons of CO₂-equivalent into Earth’s atmosphere; this represented 14.5% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. About 44% of livestock emissions were in the form of methane (which was 44% of anthropogenic CH₄ emissions), 29% as Nitrous Oxide (which was 53% of anthropogenic N₂O emissions) and 27% as Carbon Dioxide (which was 5% of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions). See ‘GHG Emissions by Livestock’.

29. Human use of fossil fuels and farming of crops and animals released more than 3.2 million metric tons of (CO₂ equivalent) nitrous oxide (N₂O) into Earth’s atmosphere. See ‘Nitrous oxide emissions’. Each year, more than 100 million tonnes of nitrogen is spread on crops in the form of synthetic fertilizer. See ‘Fertilizers by Nutrient’. Along with an equivalent amount of livestock manure, this releases a colossal amount of N₂O into the atmosphere, accounting for almost 70% of N₂O emissions. See A comprehensive quantification of global nitrous oxide sources and sinks.

While N₂O is ‘only’ the third most important greenhouse gas after CO₂ (which lasts up to thousands of years in the atmosphere) and CH₄, N₂O has 300 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and stays in the atmosphere for an average 116 years. Atmospheric concentrations of N₂O have now exceeded 331 parts per billion, 22% above the level in 1750, before the industrial era began. See ‘United in Science 2020: A multi-organization high-level compilation of the latest climate science information’ and ‘New research: nitrous oxide emissions 300 times more powerful than CO₂ are jeopardising Earth’s future’.

30. Glaciers and mountain ice fields – whether located in Greenland or other regions of the far north, the Himalaya, at the Equator, in southern latitudes or Antarctica – are all melting at unprecedented and accelerating rates, losing billions of tonnes of ice in 2020. For a discussion of the details and the implications of this, see ‘Our Vanishing World: Glaciers’.

31. The ongoing destruction of Earth’s oceans continued unabated and accelerated in key areas.

In summary, the oceans are warming, acidifying and deoxygenating; being contaminated with nuclear radiation, by offshore oil and gas drilling as well as oil spills; being damaged by deep sea mining; being polluted by industrial (including chemical) and farming wastes which are generating ocean ‘dead zones’; being polluted by nitrogen and discharges from warships, commercial shipping and cruise ships as well as monumental amounts of plastic; being overfished and illegally fished; being subjected to destructive fishing practices such as bottom trawling, blast fishing, cyanide fishing, ghost fishing and aquaculture; being damaged by sand mining, port and harbor dredging, the increasing spread of invasive species, the live trade in fish and coral for the aquarium industry, the increasing level of noise pollution, and even by wildfires.

In essence then: the oceans are under siege on a vast range of fronts and are effectively ‘dying’. They are being stripped of everything of value to humans (ranging from its many creatures, such as fish and whales, to products such as sand, oil and minerals) while having a monumental range and quantity of garbage and pollutants (ranging from household to radioactive waste) dumped into them. All these shifts taken together, however, result in a rapid and serious decline in ocean health and this, in turn, adversely impacts all species dependent on the ocean including fish, mammals and seabirds as well as ocean plant and microscopic life.

For a comprehensive 18-point summary and extensive documentation, see ‘Our Vanishing World: Oceans’.

32. Earth’s fresh water and ground water was further depleted and contaminated. And whether in streams, rivers, lakes, wetlands or aquifers, water is being ongoingly polluted as contaminants find their way into fresh water sources wherever they occur. Moreover, once contaminated, a water source may be unusable for thousands of years. See ‘Water Pollution: Everything You Need to Know’.

The depletion of fresh water is a primary outcome of the ongoing deforestation of the planet and is manifesting in several ways including as localized droughts, which are becoming increasingly common as a number of cities and regions around the world can attest. According to the World Resources Institute, half of the surface water in some countries – mainly in Central Asia and the Middle East – was depleted between 1984 and 2015, with agriculture using an average of 70% of the water. 36 countries are ‘extremely water-stressed’ and water is now a major factor in conflict in at least 45 countries. See ‘7 Graphics Explain the State of the World’s Water’.

