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In this interview, investigative journalist Whitney Webb, who does both independent work and collaborations with The Last American Vagabond, discusses the little-known details of Operation Warp Speed, a joint operation between U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Defense to produce a fast-tracked COVID-19 vaccine and other therapeutics.
As you may have noticed by now, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and a host of other platforms are censoring information relating to COVID-19 in general and vaccine information in particular. Many commentators who touch on these issues have been deplatformed altogether, so information on these crucial topics are getting harder to come by.
“We're at a point where the line between Silicon Valley and the national security state has become so blurred, you really can't distinguish where one begins and where the other ends,” Webb says. This in large part helps explain how and why big tech is getting away with such blatant censorship as deplatforming of individuals who discuss issues the mainstream media refuse to touch.
“You can definitely make the argument that it’s state censorship to a degree,” she says. “I think it's quite telling that a lot of these companies, from the very beginning of their existence, had some sort of funding from U.S. intelligence.”
As noted by Webb, you’d expect Operation Warp Speed, being a government program, to be governed by some federal regulatory agency like the Food and Drug Administration or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or even the HHS, but no. It’s almost entirely funded and operated by the CIA and the U.S. military. Webb explains:
“When Operation Warp Speed was announced … it was essentially sold to the public as a joint operation between HHS and the Department of Defense. So, the military was involved from the beginning. But oddly enough, last month, a lot of information about Warp Speed started to come to light.
One was the organizational chart of its leadership, which showed that by and large, the entire operation is dominated by military. There were very few civilian health officials, and most of those civilian health officials are involved in the therapeutic side of Warp Speed, which as we know now is the most drastically underfunded part of this initiative.
It was initially given a $10 billion budget, and they've already spent $10 billion on the vaccine. Only $450 million have been given through Warp Speed to a therapeutics project, which of course we now know is Regeneron, which is allegedly what Trump received when he was at Walter Reed.
What I'm saying is that most, the vast majority, of the money and time and energy has gone to a vaccine specifically, not really therapeutics. And so, if you look at the organizational chart, the people that aren't directly deployed by the DoD or military intelligence were essentially put in the therapeutics part, which was drastically underfunded. It's focused largely on the vaccine.
What's also interesting is we know that Operation Warp Speed currently has about six vaccine candidates. And we know now that they plan to use them all, and that they plan to allocate a specific vaccine to specific populations — what they identify in their official guidance as critical populations — which they announced just a few days ago.”
A company called Palantir was given the contract to come up with the vaccine allocation strategy and determine the critical populations each vaccine should be distributed to. Palantir, founded by Peter Thiel, was initially funded by QTL, the CIA's venture capital arm.
The CIA was its only client for the first three years of its existence. At present, Palantir is a contractor to 17 U.S. intelligence agencies and also the U.S. military. The company is also in charge of COVID-19 data under the auspices of the HHS. Hospitals must now report their COVID-19 data to Palantir or lose their Medicaid and Medicare funding. Palantir is also involved in things like predictive policing.
“There are a lot of things in Warp Speed that are concerning. One of the things I read about recently is that Google and Oracle, two large tech companies that have longstanding ties to the CIA, are going to be involved in what they describe as a pharmacovigilance surveillance system, or what was more recently referred to by the head of Warp Speed as an incredibly precise tracking system, whereby everyone who receives one of these vaccines will be tracked and surveilled, not just to make sure that they get a second dose ...
but also to see what happens to people's physiology, because they admit that every single one of these vaccine candidates … has never been brought to market or licensed by the government before,” Webb says.
According to Webb, the plan is to monitor vaccine recipients for 24 months after the first dose. The question is, how do you monitor such a large population? One way would be to employ biosensors that collect and send biological metrics automatically.
Monsef Salafi, a long-time head of GlaxoSmithKline's vaccine division, who is now part of Warp Speed, is a leading proponent of bioelectronic medicine, the use of injectable or implantable technology for the purpose of treating nerve conditions. The MIT Technology review has referred to it as hacking the nervous system. But it also allows you to monitor the physiology of the human body from the inside.
The vaccine coordinator for Operation Warp Speed is Matt Hepburn, a former program manager for DARPA, where he oversaw the development of ProfusA,1 an implantable biosensor that allows a person’s physiology to be examined at a distance via smartphone connectivity. ProfusA is also backed by Google, the largest data mining company in the world. Salafi is also invested in a company called Galvani Bioelectronics, which was cofounded by a Google subsidiary.
