corporate greed

Environmental Charities – Another Ponzi Scheme

Posted on by Helena

Once upon a time, environmental organizations were at the top of their game!   They made the news nearly daily with their accomplishments, advocacy, and rallied millions to their causes. What happened?

The Nature Conservancy is by far one of the wealthiest with over $7.4 billion in assets and $2 billion per year in gross revenues.   But where does the money go?   In 2017, $400 million went to salaries and benefits, while $64 million went to program grants around the world. That would equate to just 3.2% of gross revenue – and 7% of total expenditures.   Unfortunately, a detailed list of every NGO receiving grants is not available – apparently, their donor recipients want to remain anonymous. In a world of NGO’s it bears accountability. The balance of expenses was equally disconcerting:   “Other” ranked highest at $138 million, $87 million for office related expenses, $15 million for interest, $5 million for equipment, etc…

They have previously come under fire for making unsecured loans and buying and selling assets to employees, trustees, and related third parties.   But even that doesn’t tell the story.

The most recent award granted the Nature Conservancy was for it’s restructuring of Sychelles’ ‘sovereign debt’ in 2016. Debt, micro-finance?   What happened to the ‘environment’?

Some of their largest corporate benefactors include: Monsanto, BP, Cargill, Shell, Chevron, Conoco, Altria and Nestle.   Not exactly companies with environmental friendly business models…   But then, they have learned from the giants.   Another supporter is Jack Ma of Alibaba who stated that he would fund his foundation with .3% of the Alibaba net revenue for such causes as education, environment, and philanthropy. In the five years since he established the foundation, he has ‘pledged’ or distributed $300 million.   He is worth $48billion. That would reflect a contribution based on his net worth of .125% per year. To put that in perspective, for a person with a net worth of $500,000, that would represent a contribution of $625.

The Sierra Club is another former actionable environmental group that has succumbed to political agendas.   For them, it is support for the Socialists who vie for the Green New Deal.  

Greenpeace past president, Patrick Moore, has vocally outed Greenpeace for abandoning their true environmentalist actions while bowing to political agendas, fear mongering and propaganda.

World Wildlife Fund  is now mostly a micro-finance organization that does little to protect the environment.   Micro-lending in countries that have no usury, the interest rates are as high as 32%.   Hardly a charitable cause.

Most of WWF income comes from government grants.  Total revenue per their 2017 990 form tax return was roughly $300 million.   Despite being a non-profit, net profit for 2017 was over $37 million, salary costs were $92 million, office related expenses were roughly $46 million, and grants amounted to about $75 million of which $70 million funded grants outside the US to unnamed NGO’s. One of their primary partnerships is with Coca-Cola.

All these environmental organizations claim to be working toward one desirable goal; sustainable water.

All of the partners of these environmental organizations have one shared need for their business future – water.   All of these partners are guilty of depleting water reserves across the globe:

“Coca-Cola has been accused of dehydrating communities in its pursuit of water resources to feed its own plants, drying up farmers’ wells and destroying local agriculture. The company has also violated workers’ rights in countries such as Colombia, Turkey, Guatemala and Russia. Only through its multi-million dollar marketing campaigns can Coca-Cola sustain the clean image it craves.

The company admits that without water it would have no business at all. Coca-Cola’s operations rely on access to vast supplies of water, as it takes almost three litres of water to make one litre of Coca-Cola. In order to satisfy this need, Coca-Cola is increasingly taking over control of aquifers in communities around the world. These vast subterranean chambers hold water resources collected over many hundreds of years. As such they the represent the heritage of entire communities.

Coca-Cola’s operations have particularly been blamed for exacerbating water shortages in regions that suffer from a lack of water resources and rainfall. Nowhere has this been better documented than in India.”

The environmental organizations of lore have been hijacked and bear no resemblance to what their mission statement details or their ideology dictates. Instead they have become the progenitors of waste, subsidizing the depletion of valuable water resources across the globe, while pocketing huge sums of money that are labeled – nontaxable. As of 2015, there were 1.5 million nonprofits registered in the US, employing roughly 10% of US workers. There are roughly 160 Environmental nonprofits in the US.

We are supposed to be stewards of this planet.   Each individual is tasked with protection and balance.   But these organizations, many of which began with a grand ideology, have succumbed to the greed of businesses that are some of our greatest polluting threats.   Instead of helping, they are decimating.   Their integrity is non-existent.   And they fly under the flag of ‘nontaxable status’, paying exorbitant executive wages, while gifting often less than 3%.

It is a travesty.

FOOD CRISIS

Posted on by Helena

Food. Crisis. This is the underlying buzz that gets modest media attention.

Headlines: Syrian refugee’s Overwhelm World Food Bank, UN Cuts Food to Syrian Refugees, Cash Strapped World Food Program…

Maybe we read the headline, but then most will scroll down without clicking the article. It’s not in our backyard, or is it?

Nearly a million Palestinians in Israel get food aid. Four million Syrian refugee’s in Jordan get food aid. According to World Food Program, 41 countries in Africa get food aid, 10 in South America, 6 in the Middle East and 17 in Asia. So far this year, 7 months, contributions by governments to just this one agency amounted to $2.5 billion. Some notable countries that were not on the list for 2015 include; Israel, Saudi Arabia, China, Austria, Poland, Mexico, Turkey, South Africa, and Iraq. And while some countries made attempts to contribute despite their own economic woes, one country didn’t even make the list of 101 as making a contribution at all for the past five years – Israel.

The US contributed nearly half the entire aid at $1.06 billion.

But the US program has fault lines that ravage the actual aid in red tape and bureaucracy. According to OXFAM, 59 cents of every dollar we spend goes to middlemen. In addition, the time frame to get food to the need takes 4-6 months.

But there is an even more grave hitch in this entire avalanche of need. Many of the countries receiving food aid are victims of foreign land grabs. The remainder are mostly refugees, people who will never climb out of refugee status and will forever be on the list living inc amps, living in squalor. These 51.6 million refugees are typically the product of regime change civil war and include those residing outside the country in camps and those remaining inside in destitution. Afghanistan stands at 5 million, Syria at 19.6 million, Sudan 5.5 million, South Sudan 4.5 million, Nigeria at 2.5 million, and Yemen has now topped over 1 million as a result of bombing this year.

The ideology used to be the quote; “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” The problem? There is no backdoor revenue to be had if you teach a man to take care of himself. The revenue is generated in man’s dependence. It is the same ideology used in the US with Social Entitlements. And still the people take it because they haven’t any other offer.

After WWII, job training was a primary government focus. Today the focus is on creating a new poverty that will create a burgeoning industry to create unsurpassed wealth.

While the US and G-7 Members advocate heavily for land grabbing as a means of feeding the poor, sixty percent of the African land grabs produce cash crops that are exported. The labor is dirt cheap, and the profits exponential. The African that once fished for himself is now on food aid. A vicious cycle that gets little attention because everyone wants on the bandwagon – even the media.

Still the stories predict nothing but gloom for the future. While many focus on global warming as the culprit, the obvious is left unsaid; most of the land grabs do NOT produce crops that will put a dent to food shortages, instead they produce crops that are a by-product of fuel. We are taking what used to be partially sustainable land and recreating it for fuel production thereby worsening the FOOD CRISIS. But the Land Grabs are not just in Africa – they are here, now, in the United States!

The Swiss Bank, UBS, has buying up large swathes of land in Wisconsin, Mississippi, Mountain West and Georgia. An investment firm, Gladstone Land Corp is buying up swathes of farmland in Michigan.

Add to the volatile mix Monsanto, who leaves behind a trail of death as it’s pesticides make the soil untenable for new crops and growth, and the food crisis roils ever faster to an implosion. The picture is grim. It crosses lines of Republican and Democrat alliances, it sees international investors in bidding wars.  Even Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin is trying to jump on the bandwagon and open up farmland to more international investors.

But the consequences will be dire.  These are not long term ingrained farmers with knowledge passed from generation to generation on how best to cultivate the land, rotate crops and consume with a plan for the future.  These are conglomerates bent on razing the land to get the most the fastest with no thought for anything but the ‘now’.  And we, all of us, will be the victims this time.