Separately from depletion, fresh water was contaminated by bacteria, viruses and household chemicals from faulty septic systems; hazardous wastes from abandoned and uncontrolled hazardous waste sites (of which there are over 20,000 in the USA alone); leaks from landfill items such as car battery acid, paint and household cleaners; the pesticides, herbicides and other poisons used on farms and home gardens; radioactive waste from nuclear tests (some of it stored in glaciers that are now melting); and the chemical contamination caused by hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in search of shale gas, for which about 750 chemicals and components, some extremely toxic and carcinogenic like lead and benzene, have been used. See ‘Groundwater contamination’‘Groundwater drunk by BILLIONS of people may be contaminated by radioactive material spread across the world by nuclear testing in the 1950s’ and ‘Fracking chemicals’.

In relation to thermal and hydroelectric power generation, all versions of which are highly dependent on huge quantities of fresh water to function, 47 percent of the world’s thermal power plant capacity – mostly coal, natural gas and nuclear – and 11 percent of hydroelectric capacity are located in highly water-stressed areas. See ‘Water Stress Threatens Nearly Half the World’s Thermal Power Plant Capacity’.

The good news is that renewable energy is less water-expensive, by orders of magnitude, and constitutes another compelling reason for switching to renewables. See ‘Renewable Energy Saves Water and Creates Jobs’.

Given that less than 1% of fresh water is readily available for human consumption and must be shared with the natural environment (because most fresh water is stored in glaciers, for example), and that official estimates indicate that a person needs at least 50 to 100 liters of water per day for consumption and basic hygiene and that between 2,000 and 5,000 liters of water are needed to produce a person’s daily food – see ‘7 Graphics Explain the State of the World’s Water’ – the ongoing depletion and contamination of fresh water in the context of an expanding human population constitutes a serious threat to human well-being as well as the ecological health of Earth’s biosphere.

This is particularly the case given that the production of our consumer goods – and particularly electronic items such as computers, mobile phones, cars… – uses staggering amounts of fresh water to produce each item and so curtailing individual and global demand for electronic items particularly is a crucial part of any strategy to conserve water. For example, it takes 147,971 liters to make a car and up to 30 liters of water to make a single chip for a laptop or smartphone. See ‘Thirsty business: How the tech industry is bracing for a water-scarce future’ and ‘How Many Gallons of Water Does It Take to Make…’.

And in the latest disaster and defeat for humanity and the biosphere in relation to water, on 7 December 2020 ‘blue gold’ was traded for the first time as a commodity on the Chicago Stock Exchange. See ‘Water, “The Ultimate Commodity”, (*) Has Entered the Stock Market. Poor water!’

33. The longstanding covert military use of geoengineering – spraying tens of millions of tons of highly toxic metals (including aluminium, barium and strontium) and toxic coal fly ash nanoparticulates (containing arsenic, chromium, thallium, chlorine, bromine, fluorine, iodine, mercury and radioactive elements) into the atmosphere from jet aircraft to weaponize the atmosphere and weather – in order to enhance elite control of human populations, continued unchecked. Geoengineering is systematically destroying Earth’s ozone layer – which blocks the deadly portion of solar radiation, UV-C and most UV-B, from reaching Earth’s surface – as well as adversely altering Earth’s weather patterns and polluting its air, water and soil at incredible cost to the health and well-being of living organisms and the biosphere. See ‘Geoengineering Watch’, including ‘Engineered Climate Cataclysm: Hurricane Harvey’.

For a discussion of the military implications of geoengineering, see ‘The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction: “Owning the Weather” for Military Use’.

And for discussions of the research, and implications of it, by Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt and Dr. Stephenie Seneff (Senior Research Scientist at MIT), which considers damage to the biosphere and human health caused by the geoengineering release of a synthesized compound of nanonized aluminium and the poison glyphosate that creates a ‘supertoxin’ that is generating ‘a crisis of neurological diseases’, see ‘World-Renowned Doctor Addresses Climate Engineering Dangers’Dr Stephenie Seneff‘Autism Explained: Synergistic Poisoning from Aluminum and Glyphosate’ and ‘Extinction is Stalking Humanity: The Threats to Human Survival Accumulate’.