“So, you have Google being contracted to monitor this pharmacovigilance surveillance system that aims to monitor the physiology and the human body for two years,” Webb says.
“And then you have the ties to the ProfusA project, which oddly enough is supposed to work inside the human body for 24 months — the exact window they've said will be used to monitor people after the first [vaccine] dose.”
In short, rather than doing long-term safety studies on both animals and humans beforehand, what’s being put into place is a “safety study” after the fact, where vaccine recipients are monitored for side effects. Unfortunately, Warp Speed, being shrouded in secrecy, has not released details about what biological parameters would actually be monitored and surveilled. As noted by Webb:
“It really doesn't make sense, if you think about it, for something that … is funded by American taxpayers to produce a medical countermeasure or a vaccine [during] peace time, is being run by the military under extreme secrecy with a lot of involvement of intelligence contractors, or intelligence agencies themselves.
We now know, for example, that the NSA and the Department of Homeland Security are directly involved in Operation Warp Speed, but they won't really say exactly what parts they're doing. But there are some indications as to what they could be involved with.
And the fact that Silicon Valley companies that have been known to collaborate with intelligence [agencies] for the purpose of spying on innocent Americans — Google and Oracle, for example — are going to be involved in this surveillance system … for everyone that gets the vaccine.
It's certainly alarming, and it seems to point to the fulfillment of an agenda that was attempted to be pushed through or foisted on the American public after 9/11, called Total Information Awareness, which was managed, originally, by DARPA.
It was about using medical data and non-medical data — essentially all data about you — to prevent terror attacks before they could happen, and also to prevent bioterror attacks and even prevent naturally occurring disease outbreaks.
A lot of the same initiatives proposed under that original program after 9/11 have essentially been resurrected, with updated technology, under the guise of combating COVID-19.”
Webb also discusses the vaccine trials currently underway around the world, and the fact that even though the vaccines are being given to perfectly healthy, younger individuals, they’re reporting lots of side effects, including serious ones. Most recently, a volunteer physician in the Brazilian arm of AstraZeneca’s trial died from receiving the placebo, which was not sterile saline but the meningitis vaccine.2
As detailed in “How COVID-19 Vaccine Trials Are Rigged,” none of the vaccines are designed to actually prevent infection. The primary measure of success is whether or not the vaccine results in fewer symptoms when you’re infected with SARS-CoV-2.
While the AstraZeneca trial initially stated the vaccine was being tested against a saline placebo,3 as I mentioned earlier, it’s since been revealed that they’re using the meningitis vaccine as the “placebo,” which can help hide a variety of side effects. The study was not halted following that death, but it’s already been paused twice due to unexpected serious illnesses. Both instances were deemed unrelated to the vaccine, of course.
“These are really things that have the potential to be very drastic because you have to consider that the sample sizes are quite small. [If] you extrapolate to the size of the U.S. population, potentially hundreds of thousands of people [may] suffer very adverse health effects,” Webb says.
Webb also points out that rather than being contracts between government and the vaccine companies, the vaccine contracts have been funneled via a third party. Why? One potential reason is because this exempts them from Freedom of Information Act requests. It also exempts vaccines made under those contracts from many federal regulations, including federal safety regulations.
“We also know, because of the changes HHS made per the Prep Act, that any person that produces a COVID-19 vaccine … associated with Operation Warp Speed will not be liable for any sort of damages it may cause.
And, it's definitely concerning that these vaccine companies, a lot of which just have atrocious track records, are being given billions of dollars and being allowed to operate under the utmost secrecy, developing something for the American public that can very well be mandated, or, for some people, even if it's not an official mandate, if they want to keep their jobs or they want to stay in school, they'll have to receive it anyway. So, it's definitely an issue that more people should be talking about.”
Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, it’s extremely difficult to get this information out. YouTube, which is owned by Google, censors all of it. This is beyond questionable considering Google’s involvement with Operation Warp Speed. In short, they’re censoring to protect their own interests.
Aside from the fact that mRNA vaccines have never been used in humans before now, there’s also the issue of their perishability. This is yet another factor that heightens the risk of these vaccines. At best, they may become ineffective unless stored properly; at worst, they may produce unexpected side effects.
