Up next on Wall Street’s exploitation list.

If not stopped, on November 17th, the U.S. government will pass a rule that allows for America’s protected lands, including parks and wildlife refuges, to be listed on the N.Y. Stock Exchange. Natural Asset Companies (NACs) will be owned, managed, and traded by companies like BlackRock, Vanguard, and even China.

Since the early 2000’s, outfits like Goldman Sachs have been trying to trade air, or specifically carbon without much success. Their 2005 carbon exchange staggered along until it was quietly discontinued, and their Climate Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) is now facing delisting. “ESG” was the next attempt to monetize the un-monetizable, with the “E” part of that acronym standing for Environment, ill-defined as that was. Now ESG is failing. Market leaders say it is facing “a perfect storm of negative sentiment” and its U.S. investments fell by $163 billion in the first quarter of 2023 alone.

Its stepchild, Net-Zero, is so loathed, it looks like it might blow up the entire carbon scam. Says Australian senator Matt Canavan, “Net-Zero has absolutely carked it. It is a soundbite and totally insane. Almost everything we grow, we make, we do in our society relies on the use of fossil fuels.” Vanguard has pulled out of Net-Zero funds. The British government too is backing out of Net-Zero, saying “we won’t save the planet by bankrupting the British people.” New Zealand’s new government revised the country’s Net-Zero plans in its first week in office. In the hard hit Netherlands, the Farmer-Citizen movement is now the dominant party in the Dutch senate and every provincial assembly. Sweden has abandoned its 100 percent Net-Zero plans and Norway has announced another $18 billion in oil and gas investments.

Not going to happen.

Even in the submissive E.U. voters are turning from the “green” parties toward anti-E.U. parties. Renewables funds are seeing massive outflows because of rising interest rates and declining subsidies. Of course, the massive subsidies taxpayers have already given both “renewables” investors and “renewables” companies will never be clawed back. All we will get is a shrug as they move onto the next kill. Which is so obvious it is a wonder no one predicted it.

The entire universe envies the lush interior of the U.S. Increasingly empty, it is filled with a cornucopia of minerals, fiber, food, waters, extraordinarily fertile soil as well as well-ordered, educated, mostly docile people. Worth in the quadrillions, if one could monetize and trade it, financialize it, the way the market has financialized the future labor of Americans, well, it would be like golden coins raining from the sky.

On October 4th, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a proposed rule to create Natural Asset Companies (NACs). A twenty-one day comment period was allowed, which is half the minimum number of days generally required. NACs will allow BlackRock, Bill Gates, and possibly even China to hold the ecosystem rights to the land, water, air, and natural processes of the properties enrolled in NACs. Each NAC will hold “management authority” over the land. When we are issued carbon allowances, owners of said lands will be able to claim tax deductions and will be able to sell carbon allowances to businesses, families and townships. In the simplest of terms, that’s where the money will be made. WE peons will be renting air from the richest people on earth.

The following are eligible for NACs: National Parks, National Wildlife Refuges, Wilderness Areas, Areas of Critical Environmental Concern, Conservation Areas on Private and Federal Lands, Endangered Species Critical Habitat, and the Conservation Reserve Program. Lest you think that any conserved land is conserved in your name, the largest Conservation organization in the U.S., is called The Nature Conservancy, or TNC, which, while being a 501(c)3, also holds six billion dollars of land on its books. Those lands have been taken using your money via donations and government grants, and transferred to the Nature Conservancy, which can do with those lands what it wills.

If this rule passes, America’s conserved lands and parks will move onto the balance sheets of the richest people in the world. Management of those lands will be decided by them and their operations, to say the least, will be opaque.

Farm country is fighting back. American Stewards of Liberty, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, Kansas Natural Resource Coalition, Financial Fairness Alliance and Blue Ribbon Coalition have filed comments, Republican senators Pete Ricketts, James Risch and Mike Crapo have sent pointed queries to the SEC. This week, Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) offered an amendment that would defund the SEC proposed rule to approve listing “NACs.”

