75

Indian Farmers on the Frontline Against Global Capitalism Indian farming “reforms” will benefit a handful of billionaires at the cost of small farms and ordinary laborers

Colin Todhunter

In the above short video on the empirediaries.com YouTube channel, a protesting farmer camped near Delhi says that during lockdown and times of crisis farmers are treated like “gods”, but when they ask for their rights, they are smeared and labelled as “terrorists”.

He, along with thousands of other farmers, are mobilising against three important pieces of farm legislation that were recently forced through parliament. To all intents and purposes, these laws sound a neoliberal death knell for most of India’s cultivators and its small farms, the backbone of the nation’s food production.

The farmer says:

“Corporates invested in Modi before the election and brought him to power. He has sold out and is an agent of Ambani and Adani. He is unable to repeal the bills because his owners will scold him. He is trapped. But we are not backing down either.”

He then asks whether ministers know how many seeds are needed to grow wheat on an acre of land:

We farmers know. They made these farm laws sitting in air-conditioned rooms. And they are teaching us the benefits!”

While the corporations that will move in on the sector due to the legislation will initially pay good money for crops, once the public sector markets (mandis) are gone, the farmer says they will become the only buyers and will beat prices down.

He asks why, in other sectors, do sellers get to put price tags on their products but not farmers:

Why can’t farmers put minimum prices on the crops we produce? A law must be brought to guarantee MSP [minimum support prices]. Whoever buys below MSP must be punished by law.”

The recent agriculture legislation represents the final pieces of a 30-year-old plan which will benefit a handful of billionaires in the US and in India. It means the livelihoods of hundreds of millions (the majority of the population) who still (directly or indirectly) rely on agriculture for a living are to be sacrificed at the behest of these elite interests.

Consider that much of the UK’s wealth came from sucking $45 trillion from India alone according to renowned economist Utsa Patnaik

Britain grew rich by underdeveloping India. What amount to little more than modern-day East India-type corporations are now in the process of helping themselves to the country’s most valuable asset – agriculture.

According to the World Bank’s lending report, based on data compiled up to 2015, India was easily the largest recipient of its loans in the history of the institution. The World Bank thus exerts a certain hold over India: on the back of India’s foreign exchange crisis in the 1990s, the IMF and World Bank wanted India to shift hundreds of millions out of agriculture.

In return for up to more than $120 billion in loans at the time, India was directed to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, reduce subsidies, run down public agriculture institutions and offer incentives for the growing of cash crops to earn foreign exchange.

The plan involves shifting at least 400 million from the countryside into cities.

The details of this plan appear in a January 2021 article by the Research Unit for Political Economy, ‘Modi’s Farm Produce Act Was Authored Thirty Years Ago, in Washington DC’.

The piece says that the current agricultural ‘reforms’ are part of a broader process of imperialism’s increasing capture of the Indian economy:

Indian business giants such as Reliance and Adani are major recipients of foreign investment, as we have seen in sectors such as telecom, retail, and energy. At the same time, multinational corporations and other financial investors in the sectors of agriculture, logistics and retail are also setting up their own operations in India.

Multinational trading corporations dominate global trade in agricultural commodities. For all these reasons, international capital has a major stake in the restructuring of India’s agriculture… The opening of India’s agriculture and food economy to foreign investors and global agribusinesses is a longstanding project of the imperialist countries.

The article provides details of a 1991 World Bank memorandum which set out the programme for India. It adds:

At the time, India was still in its foreign exchange crisis of 1990-91 and had just submitted itself to an IMF-monitored ‘structural adjustment’ programme. Thus, India’s July 1991 budget marked the fateful start of India’s neoliberal era.”

It states that now the Modi government is dramatically advancing the implementation of the above programme, using the Covid-19 crisis as cover: the dismantling of the public procurement and distribution of food is to be implemented by the three agriculture-related acts passed by parliament.

The drive is to drastically dilute the role of the public sector in agriculture, reducing it to a facilitator of private capital and leading to the entrenchment of industrial farming and the replacement of small-scale farms. The norm will be industrial (GMO) commodity-crop agriculture suited to the needs of the likes of Cargill, Archer Daniels Midlands, Louis Dreyfus, Bunge and India’s retail and agribusiness giants as well as the global agritech, seed and agrochemical corporations.

It could result in hundreds of millions of former rural dwellers without any work given that India is heading (has already reached) jobless growth.