Unlike conventional vaccines, which simply need to be refrigerated, mRNA vaccines need to be kept on dry ice in order to maintain a temperature below zero. This clearly complicates delivery and storage, which apparently is one reason why the military will be in charge of distribution.
“The person in the Pentagon who is overseeing [the distribution] aspect is a man named Paul Strauss. He's one of the people who has been most adamant about the secrecy and insisting that they can't release certain things. So, that doesn't instill me, personally, with a lot of confidence as to what's going on,” Webb says.
“But yes, there are a lot more logistical hurdles than there have been in past planned vaccination programs, which of course didn't involve the military, this extreme secrecy, and didn't involve DHS or the NSA. The HHS, like I said earlier, sold this as a joint, essentially 50/50 HHS and DoD initiative. But really, the number of HHS officials on this list is quite small.”
As mentioned, 9/11 became the justification for a series of tyrannical control mechanisms in the form of the Patriot Act that stripped Americans of civil liberties and privacy.
Now, the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the fact that it hasn’t resulted in an excess number of deaths above the historical norm for any given year, appears to be used as yet another excuse for the implementation of more tyrannical controls. It appears that what they’re doing is laying down the infrastructure for a totalitarian control system set to be deployed later. Webb agrees, saying:
“I tend to agree with you in a big way, and I'll give you an example of an initiative that's being put out right now by HHS that they claim is about preventing coronavirus outbreaks before they happen, and how it plays into this longstanding effort to produce ‘smart cities.’
HHS, a few weeks ago, issued a solicitation, which was given to this MIT spinoff company called Biobot Analytics. Essentially, they say it’s to create a nationwide wastewater surveillance system where they will be robotically sampling sewage from various cities around the country.
They say that will be done to test for COVID-19 and use an AI algorithm to predictably determine if a COVID-19 outbreak will take place in the future, up to 11 days before symptoms would even allegedly begin to show in that particular population. They say that would be done to enable rapid containment of those communities before this alleged future outbreak could happen.
What you can see there, in my opinion, is what was previously trying to be sold to the public as predictive policing, but now it's sort of the predictive policing approach to healthcare. We have to prevent infection or prevent outbreaks before it happens, which obviously is rife for abuse by a government that is fundamentally corrupt and out of control.
If they wanted to lock down a particular community, all they have to say is, ‘Our new surveillance system has identified, through this algorithm, that there will be an outbreak here in 11 days. So we have to shut everything down in this entire city.
What this wastewater surveillance system requires is sensors throughout a sewage system in a particular city, which is the underground infrastructure of what are often today called smart cities — cities filled with sensors that are united by the internet of things, 5G and Wi-Fi.
What's very alarming is that the developers chosen for this wastewater surveillance system come from a lab at MIT called Sensible City Labs, and it's not sensible. It’s sensible [in that it’s] able to be sensed. Essentially, MIT is a smart cities lab that was chosen by HHS to develop this under the guise of COVID-19.
And what is also alarming, in my opinion, is that this company has partnered with HHS before, not to predict coronavirus or to sample for coronavirus in wastewater, but to detect patterns of illicit drug use in certain populations, which dovetail with the war on drugs in the United States. Whether it has to do with opioids or marijuana use or any other illegal substance, it allows surveillance on what people are ingesting in a particular community.
They also talk about analyzing people's diets, what they're ingesting — if people are eating foods that the government has decided are associated with illnesses, they can see if too many people are eating the wrong foods and then accordingly ban those foods through a municipal or a statewide edict and things like that.
It's really a recipe for the micromanaging of regular human habits where the government was not previously involved …
[After] 9/11, the invisible enemy [was] these faceless terrorists abroad. Now, under coronavirus, the invisible enemy is a microbe that can exist anywhere, including within your own body. Therefore, to fight and win the war against the microbe we have to know what's going on inside of your body also.
And so, we're seeing the potential for the use of something like ProfusA and Operation Warp Speed, or this effort to surveil sewage, to determine what people are putting in their bodies. It’s definitely a very slippery slope in what I would call the beginnings of a Biosurveillance state.”
Indeed, it all appears to be part and parcel of a longstanding technocratic plan to govern society through technology, programmed by scientists and technicians and automated through the use of artificial intelligence, rather than through democratically elected politicians and government leaders.
