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I went to medical school to become a psychoanalyst.  It was a time when, in the early 1980s, lay – non-medical – analysts were small in number and frowned upon in America.  I knew that my road would be a difficult one but I also  cherished becoming a real doctor of medicine. The mysteries of the human body, and the connection of the body to the human mind, fascinated me endlessly. When I graduated in 1986 I took the Oath of Hippocrates, whose principal tenet was to do no harm.

The prohibition not to harm was codified by the famous Greek physician because the potential to do harm, as a physician, was immense.  Consulting a healer, on whom the hopes for treatment and recovery depend, becomes something akin to a sacred act of trust, because a person suffering, a person weakened and perhaps even terrified by illness, is at his or her most vulnerable. The physician therefore becomes a wielder of immense power over the supplicating patient. The laying on of hands during a doctor’s physical examination is an activity fraught with portent, and the allowances granted to a physician into the hidden recesses of the labyrinths of mind and body are unique and extraordinary.

As a result of this disparity in power, and the belief and trust in the expertise of the healing authority, a physician’s recommendations to a patient carry extraordinarily persuasive weight.

With the introduction of COVID onto the world stage, something uncanny and remarkable occurred. Aside from the global lockdowns – a term, incidentally, I had only associated with prison emergencies – and the commands to distance and wear masks, all of which had no basis in any reputable science, I was impressed most deeply by two things:

1)  the absence of any vigorous attempt to treat patients unless they had reached a point of crisis and required hospitalisation, and

2) the universal push to use a so-called vaccine that had been developed hastily and was by definition experimental

Those doctors who attempted, as doctors should, to emphasize informed consent, and who were reluctant to recommend a novel agent universally in a kind of one-size-fits-all approach advocated by public health officials, soon found themselves under investigation by regulatory agencies.  Here  in New Zealand physicians who spoke out on behalf of basic medical principles, and who did as doctors should do by advocating early treatment and prevention, and who refrained from assuming that warp-speed ‘vaccines’ would miraculously have no adverse effects – these doctors have been harassed and persecuted by the Medical Council of New Zealand.

Other doctors – a very vast majority –  did as they were told by the government.

It is one thing for warlords and ruling cabals and governmental cliques and ministries to exert powers of tyranny. For example, during the Peloponnesian Wars the democratic city-state of Athens approached the inhabitants of Melos, an island that sought to be neutral. Athens demanded that the Melians submit to their rule upon pain of conquest, and the Athenians justified their demands by reference to a brutal law of power: the strong do what they can and the weak must accept it. In the end the Melians resisted and Athens subjugated the island, killing the men and enslaving the women and children.

The history of the world is replete with many such examples of the sheer use of authoritative force. But it is another thing for physicians to allow such tyranny into their sacrosanct spaces.

The COVID era has done nothing if not lay bare the exploitation by the State of this doctor-patient relationship, in the service of an agenda that has, at bottom, nothing to do with health, and everything to do with control and, indeed, as we are seeing with the COVID inoculations, actual elimination of the population the State purports to protect.

The New Zealand government has successfully tyrannized its people with a dangerous, destructive and callous policy of mass inoculation. It continues to mandate up-to-date jabs for all healthcare practitioners, despite a crumbling healthcare system with endemic workforce shortages, and despite a Bill of Rights that stipulates “the right to refuse to undergo medical treatment.” It ensures compliance by making it virtually impossible to obtain either a medical or religious exemption, as I know firsthand.

The government would not be succeeding, however, without an army of physicians who function as willing executioners of medical coercion, which, given its most fundamental violations of body and soul, becomes the quintessence of tyranny.

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Dr. Garcia is a Philadelphia-born psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand in 2006. He has authored articles ranging from explorations of psychoanalytic technique, the psychology of creativity in music (Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Delius), and politics. He is also a poet, novelist and theatrical director. He retired from psychiatric practice in 2021 after working in the public sector in New Zealand.

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It has been a hobbyhorse of Greg Norman for years: a threatening, alternative golf tournament to draw the stars and undermine the musty establishment.  Realising a most dubious project, the LIV Tournament has become blood money’s greatest symbol. Funded by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it is a most noisy statement of sportswashing.

Some aspects of this are also a touch sinister.  Last month, the Wall Street Journal revealed the details of a draft LIV contract that has been offered to players.  Provisions of the contract include requirements for the players to don LIV apparel when playing both LIV and non-LIV events.  Non-LIV logos, at least for the most part, need to be cleared with management.  This also covers logos used on branded products that might be used at the events.  The contract provisions stipulate one exception: players can wear “the brand of a third-party supplier of golf equipment on the side of their hat.”

The claws of management also go deeper than logo approvals.  Tight rein is maintained over player interviews relating to an “event or league activity”.  Participation in the tournament also comes with the proselytising proviso: recruited golfers will, in turn, recruit other golfers for the tournament.  Players must agree to “where requested, assist the League Operator in seeking to persuade players to enter into multiyear player participation agreements with the League Operator.”

The first three LIV Invitational events have seen rich splashings of $25 million in individual and team prize money.  No participant has earned less than $120,000.  It has also been reported that a number of golfers with profiles – Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau, Dustin Johnson and Brooks Koepka – have signed contracts of the eight- and nine-figure sort.  In one of the tournaments under the LIV umbrella, the eventual winner, Henrik Stenson, left $4 million richer.

The success of such operations is based less on intelligence and integrity than gain and bulging bank balances.  If PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan was hoping for something more than that, he was seriously misreading the mood.  Hank Haney, Tiger Woods’ former coach, sees LIV Golf as “great for the players that left and for the players that stayed.”  He has suggested that the tournament format co-exist with the PGA Tour.  Norman, for his part, has filed an antitrust lawsuit against the PGA Tour, claiming that its actions in banning participants from participating in its competition are unlawful.

Woods has himself raised a number of suspicions for his opposition to LIV, having turned down a $700-800 million offer from the Saudis.  Hardly a moralist, though very much a student of the game, he is being tasked by the PGA Tour establishment to come up with some countering format.  As Alan Shipnuck, writing in Golf Digest asks, “what is the payoff for Woods to go all-in with the PGA Tour?”  Best not ask.

This is the sort of amoral mindset that conveniently ignores how an ensemble of murderous skyscraper building oil-rich kleptocrats have globalised their footprint across a number of sports as part of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s “Vision 2030”.

This year, the London-based human rights organisation Grant Liberty released a report noting that the Kingdom had spent something in the order of $2.1 billion on a number of international sporting events and the acquisition of sporting assets, such as the Newcastle United football team.  Regarding the latter, the exiled UK-based Abdullah al Ghamdi made a plea “to all football supporters and players at St James Park to put pressure on the Saudi Government to release all those victims of its relentless crackdown.”

This sportswashing project gathers pace even as the theocrats pursue internal repressive policies against their citizenry, despite the reformist pretensions of the Crown Prince.  The House of Saud has also shown itself to be a keen pursuer of dissenting citizens in other jurisdictions, evidenced by the savage carving up of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

The link between this gruesome assassination and the Crown Prince was confirmed by US intelligence officials in an unclassified report released in February last year.  The report found that bin Salman was in “control of decision making in the Kingdom” and supported “violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi”.

In terms of foreign policy, Riyadh continues its sponsorship of humanitarian misery in its vicious war in Yemen against the Iranian-backed Houthis.  The Yemen conflict, one that has seen the displacement of a million people, the threat of famine, medicine shortages and cholera outbreaks, has been just about forgotten by those in Washington, Canberra and various European capitals, transfixed by all things Russian.  With the war in Ukraine, Russia’s Vladimir Putin has been anointed the omnipresent bogeyman and oppressor, while the thuggish antics of the petulant bin Salman slip gently under radar and consciousness.

Sports figures the world over should be soul wary about a regime that uses cash to conceal the bodies of protesters thrown into prison, activists tormented and disappeared, and murdered journalists.  But Riyadh have their number, cunningly seductive, and aware of perennial weakness.  With its vast sovereign wealth fund, the Kingdom is willing to splash out, and sports figures are willing to be bought.  They know the harlot’s score.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image: Greg Norman, Chief Executive Officer of LIV Golf (2014 image). (Photo by Great White Shark Enterprises / Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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First published on September 5, 2022

The Legacy of the Late Prof. Graeme MacQueen will live.

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This week on 9/11 Free Fall, distinguished 9/11 scholar Graeme MacQueen joins host Andy Steele to talk about the soon-to-be-published paper he co-authored with Ted Walter entitled “The Triumph of the Official Narrative: How the TV Networks Hid the Twin Towers’ Explosive Demolition on 9/11.”

“The Triumph of the Official Narrative” is the second part of a two-part series that MacQueen and Walter started two years ago with the paper “How 36 Reporters Brought Us the Twin Towers’ Explosive Demolition on 9/11.”

In that paper, they reviewed 70 hours of news coverage and found that the “explosion hypothesis” was the dominant hypothesis among reporters on the ground. In this new paper, using the same 70 hours of news coverage, they examine how the official narrative supplanted what journalists on the ground were reporting.

Don’t miss this fascinating interview with Graeme MacQueen, and stay tuned for the publication of the paper next week!

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The late Prof. Graeme MacQueen, author and distinguished professor of religious studies, Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) 

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Featured image is a screenshot from CNN via AE911Truth

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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Six months into Russia’s “Special Military Operation,” fact-challenged reporting that constitutes Western media’s approach to covering the conflict in Ukraine has become apparent to any discerning audience. Less understood is why anyone would sacrifice their integrity to participate in such a travesty. The story of William Arkin is a case in point.

On March 30 (a little more than a month into the war), Arkin penned an article which began with the following sentence: “Russia’s armed forces are reaching a state of exhaustion, stalemated on the battlefield and unable to make additional gains, while Ukraine is slowly pushing them back, continuing to inflict destruction on the invaders.”

Arkin went on to quote a “high-level officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency,” who spoke on condition of anonymity, who declared that “The war in Ukraine is over.”

Image: William Arkin in 2013. (C-Span still)

A little less than three months later, on June 14, Arkin wrote a piece for Newsweek with the headline: “Russia Is Losing the Ukraine War. Don’t Be Fooled by What Happened in Severodonetsk.”

Apparently neither Arkin nor his editorial bosses at Newsweek felt any need to explain how Russia could be losing the war twice.

Anyone who has been following what I’ve been writing and saying since the beginning of Russia’s “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine knows I hold the exact opposite view. Russia, I maintain, is winning the Ukraine conflict, in decisive fashion.

But I don’t write for Newsweek.

William Arkin does.

Arkin proclaims that Russia is losing though it had, at the time the article was published, just taken the strategic city of Severdonetsk, killing and capturing thousands of Ukrainian forces, and rendering thousands more combat ineffective since they had to abandon their equipment to flee for their lives. (Russia has since captured all of the territory encompassing the Lugansk People’s Republic, including the city of Lysychansk, inflicting thousands of additional casualties on the Ukrainian military.)

“The Russian army’s so-called victory,” Arkin proclaimed at the time, “is the latest installment in its humiliating military display and comes with a crushing human cost.”

The humiliating display instead is Arkin’s lack of acumen in conducting an independent assessment of the military situation on the ground in Ukraine.

This was again reinforced last week when Arkin penned another article in which he helps disseminate the outlandish claims of his Pentagon sources.

“[F]rom late February through August, with only a moderate infusion of weapons from the West, some supportive declarations from Western leaders and a smattering of ‘We Stand with Ukraine’ signs on U.S. lawns,” Arkin writes, Ukraine has been able to “hold at bay the mighty Russian military,” something apparently none thought it could do.

Ignore the jaw-dropping contention by Arkin that the tens of billions of dollars in military assistance provided by the U.S. and its NATO and European allies constitutes but “a moderate infusion of weapons.” No, don’t ignore it — focus on it. This is the signature style of Arkin and his Pentagon handlers, a sort of Orwellian double-speak where one can rest assured whatever bold statement is made, the truth is the exact opposite.

Arkin quotes “U.S. intelligence officials who have been watching the war,” writing that “Russian troops have had to contend with bad battlefield leaders, inferior weapons and an unworkable supply chain.”

Anyone who has been tracking the events in Ukraine might have thought that this was the situation as it applies to the Ukrainian military. Not so, says Arkin and his source. Moreover, it is not Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky who has been interfering with his Ministry of Defense, but Russian President Vladimir Putin with his. These same Russian troops, Arkin declares, have “also been hobbled by Putin himself,” who has “ignored, overruled and fired his own generals.”

This is baseless fiction, written by a man who seems determined to cement himself in the annals of the Russian-Ukraine conflict as an unabashed Ukraine partisan and vehicle for Pentagon information warriors. Arkin’s narrative of the war to date is so far removed from the factual record it belongs in The Onion.

What Arkin writes cannot even be called propaganda, because for propaganda to be effective it needs to be both believable at the moment of consumption, and able to sustain a narrative over time. Arkin’s work fulfills neither criterion.

Image: Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and President Vladimir Putin at a parade in Saint-Petersburg, July 30, 2017. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

His Sources

Like most erstwhile journalists covering the conflict for western media outlets, Arkin appears to be a prisoner to his sources, which in this case are a combination of anonymous U.S. defense intelligence personnel and pro-Ukrainian propagandists.

I used the term “erstwhile” in describing Western journalists because normal journalistic standards dictate that one seeks to report a story — any story — from a position of dispassionate neutrality, drawing on sources which reflect all sides of the story.

There is nothing wrong about drawing conclusions from such reporting, even assigning weight when it comes to which aspects of the coverage are deemed more credible than others. But before such conclusions can be made, foundational reporting needs to take place. Simply parroting what you’re being told from sources exclusively drawn from one part of the story is stenography.

In the interests of full disclosure, Arkin and I were colleagues for a brief period in late 1998-early 1999, when we were both contracted to NBC News as “on air talent” to talk about the situation in Iraq. Arkin apparently did not hold my analysis in high regard then. I have no idea what he thinks today — Consortium News has reached out for an answer, but as of publication has not received a reply.

Arkin did not respond to an invitation to debate me on Ukraine on a weekly podcast I do with Jeff Norman.

I’ll let our respective track records speak for themselves, especially when it comes to Iraq and the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction. Arkin says he is “proud to say that I also was one of the few to report that there weren’t any WMD in Iraq and remember fondly presenting that conclusion to an incredulous NBC editorial board.”

I’m pretty sure I was saying something similar to an equally incredulous Congress and to the entire mainstream U.S. media (NBC included), as well as the international press corps.

Congratulations, Bill — we once were on the same page.

But no more.

Arkin’s Achievements

Arkin is no run-of-the mill journalist. He’s a smart guy. He got accepted to New York University, although he dropped out to join the Army, claiming NYU “wasn’t for me.” While stationed in Berlin, he completed his undergraduate studies, getting a bachelor’s degree in government and politics. After leaving the Army he got a master’s degree in National Security Studies from Georgetown University.

For the next 40 years, Arkin worked for numerous employers, specializing in nuclear issues and military affairs, before landing his current gig as Newsweeks‘ senior editor for intelligence.

For The Washington Post in 2010, after a two-year investigation, he wrote a ground-breaking story with Dana Priest about the vast and until then little-understood explosive growth of the national security state post 9/11.

Arkin then showed integrity when he resigned from MSNBC and NBC News in 2019. His reasons for leaving, spelled out here, include how he was “especially disheartened to watch NBC and much of the rest of the news media somehow become a defender of Washington and the system.”

In March this year he wrote a startling story that questioned the dominant Western reporting that Russia was committing repeated war crimes by wantonly slaughtering huge numbers of civilians just for the hell of it.

“As destructive as the Ukraine war is, Russia is causing less damage and killing fewer civilians than it could, U.S. intelligence experts say. Russia’s conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely accepted view that Vladimir Putin is intent on demolishing Ukraine and inflicting maximum civilian damage,” he wrote.

The article corroborated what Russia had been saying all along, which until that point was dismissed in the West as propaganda.

So how does Arkin transition from debunking Ukrainian and Western propaganda about Moscow deliberately killing huge numbers of civilians, to embracing the fanciful notion that Russia is losing the war? (Further underscoring Arkin’s assessment of Russia’s battlefield performance is the uninterrupted string of battlefield successes by Russia in the Donbass since that June article was published, further undermining his argument.)

It’s not a lack of education that has led Arkin down the path so many of his colleagues in mainstream media have stumbled down; there is no doubting the man is not only well educated, but also innately intelligent, something that doesn’t necessarily follow the other.

Military ‘Expertise’

Russian helicopters in a field during the invasion of Ukraine, March 2022. (Mil.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Arkin can be said to be a victim of his own CV, which is light on relevant military experience for someone selling himself as an expert in military affairs based on his time in the U.S. Army.

Arkin purports to be one of the foremost military analysts of our times, a man whose track record in military affairs dates to his time as a junior enlisted soldier in the U.S. Army where, from 1974 to 1978, he served in occupied West Berlin as an intelligence analyst working for the Deputy Chief of Staff Intelligence (DCSI), U.S. Commander Berlin (USCOB).

On his WordPress page, Arkin writes that in the army he “rose to be senior intelligence analyst for the Berlin military occupation authorities and served under civilian cover as part of a number of clandestine human and technical intelligence collection efforts.”

In Berlin, Arkin adds in his LinkIn bio, “I worked on a number of clandestine projects and was an analyst of Soviet and East German activities in East Germany.”

Alexanderplatz in Berlin, 1978. (Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

He was not just any military analyst, mind you, but someone who, according to himself, “was once one of the world’s leading experts on two military forces that don’t even exist anymore.” I worked closely with military officers who were in fact the foremost experts on both the Soviet and East German militaries during the time Arkin served. This Newsweek senior editor has engaged in more than a little self-promotion.

That someone of the rank of specialist or sergeant (I have no idea what rank Arkin achieved, but four years’ time in service is a self-limiting reality when it comes to advancement) being the “senior intelligence analyst” in all of Berlin on matters pertaining to the Soviet military is patently absurd; Berlin was home to numerous specialized intelligence units and organizations, any one of which would have been staffed with personnel far more senior and, as such, experienced, in intelligence analysis on the Soviet and East German target than Arkin. Simply put, Arkin was not, nor has he ever been, one of the world’s leading experts on the Soviet military.

Not even close.

Arkin was never involved in combat arms, nor did he serve in combat. Without that experience he cannot understand the military realities of war — logistics, communications, maneuvering, fire support, etc. Berlin was, from everything I’ve heard, a fascinating place to serve — but it wasn’t combat.

Not even close.

As Arkin has no combat experience, his military analysis is held hostage to his sources within the Defense Intelligence Agency who pass along such cutting-edge insights as the notion that Russia is suffering ten casualties for every Ukrainian soldier lost since the Donbass offensive began in April.

Arkin seemed unaware of documents alleged to have been leaked from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, dated April 21, which state that Ukraine had, as of the date, suffered 191,000 combined killed and wounded. According to Arkin’s math, this would mean Russia has suffered nearly 2 million casualties of its own.

Despite the absurdity, Arkin keeps parroting what his Defense Intelligence Agency sources tell him.

Defense Intelligence Agency headquarters viewed from the Potomac water taxi in 2019. (Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

He repeats, without hesitation, his intelligence source’s assessment of Ukraine’s “greater morale and motivation, better training and leadership, superior knowledge and use of the terrain, better maintained and more reliable equipment, and even greater accuracy.”

It doesn’t matter that literally every assertion made by Arkin’s intelligence source is demonstrably false. If Arkin knew about artillery (the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine is primarily an extended artillery duel), he would understand the concepts of probability of hit and probability of kill, and how the volume of artillery fired increases both.

He might then understand how absurd it is to think that an artillery duel where one side fires 6,000 rounds and the other 60,000 rounds could produce an outcome where the side firing 10 times fewer rounds achieves a 10-fold advantage in lethality.

Any expert on Soviet/Russian military affairs would have known that artillery was going to be a major factor in any large-scale combat operation involving Russian forces. By way of example, three days before the Russian operation began, I tweeted (when I could still tweet):

“If you haven’t done a schedule of fires for at least three artillery battalions in the field using live rounds while maneuvering, I’m probably not interested in your military opinion about Ukraine.”

Arkin, to the best of my knowledge, has never done a schedule of fires for multiple battalions of artillery. His apparent lack of knowledge of artillery shows when he repeats verbatim the dreck fed him by his intelligence sources.

Arkin’s has to be aware that NBC News reported about the deliberate declassification and release by the U.S. intelligence community of intelligence information that intelligence officials knew was not true. And yet, Arkin still relies on these types of sources to provide the fodder for his headline-grabbing tales. The question of Arkin’s motives in writing such stories now remains.

That someone with Arkin’s background would allow a lifetime of diligent work to be squandered by serving as little more than a shill for U.S. intelligence is one thing. That media outlets like Newsweekkeep printing it is another. Together, these twin phenomena represent what I call “The Arkin Effect,” which is nothing less than the total debasement of journalism in the U.S. when it comes to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Six months into Russia’s “Special Military Operation”, most military analysts admit that Russia enjoys the upper hand on the battlefield, despite the billions of dollars in military aid that has been sent to Ukraine by the U.S. and its European allies.

But not Bill Arkin and his employers at Newsweek. They seem to be content with serving as the Defense Intelligence Agency’s stenographers, putting out stories which have not, and will not, stand the test of time.

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Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.

Featured image: Ukrainian soldiers training at the Yavoriv Combat Training Center at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center, near Yavoriv, Ukraine, March 16, 2017. (Anthony Jones, Public Domain)

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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There are work-arounds the U.S. can use to fund affordable housing, drought responses, and other urgently-needed infrastructure that was left out of the two recent spending bills.

Congress has passed two major infrastructure bills in the last year, but imminent needs remain. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law chiefly focused on conventional highway programs, and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) mainly centered on energy security and combating climate change. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), over $2 trillion in much-needed infrastructure is still unfunded, including projects to address drought, affordable housing, high-speed rail, and power transmission lines. By 2039, per the ASCE, continued underinvestment at current rates will cost $10 trillion in cumulative lost GDP, more than 3 million jobs in that year, and $2.24 trillion in exports over the next 20 years.

Particularly urgent today is infrastructure to counteract the record-breaking drought in the U.S. Southwest, where 50% of the nation’s food supply is grown. Subsidies for such things as the purchase of electric vehicles, featured in the IRA, will pad the coffers of the industries lobbying for them but will not get water to our parched farmlands any time soon. More direct action is needed. But as noted by Todd Tucker in a Roosevelt Institute article, “Today, a gridlocked and austerity-minded Congress balks at appropriating sufficient money to ensure emergency readiness. … [T]he US system of government’s numerous veto points make emergency response harder than under parliamentary or authoritarian systems.”

There are, however, other ways to finance these essential projects. “A work-around,” says Tucker, “is so-called off-balance sheet money creation.” That was the approach taken in the 1930s, when commercial banks were bankrupt and the country faced its worst-ever economic depression; yet the government succeeded in building infrastructure as never before.

Off-budget Funding: The Model of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation

For funding its national infrastructure campaign in the Great Depression, Congress called on the publicly-owned Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). It was not actually a bank; it got its liquidity by issuing bonds. Notes Tucker, “The RFC was allowed to borrow money from the Treasury and the capital markets, and then invest in relief and mobilization efforts that would eventually generate a return for taxpayers, all while skating past austerity hawks determined to cut or freeze government spending.”

According to James Butkiewicz, professor of economics at the University of Delaware:

The RFC was an executive agency with the ability to obtain funding through the Treasury outside of the normal legislative process. Thus, the RFC could be used to finance a variety of favored projects and programs without obtaining legislative approval. RFC lending did not count toward budgetary expenditures, so the expansion of the role and influence of the government through the RFC was not reflected in the federal budget.

The RFC lent to federal government agencies including the Commodity Credit Corporation (which lent to farmers), the Electric Home and Farm Authority, the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), the Public Works Administration, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). It also made direct loans to local governments and businesses and funded eight RFC wartime subsidiaries in the 1940s that were essential to the war effort.

The infrastructure projects of one agency alone, the Works Progress Administration, included 1,000 miles of new and rebuilt airport runways, 651,000 miles of highway, 124,000 bridges, 8,000 parks, and 18,000 playgrounds and athletic fields; and some 84,000 miles of drainage pipes, 69,000 highway light standards, and 125,000 public buildings (built, rebuilt, or expanded), including 41,300 schools. For local governments that had hit their borrowing limits on their taxpayer-funded general obligation bonds, a workaround was devised: they could borrow by issuing “revenue bonds,” which were backed not by taxes but by the revenue that would be generated by the infrastructure funded by the loans.

A bill currently before Congress, HR 3339, proposes to duplicate the feats of the RFC without increasing the federal budget deficit or taxes, by forming a National Infrastructure Bank (NIB).

China’s State “Policy Banks”

China is dealing with the global economic downturn by embarking on a stimulus program involving large national infrastructure projects, including massive water infrastructure. For funding, the government is drawing on three state-owned “policy banks” structured like the RFC.

The Chinese government is one of those systems referred to by Todd Tucker as not being hampered by “a gridlocked and austerity-minded Congress.” It can just issue a five-year plan and hit the ground running. In May 2022, it began construction on 3,876 large projects with a total investment of nearly 2.4 trillion yuan (about $350 billion).

Funding is coming chiefly from China’s “policy banks” set up in 1994 to provide targeted loans in areas where profit-driven banks might be reluctant to lend. They are the China Development Bank, the Export-​Import Bank of China and the Agricultural Development Bank of China. As noted in a June 30 article in the Washington Post, China could also draw on its “Big Four” banks – Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., China Construction Bank Corp., Agricultural Bank of China Ltd., and Bank of China Ltd. – but “they are essentially profit-driven commercial banks that can be quite picky when it comes to selecting borrowers and projects. The policy lenders, however, operate on a non-profit basis and are often recruited to pour cheap funds into projects that are less attractive financially but matter to the longer-term development of the economy.”

Like the RFC, the policy banks mainly get their funds by issuing bonds. They can also get “Pledged Supplementary Lending” directly from the Chinese central bank, which presumably creates the money on its books, as all central banks are empowered to do.

Dealing with China’s Water Crisis

According to the Xinhua News Agency, on July 7 construction began on a project linking China’s two mega water infrastructures – the Three Gorges Project and the South-to-North Water Diversion Project – transferring water from the water-abundant south to the arid northern region of the country. The goal is a national water grid, increasing the quantity of water available for use nationally by about 20% and increasing China’s irrigated area by about 10%.

The South-to-North Water Diversion Project is already well underway. The middle route, the most prominent one due to its role in feeding water to the nation’s capital, begins at the Danjiangkou Reservoir in the Hanjiang River in central China’s Hubei and runs northeastward to Beijing and Tianjin. It was completed and began supplying water in December 2014. The eastern route began supplying water in November 2013, transferring water from Jiangsu to areas including East China’s Shandong Province.  The new project will channel water from the Three Gorges Reservoir area to the Hanjiang River, a tributary of the Yangtze River. It is scheduled to be completed in nine years.

Solving Our Water Crisis

The total estimated investment for China’s national water grid is about 2.99 trillion yuan (U.S. $470 billion). This is comparable to the $400 billion the National Infrastructure Bank Coalition proposes to allocate through HR 3339 to address the serious drought in the U.S. Southwest.

As in China, one alternative being considered by the NIB team is to divert water from areas that have it in excess. One proposal is a pipeline to ship Mississippi River floodwaters to the parched Colorado River via a Wyoming tributary. Another option is to pump water from the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest to California via a subterranean pipeline on the floor of the Pacific Ocean – not upstream water used by Washington and Oregon residents, but water from the ocean outflow where the river feeds into the Pacific and its freshwater becomes unusable saltwater.

Those are doable alternatives, but political and regulatory obstacles remain. Ideally, sources of water would be found that are new not just to the Southwest but to the surface of the planet. This is another proposal being explored by the NIB team – to tap “deep seated water” or “primary water,” the plentiful water supplies below normal groundwater tables.

Studies have found evidence of several oceans’ worth of water locked up in rock as far down as 1,000 kilometers below the Earth’s surface. (See The Smithsonian Magazine, “How the Earth’s Mantle Sends Water Up Toward the Surface,” June 2022.) This water is not part of the hydrologic cycle (clouds to rain to ground to clouds again), as shown on testing by its lack of environmental contaminants. From the time when atomic testing began in the Pacific, hydrologic water has contained traces of tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen used as a fuel in thermonuclear bombs. Primary water shoots up tritium-free —clean, fresh and usually drinkable without filtration.

There are many verified cases of mountaintop wells that have gushed water for decades in arid lands. This water is now being located and tapped by enterprising hydrogeologists using technological innovations like those used in other extractive industries, but without their destructive impact on the environment. For more on primary water and the promising vistas it opens up, see my earlier articles here and here.

Funding Through the National Infrastructure Bank

Critically needed water and other infrastructure projects can be funded without tapping the federal budget, with funds generated through a national infrastructure bank. Unlike the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the publicly-owned bank proposed in HR 3339 is designed to be a true depository bank, which can leverage its funds as all depository banks are allowed to do: with a 10% capital requirement, it can leverage $1 in capital into $10 in loans.

For capitalization, the NIB will follow the model of Alexander Hamilton’s First U.S. Bank: shares in the bank will be swapped for existing U.S. bonds. The shares will earn a 2% dividend and are non-voting. Control of the bank and its operations will remain with the public, an independent board of directors, and a panel of carefully selected non-partisan experts, precluding manipulation for political ends.

The NIB is projected to lend $5 trillion over 10 years, or roughly $500 billion per year.  That means each year the NIB will have to add $50 billion in new capitalization in the form of debt for equity swaps. The incentive for investors is the extra 2% yield the NIB provides on its preferred stock, plus a government guarantee. The U.S. Postal Service, the fourth largest holder of U.S. Treasuries globally, is one possible investor. Others are pension funds and builder associations with investment portfolios, all of which need a certain number of triple-A-rated investments. NIB bonds will have a better rate of return than Treasuries, while achieving the laudable purpose of filling the critical infrastructure gap.

To clear checks from the newly-created loan deposits, the NIB will bring in cash from incoming customer deposits, loan repayments, NIB-issued bonds, and/or borrowing from the Federal Reserve. How much cash it will need and its timing depends on how many infrastructure companies maintain their deposit accounts with the NIB.

The $5 trillion the NIB lends over 10 years will add $5 trillion to the total money supply; but the “productive” loans it will be making are the sort that do not add to price inflation. In fact, they can reduce it – by raising GDP growth, increasing the supply side of the supply-versus-demand inflation equation.

America achieved its greatest-ever infrastructure campaign in the midst of the Great Depression. We can do that again today, and we can do it with the same machinery: off-budget financing through a government-owned national financial institution.

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Ellen Brown is an attorney, chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com. 

She is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Josep Borrell, EU High Representative for Foreign Policy, not only announced the suspension of visas for Russian tourists, dealing another blow to the Italian and European tourism sector.  At a meeting of EU defense ministers, he said, “EU countries have been discussing the possibility of a training mission for Ukrainian forces since before the war: now is the time to act.” By sending weapons and training Kiev’s forces, the EU becomes a belligerent unity against Russia alongside NATO.

At the same time Ursula Von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, reiterates that we must: “end our dependence on dirty Russian fossil fuels.” She thus announces the EU’s decision to continue on the path that is causing a devastating economic crisis in Europe, due to the price of gas that has risen from 15 euros to over 300 euros per megawatt hour.

The real cause is not the fact that Russia is no longer supplying us with gas, but that the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, the one that decides the price of gas in Europe, belongs to a U.S. financial company, which determines the price based on speculative and political mechanisms.  ENI itself, while buying Russian gas at a low price, resells it at a high price according to the Amsterdam quotations. A real scam against Italians covered up by the Draghi government-

Europe is at the same time being increasingly endangered by the huge amount of arms NATO and the EU are sending to Ukraine. Washington has announced military supplies of another $3 billion, part of the $40 billion “assistance package” approved by Congress. Of these supplies – a U.S.- a CBS report shows – most end up in the clandestine arms market, in the hands of terrorist and criminal organizations.

A further serious danger is caused by the fact that Ukrainian forces – armed, trained and in fact commanded by NATO – are firing the guns and missiles supplied to them by NATO and the EU on the Zaparozhye nuclear power plant currently under Russian control, exposing Italy and Europe to the very serious risk of a new Chernobyl.

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Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image:  EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell. (EU)

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It appears increasingly like our world is being shaped by ideas and intentions that have a pseudo-religious like commitment to limits and reducing human activity upon the earth.

Whether it is in the halls of Davos, where big wig corporate magnates and powerful technocrats proclaim how important it is to cut back on food consumption, energy use and breathing or in such events as COP26 where these same elites promote decarbonization schemes that threaten to reduce not only carbon production through “global Green New Deals” but life itself, we find notions of “nature”, “equilibrium” and “limits to growth” shaping the contours of all permitted discussion of ecological, economic and political policy among those stuck within the trans-Atlantic “rules based order”.

Where does this dismal “science of managing scarcity” come from?

Certainly it has not always been this way.

Previous generations created abundance through investments into large scale infrastructure and cutting-edge discoveries that not only improved the conditions of life of people and increased the industrial productive powers of nations but even increased the abundance of the biosphere itself as we find in such former desert zones of California which were turned into lush agricultural areas through projects like the New Deal and water projects of the 1960s.

But we are told that those days are long gone, and anti-Malthusian leaders like FDR, Enrico Mattei, Charles de Gaulle and JFK have disappeared from the political landscape of western societies.

In their stead, we find only synthetic political hacks, misanthropic technocrats and several generations of Malthusians who took over the helm of our ship of state in the early 1970s. This takeover was punctuated by such policy documents as Henry Kissinger’s NSSM-200 in 1974 which redefined U.S. foreign policy from the “old wisdom” of promoting infrastructure to poor nations, to the “new wisdom” of promoting population control. Kissinger’s close misanthropic associates who shared his commitment to stasis and control found themselves in positions of vast influence during this time, as witnessed by Kissinger’s student Klaus Schwab inaugurating the World Economic Forum in 1971, and Kissinger’s patron David Rockefeller co-founding the Trilateral Commission in 1973 where the paradigm of limits to growth was turned into a political religion.

Large scale infrastructure investments seized up along with the crash science programs that had defined our earlier breakthroughs with NASA’s funding collapsing from 4.5% of GDP in 1966 to less that 1% in 1976 [see graph].

Fusion research similar shrivelled up as all research into next generation breakthroughs in science were handicapped throughout the 1970s resulting in the demoralized adage “fusion is always 30 years away” which become a cynical truism.

With the Malthusian takeover of Trans-Atlantic governments, the world was slowly turned inside out and a former viable industrial economic system was turned into a post-industrial consumer cult whose growth was defined increasingly in purely speculative monetary terms devoid of any actual genuine metrics of value or GDP.

And so now, we find ourselves trapped within a shrinking box of resources, and increased rates of scarcity across all fields that directly support life: energy, healthcare, agriculture. It isn’t that this scarcity is necessary. Even if next generation technological breakthroughs in all domains had not been sabotaged (they were), then even existing technologies and resources, IF organized and used justly, as the new multipolar alliance is doing, could eliminate hunger and want for the currently existent 7.7 billion souls on the earth with relative ease.

However, we don’t want to be merely satisfied with solving the errors in thinking that have brought us into today’s absurd crisis of scarcity, but we want to ensure that such errors are never brough back in the future.

As such, it were expedient to exit for the time being the realm of geopolitics and appreciate the more subtle scientific ideas shaping standard theory physics itself which in turn influence the thinking of both economic, ecological and political science in profound ways since all three “practical” domains derive their legitimacy from concepts of science that are in turn influenced by theories that extend into the largest domains of existence and the smallest domains of subatomic physics.

NASA’s James Webb Telescope Threatens Big Bang Cosmology

In June of this year, NASA’s James Webb telescope began its work scanning the cosmos with a high powered infra red lens providing a measure of clarity and definition to the images of both deep space and our surrounding environment within the solar system unlike anything ever seen before.

However, with new deep penetrating images of the furthest reaches of the cosmos ever photographed, problems have begun to emerge which are threatening the entire edifice of the already fragile and self-contradictory ivory tower of Standard Model Cosmology.

Images of deep space galaxies which should be few in number, and underdeveloped in form are turning out to be so old (according to the rules of current physics that interpret red shift as a measure of distance and velocity from a point of observation) that current calculations are determining must have existed long before the supposedly 13.77 billion year date which mainstream physicists have agreed the universe was “born” from nothing in the form of the big bang.

Renowned physicist Eric Lerner (author of the 1992 best seller ‘The Big Bang Never Happened’) had this to say about the crisis and newly published scientific papers which acknowledge the crisis in physics:

“Since that hypothesis [big bang theory’] has been defended for decades as unquestionable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists, the new data is causing these theorists to panic. “Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning,” says Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, “and wondering if everything I’ve done is wrong.”

In this sequal to my previous article “Open System Thinking with Vladimir Vernadsky”, I would like to discuss additional evidence for the fallacies underlying Big Bang cosmology which will hopefully liberate our crisis-ridden world from certain poisonous dogmas that have kept the scientific community in a stagnant box for far too long, and have justified the outdated and closed-system pseudo-science of “limits to growth” and Malthusianism permeating the western world.

This exercise will bring us into an appreciation of some major suppressed discoveries in embryology, life sciences and cosmology during the 19th and 20th centuries and will have us encounter certain scientists with names like Halton Arp, Alexander Gurwitsch, Hans Driesch and Fritz Popp. These names should be known far and wide due to the profound nature of their discoveries into the creative foundations of life, electromagnetism etc. However, due to the infantile period of oligarchism which humanity has struggled with in its still-early stages of life in the universe, these names have remained in obscurity.

Who was Halton Arp?

The recently deceased Halton Arp (1927-2013) remains one of the pioneers of modern astrophysics whose observational work during the 1960s formed the bedrock for much of today’s descriptive cosmology.

In 1966, Arp published an incredible book called “The Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies” which catalogued hundreds of cases of anomalous observations which broke the chains of “standard theory cosmology” which was quickly shackling mainstream scientific research. For this work and the decades of advances on these insights, Arp was never forgiven by the scientific establishment and his work at the Carnegie Institute of Washington was ended along with his access to the telescopes needed to conduct his work, while his writings would no longer be published or peer reviewed, forcing him to eventually leave the U.S.A all together.

Even though he recruited a loyal following of students and researchers internationally, his work which totally abolishes the foundations of Big Bang (and implicitly Heat Death) cosmology remains inaccessible for most students of physics and citizens alike.

What Did Arp Discover?

In his decades of fruitful work, Arp tackled the Achilles heal of big bang cosmology by demonstrating that quasars (the furthest and thus oldest objects visible from the earth), do not give off their extremely large red shifts due to the doppler effect which mainstream theorists wish to believe, but actually contain a form of “intrinsic redshift” indicative of their young age as “galactic seedlings” or embryos having only recently been born of more mature parent galaxies in their vicinities. These parent galaxies were found to exhibit redshifts of a much lower magnitude indicating their age and phase of evolution more than serving as any form of indication of the recession or speed from the point of observation as is commonly thought.

Figure 1 A simple example of the Doppler Effect as it expresses red or blue shifting observations

The importance of maintaining adherence to the Doppler Effect interpretation of redshift (the phenomenon caused by degrees of shifting of spectroscopic data from electromagnetic signatures of various celestial bodies towards the red or towards the ultraviolet part of the spectrum) is due to the fact that linear extrapolations into the past using redshift permits scientists to determine “when” the universe began. In the case of quasars, their redshift is especially important since it’s extreme intensity implies a maximum distance from us putting them onto the supposed “edge” of the universe (beyond which a vast nothingness is assumed to exist).

This assumed distance creates a certain “boundary condition” around which all other metrics of time, relationships and distances of all other visible objects are established. Imposing this bounded, finiteness onto a potentially unbounded, infinite universe has given big bang cosmologists the arrogance to assert in absolute terms that our universe is definitely 13.77 billion years old[1]. Before the universe exploded onto the scene in the form of the Big Bang from an infinitely dense and small singularity which contained all energy now in existence, these physicists insist that all that existed was an expanse of eternal nothingness and just as National Geographic reported in the opening quote, it will be this nothingness that we are destined to eventually return once more.

These big bang models have also established with certainty that in only 4.5 billion years the blue shifted Andromeda galaxy near the Milky Way’s Galaxy will smash into us[2] causing unimaginable destruction.

In his work Arp catalogues hundreds of instances of galaxies who exhibit immensely different redshifts which would suggest incredible distances of hundreds or even thousands of light years of separation from one another and yet whom are consistently bounded by material filaments emitting electromagnetic energy from all across the spectrum. The three cases of the companion galaxies NGC7630 and its companion galaxy taken from x ray and radio wave filters showcases this phenomenon excellently. Each galaxy feature vastly different redshifts implying a separation of over hundreds of millions of light years, but they are undeniably connected by filaments of gas and energy making this interpretation impossible! Additionally we see two extremely redshifted quasars which would imply a distance of thousands of millions of light years more [see figure 4].

During his years of research, Arp accumulated a vast array of quasars which tended to be found in the proximity of parent galaxies either within the filaments themselves connecting galaxies [as featured in images 3 and 4], or in the jet streams emitted by the polar axis of seyfert galaxies (ie: spiral) galaxies [image 5 and 6]

Figure 5 Galaxy NGC 4258 with two optically active x ray emitting quasars found symmetrically within the conic zones surrounding the parent galaxy’s line of axis.

