Selected Articles: NATO Learns Nothing and Forgets Nothing

August 11th, 2022 by Global Research News

NATO Learns Nothing and Forgets Nothing

By George Szamuely, August 10, 2022

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg recently addressed the Workers Youth League (AUF) summer camp in Utøya, Norway. The AUF is Norway’s largest political youth organization and is affiliated with the Norwegian Labor Party. The AUF summer camp is of course famous for being the scene of the horrific terrorist attack perpetrated by neo-Nazi Anders Breivik in 2011.

While Cuba Deals with Blazing Fire, the U.S. Watches and Waits

By Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan and Medea Benjamin, August 11, 2022

By now, the images of the oil explosion that erupted in the Cuban province of Matanzas on Friday, August 5 and continues blazing have become international news. When lightning struck an oil tank in Cuba’s largest oil storage facility, it quickly exploded and began to spread to nearby tanks. As of now, four of the eight tanks have caught fire. Dozens of people have been hospitalized, over 120 have been reported injured, at least 16 firefighters are still reported missing and one firefighter has died.

Mass Demonstrations for Democracy: Sudan’s Coalition to End Military Rule, Demanding the Immediate Establishment of a Civilian Government

By Abayomi Azikiwe, August 10, 2022

Since December of 2018, the Republic of Sudan has undergone general strikes, mass demonstrations, the forced removal of longtime former President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and the failed formations of several interim administrations. Hundreds of people have lost their lives due to the repression carried out by the military and its supporters against protests which have been led by the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC) and its Popular Resistance Committees (PRC).

Will New Zealand be the Next Member of AUKUS? Towards the Formation of an “Asia-Pacific NATO”?

By Andrew Korybko, August 10, 2022

The geostrategic pieces are all falling into place one after another to create the compelling impression that the US-led NATO proxy war on Russia through Ukraine has failed to achieve the grand strategic goals that were expected of it, which is why Washington is now willing to speed up the inevitable resumption of its “Pivot to Asia” in response instead of waiting at least several years like many observers expected.

War in Ukraine: Who Are the Winners and Losers?

By Marc Vandepitte, August 10, 2022

The invasion of Ukraine has been going on for more than five months now, and hostilities may continue for quite some time. In military terms, the outcome is still uncertain, but what is already clear is who the big winners and losers of this conflict are. An overview.

The Dark Side of the Digital Revolution: “Slowly Closing Its Grip on Our Lives”

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, August 10, 2022

People love the digital revolution.  It allows them to work from home and avoid stressful commutes and office politics.  The young love their cell phones that connect them to the world. For writers the Internet offers, for now, a far larger audience than a syndicated columnist could obtain.  But while we enjoy and delight in its advantages, the tyranny inherent in the digital revolution is slowly closing its grip on our lives.

High-Level Ukrainian Intelligence Official Admits U.S. Deeply Involved in Ukraine Conflict

By Jeremy Kuzmarov, August 10, 2022

Major General Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy head of the Kyiv regime’s military intelligence directorate, admitted in an interview with the British daily Telegraph, that the U.S. government is involved in targeting decisions regarding U.S. supplied Lockheed Martin’s High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS).

“Targeted Killing” Ordered by the President of the United States: What Ever Happened to the ‘Rules-based International Order?’

By Connor Echols, August 10, 2022

Early last week, President Joe Biden announced that the United States had killed al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul, Afghanistan. The news initially sparked widespread media attention, but in the end it came and went with relatively little fanfare, especially for the death of a long-time American enemy with a $25 million bounty on his head.

Pre-Emptive Murder

By Craig Murray, August 10, 2022

The lives of the latest fifteen Palestinian children to be murdered by Israel in Gaza, lives ripped from their small, terrified bodies with devastating violence, do not seem of much concern to the powerful in the West, or indeed anywhere.

WHO Renews Push for Global Pandemic Treaty, as World Bank Creates $1 Billion Fund for Vaccine Passports

By Michael Nevradakis, August 10, 2022

The World Health Organization (WHO) is moving ahead with plans to enact a new or revised international pandemic preparedness treaty, despite encountering setbacks earlier this summer after dozens of countries, primarily outside the Western world, objected to the plan.

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Now, it is the health sector that is suffering from decisions made by Trudeau and his government in the past. Hospitals are complaining of a shortage of nurses which has affected their emergency departments in that such departments are either being shut down completely or are on the verge of being shut down. What makes this worse is that it is not isolated to a particular area, instead, it is spreading within both rural and urban communities.

Nurses represent a core part of the health care system and essential employees at any hospital or clinic. They are the ones who take care of patients and guide them through their recovery among other duties that are solely performed by them, hence it is a big risk and significant damage for a hospital to lack the sufficient number of nurses needed to maintain the efficient running of the hospital.

Carleton Place and District Memorial Hospital, both located outside the city of Ottawa, closed their emergency department for 24 hours over staffing issues, which of course is the nursing shortage we are talking about. They were soon followed by Montfort Hospital, which is located within the city of Ottawa. The management of Montfort Hospital pointed at CO VID 19-related absences, vacations, staff fatigue and burnout, on top of a nursing shortage.

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While Cuba Deals with Blazing Fire, the U.S. Watches and Waits

August 11th, 2022 by Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan

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By now, the images of the oil explosion that erupted in the Cuban province of Matanzas on Friday, August 5 and continues blazing have become international news. When lightning struck an oil tank in Cuba’s largest oil storage facility, it quickly exploded and began to spread to nearby tanks. As of now, four of the eight tanks have caught fire. Dozens of people have been hospitalized, over 120 have been reported injured, at least 16 firefighters are still reported missing and one firefighter has died.

This latest disaster – the largest oil fire in Cuba’s history – comes at a time when Cuba is currently undergoing an energy crisis due to soaring global fuel costs, as well as over-exploited and obsolete infrastructure. The raging fire will undoubtedly further exacerbate the electricity outages that Cubans are suffering from as a result of the on-going energy crisis that is occurring in the middle of one of the hottest summers on record globally.

Almost immediately, the Cuban government requested international assistance from other countries, particularly its neighbors that have experience in handling oil-related fires. Mexico and Venezuela responded immediately and with great generosity. Mexico sent 45,000 liters of firefighting foam in 16 flights, as well as firefighters and equipment. Venezuela sent firefighters and technicians, as well as 20 tons of foam and other chemicals.

The U.S., on the other hand, offered technical assistance, which amounted to phone consultations. Despite having invaluable expertise and experience with major fires, the U.S. has not sent personnel, equipment, planes, materials, or other resources to its neighbor that would actually help minimize the risk to human life and the environment. The U.S. Embassy in Havana instead offered condolences and stated on day four of the blazing fire that they were “carefully watching the situation” and that U.S. entities and organizations could provide disaster relief. They even posted an email, [email protected], for people who want to help, saying “our team is a great resource for facilitating exports and donations of humanitarian goods to Cuba or responding to any questions.” But people who have contacted that email for help receive an automated response in return, telling people to look at their fact sheet from a year ago.

Contrast this to Cuba’s response to Hurrican Katrina in 2005, when the Cuba government offered to send to New Orleans 1,586 doctors, each carrying 27 pounds of medicine—an offer that was rejected by the United States.

While the U.S. government pays lip service to helping in Cuba’s emergency, the truth is that U.S. sanctions on Cuba create real and significant barriers to organizations trying to provide assistance to Cubans, both in the United States and abroad. For example, Cuba sanctions often require U.S. organizations to get Commerce Department export licenses. Another obstacle is the lack of commercial air cargo service between the U.S. and Cuba, and most commercial flights are prohibited from carrying humanitarian assistance without a license. Cuba’s inclusion in the State Sponsor of Terrorism List means that banks, in both the United States and abroad, are reluctant to process humanitarian donations. And while donative remittances (which can be sent for humanitarian purposes) have been recently re-authorized by the Biden administration, there is no mechanism in place to send them, as the U.S. government refuses to use the established Cuban entities that have historically processed them. Moreover, payment and fundraising platforms such as GoFundMe, PayPal, Venmo and Zelle, will not process any transactions destined or related to Cuba due to U.S. sanctions.

In any case, the response to this disaster should come primarily from the U.S. government, not NGOs. An Obama-era Presidential Policy Directive specifically mentions U.S. cooperation with Cuba “in areas of mutual interest, including diplomatic, agricultural, public health, and environmental matters, as well as disaster preparedness and response.”  Despite the 243 sanctions imposed by the Trump administration – and overwhelmingly maintained by the Biden White House – the Policy Directive appears to remain in effect.  In addition, Cuba and the United States signed a bilateral Oil Spill Preparedness and Response Agreement in 2017 prior to Trump taking office, which the U.S. noted means both countries “will cooperate and coordinate in an effort to prevent, contain, and clean up marine oil and other hazardous pollution in order to minimize adverse effects to public health and safety and the environment.”  The agreement provides a roadmap for bilateral cooperation to address the current humanitarian and environmental disaster.  In addition, the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, which is part of USAID, “is responsible for leading and coordinating the U.S. government’s response to disasters overseas,” including sending technical experts as they have in more than 50 countries. Neither OFDA nor any other part of USAID, which spends approximately $20 million annually in regime change funding in Cuba (primarily to Florida-based groups), have offered humanitarian aid thus far.

As Congress takes important steps to advance legislation to address climate change and disasters, the Biden administration is watching a potential ecological disaster 90 miles from the U.S. coastline without offering meaningful assistance to contain it, both to protect the Cuban people but also to mitigate any potential marine damage to the narrow strait that separates the two countries.

Withholding assistance at this critical time indicates to Cubans, Cuban Americans and the world that the Biden Administration is not really interested in the well-being of the Cuban people, despite statements to the contrary. This is an opportunity to show compassion, regional cooperation, environmental responsibility, and, overall, to be a good neighbor. It is also an opportunity for the Biden administration to finally reject the toxic Trump administration policies towards Cuba and restart the broad bilateral diplomatic engagement that was so successfully initiated under the Obama administration.

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Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan is a human rights lawyer and has written extensively about the principles of self-determination, democratic norms and gender justice. She is on the steering committee of ACERE (Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect).

Medea Benjamin is co-founder of Global Exchange, CODEPINK: Women for Peace and ACERE (Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect). She is the author of several books, including No Free Lunch: Food and Revolution in Cuba Today.

Featured image: A fire broke out at the Matanzas Supertanker Base when lightning struck a tank. (Source: Peoples Dispatch)

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First published on May 2, 2022

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Introduction

The debate on human rights violations is invariably limited to those committed by  governments and other public institutions.

We seldom discuss human rights violations committed by large corporations, especially multinational corporations (MNCs). Moreover, in many cases, the violation of human rights by host country governments is motivated as a means to cover up MNCs’ human rights abuse.

There is another phenomenon which does not help our resolve to acquire a solution to the issue of corporate human rights abuse; it is the biased attitude of the Western media regarding these corporate violations. 

The media seldom report the incidence of corporate human rights violations, most likely due to the fact that they themselves are owned by large corporations.

Public debate on the issues of corporate human rights violations is vitally important not only in relation of global justice but also for the health of the global economy, especially for the survival of the economies of developing countries.

We need also to conduct an ideology-neutral and unbiased debate on the long-run impact of MNCs’ human rights violations on the developing countries.

This article deals with the following issues.

  1. First, this paper will show how large, rich and powerful the MNCs are and how they can easily abuse human rights, damage the environment and destroy the economies of developing countries.
  2. Second, this paper will discuss the types of human rights violated by MNCs. It will be shown that in many cases, the MNC violates both the economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR) and the civil and political rights (CPR).
  3. Third, in this section, this paper will discuss how and why the current national and international judiciary regimes are not equipped for dealing effectively human rights violations by MNCs.

Wealth and Power of MNCs

One of the significant phenomena of the last half a century has been the rise of huge global corporations called, multinational corporations (MNCs), which have impacted deeply not only the global economic system but also the global political dynamics.

The financial assets of 200 largest MNCs is larger than the combined assets of all countries of the world excluding 10 largest economies. According to data of the Amnesty International, of 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations, namely MNCs, while 49 are Nation States.

What is more surprising is the fact that, despite their huge size, they grew fast; their profit rose between 1983 and 1999 by 36% as against the profit of the global economy which rose by 25%.

According to UNCTAD data, MNCs account for 70 % of the world trade.

Given the sheer size of MNCs, it is not difficult to imagine the huge impact of their human rights violations on social and economic justice and the well-being of the people.

This is particularly so in developing countries whose economy is tightly integrated into the global value chain (GVC) controlled by the MNCs.

The Global Value Chain (GVC)

The GVC has created a tightly knit global division of labour. Some countries are specialized in the extraction of raw materials; some countries have comparative advantage in labour intensive industries; some countries are excellent producers of knowledge-intensive products.

The following table provides some ideas about the MNCs

Table. Ten Largest MNC in terms of Revenue (USD billion)

There are value chains for agricultural products;

  • there are value chains for automobiles;
  • there are value chains for IT products;
  • there are value chains for textile products.

In fact, every product has a value chain which can be national, regional or global.

The value chains play crucial role in the world economy. The number of workers hired by the GVC increased from 297 million in 1995 to 453 million in 2013 representing 20% of all workers in the world. In short, the GVC is one of the important devises invented by man.

It is true that GVC has been a major factor of the growth of the global economy and job creation. On the other hand, it is also true that they are the significant human rights violators. 

Typology of Human Rights Violations by MNC

There are three generations of human rights recognized by international covenants.

We have the civil and political rights (CPR) which is the first generation of human rights.

We have the economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR), called as the second generation human rights.

Then, we have the collective rights (CR) known as the third generation human rights. All these human rights are inspired from the Universal Declaration on Human Rights of 1948 (UDHR).

  • The CPR refers to the freedom of thought and actions such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of religion.
  • The ESCR refers to the right to a decent and dignified life such as the rights to housing, foods, clothing, education and public health.
  • The CR refers to the right to differentiated or specialized care rights of the native people, the elders, the women, the children, the disabled and the immigrants.

Violation of ESCR and CPR by MNCs

MNC’s violation of ESCR may be grouped into the violation of labour rights and the environmental rights abuse. In many cases, MNCs violate both labour rights and environmental rights.

In addition, MNCs may violate the CPR, in an indirect way. Suppose that the MNCs violate ESCR. The victims will protest. The host country government may oppress the movements of protest, which is the violation of CPR.

Labour rights include:

  • the right to labour unionization,
  • decent wages, reasonable working hours,
  • no forced labour,
  • absence of discrimination by gender/race and other healthy work conditions needed for decent and dignified living of workers.

Environmental rights include

  • the rights to safe environment and,
  • the right to use natural resources for the benefit of residents.

The following is a list of the cases of violations of ESCR and CPR:

  • According to the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) report, of fifty GVCs’ employees, 94% is low wage only 6% represents regular jobs.
  • As much as 60% of jobs under MNC control represents the informal sector of the economy.
  • In 2006, Brazil workers of sugar plants worked 10 to 12 hours a day. More than 10,000 were freed by the Brazilian government from forced labour
  • Child labour is frequent in cobalt mines in Haut Katanga and Lualaba Province of the Republic of Congo and other places.

Notorious Cases of ESCR and CPR Violations

Ali Enterprise Textile: On September 11, 2012, there was disastrous fire at the Ali Enterprise Textile factory in Karachi, Pakistan killing 262 due to the inadequate security measures provided by the head Company, in Germany, KiK. (Violation of ESCR)

Rana Plaza Building: In April 2013, the collapse of the Rana Plaza Building, Dhaka, Bangladesh killed 1,132 and injured 2,500. (Violation of ESCR)

Union Carbide India (UCI): In the Bhopal disaster of 1984, 24,000 died and 16,000 were injured due to the leakage of pesticide. The amount of the settlement was USD 470 million, only USD 40 per victim. The tragedy occurred in Bhopal Madhya Pradesh, India. (Violation of ESCR)

Nestle: In 1970, it introduced a formula of baby food requiring clean water leading to the production of bottled water for which it pumped underground water in many countries. For example, in Serra Da Matiqueira, Brazil, due to the Company’s pumping water, local residents had to suffer from the shortage of water.

Moreover, the Company was accused of hiring children younger than 15 in their Ivory Coast cocoa plantations. (Violation of ESCR)

Screenshot: The Guardian

TTY Corporation Co. Ltd: On January 18, 2012, in Kratie Province, Cambodia, the security guard of the Company shot the protesters. The dispute was about the land use for rubber plantation vs. cassava plantation. The Company wanted to transform the cassava field into rubber plants. The cassava file was the lifeline of the local people. As many as 23 villagers were injured. (Violation of ESCR and CPR)

Timbergreen Co. Ltd (2011.04.26): Chut Wutty, founder/Director of Nature/Resource Protection Group was shot to death, on April 26,2011, in Koh Kong Province, Cambodia, during the protest against the environmental damage caused by the company. (Violation of ESCR and CPR)

Unocal/COSO: The Company was a US gas/oil company operating in partnership with Myanmar military and it was building the Pipeline Yandana in the 1990s, the Myanmar military committed murder, rapes and displacement of a great number of people. (Violation of ESCR and CPR)

Image left: Senior Traditional Owner Yvonne Margarula was “deeply saddened” that uranium from Rio Tinto’s Ranger mine on Mirarr country in the Northern Territory was exported to Japanese nuclear companies including TEPCO. Source: Photo by Dominic O’Brien

Rio Tinto, a mining company: The Company had an agreement with the Papua New Guinea government to operate copper mine in Bougainville Island in East New Guinea. During the Company’s operation in the period, 1972-1988, the Company dumped one billion tons of wastes into the Jaba River causing the environmental damage.

The damage was so bad that the citizens of Bougainville sabotaged the Company’s operation. Huge protest demonstrations took place and 15,000 people were killed and 70,000 people were dislocated. (Violation of ESCR and CPR)

There are numerous unknown cases of human rights violations by MNCs. Nobody knows how widely spread these human rights violations are, because many cases are not reported for various reasons. But, it is possible that the extent of the corporate human rights abuses could be beyond our imagination. 

Framework for the Prosecution of MNCs Which Violate Human Rights

One of the challenges which the world has to devise is a proper judiciary system capable of preventing the MNCs from committing human rights violations and punishing them, when they abuse human rights.

At present, though limited in scope and effectiveness, we have the following mechanisms designed to prevent human rights violations by MNCs and punish them when they do violate human rights.

  • The anti-bribery law
  • The Court Rulings on human rights violations by MNCs
  • The Corporate Social Responsibility Program
  • International Efforts to cope with MNCs Human Rights Violations

The Anti-Bribery Law 

It appears that bribery is an integral part of humanity. It is reported that 25% of humanity has had bribe experiences. In 2011, the amount of bribes paid was as much as 5% of global GDP, or USD 2.6 trillion.

It seems that, due to bribery, many honest and competent companies are excluded from business contracts. Don John State of Anti-Corruption survey with 300 major companies showed that 40% of the respondents lost contracts because of bribes; they did not pay bribes.

There can be many complex determinants of human rights violations by MNCs. But, perhaps, the culture of bribes is the most important determinant. Because of bribes paid by MNCs to the host country leaders, MNCs can abuse easily human rights.

The transaction of bribes takes place within the global value chains which closely integrate the economies of national, especially those of developing countries.

The bribe involves the collusion between MNCs and the government of the host country, which leads to a situation where the host country overlooks the violations of the ESCR by MNCs.

As pointed out above, this invites citizens to undertake demonstration of protests which the host country government oppress because of bribe money received. This is the violation of CPR. Thus, bribes are the roots of violation of both ESCR and CPR.

It is scandalous to see that many of the famous MNCs are involved in bribes transactions.

The following is the list of the most notorious bribe donors. I will identify the MNCs their nationality, and the amount of settlement for the bribery.

As we will see it later, it is more than difficult to make MNCs accountable for their violation of human rights through international judiciary system.

However, it is fortunate that some developed countries have anti-bribery laws which punish corporation which are involved in bribery. In this way, MNCs human rights violations can be discouraged to some extent. Here is the list of bribe givers:

  • Siemens, Germany, (USD 899 million);
  • KBR Halliburton, U.S.A., (USD 539 million);
  • BAE, the UK, (USD 400 million);
  • Total SA, France, (USD398 million);
  • Lucent, France, (USD 137 million);
  • Snamprogetti, the Netherlands, (USD 365million);
  • JCG, Japan, (USD 136 million);
  • Alcatal S.A. France, (USD 95 million).

These MNCs are operating throughout the world.

The amount of court settlement represents the amount of fine imposed on the MNCs which are involved in bribery transactions. The important question is whether or not the host countries which are victims of the corruption are compensated for the social cost caused by the bribery.

The bribery imposes several types of social cost. The bribery may end up with the wrong legislations made for the benefit of MNC at the expense of the interests of the host country. The bribery many produce a situation in which the local citizens suffer from the infrastructure facilities of inferior quality, low wage, long hour of work, misallocation of resources and poor economic development.

It is common sense that the host countries which are targets of bribery should be compensated, but, it is rare that they are compensated. Fortunately, in recent years, there have been some movements for the compensation for the bribery led by the UK, France and the U.S.

For instance, in the past decade, in the UK, Tanzania received €41 million for the damage caused by bribery paid by UK MNCs. The Global Forum for Assets Recovery is promoting the sharing of the court settlement money with the host countries which are the victims of bribery.

In the U.S., under the Foreign Corruption Practice Act (FCPA), Thailand was compensated in 2008 and Haiti in 2009 for corruption practice by American Companies operating in these countries.

I had an occasion of helping a Canadian media agent to solve a case of corruption committed by a Canadian MNC in South Korea. The Canadian MNC had a contract with a suburban town near Seoul City for the construction of light railway connecting the town to Seoul City downtown.

The Canadian company supplied a bribe of millions of dollars to the town mayor and others. One of the conditions of the bribe was, among others, the production of a false project-feasibility study in which the estimation of the demand for the railway-traffic was twice the realistic estimate. It appears that the Company was not punished.

Court Rulings on Violations of Human Rights by MNCs

The great majority of cases of MNC human rights violations do not come from court hearing. Some are ignored; some settle the dispute outside the court. There are reasons for this.

  1. First the court litigation is expensive.
  2. Second, the host governments tend to avoid court battle, because it is often involved in the corruption. Furthermore, their judiciary systems are underdeveloped to handle the case of MNCs’ human rights violations.
  3. Third, the home country of MNCs is also reluctant to bring its MNCs to the court, because it does not want to hurt the profit of its MNCs.
  4. Fourth, it is difficult to prove human rights violations. The human rights violations are committed by subsidiaries of MNCs, but the responsibility to protect human rights belongs to MNCs.
  5. Fifth, the defendant (MNC) can choose the court by virtue of so-called the Forum of Non-Conveniences (FNC). If it finds itself in unfavourable situation; it can choose another court poorly organized in developing countries which are likely to dismiss the case.

Some of the MNCs have several thousand subsidiaries. For example, the Samsung Group has more than 8,000 subsidiaries spread in 80 countries.

Thus, even if the case is brought to the court, the probability of final ruling is low.

According to the EU Parliament, in 2019, there were 35 cases of MNC human rights violations heard at the courts. Of these 35 cases, 12 were dismissed for lack of evidence, 17 were on-going and 4 had extra-judiciary settlements.

Court Hearings

In fact, the following cases have succeeded in having court hearings, but none has led to legal settlement for lack of evidence or for the use of FNC.

Thor Chemical Holding Ltd. UK Company: The plaintiff, Ngcobo sued on November 10, 1995 the Company for being exposed to hazardous mercury vapour in Kuazulu Natal Province, South Africa. Thor was recognized as responsible for its failure of providing proper safety design for the operation.

The plaintiff appealed to US courts. But, the defendant preferred to have it heard in South Africa, where the case was dismissed.

This is another case of the application of the FNC. Thor chose a South African court which was not equipped to handle the case.

Combior Inc. a Quebec Company: The Company belongs to a Quebec company, Omai Gold Mines Ltd of Guyana. Combior Inc, was sued in 2003 by Guyana residents for spilling toxic water polluting the River Essequibo. The Supreme Court of Canada allowed defendant’s use of FNC saying that the Guyana forum (court) is better suited, which was in a state of collapse.

Cape plc, a UK Company: In 2000, the Company was sued by Lubbe for making the plaintiff to be inhaling to asbestos dust causing cancer. The case was heard at a UK court, which found that the parent company had the duty to compensate the victim by virtue of the Tort Law

But, the parent company has too many subsidiaries and it claimed that it was not easy to verify the safety measures taken by all subsidiaries. The case was dismissed.

The Royal Dutch Petroleum, the Netherlands Company: The Company was sued by Wiwa family for Company’s environmental damage. The citizen of the Ogoni region in Nigeria protested. The Nigeria government in complicity with the Company committed torture, cruel treatment and summary execution of the protesters. Ken Saro-Wiwa, leader of the civic movement was hanged on November 10, 1996.

The case was heard in the US District Court and it was dismissed by virtue of FNC.

BHP: an Australia Company: The Company was sued by Rex Dagi on September 22, 1995 for having ruined a River. Dagi was representing 7,500 villagers. The river was OKTedi Fly River of 200 km long from Fly River to the Gulf of Papua. The company dumped since 1984, 100,000 tons of finely crushed rocks into the river. The River died. The Supreme Court of Victoria ruled guilty and the dispute was settle out of court in 1996

Freeport McMorgan and the Freeport McMorgan Copper and Gold, US company: The defendants were sued by Beanal for environmental damage, human right abuse and cultural genocide through the occupation of an area of 26,400 km2. Beanal was representing the community of Tamika Jaya, Indonesia. The case was handled by the District Court of Louisiana. The case was dismissed.

Company Social Responsibility (CSR)

There is one way for the national government to prevent MNCs from violating human rights. It is the system of the Company Social Responsibility (CSR). But, the vast majority of MNCs do not have the CSR program. For instance, by 2014, only 272 out of 80,000 MNCs had social policy as a result of the National Action Plan.

In some countries, large companies are obligated by law or encouraged to undertake Company Social Responsibility (CSR) programs.

For instance, in China, the Government-Owned Enterprises (GOE) and the listed enterprises in the Shanghai stock market have the legal obligation to apply CSR.

In India, by virtue of the Company Act of 2013, major companies have the duty to allocate 2% o profit to CSR projects.

Similarly, Cambodia and Japan also have measures to encourage major enterprises to do something for CSR.

But, as pointed above, CSR is not adopted by most companies, and even if they do, it is not known to what extent these measures have contributed to the prevention of human rights violations.

International Efforts to  Cope with MNCs Human Rights Violations

In the 1970s and 1980s, there were the Sullivan Principles and the MacBride Principles.

The Sullivan Principle was adopted in the 1970 in South Africa in order to protect labour rights under the Apartheid and later, in 1999, it was unveiled by Rev Sullivan and the Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan.

On the other hand, the McBride Principles were proposed by New York City controller and endorsed by 4 religious people including Rev. McBride. The principles were intended to induce the US companies in Northern Ireland to protect labour rights.

In 1976, the established Guidelines for MNC related to labour rights, environment and consumer protection.

In Europe, there is the Council of Europe (COE) which is the principal organization of human rights protection. It has 47 member countries of which 28 are European countries.

The European Court of human rights (ECtHR) handles human rights violations; what it tries to accomplish is a proper balance market freedom and human rights.

In 1977, the ILO made the Tripartite Declaration (government, employer, employee) of Principles concerning MNC’s social policy in accordance with the  Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 (UNDHR), the International Covenant in Civil and Political Rights of 1978 (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1978 (ICESCR)

The principles include conditions regarding employment (no forced labour, no child labour), work conditions (wage, safety) and industrial relations (collective negotiation).

In 1972 the UN Assembly warned the coming conflict between MNCs and national governments.

In 1998, the UN Working Group was created by the Sub-Commission on Human Rights with the function of observing the activities of MNCs and protecting human rights.

In 2005, the UN Human Rights Commission asked the UN Secretary General to appoint a special representative of the Secretary General (SRSG) to study the issues related to human rights. Professor John Ruggie was appointed as SRSG.

Professor Ruggie proposed three pillars:

  • The State has the duty to protect human rights abuses by MNCs
  • MNCs should avoid violation of human rights
  • Both State and businesses should have access to judicial and non-judicial remedies.

In 2011, the SRSG was given the second mandate to further examine the issue. The UN accepted his recommendation as guiding principles.

As a result of these guiding principles, the UNHRC visited various countries and members of the Global Compact.

The Global Compact

The Global Compact was created in 2000 and it is composed of 170 countries and 13,000 enterprises and 5,332 NGOs. It has proposed 10 principles related to human rights and business conducts.

  • Businesses should support and respect the protection of internationally claimed human rights.
  • Business should not become complicit in human rights violations.
  • Business should uphold labour organization.
  • There should be no forced labour.
  • There should be no child labour.
  • There should be no discrimination of employment and occupation.
  • Business should adopt precautionary approach to environment support.
  • Businesses should take initiatives to promote greater environmental responsibility.
  • Businesses should promote and diffuse environment-friendly technologies.
  • Businesses should work against corruption.

The efforts of the UNHRC has led to the establishment of several initiatives to better handle MNCs human rights violations including the Global Reporting Initiative, the International Finance Corporation Standard and the OECD Due Diligence Guidelines.

Moreover, some countries including France, the UK and the U.S. are enacting Due Diligence Law imposed on the parent companies so that the operation of subsidiaries be better monitored and controlled. 

Despite the efforts of some MNCs, national governments, international institutions and especially the devotion of the UNHRC, the violation of human rights by MNC is continuing without proper punishment. Why?

  1. First, there are no international laws. What are called international laws of human rights are just a set of guidelines with no judicial power; there are no real human rights courts.  Laws with no courts to manage, they are not laws.
  2. Second, neither the home country nor the host country is really interested in prosecuting MNCs which violate human rights for different reasons. The host country is reluctant to persecute MNCs either due to its collusion with the MNCs or inability to so, or both. The home country is not keen on punishing its MNCs operating in foreign countries.
  3. Third, even if MNCs are brought to the courts in the home country or the host country, it is quasi impossible to persecute MNCs due to the lack of proof of human rights violations, because of the complexity of MNC-subsidiaries relations and, especially, due to the use of the bizarre system of Forum of Non-Conveniences (FNC) which allows the defendant to choose the courts which are likely to dismiss the case.

The interesting question is the future prospect of human rights violations of MNCs. It appears that the present state of human rights violations by MNCs is likely to get worse in the future due to the difficulty of establishing binding international law of human rights on the one hand and, on the other, the possibility of increasing power and wealth of MNCs as a result of the pandemic.

What is worrisome is the long-run impact of MNCs’ human rights abuse on the developing economies.

The presence of MNCs in developing countries are supposed to be beneficial in the long run, for they would contribute to the long-run economic development of these countries through FDI, creation of jobs, transfer of technology, promotion of exports, workers training, development of free market and other constructive programs.

However, in many cases, developing countries are caught in the trap of cheap labour and low-cost natural resources partly due to their collusion with MNCs which violate human rights.

But, as long as developing countries remain the victims of MNCs human rights violations and as long as the host country leaders collide with MNCs for their own greed at the expense of the interest of the people, it would be difficult for them to free themselves from poverty and become “developed countries” They may remain “developing countries” forever.

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Dr. Joseph H. Chung is a professor of economics and member of the Research Center on Integration and Globalization (CEIM) of the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM).

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image is from Rainforest Action Network/flickr/cc

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Important article by F. William Engdahl first published on December 25, 2020 at the very outset of the Covid “vaccine” project

***

Bill Gates is actively financing and promoting new untested vaccines supposed to keep us at least somewhat safe from a ‘ghastly” death from the novel coronavirus and supposedly allow us to resume somewhat “normal” lives. The Pharma giant Pfizer has now announced what they claim were spectacular results in initial human tests. They use an experimental technology known as gene editing, specifically mRNA gene-editing, something never before used in vaccines. Before we rush to get jabbed in hopes of some immunity, we should know more about the radical experimental technology and its lack of precision.

The financial world went ballistic on November 9 when the pharma giant Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, announced in a company press release that it had developed a vaccine for Covid19 that was “90%” effective.

The controversial US head of NIAID, Tony Fauci (rightrushed to greet the news and the EU announced it had purchased 300 million doses of the costly new vaccine. If you believe financial markets, the pandemic is all but past history.

Suspicious events

However it seems Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer, doesn’t share the confidence of his own claims. On the day his company issued its press release on the proposed vaccine trials, he sold 62% of his stock in Pfizer, making millions profit in the deal. He made the sell order in a special option in August so it would not appear as “insider selling”, however he also timed it just after the US elections and the mainstream media illegitimately declared Joe Biden President-elect. It seems from appearances that Bourla had a pretty clear conflict of interest in the timing of his press release on the same day.

Bourla lied and denied to the Press that his company had received any funds from the Trump Administration to develop the vaccine when it came out they contracted in summer to deliver 100 million doses to the US Government. Further adding to the suspect actions of Pfizer was the fact the company first informed the team of Joe biden rather than the relevant US government agencies.

But this is far from the only thing alarming about the much-hyped Pfizer announcement.

The German Partner

Pfizer, famous for its Viagra and other drugs, has partnered with a small Mainz, Germany company, BioNTech, which has developed the radical mRNA technique used to produce the new corona vaccine. BioNTech was only founded in 2008. BioNTech signed an agreement with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in September, 2019, just before announcement in Wuhan China of the Novel Coronavirus and just before BioNTech made its stock market debut. The agreement involved cooperation on developing new mRNA techniques to treat cancer and HIV. Curiously that press release, “The Gates Foundation sees BioNTech potential to ‘dramatically reduce global HIV and tuberculosis’” 05. September 2019, has now been deleted.

BioNTech also has an agreement with one of the largest drug producers in China, Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd (“Fosun Pharma”) to develop a version of its mRNA vaccine for novel coronavirus for the Chinese market. Ai-Min Hui, President of Global R&D of Fosun Pharma said in an August statement, “Dosing the first Chinese subject with BNT162b1 marks a milestone of the global co-development program in China. We are closely working with BioNTech and regulatory authorities to evaluate the safety and efficacy of BNT162b1 and other mRNA vaccine candidates…”

This means that the same German biotech company is behind the covid vaccines being rushed out in China as well as the USA and EU. The vaccine is being rushed through to eventual approval in an alarmingly short time.

Both US and EU authorities and presumably also Chinese, waived the standard animal tests using ferrets or mice and have gone straight to human “guinea pigs.” Human tests began in late July and early August. Three months is unheard of for testing a new vaccine. Several years is the norm. Because of the degree of global panic engendered by WHO over the coronavirus, caution is thrown to the wind. Vaccine makers all have legal indemnity, meaning they can’t be sued if people die or are maimed from the new vaccine. But the most alarming fact about the new Pfizer-BioNTech gene edited vaccine is that the gene edited mRNA for human vaccine application has never before been approved. Notably, two year peer reviewed tests with mice fed genetically modified corn sprayed with Monsanto glyphosate-rich Roundup first showed cancer tumors after nine months as well as liver and other organ damage. Earlier Monsanto company tests ended at three months and claimed no harmA similar situation exists with the gene edited mRNA vaccines that are being rushed out after less than 90 days human tests.

