sexta-feira, 5 de fevereiro de 2021

Bill Gates and Neo-Feudalism: A Closer Look at Farmer Bill

 https://www.globalresearch.ca/bill-gates-neo-feudalism-closer-look-farmer-bill/5736504 

Bill Gates has quietly made himself the largest owner of farmland in the United States. For a man obsessed with monopoly control, the opportunity to also dominate food production must seem irresistible.

“Gates has a Napoleonic concept of himself, an appetite that derives from power and unalloyed success, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses.” — Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, presiding judge in the Gates/Microsoft antitrust-fraud case

The global lockdowns that Bill Gates helped orchestrate and cheerlead have bankrupted more than 100,000 businesses in the U.S. alone and plunged a billion people into poverty and deadly food insecurity that, among other devastating harms, kill 10,000 African children monthly — while increasing Gates’ wealth by $20 billion. His $133 billion fortune makes him the world’s fourth wealthiest man.

Gates has been using that newfound cash to expand his power over global populations by buying devalued assets at fire-sale prices and maneuvering for monopoly control over public health, privatizing prisons, online education and global communications while promoting digital currencies, high tech surveillance, data harvesting systems and artificial intelligence.

For a man obsessed with monopoly control, the opportunity to also dominate food production must seem irresistible.

According to the newest issue of The Land Report, Gates has quietly made himself the largest owner of farmland in the United States. Gates’ portfolio now comprises about 242,000 acres of American farmland and nearly 27,000 acres of other land across Louisiana, Arkansas, Nebraska, Arizona, Florida, Washington and 18 other states.

Thomas Jefferson believed that the success of America’s exemplary struggle to supplant the yoke of European feudalism with a noble experiment in self-governance depended on the perpetual control of the nation’s land base by tens of thousands of independent farmers, each with a stake in our democracy.

So at best, Gates’ campaign to scarf up America’s agricultural real estate is a signal that feudalism may again be in vogue. At worst, his buying spree is a harbinger of something far more alarming — the control of global food supplies by a power-hungry megalomaniac with a Napoleon complex.

Let’s explore the context of Gates’ stealth purchases as part of his long-term strategy of mastery over agriculture and food production globally.

Beginning in 1994, Gates launched an international biopiracy campaign to achieve vertically integrated dominion over global agricultural production. His empire now includes vast agricultural lands and hefty investments in GMO crops, seed patents, synthetic foods, artificial intelligence including robotic farm workers, and commanding positions in food behemoths including Coca-Cola, Unilever, Philip Morris (Kraft, General Foods), Kellogg’s, Procter & Gamble and Amazon (Whole Foods), and in multinationals like Monsanto and Bayer that market chemical pesticides and petrochemical fertilizers.

As usual, Gates coordinates these personal investments with taxpayer-subsidized grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the richest and most powerful organization in all of international aid, his financial partnerships with Big Ag, Big Chemical, and Big Food, and his control of international agencies — including some of his own creation — with awesome power to create captive markets for his products.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a protégé and partner to David Rockefeller, observed that, “Who controls the food supply controls the people.” In 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations launched the $424 million Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) promising to double crop productivity and boost incomes for 30 million small farmers by 2020 while cutting food insecurity in half.

Characteristically, Gates’ approach to global problems put technology and his chemical, pharmaceutical and oil industry partners at the center of every solution. As it turned out, Gates’ “innovative strategy” for food production was to force America’s failed system of GMO, chemical and fossil fuel-based agriculture on poor African farmers.

African agricultural practices have evolved from the land over 10,000 years in forms that promote crop diversity, decentralization, sustainability, private property, self-organization and local control of seeds. The personal freedom inherent in these localized systems leaves farm families making their own decisions: the masters on their lands, the sovereigns of their destinies. Continuous innovation by millions of small farmers maximized sustainable yields and biodiversity.

In his ruthless reinvention of colonialism, Gates spent $4.9 billion dollars to dismantle this ancient system and replace it with high-tech corporatized and industrialized agriculture, chemically dependent monocultures, extreme centralization and top-down control. He forced small African farms to transition to imported commercial seeds, petroleum fertilizers and pesticides.

Gates built the supply chain infrastructure for chemicals and seeds and pressured African governments to spend huge sums on subsidies and to use draconian penalties and authoritarian control to force farmers to buy his expensive inputs and comply with his diktats. Gates made farmers replace traditional nutritious subsistence crops like sorghum, millet, sweet potato and cassava with high-yield industrial cash crops, like soy and corn, which benefit elite commodity traders but leave poor Africans with little to eat. Both nutrition and productivity plummeted. Soils grew more acidic with every application of petrochemical fertilizers.

As with Gates’ African vaccine enterprise, there was neither internal evaluation nor public accountability. The 2020 study “False Promises: The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)” is the report card on the Gates’ cartel’s 14-year effort. The investigation concludes that the number of Africans suffering extreme hunger has increased by 30 percent in the 18 countries that Gates targeted. Rural poverty has metastasized dramatically, and the number of hungry people in these nations has risen to 131 million.

Under Gates’ plantation system, Africa’s rural populations have become slaves on their own land to a tyrannical serfdom of high-tech inputs, mechanization, rigid schedules, burdensome conditionalities, credits and subsidies that are the defining features of Bill Gates’ “Green Revolution.”

The only entities benefiting from Gates’ program are his international corporate partners — and particularly Monsanto, in which the Gates Foundation Trust purchased 500,000 shares worth $23 million in 2010 (but later divested those shares after pressure from civil society groups). Gates himself even filmed commercials for Monsanto’s GMOs, touting them as the “solution” to world hunger.

In a typical example of Gates’ strange largess, his foundation apparently made his taxpayer-subsidized “charitable” grants amounting to $10 million to the Big Ag behemoth, Cargill, to build his supply chains for GMO soy in South Africa. Africans call Gates’ program “Neocolonialism” or “Corporate Colonialism.”

The AGRA Watch initiative of Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice follows Gates’ agricultural and food policies. According to Heather Day, an AGRA Watch spokesperson, AGRA is a trojan horse for corporate kleptocracy.

“The Gates Foundation and AGRA claim to be ‘pro-farmer,’ ‘pro-poor’ and ‘pro-environment,’” Day told me. “But their approach is closely aligned with transnational corporations, like Monsanto, and foreign policy actors like USAID [United States Agency for International Development]. They take advantage of food and global climate crises to promote high-tech, centralized, industrial agriculture that generate profits for Gates’ corporate partners while degrading the environment and disempowering farmers. Their programs are a dark form of philanthrocapitalism based on biopiracy and corporate biopiracy.”

Gates’ climate activism (A memo to my environmental colleagues)

To cloak his dystopian plans for humanity in benign intentions, Gates has expropriated the rhetoric of “sustainability,” “biodiversity,” “good stewardship” and “climate.” These causes are all grim realities that pose existential threats to our children and require urgent attention. However, Gates’ record exposes his benevolent intentions as masquerades for his agenda to maximize personal profit and control.

It’s baffling to me how so many of my friends in the environmental movement have swallowed Gates’ chicanery. In my 40 years as a climate activist, I saw zero evidence of Gates’ funding of genuine climate advocacy; the Gates Foundation is AWOL in the climate wars.

The leading climate groups, National Resource Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Waterkeepers, etc., receive virtually nothing from the world’s largest philanthropy. His investment history suggests that the climate crisis, for Gates and his cronies, is no more than an alibi for intrusive social control, “Great Reset”-scale surveillance, and massive science fiction geoengineering boondoggles, including his demented and terrifying vanity projects to spray the stratosphere with calcium chloride or seawater to slow warming, to deploy giant balloons to saturate our atmosphere with reflective particles to blot out the sun, or his perilous gambit of releasing millions of genetically modified mosquitoes in South Florida.

When we place these nightmare schemes in context alongside the battery of experimental vaccines he forces on 161 million African children annually, it’s pretty clear that Gates regards us all as his lab rats.

Gates has also heeded Kissinger’s advice, “Control oil and you control nations;” his energy holdings nowhere reflect his expressed antipathy for greenhouse gases. Gates’ personal investments in hydrocarbons include massive stakes in all the oil majors: Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell. He owns the world’s largest private jet company. His outsized commitment to coal includes giant investments in the dirtiest coal-generating fleets including the Canadian National Railway and CSX Richmond which is the largest coal transporter east of the Mississippi River. Gates is betting big on the future of carbon.

Gates’ energy-hungry data harvesting, processing and analytics centers are among the world’s fastest-growing sources of exploding energy demand. And, of course, Gates’ chemical/industrial agriculture enterprises are the antithesis of climate-friendly. His GMO corn requires heavy applications of fertilizers, pesticides, agro-chemicals made from natural gas and other fossil-fuel inputs. He effectively forced Africans, in Michael Pollan’s words, to “eat oil.” African farmers call Gates’ program “climate-stupid agriculture.”

Gates has learned to fatten himself on global crises, whether it’s pandemics, climate, famine or mass extinction. Climate change has given Gates an excuse to create monopolies over seed, food and agriculture.

In 2008, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced $306 million in grants to promote high-yield sustainable agriculture among smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The foundation’s plans included creation, through genetic manipulation, of high-production, drought-resistant dairy cows, and the development and proliferation of super crops resistant to climate change.

In other words, climate change was the guise for more mischievous geoengineering. Meanwhile, Gates’ ag policies are destroying our planet’s climate systems, pushing millions of species to extinction, desertifying the soil, destroying water systems and enriching the Poison Cartel.

So, a note to my fellow environmental leaders: Bill Gates is not our amigo! Furthermore, Gates has put climate reform in malodour with millions of Americans, who see his climate pretenses in context of his ambitions to control humanity and put an end to economic activity and personal freedom.

It’s largely Gates’ doing that half of America sees climate change as either a “Great Reset” flimflam to shift wealth upward, or a geoengineering boondoggle. It’s on them that they don’t recognize the serious peril of climate change. It’s on us that we seem deliberately blinded to the peril of Bill Gates.

Gates profits from all this confusion; the polarization of the climate debate paralyzes reform efforts thereby preserving the value of his carbon stakes. We all need to recognize who is really behind that Green mask!

Biopiracy

“A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s letter to all state governors, February 1937

Long experience and research have shown that agroecology based on biodiversity, Seed Freedom and Food Freedom is essential not just to civil liberties and democracy, but to the future of food and farming.

For thousands of years, farmers’ innovation and biodiversity evolved together to create the most efficient practices for sustainable food production and biodiversity. The United Nations’ seminal 2009 study by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) documents the incontrovertible evidence demonstrating the abject failure of the Gates/Rockefeller “Green Revolution” to improve on traditional agriculture.