Keep in mind, most galaxies feature some form of jet streams visible in various parts of the electromagnetic spectrum which also creates vast problems for big bang cosmologists who wish to maintain that galaxies are held “together” by a combination of powerful black holes internally, and vast arrays of “dark matter” and “dark energy” pushing all stuff together. The case of Centaurus A Radio galaxy (featuring filters of other parts of the spectrum) is useful to showcase the point. The fact that vast emissions of new energy is being created by these jet streams including small quasars should not be seen as surprising.

These anomalies demonstrated several revolutionary truths:

1. That high redshift quasars could not exist on the “edge of our universe” as mainstream scientists imply, but rather must exist in close proximity to the parent galaxy that birthed them
2. That among the thousands of quasars documented, the expected continuous array of various redshifts one would expect to find in a universe governed by randomness were nowhere to be found. Rather only a handful of harmonically ordered frequencies moving from higher (younger) to lower (older) frequencies in a discrete manner[3]. This harmonic character implies an organized state of the universe which favors order over chaos and also specific phases of the quasar’s evolution towards maturity as its parts differentiate and the space time field of the system matures accordingly. [see figure 8]
3. That since redshift properties were “intrinsic” to their respective galaxies and expressed a signature to said galaxies’ rate of maturation, a process of creative life rather than death and decay fundamentally organize our universe!

Describing this process in 2009, Arp wrote:

“When quasar-like companions are associated with a parent galaxy they tend to be smaller, higher surface brightness and show emission line activity. In quasars large energies are packed into absurdly small initial volumes. As they evolve they have no place to go except to brighten towards being galaxies and lessening intrinsic redshifts with time. The important point however is that the excess redshift companions are in the process of evolving into more “normal” galaxies and it is the numerical value of the redshifts themselves evolving by steps into smaller values”.[4]

When one treats the facts discovered by Arp seriously, we confront the happy reality that evidence points not towards a dying heat death as the ultimate abysmal conclusion of our death-dominated universe, but rather to a universe characterized by life, creativity and directed upward evolution! This is a universe which has more in common to the principles of open system embryology than to the closed system lifeless processes that characterized an engine or randomized “gas theory”, and the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) underlying the statistical logic of big bang cosmology.

A Fresh Look at Embryology

Just as astronomers began to discover the fascinating geometries of galaxies at the end of the 19th century, parallel discoveries were being made on the microcosm with new insights into the mechanisms defining the growth of living matter. Embryology was a relatively new field as two opposing schools of thought began to clash in Europe. One school known as vitalism found its champion in the form of the great epigenesist Hans Driesch (1867-1941), the other was called the mechanistic/preformism school led by the figure of Wilhelm Roux (1850-1924).

Both schools were fascinated by the obvious directionality and design expressed by the unfolding of an organism from a fertilized single cell all the way to becoming a fully formed organism.

In the field of embryology, it was more obvious than any other field that randomness, chaos and chance played no role in this complex yet harmonic process of growth, multiplication and differentiation of cells over the course of an embryo’s existence. What mechanisms determined how the parts would unfold over time as the embryo grew?

An elementary question during this time was: did the parts define the whole or did the whole define the parts? How could we know at what point the undifferentiated cell’s fate becomes sealed by its destiny?

The mechanist school of Roux assumed that one could know only what a cell would do a “moment” before or after one observes it, but that the pathway was assumed generally unknowable beyond this point. The vitalist school of Driesch on the other hand presumed that only the “end phase” of an embryo could be known, but nothing of its individual changes.

To prove his case, Roux began by burning one of the two cells making up a frog zygote which resulted in the eventual formation of a half frog. This incredible experiment implied of course that all information determining the fate of all subsequent phases of embryonic evolution were contained within each of those two original cells. If Driesch were correct, then that single cell should have grown up into a full frog. While this appeared at first to be a “win” for the mechanist school, it wasn’t long enjoyed, as Driesch formulated a new experiment whereby instead of killing one of the two cells of the frog zygote, he used a four celled sea urchin embryo cut in half using a fine baby’s hair which now resulted not in two half organisms as Roux and the mechanists had expected, but rather two fully formed sea urchins!

While these experiments contributed much towards answering some fundamental questions about the mechanism of creative growth, many other questions remained unanswered and still required a few decades for a new generation of scientists to tackle the problem with a fresh perspective. One of the most prominent of these scientists being a brilliant Ukrainian naturalist named Alexander Gurwitsch.

Gurwitsch Takes the Stage

Rather than simply side with the vitalists or mechanists, Gurwitsch took the best of both schools and added something extra by asking the question “how do cells communicate and harmonize their behaviour in one unifying system”?

Considering that the average human baby comprises approximately 10 trillion cells with 10 million dying and being born with every passing second, and considering that each cell has within it over one million molecular actions/second it is nothing short of a miracle that these trillions of cells can communicate and harmonize with one another, let alone “decide” when an undifferentiated cell should take on a function such as a liver cell, brain cell, heart cell, etc that will define its “destiny”.

Gurwitsch realized that the vast intercommunication of cells could not be accounted for through mere molecular activity or the motion of enzymes from one place to another in the body. Something more had to be occurring. But what?

It was in the period of rich creative development of the 1920s that Gurwitsch configured his famous “onion root experiment” which involved simply configuring two onion roots in a perpendicular set up. While one onion root grew downwards, the other was caused to grow towards it [see image]. When the stems came into close proximity, a 30% increased rate of growth was induced in the first onion stem and it was now obvious that high rate of young cell mitoses occurring at the tip of the stem were accompanied by some form of invisible energy emission inducing the increased growth rate, but what was its nature? What sort of energy was being admitted from one stem to another?

To answer this next question, Gurwitsch tested various quartzes that blocked all but the ultraviolet part of the electromagnetic spectrum and discovered that the increased cell growth only occurred when UV light was permitted to transmit. Even though no instrumentation would be invented for another 30 years sensitive enough to pick up these ultra weak UV photon emissions, Gurwitsch’s elegant experiment demonstrated what sort of electromagnetic properties were causing living tissues to harmonize!

Gurwitsch termed this newly discovered phenomena “Mitogenetic Radiation” with this idea created several new interconnected fields of 1) molecular morphology, 2) cellular morphology and 3) organismic morphology which all encompassed the concept of Gurwitsch’s “biogenic field”.

Despite an intensive counter operation run by the Rockefeller Foundation which attempted to discredit Gurwitsch under the scientific hack A. Hollaender who intentionally bungled his experiments producing negative results, small networks of committed scientists continued this valuable work [5]. Several decades had to pass until A.B. Burkalov, inspired by Gurwitsch’s onion roots, set up a similar experiment using two sets of fertilized fish embryos separated by a glass divider and a small opening- one set of embryos being slightly older than the other. Burkalov discovered that as long as the age separating the two sets was not too great, placing each set into proximity caused the younger eggs to speed up in their development greatly. However when the age difference was too far removed beyond a certain bandwidth, the younger eggs grew into malformed mutants [6].

Popp, Montagnier and the Schumann Resonance

Over the years, this research continued in the fringes of the scientific community with some of the most interesting developments occurring under the guidance of Fritz Popp who discovered a wide array of ultra weak bio-photon emissions from all forms of life[7]. Popp established that coherent photon fields are emitted by all cells and molecules expressing life- each carrying unique signatures and information from that cell across the entire body triggering an intricate array of chemical reactions necessary for the functions of living matter to endure. Working with Walter Nagel, Popp additionally discovered techniques which interpreted the scattering patterns of cell photons in order to adduce information about viral and bacterial infections.

Popp claimed that “every change in the biological field or physiological state of the living system is reflected by a corresponding change of biophoton emission”.

This work was amplified by the later work by the Nobel Prize winning virologist Dr. Luc Montagnier who discovered how ultra weak photon emissions were not only occurring in the UV range but also in the radio wave spectrum[8].

Montagnier went even further to measure the frequency of these emissions occurring from DNA which was placed in liquid solutions within test tubes. In these experiments which advanced the work of Jacques Benveniste on water memory, Montagnier discovered how the radio signals emitted from the DNA structured the water molecules in such a manner that even after all traces of the DNA were filtered out of the water, DNA-specific radio signatures continued to be emitted from the liquid solution and even caused a clone replica of the original DNA to be created out of random organelles, proteins and nucleotides when placed within the resonant solution. The only caveat here was that this cloning only occurred under the singular condition that the solution were exposed to a 7.8 Hertz background radiation in the laboratory.[9]

This 7.8 Hz background radiation is of course the same frequency which characterizes the earth’s natural electromagnetic environment between the ionosphere and surface of the earth itself. This phenomenon was first discovered in 1923 and was given the name Schumann Resonance for its discoverer Winfried Otto Schumann (1888-1974)[10]. As Magnetic Resonance Imaging developed in the 1970s, it was also discovered that 7.8 Hz happens to also be the same frequency that the human brain emits when in a calm meditative state. The electromagnetic environment shaped by the earth’s evolving ionosphere, magnetosphere and Van Allen Belts (themselves influenced by the growth of free oxygen over long expanses of time contributing to the ozone layer) not only “tunes” but is tuned in return by the evolving systems of life on the earth leading up to the most advanced yet seen: the human brain.

Re-Uniting the Macro and Microcosmos

As you can see, the flow of these discoveries has brought us from the macrocosm of galaxies birthing seedling galaxies in the form of quasars within a dense intergalactic and interplanetary medium of plasma (not dark matter or the nebulous dark energy which so many statistical Big Bang Cosmologists assume must exist by virtue of their denial of Arp’s discoveries). We moved from the realm of galaxies into the realm of cellular evolution, and the dynamic equilibrium maintained by the space time of living organisms. We then continued our journey through the electromagnetic properties and fields of life throughout the 20th century until we arrived back at the Schumann resonance defined by the earth’s Van Allen belts, magnetic field and the broader magnetic field shaped by the sun in our small corner of the Milky Way galaxy which is itself just one of billions if not trillions of suns being shaped by our galaxy.

Although it is not well understood, our solar system exists not in “empty space” with planetary bodies falling in random locations orbiting our star, but rather in a densely saturated ocean of plasma and cosmic radiations with harmonic least action pathways defining each pulsating orbit. While each revolution of our star the sun occurs every 365 days, our solar system itself is revolving around the galactic center once every 220-250 million years during which time our solar system passes through arms of the Milky Way and bobs above and below the galactic plane. These insights are inferred primarily from measuring the relative rates of radioactive decay in fossil records and the relatively cyclical mass extinction (and mass creation events) which have been archeologically uncovered in recent years.

Just as the living organism is a sort of universe unto itself defined by trillions of cellular interactions occurring throughout a life, a galactic body is made up of trillions of stars and many more planetary bodies within each system harmonized by the living space time of that particular galaxy’s phase of evolution from young Quasar seedling to a more advanced mature state such as the blue-shifted Andromeda galaxy which may in fact be MUCH closer than the 2.5 million light years assumed by Big Bang theorists.

From this new and healthier re-framing of the forces and principles at play in our living, creative universe, Andromeda’s blue shift is no longer seen as the rate at which this large galaxy is racing towards our Milky Way where we are destined to collide in 4.5 billion years… but rather becomes seen as indicative of its older, parental relationship to our younger galaxy from which it once gave birth (as well as all other galaxies within our local galactic constellation).

If you haven’t realized it, the two opposing cosmologies currently at odds with each other (open vs closed systems) strike on the very nature of life vs death. Where one system assumes the principle of death to be primary in a universe of decay and entropy, the other paradigm sees life as primary within a universe of creative growth and perfectibility.

So before you find yourself agreeing to the assumption that “scarcity” and “limits to growth” are absolute laws which define our choices going into the 21^st century and beyond, it were wise to look at nature itself from this standpoint and ask if it were not MORE NATURAL to leap beyond our mental and physical limits by making discoveries into our potentially unbounded, albeit finite universe and live as though we were made in the image of the creator ?

The author recently delivered a lecture on this topic which can be viewed here:

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Matthew Ehret the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , and Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow. He is author of the ‘Untold History of Canada’ book series and Clash of the Two Americas trilogy. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation.

Notes

[1] Oldest surviving light reveals the universe’s true age, Rafi Letzter – LiveScience, July 17, 2020

[2] We Finally Know When Our Milky Way Will Crash Into the Andromeda Galaxy, Mike Wall, Space.com, February 08, 2019

[3] The redshifts found among quasars do not occur at any randomized interval but tend to occur at specific quantized periodicities implying a higher yet-to-be discovered harmony which Arp termed “harmonic oscillations”. These periodicities are: 0.3, 0.6, 0.96, 1.41 and 1.96 which physicist Ray Gallucci discovered to correlate directly with the rates of decreasing density of the quasars on their transformative journey to becoming galaxies

[4] Halton Arp, C. Fulton, D. Carosati, Intrinsic Redshifts in Quasars and Galaxies, 2009

[5] Describing his visit to Hollaender alongside Fritz Popp in 1985, the eminent mathematician Jonathan Tennenbaum wrote: “Hollaender admitted having been deployed by the Rockefeller Foundation to Russia with the sole purpose to “investigate” Gurwitsch and his laboratory, bringing back the story that Gurwitsch’s experimental technique was allegedly “sloppy” and his results “unreliable”. Hollaender subsequently carried out and published in 1937 his own botched series of experiments, alledgly failing to discover any evidence of Gurwitsch’s radiation. Confronted with Popp’s detailed measurements of mitogenetic radiation using modern photomultiplier instruments, Hollaender admitted, without blinking an eyelash, that he “had always suspected Gurwitsch had been right.” [21st Century Science and Technology, Winter 1998-99 “On the Fate of Gurwitsch’s Work”]

[6] A.B Burlakov, Biophotonic patterns of optical interactions between fish eggs and embryos, June 2003 Indian journal of experimental biology

[7] Marco Bischof, A Tribute to Fritz-Albert Popp on his 70th Birthday, Indian Journal of Experimental Biology, vol. 46, May 2008

[8] L. Montagnier, DNA waves and water, July 2011 Journal of Physics Conference Series

[9] This story was told in full by this author in Dr. Luc Montagnier and the Coming Revolutions in Optical Biophysics, Rising Tide Foundation

[10] It is worth noting that like the quasar redshifts, the Schumann resonances do not occur in randomized frequencies, but rather in harmonic oscillating maxima of 7.83, 14.1, 20.3, 26.4, and 32.4 Hertz

Featured image is from the Public Domain

The Clash of the Two Americas

Vol. 1 & 2

by Matthew Ehret

In his new two volume series The Clash of the Two Americas, Matthew Ehret introduces a new analysis of American history from the vantage point that the globally-extended supranational shadow government that managed the British Empire was never fully defeated and has acted within the USA itself since 1776 as a continuous multi-generational fifth column managing every significant event and assassination of American presidents for the next 250 years.

Click here to order.

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Edward Dowd is a hedge fund “guru” and former equity portfolio manager for the largest asset manager in the world, BlackRock. Over the past two years, Dowd has courageously come forward to awaken people to the collateral damage of the COVID pandemic

A global financial collapse is a mathematical certainty. Dowd predicts the collapse will begin in earnest within the next six to 24 months

COVID provided cover for central banks and governments, allowing them to temporarily hide the reality that the financial system is crashing

COVID also allowed for the erection of a control system to shield governments and central banks from the fallout from collapsing food, energy and finance systems. It allowed them to restrict travel and introduce digital IDs and central bank digital currencies by linking them together with vaccine passports

Insurance companies report a 40% increase in excess mortality among working-age adults during the fourth quarter of 2021. Millennials aged 25 to 44 had an 84% increase in excess mortality in that same timeframe. Since the rollout of the COVID jabs, the number of Americans who claim to be disabled has risen by at least 10%, possibly more

*

In this video, I interview Edward Dowd, a hedge fund “guru”¹ and former equity portfolio manager for BlackRock, one of the two largest asset managers in the world, Vanguard being the other. Over the past two years, Dowd has courageously come forward to awaken people to the collateral damage of the COVID pandemic.

For example, in early March 2022, Dowd shared mortality statistics on Steve Bannon’s War Room,²showing Millennials aged 25 to 44 had an 84% increase in excess mortality during the fall of 2021.

An Education in Booms and Busts

Dowd became interested in finance right out college. He got a job with HSBC Holdings, the largest bank in Europe, as an institutional, fixed income salesperson, selling bonds.

“That was a five-year education in what really happens in the capital markets,” he says, “and everything you learn in the textbooks is garbage … I learned about Wall Street, how it worked and how it was incentivized.

Back when I was a bond salesman from 1990 to ’95, there were a bunch of scandals. Wall Street is basically a boom and bust operation. There’s usually a boom created by the Federal Reserve that puts money into the system. They don’t control where their money goes and Wall Street takes advantage of that. And usually it ends in fraud.

The scandal in the early ‘90s was the fraud with the mortgage-backed securities. There was a big Wall Street firm that went under because they had some trades in the drawer. Computer systems weren’t as robust, so some traders were hiding losses and that firm went belly up.

So, I learned the engines of Wall Street, but I wanted to get into the stock business. I went back to business school at Indiana University, graduated in ’97 and went to Wall Street to Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, where I was an electric utility analyst down the hall from the internet folks who were doing all the IPOs [initial public offerings].

Basically, fraud on the IPOs was at every investment house, and it wasn’t hard fraud, it was soft fraud. They just were not doing the due diligence that the institutions used to do. Before they would IPO a company, they would make sure that the company had things like revenues, and in the late ‘90s that went by the wayside.

So, a lot of firms without revenues and just ideas were IPO’d … Eventually the Fed [Federal Reserve] did what they do. They tightened interest rates, the bubble popped and a whole host of corporate fraud was exposed: WorldCom, Enron, Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks.”

After that bust, the Federal Reserve went back to printing money and, in 2008, the real estate bubble burst, resulting in a massive recession. I describe the forces at work — then, and now — in “Who’s Behind the Economic Collapse?” At the time of that economic collapse, Dowd was working for State Street Investment Research, which was bought up by BlackRock.

Asset Managers and the Global Cabal

To many, BlackRock appears to play an important role in the globalist cabal’s effort to usher in The Great Reset. Dowd, having signed a non-disparagement agreement, is not free to discuss his views on BlackRock, but he can talk about similar players, such as Blackstone and Vanguard, the latter of which is a similarly sized institution.

“I don’t believe they control these corporations [the companies they own shares in], but they have undo influence, which Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway has written about,”Dowd says.

“Basically, because of the growth of passive ETFs [exchange-traded funds] the voting of those shares goes to the senior executives of the firm. And so, there is some influence at Vanguard over some of the board votes.

Back in the day … most of the money inequities were managed by fundamental portfolio managers. I used to vote for the board but because we were so busy, we had like 80 companies in our portfolio, there was a firm called Institutional Shareholder Services, ISS, which would help us figure out the votes.

It was a software system that would analyze all the proposals and then tell us how to vote accordingly. And, if we wanted to withhold a vote or change a vote, we would. So, there seems to be a concentration of power in the votes. The vote used to be more spread out over many, many different people.

So, they don’t control [the companies they own]. Vanguard and BlackRock are agents. They manage other people’s money. But they do vote on some of the shareholder board proposals. So, they don’t get on the phone and call Bourla at Pfizer and say, ‘Do what we say.’ It’s more soft influence.

But I do believe, as concentration of market share, Vanguard and BlackRock are the biggest passive investment asset management firms. Charlie Munger had a point that it’s too much decision making in too few hands.

Again, I don’t think they run the companies. But where there’s a concentration of power, there’s definitely things that can go awry and aren’t exactly above board, but I have no proof of that. Its’ just when power’s concentrated bad things usually happen.”

Kicking the Financial Doomsday Can Down the Road

Lately, I’ve written many articles discussing the coming financial collapse. Worldly signs all point in that direction, and according to Dowd, it’s a mathematical certainty.

The Federal Reserve system, which is a debt-based monetary system, was created in 1913, the same year the IRS and tax system were created. The system of creating money through debt is inherently fraudulent. In the early days, banks would lend the debt and the debt would find its way into different areas of growth, which would then get overheated. Fraud occurred because money was too easy, but it was mostly free market fraud.

In the late ‘90s, corporate fraud took over and we had a 50% stock market correction. The Federal Reserve responded by turning on the money spigot: They lowered interest rates and the money found its way into the real estate market, which turned into an unsustainable bubble.

Real estate was being hypothecated through collateral debt obligations and mortgage-backed security. Wall Street levered up 20-to-1, 30-to-1 on their balance sheets to make money and thought the party would go on forever. But inevitably, the Fed started to raise interest rates and the whole thing collapsed.

According to Dowd, the problem with this bank fraud was that it was systemic in nature. The central banks had to step in and buy this fraudulent debt. So, this fraud still remains, today, on the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, and on the balance sheets on countless other banks. In other words, the fraud didn’t go away. It was just baked in and hidden.

Financial Collapse Is a Mathematical Certainty

“Then, governments, because the economy collapsed globally, started spending like drunken sailors,” Dowd says. “The last 12 years have been a ballooning of what I call the central bank-government bubble, the sovereign debt bond bubble.”

Who’s going to save that bubble? Who’s going to be the buyer of all that debt when this bubble finally blows up? Answer: No one. Many who are aware of the situation are just surprised the system has lasted this long.

It looked like it was ready to burst in 2019, and then, conveniently, COVID showed up, which granted emergency powers to all central banks. Governments went on another spending spree, printing money, and this allowed them to kick the proverbial can down the road for another two years.

“Here we are in 2022 and it’s unraveling again,” Dowd says. “And the reason why COVID was important is because the Federal Reserve was able to plug the hole in what was beginning to become a liquidity debt crisis.

They printed 65% more money. The money stock went up 65% year over year in 2020, and that was able to paper it over. Then, when the economy was shut down, it was an external shock, not in the internal shock, so when they reopened with all the money in the system, we had a recovery for a year and a half. Stock markets went crazy, credit markets went crazy, and we went back up again.

But here we are two years later, [with] inflation caused by the bad policies of the Biden administration, the EU, the money growth … also, COVID broke a lot of supply chains … Basically, we hadn’t had inflation in goods and services for the last 12 years. We had inflation in assets, stocks and bonds.

What’s going on now is the real economy is feeling the effects of the inflation, the bad policies. We’re starting to see the U.S. dollar go up, and the dollar is a reserve currency of the world. Over the last 22 years, there’s been a tremendous growth in what’s called dollar denominated debt … We have about $15 trillion in dollar denominated debt.

So, when you see the dollar going up, that’s indicative of a debt crisis because money’s becoming tight. There are fewer dollars out there. People are scrambling for dollars. And the reason why I think we’re imminently going to collapse is we’ve never seen a commodity inflation cycle with the dollar going up at the same time …

You can make the case that it’s intentional because the policies are so bad that they’re shutting down energy production. Before the Ukraine War, Biden’s first executive order on Day 1 of his administration was to shut down the Keystone pipeline. So, here we are. I think we’re at the end.

COVID provided cover for the central banks and the governments, but it also allowed for a control system. If everything’s going to collapse, wouldn’t it be nice to have a control system where travel is restricted, you can blame it on a virus, you create vaccine passports, which then get linked to digital IDs, and then central bank digital currency. So, I think COVID was a convenient excuse.

As we roll through time, I’m starting to think this was a plan. I don’t have evidence, but the fact that we’re not stopping what’s going on suggests to me that it’s a conspiracy of interests, and they don’t want to stop the rollout of these vaccines.

And the longer this goes on, the more convinced I become that COVID may have been a plan. I used to say it was a convenient excuse, but the longer this goes on, the more ridiculous this becomes. So, I think there was ill intent.”

A Question of When

Dowd believes the initial financial collapse will occur within the next six to 18 months, or at most 24 months. If stock markets become seriously unhinged and we start getting declines of more than 40% in the indices, the Federal Reserve may start buying stocks outright, which will result in a neo-feudalism system that will only magnify already existing discrepancies between the have and the have not’s. The reason for that, Dowd explains, is because:

“There’s no market mechanism to punish anybody for making bad decisions. Their bad decisions are bailed out by the central banks. The moral hazard is so high that if you just are a C-suite executive at a major Fortune 500 company, you’re going to become phenomenally wealthy and not have to really be good. You’re going to be one of the lords and the workers and everybody else are going to be struggling to make ends meet.

That’s what’s been going on for the last 12 years. The economy for the most part has been an economy of the big and those close to the printing machine … If you’re trying to actually create a small business, if you’re a worker at one of these corporations and you don’t get a lot of stock options, you’re not getting ahead.”

Why Dowd Started Speaking Out About the COVID Jab

Dowd, who lives in Maui, first got involved in the anti-jab fight when the mandates were rolled out. In Maui, you had to have a vaccine passport just to enter a restaurant or gym.

“I was suspicious of the jab from the get-go,” he says, “because I knew two things: Operation Warp-anything sounds like a disaster. Seriously. And No. 2, it was experimental, and I knew that most vaccines took seven to 10 years of safety data to be vetted before they were put into people’s arms.

So, I just thought everybody would be like me — rational — and not take it. Then, when I saw the propaganda machine, the social pressure, I knew something else was afoot, that something was going on, and that’s when I got super involved. I started going to rallies on Maui. I started meeting like-minded people and that’s how I got hooked up with Dr. [Robert] Malone here on Maui.

Now I’m part of the crew that’s trying to expose this crime. When I met [Malone] in October of 2021, I told him I had a suspicion there were lots of bad things going on with the vaccines … I said I would be monitoring the insurance companies and the funeral home companies, and if my thesis was correct, they’d show up in those results — and sure enough, they did.”

The choice to focus on nongovernment databases was prescient, as the CDC in recent months has started compromising mortality statistics. They’re supposedly upgrading servers and reloading all-cause mortality data, and now tens of thousands of death reports are missing.³

All-Cause Mortality Is a Crucial Endpoint for Any Drug

“I was using the fraud word pretty liberally in the fall of 2021 in regards to Pfizer,” Dowd says, and as soon as he saw that the FDA wanted to hide Pfizer’s data for 75 years, he was utterly convinced. “That’s prima fascia evidence of cover up,” he says. Now, as those documents are starting to pour out, at a pace of 55,000 pages per month, we’re coming to realize what the FDA and Pfizer were so eager to hide.

“The all-cause mortality endpoint, this is something we need to talk about. Normally, if you’re a single product biotech company and you do a clinical trial that fails the all-cause mortality endpoint, the drug does not get approved [by the FDA].

At the end of the day, if the risk is higher than the benefit, this thing doesn’t get approved. The all-cause mortality endpoint for the Pfizer vaccine, when they touted its effectiveness, they conveniently hid that data point from everybody. It came out in the FOIA request in the fall and, again, the trial was only 28 days.

This is also just unprecedented. So, in 28 days, there was something like 23 deaths in the vaccine group and 17 in the placebo group, which gives all-cause mortality excess of 23%. It should not have been approved on that alone. That’s fraud in my humble opinion.”

As noted by Dowd, one of the most remarkable counterarguments to come out of a fraud litigation case against Pfizer in recent months is Pfizer’s attorneys claiming that even if there is fraud, Pfizer cannot be prosecuted because the government knew about it. “Why is this not the biggest headline in the mainstream media?” Dowd asks. “Only those of us in the echo chamber that are on top of this issue seem to know this.”

In the real world, the all-cause excess mortality demonstrated in Pfizer’s trial is turning out to be on the money. The U.K., for example, has seen excess mortality rise between 10% and 20% since the shots rolled out. In other areas, and/or in certain age categories, excess mortality is far greater, yet the FDA and CDC are just going along with it, doing absolutely nothing to warn anyone of the risks.

Shocking Increases in Excess Mortality

As noted by Dowd, insurance companies were reporting a 40% increase in excess mortality among working-age adults during the fall of 2021. A 10% all-cause mortality rise is a once in a 200-year catastrophe, so 40% is just off the charts.

Before the CDC started manipulating its death statistics, that too showed all-cause mortality was up by about 40%, Dowd says. The smoking gun in the CDC data was found when excess mortality was broken down by age group. Millennials, those between the ages of 25 and 44, had a whopping 84% increase in excess mortality during the fall of 2021.

“They try to explain it away by saying, well, lockdowns cause deaths of despair, suicides, drugs and alcohol, and people missing their cancer screenings. Well, in a three-month timeframe, we went from 40% to 50% excess mortality in the summer, to 84% excess mortality into the fall for the millennial age group, which represented about 61,000 people between March of ’21 and February of ’22.

Sixty-one thousand excessive deaths represents a Vietnam War in one year for that age group. That’s what occurred. And look, these are ages 25 to 44. You shouldn’t be dying at that age unless it’s accidental or self-induced via suicide or drug abuse. And you can’t tell me that everyone decided, in a three-month timeframe, to commit suicide and overdose on drugs. Makes no sense.”

There was also a huge shift in deaths during 2021 from the old to the young, with younger people now dying at an alarming rate.

“At this point, we have evidence of the crime,” Dowd says. “What I’m shocked at is the fact that the mainstream media are still blacking this out. The good news is there seems to be word of mouth, and more and more people, because the vaccine doesn’t work, aren’t getting boosters.”

Massive Increase in Disabilities

According to Dowd, insurance companies are also reporting increases in disability payments for the first quarter of 2022, and both insurance companies and funeral homes are also seeing a continued rise in excess mortality.

“In the second quarter, insurance companies are playing games right now where they’re releasing reserves, they’re increasing pricing, so, it doesn’t look as bad, but it’s still not good.

The funeral home companies are still seeing growth above what they thought they’d be seeing. They thought they’d be returning to trend line and they’re still getting year over year growth. You got to remember their year over year growth is versus 2021.

So, they shouldn’t be growing. And these are same store sales, not via acquisitions. So, these are same store sale comparables year over year. And both funeral home companies that I looked at for Q2 grew same store sales between 2% and 3%, which is comparable to Q2 of 2021. It should be collapsing 20%, 30%, and it’s not.

Let’s talk about the disability data. This is super important. I think we’re going to find — as tragic as the worst adverse event, death, is — there are some things worse than death; life-altering disabilities that make your life unlivable, and those who live with you have to take care of you.

And the impacts to society are way worse than a sudden death … My partner, who was an ex-Wall Street insurance analyst, discovered a Federal database, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the good news about them is they don’t have any skin in this game.

They do a household survey every month. Every month we get the employment numbers that comes from them, and they do a bunch of different questions, some of which are in regards to disability, which essentially come down to ‘Are you disabled and/or is anybody in your household disabled of working age?’

For the five years prior to 2021, that number was between 29 million and 30 million. It’s now 33 million and growing significantly since 2021. And it really started to take off in May, June of 2021. I had some Ph.D. physicists who’ve done some statistical analyses, and they’re saying that it’s almost a four-standard deviation above the norm, and the slope of it, the rate of change, is alarming.

We’ve increased the disabled by 10%. Now, this has nothing to do with disability claims. This is self-identification. This is not tied to a doctor’s note or getting on disability. This is just someone saying, voluntarily, that they’re disabled …

So, the number of disabled could be way, way more. We’re just scratching the surface here. But the signal is the change, the rate of change, the standard deviation above the norm, which is four. Three standard deviations is crazy. Four is like, ‘WOW!’ So, this is what’s going on. If you ask yourself, why is there a labor shortage? I think this explains a lot.

And you multiply this globally, and they talk about supply chains and inability to hire people — this is definitely going on. I also think a large part of the inflation we’re seeing is due to people not able to work.”

Silver Linings

If there’s a silver lining to this mess, it’s that parents are waking up to the dangers of not just the COVID jab but also the childhood vaccination schedule as a whole. As of early August 2022, only 3% of children under age 5 had received the COVID jab.⁴ Many are also taking a second look at other vaccines, including adult vaccines.

This is long overdue, as none of the vaccines on the childhood vaccination schedule has ever been compared to true placebo to confirm safety and effectiveness, and no studies have been done to confirm that giving multiple vaccines simultaneously is actually safe.

“I think as this scandal collapses and unfolds, it’s going to remake a lot of our institutions,”Dowd says, “and I think that’s a good thing. I think people like yourself and others who’ve been out in the wilderness are going to be vindicated. I’ll never take another vaccine again, or a flu shot. I’m done. I’m out.”

Are You Prepared?

With regard to what you can do to prepare for the inevitable financial crash, Dowd says:

“People ask me for investment advice. I’m loathe to give it, but I will say this: If financial assets are going to collapse, don’t worry about inflation. It’s probably a good idea to have some of your portfolio … in cash, to take advantage of the blood in the streets scenario that’s coming. So that, when everyone’s selling, you’re doing what JP Morgan of old did — you’re buying. That’s not a bad idea.”

Aside from protecting your financial assets, you’d be wise to prepare for other related scenarios as well, such as food, water and energy shortages. Shore up supplies and figure out how to live in an “off grid” scenario, in case daily conveniences suddenly vanish.

Also prepare yourself mentally, emotionally and spiritually for what could be stressful and challenging times as the globalist cabal continues to push The Great Reset forward, which will require more “emergencies.”

“We got the midterms coming up. The people in power are deathly afraid because crimes have been committed, so I suspect shenanigans,” Dowd says. “They’re trying to get monkeypox going. That doesn’t seem to be capturing the imagination of the people. They may try, I suspect, good old-fashioned war. War usually takes care of a lot of problems.

The thing we need to worry about is China. China has a demographic problem. They’re in a demographic decline that started in 2020 … In the ‘80s and ‘90s, everyone said Japan was going to overtake the U.S. Well, Japan had a demographic bust.

They collapsed and they’ve lost two decades. China is just hitting that now. Larry Fink’s a good businessman, but he is going into China at exactly the wrong time. China is done in my humble opinion. It’s a contrarian viewpoint, but it’s backed by data …

They’re over-indebted and they’re literally imploding as we speak. A lot of these COVID lockdowns you see in the last couple months are nothing more than covering up bank runs. One of their biggest fears … is their own population.

As long as they kept people fed and getting jobs, they didn’t have to worry. If there’s an economic collapse, what traditionally most countries do is they create an outside demon that unites everybody. If I’m China, and I’m running the show and I’m an evil person, I would start something with Taiwan just to get everybody focused outside of the internal issues in China.”

*

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Notes

¹ Totality of Evidence Ed Dowd

² Lew Rockwell March 22, 2022

³ The Ethical Skeptic August 20, 2022 Part 1

⁴ Healthline August 2, 2022

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It wouldn’t be fair to say I’m outmatched. I feel more than outmatched. I thought that today I came to deliver some books for the young people; It’s a book about the history of the United States and the war. It’s called “ADICTO A LAGUERRA”.

In English it’s titled: ADDICTED To WAR, written & illustrated by Joel Andreas.  So I am shaken by the way I have been honored, for my work in favor of Justice and Peace in the World. You should know that when I lay down on the railroad tracks with 2 more Veterans and about 45 witnesses, what I expected was to go to jail for a year. I did not know that I had been designated as a terrorist suspect, nor that the train crew had been ordered not to stop.

So that day, when I positioned myself, I wasn’t worried about my safety; Three days later I woke up in a hospital and my partner from that time was next to me and I saw the flowers lying around the bed and I said to myself: Why does this cell have flowers? I don’t remember what happened, I have no memory of what happened that day, September 1^st, 1987. At that moment my friends and my partner told me what had happened, that the train did not stop.

So it was on the TV in my room at the Hospital where I watched the News every night, for about 8 days, the replication of the video of what had happened to me. I still didn’t believe that had happened. But I had a friend that day who had his camcorder, who wanted to make sure that when they stopped me it was recorded, and when the train didn’t stop, he actually dropped his camera because he was so surprised. So I didn’t order that train to hit me, that was their decision.

I first learned about the Revolution from the Vietnamese while I was there participating in the cruelty against the Vietnamese and their villages. I saw how the Vietnamese lived, how they worked and how they tried to live with the invasion of those invaders of which I was one.

I thought that I was a good boy, from a small town, who went to Mass every Sunday and was serving my Country. But I quickly realized that all this was a lie; a series of crimes against humanity every day and every night on all sides of the planet. So I started studying United States History.

I realized that all the history that I had been taught, beginning in 1607, was a myth, a story that was heard beautifully, that we were told in our homes, in our Communities, in our Churches, for 20 generations. A deeply nosy story.

Since I learned my lesson, my deep lesson in Vietnam, I came back home and I knew I had to tell the truth, after realizing that we have been doing that, the United States, all over the Planet for a long time, beginning in this Hemisphere and later in all sides of the Planet, more than Rome.

Although it was never my intention to be an Activist, I became one by listening to the inner guidance of my heart, which told me that I had to speak the Truth and seek Justice.

I found out that I was in a minority, but one of the first things I realized was that I couldn’t continue paying taxes to a government that was killing people in Latin America and around the world. What sense did it make for me to be giving money to an organization that is committing mass murder? I got rid of my car, my house, all my possessions, and I had many meetings with the Treasury explaining that I did not have to pay any taxes. I had more than a dozen meetings with Hacienda over a decade. They said that I had to pay all the money they said I owed them, and I told them: It’s not that complicated, I’m not going to pay for the homicide! I’m not stupid, like I was.

That was the beginning, for me, of thinking what are the consequences of my own actions, and the actions and policies of my country towards other people in other places. And all of my actions over the years, of civil disobedience, of blocking a gate, of going on extended fasts, were not complicated, it was simply responding to injustice.

Perhaps it was my upbringing in the countryside where things are slower and easier and somehow I wanted to replicate that in my actions as an adult. But my parents never understood me after I came back from the war; until they died they never understood what I was thinking and what I was doing. But once the toothpaste comes out of the tube you will never put it back. There was no turning back!

And in Nicaragua, when I came for the first time in 1986 to study Spanish, I had been there for 5 days when the Contras attacked 3 cooperatives and killed several peasants. And that is what the United States does everywhere: They kill peasants, they kill poor people. Unfortunately for me, I was so angry that, lacking the vocabulary in Spanish, I looked for people who spoke English in Estelí in order to express the anger that I felt for that violence.

It makes me very sad and sometimes depresses me that after studying Spanish for 10 months at the School I still don’t understand or speak Spanish. And I told myself, I’m not going to move to Nicaragua until I learn Spanish, but when I turned 77, I was so tired of the gringo culture that I decided to move to Nicaragua once and for all. There was no way I was going to live with translators and interpreters, but I wasn’t going to return.

The truth is that you are my Heroes; the Vietnamese are my Heroes. They are the ones who taught me to fight and work tenaciously for Justice. And Nicaraguans have the great fortune of having had a Revolution of which I consider myself a part, even though I am a gringo-nica.

So your Revolution is worth defending, and the United States would love to put an end to it. But your Revolution is priceless, it has so much value, I can’t even tell you how much the Nicaraguan Revolution has helped me in my own Revolution.

So, I thank you all for attending the event where I thought I was going to deliver some books, I did not imagine that this Grand Ceremony was going to be.

I have brought you 3,700 copies of a book in Spanish called “Adicto a la Guerra”. It is a book that was written and illustrated by Joel Andreas, a gringo who studied the Chinese Revolution and went to China to study it and get his PHD from it. And it is an incredible book, because it tells not the History of Nicaragua but the History of North American Imperialism. And in the United States there are some 350,000 copies of this book in English, which are being used in classrooms by good Teachers who do not even tell the Principal they are using it in their classrooms.

You already have a lot of experience dealing with bullying in the North, but you’re going to see things here that you don’t know. So I hope that soon you’re reading this book and you’re going to see the great sense of humor he has in drawing and telling the story, so you’re going to be laughing, as well as crying when you read that book. Here are 2 boxes of these books, but there are 35 more boxes outside.

I cannot thank you enough for the Honors you have given me, for this Doctorate, for this Ceremony, I cannot thank you enough. I have never felt that I am brave, for me it has been very simple, you respond to the Justices, regardless of whether the Government responds or not. It has never been an intellectual question for me. I have not required much intellectual understanding to do what I do, it is the most basic thing in the world. I don’t understand why others sometimes don’t understand.

Thanks, University. Thank you, Teachers, Administrators, Students. I will always be Nicaraguan, and I will be until I am on earth.

S. Brian Willson

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This was first published on Tortilla con Sal, translated from Spanish to English. 

S. Brian Willson is a Vietnam war veteran, renowned peace activist, human rights lawyer and award winning author, Granada, Nicaragua. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

Featured image: Photo of Brian Speaking on September 1^st, 2022, Accepting the “Doctor Honoris Causa in Humanidades” from the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN), Managua Nicaragua

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***

Without a completed safety study or expert committee review, the FDA issued a supplemental Biologics License Application (“sBLA”) approval letter granting full FDA approval to Pfizer-BioNTech’s COMIRNATY® COVID-19 mRNA vaccine for use in children ages 12-15. This was done even though safety study completion, on which approval should be based, will not be completed until May 31, 2023. [see this and this] Additionally, the approval was issued even though COMIRNATY is still not available in the United States. [DeMasi, Maryanne. “Is Pfizer’s FDA-approved COMIRNATY Vaccine Available in the US?” Brownstone Institute, May 22, 2022] Thus, the FDA has approved a commercial drug for children without appropriate evidence of safety.

