THE VIOLENT CORPORATE STATE (MONSANTO AND BLACKWATER, PERFECT TOGETHER)

THE MATING OF A DEATH TECH FIRM 
AND A HIT SQUAD.

By Noor al Haqiqa

January 4, 2010

If ever two corporations match each other, it’s Monsanto and Blackwater, now called Xe in the hope that you cannot pronounce it. 

But do WE deserve THEM? 

The answer is a resounding NO!

According to Digital Journal, Monsanto finally admitted to hiring Blackwater, not only to keep watch for the safety of personnel overseas, but to monitor blogs of people who might not be fond of the corporations relentless efforts to feed us GMO food without our knowing. 

Monsanto is famous for heavy-handed methods to promote its Frankenfoods. Sometimes Monsanto fights dairies that want no part of rBST, arguing this maligns the growth hormone. Last December, the Associated Press reported on Monsanto’s strongarm tactics in dominating the GMO seed market.

Blackwater is famous for hiring former Green Berets and CIA officers to do pretty much what corporations want them to do. (Don’t ask and don’t tell or we will have to kill you.). As a result, we have Blackwater’s long, proven record of mass murder, thuggery, embezzlement, and incompetence; Clinton’s State Department continues to hand them new contracts. 

In this case, it’s an 18 month, $120 million handout for “protective security services” in Afghanistan. The contract was given to a Blackwater subsidiary called “The US Training Center”.

The mother corporation has been renamed from the tarnished aggressive name “Blackwater” to the intentionally bland “Xe”. Peripatetic Blackwater founder Erik Prince, the former Michigan SEAL who took his share of his parents’ fortune to create a company that reads like a bad Tom Clancy novel, wants to sell it while he absconds with the millions he stole to the overt slave society, the UAE.. He has, has since moved to Abu Dhabi which is also all the better to avoid the not-so-long arm of U.S. law.

In addition to how evil and corrupt such contracts are from the point of view of the public interest, this is also yet another example of Obama’s utter incompetence even from the point of view of partisan politics. Prince is a longstanding Republican operative and Bush fundraiser. Indeed Blackwater was set up in the first place with the business model of lobbying for fat corporate welfare gigs, to cash in as Bush came into office. It was never for a single day a legitimate entrepreneurial, “capitalist” outfit. It was always an embezzlement racket.

But evidently being a de facto extension of the Republican Party and self-defined exterminationist Christian crusader doesn’t disqualify one from service in the Obama administration.)

And what about the ongoing Department of Justice attempt to indict Blackwater murderers for the Nisoor Square Massacre? What about the allegations and indictments for theft? A State Dept. flack cheerfully chirped that none of that matters:

“Under federal acquisition regulations, the prosecution of the specific Blackwater individuals does not preclude the company or its successive companies and subsidiaries from bidding on contracts,” the spokeswoman said. “On the basis of full and open competition, the department performed a full technical evaluation of all proposals and determined the U.S. Training Center has the best ability and qualifications to meet the contract requirements.”

Evidently while the 1st Amendment is to be gutted for phony examples of providing “material assistance” to terrorists, and while RICO provides for severe penalties for most forms of money laundering to known organized crime outfits, neither of these forms of abetting are to apply in the case of the known terrorist and mafia gang “Blackwater”.

Meanwhile, in another example of how Obama loads his administration with corporate operatives, he has sought to install Monsanto cadres in positions of power over our food supply. Thus Michael Taylor, Monsanto executive and lobbyist, was appointed FDA Deputy Commissioner for food.

Another Monsanto name which was widely vetted was Dennis Wolff. Wolff is a notorious thug who, as Pennsylvania secretary of agriculture, wanted to ban milk producers from labeling their product hormone free, on the grounds that it would “confuse” consumers. (Monsanto markets rBGH, and Wolff as a government cadre saw his job as to serve Monsanto against the public interest.) Governor Ed Rendell had to override this anti-democratic power grab in the face of massive public outcry.

Monsanto has a long history of seeking nothing but to poison, loot, and dominate the world. It once hired Arthur Anderson (of Enron notoriety) with this commission: Monsanto wanted world domination of the food supply through control of all seeds. They asked Anderson to reverse engineer a strategy: How do we get there from here? Here’s a harrowing tale of Monsanto’s legalized thuggery, with the full collaboration of the rigged law and corrupt courts, all the way up to the Canadian “supreme” court.

Both of these corporations must be called fascist, not as anti-corporate rhetoric but by any objective, reasonable measure. Both are authoritarian and violent and operate with open contempt for democracy and the public interest. Both are unproductive, parasitic leeches off the corporate welfare state. Both propose to use brutal force to entrench that state and, in the case of Monsanto, kill the planet as they do so.