Much of it is being developed and implemented in really underhanded ways. For obvious reasons, the true, long-term purpose is never actually admitted. For example, while smart cities have received public pushback, this plan to equip the sewage system with biosensors is essentially a way to build the system from below ground, up.
Since it’s underground, people will be far less likely to object to it or understand it as an intrusion of privacy. Ultimately, topside technologies will be added in the form of smart homes, until people are living in smart cities whether they signed up for it or not.
Webb also discusses the influence and role of Google in greater depth, including the current antitrust case filed against the company by the U.S. Department of Justice.
“There are a lot of things that Eric Schmidt has done over the years that are deeply concerning. He, and a lot of other people involved with Google, including Google's top futurist, as he describes himself, Ray Kurzweil, are very big proponents of what is often called transhumanism, this belief that it's the destiny of the human race, it will be the pinnacle of human evolution, to combine with machines and defeat death.
Schmidt is a person that certainly feels that way and was close with Kurzweil. Now he's in charge of the artificial intelligence modernization efforts of the government.
It’s very, very disconcerting, especially when you look at a lot of the military's own modernization plans that are set to begin next year, with having an unprecedented role for artificial intelligence and targeting and flagging people that soldiers will then shoot with these augmented reality helmets the Pentagon has bought.
It’s a lot of the Orwellian surveillance structure that we're seeing rolled out, whether through Warp Speed or by HHS under the guise of COVID-19 response, it definitely seems to dovetail significantly with plans that have been developed by people like Schmidt for the modernization of the U.S. government itself, particularly the national security state.
And I really don't think that there's much of a coincidence that those two things are happening in tandem.”
As for the antitrust case against Google filed by the DOJ at the end of October 2020, 4 Webb doubts it will hurt the company. In fact, she suspects Google, just like the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil, wants to be broken up in order to be able to expand into other markets.
“The government was able to look like they were actually doing something about Standard Oil, but actually Standard Oil wanted to be broken up. That allowed the Rockefeller family to extend their influence and reach … far beyond oil.
For example, they got involved with totally remaking Western medicine ... and in shaping what we now know as Big Pharma … So, I think it's interesting that this is happening with Google now, and that it's only targeting Google's search monopoly, which is what Google began with.
But since then, Google's business has expanded far beyond search and they're poised to have a big role in upcoming health care initiatives, for example. I think they're ready to extend their tentacles, to use that metaphor, into a lot more different sectors, far beyond their search engine.
So maybe people would be assuaged publicly if they think, ‘Oh yeah, Google has been taken down and broken up by the government,’ when in reality they don't care about their monopoly on search anymore, and they're already too big to fail. I honestly think at the end of the day, a lot of this antitrust posturing towards Google, I don't really know if it will go anywhere,” she says.
Webb also points out that Google’s future is secured by its central and ever-growing role in data mining. Google will be harvesting brand new biological data through the upcoming Warp Speed surveillance system, and in September 2020, Google partnered with the Pentagon to develop predictive diagnostics for cancer using AI, which they intend to extend to other diseases as well, including COVID-19.
“There's this big push to create an all-powerful artificial intelligence algorithm in order to enable a lot of the functionality that they want to impose in smart cities and these other initiatives they've been putting forth.
In order to do that, they need access to data. That's why we've heard over the past couple of years that data is the new oil. It feeds back into this race to develop the greatest AI algorithm. This is very concerning when you look at the National Security Commission on AIs objectives.
They say the only way to maintain U.S. global military hegemony, and also economic hegemony, is to harvest more data than any of their adversaries’ states from Americans in order to be able to develop a better AI algorithm before China can do the same.
That's what these very powerful and influential organizations are saying. And if you actually look at their documents, they essentially say that there needs to be a total remaking of Americans way of life to facilitate that type of data extraction from a smaller population than the Chinese population.
For example, more data needs to be harvested per American citizen in order to facilitate that leapfrogging of China’s artificial intelligence. So, there is a lot to be concerned about, but I think a lot of people have declined to look at these commissions and institutions and what their thought process is …
And where they're going is nowhere good. It’s essentially pointing to tyranny in a technocratic system that's not even governed by humans. It’s governed by an algorithm created by man.
So obviously, it's a can of worms they're attempting to open, and the people that are behind this, whether the military and intelligence agencies, when they work in complete secrecy like they are in Warp Speed, they're historically up to no good … Historically they ruthlessly pursue their own ambitions at the expense of American interests. It's definitely worth considering all of these things.”
