Ronnie's Blog
Thank God it’s over.
The 2020 U.S. presidential election provided a perfect example of contemporary political degeneration. Two highly unpopular politicians, Joe Biden and Donald Trump―both backed by wealthy corporations and billionaire donors including Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the fossil fuel industry, Big Pharma, the military industrial complex and corporate agribusiness―squared off against one another in a multi-billion billion-dollar mudslinging contest for the White House.
As the candidates traded blows on the campaign trail, the climate emergency, food and farming, institutional racism, deteriorating public health, environmental destruction, 1.6 trillion dollars in student debt, a crumbling infrastructure and how to get 30 million unemployed people back to work were barely discussed except in rhetorical soundbites depicting the other as “dangerous communist” or “Nazi-like demagogue.”
With mounting evidence and increasing certainty, a growing number of independent scientists, investigators and now lawyers have begun to deconstruct and critique the “official story” on the origins, nature, dangers, prevention and treatment of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The “official story,” dogmatically upheld by the Chinese government and military, Big Pharma, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the mass media and the tech giants is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerged “naturally” from nature and then inexplicably jumped the species barrier from bats into humans, precipitating the most serious and deadly epidemic since the Spanish Flu one hundred years ago, which infected one third of the world’s population at the time, and killed up to 50 million people.
If you follow our work, you know we’re digging deep into the origins of COVID-19 — where did it come from, why is it so dangerous to certain people?
Should anyone be held accountable?
Yesterday a donor — who, like us, believes that all dangerous “gain-of-function” genetic engineering experiments must be shut down immediately — reached out to me personally with a generous offer.
In the midst of an unprecedented global disaster and government failure to solve the COVID-19 crisis, it’s time for global civil society to take matters into our own hands.
We have a plan—and we need your help.
The shocking truth is starting to come out about the real origins of COVID-19. But more shocking still is the way that this disease has shone a light on the fragility of our food system, the lack of transparency in our regulatory and scientific communities and the terrifying vulnerabilities of our bodies, worn down by lifetimes of junk food and exposure to toxic chemicals.
A growing body of legal and scientific evidence now points to the fact that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was collected from bats (as well as from the bodies of miners sicken by a SARS virus in 2012), and then genetically engineered and manipulated in a lab, before it was released (accidentally, we hope) from a Chinese, military-controlled, U.S.-funded, World Health Organization-monitored laboratory in Wuhan, China.
COVID-19 is the tragic, but unfortunately predictable, consequence of an ongoing global biological arms race that has gone on for decades. This arms race, accelerated by modern genetic engineering techniques, involves hunting down and collecting virulent viruses and bacteria all over the world, especially those that involve “spillover events” (incidents where humans became infected with rare viruses or bacteria), and then weaponizing these pathogens (engineering them to be more contagious and virulent) in biomedical/military labs.
I’m going to ask for your help. In a moment, I’ll tell you why.
But first, we at OCA hope that you and your family are safe and well.
Safe from the west coast wildfires and east coast hurricanes.
Safe from major health concerns, daunting financial worries, crushing injustices.
These are challenging, indeed frightening times.
For millions of people. For the future of our democracy. For the survival of our common home.
Despite an ongoing cover-up by government authorities, the biotech industry, the military industrial complex and the mass media, there is growing scientific consensus
that the COVID-19 virus was created and (most likely accidentally) leaked from a dual-use military/civilian lab in Wuhan, China.
The ensuing pandemic (currently with 14 million infected and 585,000 dead, which has precipitated a global economic meltdown) is the predictable, yet preventable, collateral damage of a reckless, decades-long, and accident-prone biodefense/biowarfare program carried out by the U.S. (including both the Obama and Trump administrations, and their predecessors), China, Russia and other highly industrialized and militarized nations.
Under the gun, reeling from an unprecedented public health, racial justice, environmental and climate crisis, now is certainly not the time to mince words nor offer up piecemeal reforms to greenwash a failed, degenerate system. As I point out in my recent book, "Grassroots Rising: A Call to Action on Climate, Farming, Food, and a Green New Deal," there are no magical, easy tweaks to business, politics and consumer behavior “as usual” that can save us.
After the pandemic, lockdown and economic depression, in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter rebellion, there is no healthy, just and climate-friendly “normal” we can go back to. The old red, white and blue normal of Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton et al. was and is degenerate, racist and self-destructive, a 21st Century suicide economy that is dragging us toward climate catastrophe, societal meltdown and what Vandana Shiva has aptly described as a Digital Dictatorship.
The folks at the Food & Environment Network (FERN) have taken on the grim task of monitoring the COIVD-19 situation in industrial slaughterhouses.
The numbers aren’t pretty.
As of June 29, FERN reports that at least 36,561 meatpacking, food processing and farmworkers have tested positive for Covid-19—and at least 116 workers of those have died.
Meanwhile four of the “Big Meat” companies responsible for these numbers—Tyson, JBS, Cargill and Smithfield—are being investigated for using the pandemic to needlessly endanger workers, and to deceive consumers about meat shortages so they could jack up prices, all while exporting massive amounts of meat to China.
Never have we needed to shut down factory farms more than now.
And never has the opportunity been more within our reach—if we can marshal the resources to get the job done.
It’s been a long, strange few months.
First, let me say that I hope you and your family and friends have remained safe and healthy.
Second, I want to say this: If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that our corporate-controlled industrial food system is a failure—and that we’ll never have a better opportunity for transformational change than we have right now.
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