As a result of the ongoing programme, more than 300,000 farmers in India have taken their lives since 1997 and many more are experiencing economic distress or have left farming as a result of debt, a shift to cash crops and economic liberalisation. The number of cultivators in India declined from 166 million to 146 million between 2004 and 2011. Some 6,700 left farming each day. Between 2015 and 2022, the number of cultivators is likely to decrease to around 127 million.

We have seen the running down of the sector for decades, spiralling input costs, withdrawal of government assistance and the impacts of cheap, subsidised imports which depress farmers’ incomes.

Take the cultivation of pulses, for instance. According to a report in the Indian Express (September 2017), pulses production increased by 40% during the previous 12 months (a year of record production). At the same time, however, imports also rose resulting in black gram selling at 4,000 rupees per quintal (much less than during the previous 12 months). This effectively pushed down prices thereby reducing farmers already meagre incomes.

We have already witnessed a running down of the indigenous edible oils sector thanks to Indonesian palm oil imports (which benefits Cargill) on the back of World Bank pressure to reduce tariffs (India was virtually self-sufficient in edible oils in the 1990s but now faces increasing import costs).

The pressure from the richer nations for the Indian government to further reduce support given to farmers and open up to imports and export-oriented ‘free market’ trade is based on nothing but hypocrisy.

On the ‘Down to Earth’ website in late 2017, it was stated some 3.2 million people were engaged in agriculture in the US in 2015. The US government provided them each with a subsidy of $7,860 on average. Japan provides a subsidy of $14,136 and New Zealand $2,623 to its farmers. In 2015, a British farmer earned $2,800 and $37,000 was added through subsidies. The Indian government provides on average a subsidy of $873 to farmers. However, between 2012 and 2014, India reduced the subsidy on agriculture and food security by $3 billion.

According to policy analyst Devinder Sharma subsidies provided to US wheat and rice farmers are more than the market worth of these two crops. He also notes that, per day, each cow in Europe receives subsidy worth more than an Indian farmer’s daily income.

The Indian farmer simply cannot compete with this. The World Bank, World Trade Organisation and the IMF have effectively served to undermine the indigenous farm sector in India. The long-term goal has been to displace the peasantry and consolidate a corporate-controlled model.

And now, by reducing public sector buffer stocks and introducing corporate-dictated contract farming and full-scale neoliberal marketisation for the sale and procurement of produce, India will be sacrificing its farmers and its own food security for the benefit of a handful of billionaires.

Colin Todhunter is an independent journalist who writes on development, environmental issues, politics, food and agriculture. In August 2018 he was named as one of 400 Living Peace and Justice Leaders and Models by Transcend Media Services, in recognition of his journalism. Join him on Twitter.

SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN

If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.

For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.

5 18 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

75 Comments
newest
oldest most voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
cookie clicker
cookie clicker
Mar 5, 2021 8:06 AM

I should express that I like this article so a ton and moreover using it in regular. I believe you would continue sharing better than average articles here.
cookie clicker

ekain
ekain
Jan 25, 2021 5:32 PM

Lenin read the decree on earth:
1. Private ownership of land is abolished immediately, without compensation.
2.All large agricultural estates, all land belonging to the crown, monasteries, church, including livestock, agricultural materials and buildings with all their annexes, are placed at the disposal of the peasant agricultural committees of the land and the Soviets district peasants awaiting the meeting of the Constituent Assembly…. John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World

comment image?_nc_cat=102&ccb=2&_nc_sid=a4a2d7&_nc_ohc=Wo8J6MkVqJwAX8yG6cU&_nc_ht=scontent-mxp1-2.xx&oh=69657f34ad3f1f80147a2e823fd4efb9&oe=6032CA3A

remo
remo
Jan 25, 2021 1:06 AM

Corporations are by nature, fascist in that they want more and more say in governance. It’s their way’of doing things’.
More power to those struggling.

ekain
ekain
Jan 25, 2021 5:17 PM
Reply to  remo

but more than fascism, here you can see how capitalism historically moves. That neoliberalism is one of the most brutal forms of fascism, a totalitarianism that includes us all in spite of ourselves, this is certain, Pasolini was right. .

Sunface
Sunface
Jan 24, 2021 6:04 PM

Yep. Is our dear global corporates bankers and investors in action. They have already made the deal with the Government. Ready to destroy another economy in persuit of profit.

October
October
Jan 24, 2021 1:00 PM

Thank you for this item. Let us hope there are many many people like the man in the video and that their 26 January rally is a huge success.

Ben
Ben
Jan 24, 2021 12:17 PM

.
comment image

comment image

wardropper
wardropper
Jan 24, 2021 12:33 PM
Reply to  Ben

And still others are relying upon their immune systems to keep them in decent health, without resorting to any purchasable commodities at all.