Based on her research, Webb suspects there will be another phase to the COVID-19 pandemic, some sort of bioterror event, likely before April 2021.
“I don't have a lot of reasons to be optimistic about the plans there. If you look at the people that predicted the coronavirus crisis before it happened, they were also immediately positioned to benefit from that crisis as it emerged. Bill Gates, for example, in April said that the coronavirus crisis is Pandemic 1, and it will be followed by Pandemic 2, which … would be a bioterror event.
And the way to respond to this Pandemic 2 would be to do the same types of preparations you would do for bioterrorism. That's straight from Bill Gates … Gates [also] frequently … talked about the need to merge international security, i.e., U.S. foreign policy with health security, as he calls it, and essentially merge the war on terror with a war on bioterror.”
She points out that Event 201, held by Gates, the World Economic Forum and Johns Hopkins in October 2019, featured a novel coronavirus. Was it really a coincidence that a novel coronavirus outbreak occurred 10 weeks later?
An earlier tabletop pandemic exercise was done in June 2001. The simulation, called “Dark Winter,” predicted major aspects of the subsequent 2001 anthrax attacks. During the last presidential debate, the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, stated the U.S. is headed for a “dark winter” — an unusual phrase that raised questions among some commentators.
Before that, the former head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) testified in front of Congress saying that this winter was going to be the “darkest winter” in modern U.S. history. Somehow, many plans actually seem to be signaled beforehand, if you’re keen enough to pick up the cues. Interestingly, with regard to the “Dark Winter” reference and its anthrax connection:
“The Johns Hopkins center for health security has a sister organization at UPMC (University of Pennsylvania Medical Center) called the UPMC Center for Biosecurity, in Pennsylvania. They're currently, under the guise of coronavirus vaccine research, attempting to fuse anthrax with the coronavirus spike protein. They are also attempting to do the same for measles.
Those are essentially gain of function studies. The person that runs their center for vaccine research at UPMC is a major proponent of these gain of function studies. And when there was a gain of function moratorium, he was its most vocal opponent and was giving all these talks to government officials about how it needed to be lifted.
What's very odd about what's going on at UPMC is that in the beginning of the year they were set to produce what could have easily been the first coronavirus vaccine, a COVID-19 vaccine candidate, but it used traditional and tested vaccination methods that are already on the market …
Oddly enough after that had made some headlines … UPMC received a lot of money from CEPI [the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations], which of course is backed by Gates, and as soon as that money was received, that vaccine candidate was quietly dropped, and in its place were these experiments to merge measles with the coronavirus spike protein, and then merge anthrax with that same spike protein.
‘Dark Winter’ may not mean much to the mainstream American public, but it certainly means something to the national security community when they hear that term being thrown around on TV. And then you have Bill Gates saying that after the coronavirus pandemic there's going to be a bioterror attack.
You also have the Council of Europe, a very influential and elitist think tank in Europe, saying that coronavirus will be followed by bioterror. High-ranking former CIA officials [are also saying it]. A lot of the people involved in Dark Winter in the biodefense industrial complex, which was created after the 2001 anthrax attacks, are all saying the same thing.
We really need to start listening to these people. Of course, they in advance have a narrative they create, not unlike the Dark Winter 2001 exercise itself, which initially claimed that the anthrax attacks were committed by Iraq working with Al-Qaeda. And then lo and behold it's traced to the U.S. military (at Ft. Detrick) so obviously it did not come from Iraq or from Al-Qaeda.
What you have now are attempts to seed the similar narrative about who will be blamed for events upcoming in the future. They set it up on purpose, I would argue, so that when the event takes place, people are more receptive to those predetermined narratives about this particular crisis and don't immediately start questioning what could have happened.
They essentially want these events to take place. They want to ramp up the fear, and then they want to conveniently tack blame to something very quickly before an actual thorough investigation can take place. That's what we saw in the aftermath of September 11 and also in the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks.”
If you listen to the interview in its entirety, you’ll have a good idea of why I’m so impressed with Webb’s investigative skills. It’s important to become educated about what’s really happening so that you don’t capitulate to the fear they're seeking to imbue in us.
It’s a fearful public that allows the technocratic elite to dictate the future and rip away our personal freedoms. It’s fear that allows tyranny to flourish. Remember, there are more of us than there are of them. But enough of us must be willing to stand up and say no, we won’t accept this plan.