Explicitly experimental”

Dr. Michael Yeadon replied in a recent public social media comment to a colleague in the UK;  “All vaccines against the SARS-COV-2 virus are by definition novel. No candidate vaccine has been… in development for more than a few months.” Yeadon then went on to declare,

“If any such vaccine is approved for use under any circumstances that are not EXPLICITLY experimental, I believe that recipients are being misled to a criminal extent. This is because there are precisely zero human volunteers for…whom there could possibly be more than a few months past-dose safety information.”

Yeadon is well qualified to make the critique. As he notes in the comment, “I have a degree in Biochemistry & Toxicology & a research based PhD in pharmacology. I have spent 32 years working in pharmaceutical R&D, mostly in new medicines for disorders of lung & skin. I was a VP at Pfizer & CEO…. of a biotech I founded (Ziarco – acquired by Novartis). I’m knowledgeable about new medicine R&D.” He was formerly with Pfizer at a very senior level.

Human guinea pigs?

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is experimental and far from guaranteed safe, despite the fact that Pfizer, the EU and the notorious Dr Tony Fauci seem ready to roll it out even before year end to hundreds of millions of humans.

The experimental technology is based on a rather new gene manipulation known as gene editing. In a major article in the 2018 New York Council on Foreign Relations magazine, Foreign Affairs, Bill Gates effusively promoted the novel gene editing CRISPR technology as being able to “transform global development.” He noted that his Gates Foundation had been financing gene editing developments for vaccines and other applications for a decade.

But is the technology for breaking and splicing of human genes so absolutely safe that it is worth risking on a novel experimental vaccine never before used on humans? Contrary to what Bill Gates claims, the scientific answer is no, it is not proven so safe.

In a peer reviewed article in the October, 2020 journal Trends in Genetics, the authors conclude that “the range of possible molecular events resulting from genome editing has been underestimated and the technology remains unpredictable on, and away from, the target locus.”

Dr. Romeo Quijano, retired professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the College of Medicine, University of the Philippines Manila, noted some of the dangers of the experimental gene editing when applied to human vaccines. Quijano warns of,

“the danger that the vaccine might actually “enhance” the pathogenicity of the virus, or make it more aggressive possibly due to antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), as what happened with previous studies on test vaccines in animals. If that should happen in a major human trial the outcome could be disastrous. This serious adverse effect may not even be detected by a clinical trial especially in highly biased clinical trials laden with conflicts of interest involving vaccine companies. Even when a serious adverse event is detected, this is usually swept under the rug.”

He cites the case of another Gates mRNA vaccine candidate, Moderna, where “three of the 15 human experimental subjects in the high dose group suffered serious and medically significant symptoms. Moderna, however, concluded that the vaccine was “generally safe and well tolerated,” which the corporate-dominated media dutifully reported, covering-up the real danger…”

He notes,

“Exogenous mRNA is inherently immune-stimulatory, and this feature of mRNA could be beneficial or detrimental. It may provide adjuvant activity and it may inhibit antigen expression and negatively affect the immune response. The paradoxical effects of innate immune sensing on different formats of mRNA vaccines are incompletely understood.” Quijano adds, “A mRNA-based vaccine could also induce potent type I interferon responses, which have been associated not only with inflammation but also potentially with autoimmunity… and may promote blood coagulation and pathological thrombus formation.”

Quijano writes in the extensively documented article,

“among other dangers, the virus-vectored vaccines could undergo recombination with naturally occurring viruses and produce hybrid viruses that could have undesirable properties affecting transmission or virulence. The…possible outcomes of recombination are practically impossible to quantify accurately given existing tools and knowledge. The risks, however, are real, as exemplified by the emergence of mutant types of viruses, enhanced pathogenicity and unexpected serious adverse events (including death) following haphazard mass vaccination campaigns and previous failed attempts to develop chimeric vaccines using genetic engineering technology.”

Bill Gates, the mRNA vaccine makers including Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, and their close allies such as Dr. Tony Fauci of the NIAID are clearly playing fast and loose with human lives in their rush to get these experimental vaccines into our bodies. Notably, the same Dr. Fauci and his NIAID owns the patent on a vaccine for dengue fever known as Dengvaxia, marketed by Sanofi-Pasteur and promoted as an “essential” vaccine by Tedros’ WHO since 2016. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (right) noted that Fauci and NIAID “knew from the clinical trials that there was a problem with paradoxical immune response,” but they gave it to several hundred thousand Filipino kids anyway. It was estimated that as many as 600 vaccinated children died before the government stopped the vaccinations.

Clearly the well-established Precautionary Principle–if in serious doubt, don’t– is being ignored by Fauci, Pfizer/BioNTech and others in rushing to approve the new mRNA vaccine for coronavirus. Messenger RNA technology has yet to produce an approved medicine, let alone a vaccine.

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image is from NEO


seeds_2.jpg

Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl
ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2
Year: 2007
Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

Special Price: $18.00

 

This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

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***

Lo fa tramite le attività dell’Associazione Per un mondo senza guerre, il canale Pangea Grandangolo su Byoblu, e tramite campagne che concorrono all’obiettivo primario. Tra queste:

  • FUORI L’ITALIA DALLA GUERRA – si chiede a tutti i movimenti, i partiti e i singoli, pur mantenendo ciascuno la propria identità e il proprio percorso, di convergere verso questo obiettivo urgente e prioritario. Il conflitto in Ucraina è stato cercato e provocato dalla NATO ed è parte della strategia di guerra USA contro la Russia.
    L’Italia deve dire no all’invio di armi all’Ucraina ed alle sanzioni contro la Russia. E’ in gioco il nostro futuro e la nostra stessa vita.
  • NATOEXIT – Le strategie della NATO ci hanno portato sull’orlo del precipizio:
    • la corsa agli armamenti nucleari mai arrestata, la distruzione della Federazione Jugoslava e dello Stato libico (dove ancora adesso si impedisce il riemergere della democrazia), la guerra provocata in Siria tuttora in atto, l’allargamento ed est della NATO, l’annullamento di tutti gli accordi con la Russia che mantenevano un equilibrio nucleare, la folle escalation contro Russia e Cina, la distruzione sistematica di ogni autonomia e sovranità dell’Europa.
    • L’Italia spende 80 milioni di Euro AL GIORNO per la NATO, mentre sanità, scuola, welfare e tutto ciò che necessita ai cittadini viene sacrificato. La presenza di più di 90 basi USA e NATO sul suo territorio e di armi nucleari illegali, rende l’Italia il primo bersaglio di un attacco. E’ dunque vitale uscire dalla sua strategia globale di guerra, morte e conquista.
  • CONTRO I RIGASSIFICATORI – imposti a sostegno della suicida scelta di rottura dei rapporti con la Russia e interruzione delle sue forniture energetiche, che ci farà precipitare in una crisi economica senza precedenti oltre che mettere a rischio ambientale il nostro paese.
  • ASSANGE LIBERO PER LA NOSTRA LIBERTÀ – la libertà di Julian Assange è la libertà di tutti noi. I crimini di guerra e gli illeciti meccanismi delle strategie dei governi occidentali da lui rivelati non possono restare impuniti. Toglierci la libertà di stampa, di parola, di espressione, toglierci la possibilità di conoscere l’operato dei nostri governi fa parte di questa guerra globale.

La strategia di guerra di cui siamo tutti vittime, e di cui il governo italiano è complice usa molte armi, non solo quelle convenzionali. Sono strumenti di questa stessa guerra la costante violazione della Costituzione Italiana, del diritto internazionale, della democrazia, dello stato di diritto e delle libertà personali. Il controllo, i lockdown, il greenpass, le vaccinazioni obbligatorie, l’attacco alla libera informazione e al dissenso, la distruzione del tessuto dell’economia reale e del lavoro, la ricerca utilizzata ormai solo per scopi militari, l’attacco alla socialità e alla cultura, l’eliminazione del contante, sono infatti tutte armi camuffate da politiche emergenziali.

Fa parte di questa strategia di attacco ai diritti dei cittadini indire le elezioni politiche italiane in modo da rendere difficile per i movimenti che dissentono di riuscire a raccogliere le necessarie firme per presentare le proprie liste elettorali.

Il COMITATO NO GUERRA NO NATO invita quindi tutti a firmare per permettere la partecipazione alle elezioni a
QUELLE LISTE CHE SOSTENGONO IN MODO CHIARO, COERENTE E NON EQUIVOCO LE SUDDETTE
BATTAGLIE FONDAMENTALI E PRIORITARIE.

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***

Since December of 2018, the Republic of Sudan has undergone general strikes, mass demonstrations, the forced removal of longtime former President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and the failed formations of several interim administrations.

Hundreds of people have lost their lives due to the repression carried out by the military and its supporters against protests which have been led by the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC) and its Popular Resistance Committees (PRC).

The FFC was spearheaded by the Sudanese Professional Association (SPA) as well as other organizations. Since December 2018, the alliance which came about as a direct result of the overall economic and political crisis in Sudan, has undergone several realignments involving the military leadership and within its own ranks.

After an extended sit-in outside the Ministry of Defense during the early months of 2019, the top military leadership staged a coup against then President al-Bashir vowing to create the conditions for the realization of a democratic dispensation inside the country which had experienced the rule of the National Congress Party (NCP), an entity formed by the military-turned civilian officials of the government that had remained in power since 1989.

However, despite the promise of reforms, the Transitional Military Council (TMC) led by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) attacked thousands of pro-democracy activists in Khartoum on June 3, 2019. It was estimated that at least 100 people died that day as 10,000 well-armed troops used live ammunition, teargas and concussion grenades to clear the demonstrators from in front of the military headquarters and the entire streets of the capital of Khartoum.

After the June 3, 2019 massacre in Khartoum, regional states coordinated by the African Union (AU) feverishly negotiated a truce between the FFC and the TMC. By August 2019, a Sovereign Council was created which outlined a 39-month transitional period where the military would serve as chair of the arrangements for the bulk of this time period which ostensibly would result in multi-party elections.

Nonetheless, the Sovereign Council consisting of FFC members and military leaders was dissolved on October 25, 2021. Interim Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok was placed under house arrest while yet another crackdown on the mass organizations proceeded. Hamdok was briefly brought back into the government after being released from detention. Soon enough, however, Hamdok resigned from the second interim administration accepting his failure to stabilize the political and security situation in Sudan.

Communist Party Announces New Anti-Military Coalition

Just recently in late July, the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP), which had resigned from the FFC on November 7, 2020, citing what it perceived to be the indecisiveness of the alliance as it relates to the continued role of the military within society and government, announced the establishment of another alliance. The SCP has categorically rejected any governance role for the Sudanese Armed Forces within a future democratic administration.

Calling itself the Forces for Radical Change (FRC), the SCP-led alliance consists of various mass organizations and trade unions. The FRC is demanding the immediate establishment of a civilian government which would force the military back to its barracks.

A report published by the Middle East Monitor on July 25, stated that:

“According to Sudanese media, the new alliance hopes to bring down the coup authorities to implement radical revolutionary change. SCP Political Secretary Mohamed Mokhtar Al-Khatib said that the FRC rejects ‘the military institution’s interference in politics and rejects any partnership with it.’ The alliance statement stressed the need to take decisions related to all ‘deferred issues’ and resolve them during the transitional period. Al-Khatib added that the FFC will not be part of the new alliance because it adopted a social-political approach ‘that caused the destruction of national resources.’ He claimed that the FFC still believes in an agreement with the military component and ruled out the participation of the Sudanese Revolutionary Front because it is cooperating with the military. The SCP leader did not speak about the National Consensus coalition which is seen as part of the coup.”

This new FRC grouping has called for an end to the economic underdevelopment of Sudan, a citizens-based civilian administration along with the acquisition of genuine independence which would discontinue any reliance on foreign imperialist interests. These events represent a further fracturing of those claiming to represent the democratic movement of the people which erupted during December 2018. At present there is the FFC Executive Office, the National Consensus Forces which appears to want a continued role for the military in the administrative structures of the country and the SCP-led Forces for Radical Change (FRC).

Mass Demonstrations for Democracy are Continuing in Sudan

Two large-scale protests were reported during June and July centered around the capital of Khartoum and its twin city of Omdurman. On June 30, four protesters were reportedly killed by the security forces during demonstrations calling for the reversal of the October 25 coup.

Later, on July 17, another demonstration was met with repression by the military and other security forces. Thousands participated in the protest actions prompting the security forces to utilize teargas and other crowd control weapons designed to disperse the crowds. Activists waved Sudanese flags and barricaded major thoroughfares in various locations in the Khartoum and Omdurman areas. Bridges leading to the cities were cordoned off by the military to prevent others from joining the demonstrations.

After the rejection of the October 25 coup, many of the FFC leaders who held positions in the Sovereign Council have expressed their reluctance to reenter another alliance with the military leadership of General al-Burhan. At the same time, the military regime has maintained its agreements with several armed opposition groupings known as the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF), an amalgam of rebel organizations based in Darfur, Blue Nile and South Kordofan states. The SRF has sided with the Sudanese military leadership since al-Burhan has pledged to address their grievances during the putative transitional process.

The SRF played a political role in encouraging the October 25 coup by staging a sit-in Khartoum demanding the dissolution of the Sovereign Council. After the coup, the SRF expressed its support for the latest putsch.

Meanwhile, another alliance of 10 Islamist groupings have put forward a proposal for the establishment of a new regime. This alliance dubbed The Broad Islamic Current consists of members of the banned former ruling National Congress Party (NCP), now known as the Islamic Movement and the State of Law and Development Party of Mohamed Ali al-Jazouli, who is a supporter of the Islamic State (IS) recently released from prison. At the founding of the Broad Islamic Current, supporters chanted slogans against the left organizations and coalitions in Sudan while expressing support for the October 25 coup and the military leadership.

Interestingly enough, the Broad Islamic Current does not include the Popular Congress Party (PCP) in its alliance. The PCP is one of the largest Islamist parties in Sudan founded by Hassan al-Turabi. The PCP grew out of a split between al-Turabi and former NCP leader and President al-Bashir in 1999. The Broad Islamic Current is seeking to take advantage of the political climate which emerged in the aftermath of the October 25 coup.

General al-Burhan delivered an address on July 4 calling once again for dialogue among all political groupings inside the country. He also commented on the role of the military in Sudan even after the holding of democratic elections. The military leader proposed what he called a “Supreme Council of the Armed Forces” which would have an undefined role in the economic and political structures within the country.

The FFC along with the FRC are saying publicly that they are not interested in further talks with the military regime. Noting that all other previous agreements between the FFC and the TMC have been broken by the military and its allies within the now reconfigured Sovereign Council, which is staffed by former rebel leaders, supporters of the rule by the armed forces and Islamist groupings which were formally associated with the government of ousted President al-Bashir.

Political analyst Osman Mirghani wrote during early July in the Sudan Tribune noting:

“Simply rejecting al-Burhan speech will be a continuation of the reactive approach that has enabled the military component to always be one step ahead of the civilian forces. If these forces overcome their differences and set a clear charter, they could turn the tables by agreeing on a civilian government that would close the way for any other attempts to obstruct the transitional period and be the starting point for full civil rule after the failure of the partnership formula.”

Obviously, greater unity among the democratic forces would be a tremendous step forward in the process of genuinely transforming Sudan into a people’s state. Nonetheless, without the purging and dismantling of the military apparatus, which is supported tacitly by the United States, the State of Israel and the Gulf monarchies, any transitional process to a just and humane society will remain elusive.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Sudan women protest for democratic transition, June 26, 2022 (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

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***

The geostrategic pieces are all falling into place one after another to create the compelling impression that the US-led NATO proxy war on Russia through Ukraine has failed to achieve the grand strategic goals that were expected of it, which is why Washington is now willing to speed up the inevitable resumption of its “Pivot to Asia” in response instead of waiting at least several years like many observers expected.

US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said during her trip to New Zealand that her country would be interested in having a “conversation” about that island nation’s future interest in joining AUKUS. In her words,

“We’ve always said that going forward as we look at other emerging technologies and what that may mean for everyone’s security in the world, that there may be scope for others to join so certainly if that time comes, New Zealand is a country with whom we would have conversation.”

It would be a regionally destabilizing development if this anti-Chinese military bloc expands, but no one should be surprised that New Zealand will probably be its next member.

The author predicted in early June that “New Zealand’s Training of Kiev’s Forces in the UK Hints at Its Interest in Joining AUKUS”, explaining that Wellington was participating in this unnecessary military mission halfway across the world in order to prove its commitment and worth to that anti-Chinese alliance. That interpretation of events has since been vindicated in hindsight by Sherman’s latest statement, which also follows New Zealand’s participation in the US-led “Partners in the Blue Pacific” (PBP) bloc for containing China in the South Pacific. That newly established structure is basically AUKUS+ since it includes the first-mentioned’s three members alongside Japan and New Zealand.

This observation as well as Sherman’s statement of intent very strongly suggests that New Zealand will probably be the next member of AUKUS.

It also extends credence to the prediction that Japan will likely follow in its footsteps too, thus leading to the northern and southern expansions of the so-called “Asian NATO”.

Other prospective members include the US’ Philippine mutual defense partners who Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently pledged to “defend” from China in the South China Sea during his trip to Manilla last weekend. As for South Korea, despite its new conservative leadership’s philo-Americanism, it remains unclear whether Seoul will formally or even only informally join AUKUS+.

In any case, this bloc’s likely expansion to New Zealand in the coming future confirms prior criticisms from multipolar countries that it’s a regional variant of NATO intended to contain China just like its inspiration attempts to do to Russia. The larger pattern at play is that the US is seeking to replicate the structural model that it employed in the Old Cold War in Europe against the erstwhile USSR in the New Cold War against China after having recently rejuvenated NATO following Moscow’s special military operation in Ukraine that none other than Washington itself provoked. The discussion about New Zealand’s prospective membership in AUKUS is also coming at a unique time for the US’ “Pivot to Asia”.

US Speaker Nancy Pelosi just stirred up trouble with the People’s Republic through her latest trip to Taiwan, which was arguably intended to artificially manufacture the pretext for resuming the prioritization of her declining unipolar hegemon’s anti-Chinese containment policy. As the author analyzed last week, the unexpected timing of this development after so many observers thought that it wouldn’t take place again until sometime (perhaps far) later in the future due to the US-led NATO proxy war on Russia through Ukraine is occurring precisely because that aforementioned proxy war has failed to achieve its grand strategic goals.

Bloomberg dealt a major soft power blow to the US by acknowledging Russia’s strategic gains in Africa and admitting that only half of the G20 complied with America’s demands for them to sanction Moscow, which proves that it’s far from isolated. Other Mainstream Media (MSM) outlets also recently released damning reports that decisively shifted the official narrative about the Ukrainian Conflict and what it’s supposedly achieved vis a vis Russia. Amnesty International proved that Kiev is illegally militarizing residential areas and thus exploiting civilians there as human shields while CBS News warned that Western weapons sent to Kiev might end up in terrorists’ hands.

The Guardian, meanwhile, criticized the extremely low level of military training that Kiev’s forces have received up until this point. That was then followed by CNNadmitting that the global food crisis isn’t entirely due to the Ukrainian Conflict unlike what was previously claimed by US officials. Norwegian academic Glenn Diesen also picked up on the MSM’s signals to ask in his latest article, “As the tide turns in Ukraine, is the US preparing to throw Zelensky under the bus?” Regardless of how long it takes for that prospective scenario to play out, it certainly seems like the writing is already on the wall, to which end it naturally follows that the US is actively preparing to resume its “Pivot to Asia” to contain China.

These background dynamics help make better sense of the timing of Sherman’s statement related to New Zealand’s possible membership in AUKUS. The geostrategic pieces are all falling into place one after another to create the compelling impression that the US-led NATO proxy war on Russia through Ukraine has failed to achieve the grand strategic goals that were expected of it, which is why Washington is now willing to speed up the inevitable resumption of its “Pivot to Asia” in response instead of waiting at least several years like many observers expected. Expressing public interest in formally expanding AUKUS is most likely meant to signal to the Asia-Pacific that the aforementioned assessment is indeed accurate.

It’ll of course take time for the US to reorient its grand strategic focus back to that region after abruptly prioritizing the containment of Russia upon provoking its special military operation in Ukraine, but there shouldn’t be any doubt that everything is moving in this direction. AUKUS might also not expand right away, whether through New Zealand becoming its next member or whoever else, but that too appears to be a fait accompli considering the larger trends at play. While this insight bodes negatively for China, it nevertheless suggests to Russia that some relief from the unprecedented US-led Western containment campaign might eventually be forthcoming.

*

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

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 from Wikimedia Commons

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War in Ukraine: Who are the Winners and Losers?

August 10th, 2022 by Marc Vandepitte

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The invasion of Ukraine has been going on for more than five months now, and hostilities may continue for quite some time. In military terms, the outcome is still uncertain, but what is already clear is who the big winners and losers of this conflict are. An overview.

The winners

For the arms manufacturers, this war is like a gift from heaven.

At the behest of NATO, European countries will increase their armament efforts by hundreds of billions in the coming years. In Central Europe we may expect a new arms race, just think of the threat to deploy nuclear weapons in Belarus.

In the Arctic region, the same thing threatens to happen with the entry of Finland and Sweden into the Atlantic Alliance.

The push for a so-called “Global NATO” may also lead to a dangerous and new arms race in Asia.

This militarization and new threats of war make the shares of defence companies in the U.S. skyrocket.

The same goes for the big fossil fuel companies. The spectacular rise in gas and petroleum prices has increased their profits by 350 percent.

The third big winner is NATO.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the alliance’s raison d’être ceased to exist and under Trump the alliance was even declared brain dead. Today the military alliance is alive and well.

In Europe, two members are added and operational combat troops are increased from 40,000 to 300,000 troops. In Asia, as well as other continents, expansion is in the works, either through new partnerships[i] or by increasing existing military presence[ii].

Over the past quarter century, NATO has waged wars against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, resulting in nearly one million deaths[iii]. With a vibrant and expanded alliance, there will be many more military adventures.

Unmistakably the fourth winner is the US. Twenty-five years ago, Zbigniew Brzezinski, top advisor to several US presidents, wrote that for the US, control of the Eurasian continent was essential to maintaining hegemony[iv]. Close cooperation between Europe, Russia and China was to be avoided at all costs.

In his words:

“The three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”

Over the past decade, stronger economic relations between Europe, China and Russia have been growing. This war is reversing that trend. For example, Europe’s dependence on Russian gas is quickly being decreased, mainly in favour of gas from the US. The sanctions cut almost all other economic ties between Russia and Europe.

But with this war, China is also being targeted. Mike Pompeo, former director of the CIA and Secretary of State under Trump said it plainly:

“We must prevent the formation of a Pan-Eurasian colossus incorporating Russia, but led by China,” Pompeo implored.

“To do that, we have to strengthen NATO, and we see that nothing hinders Finland and Sweden’s entry into that organization”.

It is in this context that the recent speech by Liz Truss, Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, should be understood. She calls for an “economic NATO.” Such an economic bloc would largely cut off China and Russia from Western economies. This would make the integration of the Eurasian continent impossible, allowing the U.S. to continue exercising its hegemony.

The losers

First and foremost, the entire Ukrainian population has been severely affected by this invasion: thousands of dead and wounded civilians, tens of thousands of dead and wounded soldiers, as well as millions of fleeing citizens. Much of the country’s infrastructure has been destroyed, the harvest has been more than halved, and the country is heading for complete bankruptcy.

Due to martial law, democratic rights have been severely affected. Eleven political parties were banned and according to the UN

“journalists have been targeted, tortured, kidnapped, attacked and killed, or refused safe passage”.

Workers are suffering: zero hour contracts are being legalized and 70 percent of the labour force is exempt from workplace protections.

The Russian population suffers severely too. Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have lost their lives and a multitude have been wounded. The Russian people are suffering from Western sanctions and increased repression at home.

This war has already cost tens of thousands of lives in Ukraine, but this conflict can also destroy millions of lives far from the battlefield. Indeed, the war is particularly damaging to the global food system already seriously weakened by covid-19, climate change, and high energy prices.

Fortunately, an agreement has been reached to restart grain exports from Ukrainian ports. But that does not prevent food prices from rising[v] sharply in the meantime and therefore becoming unaffordable for an increasing number of people. According to the World Food Programme (WFP), a total of 50 million people in 45 countries are on the brink of famine and, according to the UN, this conflict could cause serious malnourishment to an additional 13 million people this year.

Another major loser is Europe and its population. According to Willy Claes, former Secretary General of NATO, this is essentially a war between the U.S. and Russia, where Europe is side-lined.[vi] Although the war is being waged on the European continent, it is not the European Union but US-controlled NATO that is setting the tone. The Europeans stand by and watch.

But it’s even worse, with the sanctions against Russia, Europe is simply shooting itself in the foot. Significant gas shortages are looming before winter. Not only will that cause a lot of misery, it also increases the likelihood of an economic recession.

It’s not just scarcity that is the problem. Gas prices have increased almost tenfold over last year. Along with skyrocketing inflation, this is also impoverishing large segments of the population. And meanwhile, Russia is seeing its treasury fill up and its rouble strengthen due to phenomenal gas prices.

Among a large proportion of non-Western countries, Europe has lost a lot of prestige because of this war. Those countries cannot understand how the Union is almost completely surrendering its sovereignty and dancing to the tones and war-mongering of the U.S. and Britain.

Another major loser is world stability. After the fall of the Soviet Union, we were temporarily stuck with a unipolar world, completely dominated by the US. With the rise of China and other emerging countries, we seemed to be moving toward a multipolar world.

That was a positive evolution, but spurred on by this war and the warmongering around it, it seems that we are now heading for a division of the world into two camps: a bloc dominated by the West against the rest of the world[vii]. It is highly questionable whether this will succeed, since only a quarter of the countries worldwide have been found willing to support sanctions against Russia.[viii] But it is a negative evolution to say the least.

Another victim of this armed conflict is the planet. In an armed conflict, the ecological damage is always enormous. With this war it is no different. Due to the heavy shelling, there will be significant effects on the urban and rural environment. As a result, Ukraine and the region around it may be burdened with a toxic legacy for generations to come, as shown by a preliminary study by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and partner organizations.

But this war also jeopardizes urgent action against global warming. One could have taken advantage of this conflict to accelerate the great energy transition. Nothing will come of this, quite on the contrary. New gas-fired power stations are being built and coal-fired power stations are even being restarted.[ix] Instead of achieving a reduction in CO2 emissions, we are unfortunately setting another record in carbon emissions.

The first casualty in any war is the truth. Never was this more visible than in this conflict. The mainstream media put forward NATO’s vision with near unanimity. Dissenting voices uttered by the peace movement or some academics were barely heard. As usual, the exceptions confirm the rule.

The way the mainstream media have bent over backwards to toe the line demanded by NATO and the US in recent months have at times been painful. Before the war, Ukraine was portrayed as “the most corrupt country” in Europe. Today, the country is the epitome of liberal ideals. Before the conflict, there was a problem with neo-Nazis. Afterwards, those groups were portrayed as heroes. And so on.

In peacetime, the mainstream media sometimes blunder. In wartime, they completely mess things up. It just goes to show why alternative media are so important.

Broad front needed

The longer the war drags on, the greater the losses for the Ukrainians, the Russians, the starving people in the South and the working people at home.

The more damaging also for the planet, world peace and reliable journalism.

A broad front is urgently needed between the peace movement, the third world, labour and environmental movements to stop this war madness.

*

 

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Translated by Dirk Nimmegeers

Marc Vandepitte is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[i] This is mainly the case in Asia with the so-called Quad (partnership between Australia, India, Japan and the US), AUKUS (security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the US) and the so-called ‘Five Eyes’ (cooperation based on intelligence between New Zealand, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom and USA.)

[ii] For example, there is talk of a new US military base in Zambia. Outside the European borders, NATO partners are: Colombia, Australia, Iraq, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Mongolia and Pakistan.

[iii] In Syria, NATO provided logistical support to extremist Muslim fighters with the aim of ousting President Assad from power. Today NATO is supporting Turkey which is occupying part of that country.

[iv] Brzezinski Z., The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, New York 1997, p. 40.

[v] Compared to a year ago, the price of grain has increased by 27.6 percent. The average food price rose by 23.1 percent. Source FAO (UN).

[vi] Willy Claes in De Afspraak, on Belgian TV, 24 May: “If I may put it a little boldly, it is about a confrontation now between Russia and America. With all due respect and sympathy for the Ukrainians, and by the way, Europe is not playing along”.

[vii] The G7 is trying to develop a competitor to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the New Silk Roads. As Putin travels through Africa, Macron is also rushing to the continent to secure or expand the Western sphere of influence. In Latin America, Biden is trying to counter the influence of China with his Build Back Better World initiative (B3W). And so on.

[viii] According to the Economist’s Intelligence Unit, two-thirds of the world’s population lives in neutral or pro-Russian countries regarding the war in Ukraine.

[ix] Germany, Austria and the Netherlands are restarting coal-fired power stations that have been shut down or are easing production restrictions.

Featured image is from South Front

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People love the digital revolution.  It allows them to work from home and avoid stressful commutes and office politics.  The young love their cell phones that connect them to the world. For writers the Internet offers, for now, a far larger audience than a syndicated columnist could obtain.  But while we enjoy and delight in its advantages, the tyranny inherent in the digital revolution is slowly closing its grip on our lives.

Use a gender pronoun or doubt an official narrative and you are blocked from social media.  The same corporations that are required by federal law to send us annual statements on how they protect our privacy also track our use of the Internet in order to build marketing profiles of us.  The FBI, CIA, and NSA track our use of the Internet to identify possible terrorists, school shooters, drug operations, and foreign agents.  Face identification cameras now exist on the streets of some cities.  DNA data bases are being built.  It goes on and on.

In China the digital revolution has made possible a social credit system.  People are monitored about what they say, what they read online, how they behave, where they go.  The profile that results determines the person’s rights or privileges.  A person who hangs out with the wrong crowd, criticizes the government, misbehaves, drives too fast, drinks too much, has a poor school or work attendance record might be denied a driving license, a passport, university admission, or could have access to bank account limited or blocked.

Digital money is the ultimate power of tyranny

In a system in which there is only government digital money, there is no way to pay a drug dealer or wages off the books, etc.  There is no cash form of digital money that can be put in our pocket and used for anonymous payment.  Advocates of digital money make much of its ability to close down crime and tax avoidance.  Digital money allows a block put on an alcoholic’s bank balance to prevent its use for the purchase of alcohol, and an overweight person’s food purchases could be controlled by how his digital money can be used.  These restraints put on individual choice are hyped as health measures.

But after all of this is said, the stark fact remains that the same power conveyed to authorities by digital money can be used to totally control the person.  Suppose you object to the evaporation of freedom, or expose a corruption, or challenge an official narrative.  The government can block your access to your account or block its use to pay for your housing or food, and bring you to your knees.

Once there is only government digital money, no one will be able to support websites such as this one or to organize a new political movement to challenge the ruling monopoly.  Protest movements become impossible.  Truckers and farmers would not be able to buy fuel for their vehicles. Once there is only central bank digital money, government can control all investment.  Freedom is impossible in a digital world.  You comply or you die.

You might say, yes all this is possible, but our commitment to freedom will prevent it.  There are two things wrong with this reply.  One is that our leaders are not committed to freedom (see this). The other is that it is already happening.

In a recent issue of The International Economy, Andreas Dombret and Oliver Wunsch make “The Case for Central Bank Digital Currencies.”  It is time to “go bold,” they say, and to get on with the job.

First understand that these two are operatives of the ruling elite. 

Dombret was a board member both of the Deutsche Bundesbank (Germany’s central bank) and the European Central Bank.  Wunsch was the International Monetary Fund’s mission chief to Greece and Cyprus and the IMF’s representative to the Bank for International Settlements and the Financial Stability Board.   

As you might not remember, or ever known, a few years back Greece and Cyprus were put through engineered financial crises. 

In Cyprus people were denied access to their bank accounts.  In Greece the story is that the government was bribed to take out loans that could not be serviced or repaid.  The European Central bank backed by the IMF demanded that Greece come up with the money by shifting money from education and health spending to loan service, by freeing up more government funds by laying off civil servants, and by selling off public assets such as Greece’s ports and municipal utilities to private foreign investors, and to turn its protected islands over to real estate developers. The Greek economy collapsed. Unemployment forced many Greeks to leave the country.  The London Times reported that so many women were forced into prostitution that the price fell to the cost of a cheese sandwich.

Greece lost her sovereignty and was placed under non-elected rule.  Now operatives associated with the pillage of Greece and the ruination of her women have been assigned the task of separating each one of us from the control of our own money.  The problem of cash is that it provides individuals with sovereignty.  People can have cash in their possession outside the banking system. They can make anonymous payments. If tyrannical government seizes their bank account, they can survive off book in the cash economy.  But when there is no cash, they lose economic sovereignty. 

Dombret and Wunsch do not approach the problem in this way as that would give their game away.  They stress the inconvenience of cash:

“For consumers, stocking the right amount of cash at the bank counter or the ATM and playing physically at the baker or the butcher shop is not convenient.” 

Of course, most people no longer pay with cash.  They write checks and use credit cards that pay them back part of the fees charged the merchant or give them airline miles as Delta’s American Express card does.  But the fact remains that they can still build a cash reserve to protect their independence.  Once cash is gone, so is independence. 

Digital currency already exists in Bitcoin and its rivals.  But these cryptocurrencies are private and do not provide the control opportunities.  Dombret and Wunsch write that “one must be skeptical of private sector initiatives” in digital money, because private interests “might conflict with the public good.” In other words, Dombret and Wunsch associate “the public good” with monopoly all powerful government that is the goal of the World Economic Forum.

Central Bank Digital Currency does not yet exist.  Nevertheless, Dombret and Wunsch have created it as a concept in being by giving it a name: CBDC.  Once named, it can now appear. They push its appearance  by stressing that “the availability of a monetary instrument that does not fully rely on private sector infrastructure is an important public good.”  In other words, their position is that of the World Economic Forum, that a system controlled by a government of the elite is the model for the New World Order. 

We peons should just accept the convenience of digital money and give up our control over our own affairs. 

My conclusion is that any people stupid enough to trust government with central bank digital currency deserves to be the slaves that they will be.

William Engdahl tells us that the move by the Federal Reserve and other central banks from Quantitative Easing to Quantitative Tightening will unleash a tsunami of wealth destruction and that the fear the wealth wipeout will cause will be used to usher us into a world in which there is only central bank digital money.  Without any doubt this means the end of freedom and liberty.  Tyranny will suppress all independence of thought, expression, and action.

