Four out of every 10 British families with children under the age of 12 have been replacing meat in their diet with carbohydrates such as pasta and bread to bulk out their meals and get more out of their money. 18% of Brits are buying fewer vegetables and fruits, and almost a third are purchasing less meat, according to Red Tractor.
The cost of food continues to rise in the UK, and the country’s food retailers have warned that price inflation will continue into the foreseeable future. The latest figures show grocery prices are now increasing at their fastest rate on record.
Figures provided by retail analyst Kantar found that grocery price inflation in the country reached a new record high of 16.7% in the four weeks that ended on January 22. This amounts to a nearly £ 800-pound increase on a typical yearly shopping bill. This is a notable increase from the 14.4% recorded in December and the highest level since figures were first tracked in 2008.
Some categories of food that have noted particularly sharp rises recently include eggs, milk and dog food. However, fruit, vegetables, sugar and alcohol have also noticed steep rises in the past month. According to Kantar, the price of basics such as cheese, milk, butter and bread is up 16.7% on a year-over-year basis. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) reports that olive oil has risen by nearly 40% in the last year, while low-fat milk is up 46% and sugar is up 38.5%.
People are turning to store-label products, cheap carbs and expired food to feed their families
In response to record-setting inflation, some supermarkets are expanding their store label ranges to provide customers with more value. In January, sales of store-label products climbed by 9.3%; sales of branded alternatives only rose by 1%.
Four out of every 10 British families with children under the age of 12 have been replacing meat in their diet with carbohydrates such as pasta and bread to bulk out their meals and get more out of their money. 18% of Brits are buying fewer vegetables and fruits, and almost a third are purchasing less meat, according to Red Tractor.
Another way some people are making ends meet is by eating food that is well past its use-by date. According to the ONS, almost one in five adults say they have eaten food that was beyond its use-by date, which indicates when perishable food can safely be consumed. This is despite the Food Standards Agency warning that individuals should never eat food after this date – even if it smells or looks acceptable – because it could result in serious illness.
The ONS also found that 15% of adults are somewhat or very worried that they will run out of food before they can afford to purchase more. It also revealed that Brits are struggling to stay warm amid the higher costs of energy, with nearly a quarter of those polled saying that they struggled to stay comfortably warm during the previous two weeks.
Discount grocery chains like ALDI and Lidl have noted rising sales. For the fourth month in a row, ALDI was the country’s fastest-growing grocer, noting sales that were 26.9% higher year on year and taking a 9.2% share of the market. Sales at Lidl climbed by 24.1%; they took a market share of 7.1%. Meanwhile, the sales at bigger rivals like Sainsbury’s, Asda and Tesco only saw increases of 6%; sales at Morrisons dropped by 1.9%.
It’s bad news for Brits who are already struggling with inflation across the board. The Bank of England recently raised interest rates for the 10th time in a row, which is pushing monthly mortgage payments higher; its 0.5 percent rise places rates at 4%, which is the highest level seen since the financial crisis of 2008. A further rise to 4.25% is widely expected next month.
Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund has forecasted that the British economy will shrink this year and experience the poorest performance out of all developed countries, including Russia. The news isn’t much better in the U.S., where the prices of many foods have risen exponentially as well.
“The real culprit behind this 138% hike in the price of a carton of eggs,” says the letter, “appears to be a collusive scheme among industry leaders to turn inflationary conditions and an avian flu outbreak into an opportunity to extract egregious profits reaching as high as 40%.”
By the way, Twitter was instrumental in exposing the lies about Russia bombing Poland. Someone from that area posted pics of the wreckage of the bombs. Internet sleuths figured that it was not Russian immediately. Something like that.
In this sense, Twitter helped prevent WW3. Let us hope that it can do the same about the vaccines genocide occurring right now.
Three people from Hubby’s work died “suddenly and unexpectedly” just this week.
This has now gone beyond the stage of we told you so, we're now at the point of pull the vaccine's off the market and run the tests they were supposed to do before introducing this stuff!
My neighbor had vax injury. He was in the hospital for almost a month with breathing problems, doctors didn't know what was wrong with him. When he was released they told him they still had no idea why he went downhill. He asked about vax injury and they defended the vax 😐
I was in hospital in 2021 (not jab related) Two of the other 3 patients in my ward had symptoms after jab. Both told me they were fit and healthy previously and Doctors were "baffled" as to the cause of their illness
This thread is extensive. See for yourself. We might be in the middle of a genocide of scientism, fascism, bad medicine, corrupted ideology, and stupidity. When we don’t comprehend the horrors of this world we call it evil.
They’re now going to give the useless and toxic covid-19 jab to infants.
They’re going to add a jab that doesn’t work and isn’t safe to an aggressive, untested, officially promoted a programme of mass medication; the most alarming, experimental and grandiose example of centrally approved child abuse in human history.
The investments of just 125 billionaires emit 393 million tonnes of CO2e each year – the equivalent of France – at an individual annual average that is a million times higher than someone in the bottom 90 percent of humanity.
I’m so just as shocked as you are. A billionaire is responsible for a million times more greenhouse gas emissions than the average person… And now these same billionaires, CEOs, and politicians are currently discussing at GOP27 in Egypt, how they could tax us more to fund their CO2 diminution plans… How ironic, isn’t it? FY!
