Even as we speak, the World Bank, the big five who comprise the (In)Security Council of the UN — the biggest arms dealers on Earth — and the various multinational and transnational companies (MNC/TNC) who altogether make up more than 67 of the world’s 100 largest financial entities are working hard to liberalise the trade in liquid “biofuels”, set to give those factors in the petroleum industry a second life, by unzipping the seemingly set face-masks of the branded actors, only to release another machine with a furnace that blazes over the body of the living …

Biofuels are with righteous vehemence and great regularity totted as the solution to the energy “problem” — but what is thematic about the bio industry (patented life that is industrialised and monopolised to become a major source of profit) is simply that biofuels are predominantly derived from GM crops, which are extravagantly water intensive and rely upon the heavy use of pesticides, insecticides and artificial fertilisers, not to mention vastly fertile or forested land on which unique and diverse ecosystems depend.

Because all of the above exhaust the soil in a relatively short period of time, causing desertification and the destruction of millions’ livelihoods, new land must be found, logged, cleared and exploited.

The consequences are such that deforestation — the apotheosis of a carbon eater — becomes widespread. Indigenous communities are displaced under one guise or the other; Third World citizens become stateless residents in quagmires of industrial and environmental pollution, refugees in their own land; more carbon than ever is produced …

Companies like Monsanto command their scientific hammers to pulverise those communities living around the area in question — if only to deliver the warnings: your crops have been contaminated (who indeed can control the wind, at least until weapons of eco-warfare are subtly unveiled?).

Consequently, the upper echelons of our society become wealthier than ever dreamed while the indigenous are displaced, criminalised and made into tea-boys. And Al Gore wins a Nobel, the actual Alfred Nobel having created his wealth from dealing in arms. The same Alfred Nobel who was known in his day as the Merchant of Death. Touché.

Monsanto, a leading producer of toxic and hazardous substances — aka weapons of chemical, biological and neurological destruction, including Agent Orange — as well as “harmless” products such as aspartame or “sweeteners”, originally a weapon of neurological warfare, is the most prominent corporation involved in the biotechnology industry, regularly engaging in the great and dangerous game of corporate-careered musical chairs, swopping board members with Halliburton, Chevron-Texaco and BP.

This fact is illustrated by people such as Linda Fisher, once upon a time Monsantos vice-president for government and public affairs, who personally negotiated issues such as agriculture, biotechnology and the dumping of hazardous waste in Africa, only to later become the deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a US government institution. There are too many examples to list, including that the Food and Drug Administration is almost solely funded by and administered by Cargill, Du Pont, Monsanto and Nestlé or their representatives. They call this lobbying, of course.

Climate change — that ambiguously termed and stereotypically defined issue-cum-industry — is the key that opens the lock. Who defines it? Who creates the narrative? What issues are currently being marginalised? Who benefits and who pays the price?

We will never know because their very existence is being deleted from history, systematically and with a mechanisation that one would say, belied the Soviets … undocumented are the human rights abuses, environmental exploitation, external debts, dumping of toxic waste and goods, disease and poverty, high illiteracy and infant mortality rates, lack of water and waste sanitation facilities, among other realities such as cash-cropping economies that, when dismantled, reveal a one-resource country — soy, oil, wheat, maize, coffee, married to a one-export market that is often controlled by just one merchant …

To liquidate the communities of the land, overt or subtle wars are devised using ethnic, religious, national or ideological justifications, using the media to set the precedent by whipping and churning both the national and international scenes — political commodities — into a state of total frenzy that insinuates, falsely, the colossal threats of indigenous or communal terrorism that can only, I repeat, only be vanquished by the decent, good and peace-loving democracy-licking armies of the world, trained to kill but operating under the rhetorical cloaks of heroism, justice and freedom. Patriotism is inevitably linked to the cultural materialism of the US; buying Coke and eating McDonald’s is somehow equated with supporting troops.

In fact, the reality is very much alike.

Coke is a major financial contributor to the war efforts with Eisenhower actually having ascended through Coke finance. Starbucks, Nike and many other companies depend on cash-cropped economies to provide cheap cotton, rubber and coffee while creating a dichotomous void or legal vacuum in which to outsource labour, establish factories and dump waste. Free trade acts as the perfect tool with which to wedge open sacred worlds because it debilitates and abolishes laws that protect, record and set boundaries — Nixon threw out the gold standard to make “empty” currency and inflated market trading that much easier, this under the guise of a deliberate fomentation with GCC oil cartels, themselves an illegitimate construct.

But subtle wars are much more insidious and deceptive, using private “war” corporations to make invisible “problems” that are officially considered collateral damage, and which when detailed, sadly, list only those communities who were created by God and not the Fortune 500, hence their expediency.

DynCorp, Blackwater USA and Armor Group are such corporations, raking in over $785-billion annually. The über-gods who head this group are Herb Lanese, Jerry Hoffman and Erik Prince, respectively — because of the paradoxical premises of our civilisation, our economic philosophies which have somehow filtered down to the status of ethics and our undying belief that the next DVD machine will be better than the last, the word “respect” is almost always politically correct.