Dash For Land As Financiers Go To Ground

Colombia conference targets globalist grabs

Mar 16, 2024

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Wildfires capture the imagination but expropriation takes many forms
Bank bailouts create tsunami of money that hunts down every asset
Skulduggery of the financial markets turns digital zeroes into hard assets
Triple play as unhinged capital subverts local government, awes politicians
Migration and open borders parallel the clearances and transportations of old
International Conference on Global Land Grabbing, Bogotá, Colombia, Mar 19-21

(3,300 words or about 15 minutes of your company.)

Mar 16, 2024

Tell it to Hawaiians.

Land grabs are defined as a wave of corporate investment in land and water, accelerating under the guise of the Green agenda. In the case of Maui, homes that locals are told are too toxic to return to.

Homes in Lahaina could have been rebuilt by now — It's been seven months since the fire of August 2023.

Instead more than 3,500 people are in hotels, at a cost of $500 a day and upwards... about 11,000 people were burned out of their homes — some number between the two are waiting to be moved into short term rentals.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) proposes to pay higher than market rates for AirBnB. Yet most families have not been offered a rental, and few homes have even been assessed for insurance.

Whatever caused the fires, the government response seems clear: no home, no rental. more of a nudge to leave the island.

Along with the people of Amarillo, Texas (a UN Vision 2045 city), or Viña del Mar, Chile’s “garden city” — both proto SMART cities — the people of Lahaina might watch closely next week’s International Conference on Global Land Grabbing taking place in Bogotá.

The vast majority of land grabbing never makes the headlines.

The pivotal moment was the financial crisis of 2007-09, when privately owned central banks flooded venture capital firms and hedge funds, and the biggest corporations, with newly-created money at zero interest rates.

This tsunami of money — it was not cash, nor capital resulting from productive endeavour — was itself an instrument of grabbing. By "flooding the zone" with digital zeroes it led to the hyper-financialization of every corner of the international economy

"Easy" money may begin as fake, but with the skills and skulduggery of the financial markets it can be turned into hard assets. With the help of the “Green Mask” of sustainability, they may even portray themselves as virtuous. See Behind The Green Mask: U.N. Agenda 21, by Rosa Koire (2011).

The clearest example is “boom and bust,” in which central banks create money, borrowers buy assets on credit, then a (usually manufactured) crisis causes interest rates to jump, banks foreclose, borrowers hand over their assets, and the prestidigitation of fiat money is complete: money created out of air has been turned into real assets.

In some land grabs the pump and dump of the credit market does not work. Force majeure is needed to vacate land in parts of the world where small landowners hold the deeds outright, have no need to mortgage their property, or are too poor to have a credit rating.

Land grabs that we witness today are a variation on the theme, with technology at their disposal from financial software to the hardware of drones — and some speculate no-longer supernatural weapons like Britain’s Dragonfire laser.

Weaponised land grabs might be brutal, in the legalistic form of the British Enclosure Acts or the force and fire of the Scottish Clearances, where tens of thousands were removed from homes where they'd lived for half a millennia, to be transported by ship to Canada.

State of complicity

In an era of large scale migration on the one hand, and open borders on the other, one has to ask whether this represents the clearances and transportation of old.

Investors often claim that land is unused yet they work with the state that has the power to designate or “zone” the use of land, or even control it through nationalisation.

Should the environment be viewed from the troposphere, or does focusing on the climate disguise what’s happening on the ground where traditional water use is expropriated by intensive agriculture or developers of luxury housing, as in Hawaii?

See Maui's Fire Hydrants Ran Dry; The Politics Of Water - H20 is being rationed in an attack on humanity (MC, Sep 18, 2023).

In Haiti the imbalance of agriculture, tilted to the mass export of sugar, drove subsistence farmers to cut down forests, worsening a fuel shortage that led to further deforestation.

See Globalists Feast On Haiti's Anguish (MC, Mar 13, 2024).

The Guardian reports on the land grabs in Maui, and the mixed blessing that is the attempt to build a Community Land Trust (CLT).