S Sussex
S Sussex
Jan 24, 2021 7:40 PM
Reply to  Ben

My Indian Karnataka-based cousin lost her m-in-l and s-in-l to Covid. They all shared the same house on different floors. My cousin’s husband fell ill too but thankfully not badly enough to go to hospital – the physician prescribed exactly the above drugs plus vit C. That and healthy food and fruit aided his recovery. She says these drugs don’t prevent one getting the disease but can aid recovery.

Sasha
Sasha
Jan 27, 2021 5:44 AM
Reply to  S Sussex

And here in rural Tamil Nadu if anyone gets Covid they are given a kilo of apples by the government and told to go home and rest after 3 days. Not one person has died in this region, at least not from the shamdemic.

mgeo
mgeo
Jan 25, 2021 5:23 AM
Reply to  Ben

HCQ is in scientific limbo after 2 “leading scientific journals” withdrew the paper that dismissed it. The whole world of currupted science is disinterested in the matter. However, some countries continue to use it for their patients, as before.

Dimitri
Dimitri
Jan 25, 2021 1:40 PM
Reply to  mgeo

The Americal Medical Ass has quietly approved HCQ:

https://www.ama-assn.org/system/files/2020-10/nov20-handbook-addendum.pdf

Ben
Ben
Jan 24, 2021 12:02 PM

The great white shark billionaire cabal is grinding the Indian working class into the dirt under a corporate jackboot. Farmers who’ve reached the end of the road in complete despair are drinking pesticides to end their lives, so that their children might have a chance

Serf
Serf
Jan 24, 2021 8:44 AM

Uncle Sam ‘volunteered’ and soaked large swaths of Vietnam with systematic pesticides.

Now, they have found a way to soak India with sydtematic pesticides, but with a huge difference: Indian lawmakers are EAGER to pay for this poison. They can’t wait!

mgeo
mgeo
Jan 25, 2021 5:33 AM
Reply to  Serf

With the blessings of WHO, FAO and practically the whole of “science”.

Dimitri
Dimitri
Jan 25, 2021 1:41 PM
Reply to  Serf

systemic, not systematic

Serf
Serf
Jan 25, 2021 2:14 PM
Reply to  Dimitri

Thanks for the correction!

Serf
Serf
Jan 24, 2021 7:54 AM

Isn’t it interesting? The industrialization of Australia was funded by ‘taxes’ siphoned from India by The United Kingdom of Looting. Both India and China suffered humiliation for centuries and continue to suffer at the hands of the Anglo-Saxon imperialists/supremacists. But now, India has decided to join war preparations together with Australia (Asian NATO?) against China!!! Where is the logic behind this mind-boggling move?

What is Going on in India is SURREAL! Tearing down of the farming sector in India is basically an environmental and human catastrophe committed -again- by the Anglo-Saxons.

Amid all this, the surge in Nationalism in India can only be interpreted as a brainwashing and brain-aleration strategy to distract the population from the sinisters that are plaguing the country, courtesy of: the Anglo-Saxon Supremacists.

mgeo
mgeo
Jan 24, 2021 8:21 AM
Reply to  Serf

As you go up the pyramid of authority, there are less people to convince, bribe or blackmail. In USA, the courts provided a critical means of subversion.

Penelope
Penelope
Jan 24, 2021 7:41 AM

The Food supply is under attack everywhere by TPTB.
Using the conditions of the most recent coronavirus lockdown, the German government’s agriculture minister has made a stealth decision, without open debate, to re-instate a banned class of systemic insecticides known as neonicotinoids. The German move follows a similar move by the French Macron government and puts the entire food security of the EU in serious danger. Ironically, or maybe not, the move comes at a time when food security worldwide is in grave stress owing to consequences of the global COVID lockdowns that have disrupted huge parts of the global food chains.” — F Wm Engdahl

Bee colony collapse.

spartacus
spartacus
Jan 24, 2021 11:52 AM
Reply to  Penelope

Any links for the quote..thanks

Sunface
Sunface
Jan 25, 2021 9:45 AM
Reply to  Penelope

The science on Neonicotinoids shows that they have nothing to do with the emotional cry of Bee colony collapse. It was found to be Varroa mite invasion.

Jesper
Jesper
Jan 24, 2021 7:32 AM

India as a test bench.

Serf
Serf
Jan 24, 2021 8:17 AM
Reply to  Jesper

“India as a test bench”

This is on par with invading Iraq or Afghanistan but with different means.