“This time, as insiders like ex-Bank of England head Mark Carney noted three years ago, the crisis will be used to force the world to accept a new Central Bank Digital Currency, a world where all money will be centrally issued and controlled. This is also what Davos WEF people mean by their Great Reset. It will not be good. A Global Planned Financial Tsunami Has Just Begun.” — F. William Engdahl

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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朝鮮半島の光と影

August 10th, 2022 by Emanuel Pastreich

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***

原文

The Light and Shadows of the Korean Peninsula

By Emanuel Pastreich, July 28, 2022

 

 

朝鮮半島の衛星写真を見ると北朝鮮の夜は暗い。一方、日本や韓国の夜は人工光で明るく照らされている。アメリカの多くの専門家らはこの様な違いについて、北朝鮮が開発途上国であるからだと主張する。これは即ち、北朝鮮の偏っていて抑圧的で、哀れむほど立ち遅れた体制の結果だと言うのである。明らかな点は、明るく照らされた韓国は発展、先端技術、民主主義そして自由市場のモデルであるということです。韓国は発展と民主主義の光を得たところであり、北朝鮮は独裁や無知の暗闇に満ちたところという説明は、朝鮮半島の衛星写真を見る世界の人々の頭の中に自然と吸収され、美的にも完璧な写真であるかのように記録されている。

朝鮮半島の衛星写真に関するこの様な態度は、韓国の政治家や学者、言論人の間でも革新と保守に関わらず大きな差は無いように感じる。韓国の革新派の政治家たちは、北朝鮮との協力を通して開城工業団地のようなプロジェクトに対し更なる投資を行い、北朝鮮の住民たちに雇用の機会を提供するべきだと主張している。また、韓国は北朝鮮の安価な労働力と豊富な天然資源などで利益を得るべきだと主張している。更に、韓国の保守派は、北朝鮮は独裁国家であり韓国を武力によって脅かしている為、信頼できないと主張している。彼らは、北朝鮮がまず国際社会に完全に門戸を開放し、全ての核施設に対する完全な査察を受け入れるべきだと言う。

韓国の革新派と保守派の想定は根本的に違わない。両者とも、韓国は更に発展を遂げ、その増え続ける国内総生産(GDP)の恩恵を北朝鮮も享受しながら、自動車に乗り、テレビやスマートフォンを持ち、広い家に住んで世界的にヒットしたK-popを制作するべきだとしている。現在のように閉鎖的で抑圧的な北朝鮮の政府が理想モデルだと主張していることには呆れるが、それと同時に北朝鮮が韓国のように変わるべきだという主張に対して、私は安易に同意することは出来ない。何故なら私は12年間、韓国に住みながら韓国の深刻な問題を目撃してきた為だ。

高い自殺率、汚染された空気、学校での容赦ない競争、若者たちが感じる疎外感、輸入食品や輸入燃料への過度な依存、そしておびただしい数の貧困高齢者のような問題は、韓国全域に深い影を落としている。これは、朝鮮半島の衛星写真では写すことの出来なかった韓国の姿である。

韓国と北朝鮮について話す時、朝鮮半島を人工衛星のように高い所からではなく底辺から徹底して観る必要がある。私は北朝鮮を訪問したことのある多くの韓国人から平壌で暮らす市民の姿を見た時の印象を聞いた。平壌の小さな野菜市場やホテルの素朴な造りを見た韓国の人々は、そこから飾り気の無さを感じ、韓国では既に消えてしまった何か大切なものがそこには残っていると感じたという。北朝鮮の女性たちは、韓国のような贅沢は出来なくても、化粧をしたり、消費競争のプレッシャーを感じているようには見えなかったと言う。平壌ではブランド衣類への需要が無い。携帯電話中毒の青少年たち、必要もないものを見せつけて買わせる多くの広告も平壌には無い。その代わり北朝鮮には1960年から70年代まで韓国に存在した韓国社会の様々な文化、例えば人と人の絆の様なものが残っているように思えた。

北朝鮮について議論する時、韓国のメディアや専門家らが見逃している重大な問題が更にある。メディアでいわゆる「専門家」によって行われている北朝鮮関連の全ての議論は、経済成長、国内総生産(GDP)、生活水準、生産など、基本的に消費関連の問題について言及している。この様な基準で見ると北朝鮮は、先進国、特に韓国と比べると非常に立ち遅れている。つまり韓国は北朝鮮が「現代の先進国」になる方法を教える兄になれると言う事を意味する。しかし、この様な全ての用語は本質的にイデオロギー的で主観的である。韓国でのこの様な思い込みは、資源を浪費することが肯定的で積極的に奨励されるべきだという考えに基づいている。また更に、大きくて必要以上に暖房が効いている家に住み、自動車やスマートフォンを所有することが発展だとしている。

しかしこの思い込みの根幹となる科学的な根拠は全くない。それらは月に祈れば雨が降る、またはヒルを使って血を吸えば重い病が治ると言うことくらい空虚な話である。

実際に研究結果を見ると、消費に焦点を合わせた行動パターンは深い疎外感や自殺率、薬物乱用の増加を含む社会全般に渡る深刻で破壊的な影響を及ぼすとされている。即ち北朝鮮が進むべき方向と韓国が成功を収めたことに対する仮説は、イデオロギーや根拠のないものや近代的な神話に基づいている。それに伴う結果として韓国の人々は、そのような仮説によって挫折感や過度なストレスを感じているにも関わらず、自分たちが成功したと確信している。

朝鮮半島の夜を写した衛星写真は、実際には朝鮮半島の光と影が完全に伏せられた状態の全く異なる別の姿を説明している。イデオロギーに支配された感情を無くし、客観的で科学的な分析を重視する専門家らの間では、人類が地球温暖化(気候変動)により前例のない危機に直面していると警鐘を鳴らす。現在の地球温暖化の速度を踏まえると、地球の生命体の滅亡を避けられないと言う意見が根強い。

気候変動による災いやその結果によって既に一部では滅亡が始まっていると言う多くの報告書や書籍が出ており、それは朝鮮半島も例外ではない。現在、ソウルでは12月まで蚊が生存し、また1月には花が咲いているのを我々は目の当たりにしている。この様な現象は急速に進んでおり、今後、韓(朝鮮)民族の生活を脅かしかねない。

気候変動がこの様な速度で進んでいるのを放置する場合、魚介類が滅亡するほど朝鮮半島の沖合の海水温度が上がり酸性化し、砂漠が拡大するだろう。輸入食品と化石燃料製品の輸出依存度が高い韓国は、絶望的な状況に陥るだろう。

それでは、統一朝鮮半島はどのような選択をするべきだろうか。答えは明確である。エネルギー消費や節約面において北朝鮮に定着している方法を模索する必要がある。

人類は数万年の間、夜は暗くなくてはならず、エネルギー消費を減らす生活方法を維持してきた。その様な方法に基づきマンションなど建物の不必要な照明は無くし、ネオンサインのような商業用の建物の電気掲示板を使用せず、内部の暖房を大きく減らす一方、高い天井やコンクリート、ガラスや鋼鉄、外観などの建物の無駄なデザインを中断すべきである。それを通じて長い間、韓国歴史で維持されてきた質素でシンプルな伝統に戻らなければならない。

韓国の夜は、もっと暗くなるべきだ。韓国の都市を照らすためには政府の補助金が支給されている化石燃料の使用が大きな役割を果している。これは、恐ろしい大気汚染や過渡の燃料輸入費用を発生させる一方、私たちの子どもたちの未来を脅かす地球温暖化を進めるなど、莫大な費用が掛かると言う事を認識しなければならない。

しかし、より深くて隠された秘密がある。これまで韓国は多くの「開発途上国」とは違い、近代化と発展を成し遂げ特別だと認められるためには、更なる消費を通じて成長し続け発展しなければならないという神話に洗脳されてきた。そのため、数代にわたって近代化が最優先順位として考えられてきた。しかし、化石燃料を消費し天然資源を浪費することが、生態系を破壊し子どもたちを苦しめているとしたら、その近代化というのは一体何であろうか。

北朝鮮には、かなり深刻な多くの課題があるが、気候変動に対処する解決策と言う面で見る時、韓国は北朝鮮の「低い消費」をベンチマーキングする必要がある。私の話が可笑しく、途方もない話にすら聞こえるかもしれない。

しかし気候変動によって滅亡の危機に晒されるとしたら、この様な経済成長の数値に何の意味があると言うのだろう。韓国で夜通し灯を灯す多くの電灯は、発展を象徴するのではなく我々の子どもたちが将来使うべき電力を奪う犯罪であり、闇に満ちた偽善的な光に他ならない。韓国政府は、化石燃料の補助金支給を直ちに中断すべきである。

考えてみよう。今より少し暗い夜を過ごしながら家族や友人たちと会話を楽しんだり、読書したり、手紙やエッセイを書いて森を歩いたりしながら過ごすことは出来ないのだろうか。日常生活の中で演劇や音楽公演をしながら無限に広がる深い意味を見出し、スピリチュアルな経験をすることも出来る。スマートフォンのジャングルとスターバックスという檻で使用するプラスチック製のコップを無くすことが出来るならば、韓国の市民は遥かに豊かな生活を発見することが出来るはずだ。その様な生活の在り方に関するヒントは、もしかすると反対に北朝鮮の暗闇の夜景社会から見出すことが出来るかもしれない。

統一朝鮮半島の未来について考える時、近代的で発展したものだけが最高だという危険な考えから打破する必要がある。我々は、人になるという事が何を意味するのか自問するべきである。どのように意味があり充実した生活を送りながら社会に貢献することが出来るだろうか。

私は北朝鮮の住民が今より自由に生活し、今より栄養のある食べ物が食べられることを願っている。

しかし、一時、市民たちに経済的な独立性を享受させた家族経営の店を潰しながら支配してきた韓国式コンビニでは、消費主義が染み付いた食べ物ばかりを供給するだろう。未来の子どもたちが享受すべき豊かさから奪い去ったものを消費して暮らすことが統一朝鮮半島の理想的な食卓の風景だと言えるのだろうか。

それと同時に私は、韓国の人々が分別なく消費するよう束縛し(世界中のほとんどの国家とは反対に)石炭の消費を増やすよう強調してきた見えない鎖から解放されることによって、終わりなき競争を強制する残酷な文化によって友人や家族から疎外感を強く感じる現象が無くなることを願っている。

自由は、政治体制だけに留まった用語であってはならない。スマートフォンを所有するという自由を得た代わりに、スマートフォンなしに暮らせない物質の奴隷の様に転落したのが韓国人だ。韓国の市民たちが北朝鮮の人たちと比べて自由だと誰が言えるだろうか。

統一に向かう動きは、韓国と北朝鮮の全ての人々の自由に関するものでなければならない。北朝鮮の人々だけが質的な生活の自由を享受する資格があるとするならば、それはなんて不公平な事なのだろうか。

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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.

Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Seoul, South Korea, as seen from Namsan Mountain. strogoscope / Flickr

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Early last week, President Joe Biden announced that the United States had killed al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul, Afghanistan. The news initially sparked widespread media attention, but in the end it came and went with relatively little fanfare, especially for the death of a long-time American enemy with a $25 million bounty on his head.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the announcement (and the discourse that followed) was what was left unsaid. Despite the fact that Biden ran for president in part on restoring the “rules-based international order,” he made no effort to justify the attack under international law, and most news coverage has failed to even touch on the issue.

On the surface, the strike left relatively little to complain about. It was remarkably precise, killing only Zawahiri, and, for many analysts, it proved that America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan would not hinder its ability to conduct precise counter terror missions.

But experts say the killing lacks legal justification and shows that Biden has bought into one of the most pernicious ideas driving the past two decades of U.S. policy: Washington can and should use force wherever it sees fit, even if that means twisting international law beyond recognition. This is in many ways the underlying logic for America’s globe-spanning military presence, according to experts who spoke with Responsible Statecraft. Worse, it erodes international law, allowing other states to justify all sorts of questionable actions outside their borders.

As Russia’s illegal war on Ukraine enters its sixth month, international law has seldom been more important, according to Craig Martin, a professor at Washburn University.

“We say it’s an act of aggression. We allege that they’re committing war crimes. We’re up in arms,” Martin said. “But you can’t argue that Russia is somehow in violation of this international law — and that they should be held accountable for it — if you yourself are not willing to comply with that international law.”

Neither the White House nor the Pentagon responded to questions from Responsible Statecraft about their legal justification for the strike. In fact, U.S. officials have not yet offered a public justification for the attack. On the domestic front, the administration could point to the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force against al-Qaida, which provides a strong case under U.S. law.

The logic is less clear-cut when it comes to international law. Legal scholars who spoke to Responsible Statecraft say that Biden’s team would likely argue that it was an act of self defense and that America had the right to violate Afghanistan’s sovereignty because the Taliban is “unwilling or unable” to help stop the threat posed by Zawahiri. (Secretary of State Antony Blinken may have alluded to this idea in his speech after the strike in which he pointed to the “Taliban’s unwillingness or inability to abide by their commitments.”) Charles Dunlap, a Duke law professor who previously served as an attorney for the Air Force, argued in a blog post that this is enough to justify the strike under international law.

“Such facts seem sufficient, even in the absence of evidence about a specific forthcoming attack, to find that al-Zawahiri represented a threat that met the criteria for the application of anticipatory self-defense,” Dunlap wrote. “[T]he presence of al-Zawahiri living openly in Kabul showed that the Taliban was ‘unwilling or unable’ to address the threat he posed to the ‘security of other countries.’”

In Lawfare, national security law expert Robert Chesney noted that this concept has long held sway among U.S. officials, adding that “[t]here’s little doubt that the ‘unwilling’ condition applies here.”

But much of the international legal community is skeptical of this theory, with only a few countries accepting it as plausible. As legal expert Adil Haque told Responsible Statecraft, it also relies on the questionable assumption that America and al-Qaida are still at war.

“Anytime armed hostilities between the state and a non-state actor fall below a certain minimum threshold of intensity, the armed conflict temporarily pauses and the law of armed conflict no longer applies,” argues Haque, who teaches law at Rutgers University. “There’s a very plausible argument that that’s where the United States and al-Qaida have been for some time, while Al Qaeda really has not been carrying out attacks against U.S. targets on a kind of regular basis.”

And Haque is not alone in this assessment. As Martin noted, the United Nations Security Council recently reported that, while terror groups still create major issues in conflict-ridden countries, al-Qaida “is not viewed as posing an immediate international threat from its safe haven in Afghanistan.”

Questions left unanswered

Zawahiri’s death falls under the category of “targeted killing,” a somewhat euphemistic term that the military insists is different from assassination. Prior to 9/11, Israel was the only country that frequently engaged in the practice, which American leaders opposed. But the Global War on Terror changed the calculus in Washington, and the U.S. military adopted the tactic starting in 2002.

The practice is controversial for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that attacks are rarely as “targeted” as last week’s was. In one previous attempt to take out Zawahiri, the U.S. military killed at least 18 Pakistani civilians. (A second strike that may have targeted the al-Qaida leader killed as many as 80 civilians, many of whom were children.) And this level of “collateral damage” is more common than people like to think. Take the case of Qasim Al-Raymi: The United States took out the former leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula in 2020 after killing 66 people, including 31 children, in two prior attempts.

For international legal scholars, this type of attack is complicated. Though it can be legal under certain circumstances, most experts say the state carrying out the strike has to prove that it is at war with the group and that the person targeted poses an imminent threat to its security. In other words, it’s not enough to be a member of al-Qaida in order to be killed; the target has to be engaged in planning or carrying out actual attacks. And when it comes to the 71-year-old Zawahiri, this was far from clear.

Furthermore, the CIA — not the military — carried out the strike on Zawahiri, according to U.S. officials. While Washington has long blurred the line between the CIA and the Pentagon, legal experts contend that intelligence officials cannot legally engage in war under any circumstances given that they’re not uniformed combatants.

“They don’t get to kill people in war, at least not with immunity,” said Martin, noting that domestic Afghan law would likely apply in this case.

Perhaps of greater concern is the question of sovereignty, the bedrock of international law. Notably, the United States is no longer at war in Afghanistan with the permission of the Afghan government, and it has made no indication that the Taliban gave an authorization for the strike. In such a case, Washington generally relies on the previously mentioned “​​unwilling or unable” theory. But Martin contends that this would require U.S. officials to actually seek permission from the Taliban, which seems not to have happened in this case. (The White House did not respond when asked if the U.S. spoke to Afghan officials prior to the strike.)

Policymakers might argue that this is unnecessary given that, by harboring terrorists, the Taliban has violated its 2020 accord with the United States. But that assertion is hard to scrutinize given that the pact has still not been made public.

And all of this relies on another dubious assumption: Namely, that the “battlefield” for war with al-Qaida includes anywhere a member of the group can be found — including an apartment in a crowded city where the United States is not at war.

“If the United States had fired a drone through a street in Paris to kill Zawahiri, there would be a much different conversation, right?” Martin asked. “You would intuitively say ‘no, surely the battlefield is not in France.’ But that is one of the implications of this idea that there’s this global armed conflict with which the battlefield is defined by wherever al-Qaida members happen to go.”

As with domestic law, the international system loses legitimacy and effectiveness when powerful players bend the rule of law to their whim. Other countries have already used America’s arguments to justify questionable attacks, including Turkey, which has targeted Kurdish leaders in Iraq and Syria. (“Turkey is essentially using the same legal rationale,” said Haque. “It’s very difficult to distinguish the two cases.”) And this will only get worse if Washington continues to flout international law at will, according to Samuel Moyn, a professor at Yale University and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute.

“In general, the United States has treated the law of self defense as always permissive for whatever it wants to do,” argued Moyn. “And so why wouldn’t other states follow suit?”

Fortunately, it’s not too late for Washington to change its tune. With the threat from al-Qaida at an ebb, officials could start approaching counter terror as a question of law enforcement rather than war and encourage other states to do the same. But, in order to move on from two decades of hollowing out international law, the U.S. foreign policy community will need to get back to a question that has never been properly addressed since 9/11.

“Is it really true that this kind of illegal act is the only way of dealing with the threat?” asked Moyn. “If you say no, then your incentive is to figure out what a better regime looks like.”

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Featured image: The U.S. used a Hellfire R9X missile, like the one shown above, to kill al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri on the balcony of a safehouse in Kabul on July 31, 2022. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Nick Scott/Released via ABACAPRESS.COM

Pre-Emptive Murder

August 10th, 2022 by Craig Murray

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The lives of the latest fifteen Palestinian children to be murdered by Israel in Gaza, lives ripped from their small, terrified bodies with devastating violence, do not seem of much concern to the powerful in the West, or indeed anywhere.

The BBC repeated without question Israel’s claim that its latest launch of high explosive at the Gaza concentration camp was to prevent a terrorist attack on Israeli civilians – of which prospective attack no evidence has been produced. No western media has asked for any. Nor has it been explained why the attack would be stopped by Israel obliterating the alleged leader in Gaza of Islamic Jihad, and many innocents who chanced to be in his vicinity.

The scenarios in which the assassination of a leader prevent an attack which is in train are Hollywood.

The brave Daniel Hale sits in solitary confinement (euphemistically called a “Communications Management Unit) for blowing the whistle on the US drone assassination programme in Afghanistan. Hale, a drone operative, revealed that 90% of people killed by the drone assassination programme in Afghanistan were not the designated target, but that by default everybody killed by a drone strike was labeled an enemy combatant unless positive proof to the contrary were provided (which of course no effort was made to collect).

The extra-judicial execution of “Bad guys” with no legal process is not only carried out by Israel. The USA and the UK do it all the time, across the conflicts created by their own neo-imperial adventures and lust for hydrocarbons.

Nobody can tell you how many children have been killed by drone strikes or “targeted” missiles and bombings in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Yemen or Libya.

The total across those countries is undoubtedly tens of thousands of dead children. We, however, are apparently the good guys. All those children have been killed in our self-defence, just like Israel killed those children in Gaza. I do hope that helps you sleep more soundly.

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Featured image is from IMEMC

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General Wayne Eyre, Canada’s chief of the defence staff, refused to confirm or deny whether the country has troops deployed on the ground in Ukraine.

After Global News reported that “sources” say special operations members of the Canadian Armed Forces have been deployed on the ground to help train Ukrainians in their fight against Russia, Eyre told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that the military is “never going to talk about discreet or sensitive special operations or confirm or deny them.”

Calling the Global News report and other similar reports “disappointing,” Eyre stated, “If it was true, it would put our troops at risk,” and then questioned why “anyone” would “deliberately want to put Canadian troops at risk?”

Pressed about whether Canadians have the right to know if their own military has deployed soldiers on the ground or if Canadians would be made aware of such a development before its occurrence, Eyre stated,

“Every situation is going to be different” and one has to “balance transparency with operational security and try to find that sweet spot in the middle.”

The development that Canada may have troops on the ground comes shortly after Defence Minister Anita Anand announced the CAF is soon going to be sending members to the United Kingdom as part of a larger plan to train Ukrainians.

Asked by Global News whether the report that Canadians were actively engaged in an operation on Ukrainian soil was true, Anand also declined to comment, saying it would be “imprudent” for her to “provide that information.”

Despite the massive coverage given by the mainstream media with respect to the Russia-Ukraine crisis, many remain skeptical of whether news outlets are being transparent about the cause of the war and why Western governments are so eager to aid Ukraine.

This became particularly true after it was revealed that U.S. President Joe Biden and his son Hunter have deep ties to Ukraine, that America was funding biolabs in Ukraine, and that both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have ties to globalist organizations.

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Featured image: Canadian Army General Wayne Eyre (Source: Shutterstock)

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Israel and the Palestinian armed group Islamic Jihad declared a truce late Sunday after three days of heavy Israeli bombardment on the besieged Gaza Strip.

According to the latest official information from the Palestinian health ministry, 44 Palestinians, including 16 children, were killed and at least 350 civilians wounded.

Since 2008, Israel has waged four wars on the Palestinian territory, killing nearly 4,000 people – one-quarter of them children.

According to data compiled by Defense for Children International, at least 2,200 children have been killed by the Israeli military and Israeli settlers across the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 2000 – the beginning of the second intifada.

Here are the names and faces of the 16 children aged 18 and under killed by Israeli air strikes over the past three days:

Interactive_Gaza_ChildrenKilled_Aug9_WITH HANEEN_2022-01

Source: Al Jazeera

Click here to read the full article.

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Featured image: Smoke rises after Israeli airstrikes on Gaza City, the Gaza Strip, Palestine, Wednesday, May 12, 2021. (Nick_ Raille_07 / Shutterstock.com).

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Major General Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy head of the Kyiv regime’s military intelligence directorate, admitted in an interview with the British daily Telegraph, that the U.S. government is involved in targeting decisions regarding U.S. supplied Lockheed Martin’s High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS).

Moscow has seized on this admission to charge the U.S. with direct involvement in the Ukraine War.

Asked by the Telegraph how the HIMARS have so precisely targeted Russian fuel and ammunition depots (at least this is what the Kyiv regime has alleged—ed.), as well as battlefield headquarters in eastern Ukraine, General Skibitsky replied, “in this case in particular, we use real-time information.”

U.S. officials are not providing direct targeting information, Skibitsky claimed, because it would potentially undermine their case for not being direct participants in the war.

However, he suggested that there was a level of consultation between intelligence officials of both countries prior to launching missiles that would allow Washington to stop any potential attacks if they were unhappy with the intended target.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov made a video statement saying that Skibitsky’s admission “undeniably proves that Washington, contrary to White House and Pentagon claims, is directly involved in the conflict in Ukraine.”

“It is [the] Biden administration that is directly responsible for all Kyiv-approved rocket attacks on residential areas and civilian infrastructure in populated areas of Donbas and other regions, which have resulted in mass deaths of civilians,” Konashenkov said. “No one else in Ukraine or in the world should have any doubts that HIMARS strikes on Novaya Kakhovka on July 12, on Stakhanov on July 17, on Krasniy Luch on July 24, dozens of strikes on Donetsk, and, of course, the July 29 strike on the detention facility in Elenovka, which killed 50 and injured 73 Ukrainian POWs, were planned by [the] Zelensky regime and approved by Washington.”

“Political, criminal and moral responsibility for the Elenovka massacre and other war crimes in Ukraine, along with Zelensky, lies directly with [the] Biden administration,” he concluded.

U.S. officials denied that HIMARS rockets—having a 70-kilometer range—were used specifically to destroy the detention facility at Elenovka in Donetsk, though television crews that visited the site found rocket motor parts fit to HIMARS missiles.

On July 28, the Russians released the video of an Azov soldier, Dmytro Kozatsky, who accused Zelensky’s adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych, of ordering the creation of shock videos showing Azov Battalion members torturing and murdering Russians POWs in order to deter other Russians from fighting against Ukraine.[1]

According to Moon of Alabama, a political blogger, Kozatsky’s statement was enough to put Arestovych in jail for a very long time. Arestovych allegedly responded by sending the HIMARS missiles to kill the prisoners in Elenovka who were talking to the Russians and making accusations against him.

Amnesty Documents Ukrainian War Crimes

If indeed Ukraine, and the U.S., was responsible for the Elenovka prison bombing, it would fit a pattern of war crimes documented in a new report by Amnesty International.

The report concluded that Ukraine repeatedly violated the laws of war in the Kharkiv, Donbas and Mykolaiv regions; the Kyiv regime has “put civilians in harms way by establishing bases and operating weapons systems in populated residential areas, including in schools and hospitals.”

According to Amnesty’s researchers, viable alternatives were available to the Ukrainian forces that would not endanger civilians by inviting retaliatory strikes on them, such as military bases or densely wooded areas nearby. Even worse, when the Ukrainian army occupied civilian buildings, they did not ask residents to evacuate or assist in that evacuation.

$8.7 Billion in Military Assistance

On August 1, the Biden administration authrized another $550 million in arms and equipment from the Pentagon to Ukraine, bringing the overall total of military assistance to a whopping $8.7 billion.

The latest aid package includes more ammunition for the HIMARS and 155mm artillery systems, which on August 4 were used by the Ukrainian army in the bombing of a funeral ceremony for a Russian Colonel near Donetsk city center (a 12-year-old child was among those killed).

In late June, The New York Times reported on a secret U.S. operation involving U.S. commandos and spies who coordinate weapons deliveries and provide intelligence and training to Ukrainian special forces, largely at U.S. bases in Germany and Poland.

The Times further reported that “some CIA personnel have continued to operate in the country secretly, mostly in the capital, Kyiv, directing much of the vast amounts of intelligence the United States is sharing with Ukrainian forces, according to current and former officials. At the same time, a few dozen commandos from other NATO countries, including Britain, France, Canada and Lithuania, also have been working inside Ukraine.”

On a street in Bakhmut, a town in the hotly contested Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, The Times reporter observed a group of Ukrainian special forces that had American flag patches on their gear and were equipped with Belgian and American assault rifles.

These revelations all give further weight to Russian assertions about extensive U.S. involvement in a war that is quickly turning into another Vietnam-type quagmire.

Imperial Messenger Raises Alarm Bells

No less an establishment voice than New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman—who earned the nickname “the imperial messenger” for his long ideological support for U.S. imperialism—has raised alarm bells about U.S. policy in Ukraine.

In an August 1 column criticizing Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, Friedman wrote that

“the Ukraine war is not over. And privately, U.S. officials are a lot more concerned about Ukraine’s leadership than they are letting on. There is deep mistrust between the White House and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine—considerably more than has been reported.

“And there is funny business going on in Kyiv. On July 17, Zelensky fired his country’s prosecutor general and the leader of its domestic intelligence agency—the most significant shake-up in his government since the Russian invasion in February. It would be the equivalent of Biden firing Merrick Garland and Bill Burns on the same day. But I have still not seen any reporting that convincingly explains what that was all about.

“It is as if we don’t want to look too closely under the hood in Kyiv for fear of what corruption or antics we might see, when we have invested so much there.”

These comments are especially significant because of their source.

They indicate that the mythic narrative about Zelensky and illusions sustaining public support for the war are no longer believed at elite levels and have been shown to be fraudulent.

*

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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: [email protected].

Note

1. A similar tactic was used in the 1940s by Ukrainian Nazi collaborators of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).

Featured image is from Al Mayadeen English

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***

Legend has it, that when things go wrong and everybody is hoping for better times, they first have to get worse, before a new era of peace and harmony may emerge.

We may now be at these crossroads. The Beast is Rising. But its Fall is in sight.

We have to understand, the Beast is Big. It’s Huge. It’s so extraordinarily big, humanity has never faced something like it in recorded history.

So, we better be properly prepared.

Imagine, a small handkerchief or a pocket-square (a tiny decorative lapel accessory) is sitting on a huge quintuple king-size bedsheet, aiming at controlling the bedsheet. That’s the globalist Cult Elite, aiming at converting the world population into a One World Order (OWO). It will not happen.

It’s an image so absurd that could have only emerged form a megalomaniac – which is what the WEF and its Master, Klaus Schwab, and his behind the scene money masters are.

No matter, how powerful they think they are, tyrannizing the world at large into their slaves, We, the People, will make sure it will not happen. Fissures in the OWO ranks are already clearly visible.

The new motto is bye-bye OWO-Globalism and welcome to the new multipolar world.

Actually, a world that is gradually becoming an east-west polarization, with a west that is ever faster decaying in more ways than one – monetary-wise, in term of political ethics, as well as faltering support from western and hitherto western-leaning governments and, at least, by two thirds of western people, who vehemently oppose their governments.

Mind you, we are not quite there yet – at the point of western collapse.

However, the crack in the wall, where the light shines through [paraphrasing a famous Leonard Cohen song] gives enormous hope for the light to prevail.

The Big Picture – what is it?

The Big Picture has three major branches, three major objectives of the Beast to fulfill. Imagine the Beast as a multiple-tentacled Monster-Octopus. Listed not necessarily in order of priority, but rather as a simultaneous bulldozing approach, they include:

i) Massive depopulation, genocide, worldwide; an eugenist agenda on which the Gates and Rockefellers et al, have worked already for decades, and already their predecessor generations were obsessed with eugenics. Less people, less “useless eaters” – and consumers of scarce, unrenewable resources. So bluntly presents it Yuval Noah Hariri, Israeli “intellectual” and close adviser to Klaus Schwab, the WEF’s eternal CEO;

ii) Shifting assets from the lower and middle echelons to the top – the elite, billionaires, individuals, as well as corporate finance, such as BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street; others may include Fidelity, City Bank, Bank of America and many more.

The first three alone are interlinked as shareholders and can act as one, controlling an estimated 25 trillion dollars, worldwide, giving them a leverage power of way above US$ 100 trillion (compared to the world’s GDP of about US$ 90 trillion), thereby having virtual control over every country on the globe, and

iii) Digitization of everything, connecting everything with everything, eventually with the mega-powerful ultra-shortwaves 5G and soon to come 6G. Through these electromagnetic waves, they may access our brains. It’s Klaus Schwab’s pipedream. It includes digital worldwide unform vaxx-passes, managed through the infamous QR-code, or similar, with practically illimited info-storage capacity.

Currently it has a potential of storing more than 30,000 pieces of information about each one of us. Those who manage the QR-code, know you better than you know yourself. It is an updated version of Bill Gates’ Agenda ID2020.

Digitization may, as a first step, include an under-the-skin chip on every surviving citizen – currently being volunteer-practiced in some Nordic countries, like Sweden and Denmark, storing and monitoring every piece of info about you, incl. health records, bank accounts, with whom you talk, where you travel, where and what you shop — and-and-and – you got the picture.

Later, it will likely just be an electronic fingerprint in the form or capacity of a QR-code or its successor, that is engrained in our bodies through an electromagnetic field which is being injected into our bloodstream – graphene oxide, for example – under the pretext of covid vaxxes, or eventually any vaxxes invented and forced upon the population.

The next one may be the “new” flu-vaxx – already announced as a novelty, practically untested, but ready for the fall season. Be aware and beware!

Digital money, already largely dominating the Global North, will become the norm by the end of Agenda 2030, or sooner – if WE, the People, do not stop it. – And yes, we can. Digital money would make us to digital slaves; digital money could be blocked at will by the Cult Cabal, or outright stolen, depending on our behavior.

No worries, according to Klaus Schwab, we eventually will own nothing but will be happy – that’s the paraphrased ending of the Great Reset. Our mind will no longer think independently, but 5G and the graphene oxide injected by the covid and other vaxxes still to come, will make from humans so-called “transhumans” (expression used by Klaus Schwab in an interview in 2016 with the Swiss French TV), basically useless and dispensable slaves, since robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have taken over human roles.

These goals are all addressed in one way or another in the WEF’s Great Reset. It may be worth your while to have a glance at it. Most libraries contacted, answered with a smile, they don’t carry the book; they’d rather not associate with this monster plan.

Here is the Amazon link for The Great Reset.

The globalist agenda is gradually disintegrating. See this on the anti-globalist trend of the WEF in Davos, May 2022.

Yet, the globalists keep fighting on. A hopeless game. But they may be able to extend their globalist drive for a while, with perpetual lies, untold riches of immorally and largely illegally acquired financial wealth, possibly bringing about millions of victims – and, God forbit – leading into WWIII, potentially meaning a hard-core nuclear war.

The Beast is still on the rise. That does not mean it is winning.

Many of us may not notice. It is discrete, but deadly. In all its discretion, it keeps announcing what it is planning, what is in store for humanity. The Cult, the Luciferian Cult, to which the Beast likely belongs, in order to succeed, has to announce its action well in advance. Lest they, the Cult, may not prosper.

The Cult’s Warnings

The Cult has repeatedly warned us throughout the last at least 50 years. It has always told us well-in-advance wat they and their minions were planning. And this with increasing intensity in the last two to three decades. Just a few examples. Most of us have conveniently ignored their warnings.

The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio – official name United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 3-14 June 1992. It was based on the Club of Rome’s (in)famous 1971 publication “Limits to Growth, A Simulation Model of World Population, Environment and Economics”. The model predicted a looming environmental disaster in the coming 50 to 100 years, i.e., beginning just about now.

The Club of Rome, alias the Earth Summit, gave the impetus for what is today known as the Global Warming cum Climate Change Agenda – with its commercial side-kick, the New Green Deal.

You must know, the Club of Rome was not a European invention, as the name may have you believe. It was a Rockefeller initiative.

9/11 was the deadly, violent event to announce a new era – an era of increasing to total control, depriving personal liberties, restrictions with often denigrating and embarrassing airport security checks. A few weeks after the well-organized horrendous 9/11-devastation, the Patriot Act was passed through Congress. It had been prepared way before 9/11. It deprives US citizens of nearly 90% of their human and citizen rights.

