Fresh off their latest lawsuit victory claiming proprietary
property rights over seeds, Monsanto has set their sights on property rights to
the world’s fresh water supply. Just
last year, the Russia Times reported:
Excerpt:
Supreme Court hands Monsanto victory over farmers on GMO seed patents,
ability to sue
The US Supreme Court upheld biotech giant Monsanto’s claims on
genetically-engineered seed patents and the company’s ability to sue farmers whose
fields are inadvertently contaminated with Monsanto materials….
“If Monsanto can patent seeds for
financial gain, they should be forced to pay for contaminating a farmer’s
field, not be allowed to sue them,” said Dave Murphy, founder and executive
director of Food Democracy Now!, in a statement “Once again, America’s farmers
have been denied justice, while Monsanto’s reign of intimidation is allowed to
continue in rural America.”
“Monsanto has effectively gotten away with stealing the world’s seed
heritage and abusing farmers for the flawed nature of their patented seed
technology,” said Murphy. “This is an outrage of historic proportions and will
not stand.”
The new American government that took power after the 2000 Senate/Supreme
Court coup has morphed into something out of the 1970’s film The Prophecy, an ecological fable about
the evils of industrial pollution. But
The Prophecy is no longer is a fable in America and the world, but a fact of everyday
life.
Democracy died in America on December 12, 2000 and corporate
fascism was unleashed. Elections in
America do not result in the will of the people prevailing according to Ellen
Brown at Web of Debt:
Excerpt:
The Magna Carta, considered the
first Bill of Rights in the Western world, established the rights of nobles as
against the king. But the doctrine that
“all men are created equal” – that all people have “certain inalienable
rights,” including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” – is an
American original.
And those rights, supposedly
insured by the Bill of Rights, have the right to vote at their core. We have
the right to vote but the voters’
collective will no longer prevails.
The judicial system in America after the 2000 coup is a
fascist, corporate dream that has allowed Corporations to gain complete control
over every facet of government policy, foreign and domestic.
Take Florida, the “scene of the crime of the century.” In 2000, immediately after the United States Court,
overturned the ruling of the Florida State Supreme Court and ordered the
recount to be stopped and awarded his brother, George W. with the Presidency, Jeb
Bush handed Florida’s State pension funds to W’s donors. From International Business Times:
Excerpt:
Jeb Bush's Administration Steered Florida Pension Money to George W.
Bush’s Fundraisers
Four years before the financial collapse, Goldman Sachs executive
George Herbert Walker IV had much to be thankful for. "I've been fortunate
to be a small part of teams leading U.S.
restructurings, European privatizations, global pension management and now
hedge fund and private equity investing,” he said in the annual report of a
banking colossus that would soon be known as the “great vampire squid” of Wall
Street…
At the same time he was raising
$100,000 for his cousin George W. Bush’s successful presidential re-election
effort, the administration of another cousin, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, returned the family favor, delivering $150 million of Florida pension money to an alternative
investment fund run by Walker’s firm.
As Jeb Bush oversaw the State Board
of Administration (SBA) that runs Florida’s massive public pension system, the state shifted billions of dollars into
higher-risk, higher-fee alternative investments, benefiting the same sector
of the investment industry he would work in upon leaving office.
Along with the pension funds of the people of Florida, came
the water resources for sale to the highest bidder. Among the highest bidders are the Bush Family,
Monsanto, the Koch Brothers and T. Boone Pickens. From Global Research:
Excerpt:
The New “Water Barons”: Wall Street Mega-Banks are Buying up the
World’s Water
A disturbing trend in the water
sector is accelerating worldwide. The new “water barons” — the Wall Street
banks and elitist multibillionaires — are buying up water all over the world at
unprecedented pace.
Familiar mega-banks and investing powerhouses such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan
Chase, Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Macquarie Bank, Barclays
Bank, the Blackstone Group, Allianz, and HSBC Bank, among others, are
consolidating their control over water.
Wealthy tycoons such as T. Boone Pickens, former President George H.W. Bush and his family,
Hong Kong’s Li Ka-shing, Philippines’ Manuel V. Pangilinan and other Filipino
billionaires, and others are also buying
thousands of acres of land with aquifers, lakes, water rights, water utilities,
and shares in water engineering and technology companies all over the world.
One of the pioneers that championed the
overthrow of the American government that opened up the Everglades to billionaire
polluters was Congressman “Sugar Daddy” Clay Shaw. From CounterPunch
Excerpt:
Shaw served 26 years in Congress, at a time when the GOP
perfected polarization tactics as well as any southern Democrat. It is not
enough to note, in passing, a Republican leader who stood up for protecting one of the most threatened ecosystems
in the United States.
How Clay Shaw was a friend of the Everglades
deserves a closer reading and involves
the story of a Republican who braved dissent of the Jeb Bush orthodoxy at
the time and in a state that determined
the outcome of the most contested presidential election in US history…
Scarcely six months earlier,
ON THE SAME DAY THE US SUPREME COURT DECIDED IN FAVOR OF GEORGE W. BUSH, Jeb signed with President Bill Clinton in
the Rose Garden the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Bill….
