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Resisting Tyranny: Struggling for Seed Sovereignty in Latin America by Colin Todhunter February 1, 2018

The Latin America Seeds Collective has just released a 40-minute film ( Seeds: Common or Corporate Property?) which documents the resistance of peasant farmers to the corporate takeover of their agriculture.
The film describes how seed has been central to agriculture for 10,000 years. Farmers have been saving, exchanging and developing seeds for millennia. Seeds have been handed down from generation to generation. Peasant farmers have been the custodians of seeds, knowledge and land.
This is how it was until the 20th century when corporations took these seeds, hybridised them, genetically modified them, patented them and fashioned them to serve the needs of industrial agriculture with its monocultures and chemical inputs.
To serve the interests of these corporations by marginalising indigenous agriculture, a number of treaties and agreement over breeders’ rights and intellectual property have been enacted to prevent peasant farmers from freely improving, sharing or replanting their traditional seeds. Since this began, thousands of seed varieties have been lost and corporate seeds have increasingly dominated agriculture.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that globally just 20 cultivated plant species account for 90 percent of all the plant-based food consumed by humans. This narrow genetic base of the global food system has put food security at serious risk.
To move farmers away from using native seeds and to get them to plant corporate seeds, the film describes how seed ‘certification’ rules and laws are brought into being by national governments on behalf of commercial seed giants like Monsanto. In Costa Rica, the battle to overturn restrictions on seeds was lost with the signing of a free trade agreement with the US, although this flouted the country’s seed biodiversity laws.
Seed laws in Brazil created a corporate property regime for seeds which effectively marginalised all indigenous seeds that were locally adapted over generations. This regime attempted to stop farmers from using or breeding their own seeds.
It was an attempt to privatise seed. The privatisation of something that is a common heritage. The privatisation and appropriation of inter-generational knowledge embodied by seeds whose germplasm is ‘tweaked’ (or stolen) by corporations who then claim ownership.
In the film, an interviewee claims that if corporate seeds end up in a peasants’ field, the corporation can take the entire crop. It is a way of getting rid of the small farmer as agribusiness corporations strive to take control of the entire global food chain.
However, the film is as much about resistance as it is about corporate imperialism. No matter how well organised small farmers become, they might not be able to win the battle on their own. The struggle has to be taken to cities to raise awareness among consumers about how food is being appropriated by transnational corporations without their consent or knowledge. Without involving consumers, they become an ignorant link which merely serves to perpetuate the chain of corporate control.
The film moves from country to country in South America to highlight how farmers and social movements are fighting back to regain or retain control. Corporate control over seeds is also an attack on the survival of communities and their traditions. Seeds are integral to identity because in rural communities, people are acutely aware that they are ‘all children of the seed’. Their lives have been tied to planting, harvesting, seeds, soil and the seasons for thousands of years.
Corporate control is also an attack on biodiversity and – as we see the world over – on the integrity of soil, water, food, diets and health as well as on the integrity of international institutions, governments and officials which have too often been corrupted by powerful transnational corporations.
The film highlights the fight back against the ‘Monsanto law’ (GM corn) in Guatemala. It shows how movements are resisting regulations and seed certification laws designed to eradicate traditional seeds by allowing only ‘stable’, ‘uniform’ and ‘novel’ seeds on the market (read corporate seeds). These are the only ‘regulated’ seeds allowed: registered and certified. It is a cynical way of eradicating indigenous farming practices at the behest of corporations.
As part of the resistance, farmers are organising seed exchanges, seed fairs, public markets and seed banks. They want to ensure that seeds for different altitudes, different soils and different nutritional needs remain available.
In Brazil, the film describes how previous governments supported peasant agriculture and agroecology by developing supply chains with public sector schools and hospitals (Food Acquisition Programme). This secured good prices and brought farmers together. It came about by social movements applying pressure on the government to act.
The federal government also brought native seeds and distributed them to farmers across the country, which was important for combatting the advance of the corporations as many farmers had lost access to native seeds.
Governments are under immense pressure via lop-sided trade deals, strings-attached loans and corporate-backed seed regimes to comply with the demands of agribusiness conglomerates and to fit in with their supply chains. However, when farmers organise into effective social movements, administrators are compelled to take on board the needs of local cultivators.
It indicates what can be achieved when policy makers support traditional cultivators. And it is essential that they do because, unlike industrial agriculture, peasant farmers throughout the world have been genuine custodians of seed, the environment and the land.
Colin Todhunter is an extensively published independent writer and former social policy researcher based in the UK and India.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/01/resisting-tyranny-struggling-for-seed-sovereignty-in-latin-america/

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Bail In

Every place you can invest your money has risks and reqrds, Usually, the higher the reward, the higher the risk.
Banks deposits have traditionally been low risk, low reward.
Banks shares have a higher risk and a higher reward.
A bail in reverses this natural economic law by transfering the shareholder risk to the depositors. This makes the depositors liable for what would otherwise be shareholder losses with no offsetting reward to the depositors.
The conclusion I have come to is that the politicians are serving their campaign donors more than their electorate (a system that desperately needs to change). Therefore they are proposing to prop up the banks at the expense of the depositors, as has been done in Cyprus where bank depositors lost a percentage of their deposits. Cronyism at its unconscionable worst!

