Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, Ben, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Hey guys, on the line, I've got the great Grant F. Smith.
He runs the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P, IRMEP.
And essentially, he studies and researches and publishes books about the Israel lobby and its role in American politics, legal and illegal, and always extremely interesting.
He writes regularly for Antiwar.com as well.
Welcome back to the show.
Oh, and his last book is Big Israel.
Get it?
Like Big Tobacco, Big Pharma.
Big Israel, the Israel lobby in Washington, D.C.
Welcome back to the show, Grant.
How are you, sir?
Hey, I'm doing pretty well, Scott.
Thanks for having me on again.
Very happy to have you here.
And now listen, this is kind of an interesting thing that you wrote.
It's at WRMEA, W-R-M-E-A, that's the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, WRMEA.
And that's a really great magazine going back a great many years here.
And you have this piece, something's fishy about Aquamouth's Project Jonah in Virginia.
Tell me I pronounced Aquamouth wrong.
What is that?
That is an Israeli fish farm technology company with installations mostly in places like Poland.
I believe they have one in Russia and in Israel that brings tilapia to your plate.
And that's a big business in the United States and all over the world.
It's one of the most efficient ways to grow protein in an ecologically friendly, low environmental impact way.
So it's a hot technology.
And yeah, so I wrote that piece for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs as kind of a follow up to an article I did for you guys over at Antiwar.com on July 31st of 2018, which was called Meet Viab.
And it was about the Virginia-Israel Advisory Board.
And we talked about that at the time, right, about textbooks and stuff like that, right?
Right.
So they're backed by local Israel lobby outfits that are trying to get Israel lobby, well, propaganda basically, into the local school system textbooks.
Viab itself has been fighting to get anti-BDS legislation passed by the Virginia state government.
And what they're trying full on to do right now is get a big piece of the action in the Obama administration's MOU.
It has Buy American restrictions on the $3.8 billion, $38 billion 10-year aid to Israel.
And they're trying to set up Virginia companies, basically subsidiaries of Israeli companies, so that they can get a piece of that action as the foreign aid budget parameters change.
So this Viab, Virginia-Israel Advisory Board down in Virginia, it's like AIPAC, except it works on the Senate and the House of Delegates down there in Richmond, Virginia.
Well, and I guess if they have the power to influence the way textbooks are written and the way different public policies are handled in the state of Virginia, then hey, why not put a fish farm on the dole as long as we can get away with it, huh?
Well, it's bigger than the fish farm.
As I mentioned in the article, it's really got a pipeline that's almost a billion dollars in 13 projects.
I basically did a story about the fish farm because it was the most detailed information.
Basically, Viab operates in secrecy.
They will not say much about their projects.
In their meeting minutes, they say, OK, we're going to close session so that we don't have anything spill out through the Freedom of Information Act.
They codename everything, and they say specifically, quote, leaked information could jeopardize funding from the state, unquote.
So they're highly sensitive to any public scrutiny of what they're doing.
But their $640 million pipeline, as far as I can tell, is going to be mainly focused on military contracts.
Because I could get information on Project Jonah, which has been around since 2013, it provides kind of a good profile for how much state funding they want to get, how much self-dealing they're up to, what sort of haircuts they're asking from Virginia entities that have huge amounts of money from, well, one is the tobacco settlement.
When all the companies like Altria, Philip Morris, et cetera, got sued, they wound up paying billions of dollars to states, and then the states are now administering those funds to various projects.
They're getting tobacco commission money, and they're also getting coal-fueled recovery commission money, which is kind of a way to convert parts of the eastern part of the state into economically viable regions once again with money from that industry.
They're quietly snarfing up funds so that they can back, again, exclusively Israeli companies with big investments in Virginia.
That's so funny.
It sounds like something that isn't quite right, but then again, I guess it isn't.
Well, in this case, I just want to mention the key part of the story, kind of the culminating part of it is it's not as though there aren't fish farms in Virginia already.
In fact, Virginia has the largest fish farm in the United States called Blue Ridge Aquaculture.
It's at exactly the same latitude as the codename Project Jonah operation, and they've been around forever overcoming with local solutions how to grow tilapia and ship it to market.
So what I mentioned in the article is basically you have an entity, in this case Viab, which is targeting domestic Virginia operations for replacement, basically on the back of taxpayers who, for the most part, they don't even know anything about this stuff.
There's no local reporting.
There's no investigative reporting.
Anything you see on Project Jonah or other Viab projects is basically warmed over PR.
At press releases, it's been re-emitted from the local press.
I think it's fair to say that a lot of the people who appear on your show kind of believe the old adage that everything that a patron desires to get published is advertising, and whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news.
I mean that's Ellie Edwardson from the Chicago Herald and Examiner.
That's how it is down in Virginia.
I mean it's been since 2013.
No one ever dropped the name Aquamoff, even though it takes about 13 seconds of digging to figure out that they're the ones who are behind it all.
And of course, importantly, you mentioned taxpayers.
That includes the people who own and work at the competition are being forced to pay to be bankrupted.
And then, just as could be expected, as you document thoroughly in this article, the Israeli company here, they're not profitable in a market sense.
