An article on a site I use for news stories intended for ESL purposes stated that Nespresso is announcing ambitious new plans to make their espresso coffee machine company more sustainable. The name of the new plan is “The Positive Cup.” And it will “help” some of the world’s poorest coffee farmers in Ethiopia, Kenya and South Sudan. Hollywood actor George Clooney said that the 16 million dollars invested in the three countries will help farmers living in coffee communities.

Well then there’s really no more to this story, is there? Hollywood actor George Clooney supports it so it’s fine and dandy.

Let’s look a little deeper, shall we? This is a lesson I intend to teach, not from a “hooray for Nespresso” platform but as more of a “question everything” lesson. You see the “Nes” in Nespresso is because it is a company owned by Nestle. I recalled having watched a vomitus piece of putrid corporate politics from Nestle recently so I looked it up on Youtube and relived the horror. It’s a speech by their former CEO and current chairman, Peter Brabeck, in which he talks about Nestle’s great new corporate campaign to buy and sell the water of the world with Austrian finesse and debonair charm reminiscent of his countryman Adolf Hitler. If you investigate the details behind it, the message of subjugation and domination by the elite, who Brabeck says have never in history been so rich, is not far removed. I certainly cannot relate to the Austrian ivory tower from whence he speaks because the class to which I belong has definitely had more money. Do they have Austrian ivory? No elephants there I don’t think. Hmmm… Anyways, after WWII regular people were building cars for GM at a wage that equates to 50 bucks an hour nowadays. People had stuff and it was paid for! Seems like a distant memory don’t it?

The truth is there is a water war going on in this world and the only thing comparable to its dire importance is the incredible lengths the combatants in this war have gone to hide it. Very much like the GMO thing, and if you delve into the seedy underbellies of both, you will inevitably find that they are connected. In reality inseparable. GMO's need still water to grow. Until they mutate away that characteristic I guess. The hefty Aylmer’s glue that bonds them together is that ever-present entity that is at the heart of everything wrong with this world: corporate greed.

I could have said, “national greed,” since there are countries represented in this war but since countries are now corporations I felt the distinction redundant. Countries like France to give just one example, where water conglomerates Veolia and Suez hail from. What have these two evil entities been up to that the world knows absolutely nothing about? They hooked up with the World Bank and under the auspices of apparent debt relief they have offered places that needed financial help like Buenos Aires, Puerto Rico, Santiago and probably others this deal: privatise water and we give you aid. What you get is a situation like all over Africa where water is reserved for corporations who can buy it, then sold to the people who can’t afford it. Water is more expensive than Coke in Kenya, for example. And, the water I’m talking about is the only water available, Dasani, which is in plastic bottles and bottled by Coca Cola. A spokesman for Coke, Harry Ott, lied his ass off in the documentary, “Blue Gold” saying that the plastic bottles were more expensive and taxed more but in the background the prices of a litre of Dasani, 70, and a litre of Coke, 40, BOTH in plastic bottles, were shown.

Speaking of Kenya, there is another great example of the water war there. Roses are farmed around Lake Naivasha, using its water for irrigation of the rose crops, then they are sold in Europe. The World Bank has the balls to take credit for debt relief and proudly label these roses “fair trade” flowers even though there are locals dying of thirst around the lake that belongs to them but has somehow been BOUGHT by a company that they didn’t sell it to. Activist Joan Thorpe Root was assassinated for her attempts to save Lake Naivasha in case you think this is a bloodless war.

And while watching this informative documentary, hey, what do you know, there was a section on tea and coffee farmers in poor countries who are being “helped” by the World Bank. What is really happening is the farmers are growing the crop for practically nothing and the corporations are helping themselves to hefty profits that are not shared. “For every dollar of aid, corporations get $1.30.” Lawrence Summers – World Bank.