Most of us ill-understand “financialization.” It is a complex set of maneuvers best explained by the behavior that crashed the economy in 2008 which bundled up questionable mortgages and brokered off the risk to dozens of different funds in order to share that risk. NACs are asset grabs. From ’09-’20, funds asset-stripped America’s manufacturing via debt obligations, buying the company, selling off the equipment, firing the most expensive employees, and gutting, if they could, pension funds. Then they upped the price and sold on the assets. Which were bundled and brokered off. These are called collateralized debt obligations and they thunder doom underneath the debt-fueled economy.

Natural Asset Companies are an attempt to grab hard assets to make up for an inevitable collapse. But taking more land out of production makes it certain that collapse moves ever closer. Land needs to be used, cared for, and maintained by the people who live on and use the land. Otherwise, it runs to desert and invasive species. The mad push to “green” and net-zero has triggered financialization, or a brokering of the future, because only energy spurs real growth — and energy has been increasingly restricted over the past twenty years. NACs are another destroyer of America’s heartland.

[…]

Via https://elizabethnickson.substack.com/p/wall-streets-planned-theft-of-americas

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan © Getty Images / Mert Gokhan Koc;  dia images

RT

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has stated that Ankara intends to discuss the issue during an upcoming meeting in Russia

The Telegraph makes a very feeble attempt to backtrack on their lies and yet, they are still the frontrunner in mainstream media now finally obliged to confess the truth (of sorts).

The “boil a frog” metaphor is a popular fable that describes the process of gradual change or gradual decline, often without the individual noticing or reacting to it. The story goes that if a frog is placed in a pot of cold water and the water is slowly heated, the frog will not notice the increase in temperature and will eventually boil to death. On the other hand, if the frog is placed in a pot of boiling water, it will immediately jump out to escape the heat.

And so it is that the mainstream media (MSM) is trying to leak out the truth, that we reported faithfully over the last three plus years, so slowly that perhaps you might not notice how much they originally lied.

[…]

Knapton refers to recent research from Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, written up in BMJ Public Health (which is inevtiably more brutal in its conclusions than The Telegraph would allow to be published for the masses), viz:

Covid vaccines could be partly to blame for the rise in excess deaths since the pandemic, scientists have suggested.

Researchers from The Netherlands analysed data from 47 Western countries and discovered there had been more than three million excess deaths since 2020, with the trend continuing despite the rollout of vaccines and containment measures.

They said the “unprecedented” figures “raised serious concerns” and called on governments to fully investigate the underlying causes, including possible vaccine harms.

Writing in the BMJ Public Health, the authors from Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, said: “Although Covid-19 vaccines were provided to guard civilians from suffering morbidity and mortality by the Covid-19 virus, suspected adverse events have been documented as well.

“Both medical professionals and citizens have reported serious injuries and deaths following vaccination to various official databases in the Western World.”

They added: “During the pandemic, it was emphasised by politicians and the media on a daily basis that every Covid-19 death mattered and every life deserved protection through containment measures and Covid-19 vaccines. In the aftermath of the pandemic, the same moral should apply.”

The study found that across Europe, the US and Australia there had been more than one million excess deaths in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, but also 1.2 million in 2021 and 800,000 and 2022 after measures were implemented.

Researchers said the figure included deaths from Covid-19, but also the “indirect effects of the health strategies to address the virus spread and infection”.

They warned that side effects linked to the Covid vaccine had included ischaemic stroke, acute coronary syndrome and brain haemorrhage, cardiovascular diseases, coagulation, haemorrhages, gastrointestinal events and blood clotting.

German researchers have pointed out that the onset of excess mortality in early 2021 in the country coincided with the rollout of vaccines, which the team said “warranted further investigation”.

However, more recent data regarding side-effects has not been made available to the public, with countries keeping their own individual databases of harms, which rely on self-reporting by the public and doctors, the experts warned.

Delays to other treatments

Researchers said that it was “likely” that the impact of containment measures, restricted healthcare and socioeconomic upheaval during the pandemic had contributed to deaths, although accepted that was difficult to prove.