34. The incredibly destructive 5G technology, which a vast number of scientists – currently totaling more than 314,000 individuals and organizations from 214 nations and territories: see ‘International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space’ https://www.5gspaceappeal.org/the-appeal – are warning will have catastrophic consequences for life on Earth, is now being rapidly introduced without informed public consultation and despite ongoing protests around the world. For a straightforward account of the enormity of what is at stake, see the recently revised and updated edition of The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life or read a review of the book: ‘Deadly Rainbow: Will 5G Precipitate the Extinction of All Life on Earth?’

The following articles and videos will also give you a solid understanding of key issues from the viewpoint of human and planetary well-being. See ‘5G Satellites: A Threat to all Life’‘5G Danger: 13 Reasons 5G Wireless Technology Will Be a Catastrophe for Humanity’‘5G Technology is Coming – Linked to Cancer, Heart Disease, Diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and Death’‘20,000 Satellites for 5G to be Launched Sending Focused Beams of Intense Microwave Radiation Over Entire Earth’‘Will 5G Cell Phone Technology Lead To Dramatic Population Reduction As Large Numbers Of Men Become Sterile?’‘The 5G Revolution: Millions of “Human Guinea Pigs” in Big Telecom’s Global Experiment’ and ‘5G Apocalypse – The Extinction Event’.

35. Genetic engineering continued in 2020, with genetically mutilated organisms (GMOs) being ongoingly released into the natural environment despite extensively documented adverse impacts, such as contamination of non-GM crops by GM crops. See, for example, ‘The GM Contamination Register: a review of recorded contamination incidents associated with genetically modified organisms (GMOs), 1997–2013’.

But the social and economic costs of GM crops have been catastrophic for many, as explained years ago by Professor Vandana Shiva in relation to the ‘epidemic of farmers’ suicides in India’ resulting from the 95% control by Monsanto (since merged with Bayer) over cotton seed supply. This meant that instead of putting aside some seed from each year’s harvest for planting the following season (as had been practiced for millennia), farmers were compelled to buy a new supply of (pesticide-dependent) GM seed – the ‘intellectual property’ of Monsanto – to plant each new crop.

Of course, among the many other problems with GMO seeds, they can only be planted as monocultures rather than as part of a mixed farming regime (particularly important for small family farmers who traditionally grow their own food) and ‘GMOs are failing to control pests and weeds, and have instead led to the emergence of superpests and superweeds.’ Since the introduction of expensive GMO seeds into India, suicides by Indian farmers have become an annual ‘epidemic’ with thousands occurring each year due to accumulated debts that are impossible to repay. As Shiva evocatively puts it: ‘No GMO seeds, no debt, no suicides.’

In essence, genetic engineering is a highly profitable means ‘to control seed and the food system through patents and intellectual property rights’. See ‘The Seeds Of Suicide: How Monsanto Destroys Farming’.

But it goes well beyond that with control of nature the ultimate goal.

Notwithstanding the massive problems generated by GMOs just explained, the monstrous control exercised by the major agrochemical and biotech corporations has ensured that governments are ongoingly approving one disastrous move after another. For example, approval has recently been given to release 750 million GMO mosquitoes – created to ‘eradicate mosquito populations’ – into the wild to destroy the mosquito population in the Florida Keys in the USA. Apart from its obvious adverse impact on the food supply of insect-eating birds and amphibians, this will generate a host of other problems. See More than 750 million GMO mosquitoes to be released over Florida Keys – what could go wrong?’

Of course, government approval is not difficult to obtain. In fact: ‘The GMO agritech industry’s strategy has been to first spread seeds illegally or contaminate supplies and then obtain regulatory approval.’ See ‘GM Food Crops Illegally Growing in India: The Criminal Plan to Change the Genetic Core of the Nation’s Food System’.