IAASTD deployed a team of 900 leading scientists, agronomists, and researchers to study the issue of world hunger. Their comprehensive and definitive report showed that GMO crops are not the answer to food shortfalls or rural poverty. That report definitively concludes that neither Gates’ Green Revolution nor his GMOs can feed the world and at the same time protect the planet.

IAASTD’s comprehensive analysis demonstrates that the Green Revolution that the Rockefeller Foundation launched in India and Mexico in the 1960s was a catastrophe; the chemical path of monocultures has undermined Earth’s capacity to support life and food production by destroying biodiversity, soil and water, as well as contributing to climate change.

Green Revolution policies subvert food and nutritional security, and dispossess small farmers through debt for external inputs. IAASTD and numerous other studies show that Seed Sovereignty, Food Sovereignty and Knowledge Sovereignty are the only viable future for food and farming. The United Nations and the world’s top agricultural scientists have admitted that GMOs cannot fight hunger as effectively as traditional farming.

Bill Gates has opted to ignore this reality, dismissing science-based evidence in favor of his messianic faith that he is ordained by God to save the world with technology. According to Dr. Gates, M.D., good health only comes in a syringe (he is the world’s biggest vaccine producer).

Likewise, Farmer Bill preaches that good food only comes from monocultures, chemical pesticides and fertilizers, GMO crops and patented seeds that he happens to own. In constructing his agriculture empire, Gates has repeatedly shown himself willing to ignore the voices of scientists and farmers, and to trample laws, treaties, traditions, civil rights, science, and sensibilities.

Stealing seeds

Since the onset of the Neolithic Revolution some 10,000 years ago, farmers and communities have worked to improve yield, taste, nutrition, robust seed qualities that enhance peculiar growth, medicinal and nutritional attributes, and the genetic resilience that allows certain seeds to flourish in particular soil and water conditions or resist predators.

These vigorous, ingenious genetics are the products of a miraculous collaboration between humans, nature and their Creator during humanity’s 1,000 generations of intense agricultural innovation. The free exchange of knowledge and seeds among farmers has been the basis for maintaining biodiversity and food security.

Since 1979, under World Bank auspices, a consortium of agricultural research centers known as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) has been collecting these premier seeds from small farmers across the globe and preserving them in 15 independent Public Seed Banks stationed in different countries. That venture sought to archive a complete inventory of heritage seed stocks for the benefit of all humanity so as to preserve crop diversity for the millennia.

In the last 17 years, Gates has successfully maneuvered to gain control of those collections — comprising 768,578 seeds — and to assert monopoly ownership of the world’s premier seed inventories.

Beginning in 2003, working in coordination with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pumped $720 million into CGIAR’s Seed Bank project. As the largest funder of the CGIAR, Gates used his financial leverage to force the merger of the CGIAR’s 15 legally independent centers into one legal entity, a sinister initiative that he calls “Gates Ag One.” He then moved to orchestrate the transfer of research and seeds from scientific research institutions to commodity-based corporations like Bayer and Cargill with which he partners. In this way he is raiding, plundering and privatizing the seed stockpile for the most promising seeds from indigenous farmers around the world.

Gates Ag One’s director, Joe Cornelius, is a former executive at Bayer Crop Science. Prior to that, he was Monsanto’s Director of International Development. Working with Cornelius, Gates has perfected the techniques Monsanto pioneered in the 1980s when it led the push to propagate GMOs, and to patent seeds. Gates has made himself the Commanding General in Big Data’s pirate war to plunder and monopolize the common genomic data of millions of plants bred by peasants over the millennia.

Gates funds Diversity Seek (DivSeek), a global project he launched in 2015 to map the genomes and genome sequences of the peasant seed stocks held in seed banks. DivSeek and Gates Ag One are the tips of his spears, “mining” seed data to “censor” out the commons. In other words — to terminate the public’s ownership claims.

Using artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technologies, Gates’ minions at DivSeek and Gates AG One scan these seeds and categorize their genetic data to map, patent and pilfer humanity’s global seedstock heritage. Gates bolsters his patent rationale by using CRISPR technology to selectively edit the heritage seed genomes, making changes sufficient to withstand patent challenges.

Gates’ principal objective is to breed Green Revolution varieties engineered to respond to chemical inputs produced by Gates’ “Poison Cartel” partners: Monsanto, Bayer, Dow/DuPont, CropLife, BASF, Syngenta, Corteva, etc. In short, Gates deliberately robs the seed of its integrity and diversity, erasing evolutionary history and its links to the soil, reducing it all to a simple “code.” In this way, Gates captures our planet’s genetic diversity, rewrites it, patents its code, steals the seeds from humanity and marries them off to the chemical conglomerates.

By centralizing the Seed Banks and manipulating intellectual property laws, Gates has launched a campaign of “genetic colonialism” to rob the world’s peasants and indigenous farmers of their hard-earned seeds and knowledge.

“Gates Ag One’s aim is to take control over the genetic diversity of this planet,” agricultural freedom activist Dr. Vandana Shiva told me. According to Shiva, Gates “continues to subvert and sabotage both farmers’ seed sovereignty and the seed sovereignty of countries. ‘Gates Ag One’ is a clear declaration of his intent to create an empire over life and biodiversity, over food and farming, and over our sustenance.” In the process, says Shiva, “Gates is financing infernal Frankenstein experiments that defile God’s creation.”

Citizens, governments and farm organizations have written many laws and governments have adopted international treaties on biodiversity protection, including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol to the CBD. By conning government officials, manipulating intellectual property law and rewriting seed regulations, Gates has been able to bypass or trample these statutes and treaties, and to evade the multilateral governance structures that governments put in place to prevent global corporations from hijacking the planet’s biodiversity and the seed commonwealth of peasants and farmers.

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs)

Gates’ missionary faith in technology as the solution for every human ill, from food insecurity and disease to climate health, explains his obsessive promotion of GMOs. Gates’ zealous GMOs idolatry and gene-editing technologies leave him deaf to the mountains of peer-reviewed scientific evidence and warnings by agronomists, nutritionists, toxicologists and other scientists who question their safety.

GMO vaccines and medicines are mainstays of his public health enterprise, and Gates finances research, development and proliferation of GMOs as the fix for every agricultural problem. He funded, for example, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, the two CRISPR chemists who won 2020 Nobel prizes for gene editing.

Gates was also one of the largest shareholders of Monsanto — the world’s most aggressive promoter of GMOs and pesticides. The central mission of Gates Ag One is to fly into the face of virtually every independent science and safety assessment in a blind rush to impose Gates’ untested GMOs, patented seeds, synthetic foods and experimental medicines on humanity.

One might expect his Monsanto stake and his partnerships with processed food, chemical and oil companies to discredit Gates’ pretensions as a public health advocate. But Gates’ massive investments in media journalism (a March 2020 Nation magazine exposé reveals the Gates Foundation has bought Gates guarantees of favorable coverage with $250 million in grants to media outlets including NBC/Universal, BBC, NPR, The Guardian, Le Mond, Al Jazeera, and others “to influence the news”) have insulated him from the scrutiny and skepticism the media historically applied to fiendish profiteering schemes and rank hypocrisy by power-mad billionaires.

Money talks, and the billions that Gates and his pharma allies annually pour into public and commercial journalism have instead made Gates the media’s chief darling. He uses his biweekly “satellite tours” of leading cable and network news shows to showcase his mesmerizing power to command softball questioning and fawning deference from obsequious hosts (with the exception of Norah O’Donnell) including Anderson Cooper (CNN), David Muir (ABC), Ari Melber (MSNBC), and Chuck Todd (NBC), who gratefully entertain his lofty prognostication on topics ranging from public health to the economy and agriculture policy.

Evading government regulation

Gates’ wealth and power also allow him to evade government efforts to regulate GMO proliferation. In 2011, when India introduced a moratorium on Gates’ genetically modified Bt Cotton and Roundup Ready crops, Gates shifted his operations to Bangladesh. When the European Court of Justice ruled that gene-edited organisms and GMOs must be heavily regulated to protect public health, Gates launched a lobbying campaign for deregulation across the European community.

Gates is currently deploying his billions to orchestrate attacks against GMO and gene editing laws in many of the countries that have imposed safety standards. When scientists and regulators plead that time is essential to accurately assess the safety of gene editing and GMOs, Gates declares that “Time is the enemy!”

In 2017, a German human rights group, Heinrich Böll Stiftung (HBS), published evidence of a Gates’ secretive campaign to evade democratically imposed restraints on his high-risk gene manipulation experiments. HBS released more than 1,200 emails the group obtained under U.S. Freedom of Information laws. Those documents show that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hired a shady Big Ag/Biotech spy and propaganda outfit to mount an undercover espionage attack aimed at corrupting United Nations officials and sabotaging international efforts to ban a diabolical new technology called “gene drive.”

Gene drives are at the cutting edge of genetic engineering, synthetic biology and gene editing. They are the tools of choice for eugenicists and for those seeking to build the technocratic “transhuman future” championed by Gates and his Silicon Valley cronies.

Scientists use CRISPR technology to edit genes into an organism’s chromosomes to reprogram DNA to switch off the normal rules of genetic inheritance and “drive” the artificially introduced trait through an entire population and spread it to all future generations. Their capacity to permanently alter the genome of an entire species makes gene drives the biological instrument of ultimate power.

Gene-editing technology could facilitate Gates’ schemes to create and patent new-and-improved species of plants and animals, or to exterminate species of which he disapproves. One of his aims is to use gene drives to insert “suicide genes” to eradicate entire mosquito species that spread Zika or malaria — a goal of the Target Malaria Project, in which the Gates Foundation has invested$40 million. Dr. Anthony Fauci, a long-time protégé and partner of Gates and an enthusiastic cheerleader for gene drive, told StatNews, “Getting rid of them would be a blessing.”

Critics argue that gene drives pose an existential biosecurity risk to humanity due to their capacity to change or eliminate entire species and to catastrophically alter ecosystems. They are, also, the ultimate biological weapon; the most satanic minds in various military and intelligence agencies covet gene drives to breed supersoldiers or to mint “apocalypse genes.” Critics fear that nations might one day use “genocide genes” to eradicate certain races or undesirable traits.

HBS’s Gene Drive Files expose the leading role of the U.S. military in the development of gene drive technology. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has spent approximately $100 million researching gene drives. The other primary Gene Drive investors are Dr. Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has invested $75 million in researching suicide and anti-fertility genes.

At the 2016 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 13) in Cancun, 179 international organizations, including the Heinrich Böll Foundation, voted for the UN to impose a global moratorium on gene drives. The opponents of this technology also circulated a letter, “A Call for Conservation with a Conscience: No Place for Gene Drives in Conservation.” Environmentalists worry about unintended consequences if suicide or extinction genes leap species.