Gordon Wishart, chief medical officer at Check4Cancer, and visiting professor of cancer surgery at Anglia Ruskin University, warned repeatedly that delaying cancer diagnosis would lead to deaths.

“It was predicted early in the lockdown period that limited access to healthcare for non-Covid conditions would lead to delays in the diagnosis and treatment of time-critical conditions such as cancer, cardiac disease, diabetes and dementia and that this would lead to excess deaths from these conditions,” he said.

NHS England data shows that per 100,000 people the cancer incidence was 521 in the pre-lockdown year, then fell to 456 in 2020-2021, suggesting around 45,000 cancers were missed in the first pandemic year.

The incidence rate rose to 540 per 100,000 the following year suggesting many cancers were diagnosed late, when treatment would be less effective.

Speaking about the potential for vaccine harm, Mr Wishart added: “The authors are correct to point out that many vaccine-related serious adverse events may have been unreported, and point to the fact that the simultaneous onset of excess mortality and Covid vaccination in Germany is worthy of further investigation on its own.

“The paper provides more questions than answers but, it is hard to disagree with their conclusion that further analysis is required to understand the underlying causes of excess mortality to better prepare for the future management of pandemic crises”.

Wow. So, literally everything that we wrote in early 2021 with respect to collateral harms of non-pharmaceutical interventions, disruption to healthcare and of course the mRNA experiment was true and now being repeated almost verbatim by the MSM.

[,,,]

Via https://metatron.substack.com/p/how-to-boil-a-frog?r=83qir&triedRedirect=true

In Washington DC Roger McKenzie sees signs of the US empire’s decay all around – especially compared with the vibrant and thriving Chinese capital

Internationalist 360°

In the following article, originally published in the Morning Star, Roger McKenzie contrasts the economic priorities of the US with those of China.

Reporting from Washington DC and New York City, and reflecting on the recent Friends of Socialist China delegation to China, he compares the level of investment in infrastructure in the two countries. A train journey between DC and NYC “revealed a picture of severe urban decay in supposedly the world’s most important and richest nation” – a reflection of the fact that, in the US, “the government, of any colour, prefers to spend immense amounts of money on the military as opposed to the people.”

The article continues:

The US is visibly decaying economically as well as politically, while China is clearly stable, able to act on behalf of the people and on the way up. The transport infrastructure, road, rail and airport systems in China have undergone a massive upgrades in length and quality over the last decade. This is a sentence you simply can’t apply to the US.

In the five cities I visited during my 10-day visit to China I never saw a single homeless person and felt entirely safe to walk the streets and speak with anyone I wanted. Nobody stopped me from doing any of those things. I never felt the same level of safety in DC — or New York for that matter.

Roger notes that the US could learn a great deal from China. If it were willing to adapt to a multipolar reality and give up on its dream of a New American Century, it could prioritise the needs of its people over those of the military-industrial complex. However, he warns that the current trajectory is towards leveraging the US’s military power to maintain its global dominance, even as its economic power wanes. “The temptation will be for the empire to strike back as its power crumbles. Unfortunately it is something I think we are already seeing in Ukraine and in its attempts to stoke up tensions in the breakaway Chinese province of Taiwan.

[…]

Empires always end. All of them. The only question is about the nature of that end. We can see this before our eyes as the United States empire reaches its inevitable end, internationally and domestically.

We can see it happening in front of our eyes if we choose to look. One of the advantages of travelling by train instead of flying is you get to see much more of the reality of a country.

The Acela Express train ride of 230 miles or so for three hours from New York City to the US capital, Washington DC, was depressing in so many ways.

The train itself was better and more comfortable than many I have travelled on in Britain, but the journey revealed a picture of severe urban decay in supposedly the world’s most important and richest nation.

You could see the wealth on the skyline represented by the skyscraper office blocks of the major cities we passed through — Philadelpia and Baltimore — but much of the rest was a picture of severe urban decay.

The industrial base of the country has been gutted. It reminded me of the train journey through the once thriving Black Country in Britain. Once a hive of industrial activity, now hollowed out with miles of left-to-rot former factories.