And if you thought that the mosquito experiment just mentioned is extreme, consider the implications of ‘gene drives’. So what are gene drives? ‘Imagine that by releasing a single fly into the wild you could genetically alter all the flies on the planet – causing them all to turn yellow, carry a toxin, or go extinct. This is the terrifyingly powerful premise behind gene drives: a new and controversial genetic engineering technology that can permanently alter an entire species by releasing one bioengineered individual.’

How effective are they? ‘Gene drives can entirely re-engineer ecosystems, create fast spreading extinctions, and intervene in living systems at a scale far beyond anything ever imagined.’ For example, if gene drives are engineered into a fast-reproducing species ‘they could alter their populations within short timeframes, from months to a few years, and rapidly cause extinction.’ This radical new technology, also called a ‘mutagenic chain reaction’, combines the extreme genetic engineering of synthetic biology and new gene editing techniques with the idea ‘that humans can and should use such powerful unlimited tools to control nature. Gene drives will change the fundamental relationship between humanity and the natural world forever.’

The implications for the environment, food security, peace, and even social stability are breathtaking, particularly given that existing ‘government regulations for the use of genetic engineering in agriculture have allowed widespread genetic contamination of the food supply and the environment.’ See ‘Reckless Driving: Gene drives and the end of nature’.

Consistent with their track records of sponsoring, promoting and using hi-tech atrocities against life, the ‘Gene Drive Files’ reveal that the US military (that is, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) – which ‘appears to be the largest single funder of gene drive research on the planet’ – and individuals such as Bill Gates have been heavily involved in financing research, development and promotion of this grotesque technology. See ‘Military Revealed as Top Funder of Gene Drives; Gates Foundation paid $1.6 million to influence UN on gene drives’ and the ‘Gene Drive Files’.

‘Why would the US military be interested?’ you might ask. Well, imagine what could be done to an ‘enemy’ race with an extinction gene drive.

36. Incalculable amounts of waste of every conceivable kind – including antibiotic waste, military waste, nuclear waste, nanowaste and genetically engineered organisms, including ‘gene drives’ (or ‘mutagenic chain reactions’) – were released into Earth’s biosphere, with an endless series of adverse consequences for life. See ‘Junk Planet: Is Earth the Largest Garbage Dump in the Universe?’

Not content to dump our junk on Earth, an incalculable amount of junk was also dumped in Space which already contains 100 trillion items of orbiting junk. See ‘Junk Planet: Is Earth the Largest Garbage Dump in the Universe?’ and ‘Space Junk: Tracking & Removing Orbital Debris’.

37. As one outcome of our dysfunctional parenting model and political systems, fascism continued to rise around the world. See ‘The Psychology of Fascism’.

38. Despite the belief that we have ‘the right to privacy’, privacy (in any sense of the word) was ongoingly eroded in 2020 and, as reported last year, is now effectively non-existent, particularly thanks to Alphabet (owner of Google). Taken together, ‘Uber, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Tinder, Apple, Lyft, Foursquare, Airbnb, Spotify, Instagram, Twitter, Angry Birds… have turned our computers and phones into bugs that are plugged in to a vast corporate-owned surveillance network. Where we go, what we do, what we talk about, who we talk to, and who we see – everything is recorded and, at some point, leveraged for value.’

Moreover, given Google’s integrated relationship with the US government, the US military, the CIA, and major US weapons manufacturers, there isn’t really anything you can do that isn’t known by those who want to know it. In essence, Google is ‘a powerful global corporation with its own political agenda and a mission to maximise profits for shareholders’ and it partly achieves this by expanding the surveillance programs of the national security state at the direction of the global elite. But Google isn’t alone and it isn’t just happening in the USA. See ‘Everybody’s Watching You: The Intercept’s 2019 Technology Coverage’‘Google’s Earth: How the Tech Giant Is Helping the State Spy on Us’, the articles by John W. Whitehead on ‘Surveillance’ and the documentary ‘The Modern Surveillance State’.