The below article shows that the richest are more toxic and destructive to the environment than regular people through their investments and oh-so-secret ways of life. Runaway capitalism is in full swing and the lifestyles, ways of life, and total debauchery will lead to the destruction of the Earth.
Oxfam has reported that the wealthiest people are responsible for about a million times more emissions than the world’s lowest earners when taking into account their investments. In other words the 125 wealthiest people-Musk, Walton, Buffet, and Gates included, have a combined carbon footprint that is equivalent to the entire country of France. The investments themselves continue dirty industries and lead to the creation of more emissions added to the existing whole.
Oxfam first pulled together a list of the world’s 220 people, and identified the corporations that they hold investments in, and currently have a 10% equity stake in. Naturally, it should be known that most of the research itself may not be accurate. The reason being there is an overall lack of transparency that has come from the world of billionaires.
The transparency comes down to the wealthiest actual investments and additionally a lack of transparency around corporate emissions, meaning that the numbers are likely way higher than reported by Oxfam. Based on the research this means 3.3 million tons for the richest people, followed by about 25.4 for an average person in the UK, and then followed by the world’s 10% poorest at around 3 tons per person.
The influence of the few and the wealthy continues to show the runaway effects of capitalism and continues to sow the world’s destruction. The numbers themselves reported here aren’t accurate and are way higher. It also isn’t a final list, with no mention of Bezos, etc.
According to the Oxfam website:
Billionaire investments in polluting industries such as fossil fuels and cement double the average for the S&P 500
The investments of just 125 billionaires emit 393 million tonnes of CO2e each year – the equivalent of France – at an individual annual average that is a million times higher than someone in the bottom 90 percent of humanity.
Carbon Billionaires: The investment emissions of the world’s richest people, is a report published by Oxfam today based on a detailed analysis of the investments of 125 of the richest billionaires in some of the world’s biggest corporates and the carbon emissions of these investments. These billionaires have a collective $2.4 trillion stake in 183 companies.
The report finds that these billionaires’ investments produce an annual average of 3m tonnes of CO2e per person, which is a million times higher than the average for people living in the bottom 90 percent (2.76 tonnes of CO2e).
The actual figure is likely to be higher still, as published carbon emissions by corporates have been shown to systematically underestimate the true level of carbon impact. Further, billionaires and corporates who do not publicly reveal their emissions (and are therefore not included in the research), are likely to be those with a high climate impact.
“These few billionaires together have ‘investment emissions’ that equal the carbon footprints of entire countries like France, Egypt or Argentina,” said Nafkote Dabi, Climate Change Lead at Oxfam. “The major and growing responsibility of wealthy people for overall emissions is rarely discussed or considered in climate policy-making. This has to change. These billionaire investors at the top of the corporate pyramid have a huge responsibility for driving climate breakdown. They have escaped accountability for too long.”
“Emissions from billionaire lifestyles – due to their frequent use of private jets and yachts – are thousands of times the average person, which is already completely unacceptable,” said Dabi. “But if we look at emissions from their investments, then their carbon emissions are over a million times higher.” said.
Contrary to average people, studies show the world’s wealthiest individuals’ investments account for up to 70 percent of their emissions. Oxfam has used public data to calculate the “investment emissions” of billionaires with over 10 percent stakes in a corporation. The study allocates billionaires a share of the reported emissions of the corporates in which they are invested, in proportion to their stake.
The study also found billionaires had an average of 14 percent of their investments in polluting industries such as energy and materials like cement. This is twice the average for investments in the S&P 500. Only one billionaire in the sample had investments in a renewable energy company.
“We need COP27 to expose and change the role that big corporates and their rich investors are playing in driving the climate crisis by profiting from pollution,” said Dabi. “They can’t be allowed to hide or greenwash. We need governments to tackle this urgently by publishing emission figures for the richest people, regulating investors and corporates to slash carbon emissions and taxing wealth and polluting investments.”
The choice of investments billionaires make is shaping the future of our economy, for example, by backing high carbon infrastructure – locking in high emissions for decades to come. The study found that if the billionaires in the sample moved their investments to a fund with stronger environmental and social standards, it could reduce the intensity of their emissions by up to four times.
“The super-rich need to be taxed and regulated away from polluting investments that are destroying the planet. Governments must put also in place ambitious regulations and policies that compel corporations to be more accountable and transparent in reporting and radically reducing their emissions,” said Dabi.
Oxfam has estimated that a wealth tax on the world’s super-rich could raise $1.4 trillion a year, vital resources that could help developing countries – those worst hit by the climate crisis – to adapt, address loss and damage and carry out a just transition to renewable energy. According to the UNEP adaptation costs for developing countries could rise to $300 billion per year by 2030. Africa alone will require $600 billion between 2020 to 2030. Oxfam is also calling for steeply higher tax rates for investments in polluting industries to deter such investments.
The report says that many corporations are off track in setting their climate transition plans, including hiding behind unrealistic and unreliable decarbonization plans with the promise of attaining net zero targets only by 2050. Fewer than one in three of the 183 corporates reviewed by Oxfam are working with the Science Based Targets Initiative. Only 16 percent have set net-zero targets.
Ahead of the deliberations at COP27, Oxfam is calling for the following actions:
Governments to put in place regulations and policies that compel corporations to track and report on scope 1, scope 2 and scope 3 GHG emissions, set science-based climate targets with a clear road map to reducing emissions, and while at it ensuring a just transition from the extractive, carbon-intensive economy by securing the future livelihoods of workers and the affected communities.
