The burgeoning tech sector in the 21st century has been instrumental in destroying American labor rights and the middle class, and severely undermining national sovereignty. In many ways, it is the catalyst for the accelerating dissolution we are presently witnessing. First, the major players of Silicon Valley worked to violate the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts, and then they lobbied for extensive replacement labor via H-1B visas. As Mark Ames reports:

In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming, Apple’s Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google’s Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers’ wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other’s employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators. … eBay and its former CEO Meg Whitman, now CEO of HP, are being sued by both the federal government and the state of California for arranging a similar, secret wage-theft agreement with Intuit (and possibly Google as well) during the same period…A class action lawsuit [was] filed [by the Department of Justice] on behalf of over 100,000 tech employees whose wages were artificially lowered—an estimated $9 billion effectively stolen…to pad company earnings. Confidential internal Google and Apple memos…clearly show that what began as a secret cartel agreement between Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt to illegally fix the labor market for hi-tech workers, expanded within a few years to include companies ranging from Dell, IBM, eBay and Microsoft, to Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and London-based public relations behemoth WPP. All told, the combined workforces of the companies involved totals well over a million employees.[2],[3]

As mentioned above, in addition to this domestic collusion, Silicon Valley—just like the rest of big tech’s co-conspirators in the Partnership for a New American Economy (NAE)—is uniform in its support for unlimited foreign workers visas. The “conservative” Cato Institute, founded by Charles Koch,[4] makes the claim that there are “many upsides and no downsides,” which, if you’re Jeff Bezos or Salil Parekh, is true. Foreign scab labor is essential to your swollen profits and to maintaining lordship over your would-be serf class. As Ron Hira and Bharath Gopalaswamy state:

Employers decide whether to apply for an H-1B visa and select the candidates. Employers also have the power to decide whether the H-1B worker can remain in the country. As a result, employer motivations and behaviors are the primary drivers of the outcomes of the program. Nearly four in five H-1B applications approved by the US Department of Labor were for the lowest two wage levels, far below the average US worker’s wage. But, the costs savings run much deeper than just lower wages. Employers have enormous leverage over their H-1B workers, who are, in effect, indentured. A number of economists have recently described how rising monopsony[i.e., where there is only one buyer] power in the labor market is an important factor in explaining US wage stagnation. One of those economists, Princeton University’s Alan Krueger, who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Barack Obama White House, has described how the executives of Silicon Valley technology firms were especially eager to use their monopsony power to keep their engineers’ wages low by limiting their opportunities to leave. The executives—including Google’s Eric Schmidt, a vocal advocate of H-1B expansion—went so far as to collude with one another by agreeing not to poach each other’s engineers. So, especially in the technology industry, employers see limiting worker mobility as an important human-resource strategy to keep wages low. The H-1B rules provide even greater ability for employers to exercise monopsony power over workers. H-1B workers have limited labor-market options, since only a subset of employers is willing to sponsor a work visa. Further, like many others, H-1B workers are subject to noncompete agreements and, in some cases, are even subject to employment bonds. They are afraid to complain of violations, and can be sued for liquidated damages if they leave, even by employers found to violate H-1B rules.[5]

As discussed in Volume XII regarding Nestlé, an individual or organization’s prior conduct and violations have no negative bearing on their present status unless the ruling class needs a sacrificial lamb. Speaking of Nestlé, under the pretense of spreading “social justice” globally and “empowering women,” corporations such as Nestlé endeavor to work with NGOs and governments to produce the kind of semi-literate, cheap workforce they thrive on across the Third World. The stated aim is to, “Strengthen women’s economic capacity as entrepreneurs, employees, and producers, and invest in women’s leadership development.” Nestlé is also a founding member of the UNHCR Council of Business Leaders, which “aims to encourage private sector commitment, in programmes on health education…enhancing water delivery systems, promoting sports and education, especially for girls, as well as training skills and access to computers.” SwissContact [a joint project between the Swiss government and Nestlé] operates a program of Skill Development, including secretarial or beautician skills, as well as in construction, agriculture, energy, tourism, or media. SwissContact focuses on Asian, African, Latin American, and Central European countries, with the overall objective to “strengthen the private sector, facilitate the generation of sustainable employment for both men and women, and, ultimately, reduce poverty.” This faux-philanthropy is aimed at training a cheap, compliant workforce who will be loyal consumers and not ask questions. Nestlé also has a number of “global partnerships” and Development Programs:

·         Jamaica: “On-the-job” training for school leavers and apprenticeship programs in Nestlé operations, e.g. mechanics, industrial and electrical maintenance, welding, etc.

·         Brazil: An initiative of the government and with GR FoodServices, “First Job” creates 2000 working posts (over 2 years) in the catering field.

·         Philippines: Cut and Sew Livelihood Project provides jobs to community workers for factory orders for uniforms, hairnets, shoe covers, etc.

·         Kenya: Ndenderai youth generate income by producing banana-fibre boxes for Nestlé product displays.

·         Thailand: The “T-Bird” or Thailand Business Group for Rural Development, aims to harness and utilise private sector resources for underprivileged villages in remote areas, via loans to new businesses or contributions for education or infrastructure.

·         South Africa: More than 1 million SA Rand invested in the Apprenticeship Programme, situated Eastern Cape East London Factory which, in 2004, enrolled 12 people from a nearby disadvantaged community.