39. The right to free speech, accurate information and conscience-based nonviolent activism was dramatically eroded in 2020 as agents of the global elite (such as national governments, the medical industry and major corporations such as those in the pharmaceutical, tech and media industries), under ‘cover’ of the non-existent Covid-19 pandemic, routinely censored efforts to publish the truth, dramatically expanded official output of propaganda (particularly in relation to the non-existent SARS-CoV-2) and clamped down on political action.

Moreover, both in direct response to and separately from the elite coup, ‘governments around the world have been taking a wave of measures to close down the space for peaceful protest’: censorship, restrictions on access or violent acts directed against those whose views or actions were seen as dangerous or wrong in many contexts continued. Global Witness, Human Rights Watch and other organizations documented an endless series of setbacks for free speech and political activity in a wide variety of countries around the world with individuals suffering smear campaigns or being subjected to spurious criminal charges to silence them, activists and journalists being imprisoned for telling the truth, nonviolent activists being assaulted and killed, critics being silenced by defamation laws or ‘disappearance’, and the closure of newspapers, television stations and the internet to prevent rapid promulgation of information, among other infringements. See, for example, ‘Free Speech’‘The supply chain of violence’ and ‘Defending Tomorrow’.

In addition, according to Global Witness, a record number of people (40% of whom were indigenous) were killed last year, averaging four each week, for defending their land and environment particularly against extractive industries. Predictably: ‘The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown have intensified the problems land and environmental defenders face. Governments around the world – from the US to Brazil and Colombia to the Philippines – have used the crisis to strengthen draconian measures to control citizens and roll back hard-fought environmental regulations.’ See ‘Defending Tomorrow’. There is also ‘growing evidence of opportunistic killings during the Covid-19 lockdown in which activists were left as “sitting ducks” in their own homes’. See ‘Record Land and Environmental Activists Killed Last Year’.

Of course, the most public evisceration of human rights in 2020 was that inflicted on Julian Assange whose only ‘crime’ was to expose the truth about elite atrocities and war crimes inflicted by US military forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, among other truths. See Wikileaks‘Assange wins. The cost: Press freedom is crushed, and dissent labelled mental illness’ and ‘The US and UK may not will Assange’s death, but everything they are doing makes it more likely’.

40. Ongoing ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence against children – see Why Violence? and Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice – ensured that more people will grow up accepting (and quite powerless to challenge) our dysfunctional and violent world, as described above.

41. The global elite’s corporate media, schooling and film/television industries continued to distract vast numbers of people from reality with an endless barrage of propaganda respectively labeled, depending on the context, ‘news’, ‘education’ and ‘entertainment’ ensuring that most people remain oblivious to our predicament, devoid of the capacities to investigate, comprehend and analyze this predicament as well as their own role in it, and to respond to this predicament powerfully. See, for example, Media’s Deafening Silence on Latest from WikiLeaks about the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons Fake Douma Report Blaming Syria‘Do We Want School or Education?’ and ‘Why Do Most People Believe Propaganda and False Flag Attacks?’

42. Finally, as a direct outcome of these last two points but most tragically of all, virtually all of the individuals who self-identify as ‘activists’ continued to waste their time begging the global elite (or their government agents) to fix one or other of our crises, despite the overwhelming evidence that the global elite will not take action to ‘fix’ any of these crises. See ‘Why Activists Fail’. And, for more detail in two key contexts, see ‘The Global Climate Movement is Failing: Why?’ and ‘The War to End War 100 Years On: An Evaluation and Reorientation of our Resistance to War’.

Moreover, even if it was inclined, the elite is now powerless to avert extinction given that, if we are to have any chance given the advanced nature of the crisis and the incredibly short timeframe, we must plan intelligently to mobilize a substantial proportion of the human population in a strategically-focused effort. Nothing else can work.

Highlights of 2020

But so that the picture is clear and ‘balanced’: were there any gains made against the onslaught outlined above, particularly given we were driven inexorably closer to extinction?

Of course, there was considerable effort made to improve the state of the world. See, for example, ‘What went right in 2020: the top 20 good news stories of the year’‘World: Positive news in the difficult year of the pandemic’ and ‘We Won’.