The Gene Drive emails reveal that in reaction to the COP 13 resolution, the Gates Foundation hired “Emerging Ag,” a sketchy espionage concern with its own sinister entanglements with Big Pharma and Big Ag, to sabotage and shut down the diverse and unified international coalition opposing gene drive.

The Gates Foundation gave Emerging Ag $1.6 million to “recruit a covert coalition of academics to manipulate the UN decision-making process over gene drives.” The emails reveal that the Gates’ campaign was part of the billionaire’s plan to “fight back against gene drive moratorium proponents.” Emerging Ag secretly mobilized some 65 allegedly “independent scientists” for hire — “Biostitutes,” in the industry vernacular — and public officials to an online expert group, the UN CBD Online Forum on Synthetic Biology. A senior executive of the Gates Foundation provided these crooked operatives with daily instructions on how to sabotage regulations, undermine the science, discredit advocates, corrupt the process, and subvert democracy.

In furtherance of its campaign, Gates simultaneously funded a 2016 report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences endorsing gene driving. The DARPA co-funded the whitewash report with the Gates Foundation. As The Guardian noted after the release of the NAS report:

“The same US defense research agency (DARPA) who paid for the NAS study have made it known that they are going all-in on gene drive research and development of ‘robust’ synthetic organisms. There is good reason to be worried.”

As Jim Thomas of the ETC Group observed: “The fact that gene drive development is now being primarily funded and structured by the US military raises alarming questions about this entire field.”

In furtherance of its coordinated campaign with Emerging Ag, the Gates Foundation manipulated three members, who were under Gates’ control, of the relevant UN expert committee known as AHTEG (Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group) on Synthetic Biology. Gates and Emerging Ag were successful and the UN shot down the moratorium.

The Gates Foundation’s role, exposed by the Gene Drives files, in subverting the environmental movement’s campaign against this dangerous technology confirms Gates and his foundation as a rogue outlaw cartel with contempt for process, for democracy, for science, law, public opinion, public health and the safety of humanity.

Chemical warfare on human health

Mounting evidence points to the kind of industrially grown and processed foods that Gates favors as leading culprits in the chronic disease epidemics that are devastating human health and debilitating children across the globe.

The world’s most popular GMOs function to facilitate aerial spraying of pesticides. Monsanto’s technique of inserting genes to make agricultural crops resistant to weed-killing poisons allows Big Ag to fire ground-based farm workers, replacing them with airplanes (or drones) that saturate landscapes (and food) with aerosolized toxins like glyphosate and neonicotinoids.

Since the proliferation of chemical pesticides in the 1940s, more than half of American songbirds have disappeared, most of the world’s bee and insect populations have collapsed and chronic disease rates in America have risen to 54% in lockstep with increased pesticide use.

As Vandana Shiva pointed out, “Gates has declared chemical warfare not just on nature but on our body’s metabolic systems and the symbiosis in the gut microbiome with his pesticides and herbicides obsession, and his campaign to switch humanity to GMOs.”

Synthetic foods: soylent ‘Gates’

“Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.” — CIA propagandist Bertrand Russell, an advocate of one world government, dictatorship, and top-down control of the masses by a privileged oligarchal class (1952).

Gates’ power, profit and control agenda appears to drive his commitment to synthesize so-called “transhuman” laboratory foods and his massive investments in processed food manufacturing.

Gates calls synthetic meat “the future of food.” He holds investments in companies that make plant-based chicken, eggs and others that make food from bugs. Gates owns patents or has patents pending for over 100 animal proxies, from chicken to fish. He is invested heavily in Motif FoodWorks, a company that makes a variety of synthesized laboratory foods and ingredients. He co-founded Breakthrough Energy in 2015 with his billionaire buddies Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg and Mark Zuckerberg — the so-called “Pandemic Profiteers Club.” (U.S. billionaires have increased their wealth by $1.1 trillion since the lockdown began, while the number of impoverished Americans grew by 8 million.)

That collaboration has large stakes in Beyond Meat, which they co-own with Tyson Foods and Cargill. Beyond Meat makes plant-based GMO and pesticide-laden chicken tacos. Gates and his Billionaire Boys Club also have big positions in Impossible Foods, which uses heat and pressure to produce synthetic burgers and bratwurst from GMO soy. Lab results show the company’s imitation meat contained glyphosate levels 11 times higher than its closest competitor. Seth Itzkan from Soil4Climate wrote:

“Impossible Foods should really be called ‘Impossible Patents.’ It’s not food; it’s software, intellectual property — 14 patents, in fact, in each bite of Impossible Burger. It’s IFood, the next killer app. Just download your flavor. This is its likely appeal to Bill Gates, their über investor.”

Another of Breakthrough’s ventures is Memphis Meats, which formulates an engineered meat-like tissue on a substrate of calf’s blood. A bullish Bloomberg predicts that synthetic meat revenues will reach $3.5 billion by 2026.

In June 2020, the “Breakthrough Bros” invested $3.5 million in Biomilq, a company that produces synthetic breast milk from “cultured human mammary glands and epithelial cells.” Gates has not explained whether the milk will contain the maternal antibodies — present in authentic mother’s milk — that function to protect infants from infectious diseases, or whether the coming generations of Biomilq kids will need to rely, instead, on additional batteries of Gates’ GMO vaccines.

Unimpressed, Vandana Shiva observes that Bill Gates “wants to deprive us of good, healthy proteins and fats and get us hooked on his synthetic lab-grown trash.”

Gates is the creator and largest donor to the United Nations’ subsidiary, GAVI, a faux governmental agency that he created to push his diabolical chemical, medical and food concoctions, and conduct villainous vaccine experiments on Africans and Indians. Since 2014, The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, funded by the Gates Foundation in the amount of almost $850K has aggressively pushed the use of insect protein — particularly for the poor. GAVI characterizes wasps, beetles, crickets and other insects as “underutilized” food sources.

Following Gates’ lead, GAVI is optimistic that bugs will soon be an important food supplement for impoverished and undernourished children.

Perhaps in anticipation of that happy day, the Gates Foundation has invested in a South African company that makes edible protein from cultivated maggots. The company’s factory houses a billion flies and produces 22 tons of maggots daily that graze on slaughterhouse, municipal and household waste. Since markets are still immature for maggots as human food, Gates sells his maggot-meal to factory meat operations like those owned by Gates’ partner, Tyson Foods, to feed battery-caged chickens, and to large-scale fish farms, like those owned by Unilever, a $58 billion multinational, which is both a business partner to Gates and a grant beneficiary of his peculiar public charity.

As usual, Gates has also mobilized the international agencies that he controls and the large corporations with which he partners to drive his fake food agenda including, most notably, The Gates-funded World Economic Forum (WEF), which assembles the world’s billionaires in Davos each year to plan and plot out humanity’s political and economic future.

WEF’s Chairman, Klaus Schwab, is the author of the influential book, “COVID-19: The Great Reset”, which WEF has apparently mailed to most of the world’s elected officials, down to provincial executives.

Schwab makes the case that powerful people should use the COVID crisis to impose authoritarian controls, pervasive surveillance, oppressive new economic models and one-world government on a beleaguered, terrified and compliant humanity. The Great Reset is WEF’s plan to rebuild a new controlled economy systematically after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Schwab and Prince Charles unveiled “The Great Reset” at a WEF summit in May 2020. It is a vision for transferring the world into a totalitarian and authoritarian surveillance state manipulated by technocrats to manage traumatized populations, to shift wealth upward, and serve the interests of elite billionaire oligarchs. To “reset” global food policies, the WEF has promoted and partnered with an organization called EAT Forum, which describes itself as the “Davos for food.”

EAT’s co-founder is Wellcome Trust, an organization founded, funded by and strategically linked to vaccine maker GlaxoSmithKline, in which Gates is heavily invested. EAT’s biggest initiative is called FReSH, which the organization describes as an effort to drive the transformation of the food system. The project’s partners include Bayer, Cargill, Syngenta, Unilever, and tech giant Google.

The EAT Forum works with these companies to “add value to business and industry” and “set the political agenda.” To further this profit-making enterprise, EAT collaborates with nearly 40 city governments in Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, South America and Australia. The organization also assists the Gates-funded United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in the “creation of new dietary guidelines” and sustainable development initiatives.

According to Frederic Leroy, a food science and biotechnology professor at University of Brussels, EAT network is working closely with some of the biggest imitation meat companies, including Impossible Foods and other biotech companies, to replace wholesome nutritious foods with Gates’ genetically modified lab concoctions.

“They frame it as healthy and sustainable, which of course it is neither,” Leroy told The Defender.

Dr. Shiva also scoffs at Gates’ perennial propaganda claims that his GMO meats are about feeding kids and derailing climate change:

“Lab-processed fake food is really about patenting our food, not about feeding people or saving the climate, as Gates and his fellow biotech friends pretend. EAT’s proposed diet is not about nutrition at all, it’s about big business and it’s about a corporate takeover of the food system.”

Leroy added:

“Companies like Unilever and Bayer and other pharmaceutical companies are already chemical processors, so many of these companies are very well positioned to profit off of this new food business which revolves around processing chemicals and extracts needed to produce these lab-made foods on a global scale.”

Fortified foods

Synthetic and GMO foods tend to be low in the vital micronutrients that support human health. Glyphosate, for example, functions as a chelator. It kills weeds by leaching out the mineral building blocks of life. Farm crops exposed to glyphosate have far less nutritional value than natural foods.

People eating Gates’ processed, synthetic and GMO foods may have full stomachs, while being clinically malnourished. Gates is rushing to solve this problem by buying technologies and partnering with companies like Roche and Kraft that fortify foods artificially with minerals and vitamins. He is simultaneously promoting laws in developing nations to mandate food fortification. Those laws benefit pesticide and processed food companies to the disadvantage of traditional and organic farmers. Since U.S. companies, like Roche, Kraft, General Foods and Philip Morris already fortify their processed cheese and cereals, they are Gates’ enthusiastic partners in this grift.

I saw this hustle perpetrated by another Big Food swindler earlier in my career. In 2003, I was representing thousands of small-plot Polish farmers in the battle to keep Smithfield Foods’ industrial pork factories out of Poland. Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister, Andrzej Lepper, told me that Smithfield officials offered him a $1 million bribe to support a law requiring slaughterhouses to install high tech hygiene technology including laser-operated restroom faucets. Smithfield knew the law would have the effect of shuttering the 2,600 family operated abattoirs that made Poland’s signature kielbasa sausage. As the only entity that could afford the lasers, Smithfield would thereby gain monopoly control of Poland’s slaughter capacity and 100% of its lucrative kielbasa exports.