And back to Nestle, the largest foodstuffs corporation in the world, the 27th largest company in the world, what do you need to make coffee besides slaves in impoverished countries growing your coffee practically for free? You need water. Water that is a natural human necessity should be an inalienable right, but when despotic oligarchs like Brabeck see dollar signs, they get pretty creative with their bullshit. There’s the “heartfelt” message he delivers about some apparent misconceptions people have somehow gotten about his ideas about water in which he starts by saying he supports everyone’s fundamental right to water. But not for washing cars, filling pools or presumably watering lawns, (like the twenty acre, well maintained and watered lawn you see behind him).

If you watch the original, where people obviously got the idea that he does not support everyone’s fundamental right to water… BECAUSE HE SAYS HE DOESN’T,

you will see why I call this guy a monster. He calls the idea extreme. But what he means is it extremely limits his profitability. He explains his brain damage a bit later saying that any CEO has to concentrate on making profits. This, we should really use as a virtual finger crossing so that all the shiny toothed, mealy mouthing about creating jobs and helping solve the problems of the world he launches into afterwards can be seen as the absolute garbage it is and can be given its proper credence. Nestle wants to buy the Great Lakes for crying out loud! I may just be a bit extreme but I bet this genital wart in a suit wants to drain them, turn the surrounding provinces and states into deserts and walk amongst the withering inhabitants like a devil of a man spreading the burning sand with cool, clear, Nestle’s bottled water, (only 20 bucks a litre), like some guy from a Marty Robbins song.

But in case that doesn’t convince you, and here we are with the indelible linkage between GMO’s and water, he says that after 15 years of eating genetically modified foods there has not been one case of illness. Yet the same extreme people who are bellyaching about having to pay for the water that Nestle rightfully stole, are whinging on about wanting companies to stop infusing our food with genes that make the stomachs of insects who eat them explode. It’s just extreme to think something like that could ever harm a human being. Especially when it makes Nestle, (and ME), so much money.

Well, I’m paraphrasing. Folks, would you rather listen to this corporate trough hog or I dunno, perhaps a scientist who has studied this sort of thing? Like Pushpa M. Bharyava, a renowned biologist who after reviewing over 600 scientific journals on the subject, concluded that GMO’s are a MAJOR contributor to sharply deteriorating health. Since their large scale introduction into the food supply of America in 1996, people with more than 3 chronic diseases almost doubled from 7% to 13%. That must be a coincidence, right?

Do you suppose there has been not one case, not one study that showed illness due to GM foods because the studies just aren’t being done? Maybe this might have something to do with the colossally idiotic reality that Monsanto and other biotech companies are the ones in charge of determining the safety of the foods they produce?

The fact is there have been long term studies done only on animals and GMO’s do horrendous things to animals. But that’s no reason to assume they would affect humans in similar ways! Come on! Stop being extreme. Infertility, immune problems, insulin regulation problems, changes in organs, accelerated aging, and one I feel strongly I got from GMO foods, gastrointestinal system troubles. There has been a HUGE increase in gastrointestinal problems in North America in the last decade and I suspected GMO’s long before I read anything about it.

But this is nothing really solid is it? Geez I wonder why. And if you make up some genetically engineered drug like L-Tryptophan or something like that and say it’s responsible for 100 deaths thousands of sicknesses and permanent disabilities due to a deadly, fast acting blood disease it promoted that took over 4 years to identify, well the best scientists or doctors money can buy will tell you that’s just conspiracy theory. So I won’t say any of that.

But I don’t think eating natural, non-GM foods is a “shibboleth” or an old-fashioned, outdated idea as Mr. Nestle tells us. I think it makes good sense to avoid GMO’s when you can.

Even the comment about the 35-hour workweek not working is something that should be questioned. I love working fewer than 40 hours! It works absolutely fine for me. And in France where they ran the experiment, there are laws that make it tough to lay off employees during slow times. So when they tried the 35-hour workweek there, more jobs were not created. Instead the work quotas were increased to make up for the 5 hours that were lost. So in reality the experiment was never conducted properly, making Brabeck’s comment that it was a failure just another of his obscenely skewed corporate ideas.

So let’s not break out the ticker tape and noisemakers for the Nespresso parade just yet. I have a funny feeling there might be some shady corporate profiteering going on behind the scenes of this new espresso machine venture that is too complex for even George Clooney to recognize.