Rhys Jaggar
Rhys Jaggar
Jan 24, 2021 7:26 AM

In return for up to more than $120 billion in loans at the time, India was directed to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, reduce subsidies, run down public agriculture institutions and offer incentives for the growing of cash crops to earn foreign exchange.’

A) Who needs to ‘earn foreign exchange’?

If the small Indian farmers sell only into the domestic market, they don’t need foreign exchange. And with the US dollar about to go into terminal collapse they would do far better sourcing semi-gold-backed currencies such as the rouble or yuan. Or bitcoin. Or gold.

B) Have Indian farmers been ‘growing cash crops’ until now?

If they have not been, then clearly the only reason they would need to grow them in the future is if the price of essential staples is to be trashed.

C) If the ‘seed supply system’ is state owned, why don’t the farmers who grow the seeds for the system set up as entrepreneurs and sell directly to India’s farmers? All it will take is a loan from a philanthropic Indian as opposed to a greedy offshore bank to buy the land necessary for them to continue to supply the seeds themselves.

D) What is the $120bn in loans needed for? If it was not directly to support Indian farmers, why on earth should they pay any price whatsoever for the economic malfeasance of Indian officials??

My advice to Indian farmers: set up your own alternative, don’t be told by the Government what the alternative is. Set up distribution hubs and direct-to-consumer vegetable box schemes. Cut out the Government altogether where essential staples are concerned.

Set up your own communally-owned export company to replace whatever the Government has used. It’s not rocket science.

Simply refuse to deal with Modi and make it quite clear to the Indian people why. There are 1 billion of them, there aren’t many Indians who will benefit from the ridiculous proposals.

Use the power of propaganda to get the people behind you all.

wardropper
wardropper
Jan 24, 2021 12:42 PM
Reply to  Rhys Jaggar

Where you and I would refuse to deal with Modi, the average Indian probably finds that idea not so very easy.
After all, India has nukes, so there is always the possibility that Modi will just label half of the country as ‘harbouring terrorists’ and obliterate it…
Okay, that sounds far-fetched and gross, but we need only have in mind that the current situation is already obliterating the farmers.
One way, or another, the aim really does appear to wipe out everything that doesn’t make lots more profit for the crap-throwing chimpanzees controlling the world today.

Sunface
Sunface
Jan 24, 2021 6:39 PM
Reply to  Rhys Jaggar

Yes one thing is clear.
The Globalist corporate agri industry has been aquiring ‘seed supply system’ worldwide.
They have in tandem with the eco-fundementalists & agri-organic sector been quietly establishing monopolies in the agrisector.

There is however a common ideology in play here in the agri sector, like the renewable energy industry blames the fossil fuel industry an attack has been made on the GMO and the crop protection industry with the same objectives.
Destroy the GMO and the crop protection industry using lies and obfucation using the very same climate change arguments and to litigate the industry into bankruptcy.

The globalists have their finger in every sector of the economy. Manipulating at will.

Rev. Spooner
Rev. Spooner
Jan 25, 2021 7:05 PM
Reply to  Rhys Jaggar

No offence meant, but I think you are unaware of many ground realities. India is one of the largest global exporter of tea, rice,wheat and cotton, all cash crops.
What triggered the farmers along with the 3 new bills passed by the majority BJP in the parliament was Adani, (a crony billionaire and a Modi financier/supporter) who was building mega storage and silo facilities for the grain.
The three new bills also have clauses that prohibit the farmers from seeking justice from the courts.

fame
fame
Jan 24, 2021 7:08 AM

Colin, Thanks for expanding from your agroecology article a little bit on the plight of farmers being forced of there land and into the slaves shities. I was in the middle of responding with a rather lengthy reply when I clicked on your empirediaries link and saw the covid doc articles. Now I just want to yell and scream.

i am reminded of all the NGOs formed to “save” the peasants from starving while opening the doors for big chemical ag GMOs. The layers are thick.

Time for people to support each others return to the land and create a new world economy. Those you have lost jobs, if you have the resources can become the needed farmers.We have this resistance in our history: https://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/cancun/action/cancun/index.htm

Thanks Reset for the posts.

fame
fame
Jan 24, 2021 7:14 AM
Reply to  fame

Some more history, analysis and ideas for economic and ecological solutions from Vandana Shiva:
https://www.navdanya.org/bija-refelections/2020/06/12/jaivik-bharat/

Dimitri
Dimitri
Jan 25, 2021 1:46 PM
Reply to  fame

Unfortunately Vandana Shiva is parotting the “epidemic” lie, so she can go get stuffed with the rest of the fake greens.