With households representing about 11,000 people burned out of their homes, the journal suggests they might combine forces in a non-profit that acts as a steward of the land, building homes, shop and business units and sports and cultural facilities is a risk.

It might, if it attracts sufficient donations, be able to take on government entitities — and in the event that locals sell land, ensure that it goes to a local buyer. On the other hand, it could undermine the bigger issue of legitimate ownership, according to Lahaina elder Ke’eamoku Kapu, who ran the Maui Cultural and Research Center, who spoke to Nina Lakhani for The Guardian. [1]

This the a similar problem to putting land into "collective ownership" through assemblies established by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). It heightens potential for a land grab by the UN or entities behind UN associates like the World Economic Forum.

Stakeholders reset

The word “stakeholder” emerged as four corporations took control of 70 per cent of seeds and associated chemicals; four commodity traders took control of the same proportion of staples, and 10 companies controlled more than a third of processed foods.

The big charities (Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International) operate little differently to, and often serve the interests of, their corporate sponsors.

An example is the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), established in 2006 by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. [2]

They claimed to combine water-saving irrigation with intensive cultivation, using fertilizers to rebuild soils and improve plant yields, along with storage and processing after harvest. They promised to double the yields for 30 million households by 2020.

The result, according to one study, was that farmers found themselves in debt, the diversity of produce was restricted, they lost climate-resistant crops in preference for maize, while AGRA lobbied officials to pass legislation benefiting seed and fertilizer producers.

Historical perspective helps once again. U.S. farmers of the 1930s would recognize the techniques. The “Dustbowl” was really the indebting and squeezing of small American farmers by banks, while corportions promoted high-yield hybrids of maize that would prove uniformly vulnerable to blight, resulting in the concentration of agriculture into fewer hands.

Globalists are not creative; the techniques are almost always the same. What has changed is the concentration and intensified power of finance capital.

Electric accelerator

Today we have a new pretext and its hue is Green.

What happened in the 2000s was a rapid and notable increase in the direct acquisition of land, as world food and fuel prices surged. The activist group GRAIN documented an acceleration in land acquisition, what it called a “global land grab.”

The pretexts and motives were multiple: the 2008 financial crisis led to a tsunami of money printing the washed through the global economy looking for anything that would yield an investment.

As the flood of money gained force, commodity prices inflated, food and minerals in particular, and hedge funds and wealthy investors began to accumulate farmland.

The Green agenda of “sustainable” energy had an insatiable appetite for land, clearing forests to plant soy for ethanol; forcing farmers to sell up in order to re-wild land, reduce nitrogen use, and cut methane; and cutting down trees as fuel for bio furnaces and simply to bury them in the name of reducing CO2.

The switch to electric everything required rare earth minerals (not technically rare but often found in small deposits, and mined by hand in places like Africa). NATO and Western military doctrines declared the Sahel region of Africa a zone of great power competition in the quest for such minerals. As early as 1994 the Rwanda genocide revealed the current phase of imperial competition by American, British and French for mineral rich lands.

See Plague, War, Famine... Africa Next - As war in Ukraine runs its course, the chaos makers may be shifting their focus (MC, May 31, 2022)

New readers should tighten their belts: the 17 SDGs include ending hunger. This is a pretext for what the World Bank says is the need to reallocate investment so that idle or under-performing land is expropriated in order to increase agricultural output.

Yet we see a clear plan for depopulation, expressed by those on the fringes of the UN to see no more than 500 million to perhaps 1 billion people on the planet.

See Depopulation Article Ignites Debate Over Complicity (MC, Jan 2, 2023)

So food insecurity may not be the globalists’ concern, but rather the minerals under the land requiring demographic change (and other Malthusian euphemisms).

See Pirates, Privateers And Merchant Adventurers – second of a series on depopulation (Aug 15, 2023)

We shall see if the conference addresses the touchy subject of intergovernmental institutions like the UN being used to undermine property rights in the name of the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs).

This was most recently rejected in an Australian referendum on the "Voice to Parliament." Most voters saw it as a threat to Australians to give up title to their property.

However some indigenous leaders such as Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, of Northern Territory, recognised the insidious intent of placing an assembly representing aboriginal rights separate and outside the legislature as a step down in constitutional terms.