Similar emergency type laws were passed with ease in Europe and other so-called “western countries”, referring to countries following the US political and monetary doctrine. Most of the Global North, or the West (also including, Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand), currently lives under some kind of an “emergency legislation”, largely circumventing their Parliaments for matters that deal with the Great Reset Agenda.

Most of their populations have no clue that their Parliaments have been partially disabled.

The 2010 Rockefeller Report depicts the contents of the UN Agenda 2030 in four Chapters. The first one describes the Lockstep scenario. Pretty much what the world, the 193 UN member countries, went through after the worldwide declared lockdown for the covid-19 plandemic. In lockstep, every government followed the same human rights destroying stern rules, instilled and coerced by fear, dictated by WHO. See this full 2010 Rockefeller Report – chapters “The Scenario Framework” and the “Scenario Narratives” are of particular interest.

Bill Gates’ – TedTalk February 2010 in San Diego – he advocated:

“If we are doing a real good job (vaccinating], we may reduce world population by 10% to 15%.”

This was just a trial balloon to gauge people’s reaction.

It was also an announcement of things to come. As we know by now the ultimate target of world population is something of the order of half a billion people – as indicated on the Georgia Guidestones which have recently been vandalized. – No worries, the cabal will not reach that mass-genocide target. But it has already done immense harm, and if not stopped, will continue killing people, many in the most atrocious ways.

WHO declares in 2014 the decade of vaccination – referring to the decade of 2020 to 2030, i.e., the UN Agenda 2030. Did anybody pay attention? – How did WHO know? Maybe Bill Gates was whispering the orders in the “WHO halls” where “donations” are collected. Conveniently, any reference to this WHO warning has disappeared form internet.

June 2016 – the Swiss Gotthard tunnel inauguration – a bizarre Luciferian Celebration, depicting lockstep – Luciferian sex-dances and strange killings and deaths – remotely related to tunnel construction. Full of symbolism.

Google’s explanation – “While tunnels certainly represent journeys, they more often symbolize the passage from one phase of life to another. In its most primal meaning, the tunnel symbolizes the birth canal. Just as a baby evolves and journeys outward, so do characters of a story.”

See also this 6-min. Gotthard Tunnel inauguration video clip.

It is certainly a passage through darkness. No surprise. Not evil or Lucifer ever projected a world of light for us, the common people. All to the contrary, the more obscure they keep us, the more fear they instill, the more control they gain. And that is what seems they want to play out. – To no avail. They won’t succeed.

Event 201 of 18 October 2019 in NYC – The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, a high-level pandemic exercise on October 18, 2019, in New York City.

The Event’s website describes the exercise as an “aera where public / private partnerships will be necessary during the response to a severe pandemic in order to diminish large-scale economic and societal consequences.” The real object of the exercise was just the opposite, via a corona virus.

By coincidence, a few weeks later, at the beginning of 2020, a corona-virus broke out, called SARS-Cov-2, alias Covid-19. WHO declared it a pandemic on 11 March 2020, when reported deaths, worldwide, were fewer than 5000. Knowing what we know today, one may ask: How reliable are these death reports – then and today?

Compare this with 52,000 flu-related deaths in the US during the 2017 / 2018 flu-season. The common flu was never declared a pandemic. See this.

We are now being warned about the impending food shortages, energy shortages that will bring about a cold winter, famine; plus, a sizable recession preceded by horrendous double-digit inflation – that in turn will trigger bankruptcies, unemployment, poverty, misery – and more deaths.

The Beast’s ascent is not undisturbed. There are forces pulling in other directions, attempting pulling it down, sideways and outright apart. The massive crack in the wall, that lets the Light shine through, is getting bigger and bigger. Once the light reaches a sufficient amount of people, a critical mass – the Beast’s reign may be getting close to an end.

We are not there yet. Unfortunately. But we must think positive. Inspiring each other spiritually. Creating a mental and spiritual togetherness. We, the Awakened People, can bring this diabolical era to an end.

Following the lead mentioned above, the Beast may be depicted as a multiple-tentacled Monster-Octopus. Each tentacle has its deadly mission. Many tentacles have sub-tentacles. In case a tentacle is defeated the others will fight on, and the defeated one will grow back with even greater vigor. That’s the concept.

We have to be aware and conscious of these multiple-scenarios and the Big Picture they constitute, so as not to allow our attention to being deviated by one single scenario – for example, the plandemic and vaxx narrative. Though, admittedly important, it ought to be connected to all other “tentacle-scenarios”, lest we miss the overall objectives of The Great Reset Agenda, alias UN Agenda 2030.

We want to stop this human-made criminal Outbreak of misery and death as a whole, in its entirety. If we do it by compartment, our chances to overcome the Beast are largely diminished. The Cult Cabal counts on us being distracted by one or two tentacles, while the others keep laboring ahead – almost undisturbed – reaching gradually their goals.

It is utterly important that we are aware that all the tentacles are connected. There are no coincidences; and there is no single frontline in this war. The entire humanity, no matter where we are on this globe, is the frontline. That also means, there is no escape.

Unless, and this is crucial, we wake up. This is our escape. We, the People, see the light, and ascend to another level where the darkness of the Beast cannot reach us anymore. We need a critical mass for our People’s Power to be strong enough, to pull us, humanity, through and collectively onto a different, higher and enlightened plane.

To do that, for those who are awake, who see the Beast, who see the tentacles and their machinations as killing machines, it is utmost important that we always see the overall objective of the Great Reset, the UN Agenda 2030, and the 4th Industrial Revolution, hence, the Big Picture.

When we fight one tentacle, say, the covid narrative, an important one, we must always remember that there are others, and that covid is only one cog in the wheel, in the gear of the Reset destruction.

The covid tentacle has many sub-tentacles: Big Pharma is one; the vaxx-mandate is another one; the useless and socially degrading forced mask-wearing, social distancing, and home-office work, are all ways of humiliating, separating and isolating individuals. And so forth. They all play nicely into each other, enhancing each other, psychologically, by FEAR, and physically, by various forms of other than covid diseases, i.e., all types of cancers, leukemias, liver-kidney and heart failures – and much more; all potentially deadly. Indeed, they have already caused exponentially more deaths than the covid-plandemics is said to have caused.

It would, therefore, be unwise to put all our scientific knowledge into the vaxx debate, or the covid infection – is it real, or isn’t it? It doesn’t matter. But by doing just this, we are playing into the devil’s hands.

While it is a must to identify the covid fraud – describing the scam scientifically by medical doctors, virologists and other scientists, but it is by far not enough.  The public at large must understand the cheat, so they may be able to shed off the immune system destroying fear.

Overall objectives of the Reset are in plain view. Therefore, we must expose and connect the Cult’s covid fraud and the fear it causes, to all other tentacles of the Octopus-Beast. We must fight the entire GREAT RESET Narrative as a whole and in solidarity.

Other Tentacles of the Octopus-Beast

Fear, already mentioned before, is yet another deadly tentacle. It is well known in psychology, that fear – the constant tension of fear – lowers our auto-immune defense. It renders us increasingly vulnerable to all kinds of diseases, including a myriad of different cancers and diseases of our vital organs. They all may lead to death, at which point it will be next to impossible to trace the cause of disease and death back to the poisonous “covid-vaxx”.

Fear is one of the Beast’s strongest weapons. Not only does it destroy our natural immunity, fear makes us blind and obedient. Blind to our own human rights. For fear, we give them up, hoping the Beast will safe us. Instead, we are becoming slaves – slaves to our governments, who are, in turn, the servants of the WEF – and the Beast.

Climate Change – the ever-most ferociously propaganda-pushed agenda that the planet will heat up, that we humans are the culprits, as we use excessive amounts of fossil fuel, creating so-called greenhouse gases, driving world temperatures through the roof. As mentioned above, this is the continuation of the Rockefeller-initiated Club of Rome agenda to enslave the (western) world through guilt.

We, of the western / Global North’s Judo-Christian beliefs or cultures, are beset by guilt, as part of our guilt-driven up-bringing.  It’s part of our religious cum cultural inheritance. So, we are extremely vulnerable when told that we, humans, are guilty of death and destruction causing climate change.

The Beast plays on this vulnerability. And very successfully at that.

To enhance the Green Agenda, the Climate Change narrative, Southern European countries – Spain, Greece, Portugal, France, Italy as well as the transatlantic United States are plagued by extreme heat waves, ever-so-often interrupted by deadly flash-floods. In the process, man-made forest fires destroy the forests, the very lungs providing life on earth with oxygen. The purpose is to enhance the Climate Change agenda.

See this 1-min video, how a “rescue helicopter” sprays fire on forests in Southern Spain, filmed by a fire-fighter. The text is in Spanish, but the video is self-explanatory; no text needed; see this.

The truth is hidden or even censured from us. The universe, including our dear and generous Mother Earth, is never stagnant. She is constantly on the move. Not only physically but also temperature-wise.

Our egocentricity makes us believe that we with our short lives – on average less than 100 years – makes us the center of the universe, that everything that happens, occurs in our lifetimes, i.e., extreme climate changes / modifications.

For the past about two months the Global North went through record heat waves and record periods without rain. As reported by France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, other countries in Europe, as well as parts of the US, these are heat and dry spells never experienced since weather measurements began, in some countries as early as the 17th Century. In others in the early 20th Century. The relentless heat in Europe, as well as the US, is destroying food crops, contributing to a worldwide food shortage, leading to famine, desperation and eventually death.

As a sub-tentacle of the Beast, more fear, crop loss, famine – death.

Although nowhere mentioned, nor proven, this record phenomenon, (yet to fully analyzed and ascertained) appears like “engineered weather”. It would typically fit into the type of DARPA research and DARPA released technology. DARPA is a Pentagon sponsored thinktank. Modified weather patterns are powerful weapons. They work silently, causing food shortages, famine and death – and contributing in more ways than one to the agenda of the Great Reset. See this.

Farmland Reduction – A concerted effort of farmland reduction is also part of the Great Reset agenda. Bill Gates is buying up farmland throughout the US and even in other parts of the world. He is said to already own junks of farmland in Ukraine. See this [in German].

By now Gates owns some 300,000 ha of the most productive farmland mostly in the US but also elsewhere in the world.

Farmland owned by Gates will not produce bovine meat, under the pretext of methane gases that contributes to Global Warning. Under Gates’ concept of food reduction, his farmland may not produce food at all – accelerating the Hunger Games.

By the same token, the Dutch Government under the leadership of Mark Rutte, a scholar of Klaus Schwab’s Academy for Young Global Leaders, is adamant in reducing Dutch farmland by 30%. The Netherlands is the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural goods, after the United States. See this.

Dutch farmers have been in the streets for the last almost two months to protest their land being forcefully repossessed by the government to reduce the meet output. So far to no avail.

See this.

Curtailment of international transportation

The airline industry is severely hit by flight reductions, due to largely artificial shortages of personnel – and unattractive covid restrictions (a vaxx-must for staff of many airlines). This is said having led to significant flight reductions precisely during the Global North’s summer holidays.

The financial situation of many western airlines is precarious and may become even more so – as kerosene / petrol / energy prices keep rising.

The masters of the Great Reset do not want traveling people. They are not as easy to control as are stationary ones.

This tentacle serves at least two purposes: i) it keeps people stationary, more isolated from each other and from global movements; and ii) people who cannot move may be more fearful and better controllable.

Energy – Gas, Petrol, Electricity, Shortages

The consequences are multi-faceted. Like climate change, energy shortages affect everything. Our economies’ growth drive is based on energy. Shortages of energy are leading to recessions, diminishing economic output, reducing the workforce, creating poverty – misery, disease — and yes, death.

But we are NOT in an energy shortage. An energy shortage is artificially created – under the pretext of the Ukraine-Russia war – which, in turn, has been created to serve the Great Reset agenda: Massive death, economic collapse, bankruptcies, poverty – prompting a shift of assets from the bottom and the center to the tiny elite on top – and, accelerating the ascent of an all-digitization – from money to the human brain.

But there is no energy shortage. It’s all been artificially created by the masters of the WEF, and the Great Reset. See video below.

There are of course, many more “tentacles”, sub-tentacles and motives for what we are experiencing in the global North’s hot and rainless summer months. But you got the drift. If you consistently ask: “Cui bono?”- or “Who benefits?” – The answer will lead you always to the same vile octopus with its multiple deadly tentacles, called the Great Reset.

This desired world model described by the WEF’s Klaus Schwab et al, is a world towards an ultra-neoliberal system, with largely reduced humans and the surviving ones will have become “transhumans” (Schwab’s term), manipulable by 5G and soon 6G, to be happy owning nothing.

To sum it all up, lets remind ourselves of the dangers related to the all-commanding digital control:

Beware of the QR-Code; Remember Agenda ID2020?

As a final note, a short video (7 min. August 6, 2022) of Dr. Vernon Coleman, about the dangerous new flu-vaxx – if you care for your children, this, as part of a pdf-file inserted in the video:

While you were distracted by Boris [Johnson] resigning, the UK Government quietly confirmed COVID Vaccinated Children are 4423% more likely to die of any cause & 13,633% more likely to die of COVID-19 than Unvaccinated Children.”

These are Dr. Coleman’s final words of advice:

“Be Aware. Take Care.

Don’t believe what governments say. Warn everyone.

Please remember, you are not alone. More and more people are waking up. And once they are awake, they don’t go back to sleep. We are already a far bigger force, than the conspirators would have you believe. If we are going to win this war, then we have to fight with passion, with the truth and we have to fight with determination. No mask, no test, no jab. Don’t trust the government; no mass media, and remember – we have God on our side.”

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing. 

Featured image is from Silent Crow News

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The five largest recipients of US weapons have traditionally included Saudi Arabia, Australia, South Korea, Japan and Qatar.

Ukraine, which was ranked as the 50th largest importer of US arms, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), is now set to make a giant leap upwards.

During 2017-2021, Saudi Arabia accounted for 23% of US arms exports, Australia 9.4%, South Korea 6.8%, Japan 6.7% and Qatar 5.4%.

But these were all paying customers compared to Ukraine which has received billions of dollars in US weapons gratis—in its five-month-old battle against one of the world’s major nuclear powers.

The distribution of weapons, including large donations from Western Europe, are being coordinated by the International Donor Coordination Center, which has moved over 78,000 tons of arms and ammunitions worth more than $10 billion, both from US and Western allies, according to the New York Times.

In a fact Sheet released July 22, the State Department said the United States has committed a staggering $8.2 billion in arms and security assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of the Biden Administration in early 2021, with an accelerated flow of weapons following the Russian invasion on February 24.

A partial breakdown of US arms to Ukraine includes:

  • Over 1,400 Stinger anti-aircraft systems; more than 6,500 Javelin anti-armor systems.
  • Over 20,000 other anti-armor systems.
  • Over 700 Switchblade Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems.
  • 126 155mm Howitzers and up to 411,000 155mm artillery rounds.
  • 72,000 105mm artillery rounds.
  • 126 Tactical Vehicles to tow 155mm Howitzers.
  • 22 Tactical Vehicles to recover equipment.
  • 16 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems and ammunition.
  • Four Command Post vehicles.
  • Two National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS).
  • 20 Mi-17 helicopters.
  • Counter-battery systems.
  • Hundreds of Armored High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles.
  • 200 M113 Armored Personnel Carriers.
  • Over 10,000 grenade launchers and small arms.
  • Over 59,000,000 rounds of small arms ammunition.
  • 75,000 sets of body armor and helmets.
  • Approximately 700 Phoenix Ghost Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems.
  • Laser-guided rocket systems—and more.

Norman Solomon, Executive Director, Institute for Public Accuracy and Director, RootsAction.org told IDN the massive arms shipments from the United States to Ukraine are in sync with the refusal of the US government to engage in serious diplomatic efforts as the horrific Russian war on Ukraine continues.

“The military-industrial complex of the USA is thriving on the war crimes of the Kremlin, as if in a macabre and tacit partnership. It’s not difficult to discern some forms of glee—in effect, “let’s you and them fight”—from the governing U.S. establishment as it voices enthusiastic support for Ukrainian people who are suffering and dying. Yet the war can only end through negotiations and diplomacy,” he said.

There is scarcely any evidence that the top policymakers in Washington have real interest in seeking to nurture diplomatic initiatives that could halt the carnage, argued Solomon.

“Instead, we get endless rhetorical flourishes in harmony with the sounds of massive weapons shipments being rushed to Ukraine. For the arms contractors making a killing, it’s win-win; this is a war they cannot lose.”

It is mere realism to observe how fantastically lucrative the ongoing war is proving to be for US-based weapons dealers—and a longer war means still more huge profits, said Solomon, author of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death“.

He said the recent news reports that the White House is “exploring” whether to ship fighter jets to Ukraine is a further indication that the US administration is in the midst of extremely dangerous mission creep.

Back on March 11, President Biden declared that sending jets with US pilots and crews to Ukraine would amount to “World War III.”

Yet, he is now reportedly considering a big step in that direction. Instead of more massive shipments of weaponry, what’s desperately needed is a commitment to leave no stone unturned on behalf of finding diplomatic solutions that can end this war, said Solomon.

Meanwhile, the State Department says the United States is committed to strengthening allies and partners worldwide to meet their sovereign self-defense needs and to improve their capabilities to operate with US forces to address shared security challenges.

The Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs oversees most government-to-government arms transfers and commercial export licensing of U.S.-origin defense equipment and technologies, consistent with the Arms Export Control Act, the Conventional Arms Transfer Policy, the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, and other statutory authorities and relevant international agreements.

Additionally, according to the July 22 State Department Fact Sheet, US weapons to Ukraine also included:

  • Puma Unmanned Aerial Systems;
  • Unmanned Coastal Defense Vessels;
  • 26 counter-artillery radars;
  • Four counter-mortar radars;
  • Four air surveillance radars;
  • Two harpoon coastal defense systems;
  • 18 coastal and riverine patrol boats;
  • M18A1 Claymore anti-personnel munitions;
  • C-4 explosives, demolition munitions, and demolition equipment for obstacle clearing;
  • Tactical secure communications systems;
  • Thousands of night vision devices, thermal imagery systems, optics, and laser rangefinders;
  • Commercial satellite imagery services;
  • Explosive ordnance disposal protective gear;
  • Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear protective equipment;
  • Medical supplies to include first aid kits;
  • Electronic jamming equipment;
  • Field equipment and spare parts;
  • Funding for training, maintenance, and sustainment.

The United States also continues to work with its allies and partners to provide Ukraine with additional capabilities to defend itself.

According to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Russian Federation’s military and paramilitary services are equipped mostly with domestically-produced weapons systems, although since 2010, Russia has imported limited amounts of military hardware from several countries, including Czechia, France, Israel, Italy, Turkey, and Ukraine.

The Russian defense industry is also capable of designing, developing, and producing a full range of advanced air, land, missile, and naval systems. As of 2021, Russia is the world’s second largest exporter of military hardware.

The Russian armed forces include approximately 850,000 total active-duty troops (300,000 Ground Troops; 40,000 Airborne Troops; 150,000 Navy; 160,000 Aerospace Forces; 70,000 Strategic Rocket Forces; approximately 20,000 special operations forces; approximately 100,000 other uniformed personnel (command and control, cyber, support, logistics, security, etc.); estimated 200-250,000 Federal National Guard Troops.

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Thalif Deen is a former Director, Foreign Military Markets at Defense Marketing Services; Senior Defense Analyst at Forecast International; and military editor Middle East/Africa at Jane’s Information Group, US.

Featured image: Senior Airman Jansen Esteves, a 436th Aerial Port Squadron special handler, verifies shipment information for supplies bound for Ukraine at Dover Air Force Base, Del. Photo Credit: DoD

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While the World Health Organization pushes ahead with plans to enact a new or revised international pandemic preparedness treaty, the World Bank and other organizations are advancing new vaccine passport regimes.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is moving ahead with plans to enact a new or revised international pandemic preparedness treaty, despite encountering setbacks earlier this summer after dozens of countries, primarily outside the Western world, objected to the plan.

A majority of WHO member states on July 21, during a meeting of WHO’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB), agreed to pursue a legally binding pandemic instrument that will contain “both legally binding as well as non-legally binding elements.”

STAT News described the agreement, which would create a new global framework for responding to pandemics, as “the most transformative global health call to action since [the] WHO itself was formed as the first specialized United Nations agency in 1948.”

Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum, African Union and World Bank — which created a $1 billion fund for “disease surveillance” and “support against the current as well as future pandemics” — are developing their own pandemic response mechanisms, including new cross-country vaccine passport frameworks.

WHO’s ‘pandemic treaty’: what’s been proposed and what would it mean?

Ongoing talks to formulate a new or revised “pandemic treaty” are building on the existing international framework for global pandemic response, the WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHR), considered a binding instrument of international law.

On Dec. 1, 2021, in response to calls from various governments for a “strengthened global pandemic strategy” and signaling the urgency with which these entities are acting, the WHO formally launched the process of creating a new treaty or amending the IHR, during Special Session — only the second in the organization’s history

During the meeting, held May 10-11, WHO’s 194 member countries unanimously agreed to launch the process, which previously had been discussed only informally.

The member countries agreed to:

“Kickstart a global process to draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.”

The IHR, a relatively recent development, were first enacted in 2005, in the aftermath of SARS-CoV-1.

The IHR legal framework is one of only two binding treaties the WHO has achieved since its inception, the other being the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

The IHR framework already allows the WHO director-general to declare a public health emergency in any country, without the consent of that country’s government, though the framework requires the two sides to first attempt to reach an agreement.

The proposals for a new or revised pandemic treaty, put forth at the special ministerial session of the WHO in May, would “somewhat” strengthen the WHO’s pandemic-related powers, including establishing a “Compliance Committee” that would issue advisory recommendations for states.

However, according to the Daily Sceptic, while the IHR is already legally binding, the amendments proposed in May would not strengthen existing legal obligations or requirements:

“The existing treaty regulations, like all (or most) international law, do not actually compel states to do anything other than talk to the WHO and listen to it, and neither do they specify sanctions for non-compliance; almost all their output is advice.

“The proposed amendments don’t alter that. They don’t allow the WHO unilaterally to impose legally binding measures on or within countries.”

The Daily Sceptic noted one of the risks stemming from the negotiations for a new or updated treaty include the potential codification of “the new lockdown orthodoxy for future pandemics,” which would “replace the sound, science-based, pre-COVID recommendations” previously in place.

According to Dr. Joseph Mercola, such a treaty would grant the WHO “absolute power over global biosecurity, such as the power to implement digital identities/vaccine passports, mandatory vaccinations, travel restrictions, standardized medical care and more.”

Mercola also questioned a “one-size-fits-all approach to pandemic response,” pointing out that “pandemic threats are not identical in all parts of the world. In his view, he said, “the WHO is not qualified to make global health decisions.”

Similar concerns contributed at least in part to opposition against the proposals presented at the special ministerial session, during which a bloc of mostly non-Western countries, including China, India, Russia and 47 African nations, prevented an agreement from being finalized.

Will opposition fade away?

Although no final agreement was achieved at the May meeting, consensus was reached to organize a new special ministerial session of the WHO later this year, possibly after the WHO’s World Health Assembly, scheduled for Nov. 29 through Dec. 1, Reuters reported.

Mxolisi Nkosi, South Africa’s ambassador to the UN, told the WHO’s annual ministerial assembly the new special session would “consider the benefits for such a convention, agreement or other international instrument.”

Nkosi added:

“Probably the most important lesson COVID-19 has taught us is the need for stronger and more agile collective defences against health threats as well as for building resilience to address future potential pandemics.

“A new pandemic treaty is central to this.”

At the time, the U.K.’s ambassador to the UN, Simon Manley, addressing the lack of an immediate agreement and the consensus to hold a new meeting, tweeted “negotiations may take time, but this is a historic step towards global health security.”

The INB, at its meeting held in Geneva July 18-21, also agreed with this view, reaching a consensus that its members will work on finalizing a new legally binding international pandemic agreement by May 2024.

As part of this process, the INB will meet again in December and will deliver a progress report to the 76th World Health Assembly of the WHO in 2023.

According to the WHO, “Any new agreement, if any when agreed by Member States, is drafted and negotiated by governments themselves, [which] will take any action in line with their sovereignty.”

The WHO further claims that “governments themselves will determine actions under the accord while considering their own national laws and regulations.”

The Biden administration expressed broad support for a new or updated pandemic treaty, with the U.S. heading previous negotiations on this issue, along with the European Commission, via its president Ursula von der Leyen, who, as previously reported by The Defender, is also a strong proponent of vaccine passports and mandatory COVID-19 vaccination.

An analysis by the Alliance for Natural Health International speculated that any final agreement may simply strengthen the existing IHR or, alternatively, may involve an amendment to the WHO’s constitution — or both.

Just two days after the July 21 INB agreement, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, tweeted:

“I’m pleased that alongside the process of negotiating a new [international] accord on pandemic preparedness & response, WHO’s Member States are also considering targeted amendments to the [IHR], incl. ways to improve the process for declaring a [public health emergency of international concern, or PHEIC].”

In the same Twitter thread, he also declared the ongoing monkeypox outbreak “a public health emergency of international concern,” one “that is concentrated among men who have sex with men, especially those with multiple sexual partners.”

Notably, the WHO director-general overruled an expert panel that was divided over whether to classify the outbreak as a global public health emergency.

With this declaration, three “global health emergencies” are now in place, as determined by the WHO: COVID-19, monkeypox and polio.

Busy summer for vaccine passport proposals

While the WHO and global governments weigh plans for an updated or new pandemic treaty, other organizations are moving forward on vaccine passport technologies and partnerships.

On July 8, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), composed of many of the world’s industrialized nations, announced it would promote the unification of the different vaccine passport systems currently in use around the world.

Thirty-six countries and international organizations participated in a July meeting with the goal of “creating a multilateral framework for establishing a global vaccine passport regime,” according to Nick Corbishley of Naked Capitalism.

The development is a continuation of efforts involving the WHO to harmonize global vaccine passport regimes.

In February, the WHO selected Germany’s T-Systems as an “industry partner to develop the vaccination validation service,” which would enable “vaccination certificates to be checked across national borders.”

T-Systems, an arm of Deutsche Telekom, was previously instrumental in developing the interoperability of vaccine passport systems in Europe.

Also in July, 21 African governments “quietly embraced” a vaccine passport system, which in turn would also be interlinked with other such systems globally.

On July 8, which is also Africa Integration Day, the African Union and the Africa Centers for Disease Control launched a digital vaccine passport valid throughout the African Union, describing it as “the e-health backbone” of Africa’s “new health order.”

This follows the development in 2021, of the Trusted Travel platform, now required by several African countries, including Ethiopia, Kenya, Togo and Zimbabwe, and air carriers such as EgyptAir, Ethiopian Airlines and Kenya Airways, for both inbound and outbound travel.

Beyond Africa, Indonesia, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the G20, is conducting“pilot projects” that would bring about the interoperability of the various digital vaccine passport systems currently in use globally. The project is expected to be completed by November, in time for the G20 Leaders’ Summit.

Naked Capitalism highlighted the role of South African company Cassava Fintech in the efforts to develop an interoperable vaccine passport for all of Africa.

A subsidiary of African telecommunication company Econet, Cassava initially developed the “Sasail” app, which the company described as Africa’s first “global super app” that combines “social payments” with the ability to send and receive money and pay bills, chat with others and play games.

Cassava and Econet entered into a strategic partnership with Mastercard, “to advance digital inclusion across Africa and collaborate on a range of initiatives, including expansion of the Africa CDC TravelPass.”

As previously reported by The Defender, Mastercard supports the Good Health Pass vaccine passport initiative that is also backed by the ID2020 alliance and endorsed by embattled former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair.

Mastercard has also promoted technology that can be embedded into the DO Card, a credit/debit card that keeps track of one’s “personal carbon allowance.”

ID2020, founded in 2016, claims to support “ethical, privacy-protecting approaches to digital ID.” Its founding partners include Microsoft, the Rockefeller Foundation, Accenture, GAVI-The Vaccine Alliance (itself a core partner of the WHO), UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank.

Mastercard’s top two stockholders are Vanguard and BlackRock, which hold significant stakes in dozens of companies that supported the development of vaccine passports or implemented vaccine mandates for their employees. The two investment firms also hold large stakes in vaccine manufacturers, including Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson.

Mastercard provides funding for the World Bank’s Identity for Development (ID4D) Program, which “focuses on promoting digital identification systems to improve development outcomes while maintaining trust and privacy.”

The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York School of Law recently described the ID4D program, which touts its alignment with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) , as one which could pave the way to a “digital road to hell.”

According to the center, this would occur through the prioritization of “economic identity” and the use of an infrastructure that has “been linked to severe and large-scale human rights violations” in several countries.

Mastercard is also active in Africa through its joint initiative with another fintech (financial technology) company, Paycode, to “increase access to financial services and government assistance for remote communities across Africa” via a biometric identity system containing the data of 30 million individuals.

World Bank, WHO promote ‘pandemic preparedness’ and vaccine passports

The World Bank in late June announced the creation of a fund that will “finance investments in strengthening the fight against pandemics” and “support prevention, preparedness and response … with a focus on low- and middle-income countries.”

The fund was developed under the lead of the U.S., Italy and current G20 president Indonesia, “with broad support from the G20,” and will be active later this year.

It will provide more than $1 billion in funding for areas such as “disease surveillance” and “support against the current as well as future pandemics.”

The WHO is also a “stakeholder” in the project and will provide “technical expertise,” according to WHO’s director-general.

The agreement follows a 2019 strategic partnership between the UN and the World Economic Forum, to “accelerate” the implementation of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its SDGs.

Although the agreement has recently circulated on social media, it was announced in June 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. It encompasses six areas of focus, including “health” and “digital cooperation.”

In terms of health, the agreement purports that it will “support countries [sic] achieve good health and well-being for all, within the context of the 2030 Agenda, focusing on key emerging global health threats that require stronger multistakeholder partnership and action.”

In turn, the “digital cooperation” promoted by the agreement will purportedly “meet the needs of the Fourth Industrial Revolution while seeking to advance global analysis, dialogue and standards for digital governance and digital inclusiveness.”

However, despite rhetoric preaching “inclusiveness,” individuals and entities that have refused to go along with applications such as vaccine passports have faced repercussions in their personal and professional lives.

Such was the example of a Canadian doctor who was fined $6,255 in June over her refusal to use the country’s ArriveCAN health information app — which is being investigated over privacy concerns — to enter the country.

Dr. Ann Gillies said she was fined when re-entering Canada after attending a conference in the U.S.

Andrew Bud, the CEO of biometric ID company iProove, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security contractor, described vaccine certificates as driving “the whole field of digital ID in the future,” adding they are “not just about COVID [but] about something even bigger” and that “once adopted for COVID [they] will be rapidly used for everything else.”

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

Featured image is from CHD

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There were “terrible flaws” in Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials — and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) knew it, according to Alexandra Latypova, a former pharmaceutical industry executive who reviewed nearly 700 pages of documents Moderna submitted to the FDA as part of its application process.

Latypova, who has 25 years of experience in pharmaceutical research and development, started a number of successful companies — primarily focused on creating and reviewing clinical trials.

On a recent episode of “RFK Jr. The Defender Podcast,” she told Kennedy what she learned after reviewing the Moderna documents, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Latypova told Kennedy that out of nearly 700 pages, about 400 pages are irrelevant studies that Moderna repeated multiple times.

Moderna also submitted three versions of a single module, she said. And one module contained only narrative summaries of Moderna’s studies, but no actual study results.

“So we are still missing a large number of results, such as full reports that are supporting those narratives,” Latypova told Kennedy.

The FDA “obviously did not object” to any of this, she said. “That’s evidence of collusion to me with the manufacturer.”

Latypova also discussed Moderna’s clinical trials timeline. She said the Investigational New Drug (IND) application meeting is supposed to occur with the FDA when the company initiates human clinical trials.

Moderna and the FDA had a pre-IND meeting on Feb. 19, 2020, and the IND application was formally opened the next day. The global pandemic was declared on March 11, 2020.

“Somehow these visionaries could predict the future with such certainty that they opened a clinical trial for the vaccine, for which a pandemic was announced a month later,” Latypova said.

There is normally only one IND application for one product. In this case, however, there are two IND applications — one belonging to Moderna, and one belonging to the National Institutes of Health, which partnered with Moderna on its COVID-19 vaccine.

Latypova also told Kennedy that Moderna did not conduct studies to determine if its mRNA vaccine affected male fertility.

“We have no idea what [the vaccine] does to young men who want to have children in the future,” she said.

The documents also confirm that Moderna’s trials studied the vaccine’s delivery mechanism, but not its payload, which in this case is the spike protein.

“They want you to believe that … you can … have a truck filled with food, or you can have a truck filled with explosives,” Latypova said. “They’re saying it doesn’t matter. Focus on the truck. It’s the same truck, doesn’t matter what’s inside.”

In the end, Latypova said,

“They’re desperate to vaccinate every single person on the planet because they don’t want you to know what’s going on.”

Watch the episode here.

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Rachel Militello has worked extensively as a legal assistant at law firms and newspaper companies. She is also a self-published author of poetry that is geared toward mental health awareness.

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Recent imagery obtained by The War Zone from Planet Labs shows four USAF B-2 Spirit stealth bombers lined up at the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Amberley airbase in Queensland. Considering the USAF currently only operates 20 B-2 bombers, the photo provides an unprecedented glimpse from space of one-fifth of the service’s entire B-2 fleet deployed ‘down under.’ That being said, it will likely become a very normal sight as the U.S. and Australia work more closely to deter China.

The photo highlights the growing presence of USAF B-2s in Australia in recent months – signaling the U.S.’ commitment to maintaining stability within the Indo-Pacific amid growing tensions with China. The four B-2s currently stationed at Amberley were sent from the 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, to support a Pacific Air Forces Bomber Task Force. Two B-2s arrived at Amberley on July 10, while another two B-2s arrived on July 12. While B-2s have visited Australia before, this is the first deployment of B-2s to the country as part of the Bomber Task Force (BTF), according to Janes. USAF and RAAF flyers have focused on “training missions and strategic deterrence missions” since the four USAF B-2s arrived at Amberley as part of the Enhanced Cooperation Initiative under the Force Posture Agreement between the U.S. and Australia.

The first pair of B-2s to arrive at Amberley will remain there “throughout the months of July and August and are planning to be involved in various Australian Defence Force (ADF) exercises such as Exercise ‘Koolendong’ and Exercise ‘Arnhem Thunder,’” an Australian Department of Defense spokesperson said. Exercise Koolendong 2022 wrapped up at the end of July.

A USAF B-2 Spirit stealth bomber parked on the tarmac at Amberley airbase in Queensland, Australia. USAF photo.

Two USAF B-2 Spirit stealth bombers perform a Bomber Task Force mission on July 18, alongside two Royal Australian Air Force F-35A Lightning IIs. USAF photo by Tech. Sgt. Dylan Nuckolls.