There was no emergency to approve this vaccine without a full safety evaluation. The only vaccine currently available for American children is Pfizer’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) drug, a drug that is legally distinct from COMIRNATY® per the FDA. [ Johnson, Ron. “Sen. Johnson Continues to Press the FDA, Pfizer, BioNTech on Transparency and Politicization of Vaccine Approval Process.” Ron Johnson Senator from Wisconsin, Senate.gov, 8 Oct. 2021] The FDA has approved COMIRNATY® over a year before the results of the safety data will be known. In short, the FDA approved a drug for children without complete safety data and without the participation of an expert panel. Moreover, it approved a drug for children that is not currently available in the U.S. and has no known date when it will be available. [DeMasi, Maryanne. “Is Pfizer’s FDA-approved COMIRNATY Vaccine Available in the US?” Brownstone Institute, May 22, 2022] Therefore, children are still receiving an experimental vaccine with the original Wuhan Alpha spike protein mRNA, which is outdated and known to have serious adverse side effects.

The FDA’s mission statement purports to protect residents of the United States from harms, including those from medications, from the products that it regulates. [See this] So why did the FDA skip the standard safety steps to approve COMIRNATY® for adolescents before its level of safety was fully understood? To answer this, one must look at what has happened and what has been omitted.

Background

In a new low for the agency charged with keeping Americans safe and ensuring the drugs it regulates are effective, the FDA gave full approval on August 23, 2021, to Pfizer-BioNTech for its BLA STN 125742/0 mRNA vaccine, also known as COMIRNATY®, to be used in adolescents 16 years of age and older. The FDA issued a post-marketing requirement related to this approval. The associated Pediatric Study C4591001 to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of COMIRNATY® in children 12-15 years of age is due to be completed in May 2023, with final report submission due in October 2023. [p. 5.] It is noteworthy that the initial approval letter from August 2021 approved the use of COMIRNATY in children 16 years and older, despite increasing evidence of serious side effects, including myocarditis. [p. 5.]

Can we trust the data from this trial?

There has been extensive criticism of this trial since November 2021, and of the FDA’s reliance on it for granting Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for vaccinating young children. [Shir-Raz, Yaffa, M.D. “Serious violations and manipulations of trial protocol: How Pfizer obtained FDA emergency authorization for children.” AFLDS Frontline News, November 23, 2021] The efficacy claims, for instance, are based on data from before Delta and before Omicron.  Children’s Health Defense also sent a letter to the FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) explaining the problems with the children’s trials. [See this]

Are there not pre-existing protections for children with higher standards than protections for adult medications?

Yes. The Pediatric Research Equity Act (PREA) “requires the conduct of pediatric studies for certain drug and biological products.” [See this] It requires biologics licensing applications (BLAs), or supplements to applications, for any new active ingredient, new indication, new dosage form, new dosing regimen, or new route of administration to contain a “pediatric assessment” showing that it is safe for children, unless the applicant has obtained a waiver or deferral (reference section 505B(a) of PREA).

What does the deferred language mean in the FDA approval letter?

The FDA approval allowed for “deferral” of the usual testing process. “If a deferral has been granted, the pediatric assessment will be due on or before the date specified by the Agency (section 505B(a)(3) of PREA).” [See this]

Although the trial purportedly showed 100% effectiveness and that the drug was tolerated well, the safety of patients in the trial was not fully established prior to the FDA’s  approval of this injection for minors. All participants in the trial needed to be monitored for long-term protection and safety for an additional two years after their second dose. That is why data will continue to be collected until May 2023, and a final report will be submitted to the FDA by October 31, 2023. [p. 5.] So the approval for the Pfizer mRNA injection for minors short-circuited this process.

Under those circumstances, how can we ensure this vaccine’s long-term safety to our children?

We cannot ensure long-term safety under this truncated process. The trial that was used only follows the candidates within the trial itself, and the FDA’s only requirement of Pfizer, in this case, was that they present their own data. Thus, there is no reference to any adverse events that are subsequently reported in the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), which has been shown to only report 1% of vaccine injuries, a gross level of underreporting. [AHRQ’s Lazarus Report, 2011] Under these circumstances, there is no mechanism by which the FDA can look at the totality of the data in terms of harms to children over time.

What could the FDA do to provide safety during medical interventions, especially in pediatric patients?

The safety of a product should be paramount in infants and children, with proper observation and reporting of serious adverse events, and a longer time should be allocated for this to happen prior to any drug approval, as is usually the case.

The Pfizer pediatric trial does not end for nearly another year, and yet the FDA committee decided that completion of such longer-term follow-up did not need to be a prerequisite to licensure unless warranted by a specific safety concern. [See this and this]. By truncating the timeline of the trials and restricting the data observed, they did not look for and, thus, chose not to find safety concerns.

Call to Action

Americans must demand that the VAERS database be improved, and people should be strongly  encouraged to report adverse events directly into its online portal. The database findings should be reviewed by the VRBPAC, alongside any trial data from a pharmaceutical company. Additionally, no drug should be approved for use in children without fully completed, submitted, and evaluated safety studies over the appropriate length of time.

Potentially ALL American children aged 12-15 are affected, as this is a full commercial approval. The stakes could not be higher for the health and wellbeing of our next generation of Americans.

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Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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***

India is taking baby steps toward green energy. Two of India’s biggest business houses are spearheading it — Adani and Ambani groups. India has made several ambitious commitments at the Glasgow climate summit and two key pledges were that India’s non-fossil energy capacity will reach 500 GW by 2030 and the country will transition to net zero emissions by 2070. Sceptics doubt whether such timelines are realistic.

Meanwhile, the climate agenda itself has gone for a six with the  conflict in Ukraine weaponising energy security in a way that was unthinkable. In all probability, both green energy and zero emission targets will need an extended timeline, as the major industrial countries grapple with economic recession and high inflation. The momentum has been lost and the geopolitics of energy security will inevitably impact the calculus in ways not quite foreseeable. When an energy superpower such as Russia is treated as an outlier by the West, and China defers its climate dialogue with the US due to tensions over Taiwan issue, all bets are off. 

Meanwhile, natural gas, as a bridge fuel, is likely to outlast coal and oil in the age of global warming. Gas burns much cleaner than coal and this saves significant amounts of greenhouse gases emitted to the atmosphere. Europe calls gas “green energy”! Natural gas can indeed be a bridge to a carbon-free future, provided methane leaks are kept under check by installing reliable measurement equipment.

In fact, bp has predicted a strong future for natural gas, that by 2050 it would provide 22% of primary energy in their “Rapid” future scenario, compared with 45% for renewables. Above all, natural gas also manages to survive on the geopolitical stage, as is evident through the 6-month long Ukraine war. Simply put, it is a safe prediction that gas will stay fairly constant between 2020 and 2050, while oil and coal start declining in 2025 or thereabouts. 

We are now seeing inevitable price spikes as countries around the world compete for LNG shipments. The Asia-Pacific region is expected to account for half of the expected growth in global gas demand to 2025. However, the European Union’s commitment to phase out gas imports from Russia –- historically, its largest supplier –- is having global repercussions, as Europe’s surging demand for LNG draws in deliveries initially intended for other regions. 

On the other hand, according to a recent estimate in July by the International Energy Agency, Russian pipeline gas exports to the EU will fall by over 55% between 2021 and 2025— perhaps, in an accelerated case, by over 75%. 

This becomes an extremely favourable setting for India to work on a gas pipeline project from Russia. Significantly, last Tuesday, the prominent Russian daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta carried a report on the visit by the Russian gas Leviathan Gazprom’s CEO Alexey Miller to Ashgabat and his meeting with the Turkmenistan President Serdar Berdimuhamedov, which inter alia flagged that a pipeline project to send Russian gas to the South Asian region would be under consideration in Moscow. 

By the way, for the benefit of the uninitiated, following the transition in leadership in Turkmenistan in March, the Moscow-Ashgabat strategic axis has had a phenomenal makeover. On Monday, in Moscow, President Putin conferred Russia’s high honour of the Order of Merit of the Fatherland on Berdimuhamedov in a symbolic gesture signifying the Kremlin’s great appreciation for Turkmenistan’s gesture of spurning an overture from Brussels seeking additional gas supplies for the EU via Azerbaijan and Turkey to replace Russian gas! 

Gazprom chief Miller told Turkmen television in an interview that Russia intends to “continue large-scale purchases of Turkmen gas on a long-term basis.” Evidently, Moscow is mopping up the surplus Turkmen gas (after exports to China) to preclude the EU or other third parties from playing politics with it against Russia. In effect, it is a political gesture by Moscow that also reinforces the robust cooperation between the security agencies of the two countries, which is a vital brotherhood for both sides in today’s era of colour revolutions. (Ashgabat is not only a Caspian state but also has a 800-km long border with Afghanistan (which  runs from the tripoint with Iran to the tripoint with Uzbekistan.)  

The Russian daily hinted that Miller’s talks with President Berdimuhamedov in Ashgabat might have touched on an “overland route to Asian market” for surplus Russian gas, which used to be delivered to Europe previously. As the paper puts it, “And the way to Hindustan lies through Turkmenistan. There is a developed gas transportation infrastructure between it (Turkmenistan) and Russia.”

The daily cited an expert opinion that since Russia’s domestic market is already overstocked and the European market is “gradually closing” for Russian gas, and the supplies to China are being carried out anyway by both Turkmenistan and Russia, “coordination and joint activities for gas supplies to Pakistan and India no longer seem like something fantastic. Given the recent contacts between the authorities of the Russian Federation and Afghanistan on economic issues, there is more and more logic in Gazprom’s joint work with Turkmenistan on the implementation of TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline).”

The daily added that Turkmenistan will be open to the idea of Russia constructing a gas pipeline on its territory leading to the south for Russian gas to be marketed. It disclosed that Kabul is not only receptive but  negotiations have already taken place between Russian and Taliban authorities on building a pipeline to Afghanistan — and, an agreement is ready for signature.  

All this seems to be related to the recent visit by the Afghan Minister of Commerce and Industry with a delegation of officials from the finance ministry for weeklong consultations in Moscow in mid-August for supplies of wheat, gas and oil. Reuters also separately reported that talks are in the “final stages over the terms of a contract for Afghanistan to purchase gasoline and benzene from Russia.” 

Of course, a Russian gas pipeline project — instead of TAPI — is an entirely different ball game. Gazprom has enormous experience in building and operating pipelines. In effect, this idea presages Turkmenistan becoming an energy hub connecting the Russian gas grid with the vast South Asian market. 

Gazprom chief Miller told Tass yesterday that Russia has huge gas reserves for the next 100 years, and certain deposits will only be operational and producing gas by 2120! Miller explained that such grand panorama can be visualised today thanks to a new Russian gas production facility in the Yamal gas fields in northwest Siberia, which holds Russia’s biggest natural gas reserves, estimated to be in the region of 44 trillion cubic feet of gas and 550 million barrels of condensate. 

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***

The Biden administration Aug. 30 announced it plans to shift distribution of COVID-19 therapeutics to the private sector by January 2023 — despite preparing to extend its COVID-19 public health emergency.

Specifically, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said that it expects its supply of COVID-19 vaccines and treatments to be depleted in the coming months, and is now preparing for the availability of these products to transition to the commercial market.

This announcement comes despite the Biden administration’s purchase of 170 million doses of updated COVID-19 booster shots, which are expected to be available to the public sometime in September as part of an autumn vaccination campaign.

The Hill described the announcement as one which marks “a new phase in fighting the pandemic,” adding that it “would be another sign that the administration views the acute emergency phase of the pandemic as ending.”

However, HHS, the parent agency of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), indicated in mid-August it will likely extend the COVID-19 public health emergency for another 90 days, when the current 90-day period expires on Oct. 15. The public health emergency had previously been renewed on July 15, its tenth extension since initially being declared on Jan. 31, 2020.

Adding to the mixed messaging, the CDC Aug. 11 announced the reversal of its COVID-19 guidance, rescinding its previous distinctions between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. This was followed by the CDC’s Aug. 17 announcement that the agency will undergo an “overhaul” as a result of its “botched” response to COVID-19.

The Biden administration’s plans to shift the procurement of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics to the private sector were first indicated the same week as the aforementioned CDC announcements.

On Aug. 16, Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator, speaking at an event sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, said the government was working on emerging out of the “acute emergency phase” and moving COVID-19 vaccines, treatments and tests to the commercial market.

In remarks made to The Defender, Mary Holland, president of Children’s Health Defense, described the Biden administration’s COVID-19 policies as “incoherent.”

“It seems to me that these policies are at cross-purposes,” Holland said, referring to the Biden administration shifting distribution of COVID-19 therapeutics to the private sector while maintaining the public health emergency.

She added:

“[HHS] has asserted that there is a continuing emergency, giving the federal government the broadest of liability protections, and at the same time, HHS’ own CDC has, in a sense, walked back every dimension of their control.

“They shouldn’t be able to have it both ways. Either there’s an emergency and they do everything possible to alleviate the burden of this disease threat in the way that they have told us to do it, or there’s no emergency and they lose all of their emergency powers, including the liability protection.

“In this case, the Biden administration should end the Secretary of Health’s emergency declaration that still continues in effect.”

Maintaining the declared public health emergency may, however, be connected to the continued availability of the COVID-19 vaccines themselves.

As reported by Politico, although therapeutics such as COVID-19 vaccines were issued under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) granted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it is a separate declaration — under the HHS’ Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act — that allows the agency to issue EUAs in the first place.

According to Politico, the eventual termination of the COVID-19 emergency declaration will not necessarily mean that products currently being administered under EUAs will be withdrawn from the market. HHS Sec. Xavier Becerra will have to announce an end to the separate HHS declaration under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.

This is of particular significance considering COVID-19 vaccines that are “fully licensed” by the FDA, including Pfizer’s Comirnaty and Moderna’s Spikevax, continue to be largely or wholly unavailable throughout the U.S., with vaccines issued under EUA being administered instead.

There may also be political implications in the Biden administration’s intended shift to private distribution of COVID-19 therapeutics, and the CDC’s recent rollbacks of its COVID-19-related policies.

On Aug. 22, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced he will step down from his government positions.

In a recent interview with The Defender, Dr. Robert Malone, a critic of vaccine mandates and COVID-19 countermeasures, suggested that Fauci’s sudden resignation is at least partly motivated by his flagging popularity hurting the Democrats in polls, with the midterm Congressional elections looming in November.

In March 2022, The Defender reported that the Biden administration was following the recommendations of a prominent polling firm which advised it to shift away from aggressive policies and messaging concerning COVID-19, due to flagging poll numbers.

Remarking on the possibility that the Biden administration’s recent COVID-19-related moves may be politically motivated, Holland likened the government’s strategy to “Pavlovian techniques,” referencing an MIT Technology Review article published in 2020 suggesting what was to come.

She told The Defender:

“Pavlovian techniques are not constant pressure. They are pressure, release, pressure, release, freeze.

“So they’re taking off the pressure now. And I believe after the midterm elections are over, there will be an effort to reestablish more draconian measures, like at least social distancing, recommended masks, potentially reasserting discrimination between the vaccinated and unvaccinated.”

Dr. Joseph Mercola in a recent article expressed a similar perspective, writing:

“The CDC’s about-face appears to be politically motivated, to give the Biden administration a ‘win’ before the midterm elections.

“Post-election plans include ‘the biggest vaccination campaign in history,’ so tyrannical overreaches may later resume, even as mounting data show the COVID-19 shots are causing depopulation.”

However, Holland added her view that perhaps, above all, there is simply a great deal of confusion within the Biden administration regarding its next steps pertaining to COVID-19.

She told The Defender:

“I would be hesitant to ascribe too much coherence to any of this. I think the narrative has fallen apart because the shots don’t work and they’re incredibly dangerous. They don’t stop transmission or infection.

“The evidence that they’ve now stopped collecting data overwhelmingly supports the idea that these shots are causing all-cause excess mortality.

“I think it’s just an incoherent situation in a sense. I would tend to think there are some people in control who don’t really know exactly what to do next.”

According to The Hill, the Biden administration likely believes that “purchasing and distribution of measures to fight COVID-19 should [now] work more like the rest of the health care system,” instead of the government “playing the leading role.”

Speaking on Aug. 16, Jha said, “My hope is that in 2023, you’re going to see the commercialization of almost all of these products.”

In an Aug. 30 blog post, Dawn O’Connell, an assistant secretary of HHS, stated that it was always the Biden administration’s intent to shift away from its central role in coordinating the availability and distribution of COVID-19 treatments, but said that the process has now been hastened due to a lack of Congressional funding for the continued procurement of therapeutics.

As a result, according to O’Connell:

“As early as January 2023, the administration anticipates no longer having federal funds to purchase or distribute vaccines and will need to transition these activities to the commercial market, similar to seasonal flu or other commercially available vaccines.”

A lack of continued funding has also been cited as the reason why the government will cease making free at-home COVID-19 tests available to Americans beginning next week.

O’Connell said Congress could still provide funding that would facilitate an “orderly” transition to the private sector, allowing for “equitable distribution and coverage for the underinsured and uninsured.”

She also argued that “additional COVID-19 funding” from Congress is “urgently needed for a range of critical response needs, including the development of next-generation vaccines, therapeutics, and tests.”

Presumably, in preparation for this transition, HHS held a planning meeting with representatives of the healthcare industry, state governments and patient advocates Aug. 30, The Hill reported.

Hospital lobbyists have pushed for the “public health emergency” declaration to be maintained.

The impending transition of COVID-19 vaccine and treatment procurement to the private sector raised some concerns from public health advocates, who argued that the uninsured would have a more difficult time accessing these products.

Others argued that this transition may worsen vaccine uptake and make it more difficult to overcome “vaccine fatigue” and encourage the public to receive boosters.

Concerns were also raised over “issues of equity,” based on claims that “minority and ethnic populations will not be able to take advantage of the new updated COVID-19 vaccines as readily as better-advantaged people.”

The latter argument mirrors concerns that were recently raised in response to Washington, D.C.’s vaccine mandate for schoolchildren age 12 and over, addressing particularly low vaccination rates among African American students. The enforcement date of the vaccine mandate was ultimately postponed.

Perhaps in response to flagging vaccination rates among some minority groups, as well as white conservatives and others, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Social Science Research Council recently launched a new initiative, The Mercury Project, aimed at developing more “effective” messaging promoting COVID-19 vaccines.

Indeed, Newsweek reports that, according to CDC data, vaccination rates have lost momentum, as “just” 51.6% of U.S. adults have received a booster shot, and only 33.7% of those age 50 and over have received the second booster, which was first recommended by the CDC in March.

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Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.

Featured image is from CHD

Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 

Purchase directly from the Global Research Online Store!

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

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***

An Indigenous man known as “The Man of the Hole” has died in Brazil. He was the last member of his tribe, and the only inhabitant of Tanaru Indigenous Territory in Rondonia state, in the western Brazilian Amazon.

The rest of his people had been massacred in a series of attacks from the 1970s onwards, but little was known about his people as he resisted attempts to contact him. Known to outsiders as The Man of the Hole for his habit of constructing deep holes, some with sharpened stakes in them, he was filmed by a government team in 2018 during a chance encounter.

Tanaru territory stands as a small island of forest in a sea of vast cattle ranches, in one of the most violent regions in Brazil. Survival, together with organizations inside Brazil, campaigned for many years for his land to be protected.

Fiona Watson, Survival’s Research and Advocacy Director, visited the territory in 2004 with a government monitoring team, and wrote an account of the visit.

She said today: “No outsider knew this man’s name, or even very much about his tribe – and with his death the genocide of his people is complete. For this was indeed a genocide – the deliberate wiping out of an entire people by cattle ranchers hungry for land and wealth.

“He symbolized both the appalling violence and cruelty inflicted on Indigenous peoples worldwide in the name of colonization and profit, but also their resistance. We can only imagine what horrors he had witnessed in his life, and the loneliness of his existence after the rest of his tribe were killed, but he determinedly resisted all attempts at contact, and made clear he just wanted to be left alone.

“If President Bolsonaro and his agribusiness allies get their way, this story will be repeated over and over again until all the country’s Indigenous peoples are wiped out. The Indigenous movement in Brazil, and Survival, will do everything possible to ensure that doesn’t happen.”

Tanaru Indigenous Territory, Brazil (home to the man known as “The last of his tribe” or “The man of the hole” © Survival International

OPI, the Observatory for the Human Rights of Uncontacted and recently-contacted Peoples, has called for the Tanaru reserve to be permanently protected as a memorial to Indigenous genocide. Survival backs that call.

Note to Editors: The 8,000 hectare Tanaru Indigenous Territory is one of seven territories in Brazil protected by Land Protection Orders. President Bolsonaro and his allies have long campaigned to abolish these protections.

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Featured image: The Man of the Hole looks out from his hut – a still from the film Corumbiara, by the film-maker Vincent Carelli. © Vincent Carelli

Filling Gasoline Cars Could Become Cheaper Than Charging EVs in the UK

By Tsvetana Paraskova, September 05, 2022

Due to skyrocketing energy prices, Britons could soon face higher costs for charging their electric vehicles (EVs) at home than filling up gasoline-fueled cars, The Washington Times reports.

Julian Assange: Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere

By Stella Assange, September 05, 2022

Julian is fighting for his life – his life depends on not being extradited to the United States. This is a political case, it can be stopped here and it must be stopped here. So on the 8th of October, come to London to show your solidarity, come help free Julian Assange.

Big Tech Met Regularly with Biden Officials to Discuss What to Censor: Court Documents

By Matt Lamb, September 05, 2022

Big Tech employees met regularly with Biden administration officials to discuss what to censor, according to court documents recently released by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt.

The Last Lap to Freedom: Mumia Will be Free

By Noelle Hanrahan, September 05, 2022

As I drive Route 309 past Allentown to see Mumia Abu-Jamal at SCI Mahanoy in Frackville, PA, I know I am scaling formidable walls.  Just yesterday, I heard Maureen Faulkner tell Ashley Strohmier on Fox and Friends that she was going after Brown University for illuminating Mumia’s archival materials. This is a powerful development.  See “Brown University Acquires the Papers of Mumia Abu-Jamal” New York Times story 8-24-22.

Russia Vows to Halt All Oil Exports to Countries that Impose “Completely Absurd” Price-Cap

By Zero Hedge, September 05, 2022

It did not take long for the Kremlin to respond to the G-7 plan to impose price-caps on Russian oil, with Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak warning that Moscow will ban exports of oil and other petroleum products to countries that impose a cap on the price of Russian crude.

US Signs Deal to Give Israel Four Refueling Planes Needed to Bomb Iran

By Dave DeCamp, September 05, 2022

The Pentagon signed a contract with Boeing on Thursday to supply Israel with four KC-46 refueling planes that are needed for potential Israeli strikes on Iran, although the aircraft won’t be delivered until at least 2025.

Think COVID Has Stunted Growth? Try 30 Years of Conflict.

By Steven Simon, September 05, 2022

The New York Times reported this morning that the pandemic reversed 20 years of progress in reading and math among elementary school students in the United States. Commentators emphasized the dire effect this would have on life prospects for these children and, by implication, the American economy at an especially challenging moment in its history.

Digital Trails: How the FBI Is Identifying, Tracking and Rounding Up Dissidents

By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead, September 04, 2022

Databit by databit, we are building our own electronic concentration camps. With every new smart piece of smart technology we acquire, every new app we download, every new photo or post we share online, we are making it that much easier for the government and its corporate partners to identify, track and eventually round us up.

The Engineered Destruction and Political Fragmentation of Iraq. “America’s Third War against Iraq” initiated by Obama

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, September 04, 2022

March 2022 marks 19 years since the US-UK-led war on Iraq in 2003. And that war is still ongoing. Historically however this war on Iraq did not start in 2003. It was preceded by the so-called “Gulf War” in 1991 (The First War against Iraq). And in 2014, a third US-led war against Iraq was launched under the banner of Obama’s 2014 “counter-terrorism bombing campaign”.

The Indo-Pacific Command Is All About “Containing” China Through India

By Andrew Korybko, September 04, 2022

The US envisions India becoming a bulwark against China and functioning as Washington’s premier “Lead From Behind” partner in “containing” it, though it recognizes that it probably can’t sustain this role for too long unless it receives multilateral support, ergo the so-called “Quad” that also involves Japan and Australia and could unofficially be called the “Hex” through Vietnam and France’s participation as well.

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***

Big Tech employees met regularly with Biden administration officials to discuss what to censor, according to court documents recently released by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt.

Schmitt posted the documents he obtained as part of his and Louisiana’s lawsuit against the Biden administration and Big Tech companies for allegedly colluding to censor information on social media.

One email from a Facebook employee to two Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) staffers asked about setting up a monthly “misinfo/debunking” meeting, “in addition to our weekly meetings.”

A February 17 email from a Treasury Department employee to Facebook employees asked about setting up “potential influence operations on social media.”

The Deputy Secretary at Treasury sought to connect with social media platforms and influence operations on social media. pic.twitter.com/MZ46VuUw5X

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) September 1, 2022

“The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) reached out to Twitter, Google, Meta, and Microsoft following the botched rollout of DHS’ Disinformation Governance Board,” Schmitt wrote on Twitter, along with copies of the email. The board has since been disbanded.

Facebook officials also deleted a parody Anthony Fauci account on Instagram, after a White House official named Clarke Humphrey complained.

“[Department of Justice] identified 45 federal officials who have interacted with social media companies on misinformation,” Schmitt wrote, summarizing his findings on Twitter.

“Beyond DOJ, Meta [Facebook] identified 32 additional federal officials including White House Officials who communicated with them, and YouTube identified 11 federal officials including White House Officials who communicated with them, many of whom were not disclosed by DOJ,” according to the emails provided to Schmitt. “This is a vast censorship enterprise, and the American people deserve to see the truth.”

Beyond DOJ, Meta identified 32 additional federal officials including White House Officials who communicated with them, and YouTube identified 11 federal officials including White House Officials who communicated with them, many of whom were not disclosed by DOJ.

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) September 1, 2022

Others emails reveal coordination between Health and Human Services employees, including Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and Facebook, discussing a “misinformation health advisory” as well as the suppression of information on COVID and potential harms from the jabs. Twitter also hosted a meeting with White House officials to discuss “vaccine misinformation.”

Further communications show that Facebook is “increasing the strength of our demotions for COVID and vaccine-related content that third party fact checkers rate as ‘Partly False’ or ‘Missing Context.’

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) September 1, 2022

The DOJ is reportedly not turning over its communications as part of the lawsuit, leading to a further filing from Louisiana and Missouri.

“We have already received a number of documents that clearly prove that the federal government has an incestuous relationship with social media companies and clearly coordinate to censor freedom of speech, but we’re not done,” the Missouri attorney general stated in a news release on Thursday. “The Department of Justice is cowering behind executive privilege and has refused to turn over communications between the highest-ranking Biden Administration officials and social media companies.”

“That’s why, yesterday, we asked the Court to compel the Department of Justice to produce those records,” he stated. “We’re just getting started – stay tuned.”

The news adds further information to the idea that Big Tech is not acting independently as a private company, but rather as an arm of the government, according to Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer.

“These technology platforms, in short, have proven themselves to not be ‘private’ actors in any meaningful sense of the term,” Hammer wrote in response to the released emails. “They are now direct appendages of the state, and they must be constitutionally treated and regulated as such.”

He referenced Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s comments on Joe Rogan’s show posted on August 25 that the FBI spoke to his company about stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop being “Russian propaganda.”

The New York Times and The Washington Post belatedly verified the authenticity of the contents of the laptop, but not until after Big Tech censored the story and not until after the 2020 presidential election.

*

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***

“We know that Mumia will be free. We just want to delay Mumia’s release as long as possible.” Maureen Faulkner, at a Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) Lodge.

This is a startling admission. They know it and we know it: Mumia will be free. Freedom is coming and it is going to be a fast, harrowing last lap.

As I drive Route 309 past Allentown to see Mumia Abu-Jamal at SCI Mahanoy in Frackville, PA, I know I am scaling formidable walls.  Just yesterday, I heard Maureen Faulkner tell Ashley Strohmier on Fox and Friends that she was going after Brown University for illuminating Mumia’s archival materials. This is a powerful development.  See “Brown University Acquires the Papers of Mumia Abu-Jamal” New York Times story 8-24-22.

Mumia, the intellectual, the man, and the scholar, has a critical role in the discourse of abolition. And every accolade must acknowledge the demand for his immediate and unconditional freedom..

Bringing Mumia’s voice out beyond the walls to the airwaves is Prison Radio’s job. Freedom is our mission.

The brutality and banality of oppression in Pennsylvania prisons is tangible, palpable, naked.

On this visit, at least there are no snarling drug dogs circling my pockets for dog biscuit crumbs, and no one in the line to get in is turned away for setting off the notoriously fallible drug scanner.

Image: Mumia Abu-Jamal with his grandson and paralegal Jamal Jr. 

We were on a legal visit — in an open room, with a recording camera and microphone just above our heads: a blatant affront to the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The back of the room holds a fully stocked vending machine with cold bottled water on every shelf. But there is no water for this visit. A sign taped to the machine reads:  “Out of Order. Use the next one”. When you try “the next one,” it flashes “Sold Out”. There is no water fountain. The only food on offer is a few overpriced pork hoagies, which no Muslim can eat and which are deadly for an aging population fighting heart disease.

The cavernous room is practically empty of regular visitors; the online portal makes it difficult to schedule a visit. Only 9 men have visits today. Although there is plenty of room, we are all expected to sit still. Stretching and standing is frowned upon — god forbid you want to get up and walk around.

Guards tell me that photos are no longer allowed on legal visits.  This is both petty and unconstitutional. Obviously, these pictures below have power.

We know Mumia endures a full cavity strip search before and after every single visit. We know he is in his cell 21 hours a day with just 7 steps from the front to the back of the cell. His diet of processed food, with few fresh vegetables or fruit, is a violation of the 8th Amendment and ADA guidelines. After undergoing double bypass surgery in March of 2021, Mumia needs adequate exercise and healthy food. We work with Mumia to pursue administrative remedies, file Right To Know Requests, and document nutrition required for cardiac health. So much work for basic needs like healthy foods.

We continue. We plan, we strategize.

For 42 years, Mumia has appealed for a new trial in the 1981 shooting death of Philadelphia Police officer Daniel Faulkner. The current delays are a tactic designed to prevent justice and delay accountability.
On October 19th 2022 Common Pleas Court Criminal Division Supervising Judge Lucretia Clemens will issue her opinion regarding Mumia’s new trial.  At issue are the practices of removing African Americans from his jury and burying evidence. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is fighting to deny Mumia the right to challenge his conviction. Krasner has decided to defend a system (the cops, the prosecutors and the courts) that has literally victimized a generation.

Fighting to keep Mumia in prison is all about limiting exposure. It is about preserving the fiction that decades of mass incarceration (prosecuted by former Philadelphia police chief and mayor Frank Rizzo and former DA, Mayor, and Governor of Pennsylvania Ed Rendell) is not tainted by police and prosecutorial misconduct.

Their goal is to prevent the white hot spotlight on Philadelphia’s long and sordid racist history. Everyone knows that Mumia’s judge, Albert “I am going to help them fry the N-word” Sabo, is a stone-cold racist. Sitting Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Barbara McDermott told me, “Sabo is the most racist, sexist, and homophobic jurist I have ever met.”  Rendell (The DA at the time of Mumia’s trial) and Mayor Frank Rizzo, hand in hand, violated defendants constitutional rights at every turn. They knew what the cops were doing: everyone knew. Everyone still knows.

Image: Noelle Hanrahan, Esq, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and investigator Mike Africa Jr. 

The immediate question is will the current court order an evidentiary hearing; in fact, they should simply order a new trial. This moment must be met with strong and strategic action. The FOP have promised to try to intervene and delay any new court hearing. They have been emboldened by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which heard their frivolous Kings Bench Petition.

Part of our job is to keep the shining light of the public on this case, and its impact on so many others.

We are struggling to have the funds to print our mailings, make payroll, and keep the phones on.  We are poised to help the world hear this critical information. We rely on you. We just do. To keep us traveling to the prison and the phones on. You are a critical part of that small circle of folks that make this work possible.

We need you to help make these freedom dreams a reality. Can you give the largest amount you have ever given us? If not that, can you give double what you gave last year? Can you donate a building? Stock? We are so close. Your gift will help us make our next strategic, crucial, step.

We just got two cars, an Audi and a Subaru donated by Rod and Marcia. Thank you. But we need gas money and airfare ticket money.

We are in the final home stretch to freedom, and yes abolition. Please join us.

When We Fight, We Win, Cuando luchamos ganamos!

*

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***

I did this new video to give everyone an idea of what the Surround Parliament human chain will look like on 8 October.

Julian is fighting for his life – his life depends on not being extradited to the United States.

This is a political case, it can be stopped here and it must be stopped here.

So on the 8th of October, come to London to show your solidarity, come help free Julian Assange.

Thank you for your support,

Stella Assange

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Featured image: Julian Assange in Belmarsh Prison in 2019 (Source: WSWS)

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***

Due to skyrocketing energy prices, Britons could soon face higher costs for charging their electric vehicles (EVs) at home than filling up gasoline-fueled cars, The Washington Times reports.

The high energy and electricity prices that could undermine the growth in EVs uptake in the UK and globally could be a cautionary tale for what could be the future in the U.S. if the energy transition is pushed to accelerate without accounting for whether EVs and renewable energy sources could replace fossil fuels, analysts tell The Washington Times.

“For the U.S., this actually gets to an underlying fallacy of a lot of people that are pushing electric vehicles: they assert electric vehicles are cheaper because they assume electricity prices are going to stay cheap,” Kenny Stein, policy director of the Institute for Energy Research, told The Washington Times.

Last week, the UK energy regulator Ofgem said the new price cap for household energy bills would be $4,113 (£3,549) per year, an 80-percent hike in the energy price cap aimed at shielding consumers from price swings, promising to plunge millions more into energy poverty.

The chief executive of Ofgem, Jonathan Brearley, has also warned that another hike in the price cap would be coming in January next year, raising household energy bills much further, to above $6,952 (£6,000), according to recent forecasts. That would be almost double on the latest hike.

The price cap currently stands at $2,285 (£1,971) per year, based on typical use for the average household, which is already a 54% increase on the $1,480 (£1,277) per year that was in place between October 2021 and March 2022.

Many British households are already struggling with paying their bills, and they are accumulating more debt, too. The government is helping, but more help would be needed for the higher bills.

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Tsvetana is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews. 

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***

It did not take long for the Kremlin to respond to the G-7 plan to impose price-caps on Russian oil, with Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak warning that Moscow will ban exports of oil and other petroleum products to countries that impose a cap on the price of Russian crude. Novak made the remarks to reporters in Moscow on Sept. 1, according to Russian state media Tass, which came as Western powers were preparing to meet on Sept. 2 to agree on a Russian oil price cap.

“We will simply not supply oil and petroleum products to such companies or states that impose restrictions, as we will not work non-competitively,” Novak said, while denouncing the price cap as “completely absurd.”

“It will completely destroy the market,” Novak continued, arguing that interference in market mechanisms in a key commodity like oil would have a destabilizing impact on energy security in countries across the world.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen took the opportunity of G-7 agreement to a nothingburger plan to take a victory lap:

“The price cap will advance our two key objectives; The first, of course, is reducing revenues that Putin needs to continue waging his war of aggression. And the second is maintaining a reliable supply of oil to the global market and putting downward pressure on the price of energy for people in the U.S., in the UK, and around the world.”

But, echoing Novak’s remarks about a Russian oil export ban targeting countries that sign onto the cap, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters during a conference call on Sept. 2 that “companies that impose a price cap will not be among the recipients of Russian oil.”

*

As we detailed earlier, in what we are sure will be heralded as a critical step forward in the globally unified response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, G-7 finance ministers have agreed to implement a price cap for global purchases of Russian oil – a measure the US hopes will ease energy market pressures and slash Moscow’s overall revenues.

“We confirm our joint political intention to finalize and implement a comprehensive prohibition of services which enable maritime transportation of Russian-origin crude oil and petroleum products globally,” G-7 finance ministers said in a joint statement.

“The provision of such services would only be allowed if the oil and petroleum products are purchased at or below a price (“the price cap”) determined by the broad coalition of countries adhering to and implementing the price cap.”

No details were offered as to the mechanism for the buying-cartel but the stated goal set out by G7 leaders was two-pronged:

1. to limit upward pressure on global oil prices
2. to curb Russia’s revenues from oil sales.

To achieve those goals, the allies agreed to explore a new mechanism that aims to impose a ceiling on Russian oil prices. The idea behind this price cap is to permit countries that have not imposed import bans to buy Russian oil as long as it is priced at or below a predetermined price. The cap could be enforced via limits on availability of European insurance for Russian oil cargoes as well as shipping services and US finance.

While G7 leaders have not indicated where the price cap would be set, it must be lower than the $80/bbl at which Russia’s Urals grade trades today (a $32/bbl discount to Brent) and higher than Russia’s marginal cost of maintaining production levels, estimated at around $40/bbl to ensure Russia’s earnings are reduced while production is maintained.

A $50-60 per barrel price cap would likely serve the G7 goals of reducing oil revenues for Russia while assuring barrels continue to flow.

But it remains unclear how effective a price-cap regime would be, since for the price-cap to work, oil importers like India, China, and Turkey – which have significantly increased their purchases of heavily-discounted Russian grades – would need to agree to participate to access even cheaper oil.

“Quite extensive measures are going to have to be taken to ensure that companies don’t’ find ways around price limitations,” said Richard Watts, the managing director at Geneva commodities trading advisory HR Maritime.

“This was the challenge in Iraq’s food-for-oil scheme in the 1990s. The question is how does the G-7 police this?”

Furthermore, as we previously detailed, there are three scenarios as to what happens next:

• Scenario 1: Russia does not cooperate and retaliates – a 3 mbd cut would likely deliver a $190/bbl oil price
• Scenario 2: China and India don’t cooperate – the end of the European insurance dominance
• Scenario 3: Russia fully re-routes exports from west to east but loses pricing power, prices stabilize in low-$100s

There has so far been no reaction to the headlines…

Which we suspect reflects the market’s reality check that this G-7 plan has no chance of becoming operational as to implement a cap, diplomats will have to convince European Union member nations to amend its sixth round of sanctions on Russia over the invasion of Ukraine – and that may still prove to be tough. That package, which prohibits the purchase of Russian oil starting Dec. 5, included a ban on the use by third countries of the bloc’s companies for oil-related insurance and financial services.

“The price cap fundamentally lacks impact unless the G-7 can persuade the other main buyers (i.e. China, India, Turkey, etc) to sign up,” Christopher Haines, a global crude analyst at consultant Energy Aspects, said in an emailed response to questions.

“They are all reluctant despite the offer of exemptions from Western financial and shipping insurance sanctions. Meanwhile Russia will be determined to undermine the policy for both political and economic reasons.”

Russia said Friday that it won’t sell oil to nations that impose a price cap on its oil. “We simply won’t interact with them on such non-market principles,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call, adding that Russian oil will find alternative markets.

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***

The Pentagon signed a contract with Boeing on Thursday to supply Israel with four KC-46 refueling planes that are needed for potential Israeli strikes on Iran, although the aircraft won’t be delivered until at least 2025.

The deal is worth $927 million, and Israel is purchasing the planes from Boeing with money from the $3.8 billion in military aid it receives from the US each year. Of that amount, Israel receives $3.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing, a State Department program that gives foreign governments money to purchase US-made military equipment.

Israel has the option to order four more KC-46s in the future. The deal has been in the works for a long time, and Israel has previously asked the US if it could accelerate the delivery of the planes, but the US has denied the request. The US military would need to give up its spot in line to receive KC-46s in order for Israel to receive the planes earlier.

Israel currently relies on aging tankers for mid-air refueling, which aren’t expected to be capable of supporting attacks on Iran. According to the Times of Israel, Israeli jets would need to travel about 1,200 miles to strike targets in Iran, which would require either the KC-46s or stopping in a Gulf country to refuel.

Over the past year, Israel’s military has been focused on making preparations to bomb Iran. Israeli warplanes recently simulated launching large-scale attacks on Iran over the Mediterranean Sea.

The signing of the contract comes as the US and Iran are engaged in EU-mediated negotiations to revive the Iran nuclear deal, which Israel is strongly against. Israeli officials have stepped up their efforts to sabotage the agreement and are calling for the US to prepare a military option.

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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.

Featured image is from The Libertarian Institute

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***

The New York Times reported this morning that the pandemic reversed 20 years of progress in reading and math among elementary school students in the United States. Commentators emphasized the dire effect this would have on life prospects for these children and, by implication, the American economy at an especially challenging moment in its history. 

These are easy to imagine. The structure of the labor market increasingly demands greater computational and literacy skills; upward financial and social mobility hinges on successful navigation of this market. And administrative states, such as the U.S., require these skills in the labor force for effective governance, let alone national defense. So, the impact of the pandemic on education and therefore on the nation’s future will be profound.

This awful news should help Americans better understand the effects of violent conflict and economic sanctions on countries around the world. Their populations have been battered by the equivalent of terrible pandemics every year. When we observe political instability, a shattered middle class, high poverty rates, and poor economic performance in say, Iraq, it is easy to blame these conditions on intrinsic social defects.

While cultural factors might play a role, they are difficult to define and nearly impossible to measure.  Other, secular factors, especially the destruction of educational systems and psychological and nutritional effects on children who grow up to participate and shape their countries’ lives can be observed and quantified.

The Iraqi educational and public health systems have been under severe stress since the first Gulf War.  Following that short sharp conflict, the UN imposed sanctions on Iraq that compounded and prolonged the effects of the war itself. Scarcity, inflation, diminished administrative capacity, bouts of renewed fighting severely damaged schooling and children’s health.

