Seeding Freedom
The response to the virus could be a swindle.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a massive transfer of wealth to the rich.
The collective wealth of America’s billionaires has jumped by $931 billion, or nearly one-third, since mid-March, roughly the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, even as the U.S. economy was reeling from a huge spike in joblessness and a collapse in taxes collected, according to a new report by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).
The total net worth of the nation’s 644 billionaires has risen from $2.95 trillion on March 18 to $3.88 trillion on October 13 or 31.6%, based on Forbes billionaires data. March 18 is the rough start date of the pandemic shutdown, when most federal and state economic restrictions were put in place. Forbes’ annual billionaires report was published March 18, 2020, and the real-time data was collected Oct. 13 from the Forbes website.
Needless to say, ordinary workers did not fare as well as billionaires during the pandemic:
Nearly 62 million lost work between Mar. 21 and Sept. 19, 2020 [U.S. Department of Labor]
25 million were collecting unemployment on Sept. 19, 2020 [U.S. Department of Labor]
98,000 businesses have permanently closed [Yelp/CNBC]
12 million have lost employer-sponsored health insurance during the pandemic as of August 26, 2020 [Economic Policy Institute]
22 million adults reported not having enough food in the past week between Sep. 2-28, including 14 million with children in the household. [Center on Budget & Policy Priorities, CBPP]
1 in 6 renters reported being behind on September rent payments, including 12%of Colorado renters. [CBPP]
Despite growing needs and economic hardship caused by the pandemic, President Trump and U.S. Senate Republicans have refused to pass another financial aid package to help working families and to maintain state and local public services. Instead, they have opted to focus on expediting the confirmation of a new Supreme Court justice before the election.
While global lockdowns have decimated small biz & left many to struggle financially, wealthy globalists have amassed immense profits, & lockdowns have prevented public mobilization against tech & retail giants.
To facilitate the transfer of wealth, the elite lobby for the elimination of labor, environmental laws, & human & farmer’s rights. social justice & anti-GMO advocate Vandana Shiva, Ph.D wrote a book with her son,"Oneness Vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom."
Shiva means “kind”, “benign”, “auspicious”.
She argues that the ultra-wealthy elite are responsible for a majority of the environmental, financial & health crises currently facing us. look who is making all the $ off this pandemic.A small number of billionaires who have become ultra-rich over the past 30 years too.
One key player is Bill Gates, whose wealth & "philanthropic" efforts have garnered him unprecedented influence over agriculture & global health policies that threaten food security & human health. One of the "solutions" to climate change offered by this billionaire club was geoengineering, in reality is no solution at all. the climate is already changing for the worse, due to engineering temperatures, deflecting sunlight, dumping iron fillings on the ocean & chemicals in the sky, creating artificial volcanoes, creating additional problems without solving the original one.
The rich have amassed fantastic profits. The 2008 crisis was about deregulation of the financial economy. it was about taking securities, bundling up risk, & the system totally collapsed. Companies wanted to own & patent life. They also wanted to change the trade laws. They wanted to own seeds as their creation. she heard this in a 1987 [United Nations] meeting. That's when she decided to save seeds, keep track of the GATT & World Trade Organization (WTO). The antiglobalization movement grew out of that, & International Forum on Globalization.
We shut down WTO in Seattle, which shows the power of the people. We will not allow this lie of seed being Monsanto's invention. she worked with the Indian government to write laws. Article 3G says seeds are not inventions. This is what has prevented Monsanto from ripping off Indian farmers more than they did. They've been taken to court now for the illegal collection of technology fees.
Monsanto's behavior is also big tech's behavior. Do they produce anything? No. They only collect rents on digital platforms. They're rent collectors. Whether it's Amazon or Gates, they're basically rent collectors. What they've done with this pandemic is literally create a closed economy, which depends on them & their rent collection. The massive wealth transfer that has occurred in 2020 thanks to the pandemic lockdowns during which small businesses were forced to close while giant multinational companies were allowed to stay open & monopolize the market.
