- Search Results
Topic: Could not make it up,..
‘I think my losing probably accelerated that wave’: Hillary Clinton takes credit for #MeToo movement despite her close ties to Harvey Weinstein
Hillary Clinton spoke at a Manhattan women’s club on Tuesday night
Took credit for #MeToo movement despite close ties to Harvey Weinstein
She said Trump’s presidency was ‘worse than I thought it was going to be’
Also said it was ‘really depressing’ realizing many believed Trump’s accusations
Hit back at Fox News, saying ‘someone needs to tell them they can’t impeach me’———–Has to take the cake, The one woman who in no way could take credit wants credit for metoo.
mgtow is its own worst enemy- https://www.campusreform.org/
The New China – US Trade War : A Matter of Survival [1][2][4]
James G. Rickards
The Daily Reckoning
James G. Rickards is the Editor of Strategic Intelligence. He is an American lawyer, economist, and investment banker with more than 35 years of experience working in Washington and in capital markets on Wall Street.
He was the principal negotiator of the rescue of Long-Term Capital Management L.P. (LTCM) by the U.S Federal Reserve in 1998. His clients include institutional investors and government directorates. His work is regularly featured in the Financial Times, Evening Standard, New York Times, The Telegraph, and Washington Post, and he is frequently a guest on BBC, RTE Irish National Radio, CNN, NPR, CSPAN, CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox, and The Wall Street Journal.
He has contributed as an advisor on capital markets to the U.S. intelligence community, and at the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon. Rickards is the author of The New Case for Gold (April 2016), and three New York Times best sellers, The Death of Money (2014), Currency Wars (2011), The Road to Ruin (2016) from Penguin Random House
On Thursday, March 22, 2018 the trade war that has been brewing between China and the U.S. broke into full-scale combat.
President Trump signed an Executive Order pursuant to Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. This order imposed $50 billion of penalties and tariffs on Chinese exports to the U.S.
Within hours, China fired back. China imposed tariffs on $50 billion of U.S. exports as retaliation for the Section 301 action by Trump
The first Trade War since the 1930s is now in full swing and may continue for years to come.
Many investors are familiar with the fact that President Franklin Roosevelt closed all of the banks in America and confiscated all of the privately-owned gold by Executive Order in the early days of his administration, which began in 1933.
Presidents since then have seized assets from countries such as Iran, Syria, North Korea and Cuba and imposed sanctions on Russia and many other countries by Executive Order.
Yet, relatively few are familiar with the Statutory Authority for these orders
The President does not need an Act of Congress to support such extreme actions. The laws have already been passed and the President has standing authority to act like a dictator with regard to financial assets.
The first such statue was the Trading With the Enemy Act of 1917, TWE. This was used to seize German assets in the U.S. during the First World War. It’s how the U.S. took control of Bayer Aspirin from the German firm Bayer AG.
TWE was the authority FDR used to close the banks and seize the gold. It’s not clear whom FDR considered the “enemy” when he used TWE; probably private gold hoarders. But, in 1977, the Congress enacted an even more extreme version of TWE called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, or IEEPA.
This is the equivalent of a nuclear weapon when it comes to financial warfare.
IEEPA allows the President to seize or freeze any asset or block any transaction if the president deems it to be necessary in the case of a national emergency.
The problem is that “National Emergency” can be defined broadly to include trade imbalances, lost jobs or any other economic adversity. President Trump may now use IEEPA to block a variety of Chinese deals in the U.S. in retaliation for Chinese theft of U.S. intellectual property.
Trump has been threatening a trade war with China since before he was president. He campaigned on the trade issue in 2015 and 2016 and was poised to take action in early 2017 not long after his inauguration.
The key player in this trade war in addition to Trump himself is Robert Lighthizer, the United States Trade Representative (USTR). Lighthizer holds a cabinet-level position and is a veteran of the Reagan administration.
[Lighthizer is second from right]In the early 1980s, Lighthizer used high tariffs on automobile imports to force Japanese and German auto manufacturers to move their plants to the U.S. This resulted in the creation of thousands of high-paying auto manufacturing jobs in the U.S. Now Lighthizer is running the same playbook.
Except this time his target is China, not Japan and Germany, and the products he is targeting are not automobiles but a long list of industries and manufactured goods including steel, aluminum, electronics and telecommunications equipment
Beginning in 1962, the U.S. turned its back on a successful legacy of protecting its jobs and industry and embraced the free trade theory. This was done first through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, one of the original Bretton Woods institutions in addition to the World Bank and IMF.