On another level, being aware of the plan allows you to plan for your own safety and security ahead of time, so you’re not running around in a panic when something does happen. As the old saying goes, “Being forewarned is being forearmed.”
To find more of Webb’s work, be sure to check out her website, unlimitedhangout.com. You can also find her videos by searching Bitchute, and she has her own podcast channel called Unlimited Hangout on Rokfin.com. Warp Speed reporting can also be found on thelastamericanvagabond.com. At present, Webb is also still on Twitter @_whitneywebb.
Dr. Mercola Interviews the Experts
This article is part of a weekly series in which Dr. Mercola interviews various experts on a variety of health issues. To see more expert interviews, click here.
In this interview, social justice and anti-GMO advocate Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., discusses her book, "Oneness Vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom," which she co-wrote with her son, in which she argues that the ultra-wealthy elite are responsible for a majority of the environmental, financial and health crises currently facing us.
In reality, it's really about the 0.001% — the small number of billionaires and centibillionaires who have become ultra-rich over the past 30 years or so. Most of them didn't exist before globalization. The 1% is just a useful metaphor for the ruling elite that the publisher thought would be easier to communicate.
One of the key players is, no surprise, Bill Gates, whose wealth and "philanthropic" efforts have garnered him unprecedented influence over agriculture and global health policies that threaten food security and human health.
"I was in Paris for the climate summit, and I've been doing this UN Summit since the Earth summit in '92. I've been doing the Biodiversity Convention, drafting of clauses, including Article 19.1, which basically required biosafety and assessment of GMOs. So, I was very surprised that, for the first time, the billionaires were on the stage with the heads of state," she says.
One of the "solutions" to climate change offered by this billionaire club was geoengineering, which in reality is no solution at all. As noted by Shiva, if the climate is already changing for the worse, engineering temperatures, deflecting sunlight, dumping iron fillings on the ocean and chemicals in the sky, and creating artificial volcanoes, you're simply creating additional problems without solving the original one.
At the end of the August 2020 update of the book, she also discusses COVID-19, and how this engineered pandemic has catalyzed the transfer of wealth to the rich. While global lockdowns have decimated small businesses and left many to struggle financially, the rich have amassed fantastic profits.
"The 2008 crisis was very clearly about deregulation of the financial economy," she says. "It was about collateral, it was about taking securities, bundling up risk, and then the system totally collapsed because it was really trading in fictions. But I've been working on the economy, because I started to work on the seed in 1987.
Companies wanted to own and patent life. That's how my journey on GMO started. But they also wanted to change the trade laws. They wanted to own seed as their creation. They wanted an intellectual property treaty in the GATT. I first heard this in a 1987 [United Nations] meeting.
That's when I decided: a) I would save seeds, b) I would keep track of the GATT and the World Trade Organization (WTO). The antiglobalization movement grew out of that, and the International Forum on Globalization. We shut down WTO in Seattle, which shows the power of the people. We will not allow this lie of seed being Monsanto's invention.
I worked with our [Indian] parliament, I worked with our government to write laws. Article 3G [says] seeds are not inventions. This is what has prevented Monsanto from ripping off Indian farmers even more than they did. They've been taken to court now for the illegal collection of technology fees …
Basically, what we have today is this transfer of wealth. Monsanto's behavior is also the big tech's behavior. Do they produce anything? No. They only collect rents on digital platforms. They're rent collectors …
I saw the seed issue with Monsanto. I said, 'Here they are collecting rents from seed, which they didn't make. Then we won't let them own it.' In effect, whether it's Amazon or Gates, they're basically rent collectors. What they've done with this pandemic is literally create a closed economy, which depends on them and their rent collection."
The eight-minute video below provides a sobering summary of the massive wealth transfer that has occurred in 2020 thanks to pandemic lockdowns, during which small businesses were forced to close while giant multinational companies were allowed to stay open and thereby monopolize the market. The end result is the largest transfer of wealth in modern history.
Shiva goes on to review how India mobilized against Walmart's encroachment, which threatened to destroy local businesses. The COVID-19 lockdowns, however, have prevented the same kind of mobilization against the tech and retail giants.
As local businesses around the world have had to close their doors for months on end, Amazon.com's power has exploded. Amazon is even encroaching on grocery suppliers.