Gates took his food fortification laws from Smithfield’s playbook. By mandating that all foods be fortified, Kraft products like Cheez Whiz and American Singles, and its vitamin-fortified Kool-Aid and Tang, are positioned to displace locally produced goat cheese and goat milk in village markets and put small African farmers out of business.

To promote his mandatory fortified foods agenda, Gates created another of his useful quasi-governmental organizations, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) to assist multinational food companies (Gates’ business partners) in lobbying for favorable tariffs and tax rates for processed and fortified foods, and speedier regulatory review of new products in targeted countries. Gates’ GAIN consortium also gives local governments money to stimulate demand for fortified foods through large-scale public relations campaigns or by offering governmental “seals of approval” for corporate food products.

Gates, GAVI and GAIN

Gates modeled his GAIN project after his billion-dollar global vaccine program (GAVI). By masquerading as a public health agency, GAVI has successfully mobilized public agencies and private industry to profitably dump untested, experimental or discredited, and often deadly vaccines to inoculate poor children in developing nations.

Following the GAVI model, Gates launched his $70 million GAIN program at the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Children. His collaboration includes the UN agencies Gates controls, such as the World Bank, the World Health Organization and UNICEF, and the Big Processed Food companies like Philip Morris and Kraft, in which he has investments.

According to Vandana Shiva, GAIN’s objective is to “coordinate campaigns that pressure African and Asian countries to give obscene subsidies, tax breaks and tariff exemptions and other preferences for processed foods.”

Some experts are troubled by the idea of Bill Gates and multinational food companies teaming up to colonize food systems in underdeveloped countries, and hawking processed foods under a public health banner.

Dr. Mark Hyman, the New York Times bestselling author and Head of Strategy and Innovation at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, told me:

“ … despite occasionally being fortified with vitamins and minerals processed foods are loaded with sugar, starch, processed oils, artificial colors, preservatives, pesticides and sodium which contribute to the double burden of obesity and malnutrition, and the chronic disease epidemic. Globally 11 million die every year from an excess of ultra-processed foods and lack of protective whole foods, making processed food the number one killer in the world.”

Dr. Hyman calls those foods “the opposite” of nutrition. Shiva agrees. “The GAIN program,” says Shiva, “is less about solving malnutrition than a heavy-handed way to force poor nations to open access to their markets, to obliterate local producers.”

“Fortified foods are illusory technical solutions to complex socioeconomic problems. Social and economic solutions would work better in the long run,” argues Professor Marion Nestle. Nestle is the revered food and nutrition icon who occupies the Paulette Goddard Chair of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. Nestle, the author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, told me:

“With one exception, iodized salt, fortified foods cost too much, fail to reach their intended targets, or are too limited in scope to do what they are intended to do. I see these laws as solving a problem for the companies that make these products, not addressing nutrient and calorie deficiencies. I’m not a fan of fortified foods. I want a wide variety of real foods made more available and less expensive, and locally produced. So I would agree with the critics. I wish the Gates Foundation would invest in projects to promote small, local food production.”

Artificial intelligence: ridding the world of farmers

Gates says he wants to revive farm economies by transforming agriculture with super-efficient, high tech AI to create “farms of the future.” According to Gates:

“We used to all have to go out and farm. We barely got enough food, when the weather was bad people would starve. Now through better seeds, fertilizer, lots of things, most people are not farmers. And so AI will bring us immense new productivity.”

Above all, he wants it to work fast. Gates’ “computational acceleration” will hasten the adoption of these beneficial innovations to achieve his ambitious schemes to deliver scientific breakthroughs to small farmers before climate change destroys their yields.

But Shiva warns American farmers, already drowning in debt, to be wary of Gates’ promises to throw them a line:

“When Bill Gates forced his devilish ‘rescue’ technologies on Indian farmers, the only one to benefit was Gates and his multinational partners. He gave money to the government and a company called Digital Green and made extravagant promises to digitally transform Indian agriculture. Then with the cooperation of his purchased government officials.

“Bill Gates put cameras and electronic sensors in the homes and fields of Indian farmers. He used their cell phones, which he gave them for free, and his fiber optic and 5G installations — which he persuaded the Indian Telecom Company to finance — to catalog, study, and steal farmers’ crop data, indigenous practices, and agricultural knowledge for free. Then he sold it back to them as new data. Instead of digitally transforming farms as he promised, he transformed Indian farmers into digital information. He privatized their seeds and harvested the work of the public system. He ripped out their knowledge assets and heirloom genetics, and installed GMO seeds and other ridiculous practices.” Shiva adds, “His clear agenda was to drive small farmers from the land and eventually mechanize and privatize food production.”

Christian Westbrook, an agricultural researcher and the founder of the online podcast, “Ice Age Farmer,” takes comfort that American farmers know Gates’ history in India and Africa: “We know who Bill Gates is, and we know the mischief he made for small farmers in Mexico, Africa and India. We know that his recent land purchases here are just the start of the Green Revolution 3.0. He wants to suck out the democratic essence of America’s pastoral landscapes and our farm families — to steal our livelihoods, our knowledge, our seeds, and our land.”

Westbrook takes note of the fact that like all chiselers, Gates is always in a rush:

“His strategy is to keep everyone moving so fast they can’t see the scam. He’s always telling us that climate change can’t wait, that we need to accelerate access to these products and adoption of his technologies, that research isn’t happening fast enough.”

Westbrook told me that Gates’ endless talk about “accelerating the process” and his extravagant promises of miraculous new technologies, of “investment,” and of “public-private” partnerships, are all part of his con. “He keeps telling everyone we need to ‘accelerate, accelerate, accelerate.’”

Many farmers say they don’t care to be rescued by Gates. Westbrook says he thinks Gates intends his baronial U.S. spreads to serve as flagships — showcases for his retinue of digital technologies for American farmers. “He’s doing it for the same reasons he brought his technology to Indian farms — to steal their knowledge, and move them off the land.”

Trent Loos, a sixth-generation Midwestern rancher and farm activist, told me that farmers have a knee-jerk reaction against billionaires “playing Monopoly” with American farmland:

“It makes it difficult for young farmers or even those who have farmed for generations, to compete with such deep pockets. It certainly creates a barrier for them. When people with this type of wealth start to buy farms, it makes us wonder what they are really up to. Nobody wants to rent land from Bill Gates, or work as his sharecropper.”

Westbrook says he believes Gates is pursuing a darker agenda. Like Shiva, Westbrook believes that Gates and the other robber barons are using the pretexts of climate, biodiversity, and the zoonotic pandemic threat to get human beings out of the ag business and off the farm. And there is evidence to support him. The Gates Foundation is significantly invested in Alphabet, Google’sparent company. Alphabet has invented “crop sniffing” robots, designed to replace farmers and ranchers, as part of its “Mineral” project. Its “Moonshot” project is “developing and testing a range of software and hardware prototypes based on breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, simulation, sensors, robotics, and more.”

Within a year of purchasing Whole Foods, Jeff Bezos — Gates has a considerable investment in Amazon — also invested heavily in robot-controlled vertical farms that also minimize human involvement with farming.

Says Westbrook, “He wants to get the people off of the farms, get the animals off, and get us all eating his plant-based meats and bug protein.”

“Gates talks about farming as an archaic, quaint, dirty, dangerous, inefficient, barbarous relic from the past that threatens us by increasing the menace of climate change and the risks of global pandemics by putting humans in dangerous contact with microbes,” says Howard Vlieger, an Iowa farmer who has worked as a crop and livestock consultant in the U.S. and Canada since 1992.

Vlieger is an expert on the impacts of pesticides and GMOs on food products and soils. “Gates’ objective is to move the world “away from sustainable and humane animal agriculture that celebrates our contact with the soil and finds good health in our respectful interactions with nature — and toward artificial cows and a grim chemical paradigm that are all features of top-down dystopia. His vision is one of contaminated and unsavory foods and separation of man from nature.”

“Gates seems to have no concept of the joy that ordinary people — people like our family — take in farming,” Nicolette Niman told me. Niman is a California rancher and farmer, and the author of the books “Righteous Porkchop” and “Defending Beef.” Her husband Bill is the founder of Niman Ranch, a co-op of hundreds of small sustainable U.S. cattle and hog growers who market high-quality organic beef and pork from sustainable grass-fed operations.

“Regenerative farming and ranching immeasurably enriches human lives. It’s challenging work, based upon our intimate contact with the earth. At its best, good farming is a quest to understand and follow nature’s models,” Niman said. Niman says that Gates seems to have little interest in nature’s wisdom:

“He doesn’t seem to understand that our engagement with the soil, and joy we get from our contact with the earth, our complex relationship with our animals, even with all the hardships and difficulties, are sources of our freedom and our pride, and happiness at being masters of our destinies.”

“We need to build a world that respects individual self-determination, the humane treatment of animals, and good stewardship of our soils. We need to understand that a wholesome relationship with nature is not only vital to our health and climate, it’s the source of dignity, liberty, and enrichment in our post-industrial era.”

Using wide-ranging technologies, all of these activists from various continents expressed their discomfort with Gates’ tendency to look at population, rather than people, and to see the management of population as a problem in urgent need of his technological solutions.

“Gates sees the forest, not the trees,” Vlieger observes. “And even when he looks at the forest, he only seems to see board feet of lumber — how he can leverage the landscapes for cash and commoditize people.” Vlieger continues:

“Gates’ habit of seeing every human difficulty through the lens of some technological solution from which he can profit is beyond myopic. It’s pathology — sociopathology, really. Gates is a dangerously powerful sociopath with $137 billion and a vision for a top-down technocracy. Does that worry anybody?”

Westbrook says Gates, Cargill and Tyson are a powerful cartel on a mission to end animal agriculture and drive human beings from farms. “It is ‘replacement agriculture,’” says Westbrook. “They even use that word, ‘alternative agriculture.’”

Westbrook’s view of the dystopian future of technocratic totalitarianism envisioned by Bill Gates sounds like a baseless conspiracy theory if one ignores all the evidence supporting him. He predicts that we will very soon — in months, not years — see engineered food shortages and pressures to empty and “improve” the rural landscapes by idling farmland and replacing farm jobs with robots and artificial intelligence.