In the US the choice has clearly been made that the government, of any colour, prefers to spend immense amounts of money on the military as opposed to the people.

I can’t believe that the minority of the US population that actually bother to come out and vote don’t understand this. It’s no secret that the US spends by far the largest amount on the military of any country on Earth.

The US spends more on the military than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, Britain, Germany, France and South Korea combined.

Between them China and Russia account for only around 13 per cent of the world’s military spend. Not the vast amounts the corporate media would have you believe.

But while content to project its power abroad, the US is crumbling. One visit to the vast and imposing US embassy in London will show you just how much the US is intent on projecting its power. To the US size really does matter.

The Romans, along with every other past empire, knew the importance of not just having the means to exercise power, but having the symbols and institutions that constantly remind everyone of this.

As I arrived in DC and left Union Station, everything looked amazing. As the cab left the station, the Capitol building, the scene of the Trump-inspired attempted coup on January 6 2021, peeked out above other buildings.

It acts as a symbol to remind you of what the main business of the city is — the gathering and exercise of power on behalf of capitalism.

A stone’s throw from Babylon Central (the White House) nestled the World Bank, which I didn’t know was actually a group of banks, and the International Monetary Fund. In many ways the three institutions that run the world.

The area, to be fair, was immaculate, as was much of the Georgetown area where I was staying — but not everywhere.

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House I saw makeshift campsites on waste ground that people on their way to the swanky shops and restaurants of Georgetown cannot fail to see. No doubt a fair number of these passers-by work at the White House or elsewhere for the administration of the day.

Of course homeless people living rough in a capital city isn’t peculiar to DC, but the fact that it’s so close to the seat of power of the empire is notable.

Last year there was a 39 per cent increase in crime in DC. Earlier on this year data showed an outbreak of armed carjackings, many carried out by desperate teenagers. Put all of this alongside crumbling road and rail infrastructure and a strong picture of decay is painted.

But it isn’t just economic decay. The inability of the (mis)leadership of both main political parties to pass any kind of meaningful legislation for the people, the blatant gerrymandering of voting areas, a political rather than legal Supreme Court makes the case for political decay.

The January 6 attempted coup three years ago illustrates the point better than anything I am able to write. The problem for the US is that few others believe in the power they attempt to project.

The global South is looking elsewhere because it is fed up with being bullied and told who they can and can’t have trade or political relations with. They are sick of having the real decisions about their economies taken by the troika on Pennsylvania Avenue.

One such country the US warns the global South off is China, the world’s other major economic and political superpower. The comparison between the US and China is startling.

I was in Beijing just a few weeks ago, so it is still fresh enough in my mind to be able to compare the two. In reality there is no comparison between the two capitals or, indeed, the two countries.

The US is visibly decaying economically as well as politically, while China is clearly stable, able to act on behalf of the people and on the way up. The transport infrastructure, road, rail and airport systems in China have undergone a massive upgrades in length and quality over the last decade. This is a sentence you simply can’t apply to the US.

Figures from 2022 show the length of China’s highways exceeded 109,982 miles. The length of the country’s high-speed railways expanded by an additional 27,961 miles. The country had some 254 civil airports in operation.

China is clearly a beacon for the rest of the world in understanding the importance of strong domestic infrastructure. The growth shows no sign of slowing.

In the five cities I visited during my 10-day visit to China I never saw a single homeless person and felt entirely safe to walk the streets and speak with anyone I wanted. Nobody stopped me from doing any of those things. I never felt the same level of safety in DC — or New York for that matter.

Making sure people have somewhere to live is also a priority in China. You notice the high-rise buildings on the outskirts of the major cities. The aesthetics of these buildings may not be to everyone’s tastes — it was fine by me — but I think people in China would take the fact that they have somewhere decent to live rather than the tents that I saw in DC.

Instead of warning about a non-existent economic collapse of China — mainly because of its failure to compete — the US needs to look to itself and its own economic priorities. The choice is a simple one. It can continue to prioritise spending money on projecting and using a power that nobody now believes in or it can decide to prioritise the good people of the US.