Reset the Diaboligarchy
Reset the Diaboligarchy
Jan 24, 2021 5:50 AM

Oneness vs the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom by Vandana Shiva

https://www.amazon.com/Oneness-vs-1-Shattering-Illusions/dp/1645020398/
(Check out the reviews there, then go elsewhere to get a copy.)

With a new epilogue about Bill Gates’s global agenda and how we can resist the billionaires’ war on life.

Widespread poverty and malnutrition, an alarming refugee crisis, social unrest, economic polarisation… have become our lived reality as the top 1% of the world’s seven-billion-plus population pushes the planet – and all its people – to the social and ecological brink. In Oneness vs The 1%, Vandana Shiva takes on the Billionaires Club of Gates, Buffett, Zuckerberg and other modern Mughals, whose blindness to the rights of people, and to the destructive impact of their construct of linear progress, have wrought havoc across the world. Their single-minded pursuit of profit has undemocratically enforced uniformity and monocultures, division and separation, monopolies and external control – over finance, food, energy, information, healthcare, and even relationships.

Basing her analysis on explosive little-known facts, Shiva exposes the 1%’s model of philanthrocapitalism, which is about deploying unaccountable money to bypass democratic structures, derail diversity, and impose totalitarian ideas, based on One Science, One Agriculture and One History. She calls for the “resurgence of real knowledge, real intelligence, real wealth, real work, real well-being”, so that people can reclaim their right to: Live Free. Think Free. Breathe Free. Eat Free.

Reset the Diaboligarchy
Reset the Diaboligarchy
Jan 24, 2021 6:02 AM

Oneness vs the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom – Epilogue (opening paragraphs)

In March 2015, Bill Gates showed an image of the coronavirus during a TED Talk and told the audience that it was what the greatest catastrophe of our time would look like. The real threat to life, he said, is ‘not missiles, but microbes.’ When the coronavirus pandemic swept over the earth like a tsunami five years later, he revived the war language, describing the pandemic as ‘a world war’.‘The coronavirus pandemic pits all of humanity against the virus,’ he said.

In fact, the pandemic is not a war. The pandemic is a consequence of war. A war against life. The mechanical mind connected to the money machine of extraction has created the illusion of humans as separate from nature, and nature as dead, inert raw material to be exploited. But, in fact, we are part of the biome. And we are part of the virome. The biome and the virome are us. When we wage war on the biodiversity of our forests, our farms, and in our guts, we wage war on ourselves.

The health emergency of the coronavirus is inseparable from the health emergency of extinction, the health emergency of biodiversity loss, and the health emergency of the climate crisis. All of these emergencies are rooted in a mechanistic, militaristic, anthropocentric worldview that considers humans separate from—and superior to—other beings. Beings we can own, manipulate, and control. All of these emergencies are rooted in an economic model based on the illusion of limitless growth and limitless greed, which violate planetary boundaries, and destroy the integrity of ecosystems and individual species.

Reset the Diaboligarchy
Reset the Diaboligarchy
Jan 24, 2021 6:03 AM

(cont’d)

New diseases arise because a globalized, industrialized, inefficient agriculture invades habitats, destroys ecosystems, and manipulates animals, plants, and other organisms with no respect for their integrity or their health. We are linked worldwide through the spread of diseases like the coronavirus because we have invaded the homes of other species, manipulated plants and animals for commercial profits and greed, and cultivated monocultures. As we clear-cut forests, as we turn farms into industrial monocultures that produce toxic, nutritionally empty commodities, as our diets become degraded through industrial processing with synthetic chemicals and genetic engineering, and as we perpetuate the illusion that earth and life are raw materials to be exploited for profits, we are indeed connecting. But instead of connecting on a continuum of health by protecting biodiversity, integrity, and self-organization of all living beings, including humans, we are connected through disease.

According to the International Labour Organization, ‘1.6 billion informal economy workers (representing the most vulnerable in the labour market), out of a worldwide total of two billion and a global workforce of 3.3 billion, have suffered massive damage to their capacity to earn a living. This is due to lockdown measures and/or because they work in the hardest-hit sectors.’ According to the World Food Programme, a quarter of a billion additional people will be pushed to hunger and 300,000 could die every day. These, too, are pandemics that are killing people. Killing cannot be a prescription for saving lives.

