US foreign policy being steered by corporations? Say it isn't so...

[c1ue]

This article is only available for 48 hours from now.

I don't know what to think about it, but certainly the past record of US actions in Central and South America with relation to US corporate interests - makes the premise not implausible.

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/re...nlock-dispatch

In 1979, Iran took 52 Americans hostage from the U.S. Embassy. In retaliation, President Carter levied the fist of a series of economic sanctions and trade restrictions against the country. For as long as anyone can remember, Iran had been the world’s main supplier of pistachios. But Carter’s 1979 embargo on the country effectively cut off Iranian pistachio growers from the American market and created a need for alternative pistachio production, which was virtually nonexistent in the United States. Seeing a massive opportunity, the Resnicks began to snap up thousands of acres from Mobil Oil and Texaco in order to create pistachio and almond orchards. They steadily bought up more and more acreage all through the 1980s for rock-bottom prices because a long period of drought. By the end of the decade, the Resnicks had amassed enough farmland to rival Oligarch Valley’s biggest and oldest billionaire farmer clans: 100,000 acres—nearly 160 square miles—growing cotton, pistachios, almonds, oranges, lemons and grapefruit. They didn’t just grow the crops, but packaged, processed and distributed them as well.

Economic sanctions against Iran were renewed and intensified under every single president after Carter, and all the while America’s domestic pistachio farming exploded. In the past thirty years it has grown from a couple of hobby farmers to an industry generating close to $1 billion. And the Resnicks have a near monopoly on the trade. Today, Resnicks’ Paramount Farming is the country’s largest grower, processor and marketer of pistachios, controlling something like 60 percent of the industry. Pistachios are very important to the Resnicks, bringing in at least 20% of their agricultural revenue.

...

Tax filings from 2008 show that Stewart Resnick and his wife Lynda are on the board of trustees of the highly influential Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank, which was created as an AIPAC spin-off in the ’80s.

Much more at link above

[shiny!]

Re: US foreign policy being steered by corporations? Say it isn't so...

Absolutely disgusting.

[lektrode]

Re: US foreign policy being steered by corporations? Say it isn't so...

....

I don't know what to think about it, but certainly the past record of US actions in Central and South America with relation to US corporate interests - makes the premise not implausible.

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/re...nlock-dispatch

it also sheds light - or... more accurately - Illuminates several aspects of the tactics of the (liberal wing of the) crony class..

and gotta love this dude's* style:

A Journey Through Oligarch Valley

Yasha Levine heads up California's I-5 and discovers the putrid truth lurking beneath Central Valley.

By Yasha Levine


This stretch of Interstate-5 runs in an absolute straight line for 250 coma-inducing miles through an endless expanse of farmland, orchards, arid dirt, howling winds, spooky rural desolation and clouds of airborne fecal matter. It’s the main road connecting Northern and Southern California and the trick to navigating it is to set your cruise control to as close to 100 mph as you dare and gun it, eyes peeled for the sleek black CHP cruisers that prowl the highway.


The 5 bisects the Central Valley, a giant tub 450 miles long and 50 miles wide in the heart of California. It is not a place in which motorists dawdle or on which any sane human mind dwells—and that suits the people who own it just fine. The area along the 5 from Silicon Valley to Los Angeles County is one of the most productive agricultural regions in the United States. The last thing they need is people realizing this and asking themselves,


“Hmmm, I wonder who owns all this cow shit?”

whooo HAAAAA!!!
yep.
would take a wild stab of a guess and say she was a fan of hunter s thompson
who's most famous work kept me going ALL NIGHT LONG the 1st time i found it ;)
but this one kinda tingles my funny bone in a sorta personal way (since i'm somewhat familiar with some aspects of it)

.....grown to become perhaps the largest agribusiness operation in Oligarch Valley. They have a near monopoly on almonds and pistachios and dominate a huge section of the orange and mandarin market. Along the way, the Resnicks managed to single-handedly create a pomegranate health-food craze and to make tons of money sucking water out of the small impoverished nation of Fiji, which is ruled by a neoliberal military junta. Most Fijians are miserably poor and lack access to clean drinking water, but the Resnicks threatened to pull out of the country after the Fijian government attempted to impose a tiny tax of eight cents per liter.