·         Dominican Republic: FORJA Project Training of young farmers, in collaboration with Swiss Association for International Cooperation, to develop business acumen and give technical and practical training in agriproduction techniques, while financing feasible micro-business potential. Includes scholarships to children of farmers and offers on-the-job practical training.[6]

They will be expected to be grateful for being lifted from abject poverty to relative poverty.  Meanwhile, in Western countries, the “externalities” of neo-liberalism force young people to flock to urban environs to pursue work, where they will be swiftly molded into hedonistic or sexless economic cogs, failing to reproduce and staying on the white-ish collar/barista treadmill to oblivion. The economic and taxation realities artificially depress White birthrates and “necessitate” the importation of huge numbers of non-Whites to fill the labor “needs” of the host country, as one line of propagandistic “reasoning” goes. As Paul Craig Roberts writes:

The rule of law is dead throughout the West. Democracy is a scam. There is oligarchic rule.  Everything is done for organized interest groups.  Nothing is done for the people…The number of white children, that is, the group of the next generation of parents, is not only declining relative to the populations of non-whites but also absolutely.  During 2010-2018 the number of white children shrank by 2.2 million. The American middle class, which is largely white, bears the brunt of income taxation which means that white Americans bear the brunt of the cost of the welfare support systems. The white middle class also bears the brunt through property taxes of the public school systems. Many middle class members pay again in private school tuition for the education of their children in safer and more ordered environments.  The cost of university education is exorbitant. All of these costs are rising faster than middle-class incomes, and this limits white procreation. The decline of people of European descent as a percentage of the US population can only accelerate as the child-bearing ability of the white population evaporates.[7]

All of this is by design. Maximizing profitability means the willful neglect of other considerations such as ethics, which includes commodifying the very misery created by neo-liberalism and marketing and selling it back to the alienated, disaffected population produced by the current system in the first place. What is vital to understand is that when we have the Democratic Socialists of America and the Libertarian Party essentially running on the same platform, the public-private binary is a false dilemma. The spectrum of options for American voters is either cultural degeneration and racial erasure with a “social justice” paint job, or one that masquerades as “individual liberty.” Though they may couch their ulterior motives in so much rhetoric, just as with the elephant and the jackass, the leadership’s eyes might as well be represented by those cartoon dollar signs. The nexus of venture capital and big tech has proven profoundly damaging to any notions of nation, but for executives, major shareholders, the various “compliance” cottage industries, advocacy groups, and the like it has been a financial bonanza.

The American Bar Association is keenly aware of the need to provide services—and reap the financial windfall—navigating the complex international framework of labor laws and corporate restructuring, especially as private equity firms have increasingly become involved in mergers and acquisitions—described by Market Realist as “a frenzy.” Tali Orner writes:

For companies that employ foreign nationals, that task is even more complicated as there are significant immigration-related consequences that must be addressed prior to sealing the deal on a merger or acquisition. Because most work visas are employer-specific, changes in a company’s structure could affect the validity of a foreign national employee’s nonimmigrant visa status or pending green card application…It is critical for in-house counsel to be aware of immigration-related issues that may arise as a result of a restructuring between companies that employ foreign nationals. Companies should work with competent and experienced immigration counsel early on in any transaction to ensure that they are in compliance with immigration regulations and to ensure that foreign national employees remain authorized to work in the United States.[8]

While parasitic in nature, these parasitic entities have their own kind of symbiosis that allows them to flourish and generally escape scrutiny while they scrap our nations for parts. They are all deeply dependent on each other, and their enmeshing—often collusion—provides for mutual benefit. It is vital to understand that this is how the neo-liberal model continues to perpetuate itself and accelerate the accrual of capital and resources to its beneficiaries at the expense of the many through its predication on exponential growth and its maintenance of a mutually-reinforcing network of inextricably intertwined universities, NGOs, think tanks, various media outlets, governing bodies, corporate boards, law firms, financiers, and the like.

One example of this type of relationship is exhibited by Ropes & Gray LLP, advisors to Kohlberg & Co. in connection with obtaining financing for the acquisition of CIBT Global, Inc., a provider of travel visa and immigration services to corporations, travel management companies, and individuals. They also make big money advising charitable foundations, and they work closely with Silver Lake Partners. Ropes & Gray also work closely with Bain Capital, which is very much invested in this particular model. On October 20th, 2016, Greg A. Shell, managing director of Bain Capital Double Impact Fund, gave the keynote speech at the Leading by Example conference hosted by The Boston Foundation, Boston College, and Ropes & Gray. This conference is one of the premier conferences of its kind where leading figures in this burgeoning industry—and yes, it should be abundantly clear by now it is an industry—compare notes and network. The 2018 edition featured a lot of kvetching about diversity, which will surely be reflected where you live and work and not where these people do. One major point of discussion was the nexus of “civic engagement” in “inner city communities” with economic output—so here you get the perfect twofer of Democrat votes and Chamber of Commerce GDP! Another point of discussion was why it is much more advantageous to lobby under the pretense of philanthropy as opposed to direct lobbying, and that is for several reasons, not least of which are avoiding “registration and disclosure requirements” and “restrictions imposed by sources of funding.”

Of the CEOs polled in “The Future of Foundation Philanthropy” (December 2016) sponsored by the Center for Effective Philanthropy, many stated that their philanthropic endeavors were necessary to circumvent the “political climate and structure that is hostile to advancement in our mission areas,” and “political gridlock, especially at the federal level, which makes it almost impossible to address critical long-term issues in an informed manner.” That’s all well and good if the causes being advanced were not terribly destructive and totally self-serving, but they are. And the government—at least in theory accountable to the people—is constrained in ways the private sector is not. Other salient points included (and as always, you need to read between the lines):

The majority of foundation CEOs interviewed—almost 60 percent—identify climate change or the environment as a pressing issue. Several comments stress the importance of climate change in particular… Several CEOs suggest that “federal government interference with philanthropy” or “governmental efforts to more tightly regulate foundations and endowments” may pose challenges and heighten restrictions for foundation philanthropy in the future. Some CEOs specifically mention a “backlash against tax deductions” or “potential changes to IRS tax laws related to foundation giving.”… On the topic of race, a number of CEOs contemplate what the future holds. Several believe that a “majority-minority shift in U.S. demographics” and “the browning of America” will have implications for foundation staffing and leadership—namely, in a needed “transition to multiethnic leadership” and a greater focus on “diversity in leadership.” Some note the importance of diverse staffing, governance, and leadership for foundations overall for “achieving better results.”… Others note that foundations can take risks and test ideas without the constraints or ramifications that business or government might have.

