We live in a world of pesticide-drenched food, polluted air, water containing all sorts of unnatural chemicals and drug residues, poisonous homes... Pesticides are biocides and will quickly kill you in large doses, and slowly and accumulatively over time. We also live under dubious medical regimes - even untested and coercive gene therapy, some say, that will irredeemably alter our health and perhaps even our genes. But surely no one is actually trying to poison us, are they?
Is this a necessary trade-off for having enough food?
There is no historical reason to think that small farms cannot produce enough food for the population. In capitalism, scarcity is artificially maintained for economic reasons.
In an important 4-decade-long study done on US farming, organic small-scale farming was in fact found to be more profitable that industrial farming, and had similar yields. During times of drought, yields were even 40% higher. Other long-term studies have found similar results. Additional findings are that organic soil has bacteria and fungi that keep plants healthy and able to defend themselves from pests, and that soil becomes progressively healthier, unlike the soil depletion that results from industrial farming.
India’s massive famines from the 18th Century onwards occurred at a time when England was importing foods from India, and at times even stockpiling in order to increase prices. The English government at the same time prohibited other regions in India from helping those where hunger was rife, a custom that dated back more than 2000 years (the Kautilya treatise), sustaining in Parliament that aid would in the long term make India weaker and less able to fend for itself. In the mid-19th Century, it was common economic wisdom that government intervention in famines was unnecessary and even harmful. The market would restore a proper balance. Any excess deaths, according to Malthusian principles, were nature's way of responding to overpopulation. Railroads were not, as some cynically state nowadays, used to help India during famine, but to transport India’s resources out of the country.
The same happened during the Irish famines of the 19th Century, and for the same reasons, when foodstuffs were exported from Ireland and millions of Irish people lost their land and perished.
Large industrial farms are extractive, removing from nature what is not replaced. Agrobusiness is a huge environmental problem and, as such, cannot be the solution. It decimates biodiversity and food-security, as we depend increasingly on a smaller and smaller selection of foodstuffs, grown on progressively depleted land. It eradicates pollinators. It requires massive amounts of chemical fertilisers, which in turn are 2% of greenhouse gas emissions and the principal source of nitrous oxide emissions.
Even our gut health has been
decimated, due to the nutritional paucity of our calorie-laden diets, leading
to a new medical procedure: faecal transplants, the transference of faecal
matter from healthy people to those whose guts have no healthy bacteria left in
them. Clostridium difficile Infections (CDI) are on the rise, no doubt due to
our lifestyles. The US CDC reports that approximately 347,000 people in the US
alone were diagnosed with this infection in 2012. Of those, at least 14,000
died but the figure is likely to be more in the range of 30,000-50,000 range. Like
our soils and ecosystems, our guts have been desertified.
Is the sorry state of our environment due to incompetence from our leaders?
Sadly, we do not expect our politicians and leaders to be intellectually endowed, but favour showmen (and women), good-looking individuals like Justin Trudeau, despite his lies and a populist discourse clearly not in line with his coercive policies. We look for soundbites and amusement, so we favour superficially funny types like the UK’s ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, sacked by his own nasty party, but not by his country’s voters; or ones like media-savvy Donald Trump, with his preacher’s sing-song intonation, which goes down well in the southern states, and his brilliant epithets for his rivals – such as: Sanctimonious (Ron) Santos, Slippery James Comey, Sleepy Joe (Biden), Crooked Hillary, Animal Assad, Little Rocket Man (Kim Jong Un), Sloppy Steve (Bannon), Pocahontas (Elizabeth Warren), Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Low Energy Jeb (Bush)…
Our politicians are, maybe, kept reasonably busy scrabbling around for their political space, and we expect no real expertise from our so-called experts, nor relevant studies, nor experience, from government ministers.
But what about those who are really calling the shots, the Bill Gates, Carl Schwabs of this world, and the dark money behind them?
First, a little bit of history...
