statism watch

Put this beside the story about Monsanto’s market moves placing heirloom varieties out of reach for farmers, and a bleak picture begins to emerge. The seedbank’s funding sources are identified here. Among them: Syngenta (a pesticide and GMO seed company), The Rockefeller Foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well as a host of interlocking biotech firms through the CGIAR (funded by the same companies and foundations). Draw your own conclusions. For this journal’s part, it seems farmers are going to get owned by public-private multinationals unless they diversify their crops and ditch the terminator seeds.

Flashback: American thinktanks sowed seeds of food crisis

AFP
February 16, 2009

CHICAGO (AFP) — The stores of seeds in a “doomsday” vault in the Norwegian Arctic are growing as researchers rush to preserve 100,000 crop varieties from potential extinction.

The imperiled seeds are going to be critical for protecting the global food supply against devastating crop losses as a result of climate change, said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust.

“These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation,” Fowler said. “You can’t imagine a solution to climate change without crop diversity.”

That’s because the crops currently being used by farmers will not be able to evolve quickly enough on their own to adjust to predicted drought, rising temperatures and new pests and diseases, he said. [Ed. Note: Hence the justification for centralizing the world's genetic inheritance - public funds are going to provide a genebank for private GMO companies. That's all this is.]

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The only way to ‘reform’ the IMF is to abolish it, The World Bank, and all global banks tied to legislative power structures. There must be a separation of these powers – banks and the state must be separated for the same reasons the church and state were separated. Nothing wrong with banks per se, those that haven’t metastasized as a result of predatory currency regimes. But it’s these firewalls to state ownership – and most particularly ownership by ascendant global institutions – that are the only way to protect and institutionalize liberty. Otherwise the ‘IMF riots’ will continue to spread as control of financial systems becomes further centralized. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1812 that “…I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.” Who witheld fiat credit to smaller national banks in the first place? Puts this journal in mind of a song…

Patrick Wintour, The Guardian
February 16, 2009

PM plans to make G20 summit in London a turning point in remaking global economic order

Gordon Brown is making reform of the international monetary fund, its governance, funding and powers of surveillance, the centrepiece of a 45-day diplomatic drive in an attempt to make the G20 summit in London a turning point in remaking the international economic order.

Brown, in alliance with the Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, wants to increase the funding of the IMF, speed up a review to give China and India clearer voting rights, and also give the fund powers to direct nation states to respond to its surveillance reports. He also wants to give the G20 a permanent secretariat, so making it a powerful body overseeing finance and largely eclipsing the G8.

The prime minister is meeting the IMF managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, on Wednesday, the pope on Thursday and the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, on Friday, before joining a mini-summit of European G20 members France, Italy and Germany in Berlin hosted by Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. No 10 angrily denied suggestions that Merkel is lining Brown up to be a new IMF super-regulator. Some officials believe a cabinet member leaked the suggestion.

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If they’re good enough for Pakistan, they’re good enough for Canada, right?

CBC News
February 16, 2009

The first unmanned surveillance airplanes will start patrolling the Manitoba portion of Canada’s border with the U.S. after a ceremonial launch Monday, officials say.

Based at a military facility in Grand Forks, N.D., the $10-million Predator B drone aircraft are equipped with sensors capable of detecting a moving person from 10 kilometres away.

They will gather information as they fly along the 400-kilometre border and then transmit it back to operators who will in turn contact border agents. The drones will not carry weapons, such as missiles or laser-guided bombs, and will need permission to fly in Canadian airspace.

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Good on ya, Airstrip One.

Flashback: UK Terror Law To Make Photographing Police Illegal

Henry Porter, The Guardian
February 16, 2009

From today, it is illegal to photograph the police, despite the fact that they use increasingly aggressive techniques to record us

On the day that it becomes illegal to take pictures of police engaged in counter-terrorist operations – in practice a ban on taking pictures of the police – it is worth noting events in Brighton recently where police set up outside a cafe and photographed people attending a meeting about the environment.

According to the Brighton Argus, members of the Cowley Club, which was hosting a meeting of Earth First, “were confronted with four uniformed officers outside the Somerfield store, opposite the venue, snapping visitors using a paparazzi-style lens”. One of the club members, David Biset, said the police were behaving in a deliberately “intimidating manner”. He said:

Avenues of dissent are being closed down and police feel able to treat politics as a police matter. There was no suggestion of anything going on outside the building. The police have no reason to be there beyond intimidating people. You shouldn’t be put on a database simply for attending a meeting.

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Update (2009/02/18): Facebook has bowed to pressure and retracted the changes until they can decide on new language.

Flashback: Facebook ‘violates privacy laws’

Brian Stelter, New York Times
February 16, 2009

Reacting to an online swell of suspicion about changes to Facebook’s terms of service, the company’s chief executive moved to reassure users on Monday that the users, not the Web site, “own and control their information.”

The online exchanges reflected the uneasy and evolving balance between sharing information and retaining control over that information on the Internet. The subject arose when a consumer advocate’s blog shined an unflattering light onto the pages of legal language that many users accept without reading when they use a Web site.

The pages, called terms of service, generally outline appropriate conduct and grant a license to companies to store users’ data. Unknown to many users, the terms frequently give broad power to Web site operators.

This month, when Facebook updated its terms, it deleted a provision that said users could remove their content at any time, at which time the license would expire. Further, it added new language that said Facebook would retain users’ content and licenses after an account was terminated.

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