Beginning in 1995, the World Trade Organization, WTO, displaced GATT and has been the main venue for U.S. free trade policy ever since. China became a member of WTO on Dec. 11, 2001, but has notoriously broken many WTO rules since joining.
The switch in U.S. policy from quasi-mercantilism to free trade was driven partly by academics who embrace the simple version of free trade without understanding the flaws (exemplified by China and Taiwan).
The other supporters of free trade are globalists who understand the flaws well enough but value world jobs over U.S. jobs. If two or three jobs are created in China for every job lost in the U.S., the globalists consider that a form of progress toward their “one world” utopia..
I refer you to Charles Hugh Smith [4] convincing case that classical free trade theory no longer applies in today’s hyper-connected markets.
[Y – In CHS’s article [4] it is evident that the Mobile Capital in today’s markets negates not only the free trade theory of globalists, but also the protectionist theory of isolationists by the same rationale. Thus a trade war heralds a zero-sum outcome where neither party wins -Y]
With the U.S. using its nuclear option in financial warfare, investors should hope that the Chinese don’t respond in kind.
President Trump may not appreciate the extent to which China will go to protect its interests. Trade negotiations are not the art of the deal, as far as China is concerned. Their goal is national survival.
China’s economy is not just about providing jobs, goods and services that people want and need.
It is about regime survival for a Chinese Communist Party that faces an existential crisis if it fails to deliver. The overriding imperative of the Chinese leadership is to avoid societal unrest.
But China is less stable and less powerful than it appears on the surface. Its apparent stability is more of a mask concealing internal divisions.
And it is afraid that its hold on power is weaker than many in the West suspect.
Remember Tiananmen Square [3]? Rather than showing the power and unity of the Chinese government, Beijing took a different lesson from Tiananmen Square.
[Y – Background : The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, commonly known in mainland China as the June Fourth Incident, were student-led demonstrations in Beijing, the capital of the People’s Republic of China, in 1989.
More broadly, it refers to the popular national movement inspired by the Beijing protests during that period, sometimes called the ’89 Democracy Movement.
The protests were forcibly suppressed after the government declared martial law. In what became known in the West as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, troops with automatic rifles and tanks killed at least several hundred demonstrators trying to block the military’s advance towards Tiananmen Square. The number of civilian deaths has been estimated variously from 180 to 10,454 – Y]
As my colleague Kevin Massengill has pointed out, it revealed China’s political fragility.
We all know about the massacre. But what is not widely known is that several army officers refused orders to crush protests throughout China.
Seven retired generals, including a former Defense Minister, signed a letter opposing the use of force against the people of Beijing.
“Due to the exigent circumstances, we as old soldiers, make the following request: Since the People’s Army belongs to the people, it cannot stand against the people, much less kill the people, and must not be permitted to fire on the people and cause bloodshed; to prevent the situation from escalating, the Army must not enter the city.”
“I’d rather be beheaded than be a criminal in the eyes of history,” said one general commanding forces in the Beijing military district.
They were not the only one who felt that way. As Kevin has noted, armored divisions of 10,000 soldiers allowed themselves to be stopped for days by crowds of students and ordinary citizens who brought them food and water while explaining why their cause was just.
An estimated 3,500 PLA officers disobeyed orders to crush protests. Many Chinese army officers were reportedly executed. Others were demoted, or faced court martial and imprisonment.
The Tiananmen Square Massacre, Kevin says, is an example of why and proves that the position of the Chinese Communist Party is more precarious than is widely understood, even now, almost 30 years later.
Here’s something else not widely known about the protests. The Tiananmen Square protests and massacre of 1989 did not start out as a liberty movement, although that’s how they are remembered in the West. It started out as an anti-inflation protest, and that’s how the Communists remember it.
And given China’s current economic problem, Beijing’s challenge is becoming more difficult every day. Consider what’s happening in China right now.
Growth in GDP is conventionally defined as the sum of consumer spending, investment, government spending (excluding transfer payments) and net exports.
Most large economies other than oil-producing nations get most of their growth from consumption, followed by investment, with relatively small contributions from government spending and net exports.
A typical composition would show a 65% contribution from consumption plus a 15% contribution from investment. China is nearly the opposite, with about 35% from consumption and 45% from investment.