Performing training missions with USAF B-2s and allied fighter jets has been an “absolute blast [so far,]” Lt. Col. Andrew Kousgaard, commander of the 393rd Expeditionary Bomb Squadron, said in a statement after USAF flyers began training with their RAAF counterparts. “Since our advance team hit the ground… U.S. airmen have integrated with their Australian counterparts in every specialty: fuels, logistics, maintenance, aviators, you name it.”

USAF and RAAF flyers also intend to experiment with refueling B-2s from RAAF KC-30 tankers, Kousgaard indicated, which would add another means of refueling USAF bombers in the Pacific during coalition operations.

“We have plans to conduct engines-running refueling with Australian equipment, [and] air refuel with Australian KC-30s … the list goes on, and the entire deployed squadron is really excited about it,” Kousgaard said. “It’s important for us to demonstrate that we can accomplish that mission from diverse locations in the largest combatant command in the world, and that’s exactly what we’re doing here.”

“The only way to learn and improve is to actually deploy and practice,” he noted. “We simply cannot operate effectively by ourselves in this environment, and learning to effectively integrate with our partners is absolutely critical to success. We’re training against that ‘tyranny of distance,’ alongside our Australian partners on this deployment, and that experience is truly invaluable.”

Commenting on the deployment of the first pair of B-2s sent to Amberley, Kousgaard said: “This deployment of the B-2 to Australia demonstrates and enhances the readiness and lethality of our long-range penetrating strike force.”

The presence of so many B-2s in Australia clearly sends a very public signal that the U.S. is prepared to use the B-2, and do so from new operating locations, should a future conflict with China unfold.

The deployment also highlights the U.S.’ commitment to supporting its allies in the region – particularly Australia. The U.S., Australia, and the U.K. formed a trilateral security pact in September 2021 covering the Indo-Pacific region (AUKUS,) which aids the transfer of weapons and technologies between the three countries. As part of the pact, the U.S. and U.K. will also help Australia to build nuclear-powered submarines. In a further show of unity, U.S. Navy Adm. John C. Aquilino, commander of U.S. military forces in the Indo-Pacific, recently visited RAAF Base Amberley while in the country for the 24th annual Indo-Pacific Chiefs of Defense (CHODs) conference.

RAAF Air Cmdre. David Paddison underscored the significance of Aquilino’s to the base.

“It is a privilege having Admiral Aquilino visit our largest Air Force base in Australia and meeting our aviators, who have been working with their peers from the 509th Bomb Wing.”

“It’s not a regular occurrence for our refueling, security, and firefighters to gain experience on aircraft such as the B-2. This partnership has been instrumental in enhancing the capabilities and interoperability of both our forces through joint exercises and activities. The Indo-Pacific is our home and we stand committed to an open, inclusive, and resilient Indo-Pacific.”

In a recent public statement, Adm. Aquilino stressed that the Indo-Pacific is “the most consequential theater with the most challenging security issues [for the U.S.] … advancing our interoperability with critical allies like Australia is critical to maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

While several USAF B-2s are expected to stay at Amberley for at least another few weeks, it’s likely that the service’s presence in Australia will only increase with U.S. bombers setting up shop ‘down under’ becoming a common occurrence.

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Featured image: Four USAF B-2 Spirit stealth bombers lined up at Amberley airbase in Queensland, Australia. Planet Labs.

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Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) is demanding that the Canadian government holds Israel accountable for its unprovoked and aggressive war against Gaza this weekend, which killed at least 44 Palestinians. Canada has not commented on Israel’s actions except to support Israel’s right to security, ignoring Israel’s pattern of deliberately targeting civilians in airstrikes – in what clearly amount to war crimes. CJPME urges Canada to end Israel’s impunity and deter future violence, including by ending military trade with Israel.

“Canadians are appalled and deeply embarrassed by Canada’s refusal to condemn Israel’s attacks against civilians in Gaza,” said Michael Bueckert, Vice President of CJPME. “If Canada fails hold Israel accountable for its pattern of deliberately bombing civilian targets, it will embolden further Israeli aggression and encourage its wanton disregard for international law,” added Bueckert.

Over a period of three days starting on Friday, August 5, Israeli airstrikes deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure across Gaza, including residential towers. At least 44 Palestinians were killed, including 16 children, and more than 350 were injured. Due to lack of fuel, Gaza’s only power plant shut down, leaving people with only 4 hours of electricity per day. In response to Israeli attacks, Islamic Jihad militants fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, but no Israeli causalities have been reported. This was the most serious violence since Israel’s 11-day offensive on Gaza in May 2021, which killed at least 240 Palestinians, 63% of which were civilians, and injured 1,968.

Except for a single and unsigned tweet, issued late on August 6, the Canadian government has remained entirely silent on Israel’s latest war. Canada’s sole statement boasted of supporting “Israel’s right to assure its own security,” but CJPME notes that the statement failed to specify that it was Palestinians who had been killed, that Israel was the aggressor party, or that Israel’s airstrikes had deliberately targeted residential buildings. According to Palestinian NGO Al-Haq, Israel’s disproportionate attacks on civilians may amount to crimes against humanity, and UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has condemned Israel’s military offensive as “a flagrant act of aggression. Illegal. Immoral. Irresponsible.”

CJPME urges Canada to respond to Israeli aggression and violations of international law by implementing the following concrete solutions:

  1. Canada should clearly condemn Israel’s act of aggression, and deter Israel from conducting future violence;
  2. Canada should suspend all military trade with Israel, and make sure that made-in-Canada weapons are not being used against civilians in Gaza;
  3. Canada should demand an immediate and permanent end to Israel’s brutal and illegal 15-year blockade of Gaza;
  4. Canada should fully support the investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC) into possible war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories, and urge the ICC to include Israel’s recent actions in its investigation.

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One aspect of Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan that has been largely overlooked is her meeting with Mark Lui, chairman of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC). Pelosi’s trip coincided with US efforts to convince TSMC – the world’s largest chip manufacturer, on which the US is heavily dependent – to establish a manufacturing base in the US and to stop making advanced chips for Chinese companies.

US support for Taiwan has historically been based on Washington’s opposition to communist rule in Beijing, and Taiwan’s resistance to absorption by China. But in recent years, Taiwan’s autonomy has become a vital geopolitical interest for the US because of the island’s dominance of the semiconductor manufacturing market.

Semiconductors – also known as computer chips or just chips – are integral to all the networked devices that have become embedded into our lives. They also have advanced military applications.

Transformational, super-fast 5G internet is enabling a world of connected devices of every kind (the “Internet of Things”) and a new generation of networked weapons. With this in mind, US officials began to realise during the Trump administration that US semiconductor design companies, such as Intel, were heavily dependent on Asian-based supply chains for the manufacturing of their products.

In particular, Taiwan’s position in the world of semiconductor manufacturing is a bit like Saudi Arabia’s status in OPEC. TSMC has a 53% market share of the global foundry market (factories contracted to make chips designed in other countries). Other Taiwan-based manufacturers claim a further 10% of the market.

As a result, the Biden administration’s 100-Day Supply Chain Review Report says, “The United States is heavily dependent on a single company – TSMC – for producing its leading-edge chips.” The fact that only TSMC and Samsung (South Korea) can make the most advanced semiconductors (five nanometres in size) “puts at risk the ability to supply current and future [US] national security and critical infrastructure needs” .

This means that China’s long-term goal of reunifying with Taiwan is now more threatening to US interests. In the 1972 Shanghai Communique and the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, the US recognised that people in both mainland China and Taiwan believed that there was “One China” and that they both belonged to it. But for the US it is unthinkable that TSMC could one day be in territory controlled by Beijing.

‘Tech war’

For this reason, the US has been trying to attract TSMC to the US to increase domestic chip production capacity. In 2021, with the support of the Biden administration, the company bought a site in Arizona on which to build a US foundry. This is scheduled to be completed in 2024.

The US Congress has just passed the Chips and Science Act, which provides US$52 billion (£43 billion) in subsidies to support semiconductor manufacturing in the US. But companies will only receive Chips Act funding if they agree not to manufacture advanced semiconductors for Chinese companies.

This means that TSMC and others may well have to choose between doing business in China and in the US because the cost of manufacturing in the US is deemed to be too high without government subsidies.

This is all part of a broader “tech war” between the US and China, in which the US is aiming to constrain China’s technological development and prevent it from exercising a global tech leadership role.

In 2020, the Trump administration imposed crushing sanctions on the Chinese tech giant Huawei that were designed to cut the company off from TSMC, on which it was reliant for the production of high-end semiconductors needed for its 5G infrastructure business.

Huawei was the world’s leading supplier of 5G network equipment but the US feared its Chinese origins posed a security risk (though this claim has been questioned). The sanctions are still in place because both Republicans and Democrats want to stop other countries from using Huawei’s 5G equipment.

The British government had initially decided to use Huawei equipment in certain parts of the UK’s 5G network. The Trump administration’s sanctions forced London to reverse that decision.

A key US goal appears to be ending its dependency on supply chains in China or Taiwan for “emerging and foundational technologies”, which includes advanced semiconductors needed for 5G systems, but may include other advanced tech in future.

Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan was about more than just Taiwan’s critical place in the “tech war”. But the dominance of its most important company has given the island a new and critical geopolitical importance that is likely to heighten existing tensions between the US and China over the status of the island. It has also intensified US efforts to “reshore” its semiconductor supply chain.

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 is Associate Professor in US History, University of Nottingham.

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***

The brazenness of Zelensky’s hypocrisy in condemning alleged Russian meddling in his country but then openly calling for meddling inside Russia itself through the banning of its nationals from the West for the purpose of provoking a Color Revolution against President Putin is yet another bridge too far for the average Westerner to accept.

A lot of folks are talking about Zelensky’s proposal that he shared with the Washington Post in a recent interview about banning all Russians from visiting the West. It’s indisputably the epitome of fascism since it seeks to collectively punish an entire people for their authorities’ foreign policy, but there’s also a bit more to it as revealed by the Ukrainian leader himself. He slipped during the interview by admitting that “This is the only way to influence Putin” after having explained how he imagines the Russian people to react to this potential ban. It’s very strongly implied that he expects them to initiate a Color Revolution to overthrow President Putin.

Never mind that this outcome is nothing but political fantasy, the point to pay attention to is his meddling motivations for proposing a complete ban on Russians visiting the West. The US-led Western Mainstream Media (MSM) has incessantly spewed conspiracy theories from 2016 onward alleging that Moscow’s the one meddling in the West, including most recently through the US’ Uhuru Movement, yet that same declining unipolar hegemony’s Eastern European proxy is now openly admitting that he wants to meddle in Russia through his proposed means for the purpose of carrying out regime change there. The hypocrisy is stunning but obviously won’t be called out by the MSM.

Nonetheless, those Westerners who are gradually waking up – and to a certain extent largely because the MSM itself has recently started exposing some of Kiev’s unsavory aspects like Amnesty International, CBS News, The Guardian, and CNN did last week – will be able to read through the lines and discern the double standards at play. After all, Gallup’s latest poll proved that literally only 1% of Americans consider Russia to be their country’s “most important problem”, which proves that all the brainwashing hasn’t had any long-term effect and most likely was counterproductive in hindsight. Therefore, only a radical fringe minority of Americans will probably support Zelensky’s proposal.

The vast majority, meanwhile, are expected to either not even care or to perhaps even be passionately against this discriminatory policy. Although they’re practically powerless to influence their leaders since elected representatives have no accountability to their constituents until the next elections (and even then the so-called “uniparty” usually ensures that people pretty much only have a choice between bad and worse), it’s still important to note the growing divide between the government and the governed. This aligns with the tactical axis of the “Great Bifurcation” related to the fierce friction between the elite and populists, which President Putin predicted in June could soon lead to elite change in the West.

The brazenness of Zelensky’s hypocrisy in condemning Russian meddling in his country but then openly calling for meddling inside Russia itself through the banning of its nationals from the West for the purpose of provoking a Color Revolution against President Putin is yet another bridge too far for the average Westerner to accept. The Ukrainian leader is less popular than ever nowadays due to his patrons’ taxpayers becoming upset at how ungrateful he is for the tens of billions of dollars in support that their governments have provided him after he told Americans that his country should be more important to them than their own and then exposed his elite life through his Vogue photoshoot.

Overall, Zelensky seems incapable of reading the room and realizing that everything that he’s done lately works against his own interests in the sphere of Western public opinion.

He seems to think that he can flaunt his extravagant life of luxury in their taxpayers’ faces after receiving tens of billions of dollars from them, demand that his country be more important to them than their own, and now hypocritically tell their governments to do what he wants in order to meddle in Russia’s affairs, all without being seen as the megalomanic that he truly is. The Western people are getting fed up with him and now longer regard this literal comedian as funny, but as an offensive joke that’s costing them billions.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

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.

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For US, Confronting China Is More Important than Fighting Terrorism

August 10th, 2022 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

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China definitely appears to be at the top of American concerns. The CIA is launching a new project aimed at fomenting actions against Beijing. For this, the US government is even shifting money that was aimed at investing in measures against terrorism. In practice, this means that tensions between Washington and Beijing are likely to remain serious for a long time to come.

Recently, the Associated Press reported, citing sources, that the CIA’s “counterterrorism” mission center is having its budget and personnel redirected to a new center, which would be focused on China. The sources report that, although terrorism remains a “priority” for the agency, China is currently considered the greatest threat to the US, which is why more efforts would be needed in order to create measures aimed at neutralizing the Asian country.

The news comes a few days after the US carried out a military intelligence operation that killed Ayman al-Zawahri, an alleged leader of Al Qaeda, in Kabul. As the operation took place, China intensified its military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, forming an air and naval blockade against the island. American experts allegedly suggested that this fact proved that terrorism, while still a problem, is no longer the top American priority, as Beijing is taking advantage of the time spent on “counterterrorism” by the Americans to further advance its ambitions. This “new situation” would justify a change of focus on the part of American intelligence.

Douglas Wise, a former CIA officer who worked at the counter-terrorism center, commented on the case and assessed that the transition will not be so easy, since over the last few decades the US has devoted much of its intelligence apparatus to the terrorism issue. Wise believes that an anti-terrorist “culture” has been developed at the CIA, which will take years to overcome by a new focus. He stressed that a “rational plan” for transition will be needed, otherwise US intelligence will be stagnant and without operational capability, which will undoubtedly favor US enemies.

It is necessary to point out, however, that the news is not as surprising as it seems at first. The US has been promoting an intelligence focus to an “anti-China mission” since last year, when, in October, the CIA announced the creation of an operations center against China. What seems to be happening now is simply the officialization of this new focus of attention, in addition to budget and human resources redirection. China will officially become Americans’ greatest fear and Washington’s national security priority.

Also, the creation of this new anti-China intelligence center, even more specialized and equipped than the previous one, seems to be a direct consequence of Biden’s foreign policy program, which proposed to simply confront all “enemy” countries at the same time, escalating tensions around the world. While Trump has steered opposition to Beijing towards a commercial focus provoking a “trade war” Biden has intensified the confrontation in the military and intelligence field, which has put the world at risk.

What remains to be seen is what data would justify this assessment about the existence of a “Chinese threat”. The intensification of Chinese military activities in recent days came as a response to an American provocation. If the US had not sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taipei, China would not have started the current drills. There seems to be no point in considering Beijing a threat for responding to a provocation that the US itself made.

Obviously, both countries have a number of disagreements and can undoubtedly be considered rival states, but it does not seem prudent in any way to direct this opposition to an intelligence aspect. This makes the situation more serious and sets precedents for an endless chain of countermeasures. If US intelligence has China as its focus, Chinese intelligence will also be forced to have the US as its main target. And so, the tensions only tend to increase.

It is also necessary to note that terrorism has been considered the main global threat over the last decades. Combating terrorism is a national security priority in almost every state. The possibility of replacing the importance of combating this global enemy with combating one specific country is something truly outrageous and reason enough to escalate tensions even further.

The best measure the US could take with regard to China would be to simply stop provoking the Asian country and allow its process of national reunification to take place in the most peaceful and sovereign way possible. The less American interference in Chinese affairs, the more peacefully tensions will be resolved.

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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter.

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***

Why has there been almost no coverage of what was taking place at the same time multi-millionaire Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was visiting Taiwan? 

Consider what is being said, as well as what is totally omitted, in the U.S. coverage of China’s naval action around Taiwan.

The U.S. naval command RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific Amphibious Assault Training) was carrying out maneuvers involving 170 aircraft, 38 ships, four submarines, and 25,000 military personnel from all the G7 imperialist countries. Some 19 other Asia Pacific countries were pulled in for symbolic participation. RIMPAC is the world’s largest international maritime exercise.

This aggressive maritime action took place from June 29 to Aug. 4. In other words, it was going on as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was visiting Taiwan.

The shaping of information is all pervasive. Whether it is FOX News, CNN, AP, the New York Times or the Washington Post, the multibillion-dollar media are part of and totally intertwined with U.S. military industries. They collaborate in hiding U.S. war plans and provocations.

The role of the corporate media in totally distorting the news on China must be challenged.

China’s right to self-defense

The media coverage of China’s military drills around Taiwan never describe them as self-defense. The media display absolute unity, blocking any mention of China’s right to safeguard its national sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Every statement or action taken by China is relentlessly described as “threatening,” “provocative” or “expansionist.” The same words are used again and again in news articles and politicians’ statements.

There is only one accepted political line. The media repeat that China is irrational, paranoid, belligerent, menacing and overreacting.

U.S. actions, even military maneuvers in which thousands of troops employ jet bombers and aircraft carriers, are described as “routine rotations” or normal schedules – that is, if the mainstream media report on them at all.

The Chinese media are always described as state-controlled propaganda. By comparison, the U.S. corporate media are always defined as free and democratic.

This is so relentless that it impacts even social forces who oppose U.S. militarism and endless U.S. wars.

Routine threats by U.S. Navy

RIMPAC is planned and coordinated by the U.S. Navy’s Third Fleet. According to its commander, their massive training is meant to deter escalation by China’s military.

Only part of the Third Fleet is engaged in RIMPAC. The fleet’s total size comes to a combat-ready force of more than 68,000 people, 100 ships and 400 aircraft.

Moving into place as Pelosi visited Taiwan was the even larger U.S. Navy Seventh Fleet, the largest of its forward-deployed fleets. At any given time, it amounts to 50 to 70 ships and submarines, 150 aircraft, and more than 27,000 sailors and Marines.

The Seventh Fleet is led by the USS Ronald Reagan, accompanied by guided-missile destroyers, nuclear submarines and jet aircraft. This ship has now been joined by aircraft carrier battle groups of the USS Nimitz and USS Theodore Roosevelt.

It is comparable to a scenario in which Chinese destroyers were to sail into the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of New Orleans and Houston.

The U.S. Pacific Fleet consists of approximately 200 ships/submarines, nearly 1,200 aircraft, and more than 130,000 sailors and civilians. The U.S. Navy maintains 11 carrier strike groups in international waters.

Hiding in plain sight

Isn’t this aggressive and threatening? Yet this vast and deadly armada is hidden in plain sight. It is barely mentioned, but even when hundreds of ships and aircraft are involved, they are described as simply participating in “routine” or “business as usual” exercises.

These continuing assaults are not top news, but they are reported in military news media, such as the Navy Times.

When the guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold conducted its third transit through the South China Sea in a week, the Chinese government was prompted to label the move as a provocation. (See this)

The U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet has so far this year sent an average of one guided-missile destroyer per month through the Taiwan Strait as a challenge to China. (See this)

According to the Navy Times, China’s foreign ministry protested:

“The U.S. military’s actions have seriously violated China’s sovereignty and security, seriously undermined peace and stability in the South China Sea, and seriously violated international law and norms governing international relations.”

China’s long-held position is that “the two sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one China and should work together to seek national reunification.”

The Taiwan Strait is part of the South China Sea, and China has claimed the area as its territorial waters. However, the United States has consistently said that it considers the strait to be international waters.

Freedom of Navigation – imperialist piracy

“Freedom of Navigation” is similar to the grand term “Free Trade.” It is not about freedom. Freedom of Navigation has meant unrestricted U.S., British, French and Japanese access to the looting of China.

Few people in the U.S. are aware of the fact that, more than a century ago, the U.S. Navy sent fleets of armored ships to patrol Chinese rivers and coastal waters.

Special fleets of gunboats of the U.S. Navy and Marines patrolled Chinese rivers up to 1,000 miles inland. They were there to enforce U.S. trade interests and suppress uprisings. Armies of occupation from the U.S., Britain, France, Germany and Japan were stationed in Chinese cities.

“Concessions” were forced on China by brutal gunboat diplomacy and enshrined by onerous unequal treaties that made China pay imperialist countries huge indemnities and grant such “concessions” as control of its cities, major ports and largest waterways.

Britain, with U.S. and French participation, fought two Opium Wars in China to enforce its “right” to sell opium. The merchants called this “defending free trade” and “protecting freedom of navigation.”

It was the 1949 victory of the Chinese Communist Party that finally ended these “Freedom of Navigation” invasions into China’s mainland, opening the opportunity to rebuild a strong, united China which is increasingly able to defend its coastal waters and resist U.S. imperialist demands.

The corrupt and defeated former military forces, defending the rights of the old landlord class, withdrew, with U.S. Navy protection, to the island province of Taiwan. This was hardly a democratic process. It was a totally militarized U.S. occupation of the island.

China has held a consistent, well-understood position on its sovereignty and territorial integrity that is recognized internationally in all world bodies. China has repeatedly asserted its right to resolve this unfinished national reunification.

U.S. violates signed agreements

Washington is openly violating three different signed agreements – Joint Communiques it made with China in 1972, 1979 and 1982 – affirming that China is one country and Taiwan is a province of China.

Any focus on these signed agreements of “One China” in the Western media today would expose that the U.S. has broken its promises not to interrupt China’s efforts to reunify the island peacefully.

Once in a while the truth slips in. Roger Waters, co-founder of Pink Floyd, an English rock band formed in London in 1965, is now on a final U.S. tour titled: “This is not a drill.”  In an interview with CNN on August 7, Waters refuted the narrative about Taiwan.

When CNN host Michael Smerconish said in the interview that “China is too busy encircling Taiwan,” Waters immediately said, “They’re not encircling Taiwan, Taiwan is part of China, and that’s been absolutely accepted by the whole of the international community since 1948.” Smerconish tried to interrupt Waters, saying that China is “on the top of the list of human rights offenders.” Waters immediately shot back: “The Chinese didn’t go to Iraq and kill 1 million people in 2003.”

Pelosi and insider trading

The U.S. corporate media are united in hostility to China. At the same time, different media can favor either a Democratic or Republican presidency.

For example, Fox News, guilty of a daily barrage of racist stereotypes against China, was at the forefront of exposing Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, for his multimillion-dollar insider stock trading in a semiconductor firm just before Congress voted to give $52 billion to chip manufacturers in the U.S., called the CHIPS Act.

Despite this scandal and her role as Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi met with the chairman of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer and a beneficiary of the U.S. legislation.

TSMC plans to build a $12-billion chip factory in the U.S. The semiconductor industry is a priority for the U.S. “containment” of China. At the same time, the U.S. government is using various sanctions to suppress Chinese high-tech companies and break chip supply chains away from China.

Effort to reverse U.S. corporate decline

Wang Peng, a research fellow at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, explained:

“The U.S. is using the CHIPS Act to force companies in countries and regions of key status on the global chip supply and industrial chains to play by U.S. rules, as well as encircling and suppressing chip industries in emerging markets,”

The bill’s requirement is for companies to pick only one of two choices: business ties with China, or subsidies from the U.S. government. (See this)

The problem U.S. imperialists face is how to force countries in the region to act against their own economic interests.

Taiwan’s annual exports to China come to $126.2 billion, almost double its exports to the U.S. of $65.9 billion. South Korea’s exports to China, at $132.5 billion, far outweigh the $74.4 billion to the U.S. Japan’s exports to China come to $163.8 billion, compared to only $135.9 billion in exports to the U.S.

In order to force high-tech companies to decouple from the People’s Republic of China, U.S. imperialism needs a political/military crisis with China. Every U.S. plan for sanctions on China starts with a manufactured crisis over Taiwan.

U.S. imperialism’s strategy of restructuring and distorting the global economy to serve its own short-term interests of maximizing immediate profits has led to an aggressive U.S. expansion of NATO and provocations in Ukraine.

The immediate threat to U.S. hegemony was the EU trade with Russia of $260 billion a year — 10 times its trade with the U.S. The EU has also been the largest investor in Russia. Breaking this growing economic integration of the EU with Russia, and at an even greater level with China, serves the long-term strategic interests of U.S. corporate domination that have been in place since World War II.

In 2021 China’s GDP was roughly 10 times larger than Russia’s. China is the world’s top trading economy and the number-one exporter of manufactured goods. It is in an increasingly strong position to resist U.S. demands.

The desperate imperialist strategy to reverse the declining global position of the U.S. will be far more disruptive to the global economy.

This information on U.S. provocations must be dragged into the daylight by all the forces determined to prevent another imperialist war.

The role of the U.S. corporate media is to make imperialist threats seem palatable and entirely reasonable. This is possible only by blocking all past history of U.S. wars while using racism to smear and demonize China’s legitimate, reasonable and lawful responses and countermeasures,

Taiwanese rapper and anti-imperialist commentator Zhong Xiangyu explains:

“The U.S. government has never been a protector of Taiwan. The U.S. Navy was the first country to attack Taiwan with a warship in 1867. The U.S. Navy supported Japan in invading Taiwan in 1874. The U.S. government sold weapons to Japan during the Sino-Japanese War, leading to China’s defeat and forcing China to cede Taiwan to Japan in 1895.

“Today Taiwan separatism is not true independence. It just means serving U.S. interests in a hegemonic, unequal relationship.”  

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This article was originally published on Workers World.

Sara Flounders is Co-Director of the International Action Center. She is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Costa Rica’s recently elected president abolished the country’s COVID “vaccine” mandate on Wednesday.

“As of today, the vaccines are not mandatory,” President Rodrigo Chaves Robles announced during an August 3 press conference. “And therefore any action taken against anyone who does not want to be vaccinated is an action that is against the law.”

Chaves, who was elected in April 2022, shared that although he himself has been jabbed, and he encourages others to consider “vaccination” as well, his position is “fundamentally that people have freedom of choice.

“But, if you don’t want to, as I said during my campaign: Costa Rica’s people are not cattle that you beat with a piece of wood and force to get vaccinated,” Chaves declared during the press conference.

Costa Rica’s president emphasized that his administration’s position is the same as that of the World Health Organization (WHO), the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), and the majority of the world’s countries, arguing that Costa Rica’s prior vax mandates are therefore “contrary to international standards.”

Chaves backed up his claim by highlighting a WHO statement from April 2021, which stated that “vaccine” mandates “interfere with freedom and individual autonomy” and that “One must balance the well-being of the community with individual liberties.”

He further slammed the mandates as a violation of Costa Rican law since, as he pointed out, the members of Costa Rica’s National Vaccination and Epidemiology Commission (CNVE) were functioning under expired terms when they issued the jab mandates, rendering all of their post-term actions “invalid.”

After Chaves and his administration took office, “we realized that their terms … officially ended in 2020,” he said.

“When told this, they all got quiet. They said that nobody had told them their terms had ended. And nobody questioned this until the Minister here investigated,” continued Chaves, referring to Minister of Health Jocelyn Chacón, also present at the press conference.

The president explained that he asked Chacón to suspend the jab mandates “given the illegal actions taken by the Commission,” while keeping the shots available for those who, in the exercise of their liberty, desire to be vaccinated.”

During the press conference, Chacón denied claims that the current government of Costa Rica is “anti-vaccination,” pointing out that its members were “up to date” with their shots.

“There are countries which do not mandate, and have higher rates of vaccination. Why? Because people do not want to be ordered: they prefer to have things explained,” Chacón said.

In October 2021, Costa Rica announced it would start implementing a COVID shot mandate that would require the jab to enter non-essential businesses, including restaurants, shopping malls, gyms, and hotels. The jab was also required for all public servants, and private businesses were permitted to mandate the shot for their employees as well.

Costa Rica then became the first country in the world, in November 2021, to mandate COVID jabs for children. The decision came only a week after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave its approval to administering Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine to children age 5-11 despite limited safety data and virtually nonexistent need. The Costa Rican government cited the FDA approval in its announcement of the mandate.

Reuters reported that as of May 2022, more than 85% of Costa Ricans had “received at least one shot, while 79% have had two doses, and 41% have received a third vaccine, according to official data.”

Former Costa Rican president Carlos Alvarado announced that month, during his last speech as president, that the country was one of a “select group of countries in the world that has more than 85% of its population vaccinated with at least one dose.”

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***

Guest is Sara Bennett, singer, entertainer, presenter; “the chameleon among singers.” She has received several awards, among them is Artist of the Year 2019 (German Artist Magazine).

In this session, she talks about how important it is to speak to people in a positive way:

“Everything we are experiencing out there now, this complete absurdity, nothing more than purposeful numbing, hypnosis and distraction from the essential. […] People […] forget about life as such.”

Moreover, she opens up about passivity of the artistic community; colleagues collectively bury their creative freedoms and human rights.

She also shares an encounter with midwives in Luxembourg who said that the number of stillbirths has never been so high, the placentas look abnormal, there have never been so many harelips.

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  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Video: Soaring Number of Stillbirths, Abnormal Placentas.”Everything We are Experiencing is Complete Absurdity”. Sara Bennett, Corona Investigative Committee

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***

Executive summary

A doctor friend of mine in Canada heard about 15 deaths of Canadian doctors over the last 9 months. He’s been in practice for 30 years. He’s never heard of any such unusual deaths before of doctors. Zero in 30 years. Why is he now, all of a sudden, hearing of so many deaths, and why are these deaths all happening very soon after vaccination?

From July 13 to July 28, 7 doctors died… an average of one doctor every other day for 2 weeks straight. And the causes of death were statistically unusual: two died swimming (which is very rare), one died in her sleep (very rare), etc.

The fact checkers assure us all that all of these doctors died for other reasons; the fact that they all died right after the vaccine was simply bad luck. That’s not the right metric. The fact checkers need to tell us the last time this happened where 7 doctors died in 14 days from unusual causes. They cannot. This is unprecedented.

The Canadian doctors continue to ignore the deaths in plain sight and continue to believe what they are told to believe. I predict the next shots will be even worse.

Sadly, I don’t think the Canadian doctors are ever going to figure this out.

14 deaths of young doctors in the last 9 months, all shortly after the jab

Canadian doctors keep lining up to get the shots to be “protected” from a disease which is easily treatable with a combination of drugs with little to no side effects.

A doctor friend in Canada has been passively noticing the untimely death of doctors in Canada shortly after they were forced to get the third and fourth doses of the vaccine. He sent me these images below which had been sent to him. He’s not proactively researching these. There are likely a lot more deaths he doesn’t know about.

Guess how many similar deaths (young doctors dying unexpectedly of odd causes) he’s noticed in the past 30 years in practice? Yup, zero.

What’s astounding is that this is a vaccine, which according to this CDC study, makes it nearly impossible for you to die after the shot. Yet, these doctors all died shortly after the shot. The doctors are dead, so the CDC study must be wrong.

Oddly, none of the deaths were covered in the Canadian mainstream media, so I thought you should know about them.

There was coverage of six recent deaths in Health Impact News: 6 Canadian Medical Doctors Died Within 2 Weeks After 4th COVID Booster Shots for Employees Started at One Hospital.

Let me be very clear. You cannot have 14 Canadian doctors die shortly after the vaccine if there isn’t something wrong with the shot. Period. Full stop. Each of these is a very rare event. Having them clustered like this is a sure sign the vaccines killed them.

Any honest scientist would start with this hypothesis as the most obvious hypothesis and only reject it if there was compelling evidence to the contrary.

The vaccine kills people in subtle ways that are NOT being investigated by medical examiners. They are deliberately looking the other way.

Two of the most popular methods used by the vaccine to kill people are accelerating a cancer (which may have started from an earlier dose) and by causing a sudden death which, if the person is driving or swimming, appears to be a car accident or drowning.

Nearly all the medical examiners all look the other way when assessing a vaccine-caused death.

For example, I know a technician who works for a medical examiner who is seeing all these odd “blood clots,” but he says the pathologists “won’t listen or investigate”!

Why are people looking the other way? It’s because they want the pandemic to go away and they are told that the vaccine is the only way out of the pandemic so they look the other way when there is bad news.

Fact checkers: Nothing to see here folks. Move along.

According to the fact checkers, none of these doctors died from the shots, they all died of other causes. Duh. The vaccine always kills people by stopping their heart, brain, etc. so it always looks like they died from something else because they did.

But when normally healthy people all of a sudden die like this in rapid succession, you are being totally disingenuous if you rule out the vaccine as the likely instigator of the death.

What the fact checkers fail to point out is that in many cases, the diseases often first started after the first vaccine shot, and then got worse with progressive shots. Somehow, they always miss that point that the vaccine accelerated the death. The fact that all these doctors died in close proximity to the shots is just too coincidental.

Canadian docs will keep believing the “safe and effective” narrative because that’s what they are trained to do: trust the authorities

My doctor friends in Canada simply cannot believe how brainwashed his colleagues are. Zero deaths in 30 years, now all of a sudden 14 deaths in 9 months each happening shortly after their shots. Come on. That’s not bad luck. No way.

The Canadian docs will continue to ignore the stats, believe the “fact checkers,” and line up for the shots. It will get worse in the next round.

14 Canadian doctors who have died after being given the vaccine

From July 13 to July 28, 7 doctors died… an average of one doctor every other day for 2 weeks.

Vincent Mak 

Died August 3rd, 2022 at 12:45pm. My friend knew him. Covered here and here.

Dr. Bradley James Harris

March 14, 2022. His death went unnoticed.

There are certainly many more like this.

It’s not just doctors being affected

Doctors, athletes, celebrities are all very visible.

This “problem” is happening everywhere. The only question is whether people are paying attention.

Read this post by Anita Jader. She’s paying attention.

Ask yourself: have you ever seen a post like this in your life? Do you think this is “normal”?

Read this post about Wayne Root’s wedding. He basically did the post-marketing randomized clinical trial that the CDC never did. Only 200 people were “enrolled” in his “trial” which lasted just 8 months. The results are stunning and cannot be explained by just “bad luck.” There is no other possible explanation: the vaccines are a disaster.

Wayne’s vaccinated friends had a 26% risk of severe injury and a 7% chance of death compared with a 0% level for his unvaxxed friends in the same time period. This is the type of observational study the CDC should be doing… but they aren’t for obvious reasons (it would create vaccine hesitancy).

Does that sound like a safe vaccine to you?

Surveys 10% of people have buyer’s remorse on the vaccine, 15% have a new medical condition post vaccine.