Governor Bush attempted a significant re-write of Florida
water quality law. In April 2001, Sierra Club issued a state-wide alarm: “The
Florida Legislature is now considering a law that would eliminate the standards
for total coliform and other biological and chemical contaminants in our
underground drinking water supply when water is pumped down from the surface. Our drinking water supply, the Florida
Aquifer, would become a septic tank….”
On May 20. 2003 Gov. Jeb
Bush brushed off the federal judiciary and signed the Everglades bill into law.
He also spurned a massive outcry by civic leaders, environmentalists and every
newspaper editorial board in the state.
Along with the installation of George W. Bush as President of
the United States came a spate of laws and presidential orders weakening
environmental laws, particularly the Halliburton Loophole. From FrackWire:
Excerpt:
The “Halliburton Loophole” refers
to legislation introduced in the 2005 Energy Policy Act that exempts hydraulic
fracturing and oil and gas drilling from certain sections of the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 and
the Clean Water Act of 1972. As such, the Halliburton Loophole legislation
represents a significant reduction in
federal oversight of drilling and fracking operations…
The Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA)
was implemented in 1974 with the goal of
preserving the purity and safety of the limited supply of potable water in the
United States.
The purpose of the Clean Water Act was to “preserve the
purity and safety” of the LIMITED supply of potable water in America. But that was the old America, in the new
America poisoning the water is an “opportunity” for an entrepreneur.
So how did that
work out for Florida? Fast forward to
the year 2015. According to Daily Kos:
Excerpt:
EXCLUSIVE - Koch Brothers, Rick
Scott And Jeb Bush Exposed In Florida Pipeline Scandal
Tons of toxic waste is being dumped
into St. Johns River, daily, by the Koch Brothers company, Georgia-Pacific. Aspects of the deal allowing Georgia
Pacific to massively assault the environment, were misleading, sometimes
illegal, and unbeknownst to the local citizens. Florida Governor Rick Scott
and former Governor (and Republican presidential hopeful), Jeb Bush, are also
involved….
These actions in turn reach back
into the Jeb Bush administration (1999-2007), when then Governor Bush and the
Florida Cabinet, over the objection of then Attorney General Charlie Crist,
gave preliminary approval for a Georgia-Pacific pipeline from its Palatka paper
mill to the St. Johns River…
Tons of toxic waste travel through
the pipe to the heart of the St. Johns River every day. The approval was “finalized” through what Florida citizens and
environmental groups are calling a
grossly misleading newspaper public notice that aimed to cut-off public
challenges to the pipeline easement, which the Trustees’ agent, the FDEP,
eventually granted.
Another result of the 2000 election heist in Florida is sink
holes across the world. People are
losing homes, cars, roads, their lives from sinkholes. From the End of American Dream:
Excerpt:
In a previous article about
sinkholes, I talked about a sinkhole that recently formed in Ohio that was the
size of four football fields and that was more than 30 feet deep. It caused part of State Route 516 to collapse
and authorities were projecting that the road would continue to stay closed for
months to come…
The giant Louisiana sinkhole in
Assumption Parish that made headlines all over the nation last year is now more
than 800 feet in diameter. It just
continues to grow, and authorities have no idea when it will stop growing….
Just recently, large sinkholes
forced roads to close in New Jersey and in Arizona. Of course those incidents will soon be
forgotten because there are more news stories about major sinkholes in the
United States almost every single day now.
Giant sinkholes have been happening with such regularity that people
hardly take notice anymore.
And it’s not just Florida’s aquifers that have been awarded
to Bush pioneers, but aquifers across the US have chemical wastewater from “frack”
mines pumped directly into their aquifers with abandon, like in California. From Desmogblog:
Excerpt:
After California state regulators
shut down 11 fracking wastewater injection wells last July over concerns that
the wastewater might have contaminated
aquifers used for drinking water and farm irrigation, the EPA ordered a
report within 60 days.
It was revealed yesterday that the
California State Water Resources Board has sent a letter to the EPA confirming that at least nine of those sites were in fact dumping
wastewater contaminated with fracking fluids and other pollutants into aquifers ….
Fracking has been accused of exacerbating California's epic state-wide
drought, but the Central Valley
region, which has some of the worst air
and water pollution in the state, has borne a disproportionate amount of
the impacts from oil companies' increasing use of the controversial oil
extraction technique.
News of billions of gallons of
fracking wastewater contaminating
protected aquifers relied on by residents of the Central Valley for drinking
water could not have come at a worse time.
And Pioneer, T. Boone Pickens is just one billionaire tycoon
who makes huge profits from destroying the water in the United States while
being protected by the politicians they installed in office. There’s the Koch Brothers coal ash
repurposing scam. That is, repurposing
the highly toxic coal ash into materials used in road construction. Voila,
lemonade, from Earth Justice.