That might be fine in a fast-growing emerging-market economy like China if the investment component were carefully designed to produce growth in the future as well as short-term jobs and inputs.
But that’s not the case.
Up to half of China’s investment is a complete waste. It does produce jobs and utilize inputs like cement, steel, copper and glass. But the finished product, whether a city, train station or sports arena, is often a white elephant that will remain unused.
What’s worse is that these white elephants are being financed with debt that can never be repaid. And no allowance has been made for the maintenance that will be needed to keep these white elephants in usable form if demand does rise in the future, which is doubtful.
Chinese growth has been reported in recent years as 6.5–10% but is actually closer to 5% or lower once an adjustment is made for the waste. The Chinese landscape is littered with “ghost cities” that have resulted from China’s wasted investment and flawed development model.
This wasted infrastructure spending is the beginning of the debt disaster that is coming soon. China is on the horns of a dilemma with no good way out.
On the one hand, China has driven growth for the past eight years with excessive credit, wasted infrastructure investment and Ponzi schemes. The Chinese leadership knows this, but they had to keep the growth machine in high gear to create jobs for millions of migrants coming from the countryside to the city and to maintain jobs for the millions more already in the cities.
The Communist Chinese leadership knew that a day of reckoning would come. The two ways to get rid of debt are deflation (which results in write-offs, bankruptcies and unemployment) or inflation (which results in theft of purchasing power, similar to a tax increase).
Both alternatives are unacceptable to the Communists because they lack the political legitimacy to endure either unemployment or inflation. Either policy would cause social unrest and unleash revolutionary potential.
Instead of these unpalatable extremes, the Chinese leadership is trying to steer a middle course with gradual financial reform and gradual limits on shadow banking. I’ve previously predicted that this gradual policy would not work because the credit situation is so extreme that even modest reform would slow the economy too fast for comfort.
That’s exactly what has happened. China has already flip-flopped and is easing up on financial reform.
That works in the short run but just makes the credit bubble worse in the long run. China may soon resort to a combination of a debt cleanup and a maxi-devaluation of their currency to export the resulting deflation to the rest of the world.
It is probably the best way to avoid the social unrest that terrifies the Chinese Government.
When that happens, possibly later this year in response to Trump’s trade war, the effects will not be confined to China. A shock yuan maxi-devaluation [5] will be the shot heard round the world as it was in August and December 2015 (both times, U.S. stocks fell over 10% in a matter of weeks).
I hope President Trump knows what he’s getting into.
Regards
Jim Rickards
for The Daily Reckoning
Y –I had previously discussed China’s economic options at length in [5] and China’s ‘nuclear’ option to deal with trade wars with the US. The trade situation since the post was written has evolved as expected.
Update on the Trade War
As at 4th April 2018, China has imposed a 25% tariff on 106 US made products totalling US$50 billion including planes, cars, soybeans and chemicals. as retaliation for 2nd round US tariffs. The 2nd round tariffs from both countries remain only threats at this stage. [6]
Even before today, one factor behind the S&P 500 Index’s sharp fall drop this week was China’s ambassador to the U.S., Cui Tianka’s, recent indication that China wouldn’t rule out the possibility of scaling back its purchases of Treasuries in response to tariffs imposed by the White House. This was widely interpreted as a weakening of the Trump administration case for tariffs.[7]
– Y
Citations
[1] https://dailyreckoning.com/trade-matter-survival-china/
[2] https://dailyreckoning.com/real-purpose-tariffs/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989
[4] https://dailyreckoning.com/central-banks-killed-free-trade/
[5] /forums/topic/us-asia-pivot-to-china-the-impossible-trinity/
[6] https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04-04/here-full-list-106-us-exports-china-targeting
[7] https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04-04/financial-markets-war-other-means
Anonymous
AnonymousThe CIA Takeover of the Democratic Party : Part 2 of 4 [1]
by Patrick Martin
March 7 2018I am posting this series because the Congressional mid-terms this year will change the balance of power if Republicans do not come out in force to vote their candidates.
The main reason is obvious – a majority to stonewall whatever is left of the Trump administration. I believe a real and present danger is also to be directed at the Second Amendment of the Constitution. The battle lines have been set and with continued false flags for gun ownership repeal – the end result is evident if Congress changes hands.