The second Gulf War and the civil war it triggered finished what the first war and twelve years of sanctions started.  The proverbial lost generation is now responsible for their country’s well being. But traumatized by war and poorly educated, they are not especially well-equipped for this momentous task.  Scholars have documented similar correlations between educational shortfalls due to conflict and sanctions and adverse political and economic outcomes further down the road. The Quincy Institute has documented the demolition of Syria’s educational and public health delivery systems by war and sanctions.

As we in the United States cope with the longer-term effects of a single pandemic on American children, we should think about the consequences for war torn and sanctioned societies of educational deprivation for, among other things, political stability. The costs of conflict and message sending via damage to the minds and bodies of children can be extremely high.

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Featured image: Children who fled the escalating violence in the southern part of Iraq share a small house with relatives in Turaq. 04/07/2011. Erbil, Iraq. UN Photo/Bikem/Flickr

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***

First published by Global Research on August 11, 2022

***

Ordinary people in the West reading and listening to the mainstream media have been presented with a series of narratives regarding the war in Ukraine.  These are the key points upheld by the media:

• Apparently, Russia has been losing its war in Ukraine since the first days of the conflict.  The evidence to support this is the fact that Russia apparently failed to conquer Kiev and other northern cities in the first few weeks of the conflict. 
• During its failed attempt to conquer these cities, Russian troops have committed numerous war crimes due to the artillery and missile attacks that they have launched on civilian infrastructure and residential areas.
• To compound matters, Russia’s armed forces have suffered staggering losses, high desertion rates and its generals are a set of bungling fools who could not organise a booze up in a brewery.
• Apparently, it is only a matter of time before the evil Russian hordes are pushed back across the border with their tails between their legs due to a combination of Ukrainian bravery and Western weaponry. 

The picture that has been presented of the war in Ukraine is completely at odds with the reality of the situation on the ground.  Surprisingly, information that supports this assertion, which totally undermines the Western media narratives regarding the war, is provided by an article in the August edition of the United States Marine Corps Gazette.

Writing under under the pen name Marinus, a senior marine corps officer, provides an objective analysis of Russian military strategy since late February. It totally undermines the narratives provided by Western media and pro-Washington politicians.

Marinus observes how Russia has pursued three distinct military campaigns since the beginning of the war in late February 2022. In the north fast moving Russian troops never attempted to capture cities such Kiev or Kharkov, they never made any attempt to convert temporary occupation into permanent possession. Their whole purpose was to act as a ‘grand deception’ which led the Kiev government to divert large forces from its main field army in the Donbass. This gave the Russian army the time to deploy its artillery units in large numbers into the Donbass, secure transport networks and accumulate large quantities of ammunition for the long campaign ahead.

In the southern campaign Russian armed forces ‘took immediate possession of comparable cities’. This was accompanied by a thoroughgoing political transformation whereby Russian civil servants took control of local government and Ukrainian banks and cell phone providers were replaced with Russian ones. Alongside this, Russian forces conducted raids in the vicinity of the city of Mikolaiv. These raids as in the ones around the northern cities forced the Ukrainian military to send forces to defend Mikolaiv and Odessa that otherwise could have been sent to the main theatre of operations in the Donbass.

Marinus emphasised how these Russian raids in both the north and south of Ukraine avoided heavy bombardments of civilian areas which directly contradicts the propaganda of the Western media about Russian attacks on civilian areas. He notes that this attempt to avoid bombardments of civilians areas in the north ‘stemmed from a desire to avoid antagonizing the local people’ who supported the Kiev government. Marinus states that in the south Russian forces attempted to preserving the lives and property of communities who identified as ‘’Russian’’.

He observes how the Russian use of guided missile strikes ‘created a number of moral effects favourable to the Russian war effort’. Marinus emphasises how Russian guided missile strikes went out of their way to avoid collateral damage i.e. civilian casualties by their judicious use of military targets and the precision of the missiles. He does note that occasionally Russia strikes on ‘dual use facilities’ such as the main TV tower in Kiev did undermine the ‘advantages achieved by the overall Russian policy of limiting missile strikes to obvious military targets’.

In the east of Ukraine in the Donbass region Russian forces conducted bombardments ‘that, in terms of both duration and intensity, rivalled those of the great artillery contests of the world wars of the twentieth century’. Made possible by short supply lines these heavy bombardments in the Donbass served three purposes. Firstly, they pinned down Ukrainian infantry in their fortifications. Secondly,  they inflicted a large number of casualties both physical and psychological. The psychological effect has led many Ukrainian units either to retreat and abandon their positions or refuse orders to attack. Thirdly, when conducted for a sufficient period of time these bombardments have forced defenders to with draw from their trecnhes or surrender.

Marinus compares the scale of the Russian bombardment in the Donbass by comparing the struggle for the town of Popasna (18 March to 7 May 2022) to battle of Iwo Jima (19 February to 26 March 1945). At Iwo Jima US marines fought a ferocious battle to capture eight square miles of fortified ground. In Popasna Russian gunners bombarded the Ukrainian infantry in their trenches for eight weeks before they withdrew after suffering heavy casualties.

Russia’s offensive operations in the east of Ukraine have been criticised by many, both pro Ukrainian and pro Russian as slow and ponderous.  Marinus contrasts Russian operations in the Donbass with the war on the Eastern Front during World War 2 where both German and Russian forces made extensive use of cauldrons where enemy forces were encircled and then destroyed or forced to surrender. He observes that:

“Freedom from the desire to create cauldrons as quickly as possible relieved the Russians fighting in Eastern Ukraine from the need to hold any particular piece of ground. Thus, when faced with a determined Ukrainian attack, the Russian often withdrew their tank and infantry units from the contested terrain. In this way, they both reduced danger to their own troops and created situations, however brief, in which the Ukrainian attackers faced Russian shells and rockets without the benefit of shelter.’’

This point also counters all the triumphant Western propaganda which proclaims major defeats for Russia when Ukraine forces win minor tactical victories and Russia withdraws troops from a position. The Russian withdrawal from Snake Island being a good case in point.

In the final section of his article Marinus emphasis the stark contrast between the different types of warfare waged by Russian forces in different parts of Ukraine. They all formed part of an overall grand strategy whose primary goal was to destroy Ukrainian forces in the Donbass and free the Peoples Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk from Kiev’s control.

Russia’s three key objectives of the ‘special military operation’ the protection of the DPR/LPR, denazification’ and ‘demilitarization’ of Ukraine required ‘the infliction of heavy loses on Ukrainian formations fighting in the Donbass’. Marinus is at pains to point out that none of these key objectives required Russian forces to occupy parts of Ukraine where the majority of the population identified as Ukrainian and supported the Kiev government. Again, this is a point lost on the so called military analysts of the Western media. However, in the south of Ukraine the Russian campaign served direct political aims which were to incorporate territories inhabited by large numbers of ethnic Russians into the ‘’Russian world’’.

In conclusion this senior marine officer declares that Russia’s military campaign owes much to traditional Soviet models of warfare. However, he goes on to express his admiration for the unique nature of the current military campaign being fought by Russian forces in Ukraine:

“At the same time, the programme of missile strikes exploited a capability that was nothing short of revolutionary. Whether new or old, however, these component efforts were conducted in such a way that demonstrated profound appreciation of all three realms in which wars are waged. That is, the Russians rarely forgot that, in addition to being a physical struggle, war is both a mental contest and a moral argument.’’

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***

The American colonies have not stopped criticising the Hungarians for their rational approach to the war in Ukraine and yet another reason for an anti-Magyar hate campaign appears.  As a predictable country, not adventurous and going on about own business, Hungary becomes leading European centre of cooperation with China.

China’s necessity for Europe

Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd (CATL), China’s largest producer of electric car batteries recently announced that it will locate its main European plant in Hungary.  The investment value is estimated at EUR 7.34 billion, but its importance is primarily strategic.  China is a leader in renewable energy technologies (RE), thanks to its dominant position on the rare earth elements (REE) market and the largest share in the production of components for i.a. advanced magnetic wind turbines and car batteries. 

One can notice the importance of REE: examples of the embargo imposed by China on REE export to Japan in 2010, the Sino-American conflicts caused by subsidising solar panels production in 2012/2013, dispute about subsidies for the wind turbines producers, and previous controversies about customs tariffs for REE within China-USA and China-EU trade relations.

There is also the threat of supply shocks of REE used in the production of hybrid electric vehicles and some types of wind turbines, caused by assumed increase in demand on neodymium (forecasted 7% increase) and dysprosium (even 2600% increase!) in the next 25 years.  Demand for lithium used in battery cells is expected to grow at 674% by 2030.

This makes Beijing an absolutely indispensable partner for energy transformation in the Western Europe, covered by the ‘Climate Change’ pretext.  The pandemic turmoil, as well as the recent anxiety caused by the Taiwanese crisis, make European-Chinese relations extremely fragile.  Another slowdown or disruption of the global supply chain would not only blow up the entire Western energy transition but would also hit the consumer model of capitalism at the time when nations are not yet ready to reject it immediately.

In this context, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), as well as direct Chinese investments on the European side of Eurasia, constitute a potential emergency solution and Beijing’s indication of future regional centres of power.  And Budapest wants to take advantage of it.

Realism favours investments

Hungarians were the first in Europe to sign a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese on joint ventures within the RDI.  As a result, only  in 2021 bilateral trade increased by 34.5%.  China has become Hungary’s third in general and largest non-EU trade partner.  In May 2021 was commissioned Hungary’s largest 100 MW solar power plant, CMC Kaposvar Solar PV Park, built by China National Machinery Import & Export. In June 2022, the first European factory of the LENOVO concern was opened in Budapest, hiring over 1,000 local employees.

As it is typical for the Chinese politics, these are calm, even slow and non-ostentatious operations, but clearly determined to increase own presence and soft influence.  Another example is growing flow of Chinese students sent to Hungary.  Of course, 2,700 of them on the Hungarian universities that is still not a number much compared to the crowds studying in  developed countries of the West, but it clearly indicates the leader of Chinese interest in Central Europe.  The Hungarians themselves also see the partnership with Beijing as promising, and despite attempts to shake the mood during the COVID (“Chinese pandemic”) period, 51 percent of respondents are optimistic about Chinese activity in their country.

Globalists and Imperialists

Of course, Hungarian profits achieved thanks to good relations with China constitute “annoyance”  for:

• the liberal-globalist, precisely or not, but personified by Hungarians in George Soros,
• and the Anglo-Saxon military-industrial complex, aimed at eliminating the Chinese threat even with a global war.

So, from the one side there are standard voices of condemnation that Budapest hesitates “numerous violations of human rights in China, while the Americans keep pointing out the Hungarian “Trojan horse”, still in hope that it is possible to discipline Victor Orbán.

The Carnegie Endwoment for International Peace, one of the significant globalist think-tanks recommends:

“The United States should not shy away from pushing the EU and key member states (especially Germany, which is Hungary’s most important trading partner) to impose greater pressure on Orbán, including the potential use of sanction mechanisms against officials and businessmen engaged in local corruption schemes involving China. Brussels should consider applying the EU’s rule of law conditionality regime”.

Washington officially recognises that Chinese progress in Europe is not yet very dangerous and the Sino-Hungarian relations are not overwhelming in absolute numbers, but at the same time they urge that this is the best or even the very last moment to blackmail the Hungarian prime minister.

Budapest would be faced with a threat of complete cut-off from European financing in case of further cooperation with Beijing.  Well, typical friendly manner within Euro-Atlantic, ‘democratic and liberal alliances’…

The New Global Game of Thrones and how to earn on it

Then, the most important question for Eastern Europe is whether Western European funds and Anglo-Saxon diplomatic-military supervision could be replaced by Chinese loans and direct investments, like in Africa and South America.

That is also the Globalists’ and Atlantists’ most horrifying nightmare.  Russia’s attractiveness for Europe is limited to its position of energy supplier what should be dealt with by the Western ‘Climate strategy’.  However, China, with its capital surplus and dominant industrial position, is a viable alternative to the financial capitalism New World Order.  The competition of global centres will therefore accelerate and the wise, even small ones, will be able to earn on it.

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Konrad Rękas is a renowned geopolitical analyst and a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: China’s rare earths (Source: asiafinancial.com)

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***

They told you they needed just three weeks to flatten the curve.

They lied.

They told you if you stayed at home that it would protect the Health Service.

They lied. (Source)

They told you millions around the world were dying of Covid-19.

They lied. (Source)

They told you that if you got the Covid vaccine, you wouldn’t catch Covid-19.

They lied. (Source)

Then you were told the Covid vaccines make you less likely to be infected with or transmit Covid-19.

The lied. (Source)

They told you that the Covid vaccines are safe and effective.

They lied. (Source)

They told you that the contents of the Covid vaccines stay at the injection site.

They lied. (Source)

They told you that the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines do not interfere with your DNA.

They lied. (Source)

Now they’re trying to tell you that the Covid-19 vaccines lose effectiveness over time and that you need repeat booster shots.

But they are lying yet again. The Covid-19 vaccines do not lose effectiveness. Instead, we are witnessing the degradation of the immune system of most people who have had more than one dose of the Covid-19 injection. In other words, the Covid-19 injections cause a new form of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. and we can prove it…

To fathom how one could possibly come to the conclusion that the Covid-19 vaccines severely damage the natural immune system and effectively cause Acquired Immunodeficiency syndrome, one needs to understand why it is that official government data shows the vaccinated population are more likely to be infected than the unvaccinated population.

One also needs to understand that once authorities realised the data showed things were getting worse for the vaccinated population by the week, they suspiciously and conveniently decided it was in the public interest to stop publishing the data altogether.

The following table has been stitched together from the case-rate tables found in the Week 3, Week 7 and Week 13 UK Health Security Agency Vaccine Surveillance Reports –

Source

The following chart has been created using the figures contained in the above table –

The above shows a rapid improvement in case rates among the unvaccinated population in every single age group over three months, and a frightening rise in case rates per 100,000 among triple vaccinated individuals in every single age group over a period of three months.

In fact, the difference between the two groups was so significant that by week 12 of 2022, real-world vaccine effectiveness was proving to be as low as minus-391% among 60 to 69-year-olds. This had fallen from an already concerning effectiveness of minus-104.7% among the same age group by week 2 of 2022.

Pfizer’s Formula: Unvaccinated Case Rate – Vaccinated Case Rate / Unvaccinated Case Rate x 100 = Vaccine Effectiveness

But let us be absolutely clear. Despite a mass media campaign to have you believe getting a booster is essential to “top up your immunity” due to declining effectiveness, it is actually impossible for vaccine effectiveness to wane when it comes to the Covid-19 injections.

The Covid-19 vaccine is supposed to work by injecting mRNA into your body, which then invades your cells and instructs them to make the spike protein found on the alleged SARS-CoV-2 virus. Once your body has produced millions of spike proteins, your immune system is supposed to get to work, rid the body of the spike proteins, and then remember to release those same antibodies if you ever encounter the actual alleged SARS-CoV-2 virus.

So, when the authorities state that the effectiveness of the vaccines weaken over time, what they really mean is that the performance of your immune system weakens over time.

The problem we are seeing in the real world data is that the immune system isn’t returning to the natural state seen among most of the unvaccinated population. If it was we would be seeing vaccine effectiveness close to 0%, not a shocking minus-391%.

The week 13 UKHSA Vaccine Surveillance report was the final report published containing data on Covid-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths by vaccination status. UKHSA claimed this was because the UK Government had decided to put an end to free mass Covid-19 testing from April 1st.

But we imagine it was actually because of the horrific case-rate figures among triple vaccinated and the horrific hospitalisation and death rate figures among the fully vaccinated.

The following chart shows the Covid-19 hospitalisation rate per 100,000 individuals by vaccination status between 28th Feb and 27th March 22. The unvaccinated case rate has been taken from page 45 of the UKHSA Vaccine Surveillance Report – Week 13 – 2022, and the double vaccinated case rate has been calculated with the number of hospitalisations provided on page 41 of the same report –

The rates per 100,000 were highest among the fully vaccinated in every age group except for the 18-29-year-olds. This data proved that all double vaccinated people aged 30 and over were more likely to be hospitalised with Covid-19 than unvaccinated people.

The following chart shows the Covid-19 death rate per 100,000 individuals by vaccination status between 28th Feb and 27th March 22. The unvaccinated case rate has been taken from page 45 of the UKHSA Vaccine Surveillance Report – Week 13 – 2022, and the double vaccinated case rate has been calculated with the number of deaths provided on page 44 of the same report –

The death-rate per 100,000 was highest among the fully vaccinated in all age groups excluding the 30-39 year olds where the death rate was the same as the unvaccinated, and the 18-29-year-olds where the death rate was lower. This data proved that all double vaccinated people aged 40 and over were more likely to die of Covid-19 than unvaccinated people.

Fast forward to the end of May though, and we can actually see that mortality rates per 100,000 are lowest among the unvaccinated in every single age group courtesy of data published by the UK’s Office for National Statistics which can be viewed here.

The following chart shows the monthly age-standardised mortality rates by vaccination status among each age group for Non-Covid-19 deaths in England between January and May 2022, the figures can be found in table 2 of the recently published dataset –

These are age-standardised figures. There is no other conclusion that can be found for the fact mortality rates per 100,000 are the lowest among the unvaccinated other than that the Covid-19 injections are killing people, and this is because they are causing recipients to develop Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome.

But whilst the evidence points to severe immune system degradation and a new form of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, it still doesn’t answer the exact process that is causing this to happen.

One potential scenario could be as follows.

Messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is a single-stranded molecule of RNA that corresponds to the genetic sequence of a gene, and is read by a ribosome in the process of synthesizing a protein.

Covid-19 injections contain mRNA that invades the body’s cells and instructor them to create the spike protein of the alleged SARS-CoV-2 virus. Millions of these spike proteins are then released from cells and the immune system allegedly recognises it as a virus/foreign body and believes the body is under attack.

It then fights the spike protein, creating antibodies to “kill” it and remembers to do so if it encounters the spike protein/SARS-CoV-2 virus again.

But what if the process never ends? What if the mRNA that has been injected into the body constantly invades cells and instructs them to create millions of spike proteins?

Authorities claimed that the Covid-19 vaccine remains at the injection site. But they lied, and the science proves otherwise.

It actually accumulates in every single organ of the body according to a study conducted on behalf of Pfizer.

Source

The problem with the study is that after 48 hours they stopped observing the accumulation. So how does anybody know if that accumulation reverses? How do they know it doesn’t go on for months or even years? Until they can prove otherwise they are only guessing.

If the mRNA that has been injected into the body constantly invades cells and instructs them to create millions of spike proteins over a long period of time then this is one more constant thing that the immune system has to do. But then they tell you to get a booster jab, and then a fourth dose. Now the body is constantly creating millions more spike proteins and working the immune system even harder.

Whilst the body is busy battling millions of spike proteins, it’s unable to fight off other opportunist infections or cancer cells. This is similar to what occurs with HIV. HIV infects and destroys immune system cells, making it hard to fight off other diseases.

When HIV has severely weakened the immune system it can lead to Acquired Immunedeficiency Syndrome. But it isn’t the HIV virus that kills people infected with it, it is the opportunistic infections and cancers that the immune system can no longer fight off.

So this theory would make perfect sense as to why official Government data shows the triple vaccinated are more likely to be infected with Covid-19 and transmit Covid-19 than the unvaccinated.

It would make perfect sense as to why the fully vaccinated are more likely to be hospitalised and die of Covid-19 than the unvaccinated.

And it would make perfect sense as to why age-standardised mortality rates per 100,000 are lowest among the unvaccinated in all age groups.

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***

“Americans deserve the freedom to choose a life without surveillance and the government regulation that would make that possible. While we continue to believe the sentiment, we fear it may soon be obsolete or irrelevant. We deserve that freedom, but the window to achieve it narrows a little more each day. If we don’t act now, with great urgency, it may very well close for good.”—Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson, New York Times

First published on March 17, 2021

Databit by databit, we are building our own electronic concentration camps.

With every new smart piece of smart technology we acquire, every new app we download, every new photo or post we share online, we are making it that much easier for the government and its corporate partners to identify, track and eventually round us up.

Saint or sinner, it doesn’t matter because we’re all being swept up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.

This is what it means to live in a suspect society.

The government’s efforts to round up those who took part in the Capitol riots shows exactly how vulnerable we all are to the menace of a surveillance state that aspires to a God-like awareness of our lives.

Relying on selfies, social media posts, location data, geotagged photos, facial recognition, surveillance cameras and crowdsourcing, government agents are compiling a massive data trove on anyone and everyone who may have been anywhere in the vicinity of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The amount of digital information is staggering: 15,000 hours of surveillance and body-worn camera footage; 1,600 electronic devices; 270,000 digital media tips; at least 140,000 photos and videos; and about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones.

And that’s just what we know.

More than 300 individuals from 40 states have already been charged and another 280 arrested in connection with the events of January 6. As many as 500 others are still being hunted by government agents.

Also included in this data roundup are individuals who may have had nothing to do with the riots but whose cell phone location data identified them as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Forget about being innocent until proven guilty.

In a suspect society such as ours, the burden of proof has been flipped: now, you start off guilty and have to prove your innocence.

For instance, you didn’t even have to be involved in the Capitol riots to qualify for a visit from the FBI: investigators have reportedly been tracking—and questioning—anyone whose cell phones connected to wi-fi or pinged cell phone towers near the Capitol. One man, who had gone out for a walk with his daughters only to end up stranded near the Capitol crowds, actually had FBI agents show up at his door days later. Using Google Maps, agents were able to pinpoint exactly where they were standing and for how long.

All of the many creepy, calculating, invasive investigative and surveillance tools the government has acquired over the years are on full display right now in the FBI’s ongoing efforts to bring the rioters to “justice.”

FBI agents are matching photos with drivers’ license pictures; tracking movements by way of license plate toll readers; and zooming in on physical identifying marks such as moles, scars and tattoos, as well as brands, logos and symbols on clothing and backpacks. They’re poring over hours of security and body camera footage; scouring social media posts; triangulating data from cellphone towers and WiFi signals; layering facial recognition software on top of that; and then cross-referencing footage with public social media posts.

It’s not just the FBI on the hunt, however.

They’ve enlisted the help of volunteer posses of private citizens, such as Deep State Dogs, to collaborate on the grunt work. As Dinah Voyles Pulver reports, once Deep State Dogs locates a person and confirms their identity, they put a package together with the person’s name, address, phone number and several images and send it to the FBI.

According to USA Today, the FBI is relying on the American public and volunteer cybersleuths to help bolster its cases.

This takes See Something, Say Something snitching programs to a whole new level.

The lesson to be learned: Big Brother, Big Sister and all of their friends are watching you.

They see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

Simply liking or sharing this article on Facebook, retweeting it on Twitter, or merely reading it or any other articles related to government wrongdoing, surveillance, police misconduct or civil liberties might be enough to get you categorized as a particular kind of person with particular kinds of interests that reflect a particular kind of mindset that might just lead you to engage in a particular kinds of activities and, therefore, puts you in the crosshairs of a government investigation as a potential troublemaker a.k.a. domestic extremist.

Chances are, as the Washington Post reports, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.

In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.

The government has the know-how.

It took days, if not hours or minutes, for the FBI to begin the process of identifying, tracking and rounding up those suspected of being part of the Capitol riots.

Imagine how quickly government agents could target and round up any segment of society they wanted to based on the digital trails and digital footprints we leave behind.

Of course, the government has been hard at work for years acquiring these totalitarian powers.

Long before the January 6 riots, the FBI was busily amassing the surveillance tools necessary to monitor social media posts, track and identify individuals using cell phone signals and facial recognition technology, and round up “suspects” who may be of interest to the government for one reason or another.

As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.

All it needs is the data, which more than 90% of young adults and 65% of American adults are happy to provide.

When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

As for the Fourth Amendment and its prohibitions on warrantless searches and invasions of privacy without probable cause, those safeguards have been rendered all but useless by legislative end-runs, judicial justifications, and corporate collusions.

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers.

Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, social media posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

For example, police have been using Stingray devices mounted on their cruisers to intercept cell phone calls and text messages without court-issued search warrants. Doppler radar devices, which can detect human breathing and movement within a home, are already being employed by the police to deliver arrest warrants.

License plate readers, yet another law enforcement spying device made possible through funding by the Department of Homeland Security, can record up to 1800 license plates per minute. Moreover, these surveillance cameras can also photograph those inside a moving car. Reports indicate that the Drug Enforcement Administration has been using the cameras in conjunction with facial recognition software to build a “vehicle surveillance database” of the nation’s cars, drivers and passengers.

Sidewalk and “public space” cameras, sold to gullible communities as a sure-fire means of fighting crime, is yet another DHS program that is blanketing small and large towns alike with government-funded and monitored surveillance cameras. It’s all part of a public-private partnership that gives government officials access to all manner of surveillance cameras, on sidewalks, on buildings, on buses, even those installed on private property.

Couple these surveillance cameras with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology and you have the makings of “pre-crime” cameras, which scan your mannerisms, compare you to pre-set parameters for “normal” behavior, and alert the police if you trigger any computerized alarms as being “suspicious.”

State and federal law enforcement agencies are pushing to expand their biometric and DNA databases by requiring that anyone accused of a misdemeanor have their DNA collected and catalogued. However, technology is already available that allows the government to collect biometrics such as fingerprints from a distance, without a person’s cooperation or knowledge. One system can actually scan and identify a fingerprint from nearly 20 feet away.

Developers are hard at work on a radar gun that can actually show if you or someone in your car is texting. Another technology being developed, dubbed a “textalyzer” device, would allow police to determine whether someone was driving while distracted. Refusing to submit one’s phone to testing could result in a suspended or revoked driver’s license.

It’s a sure bet that anything the government welcomes (and funds) too enthusiastically is bound to be a Trojan horse full of nasty, invasive surprises.

Case in point: police body cameras. Hailed as the easy fix solution to police abuses, these body cameras—made possible by funding from the Department of Justice—turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras. Of course, if you try to request access to that footage, you’ll find yourself being led a merry and costly chase through miles of red tape, bureaucratic footmen and unhelpful courts.

The “internet of things” refers to the growing number of “smart” appliances and electronic devices now connected to the internet and capable of interacting with each other and being controlled remotely. These range from thermostats and coffee makers to cars and TVs. Of course, there’s a price to pay for such easy control and access. That price amounts to relinquishing ultimate control of and access to your home to the government and its corporate partners. For example, while Samsung’s Smart TVs are capable of “listening” to what you say, thereby allowing users to control the TV using voice commands, it also records everything you say and relays it to a third party, e.g., the government.

Then again, the government doesn’t really need to spy on you using your smart TV when the FBI can remotely activate the microphone on your cellphone and record your conversations. The FBI can also do the same thing to laptop computers without the owner knowing any better.

Drones, which are taking to the skies en masse, are the converging point for all of the weapons and technology already available to law enforcement agencies. In fact, drones can listen in on your phone calls, see through the walls of your home, scan your biometrics, photograph you and track your movements, and even corral you with sophisticated weaponry.

All of these technologies add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence, especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.

These digital trails are everywhere.

As investigative journalists Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson explain, “This data—collected by smartphone apps and then fed into a dizzyingly complex digital advertising ecosystem … provided an intimate record of people whether they were visiting drug treatment centers, strip clubs, casinos, abortion clinics or places of worship.”

In such a surveillance ecosystem, we’re all suspects and databits to be tracked, catalogued and targeted.

As Warzel and Thompson warn:

“To think that the information will be used against individuals only if they’ve broken the law is naïve; such data is collected and remains vulnerable to use and abuse whether people gather in support of an insurrection or they justly protest police violence… This collection will only grow more sophisticated… It gets easier by the day… it does not discriminate. It harvests from the phones of MAGA rioters, police officers, lawmakers and passers-by. There is no evidence, from the past or current day, that the power this data collection offers will be used only to good ends. There is no evidence that if we allow it to continue to happen, the country will be safer or fairer.”

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical genius of the American police state: the very technology we hailed as revolutionary and liberating has become our prison, jailer, probation officer, Big Brother and Father Knows Best all rolled into one.

There is no gray area any longer.

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Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at [email protected]. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

With historical insight this article by Andrew Korybko was first published on June 12 2018.

The US military rechristened its Pacific Command to the Indo-Pacific Command as a means of strongly signaling its growing interest in India and its eponymous ocean.

The importance of this development shouldn’t be underestimated because it sets the strategic basis for the US’ 21^st-century policy of “containing China”. The People’s Republic depends just as much on the Indian Ocean as it does the Pacific because of the role that this body of water plays in facilitating commerce with Europe & Africa and the energy trade with the Mideast, hence why it’s pivotal for the US to prioritize military operations in this ocean and its surrounding Rimland. To that end, America has entered into a game-changing military-strategic relationship with India through the 2016 LEMOA logistics agreement that allows both Great Powers to use one another’s facilities as part of what former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson described late last year as their planned partnership for entire 21^st century.

The US envisions India becoming a bulwark against China and functioning as Washington’s premier “Lead From Behind” partner in “containing” it, though it recognizes that it probably can’t sustain this role for too long unless it receives multilateral support, ergo the so-called “Quad” that also involves Japan and Australia and could unofficially be called the “Hex” through Vietnam and France’s participation as well. India’s LEMOA-like deal with France to also use its Indian Ocean military facilities gives New Delhi the potential to massively expand its strategic reach in the region and fulfill its US-backed geopolitical destiny, which just received a strong strategic boost last week after Prime Minister Modi clinched an agreement to develop a base in Indonesia’s Sabang island right near the mouth of the Strait of Malacca.

A new American-encouraged Great Power constellation is therefore in the process of forming all across the Indo-Pacific Rimland in seeing India, Indonesia, and Japan deepening their multilateral strategic integration with one another, with Washington desiring for New Delhi to play the role of regional hegemon in the Indian Ocean, Tokyo to do so in the Pacific, and Jakarta to bridge the two together in the Southeast Asian archipelago connecting both of their bodies of water. Seeing as how half of this grand strategy geographically involves the Indian Ocean, it’s therefore appropriate that the erstwhile Pacific Command updated its name to the Indo-Pacific Command to better reflect the bulk of its future efforts.

The next step that could be expected would for the US to organize a so-called “Eighth Fleet” in the Indian Ocean region in order to more effectively concentrate its strategic focus in this part of the world. The Japanese-based Seventh Fleet covers the same area of maritime operations as the Indo-Pacific Command does, which includes the half of the Indian Ocean south and east of its namesake country, so it would make sense to “decentralize” operations by setting up a separate regional branch that’s actually based in this body of water. Although the Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet would probably still remain responsible for activities around the Arabian Peninsula, the Italian-based Sixth Fleet wouldn’t have to take care of East Africa like it already does because everything east of the Cape of Good Hope would prospectively fall under the Eighth Fleet’s area of responsibility.

So as not to be misunderstood, there presently aren’t any serious plans to create an Eighth Fleet, but it’s logical that this might eventually follow the rechristening of the Pacific Command as the Indo-Pacific Command, and naturally have an Indian Ocean base of operations either in Diego Garcia or somewhere on the South Asian mainland in order to more effectively “contain” China.

*

This article was originally published on Oriental Review.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Japan Times.

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First published by Global Research on December 13, 2021

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I studied medicine at the University of Zurich, obtained a doctorate in immunology and virology, specialized in internal medicine and cardiology and have 33 years of experience in diagnosis and therapy of acute respiratory infections, in hospitals, in intensive care units and, for 23 years, in my medical practice.

In February 2020, I sat in my practice and was amazed. What I had learned in medical school, during my scientific training and in my practical medical work was suddenly turned upside down. Anyone who felt even a sore throat, no longer treated himself, to visit his or her GP only if the symptoms got worse, but ran to the nearest hospital with the request to be tested immediately, and with the fear of perhaps having to die, and not only having to die, but perhaps of having to suffocate miserably.

Worldwide, the prevailing corona narrative was established in a very short period. At the same time, humanity was divided into its supporters and opponents.

Such an extent of division of the society we have never experienced before. It divides friendships, families, and even partnerships. Such a division is always an expression of the fact that a large partof humanity is not living in reality, but is caught up in a context of delusion imposed by a handful of psychopaths and their many narcissistic lackeys. In such a situation, we must always ask ourselves first: “Am I a realist, or in fact a totally deluded one?” This question can only be answered by looking at reality as soberly as possible.

It is my duty as a doctor to treat my patients to the best of my knowledge. This includes to inform them about their disease in a way that laypeople can understand and make informed decisions about what to do.

In February / March 2020 I realised that it is my duty as a doctor to educate the public about this disease of the whole society, in a way that laypeople can understand and make informed decisions about what to do. I am still doing this, no more but also no less, and nobody and nothing will stop me from continuing to do so.

I confront the myths and intellectual absurdities of the prevailing corona narrative with the scientific evidence. I do this chronologically, and so that also laypeople can understand and make informed decisions as to what further actions seem appropriate, for themselves and for their loved ones.

Scientific references to my statements can be found on the homepages of ‘Aletheia – ourSwiss network of doctors and scientists for proportionality’, of the ‘Corman-Drosten Review Report’, and of ‘Doctors for Covid Ethics’, all of which I am a member, and on my simple homepage, which I had created after having been banned from social media.

PCR Testing Epidemic, 2006

As responsible physicians and scientists, in the case of infections diagnosed by quick PCR tests, especially in the context of an alleged epidemic of national or pandemic of international scope, we must always consider the possibility of a pseudo or testing epidemic.

In 2007, the New York Times, virtually the bible of journalists whose integrity they still trusted at the time, publishes an important piece entitled: ‘Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn’t’.

Dr. Herndon, internist at a medical centre in the U.S. state of New Hampshire, coughs seemingly incessantly for a fortnight starting in mid-April 2006. Soon, an infectious disease specialist has the disturbing idea that this could be the beginning of a pertussis epidemic. By the end of April, other hospital staff are also coughing. Severe, persistent coughing is a leading symptom of whooping cough. And if it is whooping cough, the outbreak must be contained immediately because the disease can be fatal for babies in the hospital and lead to dangerous pneumonia in frail elderly patients.

It is the Start of a Bizarre Episode: the Story of an Epidemic that wasn’t.

For months, almost everyone involved believes there is a huge whooping cough outbreak at the medical centre with far-reaching consequences. Nearly 1,000 staff members are given a quick PCR test and put on leave from work until the results are in; 142 people, 14.2% of those tested, including Dr. Herndon, are positive on the quick PCR test and diagnosed with pertussis. Thousands, including many children, receive antibiotics and a vaccine as protection. Hospital beds are taken out of service as a precaution, including some in the intensive care unit.

Months later, all those apparently suffering from whooping cough are stunned to learn that bacterial cultures, the diagnostic gold standard for pertussis, could not detect the bacterium that causes whooping cough in any single sample. The whole insanity was a false alarm.

The supposed pertussis epidemic had not taken place in reality, but only in the minds of those involved, triggered by blind faith in a highly sensitive quick PCR test that had become, oh, so modern. In truth, all those who had fallen ill had suffered from a harmlesscold. Infectiologists and epidemiologists had put aside their expertise and common sense and blatantly ignored this most likely differential diagnosis of the symptom cough.

Many of the new molecular tests are quick but technically demanding. Each laboratory performs them in its own way as so-called ‘home brews’. Often they are not commerciallyavailable and there are rarely good estimates of their error rates. Their high sensitivity makes false positives likely. When hundreds or thousands of people are tested, as happened here, false-positive results can give the appearance of an epidemic.

An infectiologist said, I had a feeling at the time that this gave us a shadow of a hint of what it might be like during a pandemic flu epidemic.

And an epidemiologist explained: One of the most troubling aspects of the pseudo-epidemic is that all the decisions seemed so sensible at the time.

The madness of a pseudo or testing epidemic had seemed perfectly normal to so many people involved.

I recommend you read this article published in the New York Times in 2007 and ask yourself: “Shouldn’t we all have learned a lot from this for the future?”

Swine Flu Scandal, 2009

As responsible physicians and scientists, in an alleged or real epidemic of national or pandemic of international scope we must always remember previous alleged or real epidemics and pandemics. Here is the last allegedly serious pandemic: The swine flu scandal.

In spring 2009, a highly contagious, very dangerous influenza virus, H1N1, seems to threaten humanity. The disease it causes is clinically indistinguishable from seasonal flu. It is called swine flu.

Experts like the German virologist Prof. Christian Drosten spread horror scenarios predicting millions of deaths worldwide. In May, the WHO relaxes the criteria for declaring a pandemic for reasons that have never been explained. It removes the dangerousness of the causative pathogen from the definition of a pandemic. Now, the rapid massive spread of a comparatively harmless pathogen over at least two WHO regions is enough. Any endemic, every seasonal wave of any flu or cold virus, no matter how harmless it is, can be called a pandemic. Promptly, the WHO declares an H1N1 pandemic on June 11th.

Politicians are taking seriously the warnings of the experts and the WHO. Without consulting the population, they are procuring hundreds of millions of packages of sparsely effective, expensive antiviral drugs and hundreds of millions of doses of hastily approved vaccines which are, after all, produced using conventional methods.

Critics, who describe the virus as comparatively harmless, are ridiculed or ignored initially. Finally, scientists, in Europe especially the German microbiologist and infection epidemiologist Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi, and the German pneumologist and politician Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, gain media and political attention. The global madness, already threatening at that time, can be averted.

Worldwide, about 150 000 to 600 000 people died with or from H1N1, which turned out to be less dangerous than seasonal influenza. Correspondingly, vaccination readiness was low. Nevertheless, in Sweden alone, about 700 children contracted disabling narcolepsy, sleeping sickness, caused by hastily approved unnecessary and unsafe vaccines. In Switzerland alone, 1.8 million vaccine doses were sold abroad or given away, and 8.9 million were disposed of.

There was hardly any media coverage of the swine flu scandal. The temporary success of the media-fuelled panic was primarily due to the interconnectedness of experts, the pharmaceutical industry, the WHO and health politicians. In the end, the seemingly completely overwhelmed health authorities had fallen for an almost perfectly orchestrated propaganda campaign.

I recommend you watch the documentary ‘Profiteers of Fear – The Swine Flu Business’, produced in German by Arte in November 2009, and ask yourself: “Shouldn’t we all have learned a lot from this for the future?”

‘Event 201’: Corona Pandemic Simulation, 2019

The situation is threatening. A new corona virus is spreading across the world. Case numbers on the Johns Hopkins University dashboard are rising and rising. The highly contagious, immune-resistant, dangerous virus is paralysing trade and transport globally and sending the world economy into free fall.

What sounds like the alleged outbreak of the alleged pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 in China’s Wuhan province in December 2019, is the scenario of ‘Event 201′, which, because the figure zero is actually a globe, should rather be called “Event 21”.

On October 18th 2019, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Johns Hopkins University and World Economic Forum are organising a pandemic simulation under this name. After the Spanish flu, the bird flu and the swine flu, they do not choose another influenza virus as the pathogen, but a corona virus that was completely unknown to laypeople so far, especially not to politicians and journalists.

This simulation of a corona pandemic that broke out in South America is not attended by doctors, but by Western representatives of the organisers, the UN, the WHO, governments, authorities and global corporations from the fields of high finance, pharmaceuticals, logistics, tourism and the media, as well as Dr George Gao, virologist and director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (see list of participants below)

Video

The participants agree that a corona pandemic is disruptive, can only be overcome by global governmental and private cooperation, that system-relevant global corporations must be propped up financially while medium-sized businesses must be sacrificed if necessary, that voices who deviate from the prevailing narrative must be censored consistently in the social and mass media, and that the pandemic can only be terminated by vaccinating the entire world population.

“The entities directly or indirectly “represented” by the “players” included the WHO, John Hopkins, the Global Alliance on Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) (Dr. Timothy Grant Evans), US Intelligence, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Dr. Chris Elias), the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) (Chairwoman Jane Halton), the World Economic Forum (WEF), the UN Foundation, the US  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Stephen Redd), China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Director Dr. George Fu Gao). Big Pharma (Adrian Thomas), the World Bank and Global Banking, the Airline and Hotel industries. For more details click here.” (quoted in Michel Chossudovsky, E-Book, Chapter I)

The simulation ends with 65 million deaths worldwide.

I recommend you watch the documentary ‘Event 201: Corona Pandemic from the Drafting Table’, produced in German with English subtitles by ExpressZeitung in June 2020, and ask yourself:

“Shouldn’t the mass media have reported on this in detail?”

Corona Scandal, 2020 and ongoing

Two and a half months later, on December 31st 2019, the Chinese CDC, led by Dr. George Gao Fu, reports 27 cases of pneumonia of unknown cause to the WHO – out of a Chinese population of 1.4 billion. On January 7th 2020, the Chinese health authorities identify a novel corona virus as the causative agent.

On January 21st, Prof. Christian Drosten et al. submit a paper, the recipe for which laboratories can produce a rapid RT-PCR test for the detection of the virus called ‘2019-nCoV’. It is accepted just the next day and published in the journal Eurosurveillance another day later. 

The WHO had already posted the Corman-Drosten RT-PCR quick test on its website one week earlier and recommended it as the global diagnostic gold standard.

On January 30th, Drosten et al. published the justification of the narrative of epidemiologically relevant asymptomatic transmission of 2019-nCoV in the letter to the editor of the ‘New England Journal of Medicine’, virtually one of the bibles of us doctors whose integrity we still trusted at the time, with the title ‘Transmission of 2019-nCoV Infection from an Asymptomatic Contact in Germany’.