The end result is the largest transfer of wealth in modern history. (now we know why the lockdowns have really been put into effect)
India mobilized against Walmart's encroachment, which threatened to destroy local businesses. but COVID-19 lockdowns have prevented the same kind of mobilization against tech & retail giants. As local businesses around the world have had to close their doors for months on end.
Amazon’s power has exploded and is even encroaching on grocery suppliers. While they rob you of your job, they're still extracting money from you for that forced software program on digital payments, for software programs on … digital education.
Poor Indian children, who could afford a universal education, now cannot afford education because their parents have no smartphones. We are seeing an engineered imposition of an economy. A healthy economy grows as an evolution with choices, with justice, with equity.
True economies would say 'Here is what I bring. If my digital currency is better than your cash, choose it. Is my forced vaccination better than your immunity? Make your choice.
The minute choice is removed from people's life, democracies stop.
When choice is removed from our conditions of being, our conditions of living, then life is threatened. What is globalization but deregulation of commerce? It is knocking down every law that was put in place by democratic societies for the protection of the environment, the protection of health, the right to education, the rights of workers.
Now that's what's being targeted. All of these companies are rent collectors. Facebook turns our minds into a raw material that is then capitalized upon. Gates is particularly vicious because through the Gates Foundation, he pretends to be doing philanthropy with every philanthropic endeavor, he carves out new colonies from which he can collect new rents & make new investments. No matter how much he gives, he gets richer.
In her book, Shiva explains how, without Gates, there would be no commercial gene editing, which is the new GMO.
He created a company called Editas Medicine Inc. to facilitate the patenting of these new climate-resilient plants, with which they aim to create new medicines. He will do biofortification to solve the nutrition problem. they want to use their money-making tools to make more $$.
Note: I personally have no problem with people wanting to make money but I DO have issues with people who make money and profit off of the suffering of others.
It is a dictatorship of the technology balance. People should be paying a lot more attention to the violent imposition of digitalization.
Shiva says: A lot of my friends, never studied the roots of these violence systems, did not understand that agrichemicals came from Hitler's concentration camps & the agrichemical industry is the poison cartel responsible for the genocide.
They're continuing that genocide.
Technologies as tools of domination & exploitation are not neutral. How can a surveillance economy be an enlargement of your freedom? You have to have the systems in place, the regulations in place, the choices in place to be able to make these technologies a servant not your master.
They also want to merge all of these various industries together agriculture, technology & finance. Shiva recounts how, in 2016, India banned all cash & made digital transactions compulsory. 90% of poor people lost their savings, their incomes as small, local economies evaporated.
Meanwhile, the wealthy elites also control the world's economy via their asset funds.
Corporations are owned by the billionaires who control every big company, Coca-Cola to McDonald's to Boeing. Look at anything in the world, it's the billionaire money & their asset management funds. Last year, BlackRock increased its wealth from $1 trillion to $7 trillion, billionaires increased their wealth.
During the lockdown, they invaded even more deeply into the Amazon & became richer. These investment asset management funds are the billionaires' wealth. They are merging with IT & info tech & the tech barons, merging with biotechnology & chemical industry.
That's why they're talking about digitalization of agriculture, farming without farmers & worse, food without food.
One of the big pushes of Gates & Silicon Valley is into fake food. while Big Biotech claims GMOs will save your health & protect the planet, these pesticide-laden plants are doing the complete opposite.
There's also the issue of social justice. She cites Gandhi, who said that if you're in doubt about what the right thing to do is, "bring the face of the most vulnerable person to your mind's eye & do what is good for them." If you think it will harm them more, don't do it.
They deliberately want to get rid of large parts of humanity.
Shiva says "First thru hunger, then thru sickness. They want a digital economy, they want a sick economy. Otherwise, you wouldn't be spending all your time on Big Pharma; you'd spend your time making sure that the smaller farmer doesn't get destroyed.
On a planetary scale, we are seeing these irresponsible, greedy, indifferent, callous men bring the world & humanity, to a brink. That's why we have to act & find creative solutions.