Separately from this, there have been some minor activist gains: for example, some western banks and insurance companies are no longer financially supporting the expansion of the western weapons industry and the western coal industry, some superannuation (pension) funds have divested from weapons and fossil fuels, some rainforest groups have managed to save portions of Earth’s rainforest heritage, and activist groups continue to work on a variety of issues sometimes making modest gains.

Moreover, there are many ongoing struggles, notably including efforts to resist the elite coup – see, for example, the ‘World Freedom Alliance’ – and local campaigns such as that by India’s farmers and their allies to secure justice against the draconian measures being implemented by the Modi national government. See ‘The year that was… India’s people fight back a hostile government’.

However, none of these (limited) gains or ongoing campaigns have directly addressed elite power. That is, none of these initiatives seriously considered how the global elite has spent centuries consolidating its power and is now very close to acquiring the worldwide control it has long worked to achieve. Therefore, of course, none of these groups has developed strategies to functionally undermine elite power; a serious shortcoming given that the global elite’s technotyranny is now imminent.

Responding Powerfully

If we are to defeat the elite coup, effectively tackle other manifestations of violence and avert the primary paths to human extinction, we must do many things.

Importantly, if you would like to be part of the campaign to undermine elite power, defeat the elite coup and prevent implementation of the transhumanist agenda, see the list of strategic goals necessary to achieve these outcomes here: Coup Strategic Aims. Other pages of this website outline how to develop and implement a comprehensive nonviolent strategy to achieve these outcomes (which can be readily adapted for local campaigns).

If you wish to nurture children to become powerful individuals capable of acting strategically to prevent and respond to violence while able to critique society and elite propaganda, see ‘My Promise to Children’.

If you wish to focus on strategically resisting one of the primary threats to human existence – nuclear war, the deployment of 5G, the collapse of biodiversity and/or the climate catastrophe – you can read about nonviolent strategy, including strategic goals to focus your campaigns, from here: Campaign Strategic Aims.

Importantly, as well, you can both resist the above ‘extinction threats’ while also reducing your vulnerability to elite control by joining those who recognize the critical importance of reduced consumption and greater self-reliance by participating in The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth. In addition, you are welcome to consider signing the online pledge of The Peoples Charter to Create a Nonviolent World.

Finally, if you want a better fundamental understanding of how we reached this point, see Why Violence?Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice and ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

Or, if the options above seem too complicated, consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

1. I will listen deeply to children. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

2. I will not travel by plane

3. I will not travel by car

4. I will not eat meat and fish

5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food

6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices

7. I will not own or use a mobile (cell) phone

8. I will not buy rainforest timber

9. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws

10. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons

11. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere

12. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)

13. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant

14. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

To summarize the evidence presented above: as a result of the elite coup being conducted against humanity, human beings stand on the verge of becoming ‘techno-slaves’ devoid of their unique identity, stripped of the human rights to privacy as well as freedom of speech, assembly and movement (among others), and minus the free will to act out their own volition and conscience.

Moreover, cumulative actions by the global elite over past centuries combined with the submissive complicity of most of the human population, have enabled a vast list of violent atrocities in many forms (but touched on above) to destroy or impair the lives of most human beings and largely destroy Earth’s biosphere.

In addition, key actions taken by the global elite in 2020 have accelerated the four primary paths to human extinction.

Hence, very soon now, the overwhelming evidence is that Homo sapiens will join other species that only exist as part of the fossil record.

Our chance of escaping this fate is now remote, essentially for two reasons. Most people have been terrorized into not seeking out the evidence for themselves (and into simply believing what elite agents, such as governments and the corporate media, tell them) and most of those struggling to resist our fate (in one context or another) do not act to strategically undermine elite power (both now and in the future).

Therefore, the global elite continues to exercise enormous power to determine our fate and only a strategic response, encompassing the various components noted above, has any genuine prospect of defeating the elite coup to defend our identity, freedom and volition, while averting each of the primary paths to human extinction.

‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls.’

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.