On February 11th, the WHO names the novel corona virus SARS-CoV-2, the disease it causes COVID-19; coronavirus disease. It does so against the request of Chinese virologists. They preferred to call it HCoV-19, human coronavirus, because of the danger that the name SARS-CoV-2 could stir up unfounded fears out of its biological and epidemiological lack of similarity to the much more dangerous SARS-CoV-1.

On March 11th, the WHO declares a COVID pandemic. Meanwhile, its Director-General, the biologist, immunologist and philosopher Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has been charged with genocide in Ethiopia before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The presumption of innocence applies, of course.

Now, almost everything is going on as it did during the swine flu scandal in 2009, but in an even more lubricated way. Experts, mostly laboratory physicians and biologists working as virologists or epidemiologists, who have never examined anyone suffering from a respiratory infection, let alone treated them, declare that SARS-CoV-2 is virtually an alien about which we know absolutely nothing and that we must regard as extremely dangerous, until largely the same experts will have proven otherwise at some point. In Switzerland, they constitute themselves as ‘Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force’ and offer themselves to the Swiss Federal Council as scientific advisors.

The executive and legislative politicians as well as the federal and cantonal health authorities, all panicked by them, accept their offer and seem to follow them as blindly as the Federal Council apparently blindly followed the WHO when it declared the COVID pandemic. Unlike any ninepins club, the now official scientific advisory board to the Swissgovernment through what is supposed to be Switzerland’s biggest crisis since the Second World War does not keep any record of its activities.

On March 16th, the Swiss Federal Council declares the ‘exceptional situation’, the highest danger level of the epidemic law, based on exactly zero scientific evidence.

The mass media, including the Swiss public service broadcaster SRG, take on the third part in this conglomerate of mutually escalating ignorance, arrogance, incompetence and organised irresponsibility. Brainless and heartless themselves, they hammer into our heads around the clock:

There is a pandemic of a highly contagious and even epidemiologically relevant asymptomatically transmissible corona killer virus. Every seemingly hale and hearty fellow human being can be your angel of death!

Unlike in 2009, the mass media consistently censor, discredit and defame questioning doctors and scientists, including luminaries such as John Ioannidis, Professor of medicine, epidemiology and public health at Stanford University School of Medicine, oneof the world’s most renowned and most cited scientists, specialised in science fraud, Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi, and Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg. At Easter 2020, after having been libelled, including an alleged threat to politicians and to my family, by a private person well known to me, myself, was brutally arrested by an anti-terrorist squad in my practice and, after it immediately turned out that I had not threatened anyone, merely the world view of insane people, I was shipped off to a closed psychiatric ward for six days becauseof ‘self-endangerment while in COVID insanity’.

The governments of almost all countries seem to have forgotten their epidemic plans, which wisely spare the individuals, the society and the economy. In blind obedience to the WHO and to lobbyists, called experts, they are enacting self-destructive non-pharmacological interventions, including lockdowns never considered before, following the authoritarian Chinese role model. They are doing this almost globally, in lockstep.

Without consulting the population, they procure billions of doses of emergency mRNA and DNA injections, which are even temporarily approved by Swissmedic. This technology is being widely used on humans for the first time. Almost worldwide, the constitution, the rule of law, human rights, civil liberties, ethics, science and common sense are being sacrificed in favour of a quasi-global authoritarian regime under the control of the WHO.

Who controls the WHO, controls the world!

The prevailing corona narrative is this: Since early 2020, there is a pandemic of a perennial killer virus, that must be searched for with the Corman-Drosten RT-PCR test in everybody, that is even spreading epidemiologically relevantly asymptomatically, against which there is no basic or cross-immunity, whose provoked disease, COVID-19, is barely treatable, which is becoming increasingly infectious and dangerous due to erratic mutations, and which can only be overcome by non-pharmacological measures that have never been applied before, such as antisocial distancing, masks in public sphere, contact tracing, isolation, quarantine, school closures and curfews, nowadays called lockdowns, even for asymptomatic, previously called healthy, people, and by serial vaccination of the entire world population.

All myths of the prevailing corona narrative are made up out of a fact-free vacuum

Based on the current state of science, these are my top 10.

1. There has been no epidemic of COVID-19 of national scope in any country, no pandemic internationally, for the general population SARS-CoV-2 is not a killer virus, and it is the same in every country.

In many countries, for example in Switzerland, there was no exceptional excess mortality when adjusted to changing demographics. The excess mortality in other countries is the best proof that the real killer is not the virus, but our paradoxical response to it, which differs from country to country and from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Also, the occupancy of the intensive care units, whose capacities have been massively reduced in the course of the alleged pandemic, has never been unusually high.

If the causes of death are established correctly by substituting the number of deceased from whatever cause within 28 days after a positive RT-PCR test with the number of deceased from COVID-19, the infection fatality rate, IFR, is below that of influenza viruses, which are deadly to some people, of course, and, unlike SARS-CoV-2, sometimes are also deadly to children. 

2. The indication to test, namely not only critically ill hospitalised patients with a need forspecific antiviral therapy, in the surveillance system for respiratory infections and in an epidemiological study cohort, but to test even asymptomatic people and, on top of that, to test only for one single of all respiratory viruses that must be considered in the differential diagnosis of respiratory infections, is wrong.

3. The Corman-Drosten RT-PCR test is neither diagnostic for an infection with SARS-CoV-2 nor for a sickness or death from COVID-19. On November 27th 2020, an international group of 22 life scientists, including myself, published an ‘External Peer Review of the Corman-Drosten Paper’, the recipe by which laboratories developed the RT-PCR test for SARS-CoV-2. In it, we declared that conflicts of interest existed, that the alleged peer review within 24 hours was absurd, and ten fundamental scientific flaws. This most momentous medical publication of 2020, which can hardly be surpassed in terms of lack of scientificity, should never have been published.

The Corman-Drosten RT-PCR test protocol is fabricated poorly and vaguely, without validation and standardisation. From a laboratory survey conducted in Germany, we know that due to cross-reaction with other beta coronaviruses its specificity of about 98.6%, correspondingto 1.4% false positives, which is already low in the absence of any virus, is further reducedto up to 92.4%, corresponding to 7.6% false positives, during the flu season. These rates offalse positive tests may seem low to many laypeople and allegedly even to many ‘experts’, because they do not realise that in the virtual absence of the virus between the flu seasons, at prevalence close to 0, almost all positive RT-PCR tests are false positives. Please consider that if we test 1000 men with a 99% specific pregnancy test, 1%, 10 tests, will be positive and because of prevalence 0 of pregnancy in men, these positive pregnancy tests are all false positives. Everywhere, the test is performed differently and at too high cycle thresholds.

Although studies have shown that no culturable viruses are present in samples with a Ct value above 28, the tests are still carried out with cycle threshold values above 35. Their results are reported without reference to clinical symptoms and findings, worldwide. The Corman-Drosten RT-PCR test is scientifically incorrect and serves mostly to create an epidemic of case numbers, a testing pandemic.

4. There is no epidemiologically relevant asymptomatic transmission of respiratory viruses. What we learned in medical school has been confirmed also for SARS-CoV-2 by numerous peer reviewed studies. The ‘asymptomatic contact’ invented by Prof. Drosten in the Letter to the Editor of January 30th 2020 was very much symptomatic: the patient had suppressed her symptoms with medication.

Therefore, all non-pharmacological interventions for asymptomatic, formerly called healthy, people beyond the proven effective measures to contain the spread of respiratory viruses, namely hygiene and self-isolation of sick people, are harmful and ineffective also against SARS-CoV-2.

6. Unlike influenza viruses, SARS-CoV-2 does not mutate erratically, but slowly and permanently. For this reason alone, even the most effective vaccines always lag behind its new variants. 

7. SARS-CoV-2 is not becoming more and more contagious AND more and more dangerous. Like all other respiratory viruses, it obeys the laws of evolution. Without human intervention, the variant that spreads most easily prevails. That is why it is becoming more and more contagious indeed, but less and less dangerous, of course.

8. SARS-CoV-2, like all viral pathogens of acute respiratory infections, does not occur perennially, but seasonally, in our mid-northern latitudes from November to April. 

What ‘experts’ call the heroic overcoming of the pandemic of a killer virus by non-pharmacological interventions and vaccination of the whole populace, we doctors call, the end of the flu season. 

9. Due to basic and cross-immunity, during each flu season only about 10-20% of the population contract the seasonal beta corona and influenza viruses. This is also true for SARS-CoV-2.

An ‘nth wave of a respiratory virus’ is a biological impossibility.

Rather, the season of Corona-19 is followed by that of Corona-20 and now by that of Corona-21, to which most people are partially cross-immune, at least.

10. The alleged pandemic of the alleged killer virus SARS-CoV-2 cannot be overcome by vaccinating the entire world population, including the immune or recovered. The serial experimental mRNA and DNA injections are unnecessary because the IFR is 0.15%, for less than 70-year-olds below 0.05%, for children 0.00%, and even much lower if the causes of death are established correctly, so below that of seasonal influenza. Moreover, SARS-CoV-2 is mutating permanently and always in the sense that it becomes more infectious while less dangerous. The experimental foreign gene injections are ineffective.

We had already known this from the registration studies, which are not worth the paper they are written on. For example, the mRNA injections reduced the risk of mild COVID-19 disease absolutely by less than 1%. There were no data for severe courses, for disease transmission and for over 75-year-old sick persons. Their ineffectiveness has alsobeen proven in the real world by now.

Finally, the gene injections are unsafe. They can cause anaphylactic reactions, thromboembolism, thrombocytopenia, disseminated intravascular coagulation, and myocarditis in the short term. There is possible immunosuppression and antibody-dependent enhancement, ADE, in the medium-term. And in the long term there are possible autoimmune diseases, cancer and infertility, risks that have not been ruled out yet.

Furthermore, natural immunisation is stronger and more sustainable than the best vaccine, and immune or recovered people do neither need basic immunisation nor a booster. Or, if you had gone through measles, mumps andrubella as a child or had received the basic MMR immunization, did anyone ever recommend that you get vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella for the first time or again? The mainly testing pandemic present since the end of the 2020 flu season,at least, can only be overcome by ending the unscientific testing of even asymptomatic people. 

These are the major myths of the prevailing corona narrative. We doctors and scientists have not been allowed to debunk them publicly for over a year and a half. If we dare to fulfil our moral duty, we are ignored and censored at best, libelled, banned or forcibly detained psychiatrically, at worst.

Yet, in the second year, as medical students we had to study basic epidemiology. There we learned that in the event of a possible epidemic of national scope, a study cohort representative of the population must be formed immediately. Its purpose is to monitor the prevalence, incidence, and severity of the disease and the status of immunity, here by testing for antibodies AND T-cell immunity. Thus, in April 2020 we would already have realised that there was no epidemic of national scope, presumably that almost everyone was already largely immune and that there was exactly 0 scientific evidence for painful and costly nonsensical interventions, for the enactment of epidemic laws, for the draftingof COVID laws and for digital COVID certificates.

Allegedly, no one in the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) and in its affiliated Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force has the knowledge of a second-year medical student. For, although it is 20 months since the WHO declared the COVID pandemic, such a representative epidemiological surveillance cohort does not exist. Even worse, from week 13 to 44/2020 the FOPH had also paused the surveillance systemof viral respiratory infections based on representative medical practices, thereby completing the blind flight in favour of total interpretive sovereignty of the arbitrarily manipulable useless RT-PCR test ‘case numbers’. Do not gloat. It is the same shame in your country.

It is wrong to test symptomatic people for only one of all respiratory viruses. It is insane to do this only with a hypersensitive, nonspecific RT-PCR test with cycle threshold above 35, without considering number of cycles, symptomatology and clinical context. It is even more insane to mass test also asymptomatic, previously called healthy, people in this way. And it is the coronation of insanity to serially administer unnecessary, ineffective, unsafe experimental mRNA and DNA injections tothe entire world population, on top of that without regard to their immune status.

Should this text seem too long or too complicated to you, please take a close look at this picture. at least: It paints a thousand words.

Just a glance at near-real-time monitoring of intensive care occupancy by ETH Zurich, state November 26th, 2021, exposes the fundamental fraud of the prevailing corona narrative.

During each alleged wave happens the same. Completely synchronously and to almost the same extent as the number of COVID patients, yellow curve, goes up, the number of non-COVID patients, green curve, goes down, although there are high reserves of intensive care beds, dashed curve, throughout the whole course of he alleged epidemic. At the end of each alleged wave, the same thing happens in the opposite directions.

Either, we believe that the very moment a COVID patient enters an intensive care unit a supernatural entity is postponing non-emergency major surgery, another viral pneumonia, a bacterial or fungal pneumonia, a myocardial infarction, a central pulmonary embolism, a cerebral stroke, or a major car accident with numerous serious injuries.

Or, on admission to hospital every patient is tested for SARS-CoV-2 using the RT-PCR test, which is unsuitable for diagnostic purposes – rolling a dice would be cheaper.

According to the test result, he or she is assigned to the green, non-COVID patients, or the yellow, COVID patients, curve, in short: other diagnoses areoften mislabelled as COVID-19. This fraud occurs not so much in the intensive care units themselves, as rather in the direct reporting by the laboratories to the FOPH, which reports these and all other meaningless “case numbers” to the mass media, who then bombard us with them around the clock.

Since April 2020, at least, the total number of ICU patients, black curve, changes little due to this fundamental fraud in the prevailing corona narrative. It also explains why the intensive care units were not overloaded in any country, regardless of whether there are almost three times as many ICU beds per capita, for example in Germany, or only about half as many, for example in Sweden, as in Switzerland.

Those responsible must have known this. Otherwise they would not have cut ICU capacity worldwide since April 2020, in Switzerland from over 1500 to under 900, but would have built up more. Instead of redistributing 100 billion taxpayers’ Swiss Francsfrom the bottom and the middle to the very top, I would have recommended to my government investing a fraction of it in recruiting retired and in increasing the workload of part-time ICU staff. 

I guess the coming so-called 5th wave will be very similar to the so-called 2nd wave during the last flu season with the usual hump in the total number of ICU patients, black curve, due to more frequent severe acute respiratory infections during every flu season.

I wish that the alleged ‘killer variant’ Omicron is natural and will therefore be more contagious, but less dangerous than the alleged ‘killer variant’ Delta, and that there will not be many very severe COVID cases due to ADE, and not too many very severe adverse events of the experimental mRNA and DNA injections.

Should you have a better explanation for the almost perfect symmetry of the yellow and green curves with an imaginary mirror axis located between the two, I will be the first to examine it closely and publicly apologize for my, then fake news. 

SARS-CoV-2 is not an alien, but a newly discovered member of the well-known beta corona virus family. From my allegedly crazed cardiologist’s view, this is the prevailing corona nonsense narrative. 

An endemic of a seasonal beta corona cold virus, that may kill some people, of course, and becomes increasingly harmless through permanent slow mutation, has been inflated into a pandemic of a perennial killer virus, which is becoming ever more dangerous through erratic mutations, with PR, PCR, frightening masks, and the myth of epidemiologically relevant asymptomatic transmission, that can only be overcome with pointless, harmful non-pharmacological interventions even for asymptomatic, formerly called healthy, people and with serial unnecessary, ineffective, unsafe experimental mRNA and DNA injections of the entire world population. 

If you still do not realise that this is, pardon, utter nonsense, from A for epidemiologically relevant Asymptomatic transmission to Z for Zero COVID, I am afraid I can’t help you either and this German proverb comes to my mind, translated into English: 

The greater the damage of the roof, the more beautiful the view of the stars! 

The still prevailing corona nonsense narrative justifies the globally dominating unscientific, inhumane madness. Such can be wrought with any respiratory virus, by the way: if we no longer test everybody with a hypersensitive, low-specific RT-PCR test, that cross-reacts with other viruses, for theoretically one RNA fragment of SARS-CoV-2, but for one of, say, influenza or metapneumo viruses, we immediately have an influenza or metapneumo virus testing pandemic.

The alleged pandemic is mainly an unreal PCR testing pandemic, but the totalitarian repressive measures it has spawned are real: they threaten our freedom, our livelihoods and even our lives.

Dear responsible colleagues! 

Please remember the Hippocratic Oath, ‘Primum non nocere, secundum cavere, tertium sanare’; ‘First do no harm, second be careful, third heal’, and the Geneva Declaration of the World Medical Association, especially ‘I will not use my medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties, even under threat!

Finally help to end this total insanity, first and foremost by no longer applying unnecessary, ineffective, unsafe experimental mRNA and DNA injections and by reporting all their adverse events. Then the corona house of nonsense cards will immediately collapse.

Dear responsible fellow Swiss!

Dear responsible fellow humans!

Wake up, stand up and fight, peacefully but firmly; if not for yourself, then for your children’s future and that of your grandchildren, now!

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Humanismus 2020.

Dr. Thomas Binder is a Swiss cardiologist, board member of Doctors for Covid Ethics, Aletheia – Medicine and Science for Proportionality, and member of the Corman-Drosten Review Report.

Josep Borrell, Alto rappresentante per la politica estera UE, non solo annuncia la sospensione dei visti ai turisti russi, assestando un altro duro colpo al settore turistico italiano ed europeo.  In una riunione dei ministri UE della Difesa ha dichiarato: “I Paesi dell’Unione Europea hanno discusso l’ipotesi di una missione di addestramento per le forze ucraine sin da prima della guerra: ora è il momento di agire”. Con l’invio di armi e l’addestramento delle forze di Kiev la UE diviene un paese belligerante contro la Russia a fianco della NATO. Allo stesso tempo Ursula Von der Leyen, Presidente della Commissione Europea, ribadisce che bisogna: “porre fine alla nostra dipendenza dagli sporchi combustibili fossili russi”. Annuncia così la decisione della UE di proseguire sulla via che sta provocando in Europa una devastante crisi economica, dovuta al prezzo del gas cresciuto da 15 euro a oltre 300 euro al megawattora. 

La vera causa non è il fatto che la Russia non ci fornisce più gas, ma che la Borsa di Amsterdam, quella che decide il prezzo del gas in Europa, appartiene a una società finanziaria statunitense, che ne determina il prezzo in base a meccanismi speculativi e politici.  La stessa ENI, mentre compra gas russo a basso prezzo, lo rivende ad alto prezzo secondo le quotazioni di Amsterdam. Una vera e propria truffa ai  danni degli italiani coperta dal governo Draghi, 

L’Europa viene allo stesso tempo messa sempre più in pericolo dall’enorme quantità di armi che NATO e UE inviano in Ucraina. Washington ha annunciato forniture militari per altri 3 miliardi di dollari, parte del “pacchetto di assistenza” da 40 miliardi di dollari approvato dal Congresso. Di queste forniture – dimostra un servizio della statunitense CBS – la maggior parte finisce nel mercato clandestino delle armi, in mano a organizzazioni terroristiche e criminali. Un ulteriore grave pericolo è provocato dal fatto che le forze ucraine – armate, addestrate e di fatto comandate dalla NATO – sparano con i cannoni e i missili forniti loro da NATO e UE  sulla centrale nucleare di Zaparozhye atttualmente sotto controllo russo, esponendo l’Italia e l’Europa al gravissinmo rischio radioattivo di una nuova Cernobyl.

Manlio Dinucci

Vidéo : byoblu.com

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***

For more than five months, full-scale hostilities have taken place on the territory of Ukraine. The number of victims is growing every day on both sides of the front line.

From the signing of the “Minsk 2” peace agreement in February 2015 until February 2022—seven long years—hostilities in the Donbas region raged with regular shelling and small arms attacks by the Ukrainian military and paramilitaries against the towns and cities of the region. Ukrainians throughout the country have become accustomed to this routinized, “low intensity” warfare.

However, the entry of the Russian Federation into the conflict on the side of the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics more than five months ago has upset the routine, causing much confusion and bewilderment among Ukrainians. They are asking themselves, how can it be that Kyiv could also be shelled in response to the shellings of Donetsk? “Isn’t the strongest military power in the world on our side? Why can’t it stop this war that has broken out?”

Western propaganda (and since 2014, Ukrainian propaganda, too), deeply corrupts a person’s understanding. It encourages the idea that a country like Ukraine, subordinated to the West, can do whatever it wishes so long as it supports the goals of the large Western countries. In this context, liberal-minded views in favor of peace do not count. Non-Western countries are, by default, considered inferior and local opponents of Western imperialism are suspect, be they governments or simple political movements.

Internal Dissent in Ukraine

To combat internal dissent, the Ukrainian state encourages its citizens to speak up against those it labels as “traitors” and “collaborators.” People who behave “suspiciously” by criticizing the actions of the authorities or even daring to declare responsibility of the Ukrainian authorities for the military intervention by the Russian Federation are considered traitors by default.

Of late, the news reporting of “criminal conduct” in Ukraine is telling the stories of the woman convicted by a court for the crime of reading Russian Telegram channels while using public transport; the man who was found in possession of the flag of the Soviet Ukrainian Republic; and the teenager who photographed an airport building.

A Ministry of Digital Transformation was established in Ukraine in 2019 with the help of the European Union and the U.S. It is part of implementing a strategy of silencing dissent. The ministry goes so far as to offer guidelines on how to correctly fill out a “collaborator report” to finger suspect acquaintances of “the enemy.”^[1] The ministry cites a typical letter sent to the chatbot єВорог: “His sister is the wife of a separatist who is fighting for Russia. They keep in touch and exchange information about the location of our army in the city.”

Vice Prime Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine Mykhailo Fedorov speaks at conference announcing new ministry. [Source: ukrinform.net]

Often such denunciations become simply a method of settling old personal scores. These raise uncomfortable memories of the pogroms against Jews which marked Ukraine during the years of Nazi German occupation. For example, one of the examples of denunciations sent to the Ministry of Digital Transformation has been highlighted by Maksim Buzhansky, deputy leader of President Zelensky’s political party. He writes of a woman being targeted for the crime of collaboration: “She is pregnant by a Russian and considers herself to be something of a first lady of the village.”^[2] This is how simple envy or personal dislike can become a pretext for a witch-hunt under the guise of a political agenda.

One of the most egregious recent cases was the expulsion of Elvira Khomenko, a student from a university in the city of Bila Tserkva, 80 km south of Kyiv. Elvira was a student in the veterinary department. She wrote that enemies should be treated with kindness, that she does not eat meat, does not support the Ukrainian army, and does not support the killing of people.^[3] She is described as something of a hippie and peacenik who strongly maintains her beliefs and opinions.

At the end of July, she was expelled from the university and denounced to the SBU, Ukraine’s political police service. Elvira has since disappeared without a trace. Police are refusing to accept her mother’s statement in defense of her daughter, treating the mother with contempt. [As of August 1, 2022, the whereabouts of Elvira Khomenko are known only to Ukrainian authorities.]

Elvira Khomenko [Source: twitter.com]

In order to carry out its widespread, anti-Russia brainwashing in Ukraine, the Zelensky-led government has banned all opposition political parties and closed critical media. Over the past two years, half of the television channels in Ukraine have gone off the air, accused of pro-Russia sympathies. Since February 2022, all remaining media are obliged to relay only the point of view of the Office of the President, under threat of being accused of treason.

During this period, the opposition parties Platform for Life (social democratic), the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the “Socialists,” the Union of Left Forces, the Sharij Party, the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine and the Labor Party of Ukraine have been banned and their property seized. Earlier, only party activity was suspended; the seizure of party properties is a new escalation. As the list of banned parties makes clear, they are left-wing for the most part. Their “fault” is their disapproval of the eight-year-old conflict waged against Donbas (which became the reason for the start of the Russian special operation in Ukraine).

In July 2022, the wealthiest Ukrainian, billionaire Rinat Akhmetov (number one on Forbes-Ukraine’s list of wealthiest people in the country) gave up control of his media holdings, although he and his media have been quite loyal to Zelensky’s office. Hundreds of employees lost their jobs. The “logic” of this business decision by Ahkmetov is that a Ukrainian billionaire has no need to own costly media if it cannot be used to advance his or her personal interests and “merely” serves to relay the point of view of the authorities.

Worker and trade union rights under attack

Under the pretext of the war in Ukraine, authorities have begun to actively attack worker and trade union rights. They are promoting regressive “reform” of existing labor legislation. This had failed earlier due to pressure by international trade unions. In early July, the parliament sent to Zelensky for his signature Bill No. 7251, which regulates the “optimization of labor relations” under martial law.

This legislative innovation significantly curtails the rights of Ukrainian employees and nullifies the main historical gains of the working class, rolling them back to the situation of the 19^th century. Among the provisions of the new law is that Ukrainian employers are no longer required to limit the working day to eight hours and the working week can stretch up to 60 hours. That could mean a ten-hour working day with one day off per week, a twelve-hour working day with two days off, or seven days of eight and a half hours each with no day off! Thus will Ukrainian employers be able to save on overtime pay.^[4]

Back in 1810, the British educator and social philosopher Robert Owen advocated for a reduced work day; by 1817, he had formulated the slogan: “Eight hours’ labor, eight hours’ recreation, eight hours’ rest.” Oh, how the world of the 21^st century is evolving—backwards!

In addition, from now on, Ukrainian workers can be fired on vague pretexts of no available work. Employers themselves will determine how this applies, depending on their interests.

A second regressive labor law

In July the Ukraine legislature (Verkhovna Rada) also adopted Bill No. 5371, on simplified termination of employment contracts during martial law. It regulates labor contracts for businesses of fewer than 250 employees, essentially canceling the provisions of the Labor Code for them. This amounts to some 80% of all companies in Ukraine.

Working conditions, working hours, holidays and wages will now be regulated not by law but by the terms of contracts drawn up by the employer. “Anything can be written in the contract, especially in conditions of unemployment. In fact, this means that Ukrainians will have to work on the conditions that employers will impose on them,” says Ukrainian lawyer Rostyslav Kravets.^[5]

The governing regime in Kyiv pushed through the bill, citing a familiar theme: “Russian aggression.” But the bill was originally registered in April 2021, nearly one year prior to Russia’s military intervention.

Formally, the bill was submitted on behalf of the head of the parliamentary committee on social policy, Galina Tretyakova, and a number of other deputies from the ruling Servant of the People party. Ukrainian trade unions had demanded Tretyakova’s resignation following a sickening speech in which she said that poor people should be sterilized to reduce the country’s welfare bill.

Bill 5371 was developed by the Ukrainian public organization “Office of Simple Solutions,” which was originally created by the former president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili (2008-13), together with the associations of Ukrainian employers and the USAID program.

In other words, the deprivation of Ukrainian labor rights has been financed by a U.S. government agency. (As for Saakashvili, he is awaiting trial in Georgia under charges of violence against his political opponents as well as harsh restrictions against media outlets before and during his presidency. He is also charged with entering the country illegally, in October 2021, when he was first arrested and detained.)

George Sandul, a lawyer at the Kyiv public organization “Labor Initiatives,” commenting on Bill 5371, noted that the employee always has less power than the employer, and at the international level, numerous conventions of the International Labor Organization (ILO) are devoted to this issue. “De facto, this regime assumes that literally anything can be entered into an employee’s employment contract, without reference to Ukrainian labor laws. For example, additional grounds for dismissal, liability, or even a 100-hour week,” explains Sandul.^[6]

In June, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) appealed to Ukrainian authorities to remove the scandalous bill No. 5371 from consideration, as it contradicts the ILO conventions ratified by Ukraine’s “association agreement” with the EU (entered into force in September 2017) and European legislation.

Ukraine has in recent years served as a testing ground for anti-social reforms and cuts, which are then carried out in other European countries. These are all the more misplaced considering that Ukraine is one of the poorest countries in Europe and over the past eight years, there has been a massive outflow of Ukrainian workers westward in Europe or eastward to Russia.

Resisting military service in wartime

Since the beginning of Russia’s military operation, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men have been drafted into the army and thousands have illegally fled across the border to dodge military service. Millions of women, too, have left the country, leaving many manufacturing facilities at a standstill. Even regular public utilities are understaffed, while many restaurants in the capital city Kyiv have closed as their chefs and other staff have left.

In July, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine reported on the elimination of 45 escape routes used by men of military age. Those caught were traveling by foot, car or boat. One enterprising draft dodger tried to leave the country by swimming across a river in a diving suit.^[7] Fees charged by those guiding the escapees range from the equivalent of US$1,000 to US$20,000.

Forced conscription was brought on and has been intensified due to huge combat losses. David Arakhamia, the head of the Zelensky-led party’s parliamentary faction, has stated that losses amount to about 1,000 killed and wounded per day.^[8] The British Daily Mail reported in July that the death toll was around 20,000 a month.^[9] But official statistics of Ukraine’s losses are treated as classified information by the Ministry of Defense.

Funeral for one of many Ukrainian war dead. [Source: voanews.com]

“The numbers of dead are a state secret during martial law. This is due to military expediency and the fact that the enemy should not know these numbers and use it for their own opportunities,” Deputy Defense Minister Anna Malyar said on July 14.^[10]

Economically, Ukraine survives almost exclusively on loans from Western partner governments and international banks. It finances its public budget expenditures only by some 30%.^[11] The main sphere of government expenses is, to no surprise, military. To a certain extent, the Ukrainian military can be described as a mercenary force of the United States, Great Britain and other NATO countries.

Ideologically, Ukrainian authorities openly position themselves as part of a “civilized West” waging war with a “barbaric East.” “We are the European army of a European country. The enemy will be destroyed consistently, systematically and as planned and expected, by a decent army of the good old West,” Aleksey Arestovych, an adviser to the head of the President’s Office, recently stated.^[12]

However, for this army, a significant part of its recruits must be snatched off the streets or from parks and workplaces. Since February, Ukrainian men between the ages of 18 and 60 have been barred from leaving the country. Starting October 1, this ban will also apply to women, who are being made liable for military service under the cunning theme of “combatting gender discrimination.” But this “fight against discrimination” is far from being an extension of rights; it is an extension of duties as defined by an increasingly unpopular and isolated governing regime.

Russian-controlled southern Ukraine

The populations of the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine oppose the regime in Kyiv for the most part, but since 2014 they have been forced to hide this. Soldiers of Ukraine’s armed forces continue to complain that, since the start of the Russian military operation, local residents are betraying their positions to Russian forces and to the forces of Luhansk and Donetsk, allowing these to more accurately target their military operations.

In one video from the city of Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region, still held by Kyiv, a soldier of the Ukrainian army complains that the locals do not like them and do not want war against the Russian Federation. He explains, “There are a lot of people here who are not being called up by the military registration and enlistment offices. We are brought here from all over Ukraine, but no one will involve the locals. The recent scenarios in Lisichansk [small city in the Lugansk region] and other territories showed that residents were willing to go to war, but against Ukraine.”^[13]

In fact, many Ukrainian soldiers are telling the truth of what is happening in the territories controlled by the Russian Federation and the Lugansk and Donetsk republics. However, “control” by Russia or the Donbas republics does not mean peace. Deliveries of heavy artillery from the U.S. and other large NATO powers now allow Ukrainian forces to shell more heavily their former territories in the east, sometimes reaching deep behind Russian/Donbas republic lines. The shelling of the territories controlled by Kyiv receives wide coverage in the Western press, but the shelling of uncontrolled territory by the Ukrainian army is completely ignored, underlining once again the prevailing system of a double standard in Western media.

In July, three Ukrainian drones with explosives attacked the nuclear energy complex (the largest in Europe) near the city of Zaporozhye located on the Dnieper River, the fourth largest river in Europe.^[14] The purpose was to disrupt the operation of the station, which supplies electricity to several nearby regions. Luckily, the concrete ceilings of the complex withstood the attacks by what was light munitions. The complex was designed and built in Soviet times to operate during wartime. Russian forces control the complex and are working with its Ukrainian engineers and other specialists to keep it operating.

At the same time, the Ukrainian special services, in conjunction with Western intelligence services, wage regular terror attacks in uncontrolled territories, threatening those citizens of Ukraine who cooperate with the Russian Federation or the Donbas republics. Many leaders of the Donbas rebels have been assassinated since 2014, notably the revered, former head of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Alexander Zakharchenko, assassinated in 2018.

Terror tactics are being used to prevent a return to peaceful life. These are prompting even former Ukrainian ultra-nationalists to reconsider their views on the conflict. In June, for example, Dmitry Kuzmenko, the head of a Ukrainian “territorial defense” (ultra-nationalist) paramilitary unit, and many of his former fighters decided to adopt Russian citizenship.^[15]

Meanwhile, deliveries of American “HIMARS” precision multiple rocket launchers and the shelling of Kherson led even the former leader of the Kherson cell of the Ukrainian fascist party Svoboda (“Freedom”), Eduard Bekharsky, to reconsider his views. “Today’s shelling of my hometown by the Armed Forces of Ukraine using American HIMARS put a bullet in my relations with Ukraine. My father was an officer in the Soviet army. I remember my childhood in the garrisons in the Urals. I am more Soviet than Ukrainian. And now I’m finished with Ukraine,” he wrote.^[16]

Since Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree in July on simplified admission of Ukrainian citizens to Russian citizenship, residents of other regions have been moving to Russian-controlled Kherson. However, their route, according to eyewitnesses, is quite difficult since it is necessary to pass through front lines and mined territories. Taxi drivers in the Kyiv-controlled city of Zaporozhye charge up to US$1,000 for such a dangerous trip.

There is also a legal option, but it costs $400 and up. To make such a trip legally, the traveler must submit an application to Ukrainian authorities and then pass a verification procedure by the SBU. Men do not use this option since they would immediately receive a summons to military service.

The coming social and political transformations in southern Ukraine

In July, the local authorities of the southern regions of Ukraine controlled by the Russian Federation–Kherson and Zaporozhye—announced the preparation of a referendum on joining the Russian Federation.^[17]

Preliminary plans call for the votes to take place in mid-September. This will severely curtail stated plans of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to return these regions under their control, since a vote to join the Russian Federation formally places the regions under the military umbrella of Russia and, perhaps, opens the way for entry of international peacekeeping forces from the Collective Security Treaty Organization, in which Russia is a leading member.

In Russian-controlled cities and towns in southern Ukraine, the interim administrations are distributing one-time social payments of 10,000 rubles (app. US$165) to residents, which is equal to the minimum monthly Ukrainian pension for elderly.^[18]

In June, internet service began to be provided from Crimea to these regions and mobile communications were established through Russian operators.

Unlike Kherson, many larger cities of Donbas have been heavily damaged due to the frequently used tactics of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to use schools, hospitals and residential buildings as shields.

Reconstruction in the heavily damaged city of Mariupol began in June. Russia is mounting an ambitious program of reconstruction assistance throughout Donbas. Large teams of building workers are being mobilized in Russia, including a clever program in which Russian cities partner with a selected city in Donbas and provide technical as well as material assistance.

Source: youtube.com

Following the recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, brigades of workers from there are helping in the restoration. “They will provide serious help in solving the problems of restoring destroyed social, infrastructural and industrial facilities,” said Russian Ambassador to North Korea Alexander Matsegora.

He also said the DPRK already uses building equipment manufactured by enterprises in Donbas. “Our Korean partners are therefore very interested in acquiring spare parts and units manufactured in Donbas in order to update their own production base.”^[19] Kyiv has severed diplomatic relations with North Korea and Syria in response to their respective recognitions of the independence of the Luhansk and Donetsk republics.

In the Russian-controlled part of the Zaporozhye region, the roads damaged or destroyed in the fighting are being restored. A resident of the DPR, author of the left-wing Telegram channel “Concretely,” describes the process as follows: “Yesterday, I watched a road being repaired in the liberated territory. Repairs are being done more substantially than Ukraine ever did. Not only is the roadbed completely removed and restored, its support bedding (so-called pillow) is one and a half meters deeper. From the original road dating from Soviet times and ‘killed’ by Ukraine through neglect, only its direction will remain. A completely new road is being built, 100 kilometers long. The locals, I think, have never seen such a miracle; modern civilization has come to our steppes.”^[20]

In Ukrainian media, this news was presented as a case of Russians “stealing” the old asphalt from the roads because they themselves do not have such roads.

In the Russian-controlled parts of the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, new tariffs for utilities were approved in July. Utilities in those regions are much less expensive than in the rest of Ukraine: Natural gas is less than one-fifth the price in the Russian-controlled areas; hot water is almost 60% less; heating is more than 60% less; and electricity is 45% less. Such are the economic benefits brought by Russia and which are very appealing to local populations.^[21]

Previously, Russian authorities announced the cancellation of all the debts of Ukrainian citizens owed for gas, electricity and water utilities, as well as bank debts. As a result, thousands of households in Kyiv-controlled territories have stopped paying their bills, expecting that Russia may some day arrive and write off their debts as well. This is one of the reasons why the regime of Zelensky is obliged to step up requests to the Western powers for additional financial assistance.

Crimea

Apparently, the regions of Donbas and southern Ukraine will follow the path of rebuilding and restoration taken earlier in the Chechen Republic and Crimea.

Crimea and most of what became Ukraine following 1991 lived off the infrastructure legacy of the Soviet Union without repairing or updating it. After the 2014 referendum in Crimea (March 15 of that year), the Russians involved in restoring the infrastructure of Crimea were shocked by the degree of deterioration of buildings, pipes and roads.

In 2014, average wages and pensions almost tripled for Crimeans as a result of their vote to join Russia. Naturally, this only strengthened their loyalty to Moscow. Now Crimea and Chechnya are the most loyal regions to the Russian central government, not least due to the substantial financial injections into the economies of these regions. These are much higher, proportionately, than in other regions of the Russian Federation. The volume of infrastructure investments per capita in Crimea, for example, is 29% ahead of the Russian average.^[22]

In 2013, by comparison, the per capita GRP (gross regional product) of Crimea was 25% of that in Russia, the average salary was less than 40% of that in Russia, and investments were 30% of that in Russia.

Because of Western sanctions, tourism in Crimea has suffered heavily. As well, the blockade of water supply imposed by Kyiv did not allow the development of agriculture in the arid northern regions of Crimea. Ukrainian authorities blockaded the Northern Crimea Canal in 2015, which provided most drinking and agricultural water to Crimea from the Dnieper River to the north. The canal was built during the 1950s.

In place of tourism, the Crimean economy is now shifting toward industrial production, in particular, shipbuilding and engineering at Soviet factories that were virtually abandoned or on the verge of bankruptcy under Ukraine’s rule. Ukraine has allowed much of its industrial production capacity to degrade since 1991, saying it can instead buy superior equipment from Western corporations.

Among the largest projects in Crimea since 2014 have been extensive water supply and pipeline infrastructure; a new airport in the capital city of Simferopol; and the historic Kerch Strait Bridge, 19 km long and carrying trucks and autos as well as a two-track railway to and from Crimea and the Russian mainland.

Ukraine is today threatening to strike the bridge with missiles. Perhaps it is too much of an embarrassment to Ukrainian officials. Since 1992, several plans to build a Podolsky Bridge, four kilometers long, in the Kyiv region across the Dnieper River have failed due to bad planning or escalating costs.^[23]

In 2015, Ukrainian nationalists organized, in addition to the water blockade, an energy blockade of Crimea, blowing up power lines in the Kherson region. The destroyed power lines were finally restored at the end of July 2022. “Crimea has overcome the water, food, and transport blockades set up by the Kyiv regime, and now the latest energy blockade,” Oleg Kryuchkov recently announced. He is an information officer for the head of Crimea. “Crimea receives water through the unblocked North Crimean Canal, trade and transport links with the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions have been restored, and the energy system has been fully restored. Everything is returning to normal.”^[24]

All this said, there remain conflicting loyalties among business people in Crimea toward Moscow or Kyiv. Due to policies deregulating business in Ukraine, in accordance with the loan requirements of the IMF, private businesses in Crimea often lean in favor of Ukraine. Such businesses are more prone to evade taxes and not comply with sanitary and labor standards. The Russian state tightly regulates private businesses, in contrast to Ukraine, causing dissatisfaction with private taxi drivers who worked in Ukraine, at times without licenses and without paying any taxes. Some hotel owners—those who built their hotels in protected areas prior to 2014—are also dissatisfied, thanks to bribery and corruption.

Behind the scenes in Ukraine and its former territories, there is also competition between state-planned and private, neoliberal economies. In the Russian Federation, workers and technicians employed in state-run enterprises receive higher salaries and benefits.

Similar trends should be expected in the Russian-controlled territories of southern Ukraine and Donbas as soon as peace comes to them.

*

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Dmitri Kovalevich is a Ukrainian journalist and activist of the banned Ukrainian communist organization ‘Borotba’.