"I was just reading a paper, that the super wealthy in the U.S. have transferred $50 trillion to themselves [over the past 30 years; the globalization period] … While they rob you of your job, they're still extracting [money from] you for that forced software program on digital payments, for software programs on … digital education.
Poor Indian children, who could afford a universal education, now cannot afford education because their parents have no smartphones. So, we are seeing an engineered imposition of an economy. A healthy economy grows as an evolution with choices, with justice, with equity …
True economies would say, 'Here is what I bring. If my digital [currency is] better than your cash, choose it. Is my forced vaccination better than your immunity? Make your choice.' The minute choice is removed from people's life, democracies stop. When the choice is removed from our conditions of being, our conditions of living, then life is threatened …
What is globalization but deregulation of commerce? It is knocking down every law that was put in place by democratic societies for the protection of the environment, the protection of health, the right to education, the rights of workers. Now that's what's being targeted."
In India, they recently eliminated all labor laws, and they're trying to remove the Farmers' Rights Act, as well as environmental laws. This is what allows for the transfer of wealth to happen, Shiva says.
As explained by Shiva, all of these companies are essentially rent collectors. Facebook turns our minds into a raw material that is then capitalized upon. "Gates is particularly vicious because through the Gates Foundation, he pretends to be doing philanthropy," she says.
But with every philanthropic endeavor, he carves out new colonies from which he can collect new rents and make new investments. "That's why no matter how much he gives, he gets richer and richer," Shiva says. "A genuine giver would get poorer."
In her book, she explains how, without Gates, there would be no commercial gene editing, for example, which is the new GMO. He created a company called Editas Medicine Inc. to facilitate the patenting of these new climate-resilient plants, with which they aim to create new medicines. "He will do biofortification to solve the nutrition problem. He is particularly vicious," she says. As for what the ultimate goal might be, Shiva says:
"The first thing is, of course, they want to use their money-making tools to make more money. So, it is a dictatorship of the technology balance. That's why people should be paying a lot more attention to the violent imposition of digitalization.
A lot of my friends, who never studied the roots of these violence systems, who never understood that agrichemicals came from Hitler's concentration camps and that the agrichemical industry is the poison cartel responsible for the genocide, they're continuing that genocide.
Technologies as tools of domination and exploitation are not neutral. A lot of progressive think, 'More digitalization, more democracy.' How can a surveillance economy be an enlargement of your freedom? You have to have the systems in place, the regulations in place, the choices in place to be able to make these technologies a servant and not your master."
They also want to merge all of these various industries together — agriculture, technology and finance. Shiva recounts how, in 2016, India banned all cash and made digital transactions compulsory. In short order, "90% of poor people lost their savings, their incomes," she says, as small, local economies evaporated. Meanwhile, the wealthy elites also control the world's economy via their asset funds.
"Corporations don't own themselves anymore. Even the corporations are owned by the billionaires, the same BlackRocks, the same Vanguards control every big company, Coca-Cola to McDonald's to Boeing. Look at anything in the world, it's the billionaire money and their asset management funds.
Last year, BlackRock increased its wealth from $1 trillion to $7 trillion, which means the billionaires increased their wealth. During the lockdown, they invaded even more deeply into the Amazon and became richer.
So, these investment asset management funds are the billionaires' wealth, and it is increasing. That is merging with IT and information technology and the tech barons, and it's merging with biotechnology and the chemical industry.
That's why they're talking about digitalization of agriculture — farming without farmers and, worse, food without food. One of the big pushes of Gates and Silicon Valley is into fake food."
As noted by Shiva, while Big Biotech claims GMOs will save your health and protect the planet, these pesticide-laden plants are in fact doing the complete opposite.
There's also the issue of social justice. She cites Gandhi, who said that if you're in doubt about what the right thing to do is, "bring the face of the most vulnerable person to your mind's eye and do what is good for them." If you think it will harm them more, don't do it.
"They deliberately want to get rid of large parts of humanity," Shiva says. "First through hunger, then through sickness. They want a digital economy, they want a sick economy. Otherwise, you wouldn't be spending all your time on Big Pharma; you'd spend your time making sure that the smaller farmer doesn't get destroyed …
On a planetary scale, we are seeing these irresponsible, greedy, indifferent, callous men bring the world, and humanity, to a brink. That's why we have to act and find creative ways …
All of these tech barons who have taken over the economy, hiding behind the virus, are all jumping into life sciences. Google has a new life sciences division. This will be the final defeat of Mother Nature, At a time [when] the world is waking up to the rules of nature and healthy bodies, healthy ecosystems, an eco-healthy planet, they're still carrying on the Colonial franchise of defeating Mother Nature."