An NIH study finds 40.2% of women experienced menstrual changes post vaccine.

The evidence just doesn’t seem to matter, even when it is in plain sight. 40.2% of women had their reproductive organs affected by the vaccine and we still are mandating this vaccine?!?!

Are there any anecdotes showing the reverse, i.e., only unvaxxed getting sick/dying? I couldn’t find any!

When I looked for anecdotes that are opposite to this one (where it was the unvaxxed who were being injured or dying), I couldn’t find any.

Apparently, I am not alone. This poll is as lopsided as it gets; it tells you everything you need to know:

It’s up to the fact checkers now to produce hundreds of extreme reverse anecdotes (e.g., Wayne Root’s wedding anecdotes, but where ONLY the unvaccinated were dying and injured).

Summary

This is a partial list of Canadian doctor deaths. I’m sure there will be more in the comments.

The key point is the sheer number of events are simply too high in the doctor category alone. These doctors all dying shortly after the jab suggests a most likely hypothesis be that the jab killed them, e.g., by accelerating their existing medical condition, or creating a new medical condition, or by a mysterious sudden death.

So while it could be that one or maybe two of the deaths were just coincidences, odds are that the rest were not. This sort of pattern has not happened before.

Science is about figuring out which hypothesis is a better match to the data. For the data I’m seeing, it’s always that the vaccines are too unsafe to use.

IMPORTANT

I have yet to see an anecdote that is the mirror image of Wayne Root’s anecdote where it is only the unvaxxed getting injured and dying in a randomly matched group. If you got one, let me know in the comments!

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August Ninth: The Atomic Bomb dropped on Nagasaki, August 9, 1945: Christians Killing Christians in the Name of Christ

By Dr. Gary G. Kohls, August 09, 2022

On the 9th of August, 1945, an all-Christian B-29 bomber crew, took off from Tinian Island in the South Pacific, with the blessings of its Catholic and Protestant chaplains. In the plane’s hold was the second of the only two nuclear bombs to ever be used against human targets in wartime. The primary target, Kokura, Japan, was clouded over, so the plane, named Bock’s Car, headed for the secondary target, Nagasaki.

Moscow Prioritises Ties with Myanmar

By M. K. Bhadrakumar, August 10, 202

The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s visit to Myanmar on August 3 shows that the relationship is assuming a strategic character. The Foreign Ministry in a press release on August 2 highlighted that the relationship is “one of the priorities of foreign policy in the Asia–Pacific region, an important factor in ensuring peace, stability and sustainable development.” 

US-China Chip War Continues. Geopolitics and the Semiconductor Industry

By Prabir Purkayastha, August 09, 2022

As the tension between the US and China mounts as a fall-out of Nancy Pelosi’s provocative Taiwan visit, the technology war between the two is also taking a new turn. Both houses in the US Congress have approved a $280 billion plan – The Chips and Science Act – to boost US chip manufacturing.

Video: COVID-19 Vaccine Patents and Gene-Deletion. Dr. Ariyana Love Interviewed by Dr. Reiner Fuellmich

By Dr. Ariyana Love and Reiner Fuellmich, August 09, 2022

Guest is Dr. Ariyana Love, a Naturopathic Doctor & Investigative Journalist. Her elder son was vaccine injured at age two and diagnosed with High Functioning Autism at age 7. She applied her knowledge of Naturopathic Medicine and designed a dietary protocol that resulted in a near total reversal of her son’s debilitating symptoms.

New Documentary: Eugenics to Pandemics

By John Potash, August 09, 2022

Shots puts an amusing spin on the little-known history of eugenics. It traces the genocidal, anti-ethnic eugenics movement which resulted in the sterilization and elimination of millions. It exposes how the wealthiest families financed the evolution of eugenics into Nazi Germany, and pushed America into perpetual wars. These families further influenced the government’s elimination of financial liability for vaccine manufacturers while simulating run-ups to the 2020 pandemic. By that year the wealthiest had bought and controlled the media, and censored medical experts that criticized government actions.

Video: Hollywood’s Pro-Soviet Propaganda vs. The “Russia Probe”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, August 09, 2022

This title might surprise you. But at the height of the Second World War, America and the Soviet Union were allies. And Hollywood as of June 1941 was involved in producing a very different type of war film.

11 Year Old Girl Calls Out Klaus Schwab and His Globalist Goons

By American Right TV, August 09, 2022

In a video that is sure to give anyone hope, an 11-year-old girl calls out Klaus Schwab and the plans of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in one of the most intelligent and well-spoken deliveries that would flaw even some of the greatest speakers in history.

Controversial Drug Remdesivir Plays Key Role in COVID-Related Hospital Deaths: Dr. Ardis

By Matt McGregor, August 09, 2022

The antiviral medication remdesivir has played a controversial role in the COVID-19 treatment protocols used by hospitals that many families allege resulted in the death of their loved ones.

The Rapid Postwar Increase of America’s Nuclear Arsenal. Churning Out Nukes “Like Sausages”

By Shane Quinn, August 09, 2022

By New Year’s Day 1951, the United States had increased its atomic bomb stockpile by many times over, enough to wipe out the Soviet Union. In June 1946, to the frustration of US war planners, the military possessed a modest nine atomic bombs.

Crisis of the Wheat Export Supply Chain: EU Sanctions Against Russia Could Trigger an African-Middle Eastern Migrant Crisis

By Ahmed Adel, August 09, 2022

Africa and the Middle East is set to suffer more than Europe if there is a reduction of grain exports, according to the head of the Belgian federation of cereal traders and agrosupply (FEGRA), Gisele Fichefet. Her comment was said in response to Russian Agriculture Minister Dmitry Patrushev’s August 5 warning that 50 million tonnes of grain might be forced off the market because this year’s crops did not reach the 130 million tonne target.

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Peaceful Protests for a Revolutionary Change in Sri Lanka

August 10th, 2022 by Kumarathasan Rasingam

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Moscow Prioritises Ties with Myanmar

August 10th, 2022 by M. K. Bhadrakumar

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Africa and the Middle East is set to suffer more than Europe if there is a reduction of grain exports, according to the head of the Belgian federation of cereal traders and agrosupply (FEGRA), Gisele Fichefet. Her comment was said in response to Russian Agriculture Minister Dmitry Patrushev’s August 5 warning that 50 million tonnes of grain might be forced off the market because this year’s crops did not reach the 130 million tonne target.

“I don’t expect major problems in Europe in both categories of grain, for cattle breeding and for human consumption, since this year’s crops were excellent despite the drought at the end of the season. The problems, if they arise, will be in the Middle East and Africa, and maybe in some countries of Southeast Asia,” Fichefet said.

Russia, the world’s largest exporter of wheat, and Ukraine, the fifth largest exporter of the same product, collectively account for more than one-third of global cereal exports and a half of the world’s sunflower oil export market. In addition, UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) data found that Russia was the number one exporter of nitrogen fertilisers in 2021, and many European and Central Asian countries rely on Russia for over 50% of their fertilizer supply.

FAO predicted in March that supply disruptions in Russia and Ukraine could affect up to 30% of the wheat supply in some 50 countries, many of them being low-income countries in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

Fichefet believes it was “not so much a price problem, as a delivery issue” as price fluctuations had not been more than 20% up or down since the start of the Ukrainian conflict. Although prices stabilised following the UN-brokered deal between Russia, Ukraine and Turkey, Fichefet warned this scenario could change if Moscow cuts grain exports.

On July 22, Russia, Turkey and the UN signed an agreement that unblocked Ukraine’s grain and fertiliser exports amid hostilities. Representatives of the Ukrainian government signed a similar document with Ankara and UN representatives.

In addition, Russia signed a memorandum with the UN to contribute to the export of Russian fertilisers and agricultural products to international markets. UN Secretary General António Guterres, meanwhile, announced the creation of the joint coordination centre to ensure the safety of bulk carriers transporting grain from Ukrainian ports, such as Odessa.

The eventual release of funds from Russian banks frozen by the sanctions against Moscow for its operation in Ukraine could help stop a potential food crisis being instigated by the shortage of agricultural products. Although Fichefet believes Europe is mostly protected from a potential food crisis, a destabilised global situation can become unsustainable for Europe.

On July 19, the European Commission proposed to unblock some of the funds in Russian banks to resume trade in agricultural and food products. The sanctions against Moscow caused the global rise in the prices of oil, gas and fertilisers. This has not only had a negative impact on Russia, but also the US and EU.

There has been a boomerang effect from the sanctions imposed by the West, specifically on the EU, which are the ones now suffering the most. Alarmingly though, the EU never considered that its measures against Russia could also lead to famine and a subsequent migration crisis in African and Middle Eastern countries. Europe since 2015 has already experienced a migration crisis due to all the conflicts that the US started in the Middle East and Africa, including Libya, by wanting to change the region geopolitically.

Egypt is already one of the world’s top wheat importers, buying around 75% of its supply from Ukraine and Russia. The war in Ukraine has seen wheat prices in Egypt soar, prompting President Abdel Fattah el Sisi to urge the government to determine a fixed price for unsubsidised bread, which started at the end of March.

In a speech on May 21, Sisi referred to the Quran’s Surah Yusuf about the necessity to “store up wheat for famine”, drawing a parallel between the present crisis to the famine during Prophet Joseph’s time. He also urged Egyptians to prioritise wheat planting rather than wasting this resource.

Cairo is also concerned by the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam being constructed on the Blue Nile River. This project has received huge opposition from Egypt and Sudan as it could impact farmland downstream and instigate a drought. Such a scenario will not only increase internal pressures in Egypt, but coupled with simultaneous crises across Africa, the country could become a transit point for migrants attempting to reach Europe.

Therefore, although the EU may feel comfortable by its own supply of grains, it risks instigating another migration crisis by continuing with reckless sanctions against Russia that significantly affects African and Middle Eastern countries from securing grain.

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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

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Video: Hollywood’s Pro-Soviet Propaganda vs. The “Russia Probe”

August 9th, 2022 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

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First published by GR in May 2017

This title might surprise you. But at the height of the Second World War, America and the Soviet Union were allies.

And Hollywood as of June 1941 was involved in producing a very different type of war film.

The United States’ attitude towards the Soviet Union shifted on 22nd of June 1941, when Hitler began sending his Panzers towards Moscow, and after December ’41 the alliance between the two opposite systems was a necessity. So, the Americans’ perceptions of the Soviet Union had to be shaped overnight so that FDR could receive popular support for entering the war on the Soviet Union’s side. The responsibility for such a task was put on the back of the OWI (Office of War Information). Understanding the relationship between this agency and Hollywood can help shed light the objectives of pro-Soviet films released between 1942 and 1945. (Andrei Cojoc)

North Star 1943, starring Anne Baxter, Walter Houston, Dana Andrews and Walter Brennan.

According to Andrei Cojoc, “The highlight of the movie is the resistance fight of the heroic villagers, portrayed by an all American cast”.

The movie was decidedly pro-Soviet, pro-Communist describing Nazi repression in rural Ukraine. A variation of  “The International” was used as background music: “Comrades our people are at war… The Germans are 50 miles away.”

There was no “Russia Probe” in 1943.  “I am a guerrilla fighter of the Soviet Union”.

The Soviet people were described as freedom fighters. “It is our land, we swear to give our lives…”

Hollywood was recounting the courageous battle of villagers against Nazi Germany with the support of the Red Army and how the heroic Soviet peasantry was resisting Nazi occupation.

Every major studio (except Paramount) submitted its share of pro-Soviet movies: Samuel Goldwin’s North Star (1943), MGM’s Song of Russia (1943), United Artist’s Three Russian Girls (1943), Warner’s Mission to Moscow (1943), RKo’s Days of Glory (1944), Columbia’s Boy from Stalingrad (1943) and Counter Attack (1945). The three most important pillars of pro-Soviet propaganda emerged in 1943: The North Star, Song of Russia and Mission to Moscow. (Ibid)

Produced by Samuel Goldwyn, the Screenplay was written by Lillian Hellman. The concluding words of Marina (Ann Baxter) shed a light of hope:

“We will make this the last war, We will make a Free World for All Men. The Earth belongs to us, the people, if we fight for it and we will fight for it…” (1.44′)

 

North Star 1943. MGM View Movie in full 1.46′

 

Author’s conclusion:

Dump Russia-Gate and the Russia Probe,

Restore sanity in US foreign policy, reestablish diplomatic dialogue with Moscow, say no to World War III.

Wishful thinking? Enlist Hollywood in waging a “propaganda for peace”


The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

America’s hegemonic project in the post 9/11 era is the “Globalization of War” whereby the U.S.-NATO military machine —coupled with covert intelligence operations, economic sanctions and the thrust of “regime change”— is deployed in all major regions of the world. The threat of pre-emptive nuclear war is also used to black-mail countries into submission.

This “Long War against Humanity” is carried out at the height of the most serious economic crisis in modern history.

It is intimately related to a process of global financial restructuring, which has resulted in the collapse of national economies and the impoverishment of large sectors of the World population.

The ultimate objective is World conquest under the cloak of “human rights” and “Western democracy”.

Click here to order.

At the moment pdf version only

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In a video that is sure to give anyone hope, an 11-year-old girl calls out Klaus Schwab and the plans of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in one of the most intelligent and well-spoken deliveries that would flaw even some of the greatest speakers in history.

In her almost eight-minute speech, the girl unveils the plans that the globalist elites are wanting to unleash on us – medical tyranny and complete control through digital money – of which could be cut off at their leisure.

There are literally thousands of “white papers” that have been released by globalist organizations, like the WEF and the United Nations (UN) that clearly state what they have in store for humanity – and it isn’t anything good.

The UN has recently said that they are not under the control of any “Global Elites who run the world” but the very fact that they even acknowledged it in the first place, shows they probably are – why else would they want to push people to “report” “conspiracy theorists” who spread these “lies.”

The fact is, there is a global elite who turn the wheels of humanity to wherever they want it to go, they literally own everything – all the media, the food supply, the supply of oil, gas and energy and our financial systems. Not to mention the politicians that they lobby to push legislation that would be heavily gaged in their favor.

The courage and tenacity of this young girl should be appreciated by all, and should at least inspire enough hope to resist these tyrants who want complete destruction of the world – she has the courage, so should we.

 

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As the tension between the US and China mounts as a fall-out of Nancy Pelosi’s provocative Taiwan visit, the technology war between the two is also taking a new turn. Both houses in the US Congress have approved a $280 billion plan – The Chips and Science Act – to boost US chip manufacturing. Currently, 75 per cent of chip manufacturing in the world takes place in East Asia, centred around Taiwan, South Korea and China. The US aims to re-shore the semiconductor industry back to the US. It also hopes to revive the fortunes of its chip manufacturers like Intel, once upon a time the king of chip manufacturing, currently fighting not to become another has-been like IBM.

While the plan offers various carrots to the semiconductor industry in the US, termed by some as “corporate handouts”, it also comes with some substantial stick. Any company availing of its $52.7 billion subsidies for locating computer chip manufacturing in the US is prohibited from expanding or upgrading their advanced chipmaking facilities in China. As a result, companies like Samsung and SK Hynix, two major chip manufacturers who have made substantial investments in China, will now have to choose between walking away from these investments or not availing of the US subsidies.

Meanwhile, China has also not been sitting on its hands, waiting for the US to ratchet up its sanctions on its high-tech ambitions in this area. Recognising that the semiconductor industry, particularly advanced chipmaking, is a key area of struggle, it has made a major advance in manufacturing. SMIC, the Shanghai-based chip manufacturer, released its 7nm chips, which have been in the market for the last 12 months. Currently, only Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung have succeeded in manufacturing 7nm chips. Dylan Patel, a leading tech analyst, has written, “China’s SMIC is shipping a foundry process with commercially available chips in the open market which are more advanced than any American or European company…The most advanced American or European foundry produced chips are based on GlobalFoundries 12nm.” SMIC is the world’s fifth largest chip manufacturer.

The astonishing progress in computational power of electronic chips comes from our ability to pack more and more components into a silicon chip. This is known as Moore’s Law and has continued for the last five decades. A measure of the increased density of components in chips is the size of the transistors being created within the silicon chip. Therefore 14nm, 7nm, and 5nm are an indication of the size of the components in the chip and a measure of its computing power.

Lithography is a critical process in chipmaking and is used to create patterns on silicon wafers using ultraviolet (UV) light. The thinner the line that the lithographic machine creates on the silicon wafer, the more the devices that can be packed into a chip. Each of the measures, 14nm, 7nm, 5nm, etc., is a measure of the density of devices on the chip. The more devices we pack into a chip, the more its computing power and its power consumption.

I have written earlier in these columns about chip manufacturing and the importance of tools, specifically the Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUV) machines from ASML, the requisite for moving beyond the 14nm chips. It is not that older Deep Ultraviolet Lithography (DUV) machines cannot create higher densities. But the productivity of DUV machines to produce 10nm or 7nm chips is lower than with EUV technology. And going to 5nm or 3nm is not possible without EUV lithography.

ASML of Netherlands is the only maker of EUV machines in the world. As ASML’s EUV machine light source that creates the chip patterns is made by an American company, technically, it comes under US regulations. Though ASML was quite unhappy to lose a part of its China market, it has accepted that it will not supply EUV machines to China. For now, it can still continue to supply DUV machines to China, but this may also change in the future.

The US had believed that without EUV lithographic machines, the Chinese manufacturers would not be able to produce chips below 14nm. The SMIC 7nm chip has therefore blown a big hole in this assumption.

While DUV lithographic tools can create a high degree of packing of devices on a chip, it requires many more runs and a more complex set of operations to achieve such results. This is how lithographic machines for creating 28nm chips could produce 14 nm chips. This is the same process Intel and others have been trying for some time: use DUV technology to create 10nm or 7nm chips. SMIC is the first to successfully use DUV machines for creating 7nm chips.

It still does not put SMIC in the same bracket as Taiwan’s TSMC or South Korea’s Samsung, which already use EUV technology. But it still puts SMIC ahead of the rest of the pack. It also allows China to compete with products in the market using 7nm chips, as hundreds of its leading companies have come under US sanctions, including Huawei and SMIC. The US interpretation of its powers is that if any company uses US technology, under the US Foreign Direct Product Rule, it must obey the US sanctions regime. That is why ASML’s machines are under the US sanctions regime; as also any product manufactured using such machines. Therefore TSMC or Samsung, who use EUV machines from ASML, also cannot export any of their advanced chips to entities in China under the US sanctions regime.

There has been criticism that the 7nm chip from SMIC is only a copy of the TSMC chip and therefore does not show any major advance. While it is indeed a simple chip meant for cryptocurrency mining, according to TechInsights, its importance is that it is a stepping stone for “achieving a “true 7nm process”.

On the flip side is that China cannot go to 5 or 3nm technology without EUV lithographic machines. Currently, it is able to import DUV machines from ASML. Apart from ASML, two Japanese companies, Canon and Nikon, also manufacture DUV machines. So, where is China in manufacturing lithographic machines?

China has built indigenous capability in manufacturing chip manufacturing machines for some time, with Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment – or SMEE – as its leading manufacturer. SMEE had announced that it would release its first 28nm DUV machine in 2022, which can be used for 14nm chip manufacture. As SMIC has shown, it can then be used for also manufacturing 7nm chips. There is still no announcement from SMEE’s DUV machine of a supply date, which would be crucial for China’s ability to set up large-scale chip manufacturing indigenously.

The world’s semiconductor industry is clearly at a crossroads with the risk of the global supply chain splitting into two competing blocks, one led by the US and the other by China. The US semiconductor industry had argued that if such a split happens, then the US, which has a commanding lead in a number of technology areas today, will lose this lead in 5-10 years as a huge part of its profits and, therefore, R&D investments, are financed from their Chinese sales. Losing that market will mean that China will face a temporary setback but the US will permanently lose its leadership. This is why ASML’s CEO Peter Wennink has said the export restrictions regime that the US is forcing on the industry would not work.

The bulk of the chip market is not for the more advanced chips. According to a report published by the Boston Consulting Group/Semiconductor Industry Association (BCG/SIA) in late 2020, chips less than 10nm density are only 2 per cent of the market, even though they are the most glamorous and figure in the latest laptops and mobile phones. The bulk of the market is in chips for which China already has the technology or can play catch up with its investments in research and in building the entire supply chain, including chip fabrication and even DUV machines. According to the BCG/ SIA report, the smart way for the west to “combat” China would be to restrict the sanctions to only military tech and, from the profits from the rest, finance the R&D expenditure of the US companies. Without these profits, US companies will not be able to finance their future development.

But with “politics in command” in the US and a bi-partisan war hysteria being whipped up, the US seems to prefer the carrot and stick approach: carrot for investing in chip manufacture in the US; and the stick for any company setting up production in China. If the Covid-19 pandemic damaged the semiconductor supply chain leading to a chip shortage in 2021, the supply chain shock in the future is going to be from the US sanctions regime. The belief that the US can restrict the trade war only to sectors where they have a technical edge is the other weakness of the US strategy. It leaves open the possibility of asymmetric responses from China. “May you live in interesting times” is supposedly a traditional Chinese curse. The world appears to be entering such a phase, starting with the US-China chip war.

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How many Chinese fought in the Civil War? That is, the U.S. Civil War, 1861-1865?

As Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi sticks her nose into the Taiwan Strait, this is an interesting and illuminating question to ponder. Second in line to the U.S. presidency, Pelosi’s August 2 visit to Taiwan is the highest-level trip there since her predecessor, the rabidly reactionary ex-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s foray a quarter of a century ago to this island still claimed by Beijing, located about 100 miles east of the Chinese mainland.

As CovertAction Bulletin reported,

“1979 was the last time that a U.S. head of state or member of the ruling party visited Taiwan. Since the 1970s the official policy of the U.S. has been the One China policy, and this visit undermines this very policy.”

In Taipei, Pelosi met with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and addressed the parliament as part of her Asia jaunt at taxpayer expense, which has greatly upset the People’s Republic of China—as if our beleaguered planet did not already have enough problems to deal with.

A Reuters report uses words such as “enraged” (in the headline) and “furious” to describe Beijing’s reaction to Pelosi’s interloper excursion and quoted China’s foreign ministry as saying the trip “has a severe impact on the political foundation of China-U.S. relations, and seriously infringes upon China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

The Washington Post reported:

“China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs added of Pelosi’s trip that ‘China firmly opposes and sternly condemns this, and has made serious démarche [a complaint through diplomatic channels] and strong protest to the United States.’”

The Post added:

“Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said at a meeting in Shanghai that U.S. politicians who are ‘playing with fire’ on the issue of Taiwan will ‘come to no good end,’ according to a transcript released by the Foreign Ministry.” Wang has also called the U.S. “the world’s biggest saboteur of peace.”

Echoing this sentiment, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying tweeted:

“Making themselves an enemy of the 1.4 billion Chinese people will not end up well. Acting like a bully in front of the whole world will only make everyone see that the U.S. is the biggest danger to world peace.”

During a two-hour-plus phone call on July 28 between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden, Xi warned in no uncertain terms:

“The position of the Chinese government and people on the Taiwan question is consistent, and resolutely safeguarding China’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity is the firm will of the more than 1.4 billion Chinese people. The public opinion cannot be defied. Those who play with fire will perish by it. It is hoped that the U.S. will be clear-eyed about this. The U.S. should honor the one-China principle…”

According to its Defense Ministry, the PRC has ramped up “targeted military operations” that “include joint air and sea drills in the north, southwest and southeast of Taiwan, long-range live firing in the Taiwan Strait, and missile test-launches in the sea east of Taiwan, the [People’s Liberation Army’s] Eastern Theatre Command said.”

Media commentators have used the “B” word to describe Beijing’s strategic response, with the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post stating: “China is set to launch an unprecedented military drill that effectively blockades Taiwan until Sunday afternoon following U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island.” Some economic sanctions, too, are being imposed on Taipei.

East Meets West Meets Geopolitical Gamesmanship

After a circuitous route, Pelosi arrived in Taipei aboard a U.S. Air Force passenger jet where she was met by Taiwan Foreign Minister Joseph Wu. According to the U.K.’s Daily Mail:

“Eight U.S. F-15 fighter jets and five tanker aircraft took off from a U.S. base in Okinawa to provide protection for Pelosi’s flight, NHK reported.”

The Military Times noted:

“U.S. officials have said the American military will increase its movements in the Indo-Pacific region during Pelosi’s visit. The aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and its strike group were in the Philippine Sea on Monday, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military operations.”

President Tsai Ing-wen gave Pelosi “an award… on behalf of the Congress, the ‘Order of Propitious Clouds with Special Grand Cordon,’” Taipei’s highest civilian honor.

Pelosi’s reckless, completely unnecessary pot-stirring brinkmanship has been met with disapproval and sparked controversy at home. According to The Washington Post:

“Virtually all the senior members of President Biden’s national security team have privately expressed deep reservations about the trip and its timing, said a White House official.”

“The arrogance of power is especially ominous and despicable when a government leader risks huge numbers of lives in order to make a provocative move on the world’s geopolitical chessboard. Nancy Pelosi’s plan to visit Taiwan is in that category. Thanks to her, the chances of a military confrontation between China and the United States have spiked upward,” observed longtime peace activist and author Norman Solomon.

Even late-night comic Trevor Noah chimed in on The Daily Show:

“Nancy Pelosi is going to get us all killed… Now’s not a good time to start World War III.” (Uh Trev, is there ever a good time?)

Civil and Uncivil Wars

Why is Pelosi blithely playing with fire and acting like the proverbial “bull in a China shop”?

Let’s circle back to this commentary’s original question: How many Chinese fought in the U.S. Civil War? This may sound facetious, but some 58 Chinese, almost all immigrants and none of them known to be officials of the Middle Kingdom, actually did see military action during the War Between the States, mostly in the Union Army and Navy.

Oddly, two sons of the Siamese twins Chang and Eng—who rose to fame and fortune through the Barnum and Bailey Circus and owned slaves on a farm in North Carolina—fought for Dixie, as did three other Chinese men.

Chinese Yankee by Ruthanne Lum McCunn tells the true story of Hong Kong-born Thomas Sylvanus (Ah Yee Way), an orphan brought to America for schooling in the mid-1850s, but enslaved in Baltimore. Only sixteen at the outbreak of war, Thomas ran north, joined the Freedom Army, and was blinded in the first major campaign. He failed to fully recover his sight and, deemed incapable of performing the duties of a soldier, was discharged. Yet he re-enlisted twice, saved his regiment’s colors during the bloodbath of Spotsylvania, was lamed at Cold Harbor, and survived nine months’ imprisonment in the dreaded Andersonville stockade.

Having said this in the interest of historical accuracy, the fact is that out of the millions of Americans who fought for the North and South during the Civil War, only a miniscule handful were of Chinese ancestry, and none is known to have officially represented the Chinese government. Nor did Empress Dowager Cixi or other powerful Forbidden City leaders travel during 1861-1865 to Washington or Richmond, the Confederacy’s capital, to intervene in the U.S. Civil War.

Furthermore, in the summer of 1861, Secretary of State William Seward sternly cautioned against foreign intervention in America’s domestic affairs while the Union fought the secessionists, boldly warning: “If any European Power provokes a war, we shall not shrink from it. A contest between Great Britain and the United States would wrap the world in fire.” (Note that Seward doesn’t even so much as mention China in his warning.)

Pelosi’s Background of Power and Privilege

On the other hand, imperialists like Nancy Pelosi have absolutely no idea that they are perpetually meddling in other people’s affairs and should mind their own business. They are not cognizant of it; the notion does not even cross their cerebral cortex. Like the Europeans who crisscrossed the world, claiming and conquering lands whether their inhabitants wanted to be dominated or not, it simply never occurs to interlopers like Pelosi that they have absolutely no right to stick their noses where they do not belong.

Multi-millionaires and powerful pols like Pelosi are so convinced of their superiority, inevitability and indispensability that they have absolutely no understanding they are overstepping their boundaries because, in their limitless self-esteem and self-conception, the world is their oyster.

The snooty Pelosi is so self-assured of her own sense of entitlement that she is often dismissive of the free press, treating reporters rudely if they dare question her royal highness. What is the source of Madam Speaker’s high self-regard?

Pelosi, who has served in Congress longer than any other California Democrat, is a creature of power and privilege who was born into the D’Alesandro dynasty. The 82-year-old’s father Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., served as a Democratic congressman (1939-1947) and mayor of Baltimore (1947-1959)—a position her brother also held.

Young Nancy managed the book of people who owed her father political favors and attended JFK’s inauguration.

After relocating by 1969 to the West Coast, Pelosi, who holds a degree from Trinity College in Washington, D.C., became a Democratic Party fundraiser and then state party chairwoman. In 1987, at the age of 47 after her two kids had gone off to college, Pelosi first ran for Congress in California’s 5th Congressional District (long represented by liberal firebrand Phillip Burton) where her posh home was not even located, so her husband, moneybags Paul Pelosi, bought a new home in upper-class Pacific Heights so she would qualify to represent the district in which she was running.

According to the New York Post, Paul ran a “venture capital and investment firm Financial Leasing Services Inc. Over the years he’s made countless bets on high-profile companies his wife is supposed to regulate, like Amazon, Apple and Google.”[1]

According to Time political correspondent and Pelosi biographer Molly Ball:

“Pelosi’s most formidable rival [in 1987’s special election] would be Harry Britt, a gay socialist former aide to Harvey Milk who had succeeded Milk on the Board of Supervisors. The AIDS crisis was at its height, ravaging the community. Britt had a chance to be the first openly gay man elected to Congress in history, at a time when President Reagan refused even to acknowledge the disease. It was time, Britt contended, for gay men and women to be represented by one of their own, not merely a sympathetic outsider.”

Thus, during the AIDS epidemic, Pelosi went to Washington by running to the right of and defeating an LGBTQ founder and vice chair of Democratic Socialists of America 36% to 32% in a three-way race.

To be fair, Pelosi has done some good in her time in Congress—she opposed the Iraq war and the Bush administration’s efforts to privatize Social Security, for example, was one of the House architects behind the 1994 assault weapons ban, helped pass the Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank bill regulating Wall Street and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Repeal Act allowing gays to serve openly in the military and ripped up a copy of President Trump’s “State of the Union” speech on live TV.

However, Pelosi has also served as the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, rubber-stamping criminal CIA covert interventions. Although she is viewed as a doyenne of the Democratic Party’s liberal wing, this prototypical “corporate liberal” attained power by, according to a Britt campaign brochure, taking donations from “oil companies, highrise developers, Washington lobbyists and other special interests” in order to defeat a candidate far to her Left.

Profiteer Pelosi, the Free Marketeer

Although she has flip-flopped on the issue, Newsweek reports:

“Pelosi said she was against prohibiting lawmakers from owning and trading individual stocks. ‘We are a free market economy,’ she said. ‘They should be able to participate in that.’”

Newsweek notes:

“Pelosi has so far disclosed 48 transactions made by her family worth more than $50 million… Pelosi is currently one of the 25 wealthiest members of Congress, according to Business Insider.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a DSA member, tweeted:

“It is absolutely ludicrous that members of Congress can hold and trade individual stock while in office. The access and influence we have should be exercised for the public interest, not our profit. It shouldn’t be legal for us to trade individual stock with the info we have.”

According to one of AOC’s hometown newspapers, the right-wing New York Post, “the speaker—whose estimated worth tops $100 million—and hubby Paul Pelosi have amassed as much as $30 million from Big Tech stock trades, even as she’s supposed to be regulating that industry… The rules guard against conflict-of-interest trading by congressional staff, and some lawmakers acknowledge the conflict (for themselves as well as her) and want to ban lawmakers and their families from trading stocks. Yet Pelosi defends the practice.”

A Chip Off the Old Blockhead

The Post also observes:

“From 2007 to 2020, the speaker and her spouse raked in between $5.6 million and $30.4 million (the rules don’t even require exact disclosure) from just five Big Tech firms: Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft.”

Microsoft has been one of Pelosi’s top campaign contributors, donating $113,822 to her since 1989.

Congress may have dropped the ball on the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and Biden’s Build Back Better Act but, in July 2022, Congress somehow managed to pass the $52 billion Pelosi-backed CHIPS Act of 2022to strengthen domestic semiconductor manufacturing.

According to the Australian Broadcasting Corp., during her Taipei foray, Pelosi “said a U.S. bill on computer chips was a good opportunity for more cooperation with Taiwan.”

The world’s number 1 and 3 largest manufacturing companies that produce the microchips that power Big Tech, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and United Microelectronics Corporation, are based in Taiwan. Mere coincidence or self-dealing? Could this have something to do with Pelosi’s insistence on going to Taiwan, even if it means upsetting the international apple cart? Hmmm, inquiring minds want to know…

Perpetual Busybodies, Endlessly Intervening in Others’ Internal Affairs

It never dawns on one percenters like Pelosi, who have such high opinions of themselves, that they simply do not belong in a quarrel on the other side of the world. The distance between Taipei and San Francisco is 6,449 miles; between Taipei and Washington, D.C., 7,864 miles.

The closest U.S. territory to Taiwan is the American colony of Guam—one-third owned and operated by the Pentagon—located 1,711 miles away, while Hawaii—where the U.S. military owns and operates 21% of Oahu, including Pearl Harbor—is 5,142 miles from Taipei.

Imperialist busybodies like Pelosi need to mind their own business, and let the people of China, as well as the Formosans (the Indigenous people of Taiwan who are almost always left out of the discussion) settle their own differences and disputes among themselves.

As we can clearly see by this latest outsider incursion, this foreign intrusion into what are essentially domestic matters and squabbles only exacerbate and heighten their problems. (Hey, how did those Iraq and Afghanistan invasions end up working out?)

Furthermore, these eternal trespassers want to do so without being held accountable for their encroachments. Thus, like Orwellian Newspeak, we are now witnessing the birth of new definitions. Consider this France 24 headline: “White House warns China against escalation over Pelosi’s… Taiwan visit”

Now, words like “escalation” and “retaliation” mean how a country that has been provoked by a superpower provocateur dares to respond to the offending party’s provocative actions. In this imperialist doublethink, countermeasures to blatant provocations are characterized as “escalation.” MSNBC hack Andrea Mitchell chimed in, insisting that no matter what Pelosi did, “They [PRC] started it!” The imperialists sure can dish it out, but they cannot take it. The elite must never ever be held accountable for their actions.

Although the U.S. media correctly point out that the People’s Republic of China considers Taiwan to be a “breakaway, renegade” province of China proper that is now “self-ruled,” I have not seen/heard/watched a single report that discussed the Chinese Revolution that spawned this conundrum and split.

In a nutshell, the Chinese Civil War was fought between the USSR-backed Chinese Communist Party and the U.S.-backed Kuomintang (KMT) from about 1927 to 1949, pitting China’s peasants and workers against its elite. In 1949, the CCP led by Chairman Mao Zedong triumphed and, with its tails between its legs, the KMT, led by Chiang Kai-shek, a man of legendary corruption, fled across the Taiwan Strait and established a military dictatorship on that island, where martial law lasted almost four decades.

