So much about “holodomor no food”, huh?

  • OgdenTO [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Shocking to no-one, right? Hasn't the privatization of agricultural lands been the entire point of this war?

      • OgdenTO [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        They've been explicit that they are looking to privatize what nationalized industry still exists in Ukraine (basically only agricultural land) to "improve Ukraine's business competitiveness" and have been working hard to remove any remaining worker protections as well, including banning left wing political groups.

        They had a whole conference about it in August: https://mronline.org/2022/08/01/west-prepares-to-plunder-post-war-ukraine-with-neoliberal-shock-therapy/

    • Teekeeus [comrade/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      I thought it was about reshoring industry by stealing from europe but privatization is (obviously) always on the agenda

    • SoyViking [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I think looting Ukraine was a secondary objective to the evil empire whose main concern was crushing Russian ambitions of multipolarity. The plundering is just something yanks and their henchmen do by default when they go somewhere.

      • OgdenTO [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        They are opportunists -- but they've been running a conference planning the privatization of Ukraine for years: https://mronline.org/2022/08/01/west-prepares-to-plunder-post-war-ukraine-with-neoliberal-shock-therapy/

        I think the war serves both purposes, and it's something they've been trying to get to happen since before 2014

        • SoyViking [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I think the war serves both purposes, and it’s something they’ve been trying to get to happen since before 2014

          Absolutely. Looting Ukraine and defeating Russia (and by extent weakening an ally of China) are not mutually exclusive goals. They dovetail very nicely with eachother.

  • Wertheimer [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Following the 2003 war and invasion of the United States (U.S) war on Iraq, the U.S. government appointed diplomat Paul Bremer, as the head of the occupational authority in Iraq. Bremer issued several Orders for a "rebuilding" effort, one of which was Order 81, aimed at reforming Iraq's seed industry - previously centralized and resulting in a rich seed variety over the pre-war years.

    Under the new Order, farmers were prohibited from saving, sharing, or replanting harvested seeds, leading to reliance on major corporations such as Monsanto, Cargill Inc., and Dow Chemical. As a result, since 2005, Iraq has only been able to provide 4% of its seed needs. Hence, with the new regulation, farmers were forced to buy seeds from suppliers, mainly from Monsanto, which without warning, would charge royalties when crops were found to contain their patented genetic material.

    Therefore, Order 81 allowed Monsanto to promote the benefits of its seeds to a suffering population without warning farmers of the potential financial risks.

    https://ejatlas.org/conflict/order-81s-effect-on-agriculture

  • medium_adult_son [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    :geordi-no: Land reform to privatize farmland at the expense of everyone except the top 1%

    :geordi-yes: Land reform to redistribute land from a fruit company to give to peasants

  • bubbalu [they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    "Mom can we have land reform" "We have land reform at home" land reform at home:

  • UlyssesT [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    "Reform" :capitalist-laugh:

    Same "reform" strategy used to make public education much worse than it was before the "reforms," when it was already bad.

  • Collatz_problem [comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Larysa Boden

    Agribusiness lobbyist with surname literally meaning 'soil' is yet another proof we live in a simulation.

    • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      That and the fact that the FTX guy's name includes "bank man" really scrambled my eggs

    • Kumikommunism [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Okay, I wanted to make sure I had the name for this phenomenon right, but found something way funnier on the Wikipedia page because I was bored.

      In 2015 researchers Limb, Limb, Limb and Limb published a paper on their study into the effect of surnames on medical specialisation. They looked at 313,445 entries in the medical register from the General Medical Council, and identified surnames that were apt for the speciality, for example, Limb for an orthopaedic surgeon, and Doctor for medicine in general. They found that the frequency of names relevant to medicine and to subspecialties was much greater than expected by chance. Specialties that had the largest proportion of names specifically relevant to that specialty were those for which the English language has provided a wide range of alternative terms for the same anatomical parts (or functions thereof). Specifically, these were genitourinary medicine (e.g., Hardwick and Woodcock) and urology (e.g., Burns, Cox, Ball).

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism

  • NephewAlphaBravo [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    "If you do not own the land, the risk of cultivating it is immense" :porky-scared-flipped: :stalin-gun-1::mao-aggro-shining:

    • panopticon [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Like that island in the Pacific that's exploited for its phosphates for fertilizer

  • SoyViking [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Naomi Klein is a giant lib but she was dead right about the shock doctrine. It comes like clockwork every single time.

  • THC
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    deleted by creator

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        They care. They're useful idiots, but they'll be at least as pissed about this as Iraqis radicalized by US looting.

  • RNAi [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    So Ukraine still had a lot of state owned farmland? That's a surprise