The temptation will be for the empire to strike back as its power crumbles. Unfortunately it is something I think we are already seeing in Ukraine and in its attempts to stoke up tensions in the breakaway Chinese province of Taiwan.

[…]

Via https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/06/03/contrasting-the-uss-severe-urban-decay-with-chinas-extraordinary-infrastructure-development/

Claudia Sheinbaum at her campaign launch.

Zoe Alexandra

Dr. Claudia Sheinbaum won the presidential election in Mexico on June 2, making her the first female president of Mexico. The scientist, public servant, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and longtime activist ran with the “Let’s Continue Making History” Coalition composed of the Movement for National Regeneration (MORENA), the Labor Party (PT), and the Green Ecologist Party of Mexico. With 58% of the votes (according to INE quick count at 1:25 am (UTC-6)), Sheinbaum defeated Xóchitl Gálvez Ruíz who was the candidate of the right-wing Force and Heart for Mexico Coalition of PRI-PAN-PRD. Jorge Álvarez Máynez came in third with around 10% of the total vote share.

Sheinbaum addressed thousands of supporters in the Zocalo in the center of Mexico City to celebrate her victory. “I feel excited and thankful, for the recognition that you have given to the Fourth Transformation of public life of Mexico. Here as we have always done, I promise to not let you down. Today, the people of Mexico have made possible the continuity and advance of the Fourth Transformation, and also for the first time in 200 years, we women have arrived to the presidency of the Republic!”

Earlier in a press conference, Sheinbaum also announced that MORENA had achieved a majority in the Chamber of Deputies and was set to also win a majority in the Senate. Clara Brugada, the former mayor of Iztapalapa, won the race for head of government of Mexico City.

Sheinbaum’s party MORENA had announced her victory in a press conference about an hour and a half after polls had closed and all major exit polls projected her victory with a 2:1 margin, which they characterized as an irreversible trend. The President of MORENA, Mario Delgado, had stated: “Today sovereignty, independence, and democracy have also triumphed. The people have shown that they will not be deceived, not with hate campaigns nor with lies. The votes defeated the bots!”

The National Electoral Institute (INE) began to release results of the quick count at 8:00 pm (Mexico City time). Just before midnight on Sunday, the Council President of the National Electoral Institute (INE), Guadalupe Taddei Zavala, released a message to announce that based on the preliminary results of the rapid count, Dr. Claudia Sheinbaum is set to win the presidency with a wide margin over right-wing candidate Xóchitl Gálvez. She added that between 58.9-61.7% of the electorate had participated in Sunday’s local and federal elections.

Tensions had begun to rise in the period after voting when conservative candidate Gálvez Ruiz, instead of accepting her overwhelming defeat, confirmed in the exit polls and the preliminary results of INE, called on her supporters to remain vigilant and suggested she is in fact be the winner. She then published a series of tweets, echoing the same messages of “vigilance” and wrote, “They want you to go to bed thinking that they beat you. They lie like always.” Analysts had been alerting to a situation wherein Gálvez would “cry fraud” and attempt to undermine the results of the election in light of her predictable defeat.

However, this narrative was quickly debunked after the official results confirmed the landslide victory of the MORENA candidate. When Sheinbaum announced her victory, she confirmed that Gálvez had called to congratulate her moments earlier.

Claudia Sheinbaum vows to continue making history

Sheinbaum will be the first woman president of Mexico and North America, and has vowed to continue the project of the “Fourth Transformation” inaugurated by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, led by the principle of “Mexican Humanism”. The anti-neoliberal socio economic project has had enormous success across Mexico in raising the standard of living for the majorities in the country through the increase in minimum wage, expanded social and economic programs to increase access to key rights of education, housing, healthcare, and more. AMLO will finish his term in office with a 80% approval rating, according to Gallup polls.

Sheinbaum spoke about the importance of the 4T project in an interview  with Peoples Dispatch and BreakThrough News in April 2023, “states have to give the rights to the people. What do we think is a right? Education, health, a home, pension for all the elders. We also believe in strategic areas of the economy such as energy. The state has to be part of this, especially electricity, oil and mainly and now lithium…it’s important and it’s going to be very important in the future…You cannot have private investment measured only by GDP or international investment. You have to measure investment, public and private, in wealth for the people. And that’s the big difference with neoliberalism that believed that everything was going to be solved by the market.”