The other guys who are getting along without subsidies, they figured out how to make it work in the market.
These guys are given subsidies and then, as you put it in here, they continue to fall short of all of their targets that the law said they got to be doing at least this good or have invested this much money or gotten this much accomplished before they get the next set of dollars to come in.
And they keep failing to make the grade.
And so instead they just use politics to remove the report card altogether.
Right.
It's a pretty sad and pretty anti-market approach to get into Virginia.
And, you know, it's really reliant on backroom deals.
I mentioned the offtake agreement.
They pretty much got to get a supermarket chain that's just south of them to agree to buy all their product.
But in my estimation, they're also going to have to take all of Blue Ridge Aquaculture's market as well.
And they're in the unique market of shipping live tilapia to Asian and Hispanic markets on the East Coast.
So they're going to have to get that as well.
And I just think that it's kind of disingenuous because they keep changing their value proposition.
The latest sort of puff piece in the news said, oh, they're probably going to go into salmon.
Well, you know, who knows?
But they haven't done anything yet except soak up state funding and make big promises.
And I think the big problem is, besides the anti-market nature of all of this and the secrecy, is that a great deal of this is really being embedded by VIAB into state government.
The current director who's working out of the Pocahontas building down by the Richmond Capitol, which is just a block from the Tobacco Commission, which has doled out over a billion dollars in grants and quite a bit of money to VIAB, basically says, look, I was working in the, get this, Scott, Texas, Israel Chamber of Commerce, and I could never get anyone to pay attention to me.
But now as a fellow government agency, they have to sit down with me and they do.
The legislators, the Tobacco Commission, you know, the Virginia Economic Development Commission.
And so by being a state commission, an advisory board underneath the legislature, they have a lot of power.
And the reason that I'm following this, the reason that others are beginning to follow it, is this is the model.
The Israel lobby as part of state government with a tightly controlled admissions process for being on the board is going to be the future if other states look at VIAB and say, yeah, this is a great way to separate, you know, the legislature from the will of the people, kind of like AIPAC has done.
I mean, you know, you see all these polls that we're doing, Scott, where it says, yeah, most people don't want to put more money into war in the Middle East.
Most people don't want to subsidize Israel.
But guess what?
None of that sentiment is ever polled for one by Gallup and others.
And number two, it doesn't have any impact on legislation.
This is kind of a step toward putting an AIPAC in every state capital.
Oh, man.
And plus money.
I mean, hey, you know, Israel, they got their role in it and all.
But this just means kickbacks for everybody up and down the line.
What a great way to politicize business.
And then anyone who's against it is an anti-Semite.
I can see that coming from a hundred miles away.
Do you see that on the horizon?
Well, one thing about Virginia is it's been an open election campaign contribution market forever.
I mean, in the governor's races, whether it was McAuliffe or Northam, anyone, corporation, individual resident in the state or not, could donate unlimited amounts to the election.
And you see that with major, major contributions.
I mean, Haim Saban and J.B. Pritzker, who are both big Israel promoters, dumped one point four million dollars to McAuliffe's race.
And all sorts of companies are gigantic campaign contribution makers in Virginia.
And it's a weekly thing.
I mean, they're writing checks every week.
And so there's no restriction on, for example, I'd like to mention Sabra Dipping Company just south of Richmond.
They can write an unlimited check if they want.
And they are a subsidiary of a group in Israel in a joint venture with PepsiCo.
They could they could write a check for a million dollars if they want to move something in Virginia.
There's no limit to the amount of campaign contributions.
So it's a very interesting thing.
And in the article, I really use Sabra as the model.
In this case, there was a big battle.
It was such a big battle that it was reported in that market following business analytics journal called The Onion, which did a humorous article about it in which they said, you know, Sabra and Cedar death battle.
And this was way back, you know, 10 years ago.
But they said, basically, this is going to be a very tight, tight battle.
And so what basically happened is this small New England family owned private company was competing with, again, Virginia state subsidized Sabra Dipping Company.
And from 2006 to 2015, Sabra took 60.7 percent of the market and Cedar's share of that market fell from 16, which was roughly the same as Sabra's in 2006 to 4 percent.
So that's the name of the game.
Gather massive state subsidies, wrangle your way into a major distribution agreement, and then put the private or homegrown competitor out of business.
And so I don't think that's something people should be unaware of.
Yeah, me either.
And the whole thing's unfair.
And if it was any of what you're talking about going on in favor of any company, the whole thing is corrupt and wrong.
It's exactly what's wrong with the regulatory state.
As Harry Brown used to say, it's not the abuse of power.
It's the power to abuse.
And as long as Virginia and the U.S. national government have the unlimited right, supposedly, authority to regulate business, to subsidize it, to control it, then guess what?
You live in a fascist state.
As Robert Higgs said, it's a participatory fascism.
You can still run for the local whatever it is, but at the end of the day, it doesn't make any difference on these kind of big questions.
And of course, the power is going to be abused, and it's going to be abused by those who are already rich, like Sabra, a giant corporation that has the legal firm division in their company capable of getting work done.