As a second example of the kind of neo-liberal incestuousness that would make Gellius blush, the entire political enterprise of “liberal democracy” is only so much corporatized oligarchic rule. Let’s consider major private equity firm Silver Lake Partners. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s former chief of staff—replaced by Dan Meyer of the Duberstein Group[9]—Barrett Karr is now a managing director and Head of Government Affairs in Washington, DC at Silver Lake Partners, assuming many of the duties of departed CFR member and international security adviser to the United Nations secretary-general Gordon M. Goldstein. Karr’s position entails coordinating with lobbyists, trade associations, media contacts, government agencies, and local, state, and federal government officials, working to see to the implementation of policy proposals and ensuring a generally favorable environment for Silver Lake to continue to grow its $43 billion in assets.

One of Silver Lake’s founders is Maine native and Lewiston High School graduate David Roux. Bristol Seafood, Inc. in Portland is now positioned for “exponential growth” in the international market, according to former CEO Darrell Pardy, after Roux’s decision to invest in the company and provide it with an infusion of capital. With the much-discussed addition of another facility and a consequent spike in its demand for cheap labor, Bristol will likely be using the same Hancock, DeCoster, Wyman, and company playbook.[10] For his part, Roux will likely see to it that Silver Lake’s private equity model be applied to Bristol’s seafood harvesting, which will have predictably disastrous consequences affecting wages, demographics, social cohesion and trust, and the Atlantic ecosystem.

Silver Lake Partners is emblematic of the private equity model so pervasive in driving America’s transformation from nation to economic zone. Silver Lake co-founder and CFR and NAE member Glenn H. Hutchins is on the New York Federal Reserve Board of Directors, co-chairs the Brookings Institution and Harvard University’s capital campaign, and is a director of AT&T and Virtu Financial—there is of course no conflict of interest. As a case-in-point, speaking of the Brookings Institution, their Hamilton Project is yet another outlet publishing policy papers and memoranda advocating for “a twenty-first century immigration policy.” There is a near-uniformity in the policy positions of these pro-immigration, GDP-centric organizations like the Hamilton Project or the National Association for Business Economics (NABE), which has featured Hutchins as a speaker at its conferences in the past. Organizations partnering with NABE include Facebook, Google, Netflix, IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, Zillow, Brandeis University, Wells Fargo, Haver Analytics, Ford, Thomson Reuters, the US Census Bureau, Fidelity Investments, Fannie Mae, the McKinsey Institute, FedEx, and the Kingdom of the Netherlands, once again clearly signaling the beneficiaries and supporters of unfettered non-White immigration. Many of those names are very familiar to us by now. What does their “twenty-first century immigration policy” entail? From the Hamilton Project’s May 2012 framing memorandum “The US Immigration System: Potential Benefits of Reform”:

The United States is a nation of immigrants…Even as immigration to the United States continues to rise after a midcentury dip, most agree that America’s immigration policy has failed to keep up with changing circumstances. The current system does not meet U.S. economic needs, no longer reflects the historic humanitarian goal of reuniting families set out in the landmark 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, undermines the confidence of Americans in the rule of law, and has produced divisive and fragmented policy responses at the state level…While there are many ways in which both immigrants and U.S.-born citizens benefit from immigration, few are as stark as the fact that when a non-European college-educated immigrant moves from her native country to the United States, her annual productivity and compensation leaps by $57,000.[11]

Right. In the realm of per-capita GDP, immigration does have benefits—98% of which accrue to the immigrants themselves in the form of wages and benefits.[12] The presumption that natives will experience a net gain is wholly theoretical and is also predicated on wealth re-distribution, that is to say an increased concentration of wealth in the hands of business owners at the expense of workers. This particular idea has been thoroughly discredited and yet remains the staid talking point of Koch Brothers types—out of the GDP growth through immigration of $1.7 to $2 trillion a year, the size of the redistribution will be much larger (about $531 billion) than the net gain (about $54 billion).[13] Furthermore, as Steven A. Camarota, Director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies reports:

The National Academy of Sciences’ comprehensive look at the economic and fiscal impact of immigrants (taxes paid minus services used) found that the net fiscal burden immigrants create (taxes paid minus services used) is actually larger than the immigrant surplus…Whenever the impact of immigration on the labor market is discussed the argument is often made that immigration can fix the problems associated with our aging society, in particular the decline in the share of the population who are workers. However, this is not the case. For example, if we remove the 17.3 million immigrants (legal and illegal) who arrived in 2000-2014 and their 3.9 million U.S.-born children from 2014 Census Bureau data, 66 percent of the U.S. population would be of working age (16 to 65); if they are included, 66.2 percent are of working-age—a miniscule difference…Even before the Great Recession, a disproportionate share of employment gains went to immigrants…In the fourth quarter of 2015 only about two-thirds of working-age native-born Americans actually had a job; as recently as 2000 about three-fourths were working. American does not have a shortage of workers, it has a shortage of jobs.[14]

The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that globally over 200 million people are unemployed and 1.44 billion people are in vulnerable employment. Both numbers are projected to continue to get worse. Trends in labor force participation also indicate a decline, and wage growth has been suppressed, contributing to a long-term decline in the labor share of income.