Westbrook predicts government efforts to push populations toward mega cities and smart cities where businesses are closed, jobs are scarce, and most of us will rely on universal basic income paid in digital currencies — revocable, of course, in cases of noncompliance and disobedience. Westbrook predicts a scenario “where the human cattle are completely dependent on the government for money and food, and all the folks are in one place in the smart cities and they’re easily monitored by the technocrats of Gates’ Great Reset.” Westbrook continued:

“They’re shutting down food production and actually more, more broadly, they’re shutting down all economic activity, all human activity, corralling us into their smart cities. It’s pretty appalling. And now that we’ve got these pandemics, we had to implement medical martial law, and since it’s all a health crisis, we’re also going to have to take over all of your food productions and your nutritional needs. They’ve married these two things.”

Time will tell us if Westbrook’s nightmare is merely a paranoid conspiracy theory — I hope so.

Food Systems Summit

In 2009, Bill Gates, an unelected billionaire with no governmental office or diplomatic portfolio, kicked off his global vaccine enterprise with a speech to the United Nations. He announced the $10 billion donation and declared the launch of his “Decade of Vaccines.” His scheme unfolded like clockwork. Gates’ contributions secured him ironclad control over WHO. As Foreign Affairs has reported, “Few policy initiatives or normative standards set by the World Health Organization are announced before they have been casually, unofficially vetted by Gates Foundation staff.”

Gates created and funded powerful faux-governmental agencies like PATH, GAVI, CEPI, and the Brighton Collaboration, to push vaccines in developing countries, to consolidate his control over public health, and to prepare the groundwork for the global vaccine putsch he had pre-scheduled for 2020.

In January 2019, the WHO dutifully declared — citing no specific evidence — that “vaccine hesitancy” was one of the principal threats to global health. The Gates’ Medical Cartel followed that statement with orchestrated campaigns in every U.S. state and in countries around the globe by pharma-financed politicians introducing laws to mandate vaccines and end exemptions.

Two months later, the powerful House Intelligence Committee chair, Adam Schiff — yet another of Gates’ financial beneficiaries — demanded social media and media companies begin censoring “vaccine misinformation” — a euphemism for any assertion that departs from official pharma and government pronouncements. Gates has giant stakes in Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook. Those companies all began enthusiastically censoring criticism of vaccines.

A year later, the COVID-19 outbreak provided an opportunity of convenience for Gates and his vaccine cartel to consolidate their control of humanity. A May 2020 article by Derrick Broze in The Last American Vagabond observed that, “By tracing the Foundation’s investments and Gates’ relationships we can see that nearly every person involved in the fight against COVID-19 is tied to Gates or his Foundation by two degrees or less.” Their relationship gave Bill Gates and his Foundation an unchallenged influence over the response to the pandemic.

Gates repeatedly declared, in appearances on virtually every network and cable show and on every media platform, that all economic activity must cease until all 7 billion humans were vaccinated and possessed immunization passports. His ten-year Decade of Vaccines that began with his UN appearance had gone off without a hitch. Under the leadership of Gates’ old protégé and loyalist, Fauci, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services arranged immunity from liability for COVID vaccines and committed $48 billion in taxpayer money to buy and distribute a retinue of new experimental vaccines, many of them owned by Gates.

Gates’ control of the process has been complete. His execution of his vaccine prediction was elegant and flawless. And now Gates’ surrogates are rolling out the same playbook to push through his totalitarian food agenda.

During the October 14 -18 plenary of the 46th Session of the UN Committee on World Food Security, the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, announced the convening of a UN Food Systems Summit in 2021. Guterres acknowledged that the Summit had been jointly requested by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Economic Forum (WEF). Bill Gates and his foundation generously fund and control all four organizations.

The UN Food Systems Summit effectively announced a parallel agenda to the one launched by the WEF when it hosted its Great Reset conference in June, 2020. In their research into the UN Food Systems Summit, AGRA Watch (the grassroots advocacy group that follows Gates and his foundation’s failed Green Revolution in Africa) found that of the 12 individuals involved in the Summit, 11 have strong connections to the Gates Foundation.

According to Heather Day of AGRA Watch, in some instances, these organizations were directly funded by the Gates Foundation and others Gates-funded specific programs that had major roles: “So his fingers aren’t just in it; almost every single one of the participants is working for Bill Gates. These are the authors of the UN food systems summit.” The Food Systems Summit is a 100% Gates project.

It gets worse: The coordinator of Gates’ “Decade of Food Security” is Dr. Agnes Kalibata. Kalibata is the President of Gates/Rockefeller’s AGRA program that orchestrated Gates’ notorious failed Green Revolution in Africa. Kalibata is the perfect leader to bring AGRA to the world. The Summit, she predicts, will bring together all the major stakeholders in a public-private partnership “to make food systems inclusive, climate adapted and resilient, and support sustainable peace.”

Kalibata reminded Food Systems Summit participants of the urgency. They had, she said, only 10 years left to accelerate the transformation of our food systems to meet Sustainable Development Goals for climate, nutrition and pandemic response.

The UN Food Systems Summit will lay out Gates’ “Decade of Food” blueprint for the global food agenda to be completed by 2030. We can only pray that Gates’ next new health plan for humanity won’t involve the same level of traumatic violence to our civil rights, to our global economy, to the traditions of our civilization, to the idealism of democracies, and to our self-determination, that accompanied his 2020 “Decade of Vaccines.”

Day is pessimistic: “Gates’ plan will be a roadmap of how to replace everything that is good about farming with the technocrats’ own systems for jobless farming, chemical food and bug protein,” predicts Day.

Conclusion

The Gates Foundation is not conventional philanthropy. It gives miniscule, if any, support to popular causes like the Wounded Warrior Foundation, ASPCA, environmental, or voting rights or civil rights groups.

It is a weaponized philanthropy that Gates launched in 1994 to resuscitate his reputation after the Microsoft antitrust case exposed him as a lying, cheating, thieving, manipulator intent on felonious monopoly control of global information conduits.

Gates has since invested $36 billion into the Gates Foundation, which has a value of $46.9 billionover which he and his wife exercise total control. The foundation has given away only $23.6 billionin charitable grants, and these “gifts” include billions in tax-deductible donations to companies in which Gates is invested, like Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Sanofi.

Gates’ brilliant mind devised this scheme to form a foundation that shelters his income, and allows him to leverage taxpayer dollars by investing the foundation’s earnings in projects that multiply his wealth and expand his power and public prestige, while avoiding taxes.

Using this structure, he can give tax-deductible donations to companies he partly owns and reap personal and foundation profits while avoiding taxes — and allowing him to hide his money in myriad ways. It’s a win-win! Gates has deployed his foundation as the embodiment of his base instincts for monopoly and control — a vehicle for ruthless philanthrocapitalism that hijacks public access and blurs the lines between corporate and public interests, cloaks private profit agendas with lofty public-spirited rhetoric and gives himself monopoly control over public health, our planet’s life support systems, our economics and people.

Gates has made his foundation a tool for consolidating the efforts of his fellow billionaires, captured regulators, and his business partners from Big Pharma, Dirty Energy, GMO food, Telecom and Big Data, and the bought and brain-dead journalists who collectively profit from the multiplying miseries of the dystopian world they have arranged for the rest of us. Gates and his cronies, toadies and minions pump up fear of pandemics, climate change, mass extinction — and offer his vision of new technologies as the salvation, which only he possesses the genius to deploy.

Even as he consolidates control over our health and food systems, Gates is promoting digitalized currencies, calling these systems a “global humanitarian priority.” (Kissinger’s final adjuration is, “Who controls money can control the world”), and in funding ground and space-based and 5G infrastructures, city-sized analytics centers, and biometric chips to mine and harvest our data and biodata and as mechanisms of surveillance, profit, and control.

Gates is planning a satellite fleet that will be able to survey every square inch of the planet 24 hours per day. Such systems will no doubt be useful should populations become restless with political and economic structures that strip citizens of power, shift wealth ever upward, and doom most of humanity to meaningless, hopeless survival.

Democracy and farm freedom advocate Dr. Vandana Shiva says that Gates’ philanthrocapitalism is a “destructive force with the potential to push the future of our planet towards extinction and ecological collapse.” Shiva accuses Gates of using philanthropic capitalism to accelerate the corporate takeover of our seed, agriculture, food, knowledge and global health systems. “He funds the manipulation of information and promotes the erosion of democracy — all in pursuit of personal power and profits.”

Shiva says the Gates Foundation has powered an “unholy alliance” between big capital, science and technology institutions and governments to establish a global empire over life, through monocultures, patents and monopolies designed to destroy the natural world of diversity, self-organization and freedom.

“You have seen the wickedness they can do with vaccines in the name of public health,” Shiva told me. “Well, now he controls the land. He controls the seed. He controls the food. He has the ultimate power to starve us all to death.”

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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s reputation as a resolute defender of the environment stems from a litany of successful legal actions.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

Why China Surpassed the United States

 Why China Surpassed the United States

By Mohamad Shaaf

February 04, 2021 "Information Clearing House" - Following its revolution in1949, China adopted a new economic model based on the basic needs of the population instead of profit. This vital switch resulted in lifting over one billion people out of poverty. Disregarding flaws of the Chinese political model, when measured by Purchasing Power Parity its economy is larger than that of the US by 25 percent. Becoming an economic superpower in this short period of time, and getting ahead of the US, China has already changed the world balance of power. The purpose of this essay is to use several historically proven criteria to determine how China’s dream happened, and why it will continue to win the economic race with the US, peacefully or otherwise. It starts with comparing the Chinese and US economic models, their goals that are reflected by policies, and the race itself. Finally, it will discuss the outcomes, options, and best choices in dealing with China.

II. Economic Model Criteria

1. Primacy of Needs versus Corporate Profit: China’s economy, like that of the US, is a market economy with profit-making and capital accumulation. The main difference is that China’s primary goal is meeting the basic needs of the population, while that of the US is profit. This implies that the Chinese Communist party develops plans based on the provision of basic needs, while the US-two main parties primarily stand for big corporations and monopolies, protecting their profit, and interests. Accordingly, their governments’ goals, priorities, functions, structures, and organizations are different.

2. Public versus Private Ownership: In the US natural resources, land, oil, gas, and other minerals, are mainly owned by private corporations compared to China where all are owned and regulated publicly (collectively). China’s government regulates large and highly profitable state enterprises, which dominate key sectors of the economy; it discourages private ownership of enterprises to limit private-capital accumulation. Also, the majority of banks in China are publicly owned, while in the US all banks, other than one in North Dakota, are privately-owned where profit is in command, rather than responding to the needs of the community including housing, healthcare, and education.

III. Reflections of the Models

1. Stable vs Unstable Economy: The dynamics of the US model leads to structural imbalances: overproduction, over-accumulation of capital, concentration of wealth, monopolies; commodification and privatization of public assets, resources, housing, healthcare, and education. It opens the way for risky speculation and cycles of bubbles and crashes. All the above further increase polarization and inequality.