Governments should implement a wealth tax on the richest people and an additional steep rate top-up on wealth invested in polluting industries. This will reduce the numbers and power of rich people in our society, and drastically reduce their emissions. It will also raise billions that can be used to help countries cope with the brutal impacts of climate breakdown and the loss and damage they incur and fund the global shift to renewable energy.
Corporations must put in place ambitious and time-bound climate change action plans with short-to-medium term targets in line with global climate change objectives in a view to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.
Canada’s top three grocers all posted higher profits this year compared with their average performances over the last five years, new research from Dalhousie University has found.
Critics have accused grocers of so-called greedflation, suggesting they are profiteering at a time when food prices are rising at the fastest rate in more than 40 years, and researchers say a lack of transparency in their financial results isn’t helping.
“These companies are massive and quite diversified from a retail perspective so we recommend dividing food sales from other sales,” said Sylvain Charlebois, co-author of the report by the Agri-Food Analytics Lab and Dalhousie professor.
Loblaw Companies Ltd. was particularly notable, the report found, as it has outperformed not only its five-year average performance but did better than any of those years individually.
“They do not know what this vaccine does. They have no clue, yet, they want pregnant women to take it.”
Well done @AndersonAfDMdEP she had to activate her lawyers against YT. YouTube was ordered to restore the recent viral EU MEP videos, as well as withdrawing the warnings. A crucial victory for free speech. Well done.https://t.co/8vUrgdNPWxpic.twitter.com/9qzOKgCp6b
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) – Lockheed Martin recorded increased net sales and net earnings in the third quarter of 2022, the American aerospace and defense giant said on Tuesday.
“Lockheed Martin Corporation [NYSE: LMT] today reported third quarter 2022 net sales of $16.6 billion, compared to $16.0 billion in the third quarter of 2021. Net earnings in the third quarter of 2022 were $1.8 billion, or $6.71 per share, compared to $614 million, or $2.21 per share, in the third quarter of 2021,” the company said in a press release.
Cash from operations totaled $3.1 billion, compared to $1.9 billion during the same period of last year, while free cash flow rose from $1.6 billion to $2.7 billion in Q3 of 2022, according to the release.
Lockheed Martin President and CEO James Taiclet stressed the company’s continuing ability to invest in new technologies.
“These technologies include hypersonics, directed energy, and autonomy, as well as cutting-edge digital capabilities in our evolving 5G.MIL open standards-based architecture. In addition, we are investing in production and sustainment capacity for the solutions needed now to defend our allies and our nation, including F-35, Javelin, and HIMARS,” Taiclet said, as quoted in the release.
Aeronautics’ net sales for the quarter rose by $521 million, or 8% year-on-year. They increased by about $425 million for the F-35 program.
“MFC’s [Missile and Fire Control] net sales during the quarter ended Sept. 25, 2022, increased $50 million, or 2%, compared to the same period in 2021,” the company said. “The increase was primarily attributable to higher net sales of approximately $95 million for integrated air and missile defense programs due to higher volume (Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3)).”
Space’s net sales were up by $183 million in the third quarter of this year, or 7%, compared to the same period in 2021.
In his speech to the UN General Assembly, the Colombian president highlighted the necessity of ending the war on drugs and saving the environment
“You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing the jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison [the rainforest] is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.”
They invaded in the name of oil and gas. They discovered in the 21st century the worst of their addictions: addiction to money and oil. Wars have served as an excuse not to act against the climate crisis. Wars have shown them how dependent they are on what will kill the human species.
On the first day of the United Nations General Assembly, Colombian President Gustavo Petro made his first address to the body. The speech sharply deviated from those of his conservative predecessors. Petro did not shy away from calling out global North countries for their role in the destruction of the environment and in the perpetuation of the War on Drugs, as a symptom of their capitalist greed. He accused
“You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing the jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison [the rainforest] is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.”
This is Petro’s first trip to the United States since he was inaugurated in August. He was received on Sunday night September 18 by hundreds of supporters in Queens, NY who manifested their support for his administration’s commitment to working for peace and ensuring the wellbeing of the Colombian people.
Below is a full transcription of his speech on September 20, 2022 to the United Nations General Assembly.
I come from one of the three most beautiful countries on Earth.
There is an explosion of life there. Thousands of multicolored species in the seas, in the skies, in the lands…I come from the land of yellow butterflies and magic. There in the mountains and valleys of all greens, not only do the abundant waters flow down but also the torrents of blood. I come from a land of bloody beauty.
My country is not only beautiful, but it is also violent.
How can beauty be conjugated with death, how can the biodiversity of life erupt with the dances of death and horror? Who is guilty of breaking the enchantment with terror? Who or what is responsible for drowning life in the routine decisions of wealth and interest? Who is leading us to destruction as a nation and as a people?
My country is beautiful because it has the Amazon jungle, the ChocóWar jungle, the waters, the Andes mountain ranges, and the oceans. There, in those forests, planetary oxygen is emanated and atmospheric CO2 is absorbed. One of these CO2 absorbing plants, among millions of species, is one of the most persecuted on earth. At any cost, its destruction is sought: it is an Amazonian plant, the coca plant, sacred plant of the Incas. [It is in] a paradoxical crossroads.