Now Pelosi, an old Cold Warrior whose world view was formed during the 1950s, is using a retread of the tired old anticommunist sloganeering, which in the past pit “the free world” against “communism” and “Red China.”

Although the CCP still politically rules the PRC, given China’s tremendous market reforms and development, Pelosi currently rephrases the tired old Cold War mantra as: “America’s solidarity with the 23 million people of Taiwan is more important today than ever, as the world faces a choice between autocracy and democracy.”

Which part of our much-vaunted system do the Pelosis of the world want to export to China, et al.? The electoral college? The fact that Americans have no direct vote for president? The unelected Supreme Court with life tenure that is stripping away our rights and freedoms?

The Senate filibuster and other measures such as two senators per state, no matter what the size of their population, enables minority rule? The right to purchase weapons of war to perpetrate mass slaughter in our schools, malls, places of worship, July 4th parades, the Las Vegas strip, etc.? Student debt? Earth’s highest incarceration rate in the land of the “free”?

To return to the U.S. Civil War metaphor, in reality, Madam Speaker is following in the footsteps of Madame Chiang, and backing the side that would be equivalent to the Confederacy.

U.S. ruling circles may be alarmed at how “aggressive” modern China has supposedly become, but if one were to compare Beijing’s military posture to that of Washington’s incessantly interventionist foreign policy and militarism, with 750-plus bases girdling the globe and endless invasions, colossal Pentagon budgets, drone warfare, covert ops, cruel sanctions and so on, it would be laughable. In the 21st century alone, America has slaughtered at least hundreds of thousands of human beings with completely unnecessary wars inflicted in Iraq and dubious other military adventures throughout the Middle East, Afghanistan and beyond. China’s military stance and defense budget is truly dwarfed by that of the bloody American empire, willy-nilly endlessly interfering around the world, as arguably the most destabilizing force in the world today, pursuing the same outdated Cold War strategy and realpolitik it has essentially practiced since 1949, still pitting Washington against Beijing and Moscow.

Running Dogs

Like all bullies Washington hates to pick on somebody its own size. The nuclear-armed United States prefers to invade smaller, helpless countries—Reagan’s counterinsurgency in Central America and the invasion of tiny Grenada are the more cowardly America’s speed.

But when it comes to other big powers like Russia and China, perpetually throwing your weight around does not always work. Taunting and bullying will only get you so far. After the Bush regime promised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not “move one inch east of Germany,” starting in the 1990s, Boris Yeltsin and then Vladimir Putin began warning the West against NATO expansion that eventually pushed right up to Russia’s borders.

When somebody is nuclear-armed and dangerous like Putin, it is incumbent upon wise statesmanship to listen to what your adversary is telling you and warning you against. This is not in any way to justify (but perhaps to explain) Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but a clear failure of statecraft and diplomacy led to this horrific turn of events.

Now, not content with triggering a war involving Moscow, entitled globetrotters like Nancy Pelosi traipse around the planet on the taxpayers’ dime and pick a fight with another mighty nuclear power with substantial armed forces. Unlike Grenada, China can fight back and will not be pushed around.

What is really behind Washington’s anxiety is that China seems to be on the rise, while America is in decline. To be sure, the PRC—like the U.S.—is an imperfect entity with lots of room for improvement. Critics could point to Hong Kong, the Uyghurs, mass surveillance, the zero-tolerance Covid policy, policies toward Taiwan and much more. But this is really absolutely none of America’s business. Should Beijing, Moscow, et al., base their foreign relations with Washington on the mistreatment of George Floyd, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor and the countless other African Americans slaughtered and abused by U.S. law enforcement?

And just as Western policy makers triggered the Russian bear, when it comes to the Pelosis of the world, rash decision makers who misbehave like pitbulls in China shops may learn the hard way that when it comes to China, if you travel from afar to smash a beehive with a baseball bat, you just might get stung. In the immortal words that may have originated with East German youth at a 1950 Berlin march: “Yankee, Go Home!” And while you’re at it, fix your own troubled household, instead of searching for endless enemies and troublemaking abroad.

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Ed Rampell is an L.A.-based film historian and critic who also reviews culture, foreign affairs and current events. Ed can be reached at [email protected].

Note

1. Most recently DUI Paul has been in the news for his drunk driving escapades.

Featured image is from The Cradle

The Hypocrisy of the Assange Case

August 9th, 2022 by Milagros Pichardo Pérez

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One count of conspiring to receive national defense information, seven counts of obtaining that information, nine counts of disclosing it, and one count of conspiring to access a computer.

It sounds like a tongue twister, but it is not. Those are the charges against Australian journalist Julian Assange, a total of 17 which will probably turn into 175 years in prison, if he is eventually extradited to the United States.

He sounds like a very bad boy, a real, Hollywood-style criminal. Of course, from the United States’ standpoint. If WikiLeaks had revealed the war horrors of any other country, Assange would be a hero, not a criminal.

Or if any other nation were moving land and sea to secure the extradition of a journalist who revealed civilian deaths, acts of torture and clandestine military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through thousands of documents, then that country would engage in “political persecution” that goes against “freedom of the press” and “represses the media.”

However, since the horrors and violations revealed in those documents were committed by the United States, then that nation “acts in accordance with the law.” This is hypocrisy.

Assange has been confined in the United Kingdom for more than ten years now. First in the Ecuadorian Embassy in that country and, when former President Lenín Moreno withdrew his refuge in 2019, the journalist remains ever since in the high security prison of Belmarsh, east of London.

Although he is not accused of any charges after serving a 50-week jail sentence for violating a bail in 2012, the British justice system decided to keep him locked up until the extradition case presented by the U.S. prosecution is concluded.

It has been years of struggle by his defense to avoid extradition, which would mean the total annihilation of what Assange has represented for those who dream of a world where war crimes and interference and hegemonic actions do not go unpunished; or at least, do not stay in the dark.

If he sets foot in the United States, not only will his life be in danger, but an alarming precedent will be set for investigative journalists. It would be a direct blow to that banner he is trying to sell: freedom of the press and free speech.

Assange’s team of lawyers has managed to delay that moment that already seems closer with the approval of extradition by the British government, more than a month ago. His legal hopes are running out, however, the support of intellectuals and activists worldwide for his release is growing daily.

Even the President of Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador directly asked his counterpart Joe Biden to release the founder of the WikiLeaks portal, to whom he “opens the doors of his country,” and described him as “the best journalist of our time.” He also considered that the treatment he has received only “for denouncing human rights violations” is worse than that of a criminal.

The Mexican president insisted that the United Nations should pronounce itself on this case. In fact, the UN special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, has denounced on numerous occasions that Assange has been subjected to psychological torture. Following the British government’s decision, he said it was another blow to press freedom. “How far have we sunk?” he questioned.

Independent, serious journalism, as Assange did, is a serious threat to the hegemony of the West, which has historically controlled information. For that reason, when crimes committed by the powerful are revealed, there is nothing left but to appeal to double standards and hypocrisy.

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Guest is Dr. Ariyana Love, a Naturopathic Doctor & Investigative Journalist. Her elder son was vaccine injured at age two and diagnosed with High Functioning Autism at age 7. She applied her knowledge of Naturopathic Medicine and designed a dietary protocol that resulted in a near total reversal of her son’s debilitating symptoms. In 2017, she was awarded the official title of Goodwill Ambassador to Palestine via the Palestinian Authorities.

In this session, she talks about Covid-19 vaccine-patents and how they’re able to target and permanently delete genetic codes on genetic lineages in humans, and also encode new genetic sequences into the genome of targeted cells – about the role of gene-deletion in Autism or AIDS. Further, she discusses about the 115 different animal venoms contained within the “spike protein” (“Glycoprotein S”) and about the transmissibility of this bioweapon using graphene oxide nanoparticles as vectors. “They are not using viruses in any vaccines. It’s always been deadly bacteria extractions, like E. coli, to create lab generated Mycoplasmas and this is the root cause of all chronic illness.”

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Featured image is a screenshot from the video

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Video: COVID-19 Vaccine Patents and Gene-Deletion. Dr. Ariyana Love Interviewed by Dr. Reiner Fuellmich

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In addition to escalating brinkmanship with Russia and China, President Joe Biden’s administration is flirting with war against Iran. The clearest evidence of this includes the ever expanding “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign, as well as the development of a U.S.-led, NATO style alliance encircling Iran. There is also ample support for Israel’s incessant drone strikes, assassinations, and ceaseless bombings of allegedly Iranian targets in Syria.

Last month, Biden traveled to the region to publicly genuflect before the rulers of America’s cherished Gulf tyrannies and apartheid Israel. The aforementioned burgeoning alliance topped his agenda.

In May, Tel Aviv’s U.S. taxpayer subsidized military murdered Shireen Abu Akleh, a world renowned Al Jazeera journalist, a Palestinian Christian, and American citizen. During a raid on the occupied West Bank’s Jenin refugee camp, the Israeli Occupation Forces shot her in the face while she was wearing a press vest. They also attacked her funeral procession, attempting to knock her casket to the ground while mourners were carrying it.

But Biden, “Israel’s man in Washington,” got off the plane at Ben Gurion airport and said our bilateral relationship is “bone-deep.” And speaking for the “vast majority” of Americans, he stated emphatically we are “completely devoted to Israel’s security without any ifs, ands, or buts—without any doubts about it.”

He went on to sign a joint declaration with acting Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid committing the U.S. to use all of its “national power” to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

During an interview ahead of his Israel visit, Biden said he would use force, threatening war against Iran “as a last resort.” It is not enough for the Israelis, they demand an “offensive” and “credible” military threat against Iran. Lapid called it “the real thing.”

Biden refuses to lift the necessary sanctions to return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal, which means at least the brutal economic war on Iran will persist in perpetuity. This week, Biden levied fresh sanctions on Iran. Biden’s issuance of sanctions has become more frequent in recent months and ever since the other members of the P5+1 began approaching a finalized deal.

As Dave DeCamp, news editor at Antiwar.com, reported,

The U.S. on Monday issued fresh sanctions against Iran meant to target the Islamic Republic’s oil and petrochemical sales to East Asia.

The new sanctions targeted three Chinese firms and one UAE firm accused of doing business with the Persian Gulf Petrochemical Industry Commercial Co. (PGPICC), which the U.S. Treasury Department says is one of Iran’s largest petrochemical brokers.

According to the Treasury Department, PGPICC facilitated the “sale of tens of millions of dollars worth of Iranian petroleum and petrochemical products from Iran to East Asia” through the firms that were hit with sanctions.

The sanctions are the latest sign that the Biden administration is not serious about reviving the Iran nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA. On Monday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was asked if the U.S. was ready to return to JCPOA, but he sidestepped the questions and put the responsibility on Iran.

Donald Trump and Biden’s “maximum pressure” campaign has led to 40-50% inflation rates and medical shortages. Washington has deliberately suffocated the Iranian people, almost half of whom live below the poverty line.

Last year, former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told Biden his “strategic vision” for Iran was “death by a thousand cuts,” or myriad military and diplomatic attacks, as well as clandestine attacks, “the gray-area stuff.” Bennett went on to demand U.S. troops remain indefinitely in both Syria and Iraq.

But the decades of lies and unsubstantiated assertions by hawks about Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons may remain a useable casus belli. Americans aware of Israel’s arsenal, which includes 200or more nuclear weapons and makes U.S. aid illegal, are considerably outnumbered statistically by those who falsely believe Iran has the bomb. The Iranians have never sought nuclear arms, and they recently reiterated twice that they have the technical capability but, despite their encirclement, Tehran has chosen not to take this course. The development of such weapons is haram under Islamic law, forbidden by the Ayatollah Khamenei’s fatwah.

However, this was never about the phony threat of Iran nuking Israel. The Iranians’ latent threat is unacceptable for Tel Aviv because it may finally restrict the Israelis’ ability to attack their neighbors with impunity, the way they bomb Syria every week.

In the book Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, Scott Horton, the Libertarian Institute’s Director, explains,

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his then-defense minister, the former prime minister Ehud Barak, admitted in 2010 that even if Iran were hypothetically to gain atomic weapons, the Israelis were not afraid the Ayatollah would attack them in a first strike, as they constantly tell the public. Instead they were merely concerned that it would limit their “freedom of action” against other regional adversaries, such as Hezbollah, and could cause a “brain drain” of talented young Israelis to the United States. Netanyahu’s immediate predecessor, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the New York Times that, “Just as Pakistan had the bomb and nothing happened, Israel could also accept and survive Iran having the bomb.” Former Clinton administration State Department official Jamie Rubin also explained in Foreign Policy that the problem was never an Israeli fear of a first strike by Iran, but “Israel’s real fear – losing its nuclear monopoly and therefore the ability to use its conventional forces at will throughout the Middle East – is the unacknowledged factor driving its decision-making toward the Islamic Republic.”

Horton continues quoting Rubin,

[F]or Israeli leaders, the real threat from a nuclear-armed Iran is not the prospect of an insane Iranian leader launching an unprovoked nuclear attack on Israel that would lead to the annihilation of both countries. It’s the fact that Iran doesn’t even need to test a nuclear weapon to undermine Israeli military leverage in Lebanon and Syria.

Earlier this year, the Israelis simulated a massive bombing campaign over Iran, with a series of repeated airstrikes against the Iran’s civilian nuclear energy program. The drills took place over the Mediterranean Sea, spanned over 10,000 kilometers, and saw more than 100 military aircraft and navy submarines participating.

These simulations capped off a month long military exercise called Chariots of Fire which practiced for war with Iran and other contingencies. The U.S. General overseeing Central Command was in attendance. The IDF’s chief of staff has now announced the Israeli military’s primary focus is preparing an attack on Iran. In the Red Sea, the U.S. and Israel are now conducting joint war drills.

The Iran situation is another deadly indication that presidents and administrations may change, but the overall foreign policy agenda does not. Apparently, it only gets worse. The U.S. empire is in decline and the American people feel it. But the neocons and their liberal interventionist partners are holding onto their dream of a “Unipolar Moment.”

As the world adjusts to a multipolar world order, the U.S. foreign policy establishment, left and right, has picked fights with its enemies, not ours.

Americans’ only enemy is our own ruling class who would drag us into wars (proxy wars or otherwise), including with nuclear armed world powers to fulfill their desires to violently dominate the planet, funneling trillions of our dollars into the military-industrial complex. This establishment’s geopolitical and monetary schemes are destroying our nation’s future.  As the Ron Paul Institute’s Daniel McAdams recently said, “[American] foreign policy is the FED with nukes.”

We have been stuck with a bill for more than $10 trillion after more than 20 years of war and killing in the Middle East, with millions dead and tens of thousands of soldiers committing suicide. It is long past time Americans put their foot down.

We have a choice. Do we want to continue gambling on the apocalypse, fighting wars with Iran, Russia, and China in memory of the disgraced neocon Charles Krauthammer’s “Unipolar Moment?”

Or should we pursue “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none?”

The answer should be obvious.

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New Documentary: Eugenics to Pandemics

August 9th, 2022 by John Potash

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Shots puts an amusing spin on the little-known history of eugenics.

It traces the genocidal, anti-ethnic eugenics movement which resulted in the sterilization and elimination of millions.

It exposes how the wealthiest families financed the evolution of eugenics into Nazi Germany, and pushed America into perpetual wars. These families further influenced the government’s elimination of financial liability for vaccine manufacturers while simulating run-ups to the 2020 pandemic. By that year the wealthiest had bought and controlled the media, and censored medical experts that criticized government actions.

Shots illuminates how the government censored effective therapeutics, financially incentivized hospitals to adopt misleading reporting practices and deadly treatments, doubled global deaths with lockdowns, bankrupted small businesses, and allowed the most unsafe vaccines in a century.

Watch the trailer below or click here

click image to acces video

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A judicial panel Thursday consolidated more than 31 lawsuits against Merck for injuries allegedly caused by its Gardasil HPV vaccine, rejecting Merck’s argument that doing so would increase vaccine hesitancy, spread misinformation about vaccines and cause a flood of ‘meritless’ injury claims.

The lawsuits against Merck allege the pharmaceutical giant fast-tracked Gardasil through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval process and deceptively conducted clinical trials to mask serious side effects and exaggerate the vaccine’s effectiveness.

The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation said the individual lawsuits involve common questions of fact, and that “centralization in the Western District of North Carolina will serve the convenience of the parties and witnesses and promote the just and efficient conduct of the litigation.”

The judicial panel wrote:

“These personal injury actions present common questions of fact arising from allegations that plaintiffs, or their minor children, developed postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) and various other injuries as the result of an autoimmune reaction to the Gardasil vaccine, which is recommended for the prevention of certain strains of the human papillomavirus and various cancers.”

The lawsuits consist of product liability claims, claims for breach of warranty, fraud, negligence and in some cases, violations of state consumer protection laws.

“Discovery in all cases can be expected to focus on the testing, labeling, regulatory approval and marketing of Gardasil,” the judicial panel wrote.

“Centralization will eliminate duplicative discovery and prevent inconsistent pretrial rulings — particularly with respect to preemption issues under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act and Daubert issues — and will preserve the resources of the parties, their counsel and the judiciary.”

According to the order, after the motion for consolidation was filed, the panel was notified of nine other potentially related actions in six additional districts.

U.S. District Court Judge Robert J. Conrad, Jr., in 2007, was appointed to the Western District of North Carolina by President George W. Bush and will preside over the consolidated cases.

“Over the past year of intensive discovery, we’ve been able to show that Merck, manufacturer of the Gardasil vaccine, was aware that there was an unacceptable risk of neurological disorders, autoimmune diseases and particularly postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, also known as POTS,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman of Children’s Health Defense, said in a video.

Click here to watch the video.

The consolidation of all Gardasil cases in the U.S. into a single courtroom means that every child and every adult injured by the Gardasil vaccine can now argue their cases in front of a single federal judge, Kennedy said.

Merck argues cases should not be consolidated

According to the order, Merck opposed consolidating the lawsuits on several grounds. First, Merck argued that “individual issues in the cases will predominate” if the cases are consolidated, but the judicial panel was not persuaded.

“In this litigation, all plaintiffs allege that they were injured by the Gardasil vaccine in the same manner — through an autoimmune reaction caused by structural similarities between proteins in the vaccine’s antigens and within the vaccine recipient’s own cells. In view of the common issues arising from these allegations, we conclude that centralization will provide significant efficiencies,” the panel wrote.

Merck also argued informal coordination among parties of the lawsuits “has been, and would continue to be, practicable,” but the panel found “efforts to date by Merck and movants’ counsel to coordinate in a limited number of actions appear to have been only partially successful at best.”

Finally, Merck argued consolidation of the claims subject to the “Vaccine Act” would be “unprecedented” and “would attract a flood of meritless claims brought solely for the purpose of exhausting the claim process under the Vaccine Act and proceeding with tort claims in court.”

Merck was referring to the fact that claimants bringing the lawsuits were first required to go through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP), established by the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, before they could file their claims in an actual court of law.

The NVICP is a special, no-fault tribunal housed within the U.S. Court of Federal Claims that handles injury claims for 16 federally recommended vaccines. To date, the court has awarded more than $4 billion to thousands of people for vaccine injuries despite the system’s shortcomings.

In the NVICP, America’s legal system is replaced by a “special master.” The special masters who review claims are government-appointed attorneys, many of whom are former U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) attorneys.

Under the NVICP, the parents of vaccine-injured children are forced to sue the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for compensation. HHS is represented by DOJ attorneys.

It is exceptionally difficult to obtain compensation within the NVICP. The proceedings are often turned into drawn-out, contentious expert battles and the backlog of cases is substantial. Because of this, a single case can drag on for over a decade.

Payouts, including attorneys’ fees, are funded by a 75-cent tax per vaccine. There is a $250,000 cap on pain and suffering and death benefits.

Persons claiming injury from a covered vaccine may not sue the vaccine manufacturer or the healthcare provider that administered the vaccine in state or federal court unless they have exhausted the claim process in the Court of Federal Claims.

Merck asserted such claims would “overwhelm the already overburdened claim process” resulting in an “improper evasion of the intended purposes of that process.”

Merck further argued publicity surrounding the litigation would spread “misinformation” about vaccines and increase “vaccine hesitancy.”

The panel was not convinced. The judicial panel said:

“None of these arguments persuades us that centralization is not warranted. While the panel has not previously centralized actions subject to the Vaccine Act, it has previously centralized vaccine-related personal injury actions, including actions subject to an administrative exhaustion requirement.

“The Vaccine Act expressly permits claimants to file suit against vaccine manufacturers in federal court after exhausting the required claim process, and nothing in the Act […]  forbids centralization of such actions.

“Nor are we convinced by Merck’s argument that the creation of an MDL [multi-district-litigation] will encourage the filing of meritless claims, as any such claims are more appropriately brought to the attention of the transferee court.”

The court said concerns about the efficient functioning of the Vaccine Court and vaccine hesitancy are “properly raised elsewhere.”

The panel’s job, they said, was to determine if the litigation involved “common questions of fact” and whether centralization of the litigation would serve the convenience of the parties and witnesses, and “produce efficiencies for the litigants and the judiciary.”

Law firm representing plaintiffs pleased with ruling

According to a press release, lawyers from the firm Baum Hedlund Aristei & Goldman in April 2022, filed a motion to consolidate 30 vaccine lawsuits pending in district courts throughout the U.S.

As of July 28, the law firm said 48 cases were pending with at least 100 more to be filed in federal court.

In their motion for consolidation, attorneys said the central question of all of the cases was whether Gardasil can cause autoimmune disorders, whether Merck adequately warned of the vaccine’s risks and whether Gardasil caused the plaintiff’s injuries.

“We are very pleased the JPML [U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation] decided to centralize the Gardasil litigation,” said Bijan Esfandiari, Gardasil lawyer and senior shareholder at Baum Hedlund. “Efficient coordination of the multidistrict litigation makes the most sense and gives the plaintiffs the best path for seeking and obtaining justice. Our clients are looking forward to getting their day in court.”

Esfandiari, whose firm represents young men and women across the country who allege serious injuries from Gardasil, said some of the most common side effects alleged in the HPV vaccine lawsuits include:

  • autonomic dysfunction
  • complex regional pain syndrome
  • premature ovarian failure
  • fibromyalgia
  • myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome
  • orthostatic intolerance
  • POTS

According to the press release, Judge Conrad will likely schedule a conference in the near future and establish procedures for the selection of lead and co-lead counsel for the Gardasil multi-district-litigation along with the selection of the executive committee, steering committee and other positions. The court will also issue various orders on how discovery is to proceed and establish deadlines.

Attorneys anticipate the trial against Merck over its Gardasil vaccine will begin in 2023.

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Megan Redshaw is a staff attorney for Children’s Health Defense and a reporter for The Defender.

Featured image is from CHD

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “surprise” trip to Taiwan last week should be “Exhibit A” as to why interventionism is dangerous, deadly, and dumb. Though she claimed her visit won some sort of victory for democracy over autocracy, the stopover achieved nothing of the sort. It was a pointless gesture that brought us closer to military conflict with zero benefits.

As Col. Doug Macgregor said of Pelosi’s trip on a recent episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight,

“statesmanship involves advancing American interests at the least cost to the American people. None of that is in play here. … Posturing is not statesmanship.”

Pelosi’s trip was no outlier. Such counterproductive posturing is much celebrated by both parties in Washington. Neoconservative Senators Bob Menendez and Lindsey Graham were thrilled with Pelosi’s stop in Taipei and used it as a springboard to push for new legislation that would essentially declare war on China by declaring Taiwan a “major non-NATO ally.”

The “one China” policy that, while perhaps not perfect, has kept the peace for more than 40 years is to be scrapped and replaced with one sure to provoke a war. Who benefits?

Foolishly taking the US to the brink of war with Russia over Ukraine is evidently not enough for Washington’s bipartisan warmongering class. Risking a nuclear war on two fronts, with both Russia and China, is apparently the only way for Washington to show the rest of the world it’s serious.

The Washington Post’s neoconservative columnist Josh Rogin accurately captures the mindset in Washington DC with a recent article titled, “The skeptics are wrong: The US can confront both China and Russia.”

For Washington’s foreign policy “experts,” those of us who don’t believe a war with both Russia and China is a great idea are written off as “skeptics.” Count me as one of the skeptics!

During the Cold War there were times of heightened tension, but even in the darkest days the idea that nuclear war with China and the Soviet Union could be a solution was held only by only a few madmen. Now, with the ideological struggles of the Cold War a decades-old memory, such an argument makes even less sense. Yet this is what Washington is selling.

The US fighting a proxy war with Russia through Ukraine and Nancy Pelosi provoking China nearly to the point of war over Taiwan is meant to show the world how tough we are. In reality, it demonstrates the opposite. The drunken man in a bar challenging everyone to a fight is not tough. He’s foolish. He has nothing to gain and everything to lose from his display of bravado.

That is interventionism at its core: a foolish policy that provokes nothing but anger overseas, benefits no one in the US except the special interests, and leaves the rest of us much poorer and worse off.

There may be plenty to criticize about China’s government and policies. They are far from perfect, particularly in protection of civil liberties. But have we already forgotten that our own government shut down the country for two years over a virus, and then forced a huge number of Americans to take an experimental shot that is proving to be as worthless as it is dangerous? Let’s look at the log in our own eye before we start lobbing missiles overseas.

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Vital statistics during the past two and half years of the Covid-19 pandemic, indicate that nearly one million Americans died. Countless people suffered adverse effects from isolation, the loss of 22 million jobs, shuttered businesses, closed schools, and the inability to have pre-existing medical conditions treated in a timely manner. Mental disorders skyrocketed.  

Among adults, moderate to severe anxiety increased 37 percent and 30 percent for depression.

It was worse for young adults and teens; the Century Foundation states 43 percent of younger adults reported anxiety conditions. Behind this pain and suffering is a national healthcare system that has become a predatory phenomenon. Medical costs are outrageous and insurance coverage charges for every conceivable medical service and item imaginable. Most people with health insurance are denied full coverage. This has resulted in millions of Americans being placed in debt peonage and on the threshold of bankruptcy.

The question is what can be done to bring an out of control medical industrial complex into line to serve the needs of American citizens which other nations’ healthcare systems have done for decades.  The answer remains the same as it has been for the past half century. Universal healthcare.

For a nation that prides itself on being the world’s wealthiest, most innovative and technologically advanced, the US’ healthcare system is nothing less than a disaster and disgrace. Not only are Americans the least healthy among the most developed nations, but the US’ health system also ranks dead last among high-income countries. Despite rising costs and our unshakeable faith in American medical exceptionalism, average life expectancy in the US has remained lower than other OECD nations for many years and continues to decline. During the pandemic it is estimated that two to three years was lot on average life expectancy. On the other hand, before the Covid-19 pandemic, countries with universal healthcare coverage found their average life expectancy stable or slowly increasing.  The fundamental problem in Washington is that both parties have been far too beholden to the pharmaceutical, HMO and private insurance industries. Neither has made any concerted effort to reign in the corruption of corporate campaign funding and do what is sensible, financially feasible and morally correct to improve Americans’ quality of health and well-being.

The fact that our healthcare system is horribly broken is proof that moneyed interests have become so powerful to keep single-payer debate out of the media spotlight and censored. Poll after poll shows that the American public favors the expansion of public health coverage.  Other incremental proposals, including Medicare and Medicaid buy-in plans, are also widely preferred to the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare mess we are currently stuck with.

It is not difficult to understand how the dismal state of American medicine is the result of a system that has been completely sold out to the free-market ideology and the bottom line interests of drug makers, healthcare mega-corporations, and an inflated private insurance industry. How advanced and ethically sound can a healthcare system be if tens of millions of people have no access to medical care because it is financially out of their reach? At the end of 2021, 30 million Americans did not have health insurance including 9 million children. Almost 40 million more are underinsured.

The United Nations recognizes healthcare as a human right. In the 2018, former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon denounced the American healthcare system as “politically and morally wrong.”  Ki-moon belongs to a group known as The Elders founded by Nelson Mandela and funded by Sir Richard Branson and musician Peter Gabriel, a group of older wise statespersons around the world determined to tackle global crises during their remaining years and unafraid to take on the capitalist system. Among their initiatives is global universal healthcare. As it turns out, the US has been the most influential roadblock to reach that goal.

The US’ healthcare system is a public economic failure, benefiting no one except the large and increasingly consolidated insurance firms at the top that ultimately supervise the racket.  It spends twice that of any other country, making up 18 percent of national GDP in 2019. The entire system is an example of the nation’s moral deterioration that also fuels a steady rise of inequality for the past three decades.

Our political parties have wrestled with single-payer or universal healthcare for decades. Obama ran his first 2008 presidential campaign on a single-payer platform. His campaign health adviser, the late Dr. Quentin Young from the University of Illinois Medical School, was one of the nation’s leading voices calling for universal health coverage since 1986.   Among the 35 most developed OECD nations, 32 have some form of national universal care.  However, past efforts to even raise the issue have been viciously attacked. A huge army of private interests is determined to keep the public enslaved to private insurers and high medical costs. The failure of our healthcare is in no small measure due to it being a fully for-profit operation.  Consider that there are currently 907 private insurance companies in the US, which earned the industry $881 billion in 2020. Older corporate rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans argue that a single-payer or socialized medical program is unaffordable. However, not only is single-payer affordable, it will in the long-term save $2 trillion or more annually. It will end bankruptcies due to unpayable medical debt. In addition, universal healthcare, structured on a preventative model, will reduce disease rates at the outset.

During a private conversation with Dr. Young shortly before his passing in 2016, he conveyed his sense of betrayal at the hands of the Obama administration. Dr. Young was in his 80s when he joined the Obama campaign team to help lead the young Senator to victory on a promise that America would finally catch up with other nations. The doctor sounded like a defeated man. He shared how he was manipulated, and that Obama held no sincere intention to make universal healthcare a part of his administration’s agenda. During the closed-door negotiations, which spawned the weak and compromised Affordable Care Act, Dr. Young was neither consulted nor invited to participate. In fact, he told us that he never heard from Obama again after his White House victory.

The record shows that the principal parties meeting with the Obama administration were from the private insurance and medical industries. It was this cartel that created Obamacare. It was left to the charismatic Obama and bureaucrats in his administration to tailor the disingenuous narrative to convince Americans it was a spectacular public victory. Looking back, Obama’s domestic promises and accomplishments, including Obamacare, were anemic at best. His policies only further muddied the bureaucratic waters and public interests with esoteric taxes, shortsighted giveaways, and regulatory hurdles.  Meanwhile, the physical and mental health of the nation continues to erode.

Today the pharmaceutical, HMO, and insurance industries, as well as medicine’s most prominent professional associations, medical schools and Wall Street firms form a powerful force with its tentacles wrapped around the throats of politicians and the federal health agencies. In 2021, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries alone spent over half a billion dollars on lobbying Washington.

Corporate Democrats argue that Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a positive step inching the country towards complete public coverage. However, aside from providing coverage to the poorest of Americans, Obamacare turned into another financial anchor around the necks of millions more.  Since the law was enacted, the average price for a family health policy rose by $2,200. During the same period, patient out-of-pocket hospitalization costs increased to $329 billion. The ACA is riddled with loopholes benefiting the private insurers who wrote the bill. Rather than healthcare spending falling, as Obama promised, it has exploded.  Trump made matters worse. Under his administration, an additional 7 million Americans fell into medical hardship and joined the uninsured. Today, one in 10 children under 18 are uninsured, an increase of 5 percent under Obama to almost 10 percent before Biden took office. These figures are in no way indicative of a “strong economy.”

Clearly, a universal healthcare program will require flipping the script on the entire private insurance industry, which employed over half a million people last year. During the years 2015 to the end of 2018, private insurance profiles rose almost 600 percent. And profits continue to surge. Topping the list, The Guardian reported that United Healthcare Group alone earned $4.3 billion in profit during the first year of the pandemic, far beating out its expectations.  None of this extreme wealth went directly towards preventing disease. Private insurance is a middle-man scam.

Obviously, the most volatile debate concerning a national universal healthcare system concerns cost.  Although there is already a socialized healthcare system in place — every federal legislator, bureaucrat, government employee and veteran benefits from it — fiscal Republican conservatives and groups such as the Koch Brothers network, including the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University, are single-mindedly dedicated to preventing the expansion of Medicare and Medicaid. A Mercatus analysis made the outrageous claim that a single-payer system would increase federal health spending by $32 trillion in ten years. However, analyses and reviews by the Congressional Budget Office in the early 1990s concluded that such a system would only increase spending at the start; enormous savings would quickly offset it as the years pass.  In one analysis, “the savings in administrative costs [10 percent of health spending] would be more than enough to offset the expense of universal coverage.” High administrative costs overshadow all aspects of US healthcare, not just the insurance industry. Twenty-five percent of hospital spending is administrative, compared to 16 percent in the UK. In 2015, CNBC reported that $275 billion was wasted in insurance paperwork. In addition, there are billing services, which in 2012 averaged $471 billion to physicians, hospitals, supply services, and private and public insurers.  The Green Party’s Dr. Margaret Flowers, the national coordinator of Health Over Profit for Everyone, argues that a single payer system is “the best way to put private insurers on the margins of our healthcare system and to control the pharmaceutical industry” as well as their exorbitant drug prices.

Indeed, a universal healthcare system would increase federal spending. But at the same time, independent analyses indicate it would reduce the nation’s total healthcare costs, a critical goal we should strive towards. Compared to other nations, the US spends a disproportionate amount on healthcare.  According to Statistica, as of 2021, the US spent approximately $12,531 per person. However, as we will note below, this is a misleading figure. It conceals the deeper problems running through the system.  Compare this to Switzerland, the second highest per capita spender at $8,000.   After the US and Switzerland, per capita expenditures decrease dramatically, with Germany (the third highest) at $5,700.  France, Canada, Belgium, Japan, Australia and the UK each spend less than half of the US.

An investigative review published by The Atlantic found that more than half of healthcare spending goes to only five percent of patients! If this money were equally distributed, then the $12,500 per capita expenditure for every adult and child might make sense. The writer calls this tiny segment of patients who dominate health costs the “Platinum Patients.”  Most of these medical “frequent flyers” are the elderly and the chronically ill who have reached the final months or days of their lives. This is where tens of billions of dollars in care and treatment are spent annually. This segment of patients is also the most lucrative for private insurers, hospitals and doctors – patients whose charts can be larded with unnecessary diagnostic tests, drug prescriptions and medical procedures to further scam the system.

Funding a National Health Program would primarily be accomplished by raising taxes to levels comparable to other developed nations. Senator Bernie Sanders and some of the younger Democrat progressives in the House would tax the highest multimillion-dollar earners 60-70 percent. Despite the outrage of its critics, including old rank-and-file multi-millionaire Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, this is still far less than in the past. During the Korean War, the top tax rate was 91 percent; it declined to 70 percent in the late 1960s. Throughout most of the 1970s, those in the lowest income bracket were taxed at 14 percent. Life, including healthcare, was affordable then.