Historically, the US has had several depressions, and many recessions, about every four years. The Great Depression that started in the US, was the worse and the largest economic disaster in history, with wide and massive cuts in production and employment, widespread poverty, social unrest, family disintegration, suicides, and homicides.

Economic depressions have frequently led to large-scale wars between imperialist rivals for markets: WWI followed the 1907 crash of 50%, 1910-1911, 26%, and WWII came after the Great Depression, 80%. Generally, after an economic downturn the US government steps in by stimulating spending in war or the economy. However, these types of remedies shift the problems, without solving them. In contrast, China’s model does not generate structural imbalances, continuing its steady-state growth. During the US-2008 major economic downturn, considered by Bernanke to be worse than the Great Depression, China continued to have a booming economy with full employment.

The current crises of the economic depression starting prior to and the Covid-19 pandemic have been much worse in the US than in China; confirmed by faster action due to a higher degree of readiness, fewer deaths, and full recovery compared with the US, that is still struggling with waves of infections and economic depression, millions of unemployed who cannot pay their rents and mortgages, anxiety and homelessness, and little hope it will get better.

2. Dynamics of Inequality: Declining vs. Rising: China’s model tends towards a reduction of inequality in wealth, income, wages, housing, healthcare, and educational services, compared with that of the US where the inequality in all of those areas has been trending upward; since the early 1980s with the adaptation of neoliberal policies of the laissez faire and less of government help, such as minimum wage and housing subsidies that inequality has been rising more rapidly.

All land in China is publicly owned, corporations and individuals are not permitted to own land, but business entities and individuals in China may own the structures above the land. This policy makes absolute rent zero, differential, and monopoly rent low due to public ownership of enterprises, which leads to affordable housing. Also, China regulates the housing market, and ensures that housing for low-income residents is affordable, resulting in relatively less expensive houses in China than in the US.

Chinese healthcare is largely publicly owned, leading to less inequality compared with that of the US where healthcare is largely provided by private corporations for profit. Starting from far behind, China has had its own set of healthcare problems. Many indications suggest that the speed of improvement in China’s healthcare is much faster than that of the US. This is confirmed by the speed of Chinese of Covid-19 recovery, and Chinese visitors to the US are often surprised by the high price and long waits at healthcare facilities. While 5% of Chinese have no health coverage, the rate of uncovered in the US is 8.5%.

In China, education is considered a public good. Nine-year compulsory education in China is free, but secondary school and college are not compulsory, nor free. College tuition in China is ranked seventh, $3,300-$9,900, and its best universities are public, unlike the US, where the highest-ranked colleges are private.

Therefore, housing, healthcare, and education are more affordable in China than in the US enabling the Chinese to live better and be content, confirmed by the population’s support of their government.

3. Postures: Defensive vs Offensive: The US has invaded 70 nations since 1776 compared with China which invaded the Korean peninsula during1950-1953, but has not invaded any country since. Very lately China began expansion of trade agreements and created several large free trade zones with other countries, based on mutual respect, and win-win cooperation. China’s defensive posture costs much less than the offensive posture followed by the US, which enables China to grow faster.

4. Dollar Scam Made US the Economic Super Power: The dollar is a tool the US has been using to rob commodities from the world peacefully. The US dollar was originally backed by gold, and since the late 1960s, US dollar creation has far exceeded the stock of gold in US possession. In 1971, Nixon had to stop converting the dollar into gold.

The US covertly replaced gold with oil; five steps were necessary. First, the oil-exporting countries must sell their oil only in dollars; oil importers had to use the dollar to buy oil, which required exchange of their real commodities and assets for the fiat dollar. The real reason why the US invaded Iraq was because Iraq was not selling its oil in dollars, and its leader was hanged (Video). Similarly, the Libyan leader, Gaddafi, was sodomized (Video) and killed. Second, the price of oil was increased quickly by 300%, and continued to be raised gradually to match the dollars stock in circulation. Third, oppose any substitute for oil: sun, wind, and nuclear energy as in France, South Korea, and Iran. Fourth, the US had to control world supply of oil. Fifth, prevent any global-warming agreements and keeping economies dependent on oil.

Moreover, the dollar has been used by the US as a weapon against countries such as Iran, by blocking it from having access to SWIFT. The US has not used this weapon against China and Russia, although they and some other countries have prepared themselves for that possibility by trying not to use the dollar in their transactions with other nations. Now that the US is in an economic dip, it is injecting trillions of dollars, at no cost, to bailout banks, and pay for huge budget and trade deficits. This action and using the dollar as a weapon have both raised the probability of de-dollarization and the loss of US dominance.

IV. War with China

1. An Economic Offensive against China: On day one of a full-scale trade war with China, Reed explains, all the American factories in China would be shut down. Apple would lose its factories, its products, and its Chinese market of 1.4 billion consumers. That action would be repeated for industry after industry; within weeks, Walmart’s shelves would be bare. Not only plastic buckets and mops but chain saws, pharmaceuticals, motorcycles, and blood-pressure cuffs. The US buys 472 billion in goods annually from China, high-tech, low-tech, consumer goods, and manufacturing components. That would cease. The US-China Trade War might be expected to become a war of military resources, under Biden.

2. A Strategic War against China: Rand, a Pentagon think tank has conducted war games and concluded that a war with China could be both very long and a loss for America. It is no longer 1961. In 2021, with her defensive posture, China is not the USSR of 1989, and will not lose. Of utmost importance, the US must stop the aggressive doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance (Video), a dream more now than ever, pushed by discredited neocons who strongly believed in 2003 the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would be a cakewalk. Since the war in Syria, Russia and China with superior defensive weapons such as S-400 and S-500 (Video), wars of aggression should not happen; in fact, it could bring peace.

V. Conclusions

Being far behind with poverty and hunger before1949, today China has eliminated poverty, though the US has not. China, as the winner of the economic race with the US, has consolidated its position on the world stage. The only way the US can catch up is by moving toward the Chinese model with a US-democratic character, and make peace and cooperate with all countries. That will lead to coming out of the current depression for good. The sooner the US revises its model the better; it will be less costly economically and politically. This revised model is an updated version of President Kennedy (Here, Video) and that of President Franklin Roosevelt (Here, Video).

The Western establishments must recognize that, while their economic model already contributed to the material wellbeing of mankind in the past three centuries, it now creates massive unsustainable imbalances. The model of for-profit military-industrial-Congressional-intelligence-media-prison-healthcare-education complex resulted in larger numbers of incarcerated persons, poor public health, loss of innovative spirit, permanent wars, and more “defense” costs. The political system becomes even less democratic, the government becomes like a large-scale organized-crime entity that cannot be controlled and no longer functions at the service of the population. It can only be sustained with more lies, blackmail, distortions, crimes, and aggressions against far-distance defenseless people who have not done any harm against the aggressors. It is about time for the US and its “allies” to accept the fact that the profit-only model is outdated and cannot lead to peace even for their own population, much less for the world.Thus, it is time for the West to cut their losses and stop their propaganda and lies, to discontinue using highly expensive, useless, and ineffective institutions, such as media and think tanks, to justify their aggressive conduct. It is not the time for a new cold war: provocation and aggression against China’s defensive-posture. Failure to change will result in the defeat of the West, at best, and loss of humanity at worse.

Mohamad Shaaf, MBA, PhD, is an Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Central Oklahoma, an empirical research-analyst and has published on a variety of economic issues in professional journals, using Artificial Intelligence, Dynamic Programing, and Econometric Models. His email is: mshaaf@uco.com

Review: Wendy Brown, ‘Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution’

 Review of Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revoon (Zone Books 2015), 296 pages.

Abstract

This review of Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos considers the claim that contemporary processes of neoliberalism are damaging the core principles of democracy. It is argued that Brown is right to follow Foucault in defining neoliberalism as a form of political rationality, but that core arguments of the book could be developed further through attention to the following points: 1). The operation of neoliberal politics and practices outside of the US context; 2). The position of Austrian thought within the history of neoliberal reason; 3). The problematic status of homo economicus within the neoliberal thought; 4). Why the ‘soft power’ of neoliberalism has proved so effective; and 5). How a Marxist theory of capital might be developed alongside Foucauldian critique of neoliberalism.


Reviewed by Nicholas Gane

There are many good books on neoliberalism but this one stands apart. This is a dark, haunting text that questions the fate of democracy under a new regime of neoliberal governance that understands the value of human life purely in economic terms. The starting point of this undertaking is Michel Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics, which analyses the extension of market principles into the state and beyond into civil society and, seemingly, everything ‘social’. In the first chapter of Undoing the Demos, Brown develops a position that is broadly sympathetic to Foucault’s concerns. She writes:

To speak of the relentless and ubiquitous economization of all features of life by neoliberalism is…not to claim that neoliberalism literally marketizes all spheres, even as such marketization is certainly one important effect of neoliberalism. Rather, the point is that neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities – even where money is not at issue – and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo economicus (p.31).

Neoliberalism, then, is not simply about markets, money or social class (which is barely mentioned in this book, except to say that it has disappeared, see p.38); it is rather a condition under which a raw economic rationality is applied to all forms of human activity and becomes the basis of a certain style of political governance. For Brown, nothing is now sacred or exempt from this process. Using Obama as her primary example, she argues that democratic principles of equality or liberty are today being displaced by new concerns for ‘economic growth, competitive positioning, and capital enhancement’ (p.26). The fabric of political life is thus said to be changing for the worse: we are losing our appetite for democratic values not least because liberty is being individualised and recast as a form of market conduct.

Brown’s stark portrayal of these developments is disturbing. There are points in this text when you sit up and take notice. One comes on p.44, where she observes that ‘neoliberalism is the rationality through which capitalism finally swallows humanity…’. Another is on pp.110-1: ‘In place of the liberal promise to secure the politically autonomous and sovereign subject, the neoliberal subject is granted no guarantee of life (on the contrary, in markets, some must die for others to live), and is so tethered to economic ends as to be potentially sacrificible to them’. At the core of this book, then, is an analysis of the biopolitics of contemporary neoliberalism that goes well beyond anything found in Foucault’s lectures. This is not surprising as while Brown uses Foucault as her starting point, she expresses deep dissatisfaction with key aspects of his work. She states, for example, that ‘Foucault’s relative indifference to democracy and to capital constitutes the major limitations in his framework for my specific purposes’ (pp.76-7). While Foucault was remarkably insightful in mapping out different historical trajectories of neoliberal reason, there are recent developments that, for Brown, take us well beyond the limits of his work. These include, for example, ‘The rise of finance capital, the financialization of everything, and the importance of debt and derivatives in shaping the economy and political reason as well as transforming neoliberal rationality itself – its formulation of markets, subjects, and rational action’ (p.70). Increasingly, Brown argues, both states and subjects are cast in the image of firms; as forms of human capital that can be understood in the financial language of speculation, leveraging and risk-taking. For Brown, it is necessary, at this point, to move beyond Foucault’s work on governance by reconsidering the work of Marx, in particular his theory of capital, which is said to exist ‘in excess of its economic operations and circulations and in excess of its aims’ (p.76).