Once there was a conglomerate of large chemical corporations, formed in 1925, that was the mainstay of the Third Reich’s economy and war effort, supplying the synthetic rubber for vehicle tyres, synthetic fuels and explosives. On 20 February 1933, at a meeting with top Nazis, including Goering and Himmler, this conglomerate, IG Farben, was the largest donor to the Nazi Party, donating 400,000 reichsmarks (approximately $5 million in today’s money). It was the original military-industrial complex, a perfect example of the dangers of state-private collaboration, and very much the definition of fascism. As Mussolini famously stated: fascism is "corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
The Nazi ideology included social eugenics, the biological improvement of German people by selective breeding, involuntary sterilization and the belief that some people were not worthy of life. Eugenics research in Germany was inspired by similar research in the United States; and Britain also had many prominent eugenicists (including the Huxley brothers, Julian and Aldous, and HG Wells). Julian Huxley was President of the British Eugenics Society from 1959-62, and UNESCO’s first President.
The IG Farben cartel built at the start of WWII a large plant in December 1940/January 1941. The plant’s location was chosen because it had good rail transport and coal mines nearby, and land was given by the government at a knock-down price after it had been expropriated from its Polish owners, the site rendered doubly attractive by the possibility of slave labour from the Auschwitz concentration camp. The camp for workers housed some 11,000 people - mostly Jews - by July 1944; and overcrowding, plus overwork – including flogging and physical mistreatment ‑, produced high sickness and mortality.
Around 10,000 would ultimately be killed when deemed unproductive, either by lethal injection or, in the majority of cases, in the gas chambers. The Zyklon B gas used was produced by one of the company’s subsidiaries and several Nobel-prize winning scientists worked for the company. Apart from forced labour, the company also performed drug experiments on inmates. It was eugenics on steroids.
IG Farben was at the time the
world’s largest chemical company. When it was finally wound up in 2003, its
remaining assets were paid to banks, not to organizations and families of its
victims. Compensation, following the IGF Liquidation Act of 1955, permitted top
officials of IGF to resume leading positions in the German chemical industry. Some
compensation was paid under the Jewish Material Claims Conference to Jewish
forced labourers and prisoners who had been compelled to work at Monowitz, under
a voluntary scheme, although the many non-Jewish victims did not receive any
compensation.
After the Nuremberg trials, in which the IG Farben Trial was the largest of all industrial trials, IG Farben was split into its separate companies, some of which, like BASF, Hoechst (now part of French Sanofi), Agfa and Bayer, continue to prosper till today. In the Soviet zone of occupation, IGF plants were nationalised, whereas in the West they remained under their original ownership.
Only 13 of its executives were ever convicted and all were given small sentences of between 18 months and 8 years, often released early; indeed, by 1951, all IGF officials had been released from prison. Most were allowed to continue their lucrative careers as captains of industry, or receive honours. Some examples:
·
Philipp Heinrich Hörlein, who worked
specifically on the Zyklon B gas that he was well aware was being used in the
extermination camps, posthumously had a street named after him in Leverkusen in
1955).
·
Fritz ter Meer, who received a sentence of 7
years in prison for ‘mass murder and enslavement’, but was released in 1950 for
‘good behaviour’, in 1951 was elected Chairman of the board of directors for
Bayer AG, holding the position of supervisory board chairman until 1964, and
holding board positions at many other companies, including Commerzbank and
Union Bank AG.
· Otto Ambros, sentenced to 8 years for slave-labour, was also released in 1951 due to good behaviour and became an adviser to various chemical companies, including Dow Chemical and Grünenthal GmbH, the company responsible for the terrible thalidomide tragedy.
Operation Paperclip
In a secret US intelligence program, between 1945 and 1959, more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers and technicians, including leaders of the Nazi Party, were taken from Germany to the US for government employment after the war, some entering the US through Latin America. The official reason was to gain military advantage for the USA in the new Cold War against the country that had done most to win the war against the Nazis, Russia (by then the USSR).
The NASA Distinguished Service Medal (its highest award) was given to former SS official Kurt Debus, former Nazi Party and SS member Wernher von Braun, among other prominent Germans. Von Braun also received many other prestigious awards, such as the Goddard Astronautics Award, and is in the US Space and Rocket Centre Hall of Fame.
Once one German medical officer,
Walter Schreiber, was linked in the press to human experiments, he was helped
by the US military to emigrate to Argentina.