Health is about life and living systems. There is no ‘life’ in the paradigm of health that Bill Gates and his ilk are promoting and imposing on the entire world. Gates has created global alliances to impose top-down analysis and prescriptions for health problems. He gives money to define the problems, and then he uses his influence and money to impose the solutions. And in the process, he gets richer. His ‘funding’ results in an erasure of democracy and biodiversity, of nature and culture. His ‘philanthropy’ is not just philanthrocapitalism. It is philanthroimperialism.

Reset the Diaboligarchy
Reset the Diaboligarchy
Jan 24, 2021 6:12 AM

Ending with:

As I look to the future in a world of Gates and Tech Barons, I see a humanity that is further polarized into large numbers of ‘throw away’ people who have no place in the new Empire. Those who are included in the new Empire will be little more than digital slaves.

Or, we can resist. We can seed another future, deepen our democracies, reclaim our commons, regenerate the earth as living members of a One Earth Family, rich in our diversity and freedom, one in our unity and interconnectedness. It is a healthier future. It is one we must fight for. It is one we must claim.

We stand at a precipice of extinction. Will we allow our humanity as living, conscious, intelligent, autonomous beings to be extinguished by a greed machine that does not know limits and is unable to put a break on its colonisation and destruction? Or will we stop the machine and defend our humanity, freedom, and autonomy to protect life on earth?

Post Hoc
Post Hoc
Jan 24, 2021 7:35 AM

When will the world wake up to the fact that we are nature and we are not threatened by microbes but rather microbes are us.
Thanks for this post which affirms how incredibly wrong is the top-down approach to world hunger and land management which counters those who are best qualified to maintain the land and its bounty.

THX-1154
THX-1154
Jan 24, 2021 6:09 AM

In March 2015, Bill Gates showed an image of the coronavirus during a TED Talk and told the audience that it was what the greatest catastrophe of our time would look like. The real threat to life, he said, is “not missiles, but microbes.”

Reset the Diaboligarchy
Reset the Diaboligarchy
Jan 24, 2021 6:14 AM
Reply to  THX-1154

Get out your snow boots! 🙂

THX-1154
THX-1154
Jan 24, 2021 8:36 AM

I just now figured out what you were referring to.

are you going tomorrow?

Reset the Diaboligarchy
Reset the Diaboligarchy
Jan 24, 2021 9:09 AM
Reply to  THX-1154

I was, actually, simply referring to… SNOW!

I can’t find any reference to anything happening tomorrow when I do a search, but it’s probably safe to assume what the “where and when” will be. Alas, in addition to being rather camera-shy, I am not one for crowds, so it is unlikely that I will be “there.”

THX-1154
THX-1154
Jan 24, 2021 9:22 AM

art gallery, 1PM. as usual.

George Mc
George Mc
Jan 24, 2021 8:51 AM
Reply to  THX-1154

The real threat to life is neither missiles nor microbes but Bill Gates.

Ben
Ben
Jan 24, 2021 12:07 PM
Reply to  THX-1154

Bill Gates – the banality of evil

His psychopathy allows him to view the rest of humanity as expendable. The hand waving one has transferred his Microsoft business model to humans. We must submit to endless vaccine ‘updates’ in order to live our lives

wardropper
wardropper
Jan 24, 2021 1:18 PM
Reply to  Ben

And those Windows updates already contain enough nightmares for the average person…
More enlightened computer users always have to resort to counter-measures to try and undo several of the so-called ‘features’ in those updates.
Features which are nothing but an intrusive pain in the arse.

THX-1154
THX-1154
Jan 25, 2021 3:25 AM
Reply to  wardropper

more enlightened computer users decline to have anything to do with Bill Gates and his vile cartel.

anybody who does, is no more than a useful idiot for corporate fascism.

https://linuxmint.com/screenshots.php

Dimitri
Dimitri
Jan 25, 2021 1:53 PM
Reply to  THX-1154

sadly Linux Mint is still firmly in the domain of nerds and not really usable by the non-IT savvy for anything but passive web browsing. There is still no one-click way to install software and it’s a big mess of updates, dependencies, repositories, driver issues, bugs, etc etc. I have tried it twice in the last decade and both times ended up going back to the old Mac.
Even installing the OS itself is problematic.

THX-1154
THX-1154
Jan 26, 2021 5:34 AM
Reply to  Dimitri

Bill Gates thanks you from the bottom of his heart, Microsoft shill.

wardropper
wardropper
Jan 24, 2021 1:13 PM
Reply to  THX-1154

Wow.
What a scientist!
Such hands-on experience!
(I wonder when he last had contact with a microbe…)

As an elderly person myself – yet one who harbours no desire to thwart the natural evolution of our species – I can recognize already the signs of premature ageing in our good ol’ Bill here.
If we give it another few years, I can see his grasp of reality ending up the same as Joe Biden’s now is – the same as Ron Reagan’s, Maggie Thatcher’s, Uncle Adolf’s, Pol Pot’s, Bob Mugabe’s and Idi Amin’s grasp was during their last years.