It is hard to disagree with Brown’s diagnosis of the contemporary conditions of neoliberalism, or her aim of working both with and beyond Foucault. But there are some aspects of this book that are frustrating. One is that there is no engagement with contemporary writings on democracy, post-democracy and neoliberalism by figures such as Jodi Dean and Colin Crouch. Instead, Brown has a tendency to return to classical political-philosophical sources (from Aristotle to Rousseau to Hegel to Marx and so on, see pp.87-99) to make an argument about the ‘vanquishing’ of homo politicus in the present. One wonders whether such historical excursions are strictly necessary and whether they really help bolster the core argument of the book or in fact hinder an extended reflection on the type of politics and political engagement that can be developed in the face of neoliberalism’s latest ‘revolution’. Brown does ask, in the final three pages of the book, whether ‘another world is possible?’, through the course of which she briefly considers the value of non-economic forms of exchange. But surely there is more to say here? Little indication is given, for example, of how, exactly, the political Left is to combat ‘neoliberalism’s perverse theology of markets’ (p.221), or of why the neoliberal revolution has been, and continues to be, so successful. A key question is why has the ‘soft power’ of neoliberal reason been so attractive to so many, and why has it met with such feeble opposition from the political Left, which too often seems to have been seduced by the neoliberal reason that it initially set out to oppose (as documented by Stuart Hall)? Brown observes, quite rightly, that ‘neoliberalism governs as sophisticated common sense’ (p.35), but what exactly is the relationship between neoliberal governance and common sense, and how does it work so effectively?

Another point of frustration is that the book, to large extent, is written with a North American reader in mind. Many of the examples discussed in Part Two (‘Disseminating Neoliberal Reason’) reflect this geographical specificity, including the legal cases (such as Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission) that are used to illustrate what Brown calls the ‘economization of politics through law’ (p.164), and the examples selected to show that the damage done to democracy by the neoliberalization of higher education. To some extent, this is fine as there is nothing wrong in writing about the things that are closest to you, and clearly these are important examples of the practical workings of new forms of neoliberal reason. But, nonetheless, some reflection is needed on the extent to which it is possible to generalize from these examples. Is it the case, for example, that the US is at the forefront of a neoliberal revolution that the rest of the world is destined to follow? And is it possible to extrapolate a universal understanding of neoliberalism from the US experience? Clearly this is not Brown’s intention as she writes that neoliberalism is paradoxical as a global phenomenon: ‘ubiquitous and omnipresent, yet disunified and nonidentical with itself’ (p.48). But there is a danger in starting with a definition of neoliberal reason as something that is ‘ubiquitous’ (‘in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, culture, and a vast range of quotidian activity…’, p.17) and then illustrating this mainly through reference to the North American situation, when in fact neoliberal reason is no single thing and is being rolled-out in subtly different ways in different national contexts.

Where this really becomes an issue is in the definition of neoliberalism that lies at the core of this book. Quite rightly, Brown argues that ‘neoliberal political rationality does not merely marketize in the sense of monetizing all social conduct and social relations, but, more radically, casts them in an exclusively economic frame, one that has both epistemological and ontological dimensions’ (p.62). For this reason, Brown follows Foucault in placing homo economicus at the centre of her argument, but in order to make this move the epistemological underpinnings of different types of neoliberal thought need closer attention. For while this figure might be central to Gary Becker’s writings on human capital, homo economicus does not occupy a similar place within all forms of neoliberal reason. Hayek, for example, who barely features in this book and who is characterised, mistakenly, as someone ‘raised on Ordoliberalism’ (p.59), is hostile to the idea of homo economicus because he sees instead the rational powers of individual actors to be limited, which is why we should look to the market for answers. Ludwig von Mises, Hayek’s early mentor, was even more scathing of homo economicus because it was an idea that came originally from John Stuart Mill; a figure he despised for corrupting classical liberalism with socialist ideals under the influence of his wife, Harriet Taylor. These nuances are missed by Brown who follows Foucault in neglecting the influence of Austrian thought and instead constructs a genealogy of neoliberal reason that leads, ultimately, to Gary Becker and ideas of human capital. This means that the concept of homo economicus is set up as something of a straw man when in fact the underlying epistemologies (in the plural) and resultant politics of neoliberalism are far more complex (including, for example, psychological developments in behavioural economics that take Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments rather than The Wealth of Nations as their starting point).

The point to take from this is that the politics and epistemologies of neoliberalism are mobile and slippery, and can be both for and against a conception of homo economicus at the same time (depending upon which strand of neoliberal reason you read and the effects, at the moment, that it is trying to produce). At the level of politics, however, Brown does a fine job of capturing the double standards of neoliberalism, both in theory and in practice. She writes:

In the economic realm, neoliberalism aims simultaneously at deregulation and control. It seeks to privatize every public enterprise, yet valorizes public-private partnerships that imbue the market with ethical potential and social responsibility and the public realm with market metrics. With its ambition for unregulated and untaxed capital flows, it undermines national sovereignty while intensifying preoccupation with national GNP, GDP, and other growth indicators in national and postnational constellations (p.49).

This statement provokes the following question: what is the best strategy for dealing with a body of thought that, on one hand, is riddled with internal contradictions and tensions and yet, on the other, is highly coherent and effective (for example, through the transformation of human subjects into financialized forms of capital)? Should we seek to destabilize neoliberalism by exposing its internal inconsistencies, or reject its market rationalities by embracing forms of sociality and politics that cannot be reduced to economic principles such as price, or perhaps both? These questions are, to some extent, left hanging, and the book leaves one with the feeling that the battle against neoliberalism is being lost, and perhaps even that there is an air of inevitability about where things are heading. This book, then, is at the same time enlightening and disheartening: it provides a brilliant insight into some of the darkest developments of our times while at the same time providing little hope for social and political change of a different kind.


Nicholas Gane is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK. His current research addresses the history of neoliberalism and the sociological implications of the recent financial crisis. His publications include Max Weber and Contemporary Capitalism (Palgrave, 2012).

Email n.gane@warwick.ac.uk

quarta-feira, 3 de fevereiro de 2021

Bolsonaro y el mito del presidente «antiestablishment»

 

Bolsonaro y el mito del presidente «antiestablishment»

Las burlas a Bolsonaro, en razón de su incompetencia o ingenuidad, no hacen más que contribuir a despolitizarlo en sus propios términos antiestablishment y darle el privilegio de ser criticado —o, peor aún, de ser absuelto de toda responsabilidad— como si operara fuera del marco de la racionalidad política y no tuviera en última instancia que responder de sus actos. Además, contribuye a considerar que la verdadera alternativa a él son las fuerzas de derecha aglutinadas en el Centrão son la verdadera respuesta a él. Este movimiento no es de ayuda para las izquierdas.

Bolsonaro y el mito del presidente «antiestablishment»

Los resultados de las más recientes elecciones municipales en Brasil han sido interpretados de distintas maneras por sus diversos protagonistas. Para algunos analistas, los comicios mostrarían de manera incontestable el debilitamiento de la ola de ultraderechadel 2018 y de la capacidad del presidente Jair Bolsonaro para respaldar candidatos con éxito. Para otros, indicaron preferencias electorales de bajo riesgo: las restricciones que impuso el covid-19 en las campañas habrían favorecido supuestamente la reelección de alcaldes y concejales, así como de candidatos afiliados a partidos políticos bien asentados. En efecto, el fortalecimiento de varios partidos de derecha y centroderecha llevó a algunos a proclamar incluso el retorno de la «vieja política», o de la política a secas, en contradicción con la tendencia antipolítica de la última elección presidencial. Otros creyeron oportuno precisar todavía que la «vieja política», por más que se la tildara de antiestablishment, siempre había estado en realidad en el centro de la palestra. Los análisis advirtieron también cambios en la configuración de los partidos de izquierda y centroizquierda y explicaron que el Partido de los Trabajadores (PT) no era ya el único actor de peso dentro del campo progresista, haciendo hincapié en la presentación sin precedentes de candidatos LGBTI+, por primera vez electos en semejantes proporciones.

No fueron menos diversas las reacciones poselectorales de personeros y aliados del gobierno. Filipe Martins, asesor del presidente en materias de política exterior, publicó en Twitter un largo hilo en el que instaba a la «derecha» —entiéndase, el gobierno y sus acólitos— a aprender de sus errores y a ser más autocrítica. Dirigiéndose principalmente a un público que se autodefine como conservador, recordó que la victoria de 2018 había sido resultado de una coyuntura sociopolítica propicia, construida gradualmente desde 2013. La reunificación en torno a un objetivo común y la afiliación a un partido para construir una relación significativa y duradera con los electores, proseguía Martins, son pasos esenciales de cara a la reelección de 2022. Mientras Martin insistía en la necesidad de un replanteamiento interno más estratégico, algunos miembros de la base de apoyo del gobierno en el Congreso, tales como Bia Kicis y Carla Zambelli, se apresuraron a cuestionar la legitimidad del resultado, sugiriendo un posible fraude.

En la reacción de Bolsonaro, por otro lado, hubo tres frentes: primero, el presidente pregonó una «derrota histórica para la izquierda»; luego restó importancia a su participación en las campañas de algunos candidatos no exitosos; por último, repitió su infundado alegato contra la probidad del sistema de voto electrónico y exigió el regreso de las papeletas impresas (aunque perteneciente desde hace ya algunos años al arsenal conspiracionista de Bolsonaro, el «negacionismo electoral» parece haber adquirido en efecto nuevos bríos entre los grupos de extrema derecha tras las elecciones de noviembre pasado en Estados Unidos). La respuesta un tanto ecléctica del presidente se ajusta por cierto a una retórica maniquea que ya le es familiar: presentarse ora como el vencedor de una contienda de antemano desfavorable, ganada contra todo pronóstico, ora como víctima de una implacable persecución por parte de instituciones o figuras poderosas y siniestras, con lo cual elude cualquier responsabilidad ante una derrota, un fracaso o una negligencia. Sin embargo, mientras redoblada teorías conspirativas e se esmeraba en pintar un cuadro vitorioso, parecía también prestar oído –aunque de manera más discreta– a Martins, orgulloso discípulo del escritor Olavo de Carvalho, admirador de Steve Bannon y adalid de la ideología de línea dura del gobierno.