Sucks for Fiji, but the Resnicks plunder water from their countrymen just as easily as they do from abroad…

altho i happened to be in fiji (on a job) shortly after the 'junta' and most of the local/ethnic fijians agree with him (bainimarama) - the issue being the other ethnicities essentially stealing the country out from underneath the fijians - and the others arent happy with the fact they cant actually own the land they have built their businesses on - so none are happy - and a pal who lives down there says daily life isnt affected by it at all - so sounds to me like the subjects of this story are pulling the typical oligarchic BS - its somewhat expected with these types tho:

For all their wealth, power and shameless scheming, Lynda and Stewart are clearly not your run-of- the-mill Oligarch Valley billionaire farmers.

In a land dominated by old anglo families and regressive rightwingers, the Resnicks are proud Learjet Liberals. They are major Democrat Party donors, are among the biggest backers of the liberal pro-business Aspen Institute, mingle with Arianna Huffington and entertain the high society of Beverly Hills at their gaudy palace on Sunset Boulevard. They’ve expanded this house over the years by buying and tearing down three adjacent properties, which has given them room to add a greenhouse, a massive lawn studded with sculptures, a pool, a parking lot for a couple of dozen cars and an orange grove out front. Even in Beverly Hills, full of new money and ostentatious displays of wealth, the Resnicks stand out. “Exaggerated, extravagant, crude, ridiculous, a bit indecent,” is how Michael Gross described them in his book “Unreal Estate.”


The Resnicks spend quite a lot of time in their Aspen home, with its backyard mountain lake. They love that property. They love it so much that in the early 2000s, the Resnicks fought a legal battle against Aspen over an affordable housing project for local municipal employees. The Resnicks complained that the project—just half a mile from their “Little Lake Lodge” property—would devalue their land.

hilarious!
and dont it just figure, eh? (that they are big money crony capitalist lib-dems, who all are soooo 'looking out for the working class' = biggest BS story ever told - again, mostly by the lamestream media - who never fails to ignore what doesnt advance their agenda)
after having not been to aspen in 20 years, finally had chance to return there in 2000 - and altho aspen was never a 'low rent' town, it was somewhat ironic to read letters to the editor in the aspen times, of the troubles that (some) of the locals were having with all the new money pouring into the roaring fork valley - basically it was coming from 'the poor downtrodden' millionaires being driven out of their 'affordable' mere multi-million$ houses by the BILLIONAIRES flying in on their private jets and buying up the place, tearing down the 7-figure realestate and kranking up 8 (& 9?) figure 'weekend cottages'

and then bitchin because the county actually tries to take care of the workforce, by subsidizing housing development, so the working class can AFFORD to serve the billionaires dinner and drinks and clean up after them??? (the other option would be what the mexicans must do to survive in the area, pack 12 people into a 2bdrm and sleep in rotating shifts...)

even funnier that they 'mingle with Arianna Huffington' (considering what some of her staffers write ;) particularly on the subject of whats happnin down in fiji...

oh yeah, baybee!!!

gotta luv the lib-dems; for whom the ole saying mustave been written: "dont do as i do, do as i say..."

thanks for posting mr c1ue - stuff like this never fails to put a smile on me kissah!

but whats happnin right there in california makes me recall one of jack nicholsons best works: Chinatown
you remember that one, right? where the oligarchs of the day STOLE the water from out of the owens river valley, and desertified that whole stretch of the eastern sierra = merely another in the series of classic california crony-capture of the .gov

The Oligarch Valley family that had made an easy $74 million selling water to the desert subprime suburb of Victorville was closely connected to the Resnicks. Both families owned shares of the Kern County Water Bank, a natural aquifer at the southernmost edge of the Central Valley that had been converted into a privatized water-storage facility.
The water bank was designed by California’s Department of Water Resources to function as an emergency reservoir. In wet years, it would collect excess water shipped down the California Aqueduct from Northern California and hold enough water to keep Los Angeles hydrated nearly two years in case of prolonged drought. The water bank was supposed to serve as a last-line defense to protect urban users. But in 1995 California water bureaucrats tweaked a couple of arcane water regulations and handed the water bank over to a small clique of Oligarch Valley landlords.

Once water entered the water bank, it stopped being a public resource. From that point, the owner could sell it to the highest bidder. “This means they become middlemen making profits on state-supplied water,” reported Redding’s paper Record Searchlight. “If they choose to, they can dry up vast areas of productive agriculture and ship the water to municipalities south of the Tehachapi range.”