The jungle that tries to save us, is at the same time, destroyed. To destroy the coca plant, they spray poisons, glyphosate in mass that runs through the waters, they arrest its growers and imprison them. For destroying or possessing the coca leaf, one million Latin Americans are killed and two million Afro-Americans are imprisoned in North America. Destroy the plant that kills, they shout from the North, but the plant is but one more of the millions that perish when they unleash the fire on the jungle. Destroying the jungle, the Amazon, has become the slogan followed by States and businessmen. The cry of scientists baptizing the rainforest as one of the great climatic pillars is unimportant.
For the world’s power relations, the jungle and its inhabitants are to blame for the plague that plagues them. The power relations are plagued by the addiction to money, to perpetuate themselves, to oil, to cocaine and to the hardest drugs to be able to anesthetize themselves more. Nothing is more hypocritical than the discourse to save the rainforest. The jungle is burning, gentlemen, while you make war and play with it. The rainforest, the climatic pillar of the world, disappears with all its life.
The great sponge that absorbs planetary CO2 evaporates. The savior forest is seen in my country as the enemy to be defeated, as the weed to be extinguished.
Coca and the peasants who grow it, because they have nothing else to grow, are demonized. You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing its jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.
We serve them only to fill the emptiness and loneliness of their own society that leads them to live in the midst of drug bubbles. We hide from them the problems that they refuse to reform. It is better to declare war on the jungle, on its plants, on its people. While they let the forests burn, while hypocrites chase the plants with poisons to hide the disasters of their own society, they ask us for more and more coal, more and more oil, to calm the other addiction: that of consumption, of power, of money.
What is more poisonous for humanity, cocaine, coal, or oil? The dictates of power have ordered that cocaine is the poison and must be pursued, even if it only causes minimal deaths by overdose, and even more by the mixtures necessitated by clandestinity, but coal and oil must be protected, even if their use could extinguish all of humanity.
These are the things of world power, things of injustice, and things of irrationality, because world power has become irrational. They see in the exuberance of the jungle, in its vitality, the lustful, the sinful; the guilty origin of the sadness of their societies, imbued with the unlimited compulsion to have and to consume. How to hide the loneliness of the heart, its dryness in the midst of societies without affection, competitive to the point of imprisoning the soul in solitude, if not by blaming the plant, the man who cultivates it, the libertarian secrets of the jungle.
According to the irrational power of the world, it is not the fault of the market that cuts back on existence, it is the fault of the jungle and those who inhabit it. The bank accounts have become unlimited, the money saved by the most powerful on the earth will not even be able to be spent in the time of the centuries. The sadness of existence produced by this artificial call to competition is filled with noise and drugs. The addiction to money and to having has another face: the addiction to drugs in people who lose the competition, in the losers of the artificial race in which they have transformed humanity.
The disease of loneliness will not be cured with glyphosate [sprayed] on the forests. It is not the rainforest that is to blame.
The culprit is their society educated in endless consumption, in the stupid confusion between consumption and happiness that allows the pockets of power to fill with money. The culprit of drug addiction is not the jungle, it is the irrationality of your world power. Try to give some reason to your power. Turn on the lights of the century again. The war on drugs has lasted 40 years, if we do not correct the course and it continues for another 40 years, the United States will see 2,800,000 young people die of overdose from fentanyl, which is not produced in Latin America. It will see millions of Afro-Americans imprisoned in its private jails.
The Afro-prisoner will become a business of prison companies, a million more Latin Americans will die murdered, our waters and our green fields will be filled with blood, and the dream of democracy will die in my America as well as in Anglo-Saxon America. Democracy will die where it was born, in the great western European Athens. By hiding the truth, they will see the jungle and democracies die. The war on drugs has failed.
The fight against the climate crisis has failed. There has been an increase in deadly consumption, from soft drugs to harder ones, genocide has taken place in my continent, and in my country, millions of people have been condemned to prison, and to hide their own social guilt they have blamed the rainforest and its plants. They have filled speeches and policies with nonsense. I demand from here, from my wounded Latin America, to put an end to the irrational war on drugs. To reduce drug consumption we do not need wars, for this, we need all of us to build a better society: a more caring society, more affectionate, where the intensity of life saves us from addictions and new slavery. Do you want less drugs? Think of less profit and more love. Think about a rational exercise of power.
Do not touch with your poisons the beauty of my homeland, help us without hypocrisy to save the Amazon Rainforest to save the life of humanity on the planet. You gathered the scientists, and they spoke with reason. With mathematics and climatological models, they said that the end of the human species was near, that its time is no longer of millennia, not even of centuries. Science set the alarm bells ringing and we stopped listening to it.
The war served as an excuse for not taking the necessary measures. When action was most needed, when speeches were no longer useful, when it was indispensable to deposit money in funds to save humanity, when it was necessary to move away from coal and oil as soon as possible, they invented war after war after war. They invaded Ukraine, but also Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
They invaded in the name of oil and gas. They discovered in the 21st century the worst of their addictions: addiction to money and oil. Wars have served as an excuse not to act against the climate crisis. Wars have shown them how dependent they are on what will kill the human species.
If you observe that the peoples are filling up with hunger and thirst and migrating by the millions towards the north, towards where the water is; then you enclose them, build walls, deploy machine guns, shoot at them. You expel them as if they were not human beings, you reproduce five times the mentality of those who politically created the gas chambers and the concentration camps, you reproduce on a planetary scale 1933.