I don’t know how common this kind of lunacy is, but I believe it is highly prized by certain unscrupulous political manipulators
My layman’s description would be “paranoid schizophrenia”, but what do I know? Others here could probably nail the details more accurately.
He makes Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s “Psycho” look like a slightly troubled young man, and I only wish he was running a motel, like Bates, out in the Arizona countryside, where his gibbering of crackpot “microbe” theories over a cup of coffee would harm no one.

As this article states, Modi was picked and nurtured for his current role in India.
It’s the same with Gates.
“You’ll do nicely”, sort of thing…

Dimitri
Dimitri
Jan 25, 2021 1:58 PM

There is no pandemic or “health emergency” (wtf is that supposed to even mean?)
F IS FOR FAIL.

Dimitri
Dimitri
Jan 25, 2021 1:56 PM

Vandana Shiva published a statement last year reinforcing the “epidemic” lie and framing it as a consequence of the destruction of the environment. No doubt she was concerned with her reputation in the mainstream sewers.

F is for Fail.

Doctortrinate
Doctortrinate
Jan 24, 2021 5:46 AM

Elephant wars – my bull is bigger than yours…but the mice could hear them coming, – why wait until late ?…making their task a mammoth one – the way of the mastodon.

THX-1154
THX-1154
Jan 24, 2021 5:26 AM

it’s almost like people in India should stop voting for neoliberal-fascist political parties.

Arundhati Roy — Walking with the Comrades

THX-1154
THX-1154
Jan 24, 2021 5:41 AM
Reply to  THX-1154

Arundhati Roy — Capitalism: A Ghost Story

THX-1154
THX-1154
Jan 24, 2021 5:43 AM
Reply to  THX-1154
wardropper
wardropper
Jan 24, 2021 1:21 PM
Reply to  THX-1154

Which, in turn, is almost like people in the UK should stop voting for Eton-educated numskulls…

But, of course, “it’s not the votes that count, but who counts the votes”… etc etc

Reset the Diaboligarchy
Reset the Diaboligarchy
Jan 24, 2021 4:31 AM

Two videos touching upon this theme:

IWWH Ep 08: The Great Reset India – Deepti Datt/Varun Mathur/Cory Morningstar/Alison McDowell
youtube:
watch?v=d5Y1DVSXO90

Ep. 21: THE GREAT RESET VS NATURE: Round Table w/Sandi Adams, Deepti Datt and Alison Hawver-McDowell
youtube:
/watch?v=uT0wq07oH_E

And another another more recent presentation from Alison on “the idea of managing agriculture and our food system around health–and even gut health… and the way that is being enmeshed in global finance, but also in ways that will… start to fabricate digital twins of us to be managed in a cyber environment.”

youtube:
watch?v=B_wjPnZZC2c

Reset the Diaboligarchy
Reset the Diaboligarchy
Jan 24, 2021 4:58 AM

comment image

Reset the Diaboligarchy
Reset the Diaboligarchy
Jan 24, 2021 6:27 AM

comment image

Reset the Diaboligarchy
Reset the Diaboligarchy
Jan 24, 2021 6:49 AM

comment image

Ben
Ben
Jan 24, 2021 12:09 PM

Scientists are monsters

wardropper
wardropper
Jan 24, 2021 1:34 PM
Reply to  Ben

The truth is that the arm of the law doesn’t reach far enough.
Scientists are currently allowed to be monsters, when in the past, only Drs. Frankenstein, Jekyll and Mengele got away with usurping that privilege.

The reason the arm of the law doesn’t reach far enough is that there is no longer a moral backbone to the concept of ‘Law’.
You ask a modern scientist who wants to use us all as human guinea pigs how he could even think of adopting such a horrible policy, and he will answer, “Why not?”
He will see the benefits to his career, the funding with which soulless corporations will gladly provide him, and his dream of a perfect, disinfected, robotic world as the only considerations of any relevance.
or importance in his tiny, isolated brain.
Morality?
What’s that but a hindrance to my success, promoted by religious freaks?

Perhaps the experience of powerlessness in the face of such evil will teach us something about morality.
I do hope so.