Patrick Martin researched and wrote an important series of articles on the crop of Democratic candidates for House races this year that I am reposting here ad-verbatim as Parts 2 to 4 of this series. His findings reveal a major shift “from being the party for the Pentagon and CIA to become the party of the Pentagon and CIA”.
Read on and come to your own conclusions! – Y
An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department are seeking nomination as Democratic candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections.
The potential influx of military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in US political history.
If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as widely predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power in the lower chamber of Congress.
Both push and pull are at work here. Democratic Party leaders are actively recruiting candidates with a military or intelligence background for competitive seats where there is the best chance of ousting an incumbent Republican or filling a vacancy, frequently clearing the field for a favored “star” recruit.
A case in point is Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA operative with three tours in Iraq, who worked as Iraq director for the National Security Council in the Obama White House and as a top aide to John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence.After her deep involvement in US war crimes in Iraq, Slotkin moved to the Pentagon, where, as a principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, her areas of responsibility included drone warfare, “homeland defense” and cyber warfare.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has designated Slotkin as one of its top candidates, part of the so-called “Red to Blue” program targeting the most vulnerable Republican-held seats—in this case, the Eighth Congressional District of Michigan, which includes Lansing and Brighton. The House seat for the district is now held by two-term Republican Representative Mike Bishop.
The Democratic leaders are promoting CIA agents and Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. At the same time, such people are choosing the Democratic Party as their preferred political vehicle.
There are far more former spies and soldiers seeking the nomination of the Democratic Party than of the Republican Party. There are so many that there is a subset of Democratic primary campaigns that, with a nod to Mad magazine, one might call “spy vs. spy.”
The 23rd Congressional District in Texas, which includes a vast swathe of the US-Mexico border along the Rio Grande, features a contest for the Democratic nomination between Gina Ortiz Jones, an Air Force intelligence officer in Iraq, who subsequently served as an adviser for US interventions in South Sudan and Libya, and Jay Hulings.
The latter’s website describes him as a former national security aide on Capitol Hill and federal prosecutor, whose father and mother were both career undercover CIA agents. The incumbent Republican congressman, Will Hurd, is himself a former CIA agent, so any voter in that district will have his or her choice of intelligence agency loyalists in both the Democratic primary and the general election.
CNN’s “State of the Union” program on March 4 included a profile of Jones as one of many female candidates seeking nomination as a Democrat in Tuesday’s primary in Texas. The network described her discreetly as a “career civil servant.”
However, the Jones for Congress website positively shouts about her role as a spy, noting that after graduating from college, “Gina entered the US Air Force as an intelligence officer, where she deployed to Iraq and served under the US military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy” (the last phrase signaling to those interested in such matters that Jones is gay)
According to her campaign biography, Ortiz Jones was subsequently detailed to a position as “senior advisor for trade enforcement,” a post President Obama created by executive order in 2012.
She would later be invited to serve as a director for investment at the Office of the US Trade Representative, where she led the portfolio that reviewed foreign investments to ensure they did not pose national security risks. With that background, if she fails to win election, she can surely enlist in the trade war efforts of the Trump administration.
How this article was prepared
The House of Representatives is currently controlled by the Republicans, with a majority of 238 compared to 193 Democrats. There are four vacancies, one previously held by the Democrats. To reach a majority of 218 seats in the next Congress, the Democrats must have a net gain of 24 seats.
The DCCC has designated 102 seats as priority or competitive, including 22 seats where the incumbents are not running again (five Democrats and 17 Republicans), and 80 seats where Republican incumbents could be defeated for reelection in the event that polls predicting a sizeable swing to the Democrats in November prove accurate
The WSWS has reviewed Federal Election Commission reports filed by all the Democratic candidates in these 102 competitive districts, focusing on those candidates who reported by the latest filing date, December 31, 2017, that they had raised at least $100,000 for their campaigns, giving them a financial war chest sufficient to run in a competitive primary contest.
In addition, there a few cases where a candidate had less than the $100,000 cutoff, but was unchallenged for the nomination, or where last-minute retirement or resignation has led to late entry of high-profile candidates without an FEC report on file. These have also been included.
The total of such candidates for the Democratic nomination in the 102 districts is 221. Each has a website that gives biographical details, which we have collected and reviewed for this report.