Notes

1. https://ctrana.online/news/399213-kak-pisat-zajavku-o-kollaborante-na-znakomykh-v-chatbot-jevoroh.html 

2. https://t.me/MaxBuzhanskiy/11371 
3. https://readovka.news/news/104989 
4. https://liva.com.ua/lishnyaya-vosmerka.-kak-otmenyayut-trudovyie-prava.html 
5. https://apnews.com.ua/ru/news/uvolneniya-i-vykliuchenie-kzota-rada-prinyala-tri-zakona-po-trudovym-otnosheniyam/ 
6. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraines-new-labor-law-wartime/ 
7. https://antikor.com.ua/ru/articles/561566-v_ukraine_likvidirovali_45_kanalov_nezakonnogo_vyvoza_za_granitsu_muhchin_prizyvnogo_vozrasta_-_mvd 
8. https://nv.ua/ukraine/events/arahamiya-rasskazal-skolko-voennyh-kazhdyy-den-pogibayut-ili-poluchayut-raneniya-novosti-ukrainy-50250190.html 
9. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10998887/Conscripts-given-call-papers-beaches-Ukraine.html 
10. https://ctrana.online/news/399567-dannye-o-poterjakh-vsu-v-vojne-protiv-rf-javljajutsja-hostajnoj-minoborony-ukrainy.html 
11. https://www.unian.net/economics/finance/dohody-gosbyudzheta-v-mae-lish-na-30-pokryli-rashody-novosti-ukrainy-novosti-ukraina-11859918.html 
12. https://vesti.ua/politika/raschelovechivanie-programma-arestovich-skazal-kak-ne-stat-putinoidom 
13. https://t.me/skosoi/4731 
14. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/07/20/ukrainian-kamikaze-drones-strike-russian-controlled-zaporizhzhia/ 
15. https://lenta.ru/news/2022/06/02/citizen/ 
16. https://kherson-news.ru/society/2022/07/18/13758.html 
17. https://www.interfax.ru/world/849405 
18. https://suspilne.media/222862-na-hersonsini-vijskovi-rf-rozdaut-po-10-tis-rubliv-deputat-oblradi/ 
19. https://focus.ua/world/522691-kndr-pomozhet-vosstanovit-ldnr-posol-rossii-v-severnoy-koree 
20. https://t.me/konkretnost/2188 
21. https://t.me/ZeRada1/9547 
22. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%AD%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0_%D0%9A%D1%80%D1%8B%D0%BC%D0%B0 
23. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%BC%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B9_%D0%BF%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%85%D0%BE%D0%B4 

24. https://eadaily.com/ru/news/2022/07/23/konec-blokady-kryma-v-hersonskoy-oblasti-vosstanovili-vzorvannye-opory-lep 

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***

The US government has a well-documented history of backing extremist groups as part of a panoply of foreign policy misadventures, which inevitably end up blowing up in the American public’s face. In the 1960s, the CIA worked with Cuban anti–Fidel Castro radicals who turned Miami into a hub of terrorist violence. In the 1980s, the agency supported and encouraged Islamic radicals converging in Afghanistan, who would go on to orchestrate the September 11 attack. And, in the 2010s, Washington backed Syria’s not-so-“moderate” rebels who ended up cutting a swath of atrocities through civilians and the Kurdish forces that were meant to be US allies.

Based on a new report, it looks like we may soon be able to add another to that list of fatally unlearned lessons: Ukrainian neo-Nazis.

According to a recent Yahoo! News report, since 2015, the CIA has been secretly training forces in Ukraine to serve as “insurgent leaders,” in the words of one former intelligence official, in case Russia ends up invading the country. Current officials are claiming the training is purely for intelligence collection, but the former officials Yahoo! spoke to said the program involved training in firearms, “cover and move,” and camouflage, among other things.

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There are credible reasons to suspect that the United Kingdom has been more dangerously forward-leaning in its support for Ukraine than most members of the transatlantic anti-Russia coalition.

During a 2016 speech laying out the pillars of the United Kingdom’s post-Brexit foreign policy, then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson articulated an approach to international relations infused with globalist rhetoric. “We are a protagonist – a global Britain running a truly global foreign policy”, Johnson said, while calling for more “free trade” agreements and strengthening and reforming the “rules-based international order.” As prime minister, Johnson then issued the Integrated Review 2021, “Global Britain in a Competitive Age,” which outlined a hard power strategy and investments for a period of “systemic competition” among middle and great powers. One commentator noted in response that “the ambitions of ‘Global Britain’ have delivered a bargain-basement version of American grand strategy.” This is the grand strategy that has set the United Kingdom’s course in Ukraine and one that British foreign secretary Liz Truss, who is likely to be Britain’s next prime minister, will surely carry out.

As a top member of Johnson’s cabinet, Truss has had a leading role in shaping British policy toward the Russo-Ukrainian War. On this score, Truss’ diplomatic performance has been unremarkable and, at one point, even counterproductive. In line with her boss’ internationalist convictions, Truss believes her country is better off when it plays the role of deputy sheriff to help the United States police the world. For instance, Truss declared in a March speech at the Atlantic Council that “Our ultimate aim … [is] to make the world safe for freedom and democracy.”

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President Joe Biden is planning to declare Ukraine an official U.S. military operation, the Aug. 24 Wall Street Journal reports, making it a separate command with its own general. Should Biden do that, it would put the Ukraine operation on par with the U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The naming of the operation formally recognizes the U.S. effort within the military, akin to how the Pentagon dubbed the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Freedom’s Sentinel. The naming of the training and assistance is significant bureaucratically, as it typically entails long-term, dedicated funding and the possibility of special pay, ribbons and awards for service members participating in the effort.

“The selection of a general, expected to be a two- or three-star, reflects the creation of a command responsible to coordinate the effort, a shift from the largely ad hoc effort to provide training and assistance to the Ukrainians for years,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Biden and Congress are stepping up war spending and expansion, while workers have taken a pay cut of almost 4% this year. This is good old guns-not-butter politics. In the words of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

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Featured image is from SLL

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Ukraine’s Air Force staff have been essentially eliminated by Russia’s Aerospace Forces and air defense systems, a military-diplomatic source told the Russian agency TASS on Monday.

“The entire qualified operating personnel of Ukraine’s former air force – of Mig-29, Su-27 and Su-25 aircraft – have been practically eliminated by the effective actions of the Russian Aerospace Forces and the air defense systems,” the source declared.

The source also stated that the West’s vows to deliver more Soviet-manufactured combat planes will most likely remain void, adding that Ukraine was coerced to include poorly trained air cadets for combat sorties which led to “catastrophic losses among the remnants of the Ukrainian aviation.”

According to the source, attempts to bring on more pilots in Poland and other Eastern European countries were not fruitful. “The few who agreed are already in grave or in hospitals,” he explained.

This comes after Russian President Vladimir Putin requested the increase of the size of Russian military personnel from 1.9 to 2.04 million last Thursday and amid continuous attacks by Ukrainian forces on the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant (NPP).

Following the attacks, two power units of the Zaporozhye NPP have been automatically disconnected from the network after a fire erupted near a high-voltage line, Yevgeny Balitsky, the head of the Zaporozhye regional administration, said on Thursday, adding that one power unit is still connected to the network. Just a day later, the Ukrainian military targeted the Zaporozhye NPP, and four shells hit the area where radioactive isotopes are stored.

The concurrent damages have led to action by the IAEA inspectors who are due to be on their way to the Zaporozhye NPP amid mounting fears over a potential nuclear accident.

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Featured image: Su-34 bombers (Source: TASS)

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“Biden should immediately reverse his executive order,” said one humanitarian. “With millions of Afghans impoverished and starving, the U.S. must return to the Afghan people what is rightfully theirs.”

The United Nations aid chief on Monday led calls for a resumption of the humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan that ended after the Taliban reconquered the war-ravaged nation one year ago—pleas that came as six million Afghans face famine and the Biden administration continues to refuse to return billions of dollars in frozen funds.

“The people in Afghanistan continue to face extreme hardship and uncertainty,” U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths told the world body’s Security Council.

Noting that the U.N.’s Humanitarian Response Plan for Afghanistan is currently facing a more than $3 billion shortfall, Griffiths called on donors to immediately provide $754 million in aid to help Afghans survive the coming winter.

“Close to 19 million people are facing acute levels of food insecurity, including six million people at risk of famine,” he warned. “More than half of the population—some 24 million people—need humanitarian assistance. And an estimated three million children are acutely malnourished. They include over one million children estimated to be suffering from the most severe, life-threatening form of malnutrition. And without specialized treatment, these children could die.”

#Afghanistan is more than a humanitarian crisis. But it is not a hopeless crisis.

Preserving basic service delivery alongside humanitarian assistance remains the only way to prevent a catastrophe even greater than what we have seen in the past year.

My remarks:

— Martin Griffiths (@UNReliefChief) August 29, 2022

Griffiths continued:

This malnutrition crisis is fueled by recurrent drought, including the worst in three decades in 2021, and whose effects are still lingering. Eight out of 10 Afghans drink contaminated water, making them susceptible to repeated bouts of acute watery diarrhea. Around 25 million people are now living in poverty and three quarters of people’s income is spent on food. There’s been a 50% decline in households receiving remittances; unemployment could reach 40%; and inflation is rising due to increased global prices, import constraints, and currency depreciation.

“So these relentless layers of crisis persist at a time when communities are already struggling,” Griffiths added. “In June, a 5.9-magnitude earthquake affected over 360,000 people living in high-intensity impact areas. And since July, heavy rains have led to massive flash floods across the country, and indeed the region, killing and injuring hundreds of people, and destroying hundreds of homes as well as thousands of acres of crops.”

Not only has the US deprioritized Afghan refugees. The US continues to fuel crisis in Afghanistan with the criminal economic warfare on the Afghan economy which starves the Afghan people. #UnfreezeAfghanistan! https://t.co/4Wh2Ewgtmz

— CODEPINK (@codepink) August 30, 2022

Because the Taliban—which fought for two decades to oust U.S.-led forces and the coalition-backed Afghan government in a war that claimed over 170,000 lives—is not formally recognized by any nation and is under international sanctions, it is difficult to deliver humanitarian assistance to the country.

U.S. policy is exacerbating the crisis. Despite pleas from economists and humanitarians, the Biden administration continues to withhold around $7 billion in Afghan central bank funds stored in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

On Monday, a U.S. federal judge concluded that relatives of victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States should not be allowed to claim billions of dollars of the frozen funds to settle legal judgments against the Taliban, who sheltered al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden before unsuccessfully offering to turn him in for trial in a third country as the U.S.-led invasion began. However, another judge can decide whether to accept that conclusion.

U.S. President Joe Biden had sought to set aside $3.5 billion of the $7 billion to settle 9/11 claimants’ cases, while signing a February executive order allocating the remainder “to be used for the benefit of the Afghan people.”

However, six months later, the administration still has not released the funds, citing the Taliban’s apparent sheltering of al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri—who was killed by a U.S. drone strike on Kabul on July 31.

Also addressing the U.N. Security Council on Monday, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the world body, contended that “no country that is serious about containing terrorism in Afghanistan would advocate to give the Taliban instantaneous, unconditional access to billions in assets that belong to the Afghan people.”

Today marks a year since U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan.

Several key indicators reveal that people in Afghanistan are suffering more now than before the U.S. invasion in 2001.

Read the full infographic: https://t.co/6GAKlrd8Bl pic.twitter.com/TNhh0DmYAz

— The Costs of War Project (@CostsOfWar) August 30, 2022

Assal Rad, research director at National Iranian American Council Action, tweeted Monday that “the U.S. is still collectively punishing the people of Afghanistan.”

“For millions of Afghans facing starvation,” she added, “the war never ended.”

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

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Featured image: An Afghan man and children, suffering hardships from America’s longest war, pose for a portrait in Kabul, Afghanistan, on March 19, 2021. [Source: theintercept.com]

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Monitors being used for measuring the amount of sewage being pumped into the sea across the UK are faulty or not even installed, according to a new analysis of the data.

Environment Agency data shows water companies are failing to monitor sewage discharges along the coastline including at British seaside resorts.

The findings come as dozens of pollution warnings were put in place across beaches and swimming spots in England and Wales this week after heavy rain overwhelmed sewer systems, leading water companies to release sewage into the natural environment.

Discharges

Ministers are facing growing calls to clamp down on the water firms who are being criticised for not investing money back into the UK’s outdated water infrastructure.

Boris Johnson’s father Stanley blamed his son’s administration for the sewage problem. Johnson Snr said in a radio interview:

“We have to blame the government for not pressing this matter as hard as it should’ve done.

“Absent the EU push as well, you can understand how the government felt able to not push this thing as it should’ve pushed.”

The Liberal Democrats, who conducted the data analysis, said water companies have either installed Event Duration Monitors (EDMs) that are frequently faulty or have not installed devices at all. EDMs are supposed to measure the number and length of sewage dumps from storm overflows.

In total, the party found 24 percent of sewage discharges went unmonitored last year while 1,802 monitors installed by water companies across the UK did not work for at least 90 percent of the time.

Sewage

Anglian Water has the highest rate of failure, with 49 percent of all its sewage discharges not measured due to faulty or no monitors installed, according to the party. This is followed by South West Water with 30 percent and Severn Trent Water with 29 percent.

One in eight of South West Water’s sewage monitors installed at designated bathing locations across Cornwall and Devon are either faulty or not installed, the party said.

In Sussex, Southern Water was found to have altogether failed to install one at the popular seaside spot of Littlehampton Pier while one in Seaford was working only a third of the time.

It comes after a previous analysis by the Liberal Democrats found water companies dumped sewage in public swimming spots for more than 160,000 hours last year.

The Labour Party earlier this week said figures it obtained from the Environment Agency through Freedom of Information requests showed raw sewage has been pumped into UK waterways for a total of 9,427,355 hours since 2016.

Swamped

The party also said the data shows a 2,553 percent increase in the number of monitored discharge hours between 2016 and 2021, arguing the situation is “drastically worsening” under the Conservatives.

In light of the latest analysis on monitors, the Liberal Democrats say the amount of sewage could be “dramatically higher”.

The party’s environment spokesperson, Tim Farron MP, said:

“These water companies could be guilty of gross negligence by failing to install sewage monitors.

“This is a national scandal and these new figures stink of a cover-up. Britain’s seaside resorts are being swamped by foul sewage yet the government is nowhere to be found.

“Why on earth are Conservative ministers letting them get away with this? Sussex has been devastated in recent days by disgraceful sewage dumps because of Southern Water.

Target

He added:

“The CEO of Southern Water should go to Seaford to check on this sewage monitor immediately. The public needs to know how safe, if at all, popular beaches are for swimming.”

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) released a response to the issue earlier this week outlining the action it is taking.

Steve Double, the water minister, said:

“We are the first government to take action to tackle sewage overflows.”

An Anglian Water spokesperson said:

“All [the places designated for bathing] have EDM monitors installed on them. Work to install EDM monitors on all the CSOs (combined sewer overflows) across our region is ahead of target.”

The PA news agency has also contacted Southern Water, South West Water and Severn Trent Water for comment.

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Rebecca Speare-Cole is a reporter with PA. 

Featured image is from TruePublica

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US officials confirmed late on 1 September that they have received Tehran’s response to their proposals to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal.

However, Washington claims the text from Iran is “not constructive.”

“We can confirm that we have received Iran’s response through the EU,” a State Department spokesperson told reporters. “We are studying it and will respond through the EU, but unfortunately it is not constructive,” the official added.

Tehran sent its reply to Brussels on Thursday, one week after they received Washington’s observations on the EU-drafted proposal to revive the JCPOA and lift sanctions on Iran.

“The sent text has a constructive approach with the aim of finalizing the negotiations,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said in a statement.

The US unilaterally exited the JCPOA in 2018, before launching a so-called “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign on Iran.

After 16 months of talks between Tehran and the remaining signatories of the JCPOA – France, Germany, the UK, Russia, and China – on 8 August, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell announced that a final proposal had been drafted to revive the deal and welcome Washington back into the fold.

But the US has been hesitant about providing strong guarantees to Iran to confirm they will not withdraw from the deal once again. This is mainly due to strong pressure coming from Israel, as Tel Aviv has tried to sabotage the talks multiple times.

Ahead of Iran’s response on Thursday, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said during a trip to Moscow: “We need stronger guarantees from the other party to have a sustainable deal.”

This echoed comments made by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi on Monday, when he highlighted the necessity of ending an investigation of Iran’s nuclear energy program by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in order to restore the deal.

“[Without lifting the IAEA probe] it is meaningless to talk about an agreement,” Raisi said.

Iran has previously blasted the IAEA for being “hijacked and exploited” by Israel. They have also criticized the UN watchdog for their incessant probes of Iran’s nuclear energy program, as opposed to their indifference over Israel’s ample nuclear weapons arsenal.

According to western media reports this week, Washington warned Tehran against linking the UN probe of their “undeclared” nuclear activity to the reimplementation of the JCPOA, saying this could “delay the lifting of economic sanctions.”

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Featured image is from the US State Department

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These kind vets wanted to help these bears thrive. During a wildfire in Southern California, two bears and a mountain lion sadly had their paws burned by the scorching hot ground. Thankfully, the animals were found by rescuers, and they were rushed to a wildlife vet for help.

The two adult bears and the mountain lion were brought to the veterinarians at the University of California for treatment. One of the bears was pregnant, and both had third-degree burns on their paws. This made it almost impossible to walk and hunt, and without treatment, they would have died quickly in the wild.

The plight of the bears made it to nightly news shows, including PBS:

All three of the animals had to have bandages applied to their paws. This isn’t an easy task for vets. Most wild animals aren’t very trusting of humans and won’t put up with medical treatment.

The animals had to be sedated before they could be treated. This worked fine for the original treatment, but they were all given bandages that needed to be changed often. That meant putting them to sleep often, which just can’t be done.

Jamie Peyton, chief of the Integrative Medicine Service at the university’s vet school, explained.

“You can only anesthetize them so many times,” Peyton said. “It’s hard on them. We can’t do that to them every day.”

The vets decided to try some new treatments on the animals while they were already anesthetized for bandage changes.

This would help the animals recover faster and reduce the number of times they would need to be sedated.

One of the unique treatments the vets applied to the animals was the use of fish skins as bandages. They stitched the skins to the paws of the animals and then wrapped them in corn husks. This protected the paws, allowed them to heal, and helped soothe the pain in the process. These bandages were also safer for the animals.

Many animals eat their bandages, and regular cloth ones could have gotten stuck in their intestines and caused blockages and other issues.

The fish skin and corn husks are all-natural, so they won’t cause any internal problems if eaten. The mountain lion did attempt to eat his, so this proved to be beneficial.Once the treatments were applied, the animals seemed to do well.

The bears both woke up easily and walked around on their paws. They ate well and were interested in their surroundings. The mountain lion showed similar progress.

It took several weeks for the bears to get used to their bandages and recover.

They also had to learn to use their injured paws with the bandages on them. They wouldn’t be able to hunt, walk, or climb with sore paws.Once the bears recovered from their treatment, they were released back into the wild.

The bears did well, but the mountain lion was too young to be returned. Wildlife officers believed that he would not be able to survive on his own in the wild.

They decided to send him to a care facility in Northern California where he will be cared for properly for his entire life.

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All images in this article are from The Greanville Post

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A new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) document obtained by The Dossier proves without a doubt that the U.S. Department of Defense did not have FDA approved COVID-19 vaccines in its possession — despite top DOD officials claiming otherwise — while unlawfully forcing service members to take the shots, under the very real threat of separation, court martial, and other severe ramifications.

The Dossier has verified the authenticity of the FOIA document, which is published below. We’ve redacted personal information.

Replying to a question about the Defense Department’s possession of Pfizer’s Comirnaty, which in the context of the question can be understood as the FDA approved version of the COVID-19 vaccines, the Defense Logistics Agency responds:

“We began shipping Comirnaty labeled vaccine in June 2022. From the week of June 13, 2022, through the week of August 29, 2022, we will have shipped 9600 doses (160 boxes) of vaccine.”

They did not have anything with a Comirnaty label until June 2022. That’s almost a full year after the DOD vaccine mandate went into effect.

This is an admission that service members were injected exclusively with emergency use authorization products. Today, active duty troops continue to be harassed, threatened, and punished for non compliance with the unlawful order.

‼️‼️‼️ “They were escorted to the gate like they were criminals or something,” the lawyer, Michael Rose, told the newspaper.

Unvaccinated cadets ordered off Coast Guard Academy campushttps://t.co/GubUGPZCZi

— Kristina Wong 🇺🇸 (@kristina_wong) August 31, 2022

Air Force Officer Facing Court-Martial After Refusing COVID-19 Vaccinehttps://t.co/Q90T6RGkHh

— R. Davis Younts (@younts_r) April 15, 2022

It remains unclear what exactly the response of “Comirnaty labeled” means. It likely is a product of legal sleight of hand, as no FDA approved shot has become available to service members. The question about Moderna’s FDA approved Spikevax was not answered directly, so unfortunately, there is no value in that portion of the FOIA response.

Nonetheless, the Department of Defense is now on record admitting that ZERO FDA approved shots were made available to service members.

But that wasn’t what top Pentagon officials were saying at the time of the unlawful mandate.

Dr. Terry Adirim, the former Pentagon official who wrote the infamous Pentagon memo attempting to justify mandating EUA shots as if they were FDA approved, has repeatedly claimed on social media and elsewhere that the licensed FDA product was indeed available to service members at the time of the mandate. We now know her statements, and those of other Pentagon officials making similar claims, were demonstrably false. In response to inquiries about this topic, Adirim, who has since moved over to the department of Veterans Affairs, has locked her social media accounts.

Remember when @TerryAdirimMD said their was enough licensed vaccine for all and that it was available to servicemembers? This FOIA request determined THAT was a lie. pic.twitter.com/ioRHho9rYY

— Terminalcwo (@terminalcwo) August 31, 2022

Hello @DeptofDefense @SecDef can y’all explain what fda approved vaccine you are talking about? Colonel Tonya rans @MilitaryHealth made a declaration that Comirnaty wasn’t available for the DoD prior to may 20,2022? So who is lying? And BLA compliant isn’t real so let’s back off pic.twitter.com/pz1fDF3VtM

— JanineG385 (@JanineG385) August 8, 2022

As The Dossier has reported, Pfizer admitted in May 2022 that it never did and never will produce the original FDA approved shots. For many months, the trail of evidence seemed to render it unlikely, if not impossible, for the Pentagon to have obtained the FDA approved ghost shots. Today, we know for certain that is the case.

Top military officials misled the public, detonated readiness, and caused tremendous harm to the countless vaccine injured service members, through an unlawful order purportedly designed to “protect” them against a disease that does not threaten them. The DOD has finally acknowledged, through this latest FOIA response, that there was no legal basis for any of this. Now, who will be held accountable?

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Featured image: Pfc. Shaniah Edwards, Medical Detachment, prepares to administer the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to soldiers and airmen at the Joint Force Headquarters, February 12, 2021. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. Leona C. Hendrickson – Source.)

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Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

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Emerging statistics on excess mortality rates paint an alarming picture. Far more people died in 2021, after the rollout of the COVID shots, and in 2022, than during the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020

Mainstream media are trying to divert your attention from the elephant in the room — mass injection with experimental gene transfer technology — to anything and everything but that

The Telegraph blames the unexplained excess deaths on lockdown effects. Many didn’t have access to routine medical care during lockdowns, and are now dying from chronic diseases that went untreated

U.K. Office for National Statistics (ONS) data released August 16, 2022, show excess deaths in England and Wales were, as of August 5, 14.4% higher than the five-year average, which works out to 1,350 more deaths per week than normal. A majority of these excess deaths were cardiovascular in nature — a primary adverse effect of the COVID jabs

In the U.S., we lost 349,000 younger Americans to something besides COVID and non-natural death between April 3, 2021 and August 13, 2022, and that’s not counting the tens of thousands of death records that the CDC has inexplicably deleted. As much as 15% to 25% of the death reports that could indicate a COVID jab death are missing. Other data show that during the fall of 2021, Millennials, aged 25 to 44, had an 84% increase in excess deaths

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Emerging statistics on excess mortality rates paint an alarming picture. Far more people died in 2021, after the rollout of the COVID shots, and in 2022, than during the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020. I will review some of those shocking statistics — which are mirrored around the world — in a moment.

But while rational people look at these figures and ask themselves what the most apparent and likely cause behind this sudden rise in deaths of working-age adults and younger people might be, mainstream media are trying to divert your attention from the elephant in the room — mass injection with experimental gene transfer technology — to anything and everything but that.

Lockdowns Blamed for Excess Deaths

In an August 18, 2022, article,¹ Telegraph science editor Sarah Knapton blames the “unexplained excess deaths” on “the effects of lockdown.” She writes:²

“Figures for excess deaths from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that around 1,000 more people than usual are currently dying each week from conditions other than the virus.

The … Department of Health has ordered an investigation into the figures amid concern that the deaths are linked to delays to and deferment of treatment for conditions such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Over the past two months, the number of excess deaths not from Covid dwarfs the number linked to the virus …

Dr. Charles Levinson, the chief executive of Doctorcall, a private GP service, said his company was seeing ‘far too many’ cases of undetected cancers and cardiac problems, as well as ‘disturbing’ numbers of mental health conditions.

Cardiovascular Problems Kill in Record Numbers

ONS data released August 16, 2022, show excess deaths in England and Wales were, as of August 5, 14.4% higher than the five-year average, which works out to 1,350 more deaths per week than normal, Knapton reports.³ As you can see in the graph⁴ below, COVID is only involved in a small number of those deaths.

In all, non-COVID deaths are now more than three times that of COVID-related deaths. According to the U.K. Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, a majority of these excess deaths were “preventable heart and stroke and diabetes-related conditions.”

However, while lack of routine health care — people avoiding seeing their doctors for fear of COVID or due to various restrictions — may well have played a role, cardiovascular problems such as heart attacks and strokes are the primary side effects of the jab as well.

A Look at US Mortality Data

The identical trend is also seen in the U.S. In Part 1 of a three-part series,⁵ The Ethical Skeptic — self-described as a former intelligence officer and strategies for nations facing corruption challenges — reviews data from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics showing “stark increase trends beginning in the first week of April 2021.”

“This date of inception is no coincidence, in that it also happens to coincide with a key inflection point regarding a specific body-system intervention in most of the U.S. population,” The Ethical Skeptic notes.

He describes how, at the very end of May 2021, an “odd signal” developed in his COVID tracking models. This odd signal came in the form of an ICD death code (International Classification of Diseases code) called R00-R99, which stands for “Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified.” In other words, deaths from undetermined causes.

As a result of this odd signal, he started tracking these R00-R99 deaths, along with 11 other ICD-10 (the 10 stands for 10th revision, which is the most recent), such as suicides and overdoses, as well as a statistic called “Excess non-COVID natural cause deaths.” The data The Ethical Skeptic used for his models were derived from three primary databases:

1. The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention: Weekly Counts of Deaths by State and Select Causes, 2014-2019⁶
2. The CDC’s Weekly Provisional Counts of Deaths by State and Select Causes, 2020-2022⁷
3. The CDC’s Wonder: Provisional Mortality Statistics, 2018 through Last Month – Query by Constraint Engine⁸

CDC Is Scrubbing Death Records

Non-COVID mortality saw a mild uptick in October 2020, an effect The Ethical Skeptic attributes to “the systemic damage which the SARS-CoV-2 infection and virus spike protein can produce in the human body. An erstwhile COVID delayed death if you will.”

The noticeable explosion of non-COVID deaths didn’t occur until Week 14, 2021, and “by the end of 2021 it had become abundantly clear that U.S. citizens were not just dying of COVID-19 to the excess, they were also now dying of something else, and at a rate which eventually became higher than that of COVID itself,” he writes.

Disturbingly, he discovered that death records were inexplicably being redacted and deleted during a very crucial time period — Weeks 4 through 20 in 2022. “It is hard to envision a scenario explaining this 52,000-record data tampering across the most at-risk weeks … of 2022, as not constituting malicious obfuscation of U.S. citizen mortality data,” he writes.

Deep Dive Into US Death Statistics

His article is chockfull of charts for those who want to take a deeper dive into the statistics, but here are some extracts of his findings:

“The charts of particular concern … include the charts featuring stark post MMWR Week 14, 2021 rises in mortality. Specifically, they are

… While there are indeed increases in deaths incumbent inside the other ICD-10 codes, those increases appeared to plausibly conform to their same arrival patterns for 2020 as well. In other words, they appeared to be heavily Covid-related in their dynamics, both before and after the Week 14 2021 inflection.

Of particular concern, are those deaths which relate to body-wide regulatory systems as opposed to specific organs or causes. In other words, cancer and lymphomas, heart, autonomous myocarditis/pericarditis/conductive disorders, injuries to the liver and kidneys, etc.

These are not only the canaries in the coal mine in terms of pathology, but may serve to indicate as well that a pervasive systemic disruption is at play inside the average U.S. citizen human physiology, especially over the last 71 weeks. These are the death groups which exhibit the most stark trend of increase post MMWR Week 14, 2021 …

[Let] us for a moment also review the compelling rationale behind the MMWR Week 14 2021 inflection date. This date is a critical matter of concern for no small reason. Its derivation is no coincidence. The ‘Doses and Deaths Comparison Chart’, Exhibit B below, outlines why.

Exhibit B — The MMWR Week 14, 2021 inflection date also happens to correspond to the fastest velocity in administered vaccine doses inside the U.S. population. The red line is Excess Non-COVID Natural Cause Mortality extracted from the data behind Exhibit E below.”

According to The Ethical Skeptic, three types of death record codes in particular are signaling “population-wide systemic health disruption,” and those are: “Excess malignant neoplasm and lymphoma” deaths (coded C00-C97), “Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified” deaths (R00-R99) and “Excess non-COVID natural cause” deaths. All three trend very sharply against historical baselines.

For example, cancer and lymphoma deaths are now at a 9+ Sigma level, although it could potentially be higher. According to The Ethical Skeptic, 43,935 death records relating to “potential myocarditis, cancer, pericarditis, conductive, nephrosis, liver, and/or lymphoma deaths” have been removed from the CDC data sets, and as of his writing of that article had not been put back in or reassigned to another ICD code.

“That is 7% of the total deaths for the period in question, and possibly 15 to 25% of these highly concerning death ICD-10 groups’ trend data — missing. Even absent this data however, the entailed trends are alarming,” he writes.⁹

US Excess Non-COVID Natural Cause Deaths

The Ethical Skeptic continues:¹⁰

“Finally, we end with the most important chart of all — the chart which indicates deaths which are not from accidents, suicide, addiction, assault, abuse, despair, disruption, nor COVID-19. The Excess Non-COVID Natural Cause Mortality chart which we began monitoring on May 29th 2021. What I called then, the ‘What the hell is this?’ chart.

As one can see, we have lost 349,000 younger Americans to something besides COVID and non-natural death, during the period from 3 April 2021 to 13 August 2022.

The current rate of mortality in this ICD categorization, is around 5,000 – 8,000 per week … which exceeds most weeks of the COVID pandemic itself (save for the absolute peak periods). By now, if all these mortality excesses were indeed a holdover from COVID-19 itself, they should have already begun to tail off. Unfortunately, they are not only not tailing off, in many cases they are still increasing.

Exhibit E — Excess Non-COVID Natural Cause Deaths are at an all time high as of MMWR Week 32 of 2022. 349,000 U.S. citizens have died of some additional factor since MMWR Week 14 of 2021. The current rate of excess mortality represents a five-week average of 5+ sigma in excess (hedging conservatively for lag).

Accordingly, and without a shadow of a doubt, we have established that right now there exists a problem in terms of U.S. citizen health and mortality. One which is differentiated from COVID-19 itself, and began in earnest MMWR Week 14 of 2021.”

COVID Jabs Impair Immune Function

Kenji Yamamoto with the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery at the Okamura Memorial Hospital in Japan has also sounded the alarm, specifically highlighting the COVID jabs’ ability to impair your immune function. In a commentary published in the Virology Journal June 5, 2022, Yamamoto noted:¹¹

“Recently, The Lancet published a study¹² on the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines and the waning of immunity with time. The study showed that immune function among vaccinated individuals 8 months after the administration of two doses of COVID-19 vaccine was lower than that among the unvaccinated individuals …

The decrease in immunity can be caused by several factors such as N1-methylpseudouridine, the spike protein, lipid nanoparticles, antibody-dependent enhancement, and the original antigenic stimulus …

As a safety measure, further booster vaccinations should be discontinued. In addition, the date of vaccination should be recorded in the medical record of patients … In conclusion, COVID-19 vaccination is a major risk factor for infections in critically ill patients.”

It’s important to understand that when your immune function is impaired, you become vulnerable to all kinds of infections and disease, including cancer. As such, the COVID jab may well be responsible for any number of diseases resulting in death.

A Not-so-Comforting Fact Check by Reuters

A recent Thai study¹³ found teenagers, aged 13 through 18, who received two doses of Pfizer’s mRNA jab suffered a variety of heart problems. A Reuters “fact check” notes:¹⁴

“A study of 301 teens in Thailand found mild and temporary heart rhythm changes after a second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine among one in six teenagers, not one-third as social media posts claim. The study also saw possible signs of heart inflammation in just seven of those teens with rhythm changes and confirmed myocarditis in only one of the seven.”

Should we throw a victory parade over the fact that the jab causes heart problems in JUST 1 in 6 teens? Really?! Whether it’s 1 in 3 or 1 in 6, this is not “good news” and surely not worthy of the dismissive tone used by Reuters. As reported directly from the study in question:¹⁵

“The most common cardiovascular effects were tachycardia (7.64%), shortness of breath (6.64%), palpitation (4.32%), chest pain (4.32%), and hypertension (3.99%). Seven participants (2.33%) exhibited at least one elevated cardiac biomarker or positive lab assessments.

Cardiovascular effects were found in 29.24% of patients, ranging from tachycardia, palpitation, and myopericarditis. Myopericarditis was confirmed in one patient after vaccination. Two patients had suspected pericarditis and four patients had suspected subclinical myocarditis. Conclusion: Cardiovascular effects in adolescents after BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccination included tachycardia, palpitation, and myocarditis.”

Millennials Died at Staggering Rates in Late 2021

I recently interviewed Ed Dowd, a former equity portfolio manager for BlackRock and hedge fund “guru,”¹⁶ but have not yet posted it. In early March 2022 he shared disturbing CDC mortality statistics by age group on Steve Bannon’s War Room.¹⁷

During the fall of 2021, Millennials, aged 25 to 44, had an 84% increase in excess mortality. “It’s the worst-ever excess mortality, I think, in history,” Dowd told Bannon. Between the summer and fall of 2021, 61,000 Millennials died who otherwise wouldn’t. To quote Dowd:¹⁸

“Basically, Millennials experienced a Vietnam War in the second half of 2021. 58,000 people died in the Vietnam War, U.S. troops [over the course of 10 years], so this generation just experienced a Vietnam War [in 6 months] …

We’ve had 1.1 million excess deaths since the pandemic began, many of which occurred in the second half of [2021] …

I think this is the smoking gun: that the vaccines are causing excess mortality in all age groups … So, I’m going to put a word out there. It’s an old word but it should be re-introduced into the conversation. It’s called democide: Death by government. So the government, through the mandates has killed people …

If you’re on Wall Street and you still think Pfizer and Moderna are good buys, I’ve got news for you: there’s some catalysts coming that are probably not going to be good for holding those stocks.”

The following pdf was posted on Dowd’s GETTR account, March 11, 2022.¹⁹ (A GETTR user called MiloMac also reproduced Dowd’s findings using public CDC data, creating additional graphs.²⁰)

The Elephant in the Room

In a March 15, 2022, commentary and follow-up on Dowd’s revelations, Steve Kirsch wrote:²¹

“I called Ed to clarify where he got the chart and then looked for verification of this. I found the verification. Then I verified that the deaths couldn’t be explained by the COVID delta variant. OK, so what caused all the deaths? The only explanation is the vaccine because the deaths are so massive.”

Kirsch posted a WhatsApp conversation with Marc Girardot, a French-American biotech innovator, who believes the COVID jab may, in some people, age their arteries by as much as 50 years in just a few months. If true, that could certainly trigger rapid onset of cardiovascular disease leading to early death.

Teens and Young Adults Die at Higher Rates in New Zealand

In an August 16, 2022, Substack article,²² independent journalist Alex Berenson (a former New York Times reporter and novelist) highlighted COVID jab statistics from New Zealand,²³ which includes observed post-jab deaths. He explained:

“New Zealand’s Ministry of Health publishes regular and detailed reports on COVID vaccine safety, including specific lists of adverse events it has received. As part of the reports, the ministry also counts all deaths of people who have received the jabs in the previous 21 days …

New Zealand has a national COVID immunization registry and a national death registry, so the records and matching should largely be accurate … The ministry breaks down the deaths by age, ranging from 0-9 through over 80.

It then compares the actual number of people who died in the three weeks after the shots to the ‘expected’ number. That figure is simply the number of deaths demographers would have expected over a random three-week period based on actuarial tables estimating mortality …”

In summary, between February 19 and April 30, 2022, people over the age of 30 had lower than normal death rates in the 21 days’ post-jab, but people younger than 30 (ages 10 to 29) for some reason died at higher rates. (The lack of observed deaths in the under-10 age group is likely due to reporting lag.)

According to the health ministry, the slightly elevated deaths in the under-30 group is likely due to “chance.” And as noted by Berenson, “the ministry does not provide any information on the causes of death in any age range, so it is impossible to determine whether myocarditis or other cardiac conditions played a major role in the higher-than-expected figures.”

While these data are nowhere near as alarming as some others, it’s still a red flag that something odd is happening. Young people who should have decades of life left are dying.

And it’s worth noting that New Zealand, just like the U.S. claims there are NO potential safety issues with the jabs — not a single one — despite thousands of serious injury reports.²⁴ Considering the age group that is dying at a higher than normal rate — teenagers and young adults in their 20s — even a small increase ought to be taken very seriously, but is not.

To end where we started, which is the more likely culprit in these deaths? Past lockdowns temporarily preventing routine medical care, resulting in chronic diseases that kill even young people within a couple of years? Or the mass injection of experimental gene transfer shots that have never been used in humans before?

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Notes

^{1, 2, 3, 4} The Telegraph August 18, 2022 (Archived)

^5, 9, 10 The Ethical Skeptic August 20, 2022 Part 1

⁶ US Center for Disease Control and Prevention: Weekly Counts of Deaths by State and Select Causes, 2014-2019

⁷ US Center for Disease Control and Prevention: Weekly Provisional Counts of Deaths by State and Select Causes, 2020-2022

⁸ US Center for Disease Control and Prevention: Wonder: Provisional Mortality Statistics, 2018 through Last Month

¹¹ Virology Journal June 5, 2022; 19(1): 100

¹² Lancet February 26, 2022; 399(10327): 814-823

^13, 15 Trop. Med. Infect. Dis. 2022; 7: 196

¹⁴ Reuters August 18, 2022

¹⁶ Totality of Evidence Ed Dowd

^17, 18 Lew Rockwell March 22, 2022

¹⁹ GETTR Ed Dowd March 11, 2022

²⁰ GETTR MiloMac March 13, 2022

²¹ The Burning Platform March 15, 2022

²² Substack Alex Berenson August 16, 2022

²³ MedSafe NZ

²⁴ MedSafe NZ, See ”New safety signals” boxes for Pfizer and AstraZeneca

Featured image is from Mercola

Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

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Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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A bill that would have allowed California children ages 15 and older to be vaccinated without parental consent went “inactive” Wednesday.

State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), who authored Senate Bill 866 (SB 866), announced he will not put the measure up for a vote in the California Assembly because it does not have enough support to pass.

Wiener said in a statement the bill, which would have lowered the age of consent for all vaccines — including the COVID-19 vaccine — to 15, was “several votes short of 41” needed to pass, with no “viable path for these final few votes.”

He also tweeted his response regarding the outcome of the bill:

We’re close but a couple votes short on our teen vaccine bill (SB 866) on the Assembly floor. We’re thus moving the bill to inactive.

The anti-vaxxer harassment campaign worked this time, at the expense of teen health. We lost this round but aren’t going anywhere.

My statement: pic.twitter.com/lITSEujXPJ

— Senator Scott Wiener (@Scott_Wiener) August 31, 2022

While Weiner attributed the bill’s failure to a “small” but highly vocal and organized “minority of anti-vaxxers,” many Californians said the bill faced growing bipartisan opposition.

Californians rise up

“The tide has officially turned in California,” Nicole Pearson, attorney and founder of Facts Law Truth Justice, told The Defender in response to Weiner’s announcement.

Pearson continued:

“What happened Wednesday was not the product of a minority, fringe, extremist group. It was the result of thousands of tireless hours of millions of Californians uniting, educating and empowering each other, and rising up together to take our seats at the political table where we belong and have the right to be.

“It was the product of measured, respectful, informed, consistent efforts from Californians from all political, religious, racial and professional backgrounds, meeting with their elected representatives to educate and inform them and ensure that they represent and protect the will of the people.

“While we as lawyers — and doctors, nurses, teachers, parents, concerned citizens and human beings — still have a tremendous amount of work to do to truly turn our state around, today marks a tremendous moment in California history. Today marks the day that we know that we have the power and right to turn our communities into exactly what we want them to be.”

Pearson noted the efforts of Tara Thornton and Denise Aguilar of Freedom Angels “who held the line every single day the last three weeks of the legislative session to ensure we were maintaining and fostering relationships with legislators, and to keep a close track of the temperature and movement at the capitol. Without their relentless, tireless, thankless, and selfless efforts and insights, we would not have achieved the success we did today.”

In response to Wednesday’s news, Thornton and Aguilar tweeted this joint statement:

Todays defeat of SB866 pic.twitter.com/ua3bkQp3aA

— Freedom Angels2.0 (@FreedomAngels2) August 31, 2022

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman of Children’s Health Defense, also commented on the widespread lack of constituent support for Weiner’s bill.

Kennedy told The Defender:

“It’s long been said that California Democratic state legislators are not for sale; Pharma owns them all and will not sell.

“Now, years of grassroots activism have finally fortified enough legislatorial spines in Sacramento that assembly members are supporting children’s health rather than Pharma profits.

“We beat Big Pharma on its home turf. If we can win in California, we can protect kids everywhere.”