THX-1154
THX-1154
Jan 24, 2021 6:16 AM

you can make those links clickable:

https://youtu.be/d5Y1DVSXO90

https://youtu.be/uT0wq07oH_E

Reset the Diaboligarchy
Reset the Diaboligarchy
Jan 24, 2021 6:32 AM
Reply to  THX-1154

Thanks; I just broke them up due to suspicion that youtube links were invoking the dreaded SF, but further experimentation seems to confirm that post length is a key factor, not links (at least at this time…).

THX-1154
THX-1154
Jan 24, 2021 6:44 AM

post length is a key factor? which is more likely to disappear down the spamhole, short posts or long posts?

it seems to me that the censorship is political in nature, probably having been originally designed for a more “liberal” / mainstream forum than this one.

repost:

constructive suggestion to Admins: I suppose that your spam-check software is some pre-existing product, and was not developed specifically for this website.

have you considered the possibility that it might have some built-in political bias, which you (and most people who post here) might not actually sympathize with? that would explain the frequent complaints of “censorship”.

in particular, the anti-spam technique known as “Bayesian filtering” assigns spam probabilities to various keywords, based on a large sample of (supposedly) spam and non-spam documents which it has been trained on. if your filter was developed for use by the mainstream media, or even the fake-left-alternative media, then it will have an inherent bias against the words, or possibly even phrases, which are commonly associated with “conspiracy theories” and other ideological deviations from Official Reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_spam_filtering

since the actual policy of this website is that (most?) such ideological deviations be fully aired and discussed, rather than flushed down the “fake news” blackhole, it would be most unfortunate if a filter deployed with the quite proper intention of catching actual spam (irrelevant and mostly commercially-motivated junk messages), was unintentionally impeding the discussion of the kind of impermissible ideas that this website exists in order to facilitate.

please investigate this possibility, and report what anti-spam technology is actually in use here, and whether there is any reason to suspect that it might have the kind of political bias which you would expect from the Guardians of officially-permitted discourse. I expect that you yourselves are even more frustrated than anybody else, of having to constantly retrieve perfectly legitimate posts from the spam bucket, and being constantly criticized for it. if it does turn out that the filtering software has a political bias, and this problem can be fixed, it might relieve you of most of this tedious, unpleasant, and thankless job.

Reset the Diaboligarchy
Reset the Diaboligarchy
Jan 24, 2021 6:52 AM
Reply to  THX-1154

post length is a key factor? which is more likely to disappear down the spamhole, short posts or long posts?

Well, when I pasted all the quoted material from Vandana Shiva’s book in one go above, it went to SF. So I broke it up in three separate comments, and it passed through. Of course, now that I’ve mentioned this here, who knows what changes they will make to it?

Dimitri
Dimitri
Jan 25, 2021 2:05 PM
Reply to  THX-1154

It looks like you can get past it by posting an innocuous comment that does not get put in the “spam check bin, and then editing the comment to add what you want to say.

It seems to be triggered by:
-certain keywords, especially those that refer to a certain faux tribe of “chosen ones”
-using a VPN.

If your comment gets “spam-checked” you may have to use a different username and IP address to be able to post again.

Dimitri
Dimitri
Jan 25, 2021 2:07 PM
Reply to  THX-1154

It looks like you can get past it by posting an innocuous comment that does not get censored, and then editing the comment to add what you want to say.
It seems to be triggered by:
-certain keywords, especially those that refer to a certain faux tribe
-using a virtual private network.
-commenting often

If your comment gets censored you may have to use a different username and address to be able to post again.

facts are fukt
facts are fukt
Jan 25, 2021 2:09 PM
Reply to  THX-1154

It looks like you can get past it by posting an innocuous comment that does not get blocked, and then editing the comment to add what you want to say.

It seems to be triggered by:
-certain keywords, especially those that refer to a certain faux tribe of money lenders.
-using a virtual private network

If your comment gets auto-censored you may have to use a different name and IP address to be able to post again.

Ooink
Ooink
Jan 24, 2021 2:30 AM

Has Monsanto been to India yet?

THX-1154
THX-1154
Jan 24, 2021 5:30 AM
Reply to  Ooink
Koba
Koba
Jan 24, 2021 2:01 AM

Jacobin magazine don’t like this protest for some reason

THX-1154
THX-1154
Jan 24, 2021 5:32 AM
Reply to  Koba

maybe that’s because they’re just “left” camouflage for the US Democratic Party.

Ben
Ben
Jan 24, 2021 12:10 PM
Reply to  Koba

Jacobin are establishment narrative controllers

Jeff Carmack
Jeff Carmack
Jan 24, 2021 1:24 AM

w a t e r