It is notable that those candidates with a record in the military-intelligence apparatus, as well as civilian work for the State Department, Pentagon or National Security Council, do not hide their involvement, particularly in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They clearly regard working as a CIA agent in Baghdad, an Army special ops assassin in Afghanistan, or a planner for drone missile warfare in the White House or Pentagon as a star on their résumé, rather than something to conceal.
One quarter of all the Democratic challengers in competitive House districts have military-intelligence, State Department or NSC backgrounds. This is by far the largest subcategory of Democratic candidates.
National security operatives (57) outnumber state and local government officials (45), lawyers (35), corporate executives, businessmen and wealthy individuals (30) and other professionals (19) among the candidates for Democratic congressional nominations.
Of the 102 primary elections to choose the Democratic nominees in these competitive districts, 44 involve candidates with a military-intelligence or State Department background, with 11 districts having two such candidates, and one district having three.
In the majority of contests, the military-intelligence candidates seem likely to win the Democratic nomination, and, if the Democrats win in the general election, would enter Congress as new members of the House of Representatives.
There are some regional differences. In the Northeast, 21 of the 31 seats targeted by the Democrats have military-intelligence candidates. This area, not the South or Midwest, has the highest proportion of military-intelligence candidates seeking Democratic nominations
In the West, only 7 of the 23 targeted seats have military-intelligence candidates, while in a half dozen seats the leading candidates are self-funded millionaires, mainly from the IT industry. There has been a wave of Republican retirements in California and wealthy people are bidding for these seats.
Citations
[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/07/dems-m07.htmlThe Bayer-Monsanto Merger Is Bad News [1]
Ellen Brown
Truthdig.comEllen Brown is an attorney, chairman of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including “Web of Debt” and “The Public Bank Solution.” A thirteenth book titled “The Coming Revolution in Banking” is due out soon. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.
Fig 1 : GMO Use
Fig 2 : What is GMO?Two new studies from Europe [2] show that the number of birds in agricultural areas of France has crashed by a third in just 15 years, with some species being almost eradicated.
The collapse in the bird population mirrors the discovery last October [3] that more than three quarters of all flying insects in Germany have vanished in just three decades. Insects are the staple food source of birds, the pollinators of fruits and the aerators of the soil.
The chief suspect in this mass extinction is the aggressive use of neonicotinoid pesticides, particularly imidacloprid and clothianidin [4] , both made by the Germany-based chemical giant Bayer. These pesticides, along with toxic glyphosate herbicides such as Roundup[5], have delivered a one-two punch to monarch butterflies, honeybees and birds.
But rather than banning these toxic chemicals, on March 21 the EU approved [6] the $66 billion merger of Bayer and Monsanto, the U.S. agribusiness giant that produces Roundup and the genetically modified (GMO) seeds that have reduced seed diversity globally.
The merger will make the Bayer-Monsanto conglomerate the largest seed and pesticide company in the world, giving it enormous power to control farm practices, putting private profits over the public interest.
As Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren [7] noted in a speech in December at the Open Markets Institute, massive companies are merging into market-dominating entities that invest a share of their profits in lobbying and financing political campaigns, shaping the political system to their own ends. She called on the Trump administration to veto the Bayer-Monsanto merger, which is still under antitrust scrutiny and has yet to be approved in the U.S.
A 2016 survey of Trump’s voter base [8] found that more than half disapproved of the Monsanto-Bayer merger, fearing it would result in higher food prices and higher costs for farmers.
Before 1990, there were 600 or more small, independent seed businesses globally, many of them family-owned. By 2009, only about 100 survived, and seed prices had more than doubled. But reining in these powerful conglomerates is more than just a question of economics. It may be a question of the survival of life on this planet.
While Bayer’s neonicotinoid pesticides wipe out insects and birds, Monsanto’s glyphosate has been linked to more than 40 human diseases [9], including cancer. Its seeds have been genetically modified to survive this toxic herbicide, but the plants absorb it into their tissues. In the humans who eat the plants, glyphosate disrupts the endocrine system and the balance of gut bacteria, damages DNA and is a driver of cancerous mutations.
Researchers summarizing a 2014 study of glyphosates [10] in the Journal of Organic Systems linked them to the huge increase in chronic diseases in the United States, with the percentage of GMO corn and soy planted in the U.S. showing highly significant correlations with hypertension, stroke, diabetes, obesity, lipoprotein metabolism disorder, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, hepatitis C, end stage renal disease, acute kidney failure, cancers of the thyroid, liver, bladder, pancreas, kidney and myeloid leukaemia.