The great triumph of the attack on reason. Do you not see that the solution to the great exodus unleashed on your countries is to return to water filling the rivers and the fields full of nutrients? The climate disaster fills us with viruses that swarm over us, but you do business with medicines and turn vaccines into commodities. You propose that the market will save us from what the market itself has created. The Frankenstein of humanity lies in letting the market and greed act without planning, surrendering the brain and reason. Kneeling human rationality to greed.
What is the use of war if what we need is to save the human species? What is the use of NATO and empires, if what is coming is the end of intelligence? The climate disaster will kill hundreds of millions of people and listen well, it is not produced by the planet, it is produced by capital.
The cause of the climate disaster is capital. The logic of coming together only to consume more and more, produce more and more, and for some to earn more and more produces the climate disaster. They applied the logic of extended accumulation to the energy engines of coal and oil and unleashed the hurricane: the ever deeper and deadlier chemical change of the atmosphere. Now in a parallel world, the expanded accumulation of capital is an expanded accumulation of death.
From the lands of jungle and beauty. There where they decided to make an Amazon rainforest plant an enemy, extradite and imprison its growers, I invite you to stop the war and to stop the climate disaster. Here, in this Amazon Rainforest, there is a failure of humanity.
Behind the bonfires that burn it, behind its poisoning, there is an integral, civilizational failure of humanity. Behind the addiction to cocaine and drugs, behind the addiction to oil and coal, there is the real addiction of this phase of human history: the addiction to irrational power, profit, and money. This is the enormous deadly machinery that can extinguish humanity.
I propose to you as president of one of the most beautiful countries on earth, and one of the most bloodied and violated, to end the war on drugs and allow our people to live in peace. I call on all of Latin America for this purpose. I summon the voice of Latin America to unite to defeat the irrational that martyrs our bodies. I call upon you to save the Amazon Rainforest integrally with the resources that can be allocated worldwide to life.
If you do not have the capacity to finance the fund for the revitalization of the forests, if it weighs more to allocate money to weapons than to life, then reduce the foreign debt to free our own budgetary spaces and with them, carry out the task of saving humanity and life on the planet. We can do it if you don’t want to. Just exchange debt for life, for nature. I propose, and I call upon Latin America to do so, to dialogue in order to end the war. Do not pressure us to align ourselves in the fields of war.
It is time for PEACE.
Let the Slavic peoples talk to each other, let the peoples of the world talk to each other. War is only a trap that brings the end of time closer in the great orgy of irrationality.
From Latin America, we call on Ukraine and Russia to make peace. Only in peace can we save life in this land of ours. There is no total peace without social, economic, and environmental justice. We are also at war with the planet. Without peace with the planet, there will be no peace among nations. Without social justice, there is no social peace.
*
Featured image: Gustavo Petro addressed the UN General Assembly on September 20, 2022. Photo: UN
Amid the mind-numbing eulogies to Queen Elizabeth II, it is frequently asserted that she was “one of us” and “everyone’s grandmother”.
The Queen during her 2015 visit to HMS Ocean in Devonport at a ceremony to rededicate the ship [Photo by Joel Rouse/ Ministry of Defence/Open Government Licence v3.0]
Commentator Andrew Marr, a pillar of the media establishment, wrote a fawning comment in the Times, headlined, “Queen Elizabeth II: the majestic enigma who was one of us”. He went as far as to declare, “During the rawest, roughest years of the Thatcherite experiment, the Queen even seemed dryly oppositionist.”
This claim has been made throughout the media and parroted in ruling circles everywhere. Nothing was ever further from the truth. The queen heads a family of billionaires and lived a life of fabulous and unearned wealth and privilege. She ended her reign at Balmoral Castle, her £140 million private residence, as over 14 million of her “subjects”, including over 4 million children, live in poverty.
As well as Balmoral, the Sandringham House estate, valued at £600 million, was also privately owned by the queen.
Aerial photo of Sandringham House, Norfolk [Photo by John Fielding / CC BY 4.0]
Everything she and her family and relatives possesses is thanks to centuries of pillage and plunder by her forebears. Moreover, most of this staggering wealth is assiduously protected from taxation by the state.
The fortune of the monarch is shrouded in secrecy, but it runs into the many billions of pounds.
According to the Sunday Times Rich List, the queen was personally worth around £370 million. But this was only identifiable wealth. The Paradise Papers, leaked in 2017, show that among the queen’s hidden dealings, via the Duchy of Lancaster estate she owned, was the parking of millions of pounds in a Cayman Islands fund. Part of that fund went to a retailer, BrightHouse, cited for exploiting poor UK families through its hire-to-own scheme.
The queen’s will must now remain under lock and key for 90 years, stemming from a protocol established in 1910. As Reuters noted the monarch’s “will is one of more than 30 kept in a safe in an undisclosed location in London, under the care of a judge. By convention, after a senior royal dies, the executor of their will applies to the head of the London High Court’s Family Division for the will to be sealed. Successive judges in that position have always agreed.”
Sealing the will of the queen’s husband Prince Philip in 2021, the judge declared, “The degree of publicity that publication would be likely to attract would be very extensive and wholly contrary to the aim of maintaining the dignity of the Sovereign.”
Due to a deal between Downing Street and Buckingham Palace in 1993, a vast amount of untaxed wealth cascaded down to Charles III and his successor, Prince William, upon the queen’s death.
Charles inherited from the queen the Duchy of Lancaster estate, established in 1351, which reported net assets of £651 million in the 2021-22 financial year and £24 million in profits.