SB 866 was one of a handful of bills introduced by a group of Democratic lawmakers who called themselves the Vaccine Work Group and sought to “determine the best approaches to promote vaccines” as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic while “battling” misinformation.

However, many Californians felt that SB 866 was more about generating profits for pharmaceutical companies than about stopping disease and disseminating accurate information.

In its original form, SB 866 would have allowed children ages 12 years and older to “consent to vaccination when the vaccine is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and meets the recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” according to the bill’s official fact sheet.

After the original bill was met with stiff resistance, California lawmakers amended the bill in June by raising the proposed consent age from 12 to 15 years in hopes of garnering more support — but raising the consent age to 15 did little to nullify many individuals’ concerns.

A Voice for Choice Advocacy — one of the many California citizen organizations that opposed the bill — said on its website that if passed, SB 866 would “create an environment where pharmaceutical companies can coerce minors into getting vaccines with incentives and bribes.”

“It does not account for minors with exceptional needs who are not capable of making informed medical decisions on their own,” the group said.

Image: Children’s Health Defense

Moreover, minors may not know their full medical history and the potential risks, the group pointed out, and parents may not know what’s wrong if their child has an adverse reaction.

Assemblymember Carlos Villapudua (D-Stockton) previously said the bill went too far in excluding parents from medical decisions, the LA Times reported.

“As a father of four younger daughters, I would appreciate being a part of this process for them, and believe all parents should have the right to be a part of it as well for their own children,” he said.

Some said the bill would set up a situation for children injured by a vaccine to not be able to receive compensation.

Physicians for Informed Consent sent California lawmakers a letter in March 2022 “on behalf of hundreds of physician and surgeon members of Physicians for Informed Consent and thousands of our health-freedom members” who opposed SB 866.

The letter said:

“As exemplified by the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, sometimes serious vaccine injuries do occur and over $4.75 billion in compensations have been awarded for vaccine injury complaints which were filed within the three years of injury or two years of death statute of limitations.

“Furthermore, only a parent or legal guardian is legally able to petition for compensation for a minor’s vaccine injury, and this would be thwarted if SB 866 passes.”

Under current California law, a parent must consent to their child being vaccinated. An exception exists for vaccines aiming to protect against sexually transmitted diseases — such as the human papillomavirus and hepatitis B vaccines — which do not require parental permission for children 12 and older.

Although SB 866 has been declared dead, the fight in California over vaccine legislation is far from over.

According to PERK, an organization focused on educational rights, medical freedom, parental sovereignty and advocacy that fought SB 866, California lawmakers introduced 10 bills in 2022 — one of them being SB 866 — that “build on each other to create a state where you will not be able to learn, work, play or live without showing proof of vaccination.”

Five bills have been halted, and five others currently sit on Gov. Newsom’s desk.

*

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Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.

Featured image is from CHD

Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 

Purchase directly from the Global Research Online Store!

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

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***

One year after the astounding US humiliation in Kabul – and on the verge of another serious comeuppance in Donbass – there is reason to believe Moscow is wary of Washington seeking vengeance: in the form of the ‘Afghanization’ of Ukraine.

With no end in sight to western weapons and finance flowing into Kiev, it must be recognized that the Ukrainian battle is likely to disintegrate into yet another endless war. Like the Afghan jihad in the 1980s which employed US-armed and funded guerrillas to drag Russia into its depths, Ukraine’s backers will employ those war-tested methods to run a protracted battle that can spill into bordering Russian lands.

Yet this US attempt at crypto-Afghanization will at best accelerate the completion of what Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu describes as the “tasks” of its Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. For Moscow right now, that road leads all the way to Odessa.

It didn’t have to be this way. Until the recent assassination of Darya Dugina at Moscow’s gates, the battlefield in Ukraine was in fact under a ‘Syrianization’ process.

Like the foreign proxy war in Syria this past decade, frontlines around significant Ukrainian cities had roughly stabilized. Losing on the larger battlefields, Kiev had increasingly moved to employ terrorist tactics. Neither side could completely master the immense war theater at hand. So the Russian military opted to keep minimal forces in battle – contrary to the strategy it employed in 1980s Afghanistan.

Let’s remind ourselves of a few Syrian facts: Palmyra was liberated in March 2016, then lost and retaken in 2017. Aleppo was liberated only in December 2016. Deir Ezzor in September 2017. A slice of northern Hama in December and January 2018. The outskirts of Damascus in the Spring of 2018. Idlib – and significantly, over 25 percent of Syrian territory – are still not liberated. That tells a lot about rhythm in a war theater.

The Russian military never made a conscious decision to interrupt the multi-channel flow of western weapons to Kiev. Methodically destroying those weapons once they’re in Ukrainian territory – with plenty of success – is another matter. The same applies to smashing mercenary networks.

Moscow is well aware that any negotiation with those pulling the strings in Washington – and dictating all terms to puppets in Brussels and Kiev – is futile. The fight in Donbass and beyond is a do or die affair.

So the battle will go on, destroying what’s left of Ukraine, just as it destroyed much of Syria. The difference is that economically, much more than in Syria, what’s left of Ukraine will plunge into a black void. Only territory under Russian control will be rebuilt, and that includes, significantly, the bulk of Ukraine’s industrial infrastructure.

What’s left – rump Ukraine – has already been plundered anyway, as Monsanto, Cargill and Dupont have already bagged 17 million hectares of prime, fertile arable land – over half of what Ukraine still possesses. That translates de facto as BlackRock, Blackstone and Vanguard, top agro-business shareholders, owning whatever lands that really matter in non-sovereign Ukraine.

Going forward, by next year the Russians will be applying themselves to cutting off Kiev from NATO weapons supplies. As that unfolds, the Anglo-Americans will eventually move whatever puppet regime remains to Lviv. And Kiev terrorism – conducted by Bandera worshippers – will continue to be the new normal in the capital.

The Kazakh double game

By now it’s abundantly clear this is not a mere war of territorial conquest. It’s certainly part of a War of Economic Corridors – as the US spares no effort to sabotage and smash the multiple connectivity channels of Eurasia’s integration projects, be they Chinese-led (Belt and Road Initiative, BRI) or Russian-led (Eurasian Economic Union, EAEU).

Just like the proxy war in Syria remade large swathes of West Asia (witness, for instance, Erdogan about to meet Assad), the fight in Ukraine, in a microcosm, is a war for the reconfiguration of the current world order, where Europe is a mere self-inflicted victim in a minor subplot. The Big Picture is the emergence of multipolarity.

The proxy war in Syria lasted a decade, and it’s not over yet. The same may happen to the proxy war in Ukraine. As it stands, Russia has taken an area that is roughly equivalent to Hungary and Slovakia combined. That’s still far from “task” fulfillment – and it’s bound to go on until Russia has taken all the land right up to the Dnieper as well as Odessa, connecting it to the breakaway Republic of Transnistria.

It’s enlightening to see how important Eurasian actors are reacting to such geopolitical turbulence. And that brings us to the cases of Kazakhstan and Turkey.

The Telegram channel Rybar (with over 640k followers) and hacker group Beregini revealed in an investigation that Kazakhstan was selling weapons to Ukraine, which translates as de facto treason against their own Russian allies in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Consider too that Kazakhstan is also part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the EAEU, the two hubs of the Eurasian-led multipolar order.

As a consequence of the scandal, Kazakhstan was forced to officially announce the suspension of all weapons exports until the end of 2023.

It began with hackers unveiling how Technoexport – a Kazakh company – was selling armed personnel carriers, anti-tank systems and munitions to Kiev via Jordanian intermediaries, under the orders of the United Kingdom. The deal itself was supervised by the British military attaché in Nur-Sultan, the Kazakh capital.

Nur-Sultan predictably tried to dismiss the allegations, arguing that Technoexport had not asked for export licenses. That was essentially false: the Rybar team discovered that Technoexport instead used Blue Water Supplies, a Jordanian firm, for those. And the story gets even juicier. All the contract documents ended up being found in the computers of Ukrainian intel.

Moreover, the hackers found out about another deal involving Kazspetsexport, via a Bulgarian buyer, for the sale of Kazakh Su-27s, airplane turbines and Mi-24 helicopters. These would have been delivered to the US, but their final destination was Ukraine.

The icing on this Central Asian cake is that Kazakhstan also sells significant amounts of Russian – not Kazakh – oil to Kiev.

So it seems that Nur-Sultan, perhaps unofficially, somehow contributes to the ‘Afghanization’ in the war in Ukraine. No diplomatic leaks confirm it, of course, but bets can be made Putin had a few things to say about that to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in their recent – cordial – meeting.

The Sultan’s balancing act

Turkey is a way more complex case. Ankara is not a member of the SCO, the CSTO or the EAEU. It is still hedging its bets, calculating on which terms it will join the high-speed rail of Eurasian integration. And yet, via several schemes, Ankara allows Moscow to evade the avalanche of western sanctions and embargoes.

Turkish businesses – literally all of them with close connections to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) – are making a killing, and relishing their new role as crossroads warehouse between Russia and the west. It’s an open boast in Istanbul that what Russia cannot buy from Germany or France they buy “from us.” And in fact several EU companies are in on it.

Ankara’s balancing act is as sweet as a good baklava. It gathers    economic support from a very important partner right in the middle of the endless, very serious Turkish economic debacle. They agree on nearly everything: Russian gas, S-400 missile systems, the building of the Russian nuclear power plant, tourism – Istanbul is crammed with Russians – Turkish fruits and vegetables.

Ankara-Moscow employ sound textbook geopolitics. They play it openly, in full transparence. That does not mean they are allies. It’s just pragmatic business between states. For instance, an economic response may alleviate a geopolitical problem, and vice-versa.

Obviously the collective west has completely forgotten how that normal state-to-state behavior works. It’s pathetic. Turkey gets “denounced” by the west as traitorous – as much as China.

Of course Erdogan also needs to play to the galleries, so every once in a while he says that Crimea should be retaken by Kiev. After all, his companies also do business with Ukraine – Bayraktar drones and otherwise.

And then there’s proselytizing: Crimea remains theoretically ripe for Turkish influence, where Ankara may exploit the notions of pan-Islamism and mostly pan-Turkism, capitalizing on the historical relations between the peninsula and the Ottoman Empire.

Is Moscow worried? Not really. As for those Bayraktar TB2s sold to Kiev, they will continue to be relentlessly reduced to ashes. Nothing personal. Just business.

*

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This article was originally published on The Cradle.

Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Cradle

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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***

With Britain’s economy grinding on the rocks of recession, the metrics of the Conservative Party’s forty-year “special relationship” with America prove that this relationship has been an infection borne by yet another engineered American virus. Today’s terminal decline mirrors America’s economic, political, social and moral decay.

The ravages of a wartime winter have returned to Britain. With the Bank of England similarly stricken by this special relationship, it has disastrously emulated the US Federal Reserve step by step. Dying economies are the precursor to the degradation of society.  As Britain prepares to endure another desperate holiday season it is time to recall that when Margaret Thatcher became PM in 1979, before she imported Reaganomics to Britain in 1980, sterling’s value was £2.33 to the US dollar. Three years later, £1.57. Now, £1.16.

“Special relationship”, you say?

The metamorphosis, crisis by crisis, of American financial chicanery continually stoked the global economic pyramid scheme of deficit spending. This was greeted wholesale by the Exchequer and without opposition from elected officials at White Hall. However, during those four decades, Britain’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) averaged less than a 1% increase per year with negative GDP in twenty-one of forty-two years.

In 1981 UK manufacturing as a percentage of national GDP was nearly 20% and jobs in this sector made up 21.8%. Ttoday just 7.6%. Trade union membership is down from 13 million in 1980 to just over 6 million members. The average home price (adjusted for inflation) increased from £103,237 to £271,100 while home rentals increased 8.86% per year from a median monthly rent of £357 in 1980 to more than £1400 today. In 1980 53,000 families were listed as homeless then more than doubling to 126,000 by 1989 and over 219,000 as reported in 2020.

Britain’s terminal symptoms have metastasized from America’s malignancies such as its ongoing increases from 1980 to 2019 in crime and murder rates, poverty (7% vs. 22%), personal debt (42.5% of GDP vs.  £1.7 trillion/105% GDP) and student loan debt (£460Billion total/ £45,800 per student), personal and business bankruptcies, and Suicide. Obesity and diabetes costs follow the American waistline, too, and add $10.7 billion in direct NHS costs and another $33.4 in related government subsidies yearly.

Prioritizing the ever-burgeoning war annuity was, however, routine each year and increased from £24.5 billion during Thatcher’s first term to £43.3 Billion this annum.

These massive sums have been an increasing, unnecessary, and unsustainable burden on a treasury already suffering from decades of conservative tax cuts.

The American economic affliction began under Ronald Reagan and quickly changed from a promise of “fiscal responsibility” featuring financial deregulation to tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy and the snipping of the Great Society’s social safety net. What this Reaganomics also cut was the tax base. Called, “Trickle-down economics,” this injection failed to course through the arteries of society for very long, failing somewhere along the way of the wealthy purchasing super yachts, private jets and increased political influence.

Conservatives hypocritically next embraced deficit spending as prescribed by the American economic mythologist John Maynard Keynes. Thus began the yearly increases in national budget deficits and the selling of government bonds (debt) to pay for it, all the while squeezing social programs.

With interest rates approaching zero and bank depositors receiving a similar return despite record bank profits – and rarely punished with convictions for criminal behavior- the mantra of “too big to fail”  by the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve rationalized injecting manufactured money repeatedly into the economy in a trick called Quantitative Easing (QE). QE is the creation of money by printing it (digitally) after the US/UK over-budgets billions more than its tax annual base. The Treasury issues more debt (bonds) to sell to cover the deficit. Next, the BofE or Fed prints currency out of thin air to buy that debt. Sovereign UK debt is currently in excess of £2.69 Trillion. It was less than £200 Billion in 1980.

Interestingly, today there are one hundred and seventy-one British billionaires. In 1980, there was zero. That’s inflation.

Mark Carney, a Canadian, who was governor of the BofE deliberately lowered interest rates to historic lows thus making new home mortgages and equity refinancing so cheap as to transfuse 100’s of billions more in cash out of thin air as house prices soared. This was again merely a delay before the crash.

During this economic descent, too few politicians opposed this Keynesian snake oil while an increasingly complicit media dutifully back-paged it. Tony Blair and the vaporous Gordon Brown, after a decade of demonizing and privatizing the remaining vestiges of British social infrastructure in per usual Tory fashion, proved to be American lackeys rather than representatives of UK popular interests. Such treachery was highlighted in the recent article, “When Your Bank Fails, Don’t Walk…Run!”

With Blair began Britain’s slide into American-style “monocracy.”  Neither US Democrat nor Republican any longer provides sincere opposition. Although Britain has yet to suffer an American-style rigged national election, the UK has been similarly stripped of opposition leadership. The shameful and inaccurate demonization of Jeremy Corbyn by British media was designed to sever forever the spinal cord of the Labour Party. It worked. As went Corbyn, so went British socialism’s last dedicated champion. Instead, Labour offered up a Blairite member of the anti-labour Tri-lateral Commission, Sir Keir Starmer: A man whose prefix nicely explains his lack of effective leadership.

Monocracy is hidden by the media which instead of balanced reporting promotes one-sided censorship using journalistic tyranny to manipulate intellectual freedom. Like America, rather than budgeting for improving national interests, Britain finds it more cost-effective to tighten social liberties. Parliament’s quietly pending Online Safety Bill makes only the lies of the media safe but does exemplify the compliant corruption of politicians and the media. With 87% of all US media owned by six corporations that have the same agenda as the three companies controlling all of UK print media, this censorship has been uniform, self-serving, and effective.

The surreptitious privatization of Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), once the example to the developing socialist world, would make Aneurin Bevan roll in his grave. Thankfully halted in 2019, here the American trick of using Privately Financed Instruments (PFI) to provide private loans that use each hospital as collateral, but under draconian terms, forced dilapidated hospitals deliberately into the arms of US hedge funds. This still costs the NHS £2 Billion per year in ongoing pay-offs.

Before 1998 higher education was free. Since then UK students have racked up £460 Billion in student loan debt with a per-student average of £45,800. Acting on American changes in 2012 the UK made student debt one of the very few non-dischargeable debts in bankruptcy. This forever saddled each student with a huge debt service, and usually without a job within their discipline. Universities are now also heavily indebted based on the promise of these anticipated student fees. Recently diluting the A-level tests assured an increase and continuance of this vital college revenue. And a drop in standards.

The parallels to America continue from obesity caused by an adulterated US-style food supply, immigrants arriving by the thousands unchecked into cities already rotting from neglect and them also drawing on already depleted social services and,or the absurd mental aberration the young call “woke” that demands the human mind now believe that hard facts are merely discretionary or that a uterus is of no consequence whatsoever in biologically defining a woman.

The biggest and most threatening similarity, however, is apathy. Like America, Britain can blame itself for watching passively while divorcing itself from political reality and leaving that job to a corrupt media and political system.

A dying nation begins its decline by debasing its economy. When the process is irreversible the nation, instead of turning to the people’s needs, begins to turn on the people themselves.

It is time for voters to inoculate their countries at the ballot box. To elect representatives of true, not alleged, character who prioritize populism, not the profits of war. Those who reject American hegemony and its many bastardizations of Trickle-down economics. Politicians who will stop feeding the American virus on the blood and treasure of their own country, and who prioritize food before guns, society before tyranny, family before party, and education before ignorance!

If Britain is to survive it must now devote its full attention to its singular, most-important national emergency…

Britain!

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Brett Redmayne-Titley has spent the last twelve years documenting the “Sorrows of Empire.” He has authored over 200 articles all of which have been published and often republished and translated by news agencies worldwide. An archive of his published work can be found at watchingromeburn.uk. He can be contacted at live-on-scene ((@)) gmx.com

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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***

Over the past week, shocked Europeans – mostly in the UK and Ireland – have been posting viral photos of shockingly high energy bills amid the ongoing (and worsening) energy crisis.

Several of the posts were from small business owners who getting absolutely crushed right now, and won’t be able to remain operational much longer.

One such owner is Geraldine Dolan, who owns the Poppyfields cafe in Athlone, Ireland – and was charged nearly €10,000 (US$10,021) for just over two months of energy usage.

As the Irish Times reports, “The cost of electricity to the Poppyfields cafe for 73 days from early June until the end of August came in at €9,024.70 an increase of 250 per cent in just 12 months. There doesn’t include the €812.22 in VAT, which brought her total bill to €9,836.92.”

“How in the name of God is this possible,” tweeted Dolan.

I got this electricity bill today, how in the name of God is this possible, we're a small coffee shop in westmeath pic.twitter.com/uz5J8BePhB

— poppyfields cafe.🇺🇦 (@DolanGeraldine) August 29, 2022

UK pensioners are also facing a “terrifying” winter, as elderly Britons are about to get hit with an 80% rise in energy bills in October.

Elderly Britons are set to welcome a boost of around £1,000 to their state pension payments next year thanks to the return of the triple lock, however the cost of living crisis will still leave them significantly poorer.

However, the price cap for energy bills will rise by 80 per cent to £3,549 in October, and it is predicted to rise over £6,600 next year according to Cornwall Insight.

Higher energy bills often hurt pensioners significantly more than the rest of the population because they spend a greater amount of their income on heating their home. -Daily Mail

According to Caroline Abrahams, charity director of Age UK, “‘It’s a truly frightening prospect and one that most could not have prepared for, and never expected to face at this point in their lives,” adding “I think a lot of older people will be utterly bewildered that it has come to this and will also feel badly let down, and I can’t say I blame them.”

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Twitter researcher ‘Crab Man’ (@crabcrawler1), who compiles deep dives on a wide variety of topics (and is absolutely worth a follow), has put together a lengthy thread of similar cases – and put it in the context of the current European energy backdrop. The situation is dire, to say the least.

https://t.co/GqKe6S0M7a

— Crab Man (@crabcrawler1) August 30, 2022

Firebrick Brasserie. Lauder, United Kingdom. Had to close yesterday FOREVER, b/c of energy prices in the UK.

"energy prices that companies are charging – there is no price cap for businesses!!- have meant it is no longer sustainable for us to continue."
https://t.co/67CrgVw7sd pic.twitter.com/NOvMTQpumR

— Crab Man (@crabcrawler1) August 30, 2022

"Closed our tearoom we’ve successfully run for 7 years due to increasing costs in food/petrol/ utilities. Can’t sustain the hikes." pic.twitter.com/BW0bgqH1kO

— Crab Man (@crabcrawler1) August 30, 2022

"I currently pay £126 a month gas and electricity combined. Live alone. How the actual fuck can THIS be right? And I’m in a reasonable job. But I just can’t afford this. No fucking way." pic.twitter.com/TvIcbW7NS3

— Crab Man (@crabcrawler1) August 30, 2022

"Telford chippy boss 'in tears' as £5k monthly gas and electric bill forces business to close" https://t.co/gMtXWQymbY

— Crab Man (@crabcrawler1) August 30, 2022

*

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Featured image taken from Zero Hedge

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***

Is Russia in trouble in Ukraine? 

Watch this interview of Scott Ritter by Judge Andrew Napolitano. Incisive Analysis. 

Scott Ritter is former Marine Corps major and former UN weapons inspector. 

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Featured image is a screenshot from the video

Shocking: UK Government Admits COVID Vaccinated Children Are 4423% More Likely to Die of Any Cause & 13,633% More Likely to Die of COVID-19 Than Unvaccinated Children

The Expose, August 13, 2022

Spain Admits Spraying Deadly Chemtrails as Part of Secret UN Program: One Month after March 2020 Covid-19 Lockdown

Baxter Dmitry, August 13, 2022

The Crisis in Ukraine Is Not About Ukraine. It’s About Germany

Mike Whitney, August 28, 2022

11 Year Old Girl Calls Out Klaus Schwab and His Globalist Goons

American Right TV, August 9, 2022

Why Was Former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Estate Raided?

Peter Koenig, August 14, 2022

Justice Won’t Come From Our “Legal” System. It Will Come From “The Collective Masses”.

John O’Looney, August 12, 2022

Global Planned Financial Tsunami Has Just Begun

F. William Engdahl, July 30, 2022

On the Nature of Russia’s Military Campaign in Ukraine. Analysis of Russian Military Strategy

Dr. Leon Tressell, August 20, 2022

The Planned Fall 2022 “Epidemics Tyranny”

Peter Koenig, August 18, 2022

Covid Vaccination and Turbo-Cancer. “Multiple Tumors in Multiple Organs”. Dr. Ute Kruger

Etana Hecht, August 8, 2022

Video: The Plan. WHO Plans to Have 10 Years of Pandemics (2020-2030). “Proof that the Pandemic was Planned with a Purpose”

Stop World Control, August 13, 2022

PfizerGate: Official Government Reports prove Hundreds of Thousands of People Are Dying Every Single Week Due to COVID-19 Vaccination

The Expose, August 16, 2022

World Economic Forum Adviser Claims the Planet No Longer Needs the ‘Vast Majority’ of the Population

Emily Mangiaracina, August 15, 2022

As the COVID Myths Explode, Delusions Are Shattering: Our Exit from Subservience Leads to Nuremberg 2.0

Prof. Anthony J. Hall, August 22, 2022

The Most Perniciously Perfect Piece of Propaganda: The Covid Face Mask

Dr. Emanuel Garcia, August 13, 2022

The Cult of Globalism: The Great Reset and Its “Final Solution” for “Useless People”

Timothy Alexander Guzman, August 28, 2022

The “Great Zero Carbon” Conspiracy and the WEF’s “Great Reset”

F. William Engdahl, August 31, 2022

Confronting One World Order (OWO) Globalism. The Rise and Fall of the Beast

Peter Koenig, August 10, 2022

The Next Generation Says Good-Bye to Ursula von der Leyen’s Europe

Dr. Eric Beeth, August 23, 2022

One Year Later: How the Biden Admin, Big Tech, and Pfizer Fooled Americans into Taking “FDA Approved” COVID Vaccines that Never Actually Existed

Jordan Schachtel, August 16, 2022

Why Donald Trump Will Soon be Indicted

By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, September 01, 2022

Even a cursory review of the redacted version of the affidavit submitted in support of the government’s application for a search warrant at the home of former President Donald Trump reveals that he will soon be indicted by a federal grand jury for three crimes: Removing and concealing national defense information (NDI), giving NDI to those not legally entitled to possess it, and obstruction of justice by failing to return NDI to those who are legally entitled to retrieve it.

Why Is Kiev So Scared of the IAEA Visiting the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant?

By Andrew Korybko, September 01, 2022

If Kiev’s conspiracy theory were true about it being Moscow that’s supposedly attacked the same facility under its own control and is thus the one that’s blackmailing all of Europe, then it wouldn’t have just sent its soldiers on a suicide mission to seize the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant before the International Atomic Energy Agency’s representatives’ arrival in order to plant fake evidence to that end.

Preserve Human Dignity – Even in the Face of Terrible and Seemingly Hopeless Conditions!

By Dr. Rudolf Hänsel, September 01, 2022

Autonomy is the state and attitude to life of self-determination, independence (sovereignty) and self-administration. Philosophically, it is the ability to see oneself as a being of freedom and to act from this freedom. It is also the power to not participate (Adorno). Natural Law says that there is something that is right by nature. It differs from the so-called Positive Right established by man in that man is entitled to it simply because he is human.

Why Germany Needs a Revolution, and What Type. The “EurAsian Option”

By Eric Zuesse, September 01, 2022

Germany’s newsmedia — echoing America’s — have attributed the soaring fuel-prices to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which clearly is a lie, because the source is clearly Germany’s anti-Russian sanctions and termination of the Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline and other supplies into Germany of the least-expensive fuels-sources, which had been Russian, which is why Russia was the biggest supplier of fuels to Germany.

Russia-Ukraine War: The Western Threat of Nuclear Annihilation

By Joseph Massad, September 01, 2022

Last week, British Tory leadership frontrunner Liz Truss said she would be willing to unleash nuclear war if she were to become prime minister. She is not alone among political leaders in the western imperialist states to threaten nuclear annihilation in the past few months if their hegemony and imperial profits were threatened by resistance to their exploitation and control of the globe.

How Shell and BP Financed Britain’s Cold War Propaganda Machine

By John McEvoy, September 01, 2022

Formerly top secret files show how the two oil corporations bankrolled UK covert propaganda operations during the 1950s and 60s. The goal was to secure British access to key oil supplies across the developing world.

The COVID-19 Endgame: Global Governance, “Digital Tyranny” and the Depopulation Agenda

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, September 01, 2022

The Worldwide QR Verification Code project lays the groundwork for the instatement of a “Digitized Global Police State” controlled by the financial establishment. It’s part of what the late David Rockefeller entitled “The March towards World Government” based on an alliance of bankers and intellectuals.

Why Government Health Care Kills More People Than It Helps

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, September 01, 2022

August 17, 2022, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky publicly admitted the agency’s COVID response “fell short,” and that an internal reorganization has been launched to improve response times and data sharing, and to make health guidance easier to understand.

Does the US Military “Own the Weather”? “Weaponizing the Weather” as an Instrument of Modern Warfare?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, August 31, 2022

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Graphene COVID Kill Shots: Let the Evidence Speak for Itself

By Dr. Ariyana Love, August 31, 2022

I compiled all the evidence we have into this article that prove Graphene Oxide, Graphene Hydroxide and other Graphene variants are in fact being injected into people by governments and Big Pharma. This evidence was discovered and proven numerous times already by independent research teams, scientists, Biotech whistleblowers and the few ethical Journalists remaining.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

***

The list of sins is lengthy and growing with diseased relish.  Australia’s first and for decades only international airline, Qantas, is looking rather tattered of late.  Its reliability is becoming something of the past, its standing diminished in an age of diminished international carriers.

There was a time when taking a Qantas flight involved experiencing clean, solid goodness, with the softening effects of regular and, for the most part, reliable service.  Nothing ever too flash, but reliable before finding your feet on chaotic ground.

Its minted reputation was enough to earn it a mention in Barry Levinson’s Rain Man, a 1988 production featuring a tormented Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) and his autistic brother Raymond (Dustin Hoffman).  Raymond, as cinematic history notes, was utterly enamoured with Qantas’s immaculate safety record.  Various US airlines, with their documented crashes, could hardly match it.  Raymond duly regales Charlie with a number of lethal examples.  As Qantas did not fly out of Cincinnati, the car proved to be the only viable means of transport.

The current image of the airline is one of losses, be it in revenue, reputation and service.  This year, with bruising revelation, Qantas found out that it was no longer considered the safest of the globe’s airlines.  In rankings calibrated for an annual safety table by Airlineratings.com, which considers 385 carriers worldwide and their performance in terms of crashes, incident records, aircraft ages, operational innovation and COVID-19 protocols, the flying kangaroo barely figured.  That top honour went – and here it must have hurt – to Air New Zealand.

Geoffrey Thomas, the editor-in-chief of the Australian website making such bold assertions was adamant that Air NZ had an “excellent incident record, number of cockpit innovations, pilot training and very low fleet age”.  While Thomas sounds like a desperate geriatric examining a catwalk of fecund models, the overall sense of decline in Qantas is palpable.

The Qantas of today is not one of smooth reliable travel but indifference, disruption and disappointment.  It features queues, chaos and disequilibrium, from passengers to the workplace.  There are staffing problems (the taking of sick leave is regular), frequent cancellations, constant delays and instances of lost baggage.

The views of one Tom, as reported by the ABC, reveal the conditions that the airline is operating under.  “There is no one to talk to and when you go to work you are basically on your own.  It’s like we’re running a virtual airline.”

The new law of such a virtual airline is unpredictability.  “Keeping to departure times has always been sacred in the airline industry.  In the past we would be kept informed – you will be 10 minutes late, 15 minutes late.  Now you must pursue the information yourself and they may, or may not, know the answer.”

According to Tom, who has worked for three decades with the company, he had “never seen anything like it.”  He cites a flight he so happened to board earlier this year, finding no drinking water onboard and an incomplete load sheet.  (For the curious, the load sheet is essential in terms of weight and balance data, enabling the pilot to determine the load on the aircraft and how its distribution.)

The Australian Transport Workers’ Union has also roared its disapproval at the airline.  In a 2020 report, the union notes the nastier side of the carrier’s sharp practice.  QGS, a Qantas creation, is noted as being filled by part-time workers, with QGS contacts guaranteeing work to the value of only hours.  The report also notes the sacking of 5,000 employees, only to have them replaced by 9,000 part-time workers employed through subsidiary outlets.

During the course of the pandemic, this predatory beast of the aviation industry received A$2 billion worth in Australian taxpayer funds.  It is worth noting, on this score, that other airlines did not qualify, notably Virgin Australia, for the largesse of the Australian government. Qantas, with cocksure confidence, argued for its unique standing in the Australian aviation industry, boasting that it did not need a bailout.  However, just on the off chance it did require help, it would have to receive A$4.2 billion as a proportional measure to what Virgin might receive, as its revenue at the time was three times that of Virgin’s.

This staggering inversion of the survival of the fittest argument has seen the airline disappoint with dreary consistency.  Last month the company offered A$50 worth of vouchers, loyalty status extensions and lounge passes to frequent flyers by way of apology for the mess the airline had put customers in.

This meagre act of contrition is hardly likely to cover the diminished service customers have come to expect of an Australian carrier of such insufferable pride.  It certainly meant less with a video message sent to frequent flyer members featuring chief executive Alan Joyce.  “On behalf of the national carrier I want to apologise and assure you we are working hard to get back to our best,” the unconvincing CEO states, causing a residue of bile to form in any one caring to listen.

The Australian airline is hardly alone in this general malaise.  Airlines across the globe are spluttering along, providing even worse services than what they provided before.  Flights are fewer and, it follows, passengers.  Keeping these air hulks in the skies is proving increasingly challenging.  But shine has come off this particular Australian jewel, and it remains to be seen whether it is recoverable from the conundrum it, and its owners, find themselves in.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image is by MDRX/CC BY-SA 4.0

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

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***

If Kiev’s conspiracy theory were true about it being Moscow that’s supposedly attacked the same facility under its own control and is thus the one that’s blackmailing all of Europe, then it wouldn’t have just sent its soldiers on a suicide mission to seize the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant before the International Atomic Energy Agency’s representatives’ arrival in order to plant fake evidence to that end.

The Russian Defense Ministry reported on Thursday that its forces successfully thwarted Kiev’s attempted seizure of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) ahead of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) representatives’ visit to that facility. The ministry concluded that “The provocation of the Kiev regime is aimed at derailing the arrival of the IAEA mission to the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant”, which makes sense if one remembers the strategic context in which this ultimately failed mission was carried out.

That crumbling former Soviet Republic has waged nuclear terrorism against all of Europe by attacking this Russian-controlled facility over the past month out of desperation to blackmail its partners into keeping up the pace of their military aid to it, which Zelensky and his senior advisor Podalyak both tacitly admitted to in mid-August. It was subsequently revealed several days later by Politico that data from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy’s Ukraine Support Tracker surprisingly proved that none of the six largest European countries made any new military commitments to Kiev the month prior in July.

This sequence of events vindicates Russian officials who said all along that this US-led NATO proxy is waging nuclear terrorism for military-strategic reasons, thus debunking yet another of the “official narratives” connected to the Ukrainian Conflict. If Kiev’s conspiracy theory was true about it being Moscow that’s supposedly attacked the same facility under its own control and is thus the one that’s blackmailing all of Europe, then it wouldn’t have just sent its soldiers on a suicide mission to seize the ZNPP before the IAEA representatives’ arrival in order to plant fake evidence to that end.

There’s already no doubt that fake news can indeed kill after it was the reason why Kiev dispatched a fascist assassin to Moscow last month to kill journalist Darya Dugina in a terrorist car bomb attack that many suspect was actually aimed against her father, who the US-led Western Mainstream Media (MSM) falsely claimed was “Putin’s Rasputin”, but now there’s further evidence to this effect after it was also just responsible for why Kiev sent its own soldiers on a suicide mission. They needlessly lost their lives because the Ukrainian military command wanted to “prove” their latest conspiracy theory at all costs.

Should the IAEA’s representatives stick to their strict code of conduct and not function as de facto Western agents during their visit to the ZNPP, then there’s no doubt that they’ll confirm that everything that Kiev’s claimed thus far about Russia supposedly being the one waging nuclear terrorism was nothing but lies while Moscow was telling the truth this whole time. They’ll see for themselves that there aren’t any Russian heavy weapons at this sensitive facility, but rather, that it’s littered with debris from Kiev’s Western-supplied missiles and other munitions that were illegally used to attack that site.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is taken from OneWorld

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

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***

Incisive article by Dr. Rudolf Haensel first published in April 2020 in the immediate wake of the March 11, 2020 lockdown.

Autonomy is the state and attitude to life of self-determination, independence (sovereignty) and self-administration. Philosophically, it is the ability to see oneself as a being of freedom and to act from this freedom. It is also the power to not participate (Adorno). Natural Law says that there is something that is right by nature. It differs from the so-called Positive Right established by man in that man is entitled to it simply because he is human.

Since it is not created by any ruler or any kind of majority decision, it is pre-state law. This means that the laws of a state must be measured critically against natural law. (1) The knowledge of what is right by nature enables us to oppose totalitarian ideologies and dictatorships from a firm human standpoint, to feel a sense of indignation against injustice and inhumanity, even if the whole of society may cheer a dictator.

What is natural law?

Thinking in terms of natural law has its origins in ancient Greek philosophy, especially in Plato’s confrontation with the Sophists. Plato held against them that there are objective, absolutely valid norms, values and laws that do not depend on the changing opinions of people. It is by these objective ideas of what law is that the state and the state leadership must be measured at all times. Plato saw behind the law the objective idea of justice.

The highest goal in human life is a life governed by reason, and man can only achieve this if he learns in childhood and youth to moderate his desires and affects. He must learn to keep the golden rule of the middle (justice, bravery and prudence). If this does not become a habit in childhood and adolescence, he will later be torn to and fro by extreme affects and will never achieve a virtuous, level-headed, rational lifestyle (prudence).

The great teacher of the Church, Thomas Aquinas, combined Aristotle’s philosophy with the Christian philosophy and theology that came from Augustine. He thus had outstanding significance for the development of Christian natural law, Christian anthropology and theology, in the centre of which man as a person is placed. The order of being created by God is perfectly good. In it the “eternal law”, lex aeterna, was at work. This is the divine wisdom, as the supreme law. Man can recognize a part of this eternal law through his reason. (2)

Man has a natural inclination for goodness, which is “written in his heart” by the eternal law. It helps him to better recognize what is right in nature. The essential natural inclinations of man are those for the knowledge of the truth and for community life. With his reason, man can recognize the laws of nature and thus grasp the order created by God.

Human dignity is inviolable

Article 1 of the German Basic Law (GG) states:

“The dignity of man is inviolable. Respecting and protecting it is the duty of all state power.”Paragraph 1 of Article 1 adds: “Human dignity is the supreme constitutional principle to which all public authorities must therefore orient their actions. It is therefore the yardstick for the legislative, executive and judicial branches. The state must refrain from any action that could affect human dignity.” (3)

And this human dignity is over positive law (Natural Law).

What is happening, however, not only in Germany but worldwide, is the opposite of what the German Basic Law demands. Human dignity is trampled underfoot – and this is reminiscent of the Germany of the 1930s, the rise of fascism. Every thinking and feeling fellow citizen can “feel it on his own body”.

We are no longer free and can no longer lead our lives self-determined and independently. The governments leave us no room for manoeuvre and deny us the vested right not to take part in this madness, to oppose the totalitarian machinations decisively and with all their willpower. The rule of law has died.

But our thoughts are free (Cicero) and nobody can take away our dignity. We can also find the courage to use our own intellect (Kant). And we know what is right by nature. Therefore we will not submit to the dictates of corrupt politicians, scientists, doctors, journalists or questionable patrons like Bill Gates. (4)

Already more than 100 years ago, the great Russian writer Leo N. Tolstoy put on record his assessment of rulers:

“One could still justify the subordination of an entire people to a few people if the rulers were the best people; but that is not the case, never was and never can be. It is often the worst, most insignificant, cruelest, most immoral and especially the most mendacious people who rule. And that this is so is not by chance.” (5)

The human community rightly expects science – including medicine – to alleviate the plight of people and to serve the protection of life. But more and more scientists are selling their knowledge and skills and often their souls to the military-industrial complex. They even distance themselves so far from their humanity that they help to perfect the means for the general destruction of mankind.

An important contribution to the enlightenment and encouragement of the people could be the mass media, since they are obliged to provide truthful information to us citizens and to peace, in accordance with national and international agreements. But the opposite is true. They are “in the service of warmongering and hate propaganda” and “in the service of stultifying the masses” (Bertha von Suttner).

Let us therefore preserve the attitude to life of self-determination, independence (sovereignty) and self-administration and the ability to see ourselves as beings of freedom and to act from this freedom.

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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel is a graduate psychologist and educationalist.

Notes

(1) Messner, J. (1984, 7th unchanged edition). Natural law. Handbook of Social Ethics, State Ethics and Business Ethics. Berlin

(2) en.wikipedia.org. Keyword “Natural Law

(3) Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany

(4) See NRhZ No 741 of 8.04.2020: ‘To the Final Battle!’.

(5) Tolstoy, Leo N. (1983). Speech against the war. Frankfurt am Main, p. 74

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Few people in America today are as powerful and polarising as Anthony Fauci. For the Left, Fauci is a consummate cool-headed scientist, emblematic of the essential role of government. On the Right, he is a Deep State operative who destroyed the lives of countless people to serve a hidden agenda, all while mysteriously taking home a bigger paycheck than any other of the country’s two million federal employees (including their collective boss, the President).

The reality is that both narratives fundamentally misunderstand the position Fauci occupies in American government. Far from being a public health expert, Fauci sits at the very top of America’s biodefence infrastructure. And contrary to the notion that he is a Deep State string-puller of the Democratic party, it was George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who not only put Fauci there but created the very framework that the immunologist-physician commands.

This in part accounts for the otherwise inexplicable fact that Fauci, loathed by President Trump, was never fired by the notoriously vengeful politician who galvanised his brand with the phrase “You’re fired!”. But Fauci’s untouchability raises an even more perplexing question: Why did the media beatify him as the country’s beneficent, infallible Covid saviour rather than look into the reality of his position and the source of his nearly limitless authority?

To understand the rise of Fauci, and his legacy as he retires this year, we must return to the first months of the 2000s, when a hawkish new administration was settling into power. While George W. Bush had come to Washington touting a new brand of “compassionate conservatism”, Cheney came carrying decades of Defense Department experience, including a term as Defense Secretary under George H.W. Bush during Operation Desert Storm.

Bush’s interest in biodefence and pandemic preparedness is frequently traced back to a 2004 book, The Great Influenza. The reality, however, is that the administration came to power with biological weapons and infectious disease very much top of mind, with Cheney seeking to address the gaping hole in America’s national security left by the country’s lack of a coherent biodefence strategy.

But if biodefence wasn’t already a priority for the Bush White House, that swiftly changed a week to the day after the 9/11 attacks, a mere eight months into Bush’s first term, when the United States suffered the most serious biological weapons attack in its history. On September 18, 2001, a number of national media outlets, including CBS News, NBC News, ABC News, the New York Post and the National Enquirer, received a series of letters containing a dry white powder. Three weeks later, a second round of letters was sent to the offices of senators Tom Daschle, then the Senate Majority leader, and Patrick Leahy, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Twenty-two people were infected with anthrax, five of whom died. Already in a state of unprecedented military alert, the United States was sent into near-chaos by the anthrax attacks, which, by essentially weaponising the postal system with one of the world’s most lethal pathogens, engendered a sense that the country was under attack by an unseen enemy with unfathomable capabilities.