Our present world
In 2018 Monsanto was found guilty in the US of knowingly concealing the carcinogenicity of its Roundup herbicide, despite claiming that it had studies that suggest that the product does not cause cancer. A man with terminal cancer was awarded $289 million (later reduced to a lesser, albeit enormous, sum); and tens of thousands of other people have pending cases for the same reason. Further sentences have been equally harsh. The initial court ruling resulted in France banning the product and was bad news for Bayer, which had just finalised its purchase of Monsanto and saw a 30% drop in its share price.
Since 2015 the WHO has ruled that glyphosate (Roundup’s key ingredient) is “probably carcinogenic”, itself a shocking admission for a product routinely sprayed onto our food crops and natural world in increasing quantities. It is a product that decimates endangered species, requires larger and larger doses, creates rapid resistance in pests, alters genes, destroys pollinators and creates ‘superweeds’.
Monsanto was founded in 1901 and has, since then, faced litigation relating to damage from asbestos, PCB, dioxin, benzene, vinyl chloride, Agent Orange, Alachlor and Dicamba (other herbicides), Penncap-M (an insecticide)… It has also admitted falsifying its books and records, and bribery; and the spread of experimental glyphosate-resistant wheat. If you want to read more on the horrors of Monsanto, read Merchants of Poison.
VW, originally created under the Nazi regime (and called the “people’s car”, was caught up in a huge emissions scandal, Dieselgate, in 2020, after the software to control toxic gases in their smaller diesel cars, marketed to city dwellers, had been designed to falsify the results of pollution tests, and the cars were in fact emitting 40 times more pollution than that permitted by law, predictably resulting in tens of thousands of excess respiratory deaths just in Europe. The company President, in a grotesque attempt to show that car diesel fumes are really not so bad compared to lorries, ordered for monkeys to be confined in a Perspex box and for a lorry’s exhaust pipe to be fed directly into the small box. The monkeys’ futile attempts to get away from the unbreathable air are heart-breaking. Other diesel car manufacturers copied VW’s method and also falsified the recorded emissions of their vehicles, including Fiat Chrysler and Opel/GM.
Corporations behave sociopathically, responding to no other objective criterion than their share price. Despite constant scandals of this nature, they generally factor in possible fines for malfeasance, viewing sanctions and large lobbying expenses as the normal cost of doing business. ‘The polluter pays’ is in fact ‘He who pays can pollute.’
One in five business leaders have psychopathic tendencies. According a 2010 study, there were at least three times as many psychopaths in executive or CEO roles than in the overall population.
“He is a charismatic leader who inspires people to follow him. A strategic thinker who can master the details. A tireless worker with incredible focus and problem-solving skills. He is well-liked by his employees but is also able to make and execute unpopular decisions. Above all, he is an exceptional communicator who can convey a vision to any audience, from Wall Street to the most junior employee.”
The quote above could describe an ideal CEO. But it’s actually a portrait of a corporate psychopath. People with psychopathy crave power and dominant positions, but they are also chameleons, able to disguise their ruthlessness and antisocial behaviour under the veneer of charm and eloquence. One route to grabbing power for the highly intelligent psychopath is to climb the corporate ladder. Roughly 4% to as high as 12% of CEOs exhibit psychopathic traits, according to some expert estimates, many times more than the 1% rate found in the general population and more in line with the 15% rate found in prisons.
Bill Gates himself, the son of a rumored eugenicist, managed to reverse the extremely negative image the public had of him, following his courtroom behaviour (for using his de facto monopoly to destroy the competition) and Microsoft’s subsequent conviction in an Antitrust case brought by the US government. By turning to corporate philanthropy, adopting an avuncular tone, and investing in vaccines and other drugs, while funding world organisations that would promote his vaccines and other drug treatments often extremely coercively, together with mainstream media that would sell the narrative, Gates has said it made his best investment ever, turning $10 billion into $200 billion worth of economic benefit, all the while having no medical expertise, no degree and no reason – apart from his extreme wealth – for anyone to take his advice.
The current US President is hellbent on bringing Nato into direct war with Russia, in what could easily provoke the use of nuclear weapons, the destruction of the whole of Europe, or even of humanity itself. The last US government’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, one-time head of the CIA, said: “We lied, we cheated, we stole”.
These people at the top are there to get ahead and stay ahead. They are sociopaths. Do we really want them ruling over us?