But regulators have turned a blind eye, captured by corporate lobbyists and a political agenda that has more to do with power and control them protecting the health of the people.
The Trump administration has already approved a merger between former rivals Dow and DuPont, and has signed off on the takeover of Swiss pesticide giant Syngenta by ChemChina.
If Monsanto-Bayer gets approved as well, just three corporations will dominate the majority of the world’s seed and pesticide markets, giving them enormous power to continue poisoning the planet at the expense of its inhabitants.
[Look at this chart below and tell me this was not a political gravy train – Y]
The Shady History of Bayer and the Petrochemical Cartel
To understand the magnitude of this threat, it is necessary to delve into some history.
This is not the first time Monsanto and Bayer have joined forces. In both world wars, they made explosives and poisonous gases using shared technologies that they sold to both sides. After World War II, they united as MOBAY (MonsantoBayer) and supplied the ingredients for Agent Orange in the Vietnam War.
In fact, corporate mergers and cartels have played a central role in Bayer’s history [11]. In 1904, it joined with German giants BASF and AGFA to form the first chemical cartel. After World War I, Germany’s entire chemical industry merged to become I.G. Farben.
By the beginning of World War II, I.G. Farben was the largest industrial corporation in Europe, the largest chemical company in the world, and part of the most gigantic and powerful cartel in all history.
A cartel is a grouping of companies bound by agreements designed to restrict competition and keep prices high.
The dark history of the I.G. Farben cartel was detailed in a 1974 book titled “World Without Cancer,” by G. Edward Griffin, who also wrote the best-selling “Creature from Jekyll Island,” on the shady history of the Federal Reserve.
Griffin quoted from a book titled “Treason’s Peace,” [12] by Howard Ambruster, an American chemical engineer who had studied the close relations between the German chemical trust and certain American corporations. Ambruster warned:
Farben is no mere industrial enterprise conducted by Germans for the extraction of profits at home and abroad. Rather, it is and must be recognized as a cabalistic organization which, through foreign subsidiaries and secret tie-ups, operates a far-flung and highly efficient espionage machine—the ultimate purpose being world conquest … and a world superstate directed by Farben.
The I.G. Farben cartel arose out of the international oil industry. Coal tar or crude oil is the source material for most commercial chemical products, including those used in drugs and explosives.
I.G. Farben established cartel agreements with hundreds of American companies. They had little choice but to capitulate after the Rockefeller empire, represented by Standard Oil of New Jersey, did so, because they could not hope to compete with the Rockefeller-I.G. combination.
The Rockefeller group’s greatest influence was exerted through international finance and investment banking, putting them in control of a wide spectrum of industry. Their influence was particularly heavy in pharmaceuticals.
The directors of the American I.G. Chemical Company included Paul Warburg, brother of a director of the parent company in Germany and a chief architect of the Federal Reserve system.
The I.G. Farben cartel was technically disbanded at the Nuremberg trials following World War II, but in fact it merely split into three new companies—Bayer, Hoescht and BASF—which remain pharmaceutical giants today.
To conceal its checkered history, Bayer orchestrated a merger with Monsanto in 1954, giving rise to the MOBAY Corp. In 1964, the U.S. Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against MOBAY and insisted that it be broken up, but the companies continued to work together unofficially.
In “Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation” (2007), William Engdahl states that global food control and depopulation became U.S. strategic policy under Rockefeller protégé Henry Kissinger, who was secretary of state in the 1970s.
Along with oil geopolitics, these policies were to be the new “solution” to the threats to U.S. global power and continued U.S. access to cheap raw materials from the developing world. “Control oil and you control nations,” Kissinger notoriously declared. “Control food and you control the people.”
Global food control has nearly been achieved, by reducing seed diversity and establishing proprietary control with GMO seeds distributed by only a few transnational corporations, led by Monsanto; and by a massive, taxpayer-subsidized propaganda campaign in support of GMO seeds and neurotoxic pesticides.
A de facto cartel of giant chemical, drug, oil, banking and insurance companies connected by interlocking directorates reaps the profits at both ends, by waging a very lucrative pharmaceutical assault on the diseases created by their toxic agricultural chemicals.