Bush has been rightly credited with identifying the threat of a global pandemic, as well as providing a serious policy for dealing with the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa. But it was Cheney who served as the political engine behind a paradigm shift that would soon take place in America’s biodefence strategy. Six days before the 9/11 attacks, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee convened a hearing on “The Threat of Bioterrorism and the Spread of Infectious Diseases”. The hearing was led by Joe Biden, then chair of the committee, and included testimony by experts in strategic defence. In a prepared statement, Bill Frist, a physician who served as a Republican senator until 2007, noted that:

“Any threat to the security of the United States from a weapon of mass destruction, even those with low probability of occurrence but high potential consequence, including biological weapons, must be taken seriously through adequate preparation.”

The administration’s first landmark achievement in this effort was the creation of a presidential directive called “Biodefense for the 21st Century“. Signed by Bush in April 2004, it advanced a “comprehensive framework for [America’s] biodefence” based on the assumption that a bioweapons attack could devastate America. Despite being premised on a different intent (an attack), the framework described a scenario chillingly similar to what the world experienced with Covid-19, warning that a bioweapons attack could result in “catastrophic numbers of casualties, long-term disease and disability, psychological trauma, and mass panic; disrupt critical sectors of the economy and the day-to-day lives of Americans; and create cascading international effects by disrupting and damaging international trade relationships, potentially globalising the impacts of an attack on United States soil”.

That the directive warned about a biological catastrophe resulting from an attack, rather than an unintentional outbreak, was a seemingly natural assumption in the aftermath of 9/11. But even in June 2001, a small number of senior policymakers spent two days running a simulation of a bioweapons attack. Called Dark Winter, it was designed by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies and was based on a putative smallpox attack. Intended less to bolster preparedness than to expose vulnerabilities, the operation showed how quickly a public health disaster could lead to widespread chaos and social collapse. This was the stuff nightmares are made of — and, by all accounts, those were the nightmares that Dick Cheney was having.

Significant as it was, his transformation of America’s biodefence framework was part of a much larger repositioning of long-term geopolitical strategy, an effort also led by Cheney. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse in the early Nineties, Cheney, then Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush, along with Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, began formulating a grand strategy for the post-Cold War era. This plan, revealed in an infamous leaked memo, was rooted in a single strategic objective: America should permanently remain the world’s superpower. Its architects argued the US would do so only by preserving “strategic depth” to “shape the security environment”. The initial leaked memo was later reworked by Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, who broadened the concept of “strategic depth” to cover not only geographic reach but also an ability to wage war with weapons that could not only cripple an enemy’s military capabilities but disrupt its political, economic and social stability.

In this context, the Bush Administration began ramping up biodefence spending, which quintupled to $317 million in 2002 alone. But that same year, an unusual respiratory disease started to spread in the Guangdong region of China. Eventually classified as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, the disease would claim the lives of some 800 people as it spread across Asia, Europe, North America, the Mideast, reaching as far as New Zealand.

Although SARS was contained by the summer of 2003, that year the world witnessed the outbreak of yet another respiratory disease. In this case, it was the re-emergence of an avian influenza in the form of a strain known as H5N1, which had long been identified as having pandemic potential. The virus was found to have a terrifying 60% mortality rate.

By 2003, the Bush administration was requesting $2 billion in annual budget for biodefence — a sum that, as the Los Angeles Times noted, exceeded the combined research budgets for breast cancer, lung cancer, stroke and tuberculosis. That year, Bush announced in his State of the Union address that he would propose a further $6 billion for the development and stockpiling of vaccines over the subsequent decade, in addition to baseline biodefence funding.

The money was essential, but transforming a core element of America’s national strategic defence was as much about restructuring the governmental and human aspects of biodefence as it was funding them. In the case of research-based bioweapons preparedness, Cheney’s masterstroke was to remove the fragmented biodefence research programmes from various departments, institutes and centres, and place them under the aegis of a single institute: the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), led then, as now, by Anthony Fauci.

A 2003 NIAID article detailed what this shift meant for the relatively obscure public health agency: “In 2003, NIAID was assigned lead responsibility… for civilian biodefence research with a focus on research and early development of medical countermeasures against terrorist threats from infections diseases and radiation exposures. NIAID later assumed responsibility for coordinating the NIH-wide effort to develop medical countermeasures against threats to the civilian population.” While the statement is laden with references to “civilian research”, it included a crucial caveat that explains much about its role right through the Covid-19 pandemic: “Because new potentially deadly pathogens, such as avian influenza, may be naturally occurring as well as deliberately introduced by terrorists, NIAID’s biodefence research is integrated into its larger emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases portfolio.”

In other words, as far as NIAID was concerned, there was no meaningful administrative distinction between biodefence and scientific research. With the stroke of Cheney’s pen, all United States biodefence efforts, classified or unclassified, were placed under the aegis of Anthony Fauci. So important was this new command structure that a representative from the office of Scooter Libby, Cheney’s powerful chief of staff, was physically placed in NIAID headquarters in Washington during the transition to function as “a kind of political commissar” from the vice president’s office. This gave Fauci unparalleled access to not just Cheney, but President Bush, to whom he had an open channel.

Fauci now had a virtual carte blanche to not merely approve but design and run the kind of research projects he sought — and could do so with no oversight structure above him. Biodefence projects that formerly would have fallen under the authority of military or intelligence agencies were now under his direct supervision.

It’s this that explains one of the most bewildering irregularities surrounding Anthony Fauci: his compensation. As widely reported, Fauci is the highest paid member of the federal government, out-earning the President, four-star generals, senators, and Super Court Justices. His salary roughly doubled that of his own (nominal) boss, until recently, NIH director Francis Collins. Fauci’s giant pay packet can be traced back to 2004, the year after NIAID was made the country’s top biodefence authority agency. According to a report by Forbes, that year NIH deputy director Raynard S. Kingston wrote a formal memo to the agency’s director, Elias Zerhouni “to request that the current retention allowance [amount redacted] for Dr. Anthony S. Fauci be converted… in order to appropriately compensate him for the level of his responsibly in his current position of Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH), especially as it relates to his work on biodefence research activities.”

This salary jump was only a by-product of the radical restructuring of America’s biodefence apparatus. The much more significant outcome was that Fauci was essentially placed at the top of a new chain of command over which he gained nearly total decision-making ability. He went from being the director of one the NIH’s constituent 27 institutes to being the only one who really mattered.

But it was Fauci’s ability to span the divide between science and politics, to “play ball”, that made him essential to the political echelon. The rapid increase in biodefence funding in the post-9/11 world, and the mushrooming of agencies and departments involved in the endeavour, would inevitably draw critics. One was, and still is, Richard Ebright, a major figure in the world of epidemiology who serves as chair of the Board of Governors and is a Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University.

“This well-intentioned response may perversely have exactly the opposite effect,” Ebright told the Los Angeles Times in 2003, implying that the burgeoning field of biodefence research could lead to leaks, failures, and even a bioweapons arms race. But, by then, the Bush administration had hired a man credible enough to respond to, and, in many ways, outshine the critics. “It’s going to be a challenge,” Fauci told the Times, dismissing Ebright’s concern as “spurious”. “But I have every confidence that the biomedical research community will adapt well to the change.”

Almost two decades later, as he heads towards retirement, his confidence seems misplaced. Perhaps in this we have another crucial lesson from the pandemic: that Marvel-like heroes, with all their fabulous abilities, are no replacement for the facts.

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Ashley Rindsberg is author of The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’ Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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***

Germany’s newsmedia — echoing America’s — have attributed the soaring fuel-prices to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which clearly is a lie, because the source is clearly Germany’s anti-Russian sanctions and termination of the Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline and other supplies into Germany of the least-expensive fuels-sources, which had been Russian, which is why Russia was the biggest supplier of fuels to Germany.

Because those fuels were so much cheaper than the ones that the U.S. occupying forces demand Germany to use instead (such as liquefied natural gas from America), and because Germany’s leaders are more committed to Germany’s American masters than to the German people whom they are supposed to represent, they ought to be thrown out and replaced now by an entirely new German Government that will serve the German people instead of serve the U.S. occupying regime, which demands and enforces these sanctions. The purpose of the sanctions is to greatly reduce European fuel purchases from the cheapest source, Russia. That forces up fuel-costs in Europe, but Europe’s leaders comply anyway, which proves how obedient they are as stooges of the imperial regime across the Atlantic, in Washington.

America is run by — and its Government is effectively owned by — its billionaires, who buy politicians like hogs are bought at a pig-auction: the highest bidder wins. (It’s shown graphically here.) But at this auction, all of the highest bidders are billionaires, and the profit and nonprofit corporations that they control. Here is how the former U.S. President Jimmy Carter put it when asked about corruption in America:

It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members. So, now we’ve just seen a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over. … At the present time the incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody that is already in Congress has a great deal more to sell.

What’s happening now to Germany is profitable to those people, but is threatening to destroy the whole world if Washington pushes it too far, and produces WW III.

The long road to our present predicament started when U.S. President Harry S. Truman decisively repudiated and reversed his predecessor FDR on 25 July 1945 and determined that the U.S. Government henceforth would be set onto the path of taking control of the entire world ultimately, to become the first-ever all-encompassing global empire (now called “hegemon”). By the time of 1947, he had created the CIA and the falsely named “U.S. Department of ‘Defense’” (actually department of aggression, like the CIA was the department of coups), and replaced FDR’s entire cabinet, in order to do this. They then produced NATO in 1949.

(The Soviet Union responded six years later, by forming their Warsaw Pact in 1955.)

Virtually all U.S. Presidents afterwards have been committed to this “hegemonic,” actually maniacal, zero-sum-game-committed, goal of America dominating everywhere, so that any competitor is automatically viewed as being an enemy. Their obsession is to achieve “hegemony” — global control — which none of them announces publicly as constituting the Government’s top goal, but they all call it instead their support of spreading ‘freedom’ and ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’, as-if the country which has a larger percentage of its population in prison than does any other nation on Earth could even POSSIBLY be a democracy, or promote human rights. Germany, like all other U.S. vassal nations, is merely a tool of that plan for world-conquest by the U.S. regime. Like all of the others, it’s dutiful to its foreign masters, and not to its own population (who now increasingly will be feeling the consequences).

In order for the German people to become authentically free, they need to replace their existing westward, Atlanticist, pro-U.S.-regime, orientation, by a far more economically viable eastward, Russian, Chinese, and authentically EurAsian one, which will mean that Germany will no longer participate in imperialism by ANY nation, but will instead quit NATO and have commerce with all nations that is NOT being restricted by anything like the imperialism America’s billionaires have been imposing upon Germans ever since 1945 and especially since 1991. If German politicians are being bought by the highest bidders like America’s are, then they will all have to be replaced in order for the German people to become freed from the American regime’s imperial yoke. EurAsia is one continent, after all, and no way will exist to pipeline gas or oil across the Atlantic Ocean, from America. And the very idea of replacing pipelined energy by far costlier LNG and other shipped energy is an insult to all residents of Europe.

On Sunday 3 July 2022, Bloomberg News reported that Germany’s “Economics Minister Robert Habeck said on Saturday that the government is working on ways to address the surging costs both utilities and their customers face, without giving details.” At least as early as that date, Germany’s Government knew what they were doing to the German people, but they did it anyway. And they continued to lie about it to the German people. The entire Government needs to be replaced; but, more than that, NATO must be abandoned.

Any German politician who supports it supports continued U.S. occupation, and supports continuation of the U.S. regime’s non-stop war, ever since 1945, against both Russia and China.

Isolating its economy from Russia and China makes sense? To whom? Germany will do far better as a partner of Russia and of China, than as a vassal of the U.S. regime. Russia and China would welcome the new German leaders as partners — not demand them to serve as mere stooges in a mere vassal-nation (as the U.S. regime does). And any such allegation as Bloomberg ‘News’ headlined on 25 June 2022, “Putin Is Pushing Germany’s Economy to the Breaking Point” is merely pretending that the February 24th invasion of Ukraine, instead of the sanctions that America and its vassal-nations imposed in response to it, is to blame here. In fact: The U.S. and its NATO had left Russia no other option than to invade Ukraine.

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American investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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***

Last week, British Tory leadership frontrunner Liz Truss said she would be willing to unleash nuclear war if she were to become prime minister.

She is not alone among political leaders in the western imperialist states to threaten nuclear annihilation in the past few months if their hegemony and imperial profits were threatened by resistance to their exploitation and control of the globe.

It was back in February that the West began to threaten Russia with nuclear war in response to a statement given by President Vladimir Putin.

Addressing western encroachments and threats to Russian security, ongoing since 1991 but increasing significantly since 2014, Putin declared:

“Whoever tries to hinder us, and even more so, to create threats to our country, to our people, should know that Russia’s response will be immediate. And it will lead you to such consequences that you have never encountered in your history.”

Putin prefaced his statements by averring that “even after the dissolution of the USSR and losing a considerable part of its capabilities, today’s Russia remains one of the most powerful nuclear states”.

The French foreign minister subsequently threatened Putin, who spoke of Russia’s nuclear capabilities as a defensive measure, by declaring that Nato, too, remained a “nuclear alliance” and “that is all I will say about this”.

‘Thinkable’ nuclear war

By March, The New York Times jumped on the bandwagon and published an article about the possibility that the Russians might use nuclear weapons if threatened by the West. The article, ironically, cited only western experts and officials who spoke of a limited nuclear war against Russia as “thinkable”.

The newspaper of record even quoted US General James E Cartwright, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Barack Obama, as saying that the “reduced blast capability” of the smaller nuclear devices in existence today made breaking the nuclear taboo “more thinkable”.

It added:

“Nuclear war plans are one of Washington’s most deeply held secrets. Experts say that the war-fighting plans in general go from warning shots to single strikes to multiple retaliations and that the hardest question is whether there are reliable ways to prevent a conflict from escalating.”

It should be noted that the idea of a “limited” nuclear war in Europe is not new. It is a longstanding American fantasy – one that Ronald Reagan, in particular, nurtured.

In April, after the publication of The New York Times article, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov expressed worry about the implications of a nuclear war, emphasising that while Russia did not want a nuclear war, “the danger is serious”. US President Joe Biden’s response to Lavrov was to accuse the Russians of threatening nuclear war rather than expressing anxiety that the US and Nato could launch one.

Israeli threats

Indeed, in April, CNN reported that the US had not seen “any indication Russia has made any moves to prepare nuclear weapons for use during the [Ukraine] war”. But by June, NBC News joined the chorus of mainstream outlets considering the possible use of American nuclear weapons against Russia.

Earlier this month, Putin issued a statement to a UN conference which convened to review the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, affirming that “there can be no winners in a nuclear war and it should never be unleashed, and we stand for equal and indivisible security for all members of the world community”.

Yet, that very same day, Israel’s new prime minister, Yair Lapid, threatened to use Israel’s nuclear weapons against Iran:

“The operational arena in the invisible dome above us is built on defensive capabilities and offensive capabilities, and what the foreign media tends to call ‘other capabilities’. These other capabilities keep us alive and will keep us alive so long as we and our children are here.”

The Jerusalem Post, the conservative Israeli newspaper, postulated that Lapid’s not-so-veiled threat to nuke Iran was akin to his saying:

“What exactly do you ayatollahs think you are going to accomplish by trying to break out one or two weapons which you probably could not hit us with, and which might lead us to easily incinerate large parts of your country?”

This is not the first time Israel has threatened to use nuclear weapons against its neighbours. In fact, it had prepared to use its nukes twice before, in 1967 and in 1973 when it readied its then 13 nuclear bombs to be dropped on Cairo and Damascus.

Real or imagined

Of course, the only country on earth that has ever used nuclear bombs deliberately against civilians is none other than the US, which dropped them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 77 years ago this month, in a genocidal act that the US continues to defend to this day as one that prevented more casualties had the nukes not been dropped and the war continued.

In essence, the US argues that its nuking civilians was a high moral act to save more civilians from being killed. This is amazingly and horrifyingly the very same logic the US deploys today to justify its future use of nuclear weapons.

While Hiroshima and Nagasaki awakened most of the world to the utter horror of nuclear weapons, it only whetted American appetites to use them more.

Recently revealed documents show the United States seriously considered and made plans to use nuclear weapons against China in 1958, during the so-called Taiwan Straits crisis.

Yet, despite the US use of nuclear weapons and the West’s ongoing threats to annihilate all humankind if their profits and “security” interests are threatened, we have been treated for years on end to ceaseless western propaganda about the threat that allegedly Iran, which does not possess any nuclear weapons, poses to the West.

When Israel, which is in possession of possibly as many as 200 nuclear devices (and which still refuses to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty), threatened to nuke Iran a few weeks ago, its threat was taken lightly, if even considered, in the western press and by western officials, who were and remain too busy trying to eliminate a phantasmatic nuclear threat that Iran allegedly constitutes for Israel – a phantasm that has prolonged interminably the ongoing renegotiations of the nuclear treaty between the US and Iran.

It is the US and the imperialist West, not Iran or Russia, who have posed and continue to pose the largest possible threat to human existence and survival. What is truly ironic, however, is that western leaders and the western press can more easily imagine and plan for the end of the world, but not the end of the West’s imperial hegemony.

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Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of many books and academic and journalistic articles. His books include Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan; Desiring Arabs; The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism. His books and articles have been translated into a dozen languages.

Featured image: The world’s first nuclear explosion – the U.S. ‘Trinity’ atomic test in New Mexico, July 16, 1945. If a nuclear war breaks out today, the devastation caused by modern nuclear weapons would make Trinity’s power look small by comparison. Most life on Earth would likely be wiped out. | U.S. Department of Energy

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

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Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
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“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

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***

It’s not contradictory nor surprising for someone like President Putin to simultaneously acknowledge the urgent necessity of reforms during the late Soviet era, lament the ultra-disastrous geopolitical and humanitarian consequences of Gorbachev’s related implementation, and defend his resultant Great Power’s interests in line with international law, all while without ever pining for the restoration of that former communist superpower.

The US-led Western Mainstream Media (MSM) has aggressively pushed the false information warfare narrative that so-called “Putin’s Russia” supposedly wants to “restore the USSR”, yet this twisted interpretation of that Great Power’s geostrategic intentions was just discredited by none other than the Russian leader himself and one of that country’s top foreign policymakers lamenting former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s passing. President Vladimir Putin praised him for understanding the necessity of reforms to urgent problems, while Deputy Speaker of Russia’s Federation Council and Chairman of its Foreign Affairs Committee Konstantin Kosachev said that his death was “a tragedy for the country and for all of those among us whose life changed for the better with his help.”

These condolences don’t correspond to what one would expect from a purportedly “neo-colonial/-imperialist” and “revisionist” state’s top officials who the Western public was brainwashed by their MSM into thinking are still sour about the USSR’s collapse that Gorbachev himself presided over. To the contrary, they’re extremely proud of their country’s independence from that superpower even though many Russians still regret how chaotically this process unfolded and some even wish that the spirit of his reforms would have succeeded in keeping it together. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov put it best when citing his boss’ famous quip that:

“You don’t have a heart if you don’t regret the collapse of the Soviet Union, but you don’t have the brains if you want it to be restored.”

That remark and his other one about how the USSR’s dissolution “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” have been maliciously misportrayed by the MSM to manipulate their targeted audience into wrongly thinking that President Putin pines for the USSR’s restoration even though he wants nothing of the sort. Confidently defending one’s geostrategic interests in line with international law upon regaining the strength required to do so like Russia did isn’t the same ass wanting to rebuild that former superpower, let alone replicate its internal structure. Nor, for that matter, does it mean that he was influenced by Alexander Dugin’s related writings no matter how desperately some want to imagine that the latter is a modern-day “Rasputin”.

Rather, it’s objectively the fact that the collapse of the Soviet Union that Gorbachev presided over and which he inadvertently made irreversible through his well-intended but poorly implemented reforms was indeed “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” and “a genuine tragedy” for the Russian people like the subsequent part of President Putin’s misportrayed second quote noted.

Regarding the first, it immediately ended the bipolar world system that had hitherto kept the US in check to an extent while the second refers to how “Tens of millions of [Russian] citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.” Not only that, but the onset of unipolarity led to the deaths of millions and the impoverishment of many more across the Global South.

It’s therefore not contradictory nor surprising for someone like President Putin to simultaneously acknowledge the urgent necessity of reforms during the late Soviet era, lament the ultra-disastrous geopolitical and humanitarian consequences of Gorbachev’s related implementation, and defend his resultant Great Power’s interests in line with international law, all while without ever pining for the restoration of that former communist superpower. The USSR’s last leader has a much uglier legacy than the MSM claims due to the consequences connected with the well-intended policies that he was responsible for, but at the same time, contemporary Russian officials are sincerely sad at his passing since he was also unwittingly responsible for their country’s independence.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Mikhail Gorbachev, Photo by Michael Schilling (CC-BY-SA-3.0)

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***

It gives me no joy to write this piece.

Even a cursory review of the redacted version of the affidavit submitted in support of the government’s application for a search warrant at the home of former President Donald Trump reveals that he will soon be indicted by a federal grand jury for three crimes: Removing and concealing national defense information (NDI), giving NDI to those not legally entitled to possess it, and obstruction of justice by failing to return NDI to those who are legally entitled to retrieve it.

When he learned from a phone call that 30 FBI agents were at the front door of his Florida residence with a search warrant and he decided to reveal this publicly, Trump assumed that the agents were looking for classified top-secret materials that they’d allege he criminally possessed. His assumptions were apparently based on his gut instinct and not on a sophisticated analysis of the law. Hence, his public boast that he declassified all the formerly classified documents he took with him.

Unbeknownst to him, the feds had anticipated such a defense and are not preparing to indict him for possessing classified materials, even though he did possess hundreds of voluntarily surrendered materials marked “top secret.” It is irrelevant if the documents were declassified, as the feds will charge crimes that do not require proof of classification. They told the federal judge who signed the search warrant that Trump still had NDI in his home. It appears they were correct.

Under the law, it doesn’t matter if the documents on which NDI is contained are classified or not, as it is simply and always criminal to have NDI in a non-federal facility, to have those without security clearances move it from one place to another, and to keep it from the feds when they are seeking it. Stated differently, the absence of classification — for whatever reason — is not a defense to the charges that are likely to be filed against Trump.

Yet, misreading and underestimating the feds, Trump actually did them a favor. One of the elements that they must prove for any of the three crimes is that Trump knew that he had the documents. The favor he did was admitting to that when he boasted that they were no longer classified. He committed a mortal sin in the criminal defense world by denying something for which he had not been accused.

The second element that the feds must prove is that the documents actually do contain national defense information. And the third element they must prove is that Trump put these documents into the hands of those not authorized to hold them and stored them in a non-federally secured place. Intelligence community experts have already examined the documents taken from Trump’s home and are prepared to tell a jury that they contain the names of foreign agents secretly working for the U.S. This is the crown jewel of government secrets. Moreover, Trump’s Florida home is not a secure federal facility designated for the deposit of NDI.

The newest aspect of the case against Trump that we learned from the redacted affidavit is the obstruction allegation. This is not the obstruction that Robert Mueller claimed he found Trump committed during the Russia investigation. This is a newer obstruction statute, signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, that places far fewer burdens on the feds to prove. The older statute is the one Mueller alleged. It characterizes any material interference with a judicial function as criminal. Thus, one who lies to a grand jury or prevents a witness from testifying commits this variant of obstruction.

But the Bush-era statute, the one the feds contemplate charging Trump with having violated, makes it a crime of obstruction by failing to return government property or by sending the FBI on a wild goose chase looking for something that belongs to the government and that you know that you have. This statute does not require the preexistence of a judicial proceeding. It only requires that the defendant has the government’s property, knows that he has it and baselessly resists efforts by the government to get it back.

Where does all this leave Trump? The short answer is: in hot water. The longer answer is: He is confronting yet again the federal law enforcement and intelligence communities for which he has rightly expressed such public disdain. He had valid points of expression during the Russia investigation. He has little ground upon which to stand today.

I have often argued that many of these statutes that the feds have enacted to protect themselves are morally unjust and not grounded in the Constitution. One of my intellectual heroes, the great Murray Rothbard, taught that the government protects itself far more aggressively than it protects our natural rights.

In a monumental irony, both Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks journalist who exposed American war crimes during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency employee who exposed criminal mass government surveillance upon the American public, stand charged with the very same crimes that are likely to be brought against Trump. On both Assange and Snowden, Trump argued that they should be executed. Fortunately for all three, these statutes do not provide for capital punishment.

Rothbard warned that the feds aggressively protect themselves. Yet, both Assange and Snowden are heroic defenders of liberty with valid moral and legal defenses. Assange is protected by the Pentagon Papers case, which insulates the media from criminal or civil liability for revealing stolen matters of interest to the public, so long as the revealer is not the thief. Snowden is protected by the Constitution, which expressly prohibits the warrantless surveillance he revealed, which was the most massive peacetime abuse of government power.

What will Trump say is his defense to taking national defense information? I cannot think of a legally viable one.

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***

Formerly top secret files show how the two oil corporations bankrolled UK covert propaganda operations during the 1950s and 60s. The goal was to secure British access to key oil supplies across the developing world.

“Handsome” sums were provided by BP and Shell to the Information Research Department (IRD), which was Britain’s Cold War propaganda arm between 1948 and 1977, declassified files show.

The IRD used the secret subsidies to fund British covert propaganda operations during the 1950s and 1960s across the Middle East and Africa, where Britain’s oil interests were substantial. Today, the value of the payments would be in the millions of pounds.

Such operations involved setting up newspapers and magazines, funding radio and television broadcasts, and organising trade union exchanges.

The objective was to promote “stability” in these regions by countering the threat of communism and resource nationalism, while improving the “public image” of Britain’s leading oil companies.

Ultimately, the goal was to secure British access to the supply of Middle Eastern and African oil.

Oil and propaganda

During the 1950s and 1960s, the IRD met annually with Shell and BP representatives to discuss how secret oil subsidies were being used and whether the oil companies were getting value for money.

In December 1960, IRD chief Donald Hopson met Shell’s UK executive Brian Trench and senior BP executive Archie Chisholm, alongside a number of other Foreign Office officials. The name of one individual remains classified, suggesting Britain’s intelligence services were also in attendance.

At the meeting, it was noted the IRD had spent £75,500 in oil money – valued at over £1.2m today – on covert propaganda operations between April 1959 and March 1960.

Over half of this money had been spent on the Arab News Agency (ANA), a long standing British propaganda front which had strong links with MI6.

“ANA operated the most comprehensive service in English and Arabic available in the Middle East with branch offices in Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad, Jerusalem and Amman, and representatives in some 15 other cities, including Paris and New York”, wrote journalist Richard Fletcher.

Hopson informed the oil companies “that their contributions had made it possible to put the [Arab News] Agency in a very strong competitive position in regard to its communications”.

For instance, oil company subsidies allowed ANA to pay for British news agency Reuters’ wire service. During this period, Reuters was pliable to UK government influence, and was seen as a useful propaganda instrument.

With this, ANA could supply news organisations across the Middle East with Reuters’ content. The service was described as “very successful in Egypt”, and it “secured the first place for Reuters in competition with the other world agencies”.

It is unclear whether Reuters was aware that the UK government was secretly channelling oil money into its accounts. One UK file, dated 1960 and entitled “Information Research Department: renegotiation of contract between Reuters and the Arab News Agency”, remains classified by the Foreign Office.

‘Valuable propaganda instrument’

On top of this, the IRD used £3,000 of oil money to fund Al Aalam (“The Globe”), an ostensibly independent magazine published in Iraq, which was seen by the Foreign Office as “a most valuable propaganda instrument”.

Al Aalam supported UK anti-communist efforts and sought to counter anti-British messaging coming from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. At this time, Nasserite Arab nationalism posed a significant threat to Britain’s regional interests, and was a central focus of British propaganda activities.

The oil companies’ contributions to Al Aalam, which had been ongoing since the early 1950s, “had in fact tipped the scale when the Treasury decision concerning the launching of the periodical was made”, it was noted. In 1960, the magazine achieved a monthly circulation of 85,000.

During this period, £15,000 in money from the oil companies was also “expended in Iran” on “emergency operations” which enabled “visits to be arranged, publication and translation work to be undertaken, and training schemes for Persian radio officials to be put in hand”.

‘Handsome contributions’

The IRD thanked Shell and BP for their “handsome contributions”, and requested an additional £138,750 in secret funding for the period April 1960 to December 1961. Indeed, these were “handsome contributions”, amounting to roughly 8 percent of the IRD’s annual official budget, and valued at £2.25m today.

“The general pattern of ANA’s activities would continue to be the same though the Agency would concentrate in the forthcoming year on strengthening its news collecting”, an IRD memo noted. To this end, the IRD requested an additional £42,500 for ANA’s running costs, and £26,250 for Reuters’ wire service.

On top of its pre-existing operations, the IRD proposed using oil subsidies to fund a number of new ventures.

One such project was geared towards building up “sufficient influence with certain selected Libyan Trade Unionists” in order to “encourage a spirit of moderation into industrial demands”. This issue was seen as “of direct interest to the oil companies” such that the IRD could “anticipate their support”.

A Foreign Office file shows media outlets in the Middle East received secret funds from British oil firms. (Photo: John McEvoy)

‘Student news service’

In Latin America, the IRD wished to “interest ourselves particularly in the student and trade union fields” by setting up a “student news service” with oil company contributions.

On top of this, the IRD requested £5,000 for a “trade union exchange visits scheme”. The scheme had already begun in Latin America, and the IRD was looking for oil money to expand the project into Africa.

It was also “hoped to start an examination of the possibilities of setting up a [television] programme agency for the Middle East shortly”.

Another project focused on news agency Gulf Times/Al Khalij, an IRD outfit based in Beirut, which was looking to expand and open a new office in Kuwait.

According to one IRD document, the agency’s core objective was “the preservation of [British] oil interests in the Gulf”. It was noted that the oil companies may thus “think it suitable to contribute [£30,000] towards the capital cost of the new venture”, which was valued at £110,000. This project, however, was ultimately abandoned by the IRD in April 1961.

‘Handmaid of BBC Arabic’

In 1963, the oil companies funded Huna London (“This is London”), a magazine which was described by one IRD official as “the handmaid of the BBC Arabic service” and “the best means we have of addressing the Arabs as a whole”.

Huna London had been the words used to announce the first BBC broadcast in Arabic in 1938, and the magazine would become the Arabic equivalent to the Radio Times, which listed British television and radio programmes alongside “contributions from leading writers and illustrators of the day”.

Oil money had “enabled 6,000 extra copies” of Huna London to be printed in 1963, “each requested by an individual Arab, to be sent out from Beirut”. The IRD envisaged that it might soon receive “requests for 100,000 or more copies”, which was described as a “highly desirable” outcome.

One proposed project remains redacted in entirety.

‘Contingency money’

Beyond this, the oil companies provided the IRD with tens of thousands of pounds in “contingency money”, which was to be used as “a stimulator of desirable projects”.

Norman Reddaway, a seasoned British propagandist based in the British embassy in Beirut, described the contingency fund as “particularly useful for pump-priming and for persuading people that desirable things could be done in advance of agreement by London”.

The oil companies felt the IRD was making good use of their money and, by 1960, they wanted to help British propaganda operations expand.

For instance, Shell was “widening their field of interest and… thinking in terms of propaganda in distribution areas as well as in producing territories. They are thus concerned with the public image of the oil companies in places like West Africa as well as in the Middle East”.

As a result, the IRD “could take it that” the oil companies “had an interest in all production and refining areas and territories adjacent thereto. Thus, for example, Somalia was an area of interest because of its proximity to Aden”.

Foreign Office minutes from a top secret meeting with Shell and BP. (Photo: John McEvoy)

Pump-priming

By late 1963, Shell and BP were beginning to express irritation at the IRD’s continued reliance on oil funds for ongoing projects.

Shell and BP had intended to pump-prime British covert propaganda projects so that these ventures could become self-sustaining. The oil companies, it was noted, were happy to help propaganda projects get off the ground but “did not like involving themselves in continuing commitments”.

In private correspondence dated 16 December 1963, Chisholm told Foreign Office official Leslie Glass that: “the object originally of the exercise on which we are engaged was to assist you to overcome certain financial restrictions in getting things moving at a critical and difficult time. We have been glad to continue our assistance with certain of these projects to our mutual advantage”.

Chisholm continued: “It was always our intention, however, that as projects reached full development and they justified financing from other sources, our contributions to them should tail off”.

Trench agreed, expressing hope that ANA, the Reuters service, and the Ariel Foundation – a British front organisation which facilitated exchanges of trade unionists and academics – “could be entirely financed from other sources by about 1966”.

The oil companies also found covert payments an awkward affair. Chisholm, for instance, “asked whether a less complicated method of making subventions was desirable”.

The IRD was not satisfied. In a draft response to Trench, one IRD official noted that “we are… faced always with the preliminary difficulty of being able to only approach you regarding projects which have a territorial interest common to you and your friends”.

Moreover, the IRD emphasised that “the result of a cessation of your [oil company] support would be that… undertakings would have to be cut down and be less freely available in the areas of common interest”.

Secret oil subsidies, in other words, were seen as central to the success of Britain’s propaganda operations in the region.

‘Very grateful’

Meanwhile, the IRD would have to discuss Latin America “bilaterally” with Shell, given the company’s interests in Venezuela outweighed BP’s interests in the region.

Despite the oil companies’ reservations, another £60,000 was provided to the IRD in 1964, for which British officials were “very grateful”. At this stage, future oil-funded projects in Algeria and the United Arab Republic were under consideration.

Secret oil subsidies to the IRD continued beyond 1964. As historian Athol Yatesfound, BP agreed in 1968 to fund broadcaster Sawt Al Saahil, a British covert radio station based in Sharjah (an emirate in the Gulf), to the tune of £3,000 for three years.

However, the extent to which Shell and BP funded British covert propaganda operations in the late and post-Cold War period remains unclear.

Shell and BP did not respond to requests for comment.

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John McEvoy is an independent journalist who has written for International History Review, The Canary, Tribune Magazine, Jacobin and Brasil Wire.

Featured image is from SHTFplan.com

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***

If he survives until today, Khalil Awawda will have been on hunger strike for 172 days in protest against Israeli administrative detention without charge. On the weekend, his family and lawyer were permitted to visit him in an Israeli hospital where they took and published horrific photos of the starving man. His strike is the longest among scores of fasts staged by Palestinian prisoners over the past 55 years. Starvation is the only means they can adopt to challenge Israel.

The European Union representative in Jerusalem expressed shock over the images, made the point  he is striking “in protest against his detention without charges”, and warned, “he is in imminent danger of dying. Unless charged immediately, he has to be released.”

On August 21, the Israeli supreme court rejected his petition to be released. Its decision amounted to a “death sentence”, Palestinian lawyer and former negotiator Diana Buttu told Al Jazeera.

“The supreme court rubber stamps everything that the Israeli security services put forward. It is only in very rare circumstances that we actually see that they are pushing back against what the security services are saying.”

Awawda was arrested in December 2021. Israel claimed he was a member of the Israeli outlawed Islamic Jihad. This was dismissed by his lawyer. Awawdah, who comes from the town of Idna near Al Khalil (Hebron), is among several Palestinian prisoners currently on hunger strike. He suspended his strike after 111 days when he was told his term in detention would not be renewed but resumed his protest after it was renewed for six months.

Israel has retained the policy of administrative detention imposed by Britain during its mandate in Palestine (1920-1948) where Palestinians were struggling against the 1917 British policy of transforming their country into a Jewish homeland. Britain also deported Palestinians who resisted its policy as it did to freedom fighters in other British occupied lands. For some years Israel followed suit.

Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights groups contend the policy violates the right of prisoners to due process and is aimed at crushing Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation.  Israel is holding 4,400 prisoners, 680 of them in administrative detention.The recently banned Palestinian prisoners’ support organisation, Adameer, launched a campaign against administrative detention last year in the wake of the May attack on Gaza and uprising in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and among Palestinian citizens of Israel.  During May and June Israel issued more than 379 administrative detention orders, dramatically surpassing previous years. Over the same period in 2020, 208 orders were issued.

The Israeli rights organisation B’Tselem states,

“In administrative detention, a person is held without trial without having committed an offense, on the grounds that he or she plans to break the law in the future. As this measure is supposed to be preventive, it has no time limit. The person is detained without legal proceedings by order of the regional military commander, based on classified evidence that is not revealed to them. This leaves the detainees helpless…”

Amnesty International brands this policy as a “cruel, unjust practice which helps maintain Israel’s system of apartheid against Palestinians.” Amnesty argues, in general, that administrative detention violates Article 9 of the International Convenance on Civil and Political Rights which states “that no one should be subjected to arbitrary detention and that deprivation of liberty should must be based on grounds and procedures established by law.”

On August 16, Human Rights Watch called on Israel to immediately release the French-Palestinian human rights worker Salah Hamouri from administrative detention and reverse the decision to revoke his residency status in his native Jerusalem.” Hamouri, a lawyer associated with Adameer, was arrested on March 7. HRW said that Hamouri’s Jerusalem residence was revoked for “breaching allegiance to Israel,” justifying his deportation.

HRW stated,

“International humanitarian law expressly forbids an occupying power from compelling people under occupation to pledge loyalty to it.”

In 2014, the UN Human Rights Committee urged Israel to “end the practice of administrative detention and the use of secret evidence in administrative detention proceedings, and ensure that individuals subject of administrative detention orders are either promptly charged with a criminal offensive, or released”.

Hisham Abu Hawash, a construction worker from the West Bank town of Dura, ended his 141-day hunger strike in January this year when the Israeli authorities decided to release him from administrative detention. However, the Israelis returned him from the hospital to prison for a month until he had served the entire term of his detention. Gideon Levy and Alex Levac reported in the Israeli liberal daily Haaretz that his doctors at the Shamir Medical Centre where “he spent the final days of his hunger strike, told him that it would take a year-and-a-half for his body to recover”. He vowed to strike again if rearrested. He was the last of 17 detainees striking since July 2021 over detention without charge or trial. His strike was the third longest in the post-1967 occupation history of Palestinian hunger strikers.  In April 2013, Samer Issawi secured release from administrative detention after 166 days. His fast was the second longest.

Palestinians have struck for better conditions, family visits, an end to beatings and abuse, access to television and fresh clothing. Four have died from Israeli forced feeding. Many have been rearrested after release and subjected to several terms of administrative detention, as well as imprisonment.  Administration detention is an honourable occupation in Palestine.

Take the case of Faisal Husseini, son of Abdel Qader Husseini, commander of Palestinian forces who was killed fighting Israeli shock troops in the battle for Qastal in April 1948.

Born in 1940 in Baghdad during his father’s exile from British-occupied Palestine, Faisal Husseini lived a peripatetic life until settling back in his home city of Jerusalem before the Israeli conquest. He joined Fateh and began his resistance career. He was sentenced to a year in prison in October 1967.  In 1979, he and other Palestinian intellectuals established the Arab Studies which was closed down from time to time and finally shuttered by Israel in 2001 after his death.  He was placed under administrative detention from 1982-1987. He became a leading figure in the First Intifada (1987-93), and was detained repeatedly during  this time as well as being put under house arrest and deported to the West Bank from Jerusalem, where his family can trace its roots for 1,000 years.

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***

The UK significantly increased its expenditure on investment programmes in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain via a secretive fund which has been slammed repeatedly for its lack of transparency.

The UK more than doubled its funding to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain via a secretive fund despite repeated criticism over the Gulf states’ poor human rights record and a looming domestic cost of living crisis.

Freedom of Information requests revealed that the UK Foreign Office’s Gulf Strategy Fund (GSF) provided Saudi Arabia with a funding increase of £813,605 to £1.8 million in 2021-22. In Bahrain, funding was raised from £710,028 to £1.8 million.

The GSF has been slammed by several politicians and human rights groups for its lack of transparency, with senior MPs calling for it to be scrapped entirely.

“The UK works with partners around the world to improve their human rights record, including the Gulf,” said the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) according to Middle East Eye. 

“All cooperation through the Gulf Strategy Fund is subject to rigorous risk assessments to ensure all work meets our human rights obligations and values,” they added.

It is not clear what the increase in funds will be used for, or why it was implemented.

On Friday, the FCDO published updated “transparency data” on the GSF.

For Bahrain, the UK government said Britain “supports Bahrain-led and owned reform and capacity building programmes to deliver long-term security”.

This is followed by a series of bullet points listing schemes such as “criminal justice reform” without further information.

In Saudi Arabia, the UK has used the GSF to support Vision 2030 as well as to enhance “mutual prosperity by promoting inward investment”.

One of the bullet point list items simply says “smart cities and mobility opportunities in Saudi Arabia for UK companies”. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has launched a series of projects building megacities in the desert, including furitistic metropolis NEOM with a budget of US$500 billion.

An increase to the GSF comes as Britons face surging energy bills, with an estimated monthly energy bill of £3,000 to hit this winter. The UK government has been accused of offering an insufficient support package to help the most vulnerable afford power.

There are also concerns and growing scrutiny over human rights abuses in the two Gulf states.

Earlier this month, Leeds University student Salma al-Shehab was jailed for 34 years after she published a tweet that was mildly critical of a government programme.

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