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The Nuclear Posture Review by Paul Craig Roberts

The government of the United States is clearly in demonic hands. We are overflowing with proof. Take today (2-2-18) for example. A report from the House Intelligence Committee was released that is proof that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice (sic), and the Democratic National Committee are engaged in a conspiracy against American democracy and the President of the United States with the full support of the presstitute media.
As if that is not enough, also released today is the Pentagon’s new Nuclear Posture Review. A nuclear posture review specifies a country’s attitude toward nuclear weapons and their use. In past posture reviews, nuclear weapons were regarded as unusable except in retaliation for a nuclear attack. The assumption was that no one would use them. There was always the possibility that false warnings of incoming ICBMs would result in the nuclear button being pushed, thus setting off Armageddon. There were many false warnings during the Cold War. President Ronald Reagan was very concerned about a false warning resulting in mass death and destruction. This is why his principal goal was to end the Cold War, which he succeeded in doing. It did not take successor governments long to resurrect the Cold War.
The new US nuclear posture is a reckless, irresponsible, and destabilizing departure from the previous attitude toward nuclear weapons. The use of even a small part of the existing arsenal of the United States would be sufficient to destroy life on earth. Yet, the posture review calls for more weapons, speaks of nuclear weapons as “usable,” and justifies their use in First Strikes even against countries that do not have nuclear weapons.
This is an insane escalation. It tells every country that the US government believes in the first use of nuclear weapons against any and every country. Nuclear powers such as Russia and China must see this to be a massive increase in the threat level from the United States. Those responsible for this document should be committed to insane aslyums, not left in policy positions where they can put it into action.
President Trump is being blamed for the aggressive US nuclear posture announced today. However, the document is a neoconservative product. Trump, perhaps, could have prevented the document’s release, but under pressure as he is by the accusation that he conspired with Putin to steal the US presidential election from Hillary, Trump cannot afford to antagonize the neoconized Pentagon.
The neoconservatives are a small group of conspirators. Most of the neoconservatives are Jews allied with Israel. Some are dual-citizens. They created an ideology of American world hegemony, specifying that the chief goal of US foreign policy is to prevent the rise of any other power that could serve as a constraint on US unilateralism. As neoconservatives control US foreign policy, this explains US hostility toward Russia and China and also the neoconservatives’ use of the US military to remove governments in the Middle East regarded by Israel as obstacles to Israeli expansion. For two decades the US has been fighting wars for Israel in the Middle East. This fact proves the power and influence of the insane neoconservatives. It is certain that people as insane as the neoconservatives would launch a nuclear attack on Russia and China. The Russian and Chinese governments seem to be completely unaware of the threat that the neoconservatives pose to them. I have never experienced in my interviews with Russians and Chinese any awareness of the neoconservative ideology. Possibly, it is too insane for them to grasp.
Ideologues such as the neoconservatives are not fact-based. They are chasing their dream of world hegemony. Russia and China are in the way of this hegemony. Having learned the limits of US conventional military power—after 16 years the US “superpower” has been unable to defeat a few thousand lightly armed Taliban in Afghanistan—the neoconservatives know that conventional invasions of Russia or China would lead to the total defeat of US forces. Therefore, the neoconservatives have elevated nuclear weapons to a First Strike, usable, arsenal that in the neoconservative dream of world hegemony can be used to destroy Russia and China.
Ideologues who divorce themselves from the facts create a virtual world for themselves. Their belief in their ideology blinds them to the risks for themselves and others that they impose on the world.
It is clear enough that without the utterly corrupt Obama Department of Justice (sic) and FBI, the utterly corrupt Clinton-controlled Democratic National Committee, and the utterly corrupt American and European presstitute media working to destroy Trump’s presidency by framing him up as “a Russian agent,” President Trump, understanding that the Pentagon’s posture review would worsen, not normalize, relations with Russia, would have deep-sixed the demonic document that threatens all life on earth.
Thanks to the American liberal/progressive/left, the entirely of the world is faced with a far more likely nuclear demise than ever threatened us during the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
By its collaboration with the military/security complex and the corrupt Hillary DNC, the liberal/progressive/left has forever discredited itself. It is now seen by every thinking person worldwide as an insane propaganda ministry for the neoconservatives’ plan to use nuclear weapons to eliminate constraints on US unilateralism. The liberal/progressive/left has endorsed “hegemony or death.”
They will get death. For all of us.
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/02/nuclear-posture-review/

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Lift Notice

Lift Notice
One of my younger brothers sent me a challenge for you grammar Nazis out there. How many grammatical, syntax, spelling, idiom and plain errors can you find? I got to a baker’s dozen.