Mexico’s northern neighbor, the United States, is its most important trading partner. During AMLO’s six-year term, he managed to maintain a mostly amicable relationship with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but also did not shy away from holding his ground on key issues. For example, as president, AMLO was one of the strongest voices on topics which directly contradict US policy such as the US blockade of Cuba, the imprisonment and persecution of Julian Assange, and the subordination of the region to corporate and imperialist interests. AMLO was also a driving figure in reinvigorating spaces of regional integration and served as pro-tempore president of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). How Sheinbaum relates to her northern neighbor and the rest of the region will be a defining feature of her presidency.

[…]

Via https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/06/03/claudia-sheinbaum-the-next-president-of-mexico/

Adan Salazar

Japanese citizens took to the streets in protest of the World Health Organization and the Covid-19 vaccine, which has been blamed for causing a number of severe adverse effects and deaths.

Footage out of Tokyo on Friday showed thousands of people attending the “National Movement to Protect Lives from WHO: Massive Rally,” reportedly meant as a “demonstration against the revision of the IHR (International Health Regulations),” according to Sputnik Japan.

At the rally, former Japanese Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications and current member of the nation’s House of Representatives Kazuhiro Haraguchi told a crowd he’d been diagnosed with cancer after receiving three Covid jabs.

“I apologize to all of you. So many have died, and they shouldn’t have,” he said.

“This time last year, I had neither eyebrows nor hair. Two out of the three supposed vaccines I received were lethal batches,” Haraguchi said in a powerful speech.

He went on to say other members of the “National Diet,” Japan’s legislature, also suffered adverse reactions but refused to come forward.

“They are falling to pieces, some hospitalized. But they don’t speak up,” Haraguchi said, adding he was also censored from appearing on the Channel 3 news network.

Another speaker called on the Japanese government to “stop colluding with Bill Gates and Pharma!” adding that “The Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare must face the enormous excess deaths head-on!”

[…]

Via https://theblogginghounds.com/2024/06/03/japanese-people-hold-massive-protest-against-who-deadly-covid-vaccines/

Episode 28 Ramesses the Great: The Early Years

The History of Ancient Egypt

Professor Robert Brier

Film Review

As depicted in numerous temple wall paintings, Ramesses II accompanied his father Seti I on military campaigns as early as age nine. In Year 5 of his reign, he led his troops through the desert to battle the Hittites (originally from Turkey) who occupied Syria. With four divisions of 5,000 men each (including countless chariots with archers), he took town after town with no resistance. The logistics were very difficult because they had to carry all their own water and food. Although the Hittites outnumbered the Egyptians by two to one, the battle ended in a standoff. Ramsesses II refused a peace treaty but accepted a truce.

On his return to Egypt, he moved the administrative capitol from Thebes (Wassit) in southern Egypt to P-Ramses (Kantir) in the delta because it was more strategic for attacking other Mediterranean countries.

He also carved a temple out of a mountain just south of Aswan (in Nubia) fronted by four 60-foot statues of Ramsses II.* Inside, frescoes depict the pharaoh battling the Nubians and Syrians. In addition to completing his fathers temple at Abidos (and carving his own name on the door), he built a third temple at Abu Sendil.

Hi great wife Nephratare  gave him five sons and two daughters. By his other wives and concubines, he had 100 children altogether.

Living well into his eighties, Ramesses the Great ruled 67 years. Hyawasoff, a son by his second wife Isetnofret, became the high priest of Memphis and the world’s first archeologist. He restored many of the great pyramids, as well a labeling them with the names of the kings who built them.

Merataba, Ramesses’s 13th son, would succeed him.

*The sculptors were suspended from scaffolding at the top to carve them. When the Aswan dam was built, UNESCO moved the statues to higher ground by breaking them into massive blocks and reassembling them.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/1492791/1492860