Then there is the erroneous historical claim of America’s wealth being mostly generated by generous immigration (let alone slavery, but that is a topic for another time). Immigration, which is taken as sure as death and taxes these days, is by no means necessary, and as we’ve seen post-1965, far from being beneficial, even slightly as was the case in the 19th and early 20th centuries, has proven to be a major detriment to the country at large. I’ve dedicated ample space elsewhere to further debunking these dubious claims of economic benefit, to say nothing of the litany of other fallacies—the “nation of immigrants” trope, the acceptance of the 1965 Immigration Act as “humanitarian” in aim, the conception of America as a contract, etc.—so let’s look behind the curtain to see who might lend their support to such deeply erroneous claims. Cui bono? Below is the Hamilton Project’s Advisory Council with accompanying position(s) at the memo’s time of publication:

George A. Akerlof, Koshland Professor of Economics, University of California at Berkeley; Roger C. Altman, Founder & Chairman of Evercore Partners; Alan S. Blinder, Gordon S. Rentschler Memorial Professor of Economics & Public Affairs at Princeton University; Timothy C. Collins, Senior Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer at Ripplewood Holding, LLC; Jonathan Coslet, Senior Partner & Chief Investment Officer, TPG Capital, L.P.; Robert Cumby, Professor of Economics at Georgetown University; John Deutch, Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Karen Dynan, Vice President & Co-Director of Economic Studies, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution; Christopher Edley, Jr., Dean and Professor, Boalt School of Law University of California, Berkeley; Blair W. Effron, Founding Partner, Centerview Partners LLC; Judy Feder, Professor & Former Dean, Georgetown Public Policy Institute, Georgetown University; Roland Fryer, Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics, Harvard University and CEO, EdLabs; Mark T. Gallogly, Cofounder & Managing Principal, Centerbridge Partners Advisory Council; Ted Gayer, Senior Fellow & Co-Director of Economic Studies, The Brookings Institution; Richard Gephardt, President & Chief Executive Officer, Gephardt Group Government Affairs; Robert Greenstein, Executive Director, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; Chuck Hagel, Distinguished Professor, Georgetown University; Glenn H. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Silver Lake; Jim Johnson, Vice Chairman, Perseus LLC; Lawrence F. Katz, Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics at Harvard University; Mark McKinnon, Global Vice Chair, Hill + Knowlton Strategies; Eric Mindich, Chief Executive Officer, Eton Park Capital Management; Suzanne Nora Johnson, Former Vice Chairman, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.; Peter Orszag, Vice Chairman of Global Banking, Citigroup, Inc.; Richard Perry, Chief Executive Officer, Perry Capital; Penny Pritzker, Founder, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of PSP Capital; Meeghan Prunty, Senior Advisor, The Hamilton Project; Robert D. Reischauer, President Emeritus of The Urban Institute; Alice M. Rivlin, Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution and Professor of Public Policy, Georgetown University; David M. Rubenstein, Co-Founder & Managing Director of The Carlyle Group; Robert E. Rubin, Co-Chair, Council on Foreign Relations and Former U.S. Treasury Secretary; Leslie B. Samuels, Senior Partner, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP; Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer, Facebook; Ralph L. Schlosstein, President & Chief Executive Officer, Evercore Partners; Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google Inc.; Eric Schwartz, 76 West Holdings; Thomas F. Steyer, Senior Managing Member, Farallon Capital Management; Lawrence Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor, Harvard University; Laura D’Andrea Tyson, S.K. and Angela Chan Professor of Global Management, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley; Michael Greenstone, Director.

Yes, mass immigration really is great if you’re on this list. A lot of Jews on there, too. Must just be a coincidence.

Reposted with permission from The Anatomically Correct Banana.

[1] Kenneth Rapoza reports: “The H1-B visa…is the hallmark of every Indian IT company operating in the U.S.  Infosys, Wipro. Tata Consultancy, Tech Mahindra and HCL Technologies are the top Indian-owned companies importing foreign workers. In fact, of the top 10 companies that petition for the 85,000 H1-B visas issued annually, five are Indian. Cognizant, Accenture, Amazon, IBM and Deloitte are the biggest U.S. users…Indian IT firms fear Trump will either stop Indian companies from importing workers temporarily, or make it harder to provide evidence that Infosys is hiring from Bangalore because it cannot hire from Boston.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2017/02/27/trump-h1b-immigration-silicon-valley-outsourcing-india/#73d0078a7ff1

[2] https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valleys-most-celebrated-ceos-conspired-to-drive-down-100000-tech-engineers-wages/

[3] Ames writes: “The realities of inequality and capitalism invariably lead to mysticism of this sort, a natural human response to the dreary realities of concentrating so much wealth and power in the hands of a dozen interlocking board members at the expense of 100,000 employees, and so many other negative knock-off effects on the politics and culture of the world they dominate…One of the more telling elements to this lawsuit is the role played by ‘Star Wars’ creator George Lucas, who emerges as the Obi-Wan Kenobi of the wage-theft scheme. It’s almost too perfectly symbolic that Lucas — the symbiosis of Baby Boomer New Age mysticism, Left Coast power, political infantilism, and dreary 19th century labor exploitation — should be responsible for dreaming up the wage theft scheme back in the mid-1980s, when Lucas sold the computer animation division of Lucasfilm, Pixar, to Steve Jobs. Jobs held to this agreement, and used it as the basis two decades later to suppress employee costs just as fierce competition was driving up tech engineers’ wages.”

[4] Corporate partners and donors include McGraw-Hill Financial, Facebook, Google, the Walton Family Foundation, Koch Industries family foundation, eBay, Microsoft, Walmart, General Motors, ExxonMobil, Time Warner, Verizon, Visa, and Comcast. The Cato Institute in turn finances organizations such as the Maine Heritage Policy Center.