And now they’re working together. According to documents uncovered by journalist Jeremy Scahill (who has specialized in educating the public about Blackwater), Blackwater has conferred with Monsanto about setting up a Nixon-style dirty tricks outfit and god knows what else:

“The relationship between the two companies appears to have been solidified in January 2008 when Total Intelligence chair Cofer Black traveled to Zurich to meet with Kevin Wilson, Monsanto’s security manager for global issues.

“After the meeting in Zurich, Black sent an e-mail to other Blackwater executives, including to [then-president Erik] Prince and [former CIA paramilitary officer Enrique] Prado at their Blackwater e-mail addresses.

“Black wrote that Wilson ‘understands that we can span collection from internet, to reach out, to boots on the ground on legit basis protecting the Monsanto [brand] name…. Ahead of the curve info and insight/heads up is what he is looking for.’

“Black added that Total Intelligence ‘would develop into acting as intel arm of Monsanto.’ Black also noted that Monsanto was concerned about animal rights activists and that they discussed how Blackwater ‘could have our person(s) actually join [activist] group(s) legally’.

“Wilson confirmed he met Black in Zurich and that Monsanto hired Total Intelligence in 2008 and worked with the company until early 2010. He denied that he and Black discussed infiltrating animal rights groups, stating ‘there was no such discussion.’”

This is chilling in itself, as well as typical of the kind of corporate collaboration and Mussolini-style corporate-state collaboration which we see everywhere we look. Recently the people learned of the same dirty tricks at something called the Pennsylvania Homeland Security Agency.

Scahill managed to obtain documents that, according to Scahill, show

"... entities closely linked to the private security firm Blackwater have provided intelligence, training and security services to US and foreign governments as well as several multinational corporations, including Monsanto, Chevron, the Walt Disney Company, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and banking giants Deutsche Bank and Barclays, according to documents obtained by The Nation. Blackwater's work for corporations and government agencies was contracted using two companies owned by Blackwater's owner and founder, Erik Prince: Total Intelligence Solutions and the Terrorism Research Center (TRC). Prince is listed as the chairman of both companies in internal company documents, which show how the web of companies functions as a highly coordinated operation."

A spokesperson for Monsanto, reached by Scahill, first denied the relationship with Blackwater, but then admitted that Monsanto had paid Total Intelligence for intelligence reports:

"... about the activities of groups or individuals that could pose a risk to company personnel or operations around the world which were developed by monitoring local media reports and other publicly available information. The subject matter ranged from information regarding terrorist incidents in Asia or kidnappings in Central America to scanning the content of activist blogs and websites."

A government thug there proposed a secret surveillance campaign using taxpayer dollars on behalf of shale-drilling “stakeholders”. The private goons hired this time were an Israeli outfit called ITRR. The Israelis are the real pros at this kind of parasitic thuggery. The likes of Blackwater just imitate them, often hiring Israeli cadres to teach them.

Rendell swooped in to the rescue again, ordering the contract canceled but this bureaucratic criminal hasn’t been fired. Is this recurring theme of Rendell overruling “abuses” starting to look like a pattern?

It’s the same thing as with Facebook’s assault on privacy, and so many other examples. Push as far as you can, then when you go too far and bring down too much heat, backpedal and claim it was a mistake. Wait for the heat to die down and resume the assault. This was also a common tactic of Lenin and Stalin in their war on the peasants. Rendell clearly knows the game plan. 

So Blackwater and Monsanto now blandly dismiss the significance of these contacts,

just as Monsanto claims it has no interest in the food bill,

just as Prince says he’s sick of the security business and is getting out (he wanted Xe to become some kind of paper pushers or something),

just as Google says it has no plans to use the “managed services” VIP lane to run parallel to the Open Internet, it’s all just so much ennui, isn’t it?

Nothing to see here, move along.

The MSM does its part by seldom talking about any of it, and abetting the theme of downplaying everything when it does.

The reality is that international corporations like Monsanto and their mercenary private armies are a kingdom unto themselves. Their goal is to stuff our our mouths with dubious foods and our minds with half-baked science.

Tactics for keeping us in the dark range from their never-ending battles to avoid having food labels tell us the truth about what we are eating, and their lobbying efforts to ensure our government never funds any full-scale research on the health effects of these “miracles.”

 

Monsanto, by hiring a mercenary army and former CIA field agents, is deadly serious about protecting its deadly products. Yet, this contract further discredits the company. The public can now paint an even bleaker picture of the firm that brought us Agent Orange, PCBs, rBST, DDT, aspartame and, now, hitmen.

At the individual level, you can click here to read an Open Salon blog on how to decipher food labels, some of which indicate which foods are GMO. But the larger question is what we can to do fight back against food corporations that operate more like countries run by dictators that want to enslave us.

Although this is all slated to end with a bang, the sheep are expected to go with a whimper.

MONSANTO HIRES BLACKWATER TO MONITOR GMO BLOGGERS