And then, as you say, at the expense of a regular, hard-working, free-market corporation doing everything they can, in this case, cedars, and getting completely competed out of business.
Yeah, it really is.
I guess it's a case study.
I don't know if Harvard Business School wants this, but I'll rewrite it as a case study if they want it.
It's a great piece, man.
I'll tell you that.
I think it might already be ready already.
It's got the numbers.
I mean, it's a little over-seasoned with numbers.
But, I mean, the problem with this piece is it's got about, I don't know, 30 Virginia Freedom of Information Act responses packed into it.
So it's loaded with numbers because nothing has ever come out about the market impact, the state subsidies, the cronyism, the secrecy.
If you pack it all into a 2,000-word article, it's like almost one number for every word.
But I do recommend people read it, as well, and the offer to Harvard Business School stands.
Yeah, there you go.
Well, listen, I mean, where me is great, but you ought to write something for something else more local there that could get read.
You know, in most cities, they have sort of a clone of the LA Weekly, where it's kind of the free weekly, kind of single-page newspaper.
You know what I mean?
Do they have one of those around there?
Well… We have the Austin Chronicle here.
They might run something like that.
I don't know.
Yeah, I've done a little media survey, and the Richmond paper is out of the question.
But there's some young, sort of up-and-coming news outfits, and they're nonprofits, and they're going after the man, and corruption, and cronyism.
That's just like you.
No, they're not just like me, because one of them is linked to the Clinton Foundation, and the other one is linked to a giant Dem super PAC.
Yeah, they're probably not going that hard against them.
If there's anything Democratic Party bosses probably don't want to take on right now is wrongful subsidies to Israel.
That's never been, especially with the base splitting away, kind of isn't their thing.
It's not their jam.
You know, you make a compelling argument.
I have no idea what it would take.
I mean, the thing of it is, though, as you're saying it, there are people being screwed over here.
They are a constituency for somebody, aren't they?
No, not in Virginia, and that's part of my work, which didn't make it into the piece.
It's too much.
But if you look at the power of various segments in Virginia to be of any interest to politicians in this sort of campaign contribution matrix, they're literally not worth responding to over the phone.
You have to get at least a thousand of them together in a room to even make it worth your time looking at them as potential campaign contributors to make it worth your while.
That's how bad it is in Virginia.
It's literally not worth a politician's time to meet with constituents and even pretend they care.
Although that can backfire on them, too.
You know, you talked about how it was then what you call it on the state level, a state senator something canter that did this.
But just what you're talking about was his downfall.
He was busy schmoozing around with all of his big donors and was surprised to find out that his constituents were throwing him right the hell out of power for that.
And at the end of the day, it really does come down to the number of votes, not just the number of dollars.
Right.
But that was David Brad in the Tea Party.
And he had a strong message and he had some backing.
I am worried.
I'm sincerely worried.
I don't doubt that that could happen.
But I'm worried that if they do throw the bombs out, this government entity is still going to be there and it's still going to be right in the heart of the legislature.
Right.
So going to be tapping these funds.
And people don't even know about that because they don't even put up the grants until a year after they've been made.
So there's a lot of endemic corruption, I would say, in just the way things are being set up that cut voters out of the out of the loop.
I do agree that they definitely could, if they got together and formed their own communication and information networks, which don't rely on the rather poor state of investigative journalism in this state, might be able to do something.
But I would say the infrastructure and the alternative media publications at this point in time don't exist.
Yeah.
Well, you know, maybe the follow up could be focused on any efforts by those who are really losing out the competition to the subsidized here and any efforts that they're really making to try to talk to their state congressman, at least.
State congressman's got to give you the time of day if you're a company, right?
Only if you're a pretty big company.
And, you know, there are, I mean, Dominion Power is not having any trouble getting their message across or some of the big, you know, telecommunications and the I.T. sector.
They don't have any problems.
What this piece has gone to, though, really is fish farming.
If you look at the gross margin, you know, it's not exactly investment banking and it doesn't exactly produce the kind of margins that let you send a check to various delegates on Capitol Hill every single week.
So it worries me because this really is a story.
And I hate to be crass about it, but politicians, you know, they really do listen to money.
And it's very easy to come in and segment out the market and look at where the real opportunities are and kind of, you know, get rid of a lot of these rather marginal in terms of political power groupings.
And that's business and the popular, you know, constituents.
But I do agree.
I mean, something can be done.
But the first step is definitely getting good information and thinking about the real lay of the land.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, you've done a pretty good job here of laying out the landscape for everybody to see, Grant.
It's Wermia, W-R-M-E-A dot org.
Something's fishy about Aquamouse Project Jonah in Virginia.
Again, Wermia dot org.
And I really do hope that this article will get around and especially to those who are much interested from the local business interest perspective, maybe than a foreign policy type perspective where we come from, but who see the danger in this and the negative consequences of it all the same.
And it sure deserves to get around.
So, hey, everybody, do your part.
It's a story about a fish farm and corruption in the Israel lobby in Virginia.
The great Grant Smith.
Thank you, sir.
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Actually, guys.
And remember, also, Grant is the administrator, the founder, the director of IRMEP, the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
That's I-R-M-E-P dot org.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