None of these things is coming out of left field. They've been carefully planned for many decades. We now see clear evidence that a "great economic reset" is in the works, which will transition everything over to digital currencies.
As noted by Shiva, the industrial revolution shifted our mindset to one where we thought of nature as dead. The result was ecological destruction and the fragmentation of society. The coming economic reset is basically part of an effort to further manipulate and shift our mental framework toward something wholly unnatural. Shiva says:
"In India, they attacked and are still attacking organic and created something called the Zero-Budget Natural Farming … What they're basically doing is giving big loans to the state, which then gives fat loans to the farmer. In the meantime, Gates is mining farm data.
He's getting people placed in the homes of farmers to mine data. Then they'll create algorithms to sell that data back. But all of this is now being reduced to carbon in the soil. You'll get zero % for what you grow. You can get no needs of yours met through food and fodder, but we will allow you to trade in the global market on the carbon in your soil, and that's what would keep you alive. This whole financialization of nature is one aspect.
The second aspect in the great reset is to redo the economy to make it look like those who are now disposable throwaway people deserved it. They created the language of competition.
[When I was writing] my epilogue, I had just received Microsoft's patent, [which] basically reduces human beings to users. Our brain activity is tapped into in various ways. Everyone wants to have smart wear these days. I should call it spyware. That data goes through algorithms. Those algorithms will decide what [we are worthy of and] Bitcoins will be allocated to us.
But every child born is born worthy. Every member of society has equal human rights. So, they're undoing everything we've put in place on humanity, on human rights, on democracy. This is where we need to be alert.
I think the whole issue of the pandemic and the lockdown was useful for them for two reasons. One, they could get everyone afraid. Second, they could get everyone distracted while they took over the economy, they took over our minds. They basically transferred all the remaining wealth to themselves."
To learn more, please listen to the interview in its entirety, and be sure to pick up a copy of "Oneness Vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom." You can also find more details about Shiva's work on Navdanya.org.
"I personally feel that this assault is coming at a time when, in India and the world, there's a new rising of consciousness of the planet and its living systems, of our health and our living systems, and the connection between our health and the health of the planet. At this point … it needs a lot of brutal violence to impose. So, to the extent they can keep the virus as their shield to hide behind, they will."
I agree with Shiva when she says that rather than allowing COVID-19 fear-mongering take over our lives, we need to look at the infrastructures of life, humanity, democracy, economy and taxation, "and start thinking about who's taking them away from us."
"You have to protect that which you treasure," she says. "Freedom and life are what are being taken right now … We have to resist fear and we have to resist hate. We are thinking beings; let us use the minds we've been given and let us rebuild community.
Again, I don't think the 6-foot distancing is by accident. Why do they use the words 'social distancing' rather than 'physical distancing'? Six feet is a physical measure. They … want us to forget that being a human being means being in community. They want us to be users of gadgets.
We must be community. We must remember that we are interrelated to the rest of life on Earth and to society. That's why we have to be talking [about how to] rebuild regenerative economies … I think we lost a lot of time thinking the only issue was energy, how energy is produced. We lost two decades of how food is produced.
I really believe that if people start becoming aware that eating good food is the single most important [strategy for health], and growing food in the right way is the single most important part to regeneration of the planet, this will rebuild community …
I think we need to start doing homework to say, 'Where's the wealth going? How should the tax flow look? How is our money going to make the billionaires richer? How can they keep extracting more money out of us?
How is our public money the new subsidy to create the infrastructure for greed, rather than be the public resources to create the infrastructure of life, of care and of solidarity? … What in our current legal framework can stop this hemorrhaging of public money to move upwards to the billionaires?
These are foundational issues. Who are we as human beings? How will we live in the future? What is the future we will create long after the robber barons are gone, because they were there in the 1930s and we learned how to get rid of them. If there's one project we should have, it's strategies to get rid of the robber barons, whatever it takes …
I don't think we have the luxury to be hopeless. Hope is something you must cultivate on a daily basis. Cultivating hope is cultivating resistance. Cultivating hope is cultivating the strategy."