Extrapolar los resultados de las elecciones municipales a la elección presidencial es un ejercicio problemático: los aspectos que la gente prioriza a escala local y nacional pueden no coincidir forzosamente. En Brasil, no obstante, las elecciones municipales suelen leerse como un indicador más o menos sintomático del estado de ánimo electoral. Ahora bien, sean cuales sean los pronósticos, el hecho de que los partidos tradicionales del Centrão controlen hoy casi la mitad de las municipalidades del país los convierte en actores de mayor peso aún en las dos cámaras del Congreso. El Centrão, un conglomerado de partidos «fisiológicos» de derecha y centroderecha, es conocido por negociar su apoyo a cualquier gobierno en ejercicio —independientemente de su orientación política— a cambio de cargos estratégicos y beneficios financieros.

Pese a su virulento rechazo de los acuerdos «de trastienda» y a su promesa de no negociar con una clase política que considera podrida, Bolsonaro se acercó al Centrão a principios de 2020, al sentirse amenazado por un posible proceso de destitución. Poco más de un año después de asumir el cargo, su gobierno incurría  en la misma práctica cuya perpetuación reprochara —y continúa reprochando frecuentemente aún— a sus predecesores. En lugar de incitar la furia de sus adeptos, esta táctica fue presentada de manera bastante convincente a la leal base bolsonarista, como un mal necesario que permitiría al presidente gobernar sin oposición significativa. También fue vista de forma más bien positiva por algunos sectores de la oposición, que asumían —o esperaban— que la «infiltración» de miembros de partidos tradicionales haría peso al extremismo del gobierno y contendría la influencia de su «base ideológica» más radical.

Dos circunstancias adicionales podrían contribuir a afianzar aún más los lazos entre la administración actual y los miembros del Centrão. La primera tiene relación con la necesidad de afiliación partidaria de Bolsonaro. El presidente rompió filas con el Partido Social Liberal (PSL) menos de un año después de su elección y se ha mantenido desde entonces como independiente. Su tentativa de crear un partido propio, Alianza por Brasil, ha sido hasta ahora infructuosa y todo parece indicar que este no será creado a tiempo para la campaña presidencial de 2022. De hecho, el mismo Bolsonaro precisó que, de no estar creada la alianza para marzo de 2021, se afiliaría a alguno de los partidos ya existentes. La segunda circunstancia que allana el camino para la consolidación de los nexos entre el gobierno del antiestablishment y el Centrão, representante por antonomasia del establishment, es la renovación de las presidencias del Senado y de la Cámara de Diputados en febrero de 2021. No es una coincidencia que Bolsonaro haya fijado la fecha de su nueva afiliación partidaria para después de la investidura de ambos presidentes.

Estos cargos son por cierto de suma importancia. Los presidentes de las cámaras participan por ejemplo en el Consejo de Defensa Nacional y en el Consejo de la República. Pero es el presidente de la Cámara de Diputados quien decide, entre otras cosas, si considera o desestima una moción de destitución contra el Presidente de la República. La carrera por la sucesión, que se anuncia reñidísima, ya ha comenzado. La candidatura de Arthur Lira, conocido como líder del Centrão en la Cámara Baja, cuenta por su parte con el apoyo del gobierno. Por otra parte, el actual presidente de la Cámara de Diputados, Rodrigo Maia, ha respaldado oficialmente a Baleia Rossi como su sucesor, quien cuenta con el apoyo de una coalición de once partidos de oposición. Aunque ambos aspirantes prometen presidir la Cámara de manera autónoma, muchos temen que la estrechísima relación de Lira con el gobierno y el Centrão se torne aún más enmarañada y que Bolsonaro tenga más posibilidades todavía de evitar un potencial proceso de destitución.

Un equívoco persistente presenta a Bolsonaro como un político incapaz de cualquier planificación; como una figura de pocas luces, bufonesca y ocasionalmente brusca, destinada con toda probabilidad a la autodestrucción debido a su absoluta incompetencia en el gobierno de un país. Esta imagen ya generalizada, sin embargo, podría representar acaso la mayor fortaleza de Bolsonaro. Como el filósofo Marcos Nobre lo demostró de modo convincente, Bolsonaro no es ni un burro ni un loco: muy al contrario, su método estriba precisamente en su estilo caótico y estrafalario. Desestimarlo en razón de su incompetencia o ingenuidad, por consiguiente, no hace más que contribuir a despolitizarlo en sus propios términos antiestablishment y darle el privilegio de ser criticado —o, peor aún, de ser absuelto de toda responsabilidad— como si operara fuera del marco de la racionalidad política y no tuviera en última instancia que responder de sus actos. En cambio, afirma Nobre, urge reconocer que Bolsonaro opera dentro de un marco tanto o más político que cualquiera —un marco más bien atípico, por supuesto, pero político al fin y al cabo.

Es precisamente ese marco político, sumado al propósito de permanecer en el poder, lo que a menudo se desdeña como algo pueril e insubstancial. A lo largo de su presidencia, Bolsonaro ha mantenido una aprobación de alrededor de un tercio del país. Fluctuante por momentos, este tercio ha demostrado hasta ahora ser particularmente resistente en su apoyo al presidente en cada una de las fases de su mandato. La base bolsonarista, lejos de ser homogénea o uniforme, se siente especialmente atraída por el estilo heterodoxo de Bolsonaro, con frecuencia de una inflamatoria incorrección política. Como ha sugerido Nobre, a Bolsonaro le interesa particularmente mantener la lealtad de esta base puesto que con la aprobación de un tercio de la población no solo se escuda contra un proceso de destitución sino que también garantiza buenas posibilidades de llegar a la segunda vuelta en las próximas elecciones. Así pues, aunque algunas maniobras «extremas» o autoritarias del presidente siguen siendo consideradas insostenibles a largo plazo, son ellas precisamente las que parecen hacer viable su candidatura para 2022. Y Bolsonaro mantiene el apoyo de un tercio del electorado prestando atención a sus demandas y, no pocas veces, a sus quejas.

Filipe Martins ha descrito el «ala ideológica» del gobierno como el grupo que comprende la base de apoyo original y más leal a Bolsonaro, una que continúa siendo fiel a las propuestas y valores que obtuvieron un entusiasta respaldo popular en 2018. Perteneciente a este grupo —junto con figuras como la del ministro de Relaciones Exteriores, Ernesto Araújo, y la del ex Ministro de Educación, Abraham Weintraub— Martins, junto con Bolsonaro, aboga por un drástico descuaje de todo vestigio de la «hegemonía izquierdista» y una lucha encarnizada contra el «globalismo». Su cruzada, solo en parte asimilable a la retórica populista de Bolsonaro, es sin embargo esencial para movilizar el tercio (o al menos una parte de él) y crucial, por eso mismo, para el proyecto autoritario de Bolsonaro.

Si bien los populismos de extrema derecha suelen ser descritos como proyectos políticos que erosionan subrepticiamente la democracia desde dentro, Steve Bannon ha hablado abiertamente de la «deconstrucción del estado administrativo». El «ala ideológica» del gobierno brasileño prevé un proceso similar de depuración y refundación. Y aunque esto puede ser imaginado como un proyecto de exorcismo nacional, lo cierto es que desafía fundamentalmente la existencia misma de un proyecto democrático en Brasil, trátese de un proyecto liberal o iliberal. El país está inclinándose lentamente hacia un régimen antidemocrático, deriva a la que contribuyen también los aliados del gobierno.

A diferencia de lo que suele pensarse, Bolsonaro es un líder abiertamente autoritario que nunca ha ocultado su admiración por la dictadura militar (1964-1985) —para él la única «verdadera democracia» de la historia reciente del país— ni su animosidad contra la Constitución de 1988, que califica de «izquierdista». Al lanzar su candidatura a la presidencia, supo no obstante renunciar estratégicamente a sus posiciones antidemocráticas y, gracias a alianzas clave con «garantes» creíbles de la moderación, ganó por abrumadora mayoría. Un ejemplo notable de esto es el actual ministro de Economía, Paulo Guedes, que actuó como garante del mercado financiero en la futura administración de Bolsonaro y le confirió con ello el apoyo de los electores preocupados por las políticas financieras y económicas. Un mes antes de las elecciones de 2018, en una entrevista con Malu Gaspar, Guedes había prometido «domar» a Bolsonaro, a quien se refirió como «un sujeto completamente tosco, bruto». Casi dos años más tarde, es Bolsonaro quien parece haber «domado» a Guedes.

Quienes vieron en las elecciones municipales de 2020 una derrota de Bolsonaro, evaluarán probablemente sus acuerdos con el Centrão como un compromiso amargo —y bien podría ser el caso. Pero no se trata en realidad de un compromiso que mine su gobierno ni que lo modere o lo encauce por rumbos democráticos. Como advirtiera la cientista política Flávia Biroli, es probable que el fortalecimiento de los partidos del Centrão en las elecciones municipales favorezca en última instancia la candidatura de Bolsonaro para 2022, al constituir aquellos una base de apoyo para el gobierno en las dos cámaras del Congreso. En caso de ser reelegido, el presidente intentará con toda probabilidad consolidar su proyecto antidemocrático.

Bolsonaro demostró que distaba de abandonar sus anhelos autoritarios cuando, tras participar en las protestas anticonstitucionales que pedían la intervención militar y el cierre del Congreso y la Corte Suprema, decidió dar un golpe de estado el pasado mes de mayo. Todo parece indicar que habría puesto en ejecución su plan de no haber sido disuadido por el Jefe del Gabinete de Seguridad Institucional, el general de ejército en retiro Augusto Heleno, quien lo convenció de que «no era el momento».

Hay muy pocas dudas con respecto al inexistente compromiso del actual gobierno brasileño con la democracia liberal. A la luz de esto, huelga dirigir nuestra atención hacia quienes pactan alianzas con él y fomentan con ello su proyecto político. ¿Por cuánto tiempo está dispuesto el establishment político a hacer vista gorda ante los designios autoritarios de Bolsonaro? ¿Hasta dónde tiene que llegar el presidente para empezar a ser considerado como un lastre para la democracia y no ya como un socio de prestigio? O, para decirlo de forma más provocativa y esquemática: ¿quién representa un mayor peligro para la democracia brasileña: Bolsonaro —un político abierta e impenitentemente autoritario— o el Centrão —una coalición de partidos que siempre prioriza ganancias financieras y posiciones de poder por encima de cualquier pauta política?


Traducción: Ignacio Albornoz Fariña

Este artículo es producto de la alianza entre Nueva Sociedad y DemocraciaAbierta.