Larger image : https://tse3.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.LfYF2WWp6_5Gx1JSeHfIIgHaEK&pid=15.1&P=0&w=335&h=189Going Organic: The Russian Approach
In the end, the Green Revolution engineered by Kissinger to control markets and ensure U.S. economic dominance may be our nemesis. While the U.S. struggles to maintain its hegemony by economic coercion and military force, Russia is winning the battle for the health of the people and the environment.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has banned GMOs [13] and has set out to make Russia the world’s leading supplier of organic food.
Russian families are showing what can be done with permaculture methods on simple garden plots. In 2011, 40 percent of Russia’s food [14] was grown on dachas (cottage gardens or allotments), predominantly organically.
Dacha gardens produced more than 80 percent of the country’s fruit and berries, more than 66 percent of the vegetables, almost 80 percent of the potatoes and nearly 50 percent of the nation’s milk, much of it consumed raw. Russian author Vladimir Megre [15] comments:
In the U.S., only about 0.6 percent [16] of the total agricultural area is devoted to organic farming. Most farmland is soaked in pesticides and herbicides. But the need for these toxic chemicals is a myth.
In an October 2017 article in The Guardian, columnist George Monbiot [17] cited studies showing that reducing the use of neonicotinoid pesticides actually increases production, because the pesticides harm or kill the pollinators on which crops depend.
Rather than an international trade agreement that would enable giant transnational corporations to dictate to governments, he argues that we need a global treaty to regulate pesticides and require environmental impact assessments for farming. He writes:
Farmers and governments have been comprehensively conned by the global pesticide industry. It has ensured its products should not be properly regulated or even, in real-world conditions, properly assessed. … The profits of these companies depend on ecocide. Do we allow them to hold the world to ransom, or do we acknowledge that the survival of the living world is more important than returns to their shareholders?…
President Trump has boasted of winning awards [18] for environmental protection. If he is sincere about championing the environment, he needs to block the merger of Bayer and Monsanto, two agribusiness giants bent on destroying the ecosystem for private profit.
Larger picture
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QsFL3MvvQD8/UdYRSjHR99I/AAAAAAAAA50/eCgCgfYCag8/s1600/monsanto+timeline.jpg[1] https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-bayer-monsanto-merger-is-bad-news-for-the-planet/
[2] http://www2.cnrs.fr/presse/communique/5501.htm
[3] http://www.iflscience.com/environment/europe-is-facing-an-ecological-disaster-as-wildlife-numbers-plummet/
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/23/europe-poised-for-total-ban-on-bee-harming-pesticides
[5] https://www.organicconsumers.org/essays/gmos-are-killing-bees-butterflies-birds-and
[6] http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-2282_en.htm
[7] https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/12/elizabeth-warren-just-let-loose-on-trump-and-monsanto/
[8] https://www.fitsnews.com/2017/12/21/poll-donald-trump-voters-dont-want-bayer-ag-monsanto-merger/
[9] http://action.responsibletechnology.org/o/6236/t/0/blastContent.jsp?email_blast_KEY=1150514
[10] http://jeffreydachmd.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Genetically-engineered-crops-glyphosate-deterioration-health-United-States-Swanson-J-Organic-Systems-2014.pdf
[11] https://www.alternet.org/environment/monsanto-and-bayers-chemical-romance-heroin-nerve-gas-and-agent-orange
[12] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1948-01-01/treasons-peace
[13] https://www.rt.com/business/403932-russia-organic-food-export-gmo/
[14] http://naturalhomes.org/naturalliving/russian-dacha.htm
[15] https://thebovine.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/in-1999-35-million-small-family-plots-produced-90-of-russias-potatoes-77-of-vegetables-87-of-fruits-59-of-meat-49-of-milk-way-to-go-people/
[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_farming_by_country
[17] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/20/insectageddon-farming-catastrophe-climate-breakdown-insect-populations
[18] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/apr/06/donald-trump/trumps-environmental-awards-closer-look/
AnonymousI’m just not sure how SAFE it’s going to be AND IF I should put myself in that situation.
You must own a better Crystal ball than I
925069
924988
922113
921526
921524
919244
916783
915526
915524
915354
915129
914037
909862
908811
908810
908500
908465
908464
908300
907963
907895
907477
902002
901301
901106
901105
901104
901024
901017
900393
900392
900391
900390
899038
898980
896844
896798
896797
895983
895850
895848
893740
893036
891671
891670
891336
891017
890865
889894
889741
889058
888157
887960
887768
886321
886306
885519
884948
883951
881340
881339
880491
878671
878351
877678
