European Farmers Protests
Its on again
[This image is from the 2022 protests.]
Published: 2024-02-06
Everybody (Reuters, BBC, AP News, Politico) wants you to listen to their version of "why” European farmers have their tractors on the streets again. Each article provides some human interest story and/or statistics to support their explanation of the root cause of the current protests.
Please read all of that, if you wish.
Here’s the YesXorNo summary:
... because the farmer's diesel subsidies (c.f Crooke, the video source) have been wiped out, the EU is subsidizing sub-standard imports (from Ukraine, among other places), the effort to restructure agricultural industries to comply with environmental law has been kicked down the road for so long that its implementation is disastrous and the farmers can't make a living. So when their unions call them to the streets to alert the politicians to their plight, they come.
The backdrop is simple: the EU just handed the failed Operation Ukraine Euro 14 Billion per year for 4 years while the farmers are being shafted. Any idiot can not only see this, but could have predicted it.
Farmers protests have been occurring in Europe each of these last two northern summers, and this Europe wide (France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, ...) protest ahead of an EU summit is a huge salvo across the EU technocrats' bows that this summer will be no different.
And why were those diesel subsidies removed? Because they're too expensive. Why is that? Because energy prices have risen. Why? Because of the war in Ukraine, which all of these idiots in Brussels have been funding and running propaganda for these same last two years.
Perhaps the message which the independent media have been delivering over the same period, that the Ukraine war is and was a corrupt, Nazi proxy war by the US and NATO against Russia, has finally reached the ears of these farmers whose standard of living is and has been directly impacted by the EU political leadership's engagement with this stupid proxy war.
We're back to the geopolitical equivalent of Sir Isaac Newton's 3rd law, actions have, often quite predictable, consequences.
If one examines the money laundering and corporate corruption behind some parts of the proxy war, one can observe a hidden agenda. I recently saw a claim that the amount of land area which Ukraine has lost to Russia during the conflict is less than the amount which has been sold to foreign entities after the 2014 coup. The Ukrainian Rada passed legislation which enabled this foreign purchase of Ukrainian land. I don't know which foreign owners have purchased this land, but one would be an idiot not to suppose that global agricultural firms have not made plenty of dime on the dollar purchases for prime Ukrainian farming land. There were reports of Ukraine actually selling its soil, which is about as stupid a thing as a government can do (ignoring things which are plainly immoral and contravene international law, like genocide).
At a geopolitical level, the small to mid-size subsidized farmers of Europe are being shafted in favour of transnational agriculture. The European farmers are both having trouble making ends meet and may have got wind of this betrayal. They are using the only tactic which is known to work against technocrats, civil disobedience which affects the economy.
Should their protests also gather the support of the general community, EU's political leadership may have a summer they wish to forget. Perhaps the EU's diplomatic cover under the 'right to defend itself' of Israel's genocide in Gaza has helped Europe's citizenry realize the need to remove a huge amount of Europe's political leadership. They are immoral and stupid, and the most obvious way they could have taken such a wide control of EU's policy is because of corruption and psychological manipulation of the electorate.
The symptoms are dire. Fairly radical measures seem likely to be the only effective strategy to counter these technocrats who do not live among the people, do not feel their plight and are shielded by the language their colleagues and the Think-Tankers around them use.
No points for betting on the use of the police to break up protests. The problem with that may be the usual breaking point for revolution: when the security forces refuse to follow orders.
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Sources
Dutch Farmers' Protests: Government Backs Itself into a Corner Due to Decades of Inaction, YesXorNo, 2022-07-07
Wheat, Fertilizer, Pipelines and Trade, YesXorNo, 2023-07-23
War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land, Oakland Institute, reliefweb, 2023-02-21
Ukraine: Land Privatization Demanded by IMF, Links to Biden Graft Scandal. Engineered Bankruptcy of National Economy, Dmitriy Kovalevich, Global Research, 2019-11-28
US corporations own around 30% of Ukrainian arable land, Drago Bosnic, InfoBRICS, 2022,08-02
MSM
Farmer protests spread in Europe ahead of EU summit, Yves Herman and Kate Abnett, Reuters, 2024-01-30
Why Europe's farmers are taking their anger to the streets, Laura Gozzi, BBC, 2024-01-27
Why European Union officials are taking angry farmers so seriously before Thursday’s summit, Raf Casert, AP News, 2024-02-01
Europe’s farmer protests are spreading. Here’s where and why, Hanne Cokelaere and Bartosz Brzeziński, Politico, 2024-01-31
Alastair Crooke： Washington’s Theater of the Absurd!, Napolitano interviews Crooke, Judging Freedom, 2024-02-05
Culture
The Presidents of the United States of America - Body (Official Audio), uploaded 2023-01-23
Copyleft: CC0