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US stock market part of ‘everything bubble’ that is set to blow—Glass-Steagall now!

The US stock market has underscored the urgency of the government acting to protect the public from a financial crash by enacting a Glass-Steagall banking separation and scrapping its “bail-in” bill. The Down Jones Index plunged 1,177 points on Monday, the largest single one-day points drop ever, following its 666-point drop on Friday. The Australian Securities Exchange fell sharply upon opening today, after losing $30 billion on Monday.
As the CEC and numerous experts have long warned, the meteoric rise of the US stock market has been one of the insane speculative bubbles in the global economy. Others include the property bubbles in Australia and some other countries, the US corporate debt bubble, the Bitcoin bubble and the big one—the US$1.2 quadrillion global derivatives bubble. All of these bubbles effectively constitute one great big “everything bubble” that has been fed by the US$14 trillion of so-called quantitative easing (QE) money that central banks have “printed” since the global financial crash in 2008.
The everything bubble has depended entirely on the ultra-low QE interest rates. For instance, the rise of the US stock market has never reflected an economic recovery, but has come from banks and corporations borrowing at very low rates to buy back their own shares; consequently, US corporate debt increased from US$8 trillion in 2008, to US$13.5 trillion in 2017. Likewise Australia’s property bubble, and similar bubbles in Canada, New Zealand and Sweden, expanded under record low rates—the only way borrowers have been able to afford to buy houses that are 10-12 times income, compared with the historical average of 3-4 times.
Rising rates will prick the bubble
The biggest worry about the global financial system right now is that the people in charge in megabanks, central banks, regulators and governments believe their own propaganda. They act as if 2008 never happened, and deny that these bubbles exist. Pretending that there is a recovery, the US Federal Reserve has started to slightly reduce the US$4.5 trillion of QE assets on its balance sheet, the amount of the securities it purchased from the banks since 2009 with newly printed money. This is pushing interest rates higher—effectively a pin in the bubble.
There have been countless warnings that this would happen. In May 2017, the CEC’s Australian Alert Service reported the International Monetary Fund’s warning in its “Global Financial Stability Report, 2017” that if US interest rates rose sharply, defaults on the US$13.5 trillion in corporate debt could reach 20 per cent—far higher than the mortgage default rate in 2007 that triggered the 2008 crash.
William White, the former chief economist at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) who was one of the few experts to forewarn about the 2008 crash, said in a 22 January interview with London’s Telegraph that “Central banks have been pouring more fuel on the fire”—referring to the expansion of QE. “Should regulators really be congratulating themselves that the system is now safer?” he asked. “Nobody knows what is going to happen when they unwind QE. The markets had better be very careful because there are a lot of fracture points out there.”
White warned that surging global debt levels could be detonated by just a 1 per cent US rate rise, setting off massive losses throughout stock, bond, mortgage and derivatives markets and triggering a liquidity crunch. “All the market indicators right now look very similar to what we saw before the Lehman crisis, but the lesson has somehow been forgotten”, he said.
Australia heading off a cliff
QE has also fed Australia’s mortgage bubble, through the 30-40 per cent of their funding that Australia’s banks have been borrowing at cheap interest rates from overseas. As Robert Gottliebsen noted in the 30 January Australian, this dependence on foreign borrowing exposes Australia’s banks to US rate rises. Australian borrowers cannot afford rate rises. ME Bank’s latest Household Financial Comfort Report reveals rising mortgage stress, with 46 per cent of homeowners paying 30 per cent or more of household income on their mortgage, 26 per cent of households paying more than 40 per cent, and 14 per cent of households paying more than half of their income on their mortgage. According to a finder.com.au survey from November 2017, 54 per cent of households reported that just a $100 per month increase in mortgage payments would push them over the edge.
The impending disaster for Australia’s banks has been noticed in London. Today’s Australian Financial Review reports that London investment consultancy Absolute Strategy Research (ASR) has warned its clients that Australia’s banks, like the banks in Canada and Sweden—the other countries with huge housing bubbles—may become a global systemic threat, due to their disproportionate size in their domestic economies and in the global financial system. ASR notes that no major economy has been able to sustain a banking sector that is 20 per cent of its stock market capitalisation, but Australia’s Big Four banks account for more than 25 per cent of the ASX!
Glass-Steagall now!
Financial authorities will be scrambling to arrest the stock market fall, but at best they might be able to buy a bit of time. The reality is the next crash is inevitable, because all bubbles burst. This means the Australian government’s bill giving the bank regulator APRA sweeping powers to prop up failing banks by confiscating the public’s savings is not an academic exercise—APRA and the banks need such powers now.
It is urgent that Australians force the government to change its policies, by forcing changes on the banks that protect the people, and not the other way around. This means scrapping the APRA bill, and implementing a full separation of commercial banks with deposits from all other financial services, modelled on the USA’s successful Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.
Don’t wait until it’s too late—join the CEC’s fight today!
https://www.cecaust.com.au/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=66