The income of the Duchy of Cornwall estate, established in 1337 by King Edward III for his heir, was inherited by then Prince Charles upon his 21st birthday. In the 50 years since, Charles piled up staggering wealth through the Duchy now passed to Prince William inheritance tax-free. In the 2021-22 financial year its net assets were valued at £1 billion, with £25 million in profits going into Charles’s pocket.
These revenue sources are dwarfed by the major entity funding the royals, the Crown Estate. Established in 1760, its net assets were valued at £17 billion in 2021/22, with profits of £313 million.
It would take volumes to fully document the resources contained in these estates. The Duchy of Lancaster owns more than 18,000 hectares of land in England and Wales, including farms, homes, and commercial properties. This includes 70 square miles of farmland, 10 castles, a private airfield, and two acres of prime London real estate, including the land beneath the Savoy Hotel.
The Duchy of Cornwall, notes the Financial Times, “owns almost 130,000 acres of land, including the Isles of Scilly, large parts of Dartmoor and 260 farms, and holds £92mn of financial investments. But the bulk of its income comes from its commercial property portfolio, investing in assets such as offices and retail parks.” It adds, “The Duchy owns some of Charles’s residences, such as Highgrove House in Gloucestershire and Llwynywermod, the Carmarthenshire former home of a relative of [queen] Anne Boleyn bought for a reported £1.2mn in 2006.” None of the profits of the dutchy are liable for corporation or capital gains tax.
The main value of the Crown Estate’s assets is contained in a vast property portfolio. Included is a large part of central London comprising some 10 million square feet of land. This includes two entire main thoroughfares, Regents Street and St James Street, and Kensington Palace Gardens.
The rural holdings of the Crown Estate contain around 287,000 acres of agricultural land and forests. Huge mineral wealth is available to them with rights to extract them from 285,500 acres. As of 2018, the estate was extracting sand, gravel, limestone, granite, brick clay, slate, and dimension stone from 34 locations.
The Crown Estate owns virtually all the UK’s seabed up to the 12-nautical-mile (22 km) limit, with the Guardian noting this is “an asset that has become increasingly lucrative since the North Sea oil boom and, more recently, auctions of plots for offshore wind farms.”
An article published in the trade website Fish Farmer this month noted, “As well as a number of rural rents and salmon fishing rights on land, Crown Estate Scotland is responsible for the leasing of virtually all seabed out to 12 nautical miles, covering some 750 fish farming sites and agreements with cables & pipeline operators, and the rights to offshore renewable energy and gas and carbon dioxide storage out to 200 nautical miles from the shore.”
The view of the eastern façade of Buckingham Palace and the Victoria Memorial, seen from the gardens. [Photo by DAVID ILIFF / CC BY-SA 4.0]
Most of the royal palaces are owned by the Crown Estate, including Buckingham Palace (775 rooms) and Windsor Castle (over 1,000 rooms and 300 grand fireplaces), and Charles’s official four-storey London residence, Clarence House. His main country retreat, Highgrove (four reception rooms, nine main bedrooms), is owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, now belonging to Prince William.
The Royal Collection, containing over a million objects, including 7,000 paintings, 500,000 prints, and 30,000 drawings from most of art’s masters, is the largest private art collection in the world and is owned by the reigning monarch in the right of the Crown. Parts of it were privately owned by the queen. The Royal Philatelic Collection of stamps alone is valued at £100 million. Including the Crown Jewels, the Royal Collection is valued at an estimated £10 billion.
St Edward’s Crown, the centrepiece of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom [Photo by Firebrace / CC BY-SA 4.0]
Ensuring that the wealth of the royal family remains largely hidden and untouched has been a major pre-occupation of successive governments. In 1993, following a fire a Windsor Castle, and with the monarchy mired in numerous scandals, the question of who would foot the massive bill for the fire damage achieved national prominence.
John Major’s Conservative government came to an arrangement with the queen that for the first time she would voluntarily pay income tax on the Dutchy of Lancaster revenues not used for official purposes. However, the monarch is still not legally obliged to pay any income tax, capital gains tax, or inheritance tax. Major told Parliament, “In the unique circumstances of a hereditary monarchy, special arrangements are needed for inheritance tax.” This was a far more lucrative outcome for the monarchy, dwarfing anything they would go on to pay in income tax.
The 1993 deal allowed that any inheritance passed from “sovereign to sovereign” would avoid the standard 40 percent levy applied to assets valued at more than £325,000. It also ensures that the inheritance of a consort of a former sovereign to a sovereign avoid tax. Within 10 years it ensured that the queen’s mother could pass to the queen an untaxed £70 million.
Since 1760, when George III surrendered control of the Estate’s revenues to the Treasury, the monarch was paid a generous annual grant running into millions, known as the Civil List. This arrangement was altered in 2012, with the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition agreeing with the queen the Civil List’s replacement by a “Sovereign Grant”. This is calculated as a percentage of the income of the Crown Estate, making the maximisation of such revenues of direct financial interest to the monarch. According to the formula, the amount paid out to the monarchy via the grant can never be reduced from the previous year.
The percentage paid back to the monarch as the Sovereign Grant was initially set at 15 percent. In 2016, this was increased for a 10-year period in order to pay for the £369 million refurbishment of Buckingham Palace. Just in the last decade around £600 million has been handed over to the monarchy via the grant, including last year’s £86.3 million.