See Indigenous People Hijacked By Globalists - From Hawaii to Australia first nations will be expropriated (MC, Aug 18, 2023)

Green horizons

The landscape streches into the distance. We have discussed the similarities a century ago of Canada and Argentina, and how they diverged: small farmers populating the former in contrast to grand land owners in hock to international finance capital.

See Argentina’s President-Elect Milei Is An Enigma - Until you look at his WEF, Wallenberg and HSBC connections (MC, Nov 20, 2023)

From Argentina To A Street Near You - A crisis born of elite conceit is about to be exported around the world (MC, Aug 16, 2022)

Sometimes the business motive is clear: interventions like Guatemala in 1954 were prompted by the interests of the Boston United Fruit Company in which the Dulles brothers (see below) were invested. Frequently the objective is to forestall economic reforms like land redistribution, and protect the interests of powerful families (Chile, 1972; Nicaragua, 1979) or in more recent times to take control of public utilities and privatize assets (Bolivia, 2019).

See From Coup To War, Ukraine's Historical Parallel (MC, Nov 1, 2022)

Accused of benefitting from a US government-approved coup against Bolivia’s president Evo Morales in order for Tesla to secure lithium, Musk tweeted: “We will coup whoever we want.”

Proposals to abandon petroleum-fueled cars make Afghan deposits of copper, neodymium and lithium important. They have been valued at more than $1 trillion. If the G7 or World Trade Organization were serious in their promotion of "free trade", Afghanistan could be a wealth and independent country.

See Great Game Over - Did The Investors just give Afghanistan to China? (MC, Aug 17, 2021)

Tech moguls are crowding the islands of Hawaii. Many of them got their start with the deep state, and front its projects.

Hawaii’s Deep State Billionaires - 'Made men,' the creation of defence and intel agencies, are appropriating the islands (MC, Sep 4, 2023)
Amazon's Future Past (MC, Aug 31, 2021)

Ukraine’s grain

We see it in Ukraine, just as the war between Kyiv and ethnic Russians was getting underway. The New York Times admitted in May 2014, with the bloody Maidan protests not yet concluded:

“Western interests are pushing for change… Big multinationals have expressed tentative interest in Ukrainian agriculture, but they have largely remained on the sidelines, unwilling to invest in an industry hampered by structural deficiencies and, more recently, the uncertainty with its eastern neighbor.”

Those multinationals would not tolerate state regulations that specify crop rotation; they complained of land “not fully cultivated… The country’s yield per hectare of grain is about half that of the United States, according to the World Bank.” The sale of farmland being restricted, they complained that fields remained cut up “like chessboards.” [3]

You hardly need to read between the lines to see the call for more fertilizer, high yielding seeds, the consolidation of farms, and the replacement of the patchwork fields owned by Ukrainian families by corporations.

Dr. Natalia Mamonova, Research Fellow at the Russia and Eurasia Programme, Swedish Institute of International Affairs, wrote in 2019 that the collapse of the Soviet Union had left collective farms partly abandoned. Since the turn of this century, large agricultural corporations — Big Ag — succeeded in putting much land back into production, and reduced rural poverty in Ukraine from almost 75 per cent, to 20 per cent by 2010. However these corporations also have deleterious effects:

“Their activities do not directly lead to the dispossession of smallholders from their land, but imply gaining corporate control over the land and associated resources, state subsidies, and agricultural value chain. In such circumstances, rural households are unable to develop beyond the subsistence-oriented production and to become commercial family farmers.” [4]

Ukraine: The War Everyone Saw Coming - The dispossession of human and mineral in the service of Mammon (May 5, 2023)

Prof Oswaldo Zavala of the City University of New York has described how the War on Drugs has been used as a pretext for the Mexican military to clear small farmers from land in the interest of mining conglomerates (The Cartels Don't Exist, 2022).

Gouging grocers

Direct ownership is not necessary to exact control. Wealthy Western countries have their equivalent, when supermarket chains drive price margins to the bone, leaving the farm owner in place but effectively under the control of mega corporations.

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