[5] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/images/publications/Reforming_US_High-Skilled_Guestworkers_Program.pdf

[6] https://www.nestle.com/sites/default/files/asset-library/documents/reports/csv%20reports/community%20and%20development/un_millennium_development_2005_2006_english.pdf

[7] https://www.darkmoon.me/2019/the-end-of-white-america-is-now-assured/

[8] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/business_law/publications/blt/2013/04/05_orner/

[9] Founded by Kenneth Duberstein, White House Chief of Staff to President Reagan and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Duberstein Group is a lobbying firm whose services have been retained by the likes of United Airlines, Pfizer, Northrup Grumman, Estee Lauder, Comcast, Hasbro, Bank of New York Mellon, British Petroleum, General Motors, Pepsi, McGraw-Hill Financial, Goldman Sachs, Time Warner, Kellogg’s, DeBeers, Lenovo, Sara Lee, Fannie Mae, and Lockheed Martin. During the bailout, the Duberstein Group made in excess of $600,000 lobbying for Fannie Mae and $2.3 million lobbying for Goldman Sachs. The Duberstein Group regularly rubs elbows with previously-discussed firms such as Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hoauer, and Feld LLP and Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson, and Hand, as well as the Wexler Group.

[10] Hancock Foods, along with Coastal Blueberry Service Inc., recently settled a suit over the mistreatment of eighteen Haitian migrant workers who had been recruited by contactor Carol Paul in Florida to come to Maine to pick blueberries in 2008. The suit alleged hundreds of violations of the federal Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act involving Paul’s promises to the workers. As evidenced elsewhere, these practices are the rule, not the exception, when it comes to these companies.

[11] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/05_immigration_greenstone_looney.pdf

[12] https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/03-16-16%20Camarota%20Testimony.pdf

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

With a market in excess of $19 billion in the US alone and a price point that’s nearly 2,000 times more expensive than tap water and four times more expensive than regular-grade gasoline, the market for bottled water is enormous, and its potential, if you’ll pardon the pun, is as of yet still largely untapped. It will not stay that way for long, though. According to a 2017 OECD policy paper, plans are already underway to create “a global public-private platform for knowledge exchange and effective engagement, collaboration, and action across governments and regulators in developed, emerging and developing economies, institutional investors, the private sector, international organisations, philanthropies, academia and civil society organisations.”[1]

This kind of hybrid action is not limited to just the OECD and its partners. According to the United Nations’ Agenda for Sustainable Development, the aim is for major multi-nationals to “collaborate with governments, UN bodies, NGOs, industry associations and other businesses to create more effective, enabling environments for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, on both international and national levels.” In addition to an accelerated wealth transfer from the First to the Third World to “bridge the infrastructure gap” and “combat climate change,” so-called “impediments to private investment in infrastructure” will be removed and “blended finance” will allow for public funds to underwrite projects where the profits will naturally accrue to the private sector.[2] In “neo-liberalese”:

Both public and private investment have key roles to play in infrastructure financing, including through development banks, development finance institutions and tools and mechanisms such as public-private partnerships, blended finance, which combines concessional public finance with non-concessional private finance and expertise from the public and private sector, special-purpose vehicles, non-recourse project financing, risk mitigation instruments and pooled funding structures. Blended finance instruments including public-private partnerships serve to lower investment-specific risks and incentivize additional private sector finance across key development sectors led by regional, national and subnational government policies and priorities for sustainable development…We encourage the use of innovative mechanisms and partnerships to encourage greater international private financial participation.[3]

As we’ve explored in other contexts, this vast matrix of organizations work in tandem or at least toward common ends through mutually-ensured profit-maximization schemes and social, political, and demographic transformation in whatever form will be most expedient. It is truly a global phenomenon:

Philanthropic funds often foster healthy information-sharing and cooperation among the organizations they support. They also often work on common problem-solving strategies with other kinds of donors. These include multilaterals such as the World Bank, the Global Fund, or the World Health Organization; bilaterals such as USAID and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID); and large foundations, corporations, and significant individual donors.[4]

Many of the new philanthropic funds are funded by private equity and venture capitalists. New Profit, as just one example, is housed in the offices of Bain Capital (founding partner: Mitt Romney) and receives its funding from private equity professionals affiliated with Greylock, JP Morgan, and many other firms in addition to Bain Capital. These groups and individuals apply the private equity model to their philanthropy, which is reflected in a variety of ways (this will be explored more fully in the series’ final installment). In 2017, charitable assets in donor-advised funds reached an all-time high of $110 billion. Donor-advised assets have a growth rate of nearly 20 percent annually. In practical terms, let’s see what the profit-maximizing chain of events looks like with “charitable nonprofits” as the tip of the spear:

Splash, a relatively small nonprofit with revenues of about $3 million in 2017, that in 2018 received a green light for an investment of $20 million from the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), with a match of more than $12 million from city and state governments in Ethiopia and India, to dramatically expand its efforts to bring clean water to millions across the globe. Splash…was tackling an enormous problem (lack of clean water for people around the world); it was approaching that problem innovatively, using off-the-shelf technology employed by the most sophisticated corporations, such as McDonalds. For Splash, the big bet was designed to build something that local actors would then sustain. Eric Stowe, Splash’s founder and director, and his team pivoted to that longer-term vision and developed an investment concept with a clear and compelling goal: to provide clean water, sanitation, and hygiene to all public schools in two of the biggest megacities in the developing world. At the end of five years, Splash’s work in Kolkata, India, and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is expected to reach the point where local government and local private-sector actors, already well-established in those places, take it over.[5]

Now what happens when inevitable mismanagement from the local government causes regression to the mean? Well, those private sector actors are there to assume full control, and there are certainly plenty of bottled water companies out there to “supplement” cities suffering clean water crises with their products. We have seen the dire consequences here in the United States as a result of the demographic transformation of cities such as Flint, Michigan and Camden, New Jersey, and the consequent neglect, gross mismanagement, and corruption. These are reflections of a wider trend; since peaking in 1977 inflation-adjusted federal funding for water infrastructure has been cut 74 percent. On a per capita basis, that is an 82 percent drop. In 1977, the federal government spent almost $77 per person (in 2014 dollars) on water infrastructure, but by 2014 that support fell to slightly more than $14 per person.[6] As Alexis Bonogofsky reports:

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the nation’s drinking water utilities need $384.2 billion in infrastructure investments over the next 20 years for thousands of miles of pipe as well as thousands of treatment plants and storage tanks to ensure the public health. Consequences of this inadequate investment have been seen in recent high-profile public health crises in Flint, Michigan, and the New Jersey public schools. Internationally, the UN finds that investment in public water systems and infrastructure is at an all-time low.[7]

The Trump administration has advanced plans to make it easier for private companies to control public water systems, including further cuts to federal funding for water protection; the administration’s plan “relies on a $100 billion fund incentivizing private sector involvement in public utilities to address aging pipes, aqueducts, and other critical pieces of hardware essential to the provision of drinking water.”[8] We already know what this looks like, and it is not pretty. From a 2018 exposé penned by Sharon Lerner and Leana Hosea:

Flint and Pittsburgh have many unfortunate parallels. Residents of both cities unknowingly drank water with high levels of the potent neurotoxin [lead], which has long-term health consequences. … The two lead crises have another important thing in common: a private water company named Veolia. The world’s largest supplier of water services, Veolia had contracts with both Flint and Pittsburgh around the time that lead levels rose in their drinking water. And in both places, Veolia wound up in legal disputes over its role in the crises. … The promise of saving money has been central to Veolia’s appeal to cash-strapped cities and towns struggling with water provision. That was certainly the case in Pittsburgh, where the water authority was facing more than $720 million in debt when it decided to contract with Veolia in 2012. The contract was based on Veolia’s “peer performance solutions” model, in which the company is paid based in part on how much it cuts costs.[9]

This has proven very lucrative for Veolia, which now has in excess of $30 billion in revenue and its stock price has increased more than 50 percent over the past half-decade. We also learn from Lerner and Hosea’s piece that, “At least some of those profits may be stowed in an offshore company Veolia set up in the Bahamas, according the Paradise Papers database.” Under Veolia’s oversight, residents’ water bills have steadily risen while the water quality has continued to decline. Controversy seems to follow Veolia wherever they’ve been contracted:

The company’s methods have also come under scrutiny outside the U.S., with controversies in Canada, France, and Gabon. In 2015, Romania’s anti-corruption agency launched an investigation into Veolia’s Romanian subsidiary, Apa Nova Bucuresti, and individual executives for allegedly running a multiyear, multimillion-euro bribery scheme in order to dramatically raise water rates.[10]

Though the crises caused by municipal degradation in Flint, Camden, and to a lesser extent Pittsburgh are in no small part the consequence of their demographic transformation, these kinds of systemic failures are not confined to cities and communities hammered by “diversity”—though that is certainly why they receive more media coverage than Martin County, Kentucky, for example. At nearly 94% white and entirely rural, Martin County is indicative of the deep neglect our non-metropolitan and –cosmopolitan communities suffer at the hands of a ruling class that hates them and wants them extinguished. Residents in Martin County have had to grapple with what has been described as “a catastrophically failing water system” compounded by water rates rising close to 50 percent, even though many residents have to purchase bottled water because the tap water is often undrinkable.

The continued failure—by design—at the municipal level both in public and private hands dovetails rather nicely with the privatization schemes of companies such as Nestlé that benefit from public disinvestment in water infrastructure, as the chairman of Nestlé Waters stated in 2009: “We believe tap infrastructure in the U.S. will continue to decline. … People will turn to filtration and bottled water for pure water needs.”[11] A recent Michigan State University study predicts over a third of Americans could be priced out of their municipal water supplies within the next half-decade as costs triple while the infrastructure continues to break down. The only alternatives will then be to turn to bottled water or find local natural springs that aren’t owned by these companies or other possible water sources; as 83% of Americans live in metropolitan areas and their suburbs and exurbs, finding clean natural sources of water will not be an easy task, to put it mildly. According to the United Nations, up to two-thirds of the world’s exploding population could be living under “stressed water conditions” by mid-next decade. Returning to Alexis Bonogofsky:

Internationally, bottled water consumption is estimated to have neared 70.4 billion gallons in 2013, according to data from the latest edition of Beverage Marketing’s report “The Global Bottled Water Market.” Consumption increased 6 percent in one year and is projected to grow. In fact, the International Bottled Water Association predicts the largest growth in bottled water to be in poor countries, where access to safe and clean water is not necessarily a given, and public water infrastructure is severely underfunded.[12]

Providing one case-in-point, Caroline Winter reports:

Failing infrastructure has already led to a near-total reliance on bottled water in parts of the world. Nestlé started selling Pure Life in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1998 to “provide a safe, quality water solution,” the company says. But locals wonder if the Swiss multinational is exacerbating the problem. “Twenty years ago, you could go anywhere in Lahore and get a glass of clean tap water for free,” says Ahmad Rafay Alam, an environmental lawyer in the country. “Now, everyone drinks bottled water…What Nestlé did is use a good marketing scheme to make tap water uncool and dangerous. It’s ubiquitous, like Kleenex. People will say, ‘Give me a bottle of Nestlé.’”…He adds that this change has taken the pressure off the government to fix its utilities, degrading the quality of Lahore’s supply.[13]

Nestlé has been anticipating and increasingly exploiting this situation for decades, controlling local springs and aquifers for their exclusive use. Other bottled water companies do the same. While people are literally dying from the water in Flint, a mere two hours down the road, Nestlé pays just $200 a year in municipal extraction fees to pump clean water and sell it at dramatically marked-up prices. Nestlé’s California water use increased by 19 percent during the major drought from 2011 to 2014. The company paid only $524 annually in permit fees to pump water from the San Bernardino National Forest—on a permit that was nearly thirty years expired, no less.

Nestlé generally seeks out areas with weak or antiquated water laws and regulations. In states like Maine and Texas, a law from the 1800s called “absolute capture” is still in effect. Absolute capture allows for landowners to use unlimited amounts of groundwater “captured” from said property. Nestlé will then appeal zoning resolutions and other restrictions to build massive facilities to extract the water, as in Fryeburg, Maine, where Nestlé’s Poland Spring line now has the means and the rights to extract water for the next twenty to forty-five years, perhaps longer.

Nestlé has sought to influence the political process at the state level in Maine as well, donating to such PACs as [Susan] Collins for Senator, Angus King for US Senate, Leading to a Balanced Maine, and the Alfond Business Community and Development. The Alfond Family, you’ll recall, are an extraordinarily wealthy Jewish family working to transform Maine both through their involvement in politics and through their many “philanthropic endeavors.” Nestlé/Poland Springs effectively has carte blanche in the state to buy up as many springs and aquifers as they can, privatizing what was once publically-accessible and what for many Mainers was their primary or secondary water source.[14] Water independence is part of the deeply self-reliant culture found in the state of Maine; 40 percent of Mainers drink private, unregulated well water as opposed to 86 percent of Americans who drink municipal water treated with fluoride, chlorine, and other chemicals. Furthermore, writes Winter:

Despite the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, compliance with harmful chemical restrictions isn’t monitored carefully, and most wastewater-treatment systems aren’t designed to remove hormones, antidepressants, and other drugs…77 million Americans are served by water systems that violate testing requirements or rules about contamination in drinking water, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council…[Bottled water] outpaced soda sales for the first time as drinkers continue to seek convenience and healthier options and worry about the safety of tap water after the high-profile contamination in Flint, Mich...Nestlé has come to dominate a controversial industry, spring by spring, often going into economically depressed municipalities with the promise of jobs and new infrastructure in exchange for tax breaks and access to a resource that’s scarce for millions. Where Nestlé encounters grass-roots resistance against its industrial-strength guzzling, it deploys lawyers; where it’s welcome, it can push the limits of that hospitality, sometimes with the acquiescence of state and local governments that are too cash-strapped or inept to say no.[15]

Nestlé will also sometimes buy water straight from a municipality with clean water, such as Fryeburg, and as Katy Kelleher writes, “sell it under its private labels, meaning that the same water flowing through faucets in Fryeburg for free is distributed in convenience and grocery stores throughout the country for around $1.99 a liter. One of those private labels is Poland Spring.”[16] If neither springs nor compliant municipalities with clean water are available, Nestlé is content to use common ground water from populated areas and pass it off as “fresh”; a recent lawsuit alleges Poland Spring bottles much of its water from ground water near petroleum pits, landfills, and densely-populated areas. In fact, per Kelleher, “Multiple lawsuits alleging mislabeling of water have been brought against Poland Spring over the past 20 years. A 2017 class-action lawsuit argued that ‘not one drop of Poland Spring Water emanates from a water source that complies with the FDA’s definition of spring water.’”[17]

Not that any of this comes as a surprise from a Nestlé that in the 1970s and 80s pressed a misinformation campaign on women across the Third World and aggressively marketed their infant formula—to be mixed with local water, which as we know is likely to be impure and/or polluted—as a superior alternative to breastfeeding. Nevertheless, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) saw nothing wrong with entering into a partnership with Nestlé. In fact, in a darkly ironic turn:

In 2003, Nestlé began a partnership with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to address the water needs of 210,000 Somali refugees and local people in Eastern Ethiopia. The partnership was both financial and practical, including on-going technical assistance in the form of a Nestlé Waters hydrogeologist and water resources manager…During 2005, the process of handing over the long-term operation and maintenance of the system to local water authorities was commenced. … In November 2005, Nestlé became a founding member of BAFF, a coalition working to reduce vitamin and mineral deficiencies through food fortification. Nestlé is the world’s largest producer of manufactured foods fortified with micronutrients. Nestlé collaborated with NGOs, ENDA Tiers Monde, and the International Association for Maternal and Neonatal Health in Senegal to establish a number of local centers “to improve nutritional and hygiene status of mothers and their infants under 5 years of age.”[18]

The Nestlé Nutrition Duchess Club markets Nestlé products to children in countries such as Nigeria under the guise of humanitarian outreach in order to, “Meet basic needs such as nutrition, healthcare, water…through affordable products and services. Food and beverage companies can develop new products that combat nutritional deficiencies and are affordable to low-income families.”[19] Nestlé works with NGOs and governmental organizations in countries such as Turkey, Egypt, South Africa, and Malaysia to do something similar.[20] As we might expect, the unethical and probably lethal practices of Nestlé have not disqualified the company from “educating” Senegalese mothers on the very infant formula they’ll be purchasing in bulk—or subsidized to purchase in bulk in any case—for their average close to five children per mother. With its low average IQ, dearth of education,[21] and fecundity, Senegal makes for the perfect market, and these factors, along with what for succinctness’s sake we’ll call the “Jewish Question,” are key to understanding neo-liberalism. Recalling the marketing strategies used in Pakistan discussed earlier and understanding the just-aforementioned factors of the Senegalese and Third World peoples in general, Nestlé has endeavored to position itself as a major beneficiary of America’s continued demographic transformation and municipal services degradation:

According to a 2014 market research report, adults that consume large volumes of bottled water are more likely than average to be African American, and Latinos make up the key customer base for bottled water. Researchers from the Medical College of Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin found that Latino and African-American parents were more likely to buy bottled water than white parents, and they are dishing out more money on bottled water primarily because of perceived health benefits. The bottled water industry markets to Latino immigrants…in part by exploiting bottled water as part of the immigrant “heritage” of coming from places with less access to clean drinking water. Nestlé Pure Life’s target audience is recent Latin-American immigrants, particularly mothers. In 2014, Nestlé spent over $5 million advertising Pure Life… and three-quarters of this spending ($3.8 million) went to Spanish-language television advertising.[22]

A recent Penn State study found that Black and Hispanic adults in the United States are half as likely as Whites to drink tap water and more than twice as likely to drink bottled water. Much of this is attributable to the state of municipal tap water in more “diverse” and urban environs, but the ability to market to these population groups more successfully is also a major factor. This may seem harsh, but disparities in intelligence and time preference do make Blacks and Browns better consumers, and a lower ability to engage in critical thinking makes these populations easier to manipulate and thus control. Despite the fluffy egalitarian propaganda that would force us to think otherwise, the ruling class understands this well—so well they’re party to mass genocide in order to produce a new hyper-consumerist, easily-controlled global serf class. It truly is a numbers game for them, and you can scarcely find anything more dehumanizing than that.

Reposted with permission from The Anatomically Correct Banana.

[1] http://www.oecd.org/water/Policy-Paper-Financing-Water-Investing-in-Sustainable-Growth.pdf

[2] From the OECD policy paper: “Blended finance is not an asset class, rather it uses a range of instruments to calibrate the risk-return profile of projects and to address other barriers to private investment…Challenges related to blending include the need for a good enabling investment environment, ensuring that development finance does not crowd out private finance and that the desired development outcomes are realised…Investments in water security compete with other sectors for financiers’ attention, driven primarily by the attractiveness of the risk-return profile. This depends on two factors: i) a stable revenue stream; and ii) how the range of risks related to water security investments are shared between public and private actors. Mobilising commercial finance, in particular domestic sources, need to be based on policy reforms of the water sector to promote efficiency gains, cost reduction and cost recovery, as well as improving the balance of tariffs and taxes as sources of finance.” Also from said paper, and of particular note to how the globalist entities view the project to commodify water and ultimately completely privatize it, with the state only useful in an interim stage as facilitator:

“[To date] water services are often under-priced, resulting in a poor record of cost recovery for water investments…Valuing water means recognising and considering all the diverse benefits derived from improvements in water management in terms of valued goods and services…It creates opportunities for converting the benefits from investments in water management into revenue streams, potentially improving the financial case for investment…Financial flows may benefit projects which are bankable, but may not maximise benefits for communities and the environment [my emphasis]…Mapping the flow of finance to water security investments can identify the ultimate sources of capital…The ‘Infrastructure Data Initiative’ was recently launched to address this need and support efforts to establish infrastructure as an asset class. This is a joint initiative by the OECD, the European Investment Bank, Global Infrastructure Hub, Long-term Infrastructure Investors Association and the Club of Long-Term Investors, which aims to create a centralised repository on historical long-term data on infrastructure (including water) at an asset level…This methodology should also explore the potential benefits from synergies emerging from interrelated projects and their impact on water resources. It would inform project preparation and selection by governments, development finance institutions and other partners.”

[3] https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/frameworks/addisababaactionagenda

[4] https://ssir.org/articles/entry/reimagining_institutional_philanthropy

[5] https://ssir.org/articles/entry/becoming_big_bettable#sidebar1

[6] https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/sites/default/files/rpt_1802_tbttbigwaterhustle-web.pdf

[7] https://truthout.org/articles/nestle-is-trying-to-break-us-a-pennsylvania-town-fights-predatory-water-extraction/

[8] https://theintercept.com/2018/05/20/pittsburgh-flint-veolia-privatization-public-water-systems-lead/

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/news/nestle-and-others-cashing-us-water-infrastructure-crisis

[12] https://truthout.org/articles/nestle-is-trying-to-break-us-a-pennsylvania-town-fights-predatory-water-extraction/

[13] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-09-21/nestl-makes-billions-bottling-water-it-pays-nearly-nothing-for

[14] To say nothing of the dramatic environmental impact: “Bottlers’ groundwater pumping operations can harm the local environment as well as natural resources that communities rely on for drinking water, farming, recreation and other uses. Groundwater sources are usually connected to surface waters, and when an aquifer is over-pumped, the water levels…can change. Large-scale groundwater extraction, such as for water bottling plants, could reduce the availability of local groundwater and surface water supplies to the detriment of the natural resources that depend on them. When bottled water companies extract groundwater sources, they not replenish what they take.” https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/sites/default/files/rpt_1802_tbttbigwaterhustle-web.pdf

[15] Ibid.

[16] https://www.topic.com/wet-n-wild

[17] Ibid.

[18] https://www.nestle.com/sites/default/files/asset-library/documents/reports/csv%20reports/community%20and%20development/un_millennium_development_2005_2006_english.pdf

[19] Ibid.

[20] Nestlé, in conjunction with Project Head Start in townships around Pretoria, South Africa, “trains adult caregivers in adequate pre-school education to stimulate children, age 6 and under. Teaching materials as well as health and nutrition education are given to overcome negative effects of poor nutrition. Workshops and weekly training at the University include appropriate handling of HIV/AIDS cases in the pre-school environment (my emphasis) and treating of cuts and wounds”…Nestlé also provides funding for a dietician to give nutrition advice and help to “inner-city” HIV/AIDS patients in France.

[21] A corporation named Bridge International Academies (BIA) is opening for-profit schools across the Third World, where instructors in the Bridge schools teach a pre-scripted curriculum from a computer. Liberia is considering outsourcing its entire elementary program to BIA, which is funded by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and a number of prominent interests from Wall Street.

[22] https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/sites/default/files/rpt_1802_tbttbigwaterhustle-web.pdf