Machines of War: Blackwater, Monsanto and Bill Gates

A report by Jeremy Scahill, published in The Nation (Blackwater’s Black Ops, Sept. 15, 2010), revealed that the largest mercenary army in the world, Blackwater (now called Xe Services) sold clandestine espionage services to the transnational Monsanto. Blackwater changed names in 2009, after becoming famous in the world for reports of its abuses in Iraq, including massacres of civilians.

It continues to be the U.S. State Department’s greatest private contractor of “security services”, that is to say, state terrorism, giving the government deniability.

Many military men and ex-CIA officials work for Blackwater or one of the related companies it created to divert attention from its bad reputation and to generate more profits selling its harmful services — which range from information and espionage to infiltration, political lobbying and paramilitary training — to other governments, transnational banks and companies. According to Scahill, business with transnationals — like Monsanto, Chevron and financial giants like Barclays and Deutsche Bank — is channeled through two companies that are the properties of Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater: Total Intelligence Solutions and Terrorism Research Center. These companies share Blackwater officials and directors.

One of them, Cofer Black, known for his brutality as one of the directors of the CIA, made contact with Monsanto in 2008 as director of Total Intelligence, arranging a contract with the company to spy on and infiltrate activist animal rights organizations and those working against transgenics and other dirty activities of the bio-tech giant.

When contacted by Scahill, Monsanto executive Kevin Wilson refused to speak, but later confirmed to The Nation that they had contracted Total Intelligence in 2008 and 2009, only to monitor “public information” of its opponents. Furthermore, he said that Total Intelligence was a “completely separate entity from Blackwater.”

However, Scahill has copies of Cofer Black’s emails following the reunion with Monsanto’s Wilson, where he explains to other ex-CIA agents, using his Blackwater email addresses, that the discussion with Wilson was that Total Intelligence would develop into the “intel arm of Monsanto”, spying on activists and other actions. How Blackwater “could have our person(s) actually join [activist] group(s) legally” was included. Monsanto paid Total Intelligence $127,000 in 2008 and $105,000 in 2009.

It is no surprise that a “science of death” company like Monsanto, which since the beginning has been dedicated to producing toxins and spilling poisons — from Agent Orange to PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), agro-toxins, hormones and transgenic seeds — would associate itself with another company of thugs.

Almost at the same time of the publication of this article in The Nation, the Via Campesina reported a buy of 500,000 Monsanto shares for more than $23 million by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which, with this, finally took off the “philanthropist” mask. Another association that is not surprising.

It is about a marriage between the two most brutal monopolies in the history of industrialism: Bill Gates controls more than ninety percent of the market for patented computer programs, and Monsanto controls almost ninety percent of the world market for transgenic seeds and the majority of the global market for commercial seeds. In no other industrial area do such vast monopolies exist, whose very existences are a negation of capitalism’s much-trumpeted “market competition”. Both Gates and Monsanto are very aggressive in the defense of their ill-gotten monopolies.

Even though Bill Gates tries to say that the Foundation is not connected with his commercial activities, everything that it does shows the opposite: A large part of its donations end up favoring the tycoon’s commercial investments; apart from that, in reality, he does not “donate” anything, but in place of paying taxes to the public treasury, invests his profits where it favors him economically, including as propaganda of his supposed good intentions. On the contrary, his “donations” finance such destructive projects like geo-engineering, or the substitution of natural and communal medicines for high-tech, patented medicines in the poorest areas of the world. What a coincidence; Mexico’s ex-secretaries of Health, Julio Frenk and Ernesto Zedillo, are Foundation advisers.

Just like Monsanto, Gates also dedicates himself to trying to destroy rural agriculture world-wide, principally through the so-called “Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa” (AGRA). This operates as a Trojan Horse to strip poor African farmers of their traditional seeds and substitute them with the company’s transgenic seeds. To that end, in 2006, the Foundation contracted Robert Horsch, a Monsanto director. Now Gates, sniffing greater profits, went directly to the source.

Blackwater, Monsanto and Gates are three faces of the same figure: the war machine against the planet and the majority of people who live on it — be they farmers, indigenous people, local communities, people who want to share information and knowledge, or any other person that does not want to be under capitalism’s aegis of profit and destruction.