The short of the following tweets (I will embed them as they will be taken down) is that the COVID gene injections were always fraudulent, dangerous, harmful & ineffective; jail them all, Fauci, Bourla, etc.
Methinks that we need an international court of medical and pharmacological damages along with an appropriate detention center where all the doctors and Big Pharma executives could have time to think about the damages they have caused. Lou
Substack Alexander COVID News evidence-based medicine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Original tweet:
CATASTROPHIC Israeli cover-up of COVID vaccine harms: Yaffa Shir-Raz, health researcher in Israel, blows the whistle and releases twitter (10 posts) of what she uncovered & what Israel is hiding https://t.co/S8x2oTEZhG
Write to your MP. This is ridiculous. Why are we paying for his groceries?
Justin Trudeau is spending $12,000 a month on groceries and sending the bill to taxpayers. Canadians need to know about this. pic.twitter.com/DrwXHx5m9E
An estimated 500 million people have fallen into poverty during the Covid pandemic, but the wealth of the world’s 2,668 billionaires has risen by $3.78 trillion since 2020. This is the biggest wealth transfer in the history of the planet.
French member of the European Parliament for Rassemblement National (National Rally), Virginie Joron, railed against the waste and corruption surrounding Covid vaccine orders.
Billions of Covid “vaccine” doses were bought and paid for by the European Union. A large proportion of them will have to be destroyed because they will remain unused after their expiration date. Meanwhile, the taxpayer’s money has not only gone to waste but helped Pharmaceutical Giants like Pfizer grow wealthier.
MEP Jordan demands an audit and complete investigation into the wasteful and potentially corrupt purchases of Covid “vaccine” doses.
Video Transcript
I have one minute to talk about billions of euros being thrown out of the windows in Brussels, so every second is very expensive. In this place, everyone is congratulating themselves on the good management of the commission and its agencies.
The European Medicines Agency has a budget of €3,170 million.
84% of that revenue comes from Big Pharma. Should we congratulate them, too?
The commission was given the responsibility to purchase vaccines, and has reserved, via text message, four billion doses of Covid vaccine. Today there are still two billion doses waiting to be injected.
How many of these are already past their expiration date? Most of these doses are made by Pfizer.
This is a waste of at least 240 million doses. This same waste is responsible for 77% of the increase in Pfizer’s sales.
Stocks are exploding. Twelve billion were manufactured in 2021 and double that number are expected in 2022.
Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland have been warning about this forced over-ordering and want to suspend their orders from the commission.
When will the mismanagement that burdens European taxpayers come to an end?
When will there be an audit of the commission’s vaccine orders? And when will there be an investigation concerning conflict of interest?
With Virginie Joron, Defending France and the French in the European Parliament.
The poet Langston Hughes once wrote, “I wish the rent was heaven sent.” With 10 million Americans filing for unemployment benefits in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Hughes’ words resonate now more than ever. As we hurtle toward a public health and economic catastrophe, we must reckon with the sobering fact that our federal government is helmed by landlords, real estate developers, and financiers whose fortunes have been made – and whose worldview has been shaped – by years of predatory and extractive business practices. These practices prefigured the federal response to the pandemic and overdetermine the nature of the state-led economic rescue that is already underway.
Jared Kushner is widely regarded as the Trump administration’s behind-the-scenes point person on the coronavirus. Kushner, like Trump, inherited his family’s real estate holdings, updating the business model and expanding its geographical footprint. A New York Times expose from 2017 sheds light on the day-to-day workings of Kushner’s properties in the Baltimore area, where tenants live amidst chronically poor conditions and are subjected to a relentless pattern of petty and meritless litigation. In New York City, Kushner’s residential real estate portfolio has benefited from generous tax incentives and exploited loopholes in the state’s rent laws to remove units from regulation, in the process converting affordable apartments to luxury goods.
The extraction of value that is at the core of Kushner’s business model is based on the multiplication of rents-debts and the intensification of inequalities.
The business practices of Kushner – like those of the real estate industry more broadly – are emblematic of the shifting relationship between the state and the market economy over the past four decades. Beginning in the 1970s, after years of intellectual mobilization by right-leaning economists, neoliberal policies began to take hold in the US and Western Europe. The redistributive functions of the state, established during the New Deal and expanded during the Great Society, were whittled down to a nub, resulting in a tattered safety net and exploding inequalities. At roughly the same time, capital began to move more freely across borders, and once-vibrant economic centers saw massive losses of stable, relatively high paying industrial jobs.
During this period, the power of finance capital grew and real estate became a motor of economic growth. In fact, global real estate now comprises the majority of the world’s assets. The economic centrality of real estate is inextricably linked with financialization, which refers to the expansion of financial services and technologies, and denotes the process through which financial markets have been unleashed, empowering creditors and expanding private debt. Across the country, private equity landlords have bought up swaths of residential properties, preying on tenants of meager means, in the name of short-term value maximization. Though the spread of financialized real estate seems bland and technocratic on the surface, its effects – rent hikes, harassment, evictions – are dislocating and violent. In the words of economic geographer Desiree Fields, the end result is the plundering of “the spaces of existence of the working poor.”