Stewart Resnick masterminded the scheme, and emerged with a majority stake in the new Kern County Water Bank. In fact, the Resnicks dominated and controlled the water bank so thoroughly that it’s become a de facto extension of their private agribusiness.
Resnick’s scheme did more than privatize a single piece of public infrastructure. It created a novel legal framework that gave Oligarch Valley famers the power to create non-existent water out of thin air. Resnick created “paper water.”


Paper water was the envy of every finance conman in the country. It was so brilliant and innovative, in fact, that the snake-oil experts at Enron couldn’t help trying to get in on the racket.

In the early 2000s, Enron bought a chunk of land in Oligarch Valley atop a natural underground reservoir and started working on a water bank of its own. Enron promised to herald the brave new future of paper water commodities with an Internet-based operation called Azurix that was going to become the etrade.com of H2O. Water day traders would log in from around the world, buying and selling water, hedging bets, trading water-backed securities.

Here’s how Chris Wasden, the mastermind behind Azurix, explained it:

“...the way that water trading works is that you’re really not trading the actual molecule of water that you own with someone else’s water molecule. So I have this amount of water, and now let’s swap it in such a way that I get access to water when I need it but it’s not the actual water that’s going there, it’s an allocation of water.”

Enron’s water speculation utopia crashed and burned, in large part because the owners of Oligarch Valley didn’t like outsiders crowding their territory. Mr. Wasden landed on his feet, though. He’s now at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, managing director of “healthcare strategy and innovation.”

and was no doubt a BIG supporter of the 'affordable care act'
(something only orwell himself could appreciate...)

(adding) O&BTW...

KUDOS to mr levine (yasha) - for HAVING THE BALLS to write this piece (and the prev one shared by mr c1ue)
his type of take-no-prisoners style of journalism is something in VERY SHORT SUPPLY these daze and he's
in VERY GOOD COMPANY

my hat comes off for VERY FEW, but this guy should be knighted.

[dcarrigg]

Re: US foreign policy being steered by corporations? Say it isn't so...

This article is only available for 48 hours from now.

Nothing dies on the internet.

˙

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: US foreign policy being steered by corporations? Say it isn't so...

This article is only available for 48 hours from now.

I don't know what to think about it, but certainly the past record of US actions in Central and South America with relation to US corporate interests - makes the premise not implausible.

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/re...nlock-dispatch



Much more at link above

Very interesting Clue. Persian Ferni garnished with pistachio is always a favorite as well as their other desserts with pistachio in it.

[photon555]

Re: US foreign policy being steered by corporations? Say it isn't so...

Upon his entrance into Hell Oligarch Jr. is stunned to meet Oligarch Sr. He's not stunned that they're both in Hell. He fully expected to end up there, and he remembered his father always boasted about buying out the place when he arrived and getting a monopoly on the furnace business. He's stunned because his father is buck naked, and then even more stunned to look down and see that he also is sans clothes, or any type of ornamentation. Still, after a moment or two he regains his composure (he is an oligarch, after all, not some pissant multi-millionaire) and asks senior what Hell is like.
"It's just like Earth, but better, much better," replies Dad.
"How is it better? I'm already sweating like a manager getting reviewed, and these flames hurt!"
"It's better because I'm making more money here than I ever made on Earth. I've got more zeros in my account balance than I can count," boasts Senior.
"That's great, but what about..."
"Come on, there's no time to waste." interrupts Dad. "I gotta get back to work, and you've gotta get busy making your fortune. I can spot you a couple trillion at 5% but you're on your own here. Everybody's on their own here. It's how the place works. I've already lost a billion while we've been talking. Let's go! You've gotta get to work. It's 24/7 here. No rest for the wicked."
Junior has to shout to get Senior's attention. "Wait a minute! If you're so rich how come you don't have any clothes, or even a ring?"
"Oh... Oh yeah." For a few moments Dad's face loses all expression, then a confused look. "Oh yeah... I forgot. See, you can make all the money you want here. And you'll want. Believe me you'll want like you've never wanted before. But there's nothing to spend your money on here; nothing at all."
Junior looks perplexed while mumbling under his breath. "There's something not quite right here, but I just can't put my finger on it." It's the last semi-intelligent thought he will have for all eternity.