All of these tech barons who have taken over the economy, hiding behind the virus, are all jumping into life sciences. Google has a new life sciences division. This will be the final defeat of Mother Nature, At a time when the world is waking up to the rules of nature & healthy bodies, healthy ecosystems an eco-healthy planet, they're still carrying on the Colonial war on Mother Nature.
They've been carefully planning this for decades. We now see clear evidence that a "great economic reset" is in the works, which will transition everything over to digital currencies.
If there's one project we should have, it's strategies to get rid of the robber barons, whatever it takes. ~ Vandana Shiva, Ph.D.
The industrial revolution shifted our mindset to one where we thought of nature as dead. The result was ecological destruction & fragmentation of society. The coming economic reset is basically part of an effort to further manipulate & shift our mental framework toward something wholly unnatural. In India, they are attacking organic & created something called the Zero-Budget Natural Farming …
What they're basically doing is giving big loans to the state, which then gives fat loans to the farmer while Gates is mining farm data. He's getting people placed in the homes of farmers to mine data. They'll create algorithms to sell that data back. All of this is now being reduced to carbon in the soil. You'll get zero % for what you grow. You can get no needs of yours met thru food but we will allow you to trade in the global market on the carbon in your soil, that's what would keep you alive.
This whole financialization of nature is 1 aspect. 2nd aspect in the great reset is to redo the economy to make it look like those who are now disposable throwaway people deserved it.
Microsoft's patent, basically reduces human beings to users. Our brain activity is tapped into in various ways. Everyone wants to have smart wear Shiva calls it spyware. That data goes thru algorithms. Those algorithms will decide what we are worthy of & Bitcoins will be allocated to us.
Every child born is born worthy. Every member of society has equal human rights.
They're undoing everything we've put in place on humanity, on human rights, on democracy.
We need to be alert.
The whole issue of the pandemic & lockdown was useful for them for 2 reasons. 1, they could get everyone afraid. 2, they could get everyone distracted while they took over the economy, they took over our minds. They basically transferred all the remaining wealth to themselves.
You can find more details about Shiva's work on http://Navdanya.org.
There's a new rising of consciousness of the planet & its living systems, of our health & the connection between our health & the health of the planet.
To the extent they can keep the virus as their shield to hide behind, they will.
Rather than allowing COVID-19 fear-mongering to take over our lives, we need to look at the infrastructures of life, humanity, democracy, economy & taxation.
Start thinking about who's taking them away from us.
You have to protect that which you treasure.
Freedom & life are what are being taken right now … We have to resist fear & resist hate. We are thinking beings; let us use the minds we've been given & rebuild community.
I don't think the 6-foot distancing is by accident. Why do they use the words 'social distancing' rather than 'physical distancing'? 6 feet is a physical measure. They … want us to forget that being a human being means being in community. They want us to be users of gadgets.
Note: they used TV to make us into consumers of products.
Read Captains of Consciousness by Stewart Ewen.
We must be community. We must remember that we are interrelated to the rest of life on Earth & to society. We have to be talking about how to rebuild regenerative economies
We lost 2 decades of how food is produced. if people start becoming aware that eating good food is the single most important strategy for health & growing food in the right way is the single most important path to health of the planet, this will rebuild community.
We need to start doing homework to say, 'Where's the wealth going? How should the tax flow look? How is our money going to make the billionaires richer? How can they keep extracting more money out of us? How is our public $ the new subsidy to create the infrastructure for greed, rather than be the public resources to create the infrastructure of life, of care & solidarity?
What in our current legal framework can stop this hemorrhaging of public $ to move upwards to the billionaires? These are foundational issues.
Who are we as human beings? How will we live in the future? What is the future we will create long after the robber barons are gone, they were there in the 1930s & we learned how to get rid of them. one project we should have, it's strategies to get rid of the robber barons whatever it takes.
I don't think we have the luxury to be hopeless. Hope is something you must cultivate on a daily basis. Cultivating hope is cultivating resistance. Cultivating hope is cultivating the strategy.
Read "Oneness Vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom."