Hugh Faulkner – – This is a good interview. Please send it further. /S
Mark Carney’s border bill C-2 will give the federal government unprecedented surveillance measures over Canadians if passed. Constitutional lawyer John Carpay joins me (Hugh Faulkner) to outline the dark side of Bill C-2 and urges Canadians to speak to their MPs and get them to vote against this bill.
Read John Capay’s latest book: https://www.amazon.ca/Corrupted-Fear-…
A very important initiative, IMHO.
BACKGROUND: 2024-05-03 Crown appeal against acquitted peaceful protestor Evan Blackman back in court June 19. JCCF
UPDATE:
Rebel News (Ezra Levant) Interview of John Carpay:
Go to:
As 2025 progresses, revelations about the COVID era emerge.
Global News, once a propagandist, now reports on vaccine injury bureaucracy’s lax behavior, signaling a shift in critical thinking, albeit belatedly. This comes as good news for figures like John Carpay of the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms.
Carpay discusses the case of Evan Blackman, wrongfully arrested during the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa.
Blackman, acquitted despite drone footage showing him peacefully de-escalating a situation and singing “O Canada” on his knees, faces an abusive Crown appeal in Ontario. Carpay criticizes Ontario’s prosecutors for pursuing such cases while more serious crimes go unaddressed due to resource limitations.
The Calgary-based lawyer then reveals a recent judicial order: the RCMP and TD Bank must turn over documents related to the freezing of Blackman’s bank accounts.
This unprecedented order seeks to understand the rationale behind the freeze and its connection to the criminal prosecution. This marks a potential turning point, moving away from the “madness” of 2021-2022 when judges made questionable rulings.
According to figures obtained through an access-to-information request by Blacklock’s, an estimated $7.8 million in holdings belonging to convoy supporters had been seized by 267 bank accounts and 170 bitcoin wallets in 2022.
Ezra anticipates TD Bank or RCMP appealing the subpoena to conceal “dirty deeds.” He speculates that if the subpoena holds, the prosecution might drop the appeal or even charges against Blackman to prevent exposure of potentially “dark” internal communications.
Ezra draws a parallel to the “ArriveCan” app cases, where the government avoided constitutional challenges by withdrawing charges, preventing a public examination of their lack of scientific and medical basis for lockdown policies.
Democracy – – we are the ones responsible for what our Governments do.
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Source: Nova Scotia Health Authority, Instagram. July 23, 2024
Exclusive documents reveal that doctors in Nova Scotia greenlit five surgeries to create artificial vaginas for patients listed as under 19 years old. Citing privacy laws, the provincial health authority refused to reveal whether any of the patients were minors but acknowledged that Nova Scotia Health funds transgender genital surgeries for minors as of this year, “as per policy and procedures.”
Federal officials and Canadian medical organizations have long assured the public that bottom surgery, a euphemism for irreversible genital procedures like vaginoplasties, or the surgical reshaping of penis tissue into an artificial vaginal opening, are not performed on minors. However, newly released documents from Nova Scotia’s public health system show otherwise.
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The Citizen’s Alliance of Nova Scotia provided True North with demographic data obtained through freedom of information requests. The data shows age breakdowns of both surgical and non-surgical gender-related interventions. The group has been requesting information from the provincial government on behalf of concerned mental health therapists fearful of professional repercussions should they be identified. The documents include internal emails, policy memos, and detailed statistical breakdowns.
The findings reveal that minors in Nova Scotia are receiving irreversible transgender medical treatments, including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and in some cases, genital surgeries. The number of transgender treatments for all ages in Nova Scotia are trending upward at a time when other jurisdictions, such as the United Kingdom and several European countries, are retreating from such interventions due to mounting evidence of harm and a lack of long-term data to back claims made by transgender activists and proponents in the medical community that such procedures lower the risk of suicide.
The 2023–2024 annual report from Nova Scotia’s the province’s health insurance program (MSI) reveals that five procedures to create a neo-vaginal canal were approved for patients under the age of 19. Additional procedures, including the removal of the penis and testicles, appear in the same age bracket but the actual figure remains suppressed under Section 20(1) of Nova Scotia’s FOIPOP Act, which exempts disclosure when the number of patients is fewer than five.
True North sent several emails to Nova Scotia Health asking if any of the patients in the under-19 column were minors, and to verify the age of those listed. Stacy Burgess, Executive Director of Clinical Care at Nova Scotia Health, would not specify any ages but admitted that genital surgeries continue to be funded by the province. Nova Scotia Health’s policy states that minors over the age of 16 can request exemptions for such surgeries under certain conditions. These revelations contradict public-facing guidance from Health Canada and several provincial health authorities, which explicitly state that bottom surgeries are not available to individuals under 18.
Puberty blockers, particularly leuprolide (the generic version of Lupron), are being prescribed to children under the age of 15. Teens aged 16 to 18 are being given testosterone and estradiol, often in combination with anti-androgens like spironolactone or cyproterone.
This pharmaceutical regimen initiates irreversible physiological changes, including infertility and altered sexual development. The documents show a sharp increase in leuprolide and testosterone prescribed to young girls in 2024. The same dataset confirms that hormonal interventions are trending upwards for young girls in Nova Scotia’s health system.
The costs associated with this care are significant. Nova Scotia budgeted $1.7 million for gender related health care in 2023–24 alone. That figure does not represent a fixed cap, as internal memos state that departments are encouraged to “adjust forecasts upward” if demand increases.
Between 2021 and 2024, the province spent just over $2 million on 187 all ages mastectomies, a medical term for breast amputation. This figure includes hospital costs, physician fees, out-of-province costs like airfare, accommodations, and post-operative care. The province also allocates public funds for binders and prosthetic genital devices as part of its transgender health equipment budget.
The administrative infrastructure overseeing this system is profoundly ideological. In recent years, Nova Scotia health authorities have implemented sweeping policy changes that removed longstanding medical safeguards. The requirement that patients live as the opposite sex for 12 months before surgery was eliminated. The mandate for psychosocial assessments before starting treatment was scrapped. The standard of requiring two independent referral letters for surgical intervention was reduced to just one.
Gender Affirming Care Reform – Nova Scotia.pdf
These changes were based on the World Professional Association for Transgender Health Standards of Care v8, a document that has come under global scrutiny for promoting early medical transition with limited evidence. In internal emails, Stacy Burgess, Executive Director of Clinical Care at Nova Scotia Health, admitted in May 2024 that she had only “skim read” WPATH v8 and hadn’t noticed anything of concern. This statement came two months after the release of the WPATH Files, an investigative exposé which documented internal dissent among the authors and raised alarms about the reliability of the organization’s standards.
WPATH Files author, Mia Hughes, recently wrote in the National Post that Nova Scotia is dangerously out of step with nearly every jurisdiction that has seriously reviewed the evidence. “Every jurisdiction that has scrutinized this medical protocol has come to the same conclusion—there is no reliable proof of benefit, and the risks are too serious to allow the experiment to continue,” Hughes wrote.
While countries like Sweden, Finland, the UK, and even Alberta have pulled back from youth medical transition, Nova Scotia is forging ahead, expanding services while ignoring growing calls for caution. Hughes describes WPATH as an “activist association posing as a medical authority,” and criticizes the provinces for relying on its guidance instead of commissioning independent reviews.
Behind the rapid expansion of transgender medicine in Nova Scotia lies a network of activist, political, and medical policy actors. This revolving door between activism and administration has allowed ideology to advance through Nova Scotia’s health system, bypassing public scrutiny, medical debate, and evidence-based caution.
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A leading biotech industry trade group denied any knowledge of a document purportedly containing the minutes of an April 3 meeting during which they criticized Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., who said he received the document “anonymously by whistleblowers,” first went public with it on Tuesday.
Editor’s note: The Defender was unable to authenticate the April 3 BIO meeting minutes document or communicate directly with its source. However, our writing and editorial team spoke directly with James Lyons-Weiler and, on the basis of that conversation, judged the document likely to have originated from a reliable source.
Research scientist and author James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., first went public with the document on Tuesday, publishing it on Substack and in an article for the Brownstone Institute. He said he received it “anonymously by whistleblowers.”
In a statement provided to The Defender on Tuesday, a Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) spokesperson said:
“Earlier today, a blog site posted an article based upon what it claimed is a leaked memo from BIO regarding our Vaccines Task Force. The purported memo was not produced by BIO. We have never seen or heard of this document and it certainly does not accurately represent the spirit, strategy, or mission of BIO’s work.
“We are aligned with Secretary Kennedy and the President’s mission to ‘Make America Healthy Again.’”
However, that statement contradicts the meeting minutes, which quote Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a Pfizer board member, as saying, “MAHA [Make America Healthy Again] is a cover for an anti-vaccine campaign.”
A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spokesperson told The Defender:
“Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine — he is pro-safety, pro-transparency, and pro-accountability. His longstanding advocacy has focused on ensuring that vaccines and all medical interventions meet the highest standards of safety and are backed by gold-standard science.
“The fact that a prominent, taxpayer-funded lobbying organization like BIO would entertain language about ‘neutralizing’ a sitting Cabinet official, whose focus has been on restoring scientific rigor and prioritizing public health over special interests, is both concerning and revealing.”
According to the document circulated by Lyons-Weiler, BIO members discussed strategies to counter Kennedy’s growing “anti-vaccine rhetoric.”
These included engaging with other federal and state policymakers to sidestep Kennedy, repositioning vaccines as “national security assets,” and focusing public messaging “on science” and the “economic benefits” of vaccines.
Lyons-Weiler stands by document’s authenticity
Lyons-Weiler stood by the veracity of the document and his sources. Commenting on BIO’s statement that the group didn’t produce the document, he told The Defender:
“While it is exciting and reassuring to see BIO’s unreserved support for the MAHA initiative and the Kennedy evidence bar, we had sufficient information to determine to our satisfaction that the document was most likely real. Nevertheless, we ran it with caveats.
“In the interest of journalistic integrity, should evidence come forward that the document was in some way falsified, and was provided as some sort of ruse, we would be happy to publish that information as well, and let the public decide.”
On whether the document may have been leaked by “nefarious” actors, Lyons-Weiler said, “That is speculative, but one could only guess whether this would then perhaps represent a type of corporate espionage, with organizations which not so long ago left the trade association.”
“If so, it could be an attempt to divide BIO from the MAHA agenda at HHS,” Lyons-Weiler said. “Either way, I’m excited to see them ready to engage in objective and ethical biomedical research.”
In November 2024, Pharma giant GSK ended its membership with BIO. A GSK spokesperson told Fierce Pharma the company “opted not to renew its BIO membership for 2025 following an annual evaluation of its corporate memberships and trade association participation.”
GSK followed in the footsteps of other pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, UCB, WuXi AppTec and Takeda, who also recently left BIO, Fierce Pharma reported.
Vaccine makers raise investor concerns, but not vaccine safety concerns
AstraZeneca, Bayer, Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Gilead Sciences, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Moderna, Novartis, Novavax, Novo Nordisk, Roche and Sanofi are among the major pharma companies listed as members of BIO.
According to the document, participants in the April meeting included Silvia Taylor, executive vice president and chief corporate affairs and advocacy officer at Novavax; Jim Wassil, executive vice president and chief operating officer of vaccine innovation company Vaxcyte; and Gottlieb, who in addition to being a Pfizer board member is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Wassil zeroed in on shareholder concerns, noting that investors are “sitting on the sidelines for the next 6-9 months” because the vaccine “pathway to approval is unpredictable and politicized.”
There was no mention in the meeting minutes of the need to improve vaccine safety. However, members purportedly discussed how to improve communication with the new administration “using their words — safety, efficiency, health resilience, transparency.”
John F. Crowley, president and CEO of BIO, also allegedly participated in the meeting.
The document allegedly shows that Crowley proposed a “creative communication campaign” targeting legislators and influencers instead of working “directly with RFK Jr.” The campaign would enlist the help of unions and conservative-leaning, pro-vaccine organizations like the American Enterprise Institute.
Crowley also allegedly suggested that BIO spend $2 million of its $4 million cash reserves on “vaccine programs.” The meeting included a discussion of BIO’s new “WhyWeVaccinate” campaign.
The document also suggests that “it is time to go to The Hill and lobby that it is time for RFK Jr to go … communicate what’s going on in business.”
It is unclear whether “The Hill” refers to Capitol Hill or to a publication by that name popular among policymaking circles.
A Novavax spokesperson contacted by The Defender declined to comment. Wassil and Gottlieb did not respond to a request for comment.
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Despite claim of support, BIO has questioned some of RFK Jr.’s moves
In their statement, BIO emphasized the organization’s pro-vaccine campaign.
“We also believe strongly in the vital role that vaccines play for public health, and we will continue to be strong advocates for scientific rigor and the importance of vaccines to protect our children, our citizens broadly — and to protect and strengthen America. The BIO vaccines campaign supports this effort,” BIO said.
In spite of its stated support for Kennedy and the MAHA agenda, BIO has previously questioned some of Kennedy’s moves as health secretary.
In March, following the resignation of Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., former FDA director responsible for authorizing vaccines, under pressure from Kennedy, BIO said it was “deeply concerned” Marks’ resignation would “broadly impact the development of new, transformative therapies to fight diseases for the American people.”
Last month, following Kennedy’s dismissal of all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee, BIO said it was “greatly concerned about the uncertainty created by the abrupt dismissal of the serving committee members.”
BIO allegedly contributed to the censorship of non-establishment views concerning COVID-19 during the pandemic.
According to “Twitter Files” documents published in January 2023 by journalist Lee Fang, BIO “fully funded a special content moderation campaign designed by a contractor called Public Good Projects” during the pandemic. The campaign worked with Twitter “to set content moderation rules around COVID ‘misinformation.’”
According to Open Secrets, 63 of BIO’s 100 lobbyists in 2024 previously held government jobs, while BIO has spent $890,000 on lobbying efforts so far this year.
Health and medical freedom advocates have said that a “revolving door” between federal public health agencies and Big Pharma has compromised the ability of those agencies to effectively regulate the industry.
In its statement, HHS said that Kennedy and HHS are working to restore trust in public health and vaccines.
“Under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, HHS is exposing decades of waste, fraud, and abuse, eliminating conflicts of interest, and restoring evidence-based policy to medicine and public health. The Department will stay focused on our mission, which is to protect the health and well-being of the American people,” HHS said.
Related articles in The Defender
An Ontario judge has ordered the RCMP and TD Bank to hand over records related to the freezing of Evan Blackman’s bank accounts during the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa.
Blackman was arrested on February 18, 2022, under the federal government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act, and charged with mischief and obstruction. He was acquitted in October 2023, but the Crown appealed and a new trial is set to begin on August 14, 2025.
Blackman is now seeking access to records detailing how and why his accounts were frozen, to support a Charter application at his retrial. His lawyers argue the freeze was a serious violation of his constitutional rights and plan to ask the court to stay the case.
“The freezing of Mr. Blackman’s bank accounts was an extreme overreach on the part of the police and the federal government,” said Chris Fleury, a constitutional lawyer representing Blackman.
“These records will hopefully reveal exactly how and why Mr. Blackman’s accounts were frozen.”
Blackman welcomed the ruling.
“I’m delighted that we will finally get records that may reveal why my bank accounts were frozen,” he said.
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, which is backing Blackman’s legal challenge, called the ruling a significant development.
It is believed to be the first criminal case in Canada involving a proposed Charter challenge based on the freezing of personal bank accounts under the Emergencies Act.
Very good interview.
Pediatrician Samara Cardenas, M.D. sued the CDC, alleging that the Vaccines for Children Program violates the Fifth Amendment by subjecting children enrolled in Medicaid to different treatment standards and compelling doctors to act against their professional judgment, according to an article written in The Defender. As this week’s returning “Pediatric Perspectives” guest, Dr. Cardenas discusses this lawsuit, her evolving view on immunizations and adverse reactions in her practice.
Capitalism in the form of neoliberal globalisation since the 1980s has responded to these crises by expanding credit markets and increasing personal debt to maintain consumer demand as workers’ wages are squeezed or they are made unemployed.
Other strategies have also been deployed. These include financial and real estate speculation, stock buybacks, massive bailouts, public asset selloffs, regulatory ‘reform’ and subsidies using public money to sustain private capital and boosting militarism, which drives demand in many sectors of the economy (one reason why Germany and other European countries are following in the footsteps of the US by boosting their spending on militarism and creating bogeymen as a justification).
These financial manoeuvres are not isolated tactics but part of a broader neoliberal agenda that also involves deregulating international capital flows and exposure to global capital markets, resulting in the obsession of maintaining ‘market confidence’ to hedge against capital flight and surrendering economic sovereignty to finance capital. We also see the displacement of production in other countries in order to capture foreign markets.
This global expansion of neoliberal capitalism is a form of imperialism, where powerful corporations and financial interests impose structural adjustments and policies that undermine local economies, especially in the Global South. The capture of new markets abroad is essential for capital accumulation and offsetting potential declining profitability at home.
This imperial dynamic is particularly visible in the agricultural sector. For instance, the process involves the destruction of indigenous rural economies, the imposition of chemical-dependent industrial agriculture and transformation of food systems to benefit global agribusiness oligopolies. Think too of the profit-driven technofixes being rolled out by Big Tech and Big Ag: the ultimate commodification and corporate capture of knowledge, seeds, data and so on under the crisis narrative of impending Malthusian catastrophe.
And this alludes to the fact that capital seeks ideological cover for its financial ambitions. The climate emergency narrative is being used to legitimise new financially lucrative instruments such as carbon trading and green investments, schemes designed to absorb surplus wealth under the guise of environmentalism. This reflects a broader pattern where perceived (or manufactured) crises are exploited to create speculative markets and investment opportunities that maintain capital accumulation.
This logic reached a new intensity during the COVID event, which provided a stark and recent illustration of how the ongoing crisis of neoliberal capitalism is exploited and managed, serving as a critical phase in its evolution. This event and associated lockdowns amplified structural inequalities and reshaped the dynamics of capital and control.
COVID was used as a strategy of ‘creative destruction’, accelerating the destruction of millions of livelihoods globally and pushing small businesses towards bankruptcy. Rather than providing genuine aid to the public, COVID policies and massive government spending primarily benefited large corporations—boosting their margins while forcing smaller enterprises to the brink and consolidating corporate power.
At the same time, COVID was used to justify unprecedented restrictions on freedoms, increased surveillance and digital control mechanisms. More on this later.
Lockdowns helped reshape capitalist accumulation patterns by externally imposing economic shutdowns that monetary policy alone could not achieve. They created conditions for increased indebtedness for households, small businesses and (Global South) nations, corporate bailouts and the imposition of new forms of control, thereby managing the contradictions of capitalism through non-market means.
According to Prof. Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University, financial markets were already collapsing before lockdowns were imposed; lockdowns did not cause the market crash in early 2022 but were imposed because financial markets were failing. Lockdowns effectively turned off the engine of the economy—suspending business transactions and draining demand for credit—which allowed central banks, particularly the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, to flood financial markets with massive emergency monetary injections without triggering hyperinflation in the real economy. Looking at Europe, investigative journalist Michael Byrant says that €1.5 trillion was needed to deal with the financial crisis in Europe alone in 2020.
This strategy was designed to stabilise and restructure the financial architecture by halting the flow of economic activity temporarily, enabling a multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Big Finance and large corporations under the guise of COVID relief. A bailout that dwarfed anything seen during the 2008 financial crisis.
Lockdowns not only destroyed small businesses and accelerated corporate consolidation, but—unlike the 2008 bailouts—this process faced little opposition, as it was justified as a public health necessity.
While COVID marked one phase of crisis management, the subsequent war in Ukraine has further accelerated these dynamics. It has served to redirect flows of energy, finance and industrial capacity. The destruction of Europe’s energy ties with Russia—via sanctions, decoupling and sabotage—engineered a forced dependency on high-cost US liquefied natural gas, delivering record profits to American fossil fuel firms (in 2022 alone, US LNG exports to the EU more than doubled—from 22 to 56 billion cubic metres—making up over half of all US LNG exports).
As European industries faltered under the weight of inflation and energy instability, the US subordinated its allies through enforced dependency while securing new opportunities for accumulation at home. Dollar supremacy was reinforced, compliance internalised and capital relocated under the banner of war. In this scenario, Europe has become both a very junior partner and collateral damage with its economic sovereignty sacrificed on the altar of transatlantic profit realignment.
This brings us to a broader understanding of the state’s role in maintaining the economic system. The state and ideology are crucial for maintaining capitalism’s economic base, with the state intervening through financial support and strategic market expansion. At the same time, ideology shapes public perception and legitimises actions by re-framing individual freedoms and exploiting crises like COVID and Ukraine to manage dissent and uphold elite power.
This ideological reconfiguration aligns with technological transformation. The rise of artificial intelligence and advanced automation technologies—such as robotics, driverless vehicles, 3D printing, drone technology and even ‘farmerless farms’—will reshape the traditional mass labour force that underpins capitalist economic activity: it is being profoundly transformed and, ultimately, significantly reduced.
Looking ahead, as economic activity is restructured through these technologies, the entire social infrastructure built to reproduce labour—mass education, welfare, healthcare—will be rendered increasingly unnecessary because fewer workers are needed to sustain production and services. This transformation alters labour’s classical role as a seller of labour power to capital, fundamentally changing the dynamics of the labour-capital relationship.
The question is: if labour is defined in terms of its relation to capital and is the condition for the existence of the working class, why bother with maintaining or reproducing labour?
In this context of social erosion, neoliberalism has already weakened trade unions, suppressed wages and increased inequality. And now the message is: get used to being poor or on the scrapheap, and dissent will not be tolerated.
The so-called ‘Great Reset anticipates a fundamental transformation of Western societies, resulting in permanent restrictions on liberties and mass surveillance.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) has speculated about a future where people ‘rent’ rather than own goods (as seen in the widely circulated ‘you will own nothing and be happy’ video), raising concerns about the erosion of ownership rights under the rhetoric of a ‘green economy’, ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.
Climate alarmism and the mantra of sustainability are about promoting money-making schemes. Beyond this, these narratives also serve to cement social control.
Neoliberalism has run its course, resulting in the impoverishment of large sections of the population. But to dampen dissent and lower expectations, the levels of personal freedom we have been used to will not be tolerated. This means that the wider population will be subjected to the discipline of an emerging surveillance state.
To push back against any dissent, ordinary people are being told that they must sacrifice personal liberty in order to protect public health, societal security or the climate. Unlike in the old normal of consumer-oriented neoliberalism, an ideological shift is occurring whereby personal freedoms are increasingly depicted as being dangerous because they run counter to the collective good.
In the 1980s, to help legitimise the deregulation-privatisation neoliberal globalisation agenda, government and media instigated an ideological onslaught, driving home the primacy of ‘free enterprise’, individual rights and responsibility and emphasising a shift away from the role of the ‘nanny state’, trade unions and the collective in society.
We are currently seeing another ideological shift. As in the 1980s, this messaging is being driven by an economic impulse. This time, the collapsing neoliberal project.
The masses are being conditioned to get used to lower living standards and accept them. At the same time, to muddy the waters, the message is that lower living standards are the result of mass immigration or supply shocks that both the Ukraine conflict and ‘the virus’ have caused.
The net-zero carbon emissions agenda will help legitimise lower living standards (reducing your carbon footprint) while reinforcing the notion that our rights must be sacrificed for the greater good. You will own nothing, not because the rich and their neoliberal agenda made you poor, but because you will be instructed to stop being irresponsible and must act to protect the planet.
Decreased consumption (your poverty) will be sold as being good for the planet by coopting the concept of ‘degrowth’; something to be imposed on the masses while elites continue to accumulate. This contrasts with genuine ecological or socialist degrowth proposals that would target elite consumption and redistribute resources.
Meanwhile, the framework is in place to ensure that huge corporations and the super-rich continue to rake in near-record profits through militarism, an energy transition, a food transition, speculative finance schemes involving land, carbon trading, data monetisation, surveillance capital, pharmaceuticals, green bonds, commodities and agribusiness, real estate and climate risk derivatives.
And there is always money available for Ukraine and various destabilisations around the world to further ensure the bottom line of giant corporations.
To illustrate global dynamics and the real-world impact of neoliberal policies, we can examine the case of India’s agricultural sector.
Structural adjustment programmes imposed by institutions like the IMF and World Bank or bilateral agreements with the US have forced countries like India to radically transform their agricultural sectors. Subsequent directives have demanded dismantling public support systems such as state-owned seed supply, subsidies and public agricultural institutions, while promoting export-oriented cash crops to earn foreign exchange.
This shift is part of a neoliberal agenda to further integrate agriculture into global capital markets, reduce the role of the public sector and open up the sector to foreign direct investment and multinational agribusiness corporations.
The outcome in India thus far has been devastating for millions of small-scale farmers and rural dwellers. Neoliberal reforms have led to spiralling input costs, dependency on proprietary seeds and agrochemicals and the erosion of traditional farming systems. This has resulted in widespread indebtedness, economic distress and a decline in the number of cultivators—millions have been pushed off the land, many driven to suicide, and hundreds of millions face jobless growth and rural displacement.
This restructuring facilitates the capture of agriculture by large agribusiness corporations and financial investors. These entities dominate global commodity trading and are increasingly consolidating control over seeds, inputs, logistics and retail. The public sector’s role is reduced to a facilitator of private capital, enabling the entrenchment of industrial, GMO-based commodity crop agriculture suited to corporate interests rather than local food security or ecological sustainability.
Contrast this with agroecology, a means to free farmers from dependency on manipulated commodity markets, unfair subsidies and food insecurity. Agroecology prioritises local food sovereignty, ecological sustainability and farmer knowledge, opposing the reductionist, industrial agriculture paradigm promoted by capitalist agribusiness.
In India, the policy of population displacement compels displaced rural workers to migrate to urban areas in search of precarious, low-paid employment or remain unemployed, swelling the ranks of a surplus labour force.
his reserve army of labour is not accidental but serves a strategic function within global capitalism. It helps suppress wages and weaken the bargaining power of workers and trade unions both in India and internationally. By maintaining a large pool of cheap and insecure labour, capital can discipline workers through competition and insecurity.
Moreover, many of these displaced Indian workers are absorbed into offshore factories and global supply chains, effectively acting as a tool to undermine labour rights and conditions in wealthier countries.
This analysis reflects the country’s incorporation into the global capitalist system, where rural displacement and labour ‘flexibility’ are central to maintaining capitalist dynamics.
There is a historical comparison to be made between the displacement of people from the land in England during the Industrial Revolution and the contemporary displacement of the peasantry in India under neoliberal capitalism. Just as the enclosure movement in England forcibly removed peasants from their land, pushing them into cities to become a labour force for emerging industrial capitalism, a similar process is unfolding in India today.
This displacement is not simply a byproduct of ‘development’ but a deliberate process tied to capitalist accumulation and imperialist restructuring of agriculture, where local food systems and rural livelihoods are subordinated to corporate interests and global markets.
Global communications and business strategy company APCO Worldwide is a lobby agency with firm links to the Wall Street/corporate US establishment and facilitates its global agenda. Some years ago, following the 2008 financial crisis, APCO stated that India’s resilience in weathering the global downturn has made governments, policy makers, economists, corporate houses and fund managers believe that the country can play a significant role in the recovery of global capitalism.
Decoded, this means global capital moving into secure control of markets. Where agriculture is concerned, this hides behind emotive and seemingly altruistic rhetoric about ‘helping farmers’ and the need to ‘feed a burgeoning population’ (regardless of the fact this is exactly what India’s farmers have been doing). APCO talks about positioning international funds and facilitating corporations’ ability to exploit markets, sell products and secure profit.
And the state has been actively obliging. The plan is to displace the peasantry, create a land market and amalgamate landholdings to form larger farms that are more suited to international land investors and export-oriented industrial farming.
For instance, an MoU was entered into by the Indian government in April 2021 with Microsoft, allowing its local partner, CropData, to leverage a master database of farmers. CropData was to be granted access to a government database of 50 million farmers and their land records. As the database is developed, it will include farmers’ personal details, profiles of land held, production information and financial details.
The stated aim is to use digital technology to improve financing, inputs, cultivation and supply and distribution. The unstated aims are to impose a certain model of farming, promote profitable corporate technologies and products, encourage market (corporate) domination and create a land market by establishing a system of ‘conclusive titling’ of all land in the country so that ownership can be identified and land can then be bought or taken away.
Globally, the financialisation of farmland accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis. From 2008 to 2022, land prices nearly doubled throughout the world. Agricultural investment funds rose ten-fold between 2005 and 2018 and now regularly include farmland as a stand-alone asset class, with US investors having doubled their stakes in farmland since 2020.
Meanwhile, agricultural commodity traders are speculating on farmland through their own private equity subsidiaries, while new financial derivatives are allowing speculators to accrue land parcels and lease them back to struggling farmers, driving steep and sustained land price inflation.
As far as India is concerned, it is becoming a fully incorporated subsidiary of global capitalism. Displaced farmers and farm workers are pushed into urban sectors like construction, manufacturing and services, despite these sectors not generating enough jobs. This displacement facilitates the replacement of labour-intensive, family-run farms with large-scale, mechanised monoculture enterprises controlled by a few powerful transnational agribusiness corporations and financial institutions.
Moreover, India is being directed to rely increasingly on its foreign exchange reserves to buy food on the international market as it is forced to eradicate its buffer food stocks.
This process is driven by pressure from global agribusiness and finance capital, which seek to dismantle India’s public food procurement and distribution systems, including the Food Corporation of India (FCI) and the Public Distribution System (PDS). These state-backed mechanisms have historically ensured food security by maintaining strategic grain stocks and providing fair prices to farmers.
Eliminating these buffer stocks would mean that India would no longer physically hold and control its own food reserves. Instead, it would have to depend on volatile global markets to procure essential food supplies, using foreign currency reserves. This shift would make India vulnerable to price fluctuations, speculation by investment firms and manipulation by multinational corporations dominating global commodity markets.
The massive farmer protests in India were, in part, a resistance to these policies. Without buffer stocks, India would effectively be paying corporations such as Cargill to supply food, perhaps financed by borrowing on international markets.
They will try anything to fragment opposition and suppress movements for systemic change.
That is not to say resistance is absent—far from it, especially in the realm of food and agriculture (discussed in my books on the global food system linked to at the end of this article).
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The fightback against emerging digital authoritarianism is already underway and takes many forms: rights groups are challenging mass surveillance laws and practices in the courts; campaigns are mobilising to block or roll back digital ID schemes, facial recognition and mass data retention.
Mass mobilisations against surveillance infrastructure are growing, as are acts of refusal in the form of non-compliance with digital ID requirements, opt-outs and public data obfuscation campaigns. There is also a burgeoning movement to build and promote peer-to-peer, federated or blockchain-based social networks and communication tools and to develop grassroots internet infrastructure that bypasses state and corporate control.
International solidarity is crucial, too, to expose and resist the export of surveillance technologies and the global harmonisation of repressive policies.
Meanwhile hundreds of millions endure poverty and many more face declining living standards and welfare cuts. At the same time, the super-rich have stashed an estimated $50 trillion in hidden accounts (as of 2020) and have only grown wealthier in recent years.
And here lies the crux of the matter—economic power. While resistance to the surveillance state and digital authoritarianism is vital, the deeper struggle is against the concentration of wealth and control in the hands of a global corporate and financial elite.
Across the world, workers, peasants and communities are organising through strikes, land occupations, agroecology, seed and food sovereignty movements, debt resistance and the fight to reclaim public goods. The task is to build movements capable not only of resisting but of transforming the structures of economic power that underpin the entire system.*
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Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is the author of the following books:
Power Play: The Future of Food
Sickening Profits: The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth
Food, Dispossession and Dependency. Resisting the New World Order
Mainstream Media reporting on vaccine injuries!!
WATCH: A Global News investigation into the federal government’s Vaccine Injury Support Program reveals ill and injured people are left waiting months, sometimes years for help to arrive.
Kimberly MacDougall lay in a hospital bed beside her injured husband, Stephen, as his final moments came. She and their two kids held him as he took his last breath.
Stephen, 45, a service manager for a luxury automobile dealership, had been fighting to live for weeks in May 2021, but stopped struggling. She informed friends on social media that the man she loved, incredibly fit and with no prior health issues, wouldn’t make it. . . .
Ross Wightman, a former pilot and realtor, social worker Shannon Dupont, and kindergarten assistant Kayla Pollock also suffered life-altering injuries after their vaccinations. . . .
I (Sandra) wrote to the journalists:
Dear Andrew McIntosh and Carolyn Jarvis, Global News.
Email: andrew.mcintosh@corusent.com or carolyn.jarvis@globalnews.com
cc: Federal Health Minister (Liberal) Marjorie Michel
Canada set up a $50M vaccine injury program. Those harmed say it’s failing them.
I greatly appreciate your reporting on Vaccine injuries. I was surprised by the depth of your research, and because most of the cases were new to me. In today’s news you report:
We all need to work together to stop these vaccinations. You are welcome to draw on material I have pulled together on my blog.
I wish to alert you, Global News, to the SIDS (Sudden Infant Death) cases associated with vaccines.
Thank-you for your contribution to journalism in Canada.
Best wishes,
Sandra Finley
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