Did Monsanto Really Buy Blackwater (Academi)?
There are updates to the Monsanto/Academi article sourced from the reputable VoltaireNet.org which we posted yesterday.The issue is not as cut and dried as reported. While the relationship between Monsanto and Academi is substantive and troubling, there is no evidence of a direct financial acquisition, says EarthFirst!Newswire.
However, PoliticalBlindspot insists that this is no hoax to be debunked, and reaffirmed the ties.
Ultimately, it’s up to the reader to decide which arguments carry weight.
We’ll continue to keep an eye on this contentious story.
Monsanto and Xe (Acadami)
From: EarthFirst!Newswire
A couple of weeks ago, we cross-posted an article from the website Political Blind Spot about Monsanto and Blackwater. While the article does contain many unsettling facts about the collaboration between the two organizations, it has been brought to our attention that it makes claims that are not backed up by any clear, concrete evidence.
We have looked at other articles “debunking” the story. They also raise good points, but some have holes in them. For instance, Democratic Underground claims that Monsanto is a publicly traded firm, and would have to be transparent about its ownership. Cargill is also publicly traded, and owns subsidiaries all over the world in order to avoid “barriers to trade.” DU also claims that Monsanto have no common directors with Xe (Acadami)—mergers and acquisitions do not require such corporate intimacy. While the two corporations are collaborators, two arms in the same body of militarization, there is still no evidence to suggest that they exist as one-in-the-same organization.
After checking over the article again, we have come to the following conclusions:
1) The evidence linking Xe (Acadami) to Monsanto is substantive, but does not prove the direct financial takeover that the article implies.
2) The indirect links, both financial and political, between Monsanto and Xe (Acadami) are tenable, and do create some space for speculation. Within that space, however, it is crucial to articulate the truth in connection with the facts as we know them. It is irresponsible to make speculative claims and pass them off as the truth.
3) When thinking about the top 1%, it is easy enough to create speculative links between any two multinational corporations, their boards of directors, CEOs, political powers, and so on. Playing “6 degrees of separation” can unveil very important networks; however Monsanto and Xe (Acadami) have ties that do not require speculative thinking—the article notes the two companies’ collaborative work through the militarization of Africa, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition.
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Read the full article at: earthfirstnews.wordpress
Yes, Monsanto Actually DID Buy the BLACKWATER Mercenary Group!
MBD | PoliticalBlindSpot
A report by Jeremy Scahill in The Nation revealed that the largest mercenary army in the world, Blackwater (later called Xe Services and more recently “Academi“) clandestine intelligence services was sold to the multinational Monsanto. Blackwater was renamed in 2009 after becoming famous in the world with numerous reports of abuses in Iraq, including massacres of civilians. It remains the largest private contractor of the U.S. Department of State “security services,” that practices state terrorism by giving the government the opportunity to deny it.
Many military and former CIA officers work for Blackwater or related companies created to divert attention from their bad reputation and make more profit selling their nefarious services-ranging from information and intelligence to infiltration, political lobbying and paramilitary training – for other governments, banks and multinational corporations. According to Scahill, business with multinationals, like Monsanto, Chevron, and financial giants such as Barclays and Deutsche Bank, are channeled through two companies owned by Erik Prince, owner of Blackwater: Total Intelligence Solutions and Terrorism Research Center. These officers and directors share Blackwater.
One of them, Cofer Black, known for his brutality as one of the directors of the CIA, was the one who made contact with Monsanto in 2008 as director of Total Intelligence, entering into the contract with the company to spy on and infiltrate organizations of animal rights activists, anti-GM and other dirty activities of the biotech giant.
Contacted by Scahill, the Monsanto executive Kevin Wilson declined to comment, but later confirmed to The Nation that they had hired Total Intelligence in 2008 and 2009, according to Monsanto only to keep track of “public disclosure” of its opponents. He also said that Total Intelligence was a “totally separate entity from Blackwater.”
However, Scahill has copies of emails from Cofer Black after the meeting with Wilson for Monsanto, where he explains to other former CIA agents, using their Blackwater e-mails, that the discussion with Wilson was that Total Intelligence had become “Monsanto’s intelligence arm,” spying on activists and other actions, including “our people to legally integrate these groups.” Total Intelligence Monsanto paid $ 127,000 in 2008 and $ 105,000 in 2009.
No wonder that a company engaged in the “science of death” as Monsanto, which has been dedicated from the outset to produce toxic poisons spilling from Agent Orange to PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), pesticides, hormones and genetically modified seeds, is associated with another company of thugs.
Almost simultaneously with the publication of this article in The Nation, the Via Campesina reported the purchase of 500,000 shares of Monsanto, for more than $23 million by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which with this action completed the outing of the mask of “philanthropy.” Another association that is not surprising.
It is a marriage between the two most brutal monopolies in the history of industrialism: Bill Gates controls more than 90 percent of the market share of proprietary computing and Monsanto about 90 percent of the global transgenic seed market and most global commercial seed. There does not exist in any other industrial sector monopolies so vast, whose very existence is a negation of the vaunted principle of “market competition” of capitalism. Both Gates and Monsanto are very aggressive in defending their ill-gotten monopolies.
Although Bill Gates might try to say that the Foundation is not linked to his business, all it proves is the opposite: most of their donations end up favoring the commercial investments of the tycoon, not really “donating” anything, but instead of paying taxes to the state coffers, he invests his profits in where it is favorable to him economically, including propaganda from their supposed good intentions. On the contrary, their “donations” finance projects as destructive as geoengineering or replacement of natural community medicines for high-tech patented medicines in the poorest areas of the world. What a coincidence, former Secretary of Health Julio Frenk and Ernesto Zedillo are advisers of the Foundation.
Like Monsanto, Gates is also engaged in trying to destroy rural farming worldwide, mainly through the “Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa” (AGRA). It works as a Trojan horse to deprive poor African farmers of their traditional seeds, replacing them with the seeds of their companies first, finally by genetically modified (GM). To this end, the Foundation hired Robert Horsch in 2006, the director of Monsanto. Now Gates, airing major profits, went straight to the source.
Blackwater, Monsanto and Gates are three sides of the same figure: the war machine on the planet and most people who inhabit it, are peasants, indigenous communities, people who want to share information and knowledge or any other who does not want to be in the aegis of profit and the destructiveness of capitalism.
So why were so many media outlets, editorialists and bloggers clamoring to say that the purchase was a “hoax”?
That’s a good question. The more cynical among us might suspect a financial incentive from Monsanto itself to such “journalists.”
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Read the full article at: politicalblindspot.org
READ: Companies linked to Blackwater worked for Monsanto, Chevron, and Disney