Excerpt:
Clean Wisconsin’s new report, Don’t
Drink the Water, demonstrates that coal
ash reuse may pose significant public health threats. Today’s report
highlights the risks to residents of
southeast Wisconsin, where more than one million tons of toxic coal ash has
been used in building projects near drinking water wells. The report
documents how dangerous chemicals have made their way into the drinking water
of hundreds of Wisconsin citizens….
Use of coal ash as construction
fill has caused water contamination at sites across the nation. Each year, more
than 20 million tons of coal ash are placed as fill without adequate safeguards
to prevent hazardous chemicals from entering our water.
Yes, indeed, no money, no water. Water wars are just another method of asset
stripping according to Ellen Brown at Web of Debt:
.jpg)
Excerpt:
Today the water wars continue on a
larger scale with new players. It’s no
longer just the farmers against the ranchers or the urbanites. It’s the
people against the
new “water barons” – Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Monsanto, the Bush family, and their
ilk – who are buying up water all over the world at an unprecedented pace…..
At a news conference on March 19,
2015, California Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon warned, “There is no
greater crisis facing our state today than our lack of water.”
Jay Famiglietti, a scientist with
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, California, wrote in
the Los Angeles Times on March 12th:
Right now the state has only about
one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup
supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency
plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year
mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for
rain.
Maps indicate that the areas of
California hardest hit by the mega-drought are those that grow a large
percentage of America’s food. California supplies 50% of the nation’s food and
more organic food than any other state.
Western Growers estimates that last year 500,000 acres of farmland were
left unplanted, an amount that could increase by 40% this year. The trade
group pegs farm job losses at 17,000
last year and more in 2015.
T. Boone Pickens’ massive water contamination due to
fracking isn’t the only threat to humankind caused by “fracking”, seems that
there is now a shortage of frack sand. Sand
is vital to sustenance of human life, is finite and suddenly there is a
shortage.
Wisconsin has the largest deposit of the type of sand
required for fracking. From Conservation Voters:
Excerpt:
Frac sand mining is literally
booming in western Wisconsin – and it’s wreaking havoc on air and water quality
and public health…
Wisconsin currently holds 75% of
the frac sand market in the entire United States. If you are at all concerned
about the booming, polluting, unregulated hydraulic fracking practices
occurring across the United States, you should definitely be concerned about
the booming, polluting, unregulated frac sand mining practices happening right
here in Wisconsin….
The inhalation of silica sand can cause silicosis, an incurable disease
that has also been known to cause cancer. Because of this threat, the federal government regulates workers’
exposure to the dust, but there are no limits set for the general public.
That’s right there are no federal or state laws that protect
the public from airborne carcinogens caused by open pit sand mines in Wisconsin
or any state. And guess, what? The sand war is turning out to be as deadly
if not more so than water wars. According
to PRI.org:
Excerpt:
The world's deadly war over sand: 7 things you need to know:
Sand is finite. And people are starting to kill for it…
“We use so much of it. We use 40 billion tons
of sand each year. And that number is just growing and growing. And we’re
running out of the stuff we can use for construction….”
“The most common form of sand, the one that is
about 70 percent of everything you see is made from quartz. It’s basically just
teeny-tiny little rocks. And that’s the stuff we use in concrete. That’s the biggest
thing we use sand for. But we also use it for windows. Every piece of glass you
see is basically made out of sand. Every silicon chip in your computer is made
out of sand."
Desert sand doesn’t work in
construction… “Because it’s been eroded by wind, rather than water, it’s shaped
a little too round to stick together properly…
It’s happening all over the world... “There are criminal gangs that are making
huge money illegally mining sand. They do what mafias do everywhere. They bribe
police. They bribe courts. They bribe government officials. And when they need
to, they kill people who get in their way.”
People are dying in the sand wars.
The bloodiest battles are in India. “They estimate hundreds of
people have been killed in the last few years. Its gangs. Its different sand
mafias fighting each other over turf. But also, they’ve killed at least a dozen
police officers, government officials, environmental activists and just
ordinary folks all over India.”
In an article in Bloomberg in 2008 T. Boone Pickens was
described as such:
If water is the new oil, T. Boone
Pickens is a modern-day John D. Rockefeller. Pickens owns more water than any
other individual in the U.S. and is looking to control even more. He hopes to
sell the water he already has, some 65 billion gallons a year, to Dallas, transporting it over 250 miles, 11
counties, and about 650 tracts of
private property.
By the mid-1990s, though, Pickens
had fallen… He went through an expensive
divorce from his second wife and retreated to his ranch. It was in the midst of this that he acquired a newfound regard for
water as a commodity that should be bought, sold, and traded for the benefit of
those who own it and those who can afford it.
That is life in the new America. The new America resembles something from your
worst nightmare, and it is infecting the entire world. So here we are, living in The Prophecy and we
can only hope God has a damned good lawyer or we’ll all be damned.
By Patricia Baeten
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