For decades, the bipartisan commonsense has been that government should be run according to market principles. The current administration takes this logic a step further, governing the country like the financialized landlord of a recently purchased ‘distressed asset’: seeking immediate, short-term gain wherever possible – via massive tax cuts and the gutting of already-depleted social programs; nickel and diming workers and poor people; exploiting racist and xenophobic tropes to erode solidarities; seizing on – and expanding – regulatory loopholes; allowing vital public infrastructure to decay, particularly in poor and Black and Brown communities; and casting itself as the insurgent populist that is cutting through entrenched and inefficient bureaucracy.
As it turns out, this mode of governance is particularly ill-suited to deal with the type of crisis we currently face. Despite having a clear window into the near-term trajectory of the coronavirus (see Italy) and a blueprint for how to contain it with relative success (see South Korea), the Trump administration – reportedly under the guidance of Kushner – initially viewed it as a hoax. Then, like a slumlord confronted with well-founded complaints about serious structural conditions, the administration failed to take action. Little to no testing was done initially, leaving the scientific and medical communities at an information deficit regarding the pace and scale of the virus’ advance. This problem was exacerbated by the interplay between our profit-driven healthcare system and our under-resourced medical and public health infrastructure.
In late February, the precipitous decline of the stock market and the inevitability of the virus’ spread left the administration with no choice but to act. The federal response – uneven and incoherent as it has been – can be viewed as a reflection of the worldview of financialized real estate. President Trump’s first instinct, apart from repeatedly referring to the coronavirus as “the Chinese virus,” was to slash the federal payroll tax – this would have given workers in much of the formal economy a small infusion of cash; it also would have starved social security of funding. The $2 trillion bailout passed by Congress and signed into law by Trump is a boon to large corporations and Wall Street. The idea – held by some progressives – that Trump would outflank the Democrats from the left was belied by the paltry benefits offered to workers: a modest one-time check for $1200, extended unemployment benefits, and no relief for renters.
During a stay in New York City in the midst of the Great Depression, the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, shaken by the inequality and alienation of his host society, wrote, “[t]he terrible, cold, cruel part … is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it.” In recent years, these rivers have coursed with lucre from the real estate industry, whose representatives wield state power in much the same way that they made their fortunes – through predation, extraction, grift, racism. As a global pandemic bears down on us all, disproportionately impacting the most vulnerable, the bankruptcy of that project is on full display. And death comes with it.
(Natural News) As millions of ordinary Americans struggle to put food on the table now that the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) has taken away their jobs, billionaires like real estate investor Tom Barrack actually have the audacity to whine on cable television about how they personally need taxpayer-funded bailouts to avoid long-overdue corrections on their greedy overleveraging.
Barrack recently warned about – or threatened, depending on how you look at it – catastrophic economic consequences if the Federal Reserve doesn’t pump even more taxpayer cash into the commercial real estate market, which of course is his cash cow.
Predicting a “domino effect” that will lead to total collapse, Barrack told Bloomberg Television, and also wrote in a white paper, that if the fat cats like himself don’t get what they’re demanding, then society will see “a chain reaction of margin calls, mass foreclosures, evictions and, potentially, bank failures,” to quote Yahoo! Finance.
“To keep people employed, you have to support the employers,” Barrack stated during a recent television interview, using the excuse of suffering employees to manipulate viewers into supporting bailouts for him and his fellow property vultures.
“The biggest part of employer expense is rent,” he added. “When commerce stops and they can’t pay rent and they can’t pay interest on the debt, and then the banks and the intermediaries can’t pay their investors, it all collapses.”
Economic collapse from Wuhan coronavirus could be worse than Great Depression
Paralleling the current situation with what transpired during the Great Depression for added effect, Barrack went on to talk of doom and gloom before praising the Fed for its recent injection of trillions of fake fiat dollars into the stock markets. According to Barrack, the Fed “is doing exactly what they need to do” by inflating the monopoly money supply in this way.
But this isn’t enough, Barrack contends. The Fed needs to inject even more, to the tune of $500 billion, in order to halt the “liquidity crisis” in the market for commercial mortgage-backed securities.
“What everybody needs is just a time out,” he claims. “Give them 60 or 90 days, let it all come back together, tack on that accrued interest to the end, and you solve the problem.”
Recognizing that taxpayers will certainly be upset about yet another socialistic bailout of big banks and real estate vultures, Barrack suggests coming up with a new way of framing it all so that perceptions of “crony capitalism,” which is exactly what this is, won’t be as easily recognized by the masses.
Keep in mind that Barrack is a personal friend of President Donald Trump, and has much at stake if he doesn’t get the bailout money he’s trying to squeeze out of the Fed. The last-year financial report for Barrack’s firm lists $3.54 billion of assets in hospitality real estate, as well as $725 million of debt and equity investments.
“So, in a nutshell, commercial real estate is grossly overvalued, asking rents are way too high, and tenant businesses can barely afford the rent when times are good,” wrote one Yahoo! Finance commenter.
“So, the solution to this problem, naturally, is to request a government bailout, rather than allow the market to deflate to a reasonable valuation, and the investors who bid prices up too high to suffer well-deserved losses.”
“Does the white paper suggest beginning by freezing all executive bonuses and salary increases, and halting golden parachutes?” asked another.
“Or is [Barrack’s] paper focused solely on how to create sufficient panic and fear to fool Americans into bailing out Wall St. again, just a few years after the last fiasco resulting from excessive subprime mortgage issuance, lack of capitalization and dangerous leverage?”
To keep up with the latest news about the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19), be sure to check out Pandemic.news.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Tales from the Conspiratum 