But Democratic supporters of the ACA who oppose a universal healthcare plan ignore the additional twenty new Obama taxes that were levied to pay for the program. These included surtaxes on investment income, Medicare taxes from those earning over $200,000, taxes on tanning services, an excise tax on medical equipment, and a 40 percent tax on health coverage for costs over the designated cap that applied to flexible savings and health savings accounts.  The entire ACA was reckless, sloppy and unnecessarily complicated from the start.  And the people who suffered most from the covert economic details, yet were mandated by law to purchase private insurance, were those who just missed the poverty line cutoff.

The fact that Obamacare further strengthened the distinctions between two parallel systems — federal and private — with entirely different economic structures created a labyrinth of red tape, rules, and wasteful bureaucracy. Since the ACA went into effect, over 150 new boards, agencies and programs have had to be established to monitor its 2,700 pages of gibberish. A federal single-payer system would easily eliminate this bureaucracy and waste.

A medical New Deal to establish universal healthcare coverage is a decisive step in the correct direction. The energy behind the younger generation of Democrat legislators is admirable, but we question whether they possess the wisdom to address the fullness of our health crisis. We must look at the crisis holistically and in a systemic way.  Simply shuffling private insurance into a federal Medicare-for-all or buy-in program, funded by taxing the wealthiest of citizens, may only reduce costs temporarily. It will not curtail nor slash escalating rates of disease. Any effective healthcare reform must also tackle the underlying reasons for Americans’ poor state of health. We cannot shy away from examining the social illnesses infecting our entire free-market capitalist culture and its addiction to deregulation. A viable healthcare model would have to structurally transform how the medical economy operates. Finally, a successful medical New Deal must honestly evaluate the best and most reliable scientific evidence in order to effectively redirect public health spending.

For example, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a former Obama healthcare adviser, observed that AIDS-HIV measures consume the most public health spending, even though the disease “ranked 75th on the list of diseases by personal health expenditures.” On the other hand, according to the American Medical Association, a large percentage of the nation’s $3.4 trillion healthcare spending goes towards treating preventable diseases, notably diabetes, common forms of heart disease, and back and neck pain conditions. In 2016, these three conditions were the most costly and accounted for approximately $277 billion in spending.  Earlier this year, the CDC announced that the autism rate is now 1 in 44 children, a 7 percent increase since 2016. In 2015, the economic burden of autism disorders was $268 billion; it is expected to almost double to $461 billion by 2025.  There are no signs that this alarming trend will reverse and decline; and yet, our entire federal health system has failed to search honestly and conscientiously for the underlying causes of this epidemic. All explanations that might interfere with the pharmaceutical industry’s unchecked growth, such as over-vaccination, are ignored and viciously discredited without any sound scientific evidence.  Therefore, a proper medical New Deal will require a systemic overhaul and reform of our federal health agencies, especially the CDC and FDA. For any medical revolution to succeed in advancing universal healthcare, the plan must prioritize spending in a manner that serves public health and not private interests. It will also require reshuffling private corporate interests and their lobbyists to the sidelines, away from any strategic planning, in order to break up the private interests’ control over federal agencies and its revolving door policies. Aside from those who benefit from this medical corruption, the overwhelming majority of Americans would agree with this criticism. However, there is a complete lack of national trust that our legislators, including the so-called progressives, would be willing to undertake such actions.

In addition, America’s healthcare system, as well as the so-called Green New Deal, ignores the single most critical initiative to reduce costs – that is, preventative efforts and programs instead of deregulation and closing loopholes designed to protect the drug and insurance industries’ bottom line.  Prevention can begin with banning toxic chemicals that are proven health hazards associated with current disease epidemics.  This should be a no-brainer for any legislator who cares for public health.  Unfortunately, unlike Europe, the US continues to permit numerous toxic chemicals, including many known carcinogens, to find their way into common everyday products. For example, Stacy Malkan, co-founder of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, notes that “the policy approach in the US and Europe is dramatically different” when it comes to chemical allowances in cosmetic products.  Whereas the EU has banned 1,328 toxic substances from the cosmetic industry alone, the US has banned only 11.  The US continues to allow carcinogenic formaldehyde, petroleum, many parabens (an estrogen mimicker and endocrine hormone destroyer), the highly allergenic p-phenylenediamine or PBD, triclosan, which has been associated with the rise in antibiotic resistant bacteria, avobenzone, and many others to be used in cosmetics, sunscreens, shampoo and hair dyes.

Another reason Europeans are much healthier than Americans is because their governments take more immediate preventative measures to remove chemicals shown to pose serious health risks. The US can easily adopt this policy in order to reduce avoidable healthcare costs. Corporations should no longer be given a free pass to poison the population for nothing more than expediency and profit. There are no safe levels for any carcinogenic and hormone-disrupting chemical, and that applies across the board – for every healthy and sickly man, woman and child.

Next, the food Americans consume can be reevaluated for its health benefits. There should be no hesitation to tax the unhealthiest foods, such as commercial junk food, sodas and candy, products that contain ingredients proven to be toxic, and meat products laden with dangerous chemicals including growth hormones and antibiotics. The scientific evidence that the average American diet is contributing to rising disease trends is indisputable. We could also implement additional taxes on the public advertising of these demonstrably unhealthy products.  All such tax revenue would accrue to a national universal health program to offset medical expenditures associated with the very illnesses linked to these products. Although such tax measures would help pay for a new medical New Deal, it may be combined with programs to educate the public about healthy nutrition if it is to produce a reduction in the most common preventable diseases. Taxing alone is not sufficient. The public will need to understand the reasons why their favorite junk foods are being taxed and the health risks they face by consuming them. Preventative health education should be mandatory throughout public school systems.

Measures to improve the quality of Americans’ health demand a harsh reality check. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, the US spent $3.4 trillion annually on healthcare.  After the first year of the pandemic, healthcare spending rose over 9 percent to $4.1 trillion.  A question most of us might ask is how much of this $4 trillion was complete, avoidable waste?

Private insurers force hospitals, clinics and private physicians into financial corners, and this is contributing to prodigious waste in money and resources. Annually, healthcare spending towards medical liability insurance costs tens of billions of dollars. In particular, this economic burden has taxed small clinics and physicians. It is well past the time that physician liability insurance is replaced with no-fault options. Today’s doctors are spending an inordinate amount of money to protect themselves. Legions of liability and trial lawyers seek big paydays for themselves stemming from physician error. Forbes reports that the cost of medical malpractice runs at about $55 billion per year.  This has created a culture of fear among doctors and hospitals, resulting in the overly cautious practice of defensive medicine, driving up costs and insurance premiums just to avoid lawsuits. Doctors are forced to order unnecessary tests and prescribe more medications and medical procedures just to cover their backsides.  In 2017, $200 billion was spent on unnecessary medical tests, compared to $6.8 billion just 6 years earlier. The blowback has been a tragic rise in medical errors, patient injuries and deaths.

According to a 2017 review by Dr. Raj Gopalan, vice president of Innovation and Clinical Informatics at Wolters Kluwer, there are at least two million confirmed adverse drug reactions in the US every year, causing 100,000 deaths. These medication errors and complications add an additional $136 billion to the US’s annual healthcare bill. Furthermore, there is the loss of work and productivity due to medical error. The Journal of Health Care Finance estimates that every year, 10 million work days valued at approximately $1.2 billion are lost due to measurable medical errors. The reality is likely worse. An earlier analysis by Loyola University Medical School estimated that the total economic impact across the board for all losses due to iatrogenic events and deaths is nearly $1 trillion annually.

No-fault insurance is a common-sense plan that enables physicians to pursue their profession in a manner that will reduce iatrogenic injuries and costs. Individual cases requiring additional medical intervention and loss of income would still be compensated. This would generate huge savings. Reports indicate that the US is experiencing a severe shortage of doctors. The greatest shortages are in emergency medicine and general practice. This trend notably escalated during the pandemic.  Too many medical school graduates are entering more financially lucrative medical specialties. We believe that all medical and nursing education should be free. From the time students graduate, they should receive an excellent living wage, even before proceeding to any specialty, without the specter of debt looming over their future.

No other nation suffers from the scourge of excessive drug price gouging like the US. After many years of haggling to lower prices and increase access to generic drugs, no substantial progress has been made. Even generic drug prices are now skyrocketing, according to a CBS News investigation. 60 Minutes feature about the Affordable Care Act reported an “orgy of lobbying and backroom deals in which just about everyone with a stake in the $3-trillion-a-year health industry came out ahead—except the taxpayers.” For example, Life Extension magazine reported that an antiviral cream (acyclovir), which had lost its patent protection, “was being sold to pharmacies for 7,500% over the active ingredient cost. The active ingredient (acyclovir) costs only 8 pennies, yet pharmacies are paying a generic maker $600 for this drug and selling it to consumers for around $700.” The active ingredient in the drug tretinoin costs 80 cents to the manufacturer, yet a full bottle costs $1,100. Other examples include the antibiotic Doxycycline. The price per pill averages 7 cents to $3.36 but has a 5,300 percent markup when it reaches the consumer. The antidepressant Clomipramine is marked up 3,780 percent, and the anti-hypertensive drug Captopril’s mark-up is 2,850 percent. And these are generic drugs! These numbers reveal how bloated and rapacious the medical industrial complex is. Drug prices like these are another reason why the US has failed to successfully launch a national universal healthcare program for all.

Medication costs need to be dramatically cut to allow drug manufacturers a reasonable but not obscene profit margin. By capping profits approximately 100 percent above all costs, we would save our system hundreds of billions of dollars. Such a measure would also extirpate the growing corporate misdemeanors of pricing fraud, which forces patients to pay out-of-pocket in order to make up for the costs insurers are unwilling to pay.

Likewise for exorbitant hospital costs. A one dollar bag of intravenous saline can cost up to $546, plus an additional $127 for administration. If given in a hospital ER, a single aspirin pill can cost $30, six times the pharmacy’s cost for a full bottle.  A Fox News report discovered that a visit to the ER for a headache might bankrupt you with over a $17,700 bill, or bilk you with a $24,100 bill for a sprained ankle. Unfortunately, the private insurance industry permits this unchecked price-gouging, and hospitals simply take advantage of the medical services racket.

Regardless of its harsh corporate critics, a single-payer program is completely feasible and well within the nation’s reach. Dean Baker at the Center for Economics and Policy Research states, “The government already pays for almost half of the nation’s health care bill through Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits and other public sector programs. Achieving Medicare for All would mean covering the other half of current expenses, along with the additional costs of paying for the uninsured and under-insured who are not getting the care they need.”

Finally, we can acknowledge that our healthcare is fundamentally a despotic rationing system based upon high insurance costs vis-a-vis a toss of the dice to determine where a person sits on the economic ladder.  For the past three decades it has contributed to inequality. The present insurance-based economic metrics cast millions of Americans out of coverage because private insurance costs are beyond their means. Uwe Reinhardt, a Princeton University political economist, has called our system “brutal” because it “rations [people] out of the system.”  He defined rationing as “withholding something from someone that is beneficial.” Discriminatory healthcare rationing now affects over 35 million people who have been priced out the system and left uninsured. They make too much to qualify for Medicare under Obamacare, yet earn far too little to afford private insurance costs and premiums. Out-of-pocket expenses for services insurers refuse to provide can also bankrupt a family. In the final analysis, the entire system is discriminatory and predatory.

However, we must be realistic. Almost every member of Congress has benefited from the flow of Big Pharma and private insurance money into their electoral campaign pockets. The only way to begin to bring our healthcare program up to the level of a truly developed nation is to remove the drug industry’s rampant and unnecessary profiteering from the equation.

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Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.

Dr. Gary Null is host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including his recent Last Call to Tomorrow

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

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***

On the 9th of August, 1945, an all-Christian B-29 bomber crew, took off from Tinian Island in the South Pacific, with the blessings of its Catholic and Protestant chaplains. In the plane’s hold was the second of the only two nuclear bombs to ever be used against human targets in wartime. The primary target, Kokura, Japan, was clouded over, so the plane, named Bock’s Car, headed for the secondary target, Nagasaki.

St. Mary’s Cathedral, located in Nagasaki City’s Urakami River district, was a massive structure and a landmark easily visible from 31,000 feet above. The cathedral was one of the landmarks on which the Bock’s Car’s bombardier had been briefed for weeks before the mission. The cathedral was briefly seen through a break in the clouds, and the drop was ordered. The bomb exploded in a searing fireball as hot as the sun 500 meters above the church.

The legendary Urakami Cathedral was Ground Zero for the Nagasaki bomb on August 9, 1945

The Urakami Cathedral was Ground Zero for the second atomic bomb ever used against civilian populations in war time, and most Nagasaki Christians who lived in the area did not survive. 6,000 of the church members died instantly, including all who were at confession at 11:02 that morning. Of the 12,000 members of the church, eventually 8,500 died as a direct result of the bomb. Three orders of nuns and a Christian girl’s school were incinerated. Tens of thousands of innocent people died instantly and hundreds of thousands were mortally wounded, some of whose progeny are still living in agony as a result of the cross-generational contagiousness of the deadly plutonium. An irradiated crucifix was photographed in the days following the blast, lying helpless and forlorn and lying on its back, a deeply profound symbol of a religion gone wrong.

The Urakami Cathedral was the oldest and largest Christian church in the Orient, and Nagasaki was the oldest, largest and most influential Christian community in Japan, having been founded by the Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, in 1549. The Nagasaki Christian community is legendary in the history of Japanese Christianity because of its two centuries of catacomb-like existence during the horrible persecutions by the Imperial Japanese government – including mass crucifixions of faithful Christians who refused to give up the faith. Despite the persecutions and the formal outlawing of the religion (it was a capital crime to be a Christian – as it was for the original nonviolent form of Christianity – for over 2 centuries), Nagasaki Christianity survived and ultimately flourished – until 11:02 am, August 9, 1945.

What Imperial Japan could not do for over two centuries of brutal persecution and the arbitrary use of the death penalty, fellow Christians from America did in 9 seconds. The Cathedral was totally destroyed by the plutonium bomb and thousands of Nagasaki Christians were instantly boiled, incinerated, carbonized or vaporized. Radiation-induced disease and deformities among the “surviving” victims and their progeny continues to this day as a gruesome testament to the horrors of nuclear war.

Franz Jaegerstaetter was beheaded for refusing to join Hitler’s military on August 9, 1943

Image on the right: Franz Jaegerstaetter (Licensed under the public domain)

Plakat Jaegerstaetter.JPG

On the 9th of August, 1943, Franz Jaegerstaetter, a devout Austrian Christian pacifist, was beheaded by German Christians for refusing to join Hitler’s army. Because of his gospel-based conscientious objection to war and killing, he had been abandoned by his spiritual leaders, as well as by his family and friends, all of whom had tried to convince him to do his patriotic duty and kill for “Volk, Fuhrer und Vaterland.” They all tried to convince him that his commitment to gospel nonviolence was futile – and, in the context of the national militarism operating at the time, also fatal. Instead, being obedient to the God of love rather than to men, he refused to relent and was murdered at Brandenburg Prison, at the hands of obedient baptized Christian soldiers, whose belt buckles read “Gott Mit Uns” (God With Us).

The Jewish Carmelite Nun, Sister Teresia Benedicta of the Cross was murdered at Auschwitz on August 9, 1942

On the 9th of August, 1942, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, a Jewish Catholic Carmelite nun, was murdered by fellow German Christians at Auschwitz. “Gott Mit Uns” was also stamped on their belt buckles. Most of German Christianity had, by its collaboration and/or by its silence, endorsed the Nazi’s ruthless forms of nationalism, militarism, racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and its “legal” right to kill the enemies of the state.

On the 9th of August, 1945, Lutheran Chaplain William B. Downey, of Hope Evangelical Lutheran Church in Minneapolis. MN, prayed for the safety of the crew and for world peace just before the Nagasaki bombing mission. (Downey was attached to the US Army Air Force’s 509thComposite Group, whose major responsibility on Tinian was the delivery of the atomic bombs.)

Pastor Downey’s prayer 

“Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we pray Thee to be gracious with those who fly this night. Guard and protect those of us who venture out into the darkness of Thy heaven. Uphold them on Thy wings. Keep them safe both in body and soul and bring them back to us. Give to us all courage and strength for the hours that are ahead; give to them rewards according to their efforts. Above all else, our Father, bring peace to Thy world. May we go forward trusting in Thee and knowing we are in Thy presence now and forever. Amen.”

After the war ended, Downey, in counseling those soldiers who still had their consciences intact and were therefore troubled by the mass killing of innocent civilians by the bombs, said:

”The wrong was the killing, whether by fire bombs from hundreds of planes, by one atomic bomb or by a single rifle bullet. War itself is the evil that man must conquer.”

Father Zabelka blessed the Nagasaki bombing mission on August 9, 1945

On the 9th of August, 1945, the 509th Composite Group’s Catholic chaplain, Father George Zabelka, was just one of millions of victims of societal attitudes at the time: “The whole structure of secular, religious and military society told me clearly that it was all right to ‘let the Japs have it.’ God was on our side.” Father Zabelka knew what his bomber crews were doing to innocent civilians and their defenseless cities with conventional incendiary bombs in the spring and summer of 1945, and yet “I said nothing.” He regretted that silence for the rest of his life, but spent the remaining two decades of his life working tirelessly for world peace and denouncing militarism as being clearly anti-Christian. A contrite Father Zabelka was in Nagasaki on August 1995 asking for forgiveness from the Japanese people for his role in what is now recognized to be a crime against humanity and an international war crime.

Father Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, the foremost apostle of Christian nonviolence in America today, and the person most responsible for Zabelka’s conversion to gospel nonviolence, has dedicated his life and ministry to raising the consciousness of the church to the truths of Jesus’s nonviolent teachings. McCarthy says:

“Today, as for most of the last 1700 years, most Christians continue to justify as consistent with the spirit of Christ those energies, understandings, and emotions which lead inevitably to August 9. Today most Christians still do not unequivocally teach what Jesus unequivocally taught on the subject of violence. Today most Christians still refuse to proclaim that violence is not the Christian way, that violence is not the Holy way, that violence is not the way of Jesus.”

Every July 1st, to call the Christian community to repent and to return to the truth of the original form of Christianity, ie, that violence is not the way of Christ, Father McCarthy leads a 40 day fast from solid foods, solemnly breaking it on August 9th at the site of the first atomic bomb detonation at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The test was blasphemously code-named “Trinity”.

McCarthy suggests that sincere Christians remember all the victims of past August 9ths (as well as other infamous dates in the history of war) in their thoughts and prayers on Nagasaki Sunday, August 8, 2010 by attending any of the various anniversary commemorations that may be available during the Hiroshima/Nagasaki week of August 6 – 9, the 65th anniversaries of the bombings. Those devoted to the truth of gospel nonviolence hope that all ethically-conscious people, especially Christians, consider a day-long fast on August 9 lamenting the hundreds of millions of war dead, the hundreds of millions of physically, psychologically and spiritually dead and dying survivors of war violence (especially those most severely afflicted: the military veterans of war, their secondarily traumatized families and their loved ones and their civilian- and soldier-victims who were on the other side of the battle lines).

And, of course, we must remember the billions of those all over this war-torn world who continue to suffer, generation after generation, from the totally preventable, war-caused starvation, malnutrition, poisoning from Agent Orange, depleted uranium, legal and illicit drugs and other military toxins and the homelessness, joblessness, poverty, suicidality, homicidality, domestic abuse, national bankruptcies and hopelessness that follows all wars.

The War Prayer by Mark Twain

It seems appropriate to end this essay on Nagasaki with the following excerpt from Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer”, which, interestingly, Twain requested not be published until after his death. It is suspected that he felt that he would be castigated for a lack of patriotism by writing such a deeply truthful allegory. The excerpt starts as the Pro-War/ Justified War Theory pastor was praying for the troops. The pastor prayed:

“Watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory–

”An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, “Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord and God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!”

”The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside–which the startled minister did–and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

”’I come from the Throne–bearing a message from Almighty God!’ The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. ‘He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import–that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of–except he pause and think. ‘God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two–one uttered, and the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this–keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware, lest without intent you invoke a curse upon your neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain on your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse on some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

”’You have heard your servant’s prayer–the uttered part of it. I am commissioned by God to put into words the other part of it–that part which the pastor–and also you in your hearts–fervently prayed silently–and ignorantly and unthinkingly. God grant that it was so! You heard the words ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results that follow victory–must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

“’Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth into battle–be Thou near them! With them–in spirit–we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander friendless in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it–

”’For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!

”’We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

”(After a pause.) ‘Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits.’

”It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.”

*

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Dr Gary G. Kohls is a retired rural family physician from Duluth, Minnesota. Since his retirement in 2008, Dr Kohls has written a weekly column, titled Duty to Warn, which has been re-published and archived at websites around the world.  

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

Dr Kohls practiced holistic mental health care in Duluth for the last decade of his family practice career, primarily helping psychiatric patients who had become addicted to their cocktails of dangerous, addictive psychiatric drugs to safely go through the complex withdrawal process. His Duty to Warn columns often deal with various unappreciated health issues, including those caused by Big Pharma’s over-drugging, Big Vaccine’s over-vaccinating, Big Medicine’s over-prescribing, over-screening, over-diagnosing and over-treating agendas and Big Food’s malnourishing and sickness-promoting food industry. Those four powerful, profit-seeking entities combine to seriously affect the physical, mental, spiritual and economic health of the recipients of the prescription drugs, medical treatments, toxic vaccines and the consumers of the tasty, ubiquitous and disease-producing “FrankenFoods” – particularly when they are consumed in combinations, doses and potencies that have never been tested for safety or long-term effectiveness.

Archive of Dr Kohls’ articles

Featured image is from Political Concern

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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***

The antiviral medication remdesivir has played a controversial role in the COVID-19 treatment protocols used by hospitals that many families allege resulted in the death of their loved ones.

Among the drug’s potential side effects is acute kidney failure, which many physicians argue is the source of the same symptom reported by the medical establishment to have been caused by COVID-19.

Dr. Bryan Ardis, CEO of Ardis Labs and host of The Dr. Ardis Show, said he watched his own father-in-law die in a hospital in February 2020 after being taken through the same hard-wired, standard-of-care protocols he would eventually witness playing out in the lives of others.

“It was the most traumatic thing I’d ever experienced in my whole life,” Ardis told The Epoch Times.

Among the multiple problems with his treatment, Ardis said, his father-in-law had been erroneously diagnosed with having the flu and given an antibiotic called vancomycin, which, like remdesivir, is known to cause acute kidney failure.

“Not only did he not have the flu, but the doctor also treated him with a horrifically toxic, last-resort antibiotic that doesn’t treat the flu,” he said.

When he asked the doctor why he had his father-in-law on the antibiotic that was causing his kidneys to fail, Ardis said the doctor told him that it was hospital protocol.

‘It Wasn’t From the Virus’

For Ardis, it became a foreshadowing of what was to come with the listed COVID symptoms in fact being caused by the drugs used to treat COVID, he alleged.

“In March 2020, every medical doctor started saying they had never seen a respiratory virus move from the lungs to attack the kidneys, which then causes acute kidney failure,” Ardis said.

But the kidney failure wasn’t from the virus, Ardis said.

Initially, Ardis said he thought they were using vancomycin because the stories in the news matched his own experience. However, he later found that the antiviral drug remdesivir, which itself is reported to cause acute kidney failure, was being used through emergency-use authorization to treat COVID before it was later approved by the Food and Drug Administration in October 2020.

Least Effective and Deadly: Study

Ardis’s research brought him to COVID protocols set by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), who had deemed remdesivir as “safe and effective” based on an experimental trial in Africa during an Ebola outbreak.

In the study found in the New England Journal of Medicine, a safety board found remdesivir to be “the least effective and the deadliest drug in this trial,” before it was suspended, Ardis explained.

“Fifty-three percent of people they gave that drug to died,” Ardis said.

Ardis said he considered whether Fauci had been given bad advice.

“I go to the end of the study and … imagine my shock when I saw that it was actually funded by Fauci’s department at NIAID,” Ardis said. “He would have been given a monthly review of everything coming out of that Ebola trial. The safety board would have let him know it was the least effective and deadliest drug in the trial.”

For Ardis, the study, which predated Fauci’s “safe and effective” estimate, showed that Fauci was not being truthful, Ardis alleged.

Fauci then asked the federal government to buy all the experimental reserves of remdesivir from the California-based pharmaceutical company called Gilead, Ardis said.

Further research didn’t improve his medical opinion of remdesivir, Ardis said, leaving him to conclude that the kidney failure doctors were reporting to be caused by the virus was in fact caused by remdesivir.

“Doctors had no idea they were being set up to use a drug that had such toxic effects and was proven to be ineffective and very dangerous,” Ardis said.

Support Behind Remdesivir

Though NIAID didn’t respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment, Fauci told reporters in 2020 during a White House press briefing that the data “shows that remdesivir has a clear cut significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery. This is really quite important.”

A final 2020 report from the National Institute of Health said that remdesivir was “effective against viruses in the coronavirus family.”

The NIH said in its report that remdesivir accelerated recovery for hospitalized patients with severe COVID-19.

“Our findings show that remdesivir is a beneficial treatment for patients with COVID-19,” says study author Dr. John Beigel of NIAID in the report. “It may also help to conserve scarce health care resources, such as ventilators, during this pandemic.”

Physicians such as Dr. Arnold Weg reported to NBC News in 2020 that remdesivir helped him recover from COVID, and that from this personal experience, “I feel very strongly that it should be used.”

Dr. Aneesh Mehta at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta told NBC News in the 2020 report on remdesivir that “remdesivir will get many of our patients home to their families more rapidly and with less side effects.”

As public support for remdesivir grew, Ardis continued to give his second opinion, sharing what he believed to be the truth about remdesivir, COVID protocols, alternative treatments, and the then-imminent vaccines.

It was Ardis’s information that helped people who reported equally traumatic experiences with hospital protocols, such as Kristi Schmadl and Greta Crawford.

‘Enough Sedatives to Put Down a Horse’

Schmadl told The Epoch Times that she believes it was remdesivir that caused her mother’s death in a hospital, based on medical records that show a worsening of kidney levels with each dose.

In addition to not feeding her mother and giving her “enough sedatives to put down a horse,” Schmadl said hospital staff attempted to label her mother as Do Not Resuscitate (DNR).

“We had one doctor tell us that if we didn’t put a DNR on her, he would,” she said.

Schmadl’s mother, who had only one kidney, was allegedly given vancomycin, fentanyl, precedex, and other drugs to which Schmadl said she and her family never consented.

“They called us on Aug. 15 to tell us our mother had ‘expired,’” Schmadl said. “That’s the word they used.”

Schmadl connected with Crawford, who herself was being treated with remdesivir in a hospital when she demanded that hospital staff cease treatment, remove her IV, and let her leave.

“My husband wheeled me out,” Crawford told The Epoch Times. “I was still on oxygen and weak.”

Crawford said she’s the only person she knows of who was still allowed a family member to be inside with her for 12 hours a day, as hospital COVID protocols usually require that the patient be isolated from their families.

While in the hospital, Crawford said a nurse “pressured her” and her family to get vaccinated while being treated with remdesivir.

“After my first dose, I noticed my hands and feet swell,” Crawford said. “At the time, I didn’t know that it was my kidneys shutting down.”

When she asked her doctor what was going on, Crawford said he stared at the floor and mumbled, “COVID’s strange” before walking out.

“I’ve never seen a doctor act like that,” Crawford said.

Crawford had COVID for two weeks before she entered the hospital, and for that time she had not experienced the symptoms she experienced when given remdesivir, she said.

“My white blood cell count shot up, I got a blood clot in my leg, I would have vomiting—all of these symptoms I had not experienced at home,” she said.

After her husband took her home, Crawford said she spent two months on the couch healing.

“I had so much fluid in my lungs, and then I went through a detox process with different supplements and vitamins to try to get all of this stuff out of me,” Crawford said.

It was during this time that she began doing what many vaccine promoters were warning against at the time: She did her own research.

Hospital Alternatives

She followed Ardis’s podcasts, met Schmadl, and launched the website protocolkills.com to inform people “of the dangers of remdesivir, hospital protocols, and the true intended purpose of their use.”

Through her website, Crawford has gathered 170 stories of people whose loved ones died in hospitals throughout the United States, and offers alternatives to hospitals.

“It’s been a labor of love, because I don’t want people to suffer like I suffered,” she said.

Crawford works with families to get people out of hospitals with a hospital hostage hotline and provides education for those who want to know what red flags to look for when dealing with hospitals.

“It’s obvious what they’re doing now,” she said. “They need to be held accountable.”

For Crawford, hospitals have become “the new concentration camps.”

“But instead of dragging people in on trains, people are walking in willingly because they think they are going to get help, but they’re being murdered,” Crawford said.


Here’s a excerpt of earlier article on the Gilead Remdesevir Scandal by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, which reveals the role of Anthony Fauci

LancetGate: “Scientific Corona Lies” and Big Pharma Corruption. Hydroxychloroquine versus Gilead’s Remdesivir

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 12, 2022

 

Since this article was first published almost two years year ago on July 11, 2020 under the title LancetGate: “Scientific Corona Lies” and Big Pharma Corruption. Hydroxychloroquine versus Gilead’s Remdesivir on July 3, 2020, there has been a virtual censorship of debate on Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin largely directed against medical doctors.

On May 22, Remdesivir for the Treatment of Covid-19 — Preliminary Report  by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, was published by the New England Journal of Medicine, (NEJM)

On June 29, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is the head of NIAID granted the “Greenlight” to Gilead Sciences Inc. despite the fact that the study of the new experimental drug was “preliminary”.The NIH-NIAID sponsored report (May 22) was used to justify a major agreement with Gilead Sciences Inc.

A $1.6 billion agreement between the HHS and Gilead Sciences Inc. was announced on June 29th, 2020 despite the fact that NIH NIAID study published in the NEJM was considered “preliminary”. In the late 1990s, Gilead Sciences Inc was headed by Donald Rumsfeld (1997-2001), who later joined the George W. Bush administration as Secretary of Defense (2001-2006).

In recent developments, there is an ongoing campaign to suppress both Hydroxycholoroquine as well as Ivermectin as effective preventive and curative drugs.

The objective has been to sustain the vaccination campaign on behalf of Big Pharma.

A revised version of this article was published as a chapter in the author’s E-book entitled:

The 2020-21 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset”

There are recent reports of Covid-19 related deaths of hospitalized patients treated with Remdesivir.


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Matt McGregor covers news and features throughout the United States. Send him your story ideas: [email protected]

First published by GR on June 28, 2018

By New Year’s Day 1951, the United States had increased its atomic bomb stockpile by many times over, enough to wipe out the Soviet Union. In June 1946, to the frustration of US war planners, the military possessed a modest nine atomic bombs. However, less than five years later, the world’s leading power acquired an arsenal of 400 such bombs. As the postwar years further advanced America was churning out nuclear weapons “like sausages”, to borrow the phrase of Soviet president Nikita Khrushchev.

Despite Japan bearing the brunt of two atomic attacks in August 1945, it was in the direction of the Soviet Union that America’s nuclear focus was truly pointed. The atomic assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, eventually killing over 200,000 people, were further meant as a warning signal to the USSR.

US General Leslie Groves, in charge of the nuclear program known as the “Manhattan Project”, had in 1944 confirmed that the Soviets were identified as America’s real long-term enemy. At Los Alamos, New Mexico, General Groves had revealed this bombshell to Joseph Rotblat, a Polish-born nuclear physicist. Rotblat said many years later,

“I believed that we had to develop the bomb as a deterrent to the Germans who, we believed – wrongly – were also developing the bomb. It was at this time [1944] that Groves mentioned that the real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets. I was terribly shocked”.

Image on the right: Joseph Rotblat

Image result for Joseph Rotblat

Unknown to Rotblat was that Hitler had, as early as June 1942, decided against the development of an atomic bomb – on both racial and pragmatic grounds – as repeatedly outlined by Nazi war minister Albert Speer, one of the most powerful figures in the Third Reich. By the summer of 1944, Allied intelligence accounts were flowing in that a Nazi atomic bomb was non-existent. Even earlier than this, in late 1943, the British spy Paul Rosbaud operating in Germany had reported to his superiors that the Nazi nuclear program was idle. This crucial information was subsequently relayed to Manhattan Project intelligent services, and on to General Groves.

Meanwhile at the end of 1944 Rotblat had endured enough, resigning from the Manhattan Project on moral grounds, the only such scientist to do so. If the Nazis had no nuclear plans, as neither did the Russians seriously at that time, was it really worth pursuing the development of atomic weapons? It would inevitably lead to nuclear proliferation, thereby placing the human species, including Americans, under increasing peril.

In the following decades, Rotblat himself became a noted anti-nuclear proponent and activist. Just months before his death in August 2005, aged 96, Rotblat penned an open letter to US president George W. Bush, writing that:

“The only way to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and to remove the fear of their inevitable use remains, as it has always been, the global elimination of all nuclear weapons by all states”.

As the Second World War ended in mid-August 1945, just days following Japan’s surrender American strategists were highlighting which Soviet cities to attack with atomic bombs. Major General Lauris Norstad, a great advocate of nuclear weapons, sent General Groves a list marking out 15 “key Soviet cities” headed by the capital Moscow, and 25 other “leading Soviet cities”, including Leningrad – which in particular was still reeling from the horrors of the Nazi siege of that city. Norstad also compiled an estimate of how many atomic bombs it would require to destroy each city, with Moscow and Leningrad needing six each.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, as Commanding General, had first met Norstad in Algiers in October 1942. Eisenhower described the then Lieutenant-Colonel Norstad as “a young air officer who so impressed me by his alertness, grasp of problems, and personality that I never thereafter lost sight of him. He was, and is, one of those rare men whose capacity knows no limits”. Indeed, reaching all the way to the earth-altering subject of nuclear weapons. This was also the case under Eisenhower when he became president in 1953. By the time “General Ike” departed office after two terms in 1961, the US arsenal had grown to 18,000 nuclear bombs.

Truman orders H-Bomb

In the early postwar years, the US military’s demand for weapons was not in line with supply. As euphoria of victory in the war dissipated, in late 1945 the US had only two atomic bombs in its arsenal. By the time America’s first official postwar plan against the USSR was formulated, in November 1947, it called for hitting 24 Soviet cities with 34 atomic bombs. However, in late 1947, the US had only 13 such weapons, which were of the Nagasaki type. The small number of atomic bombs was a closely-guarded secret. When president Harry Truman was informed of the true figures in April 1947, he was shocked by the news, presuming the stockpile to be in the dozens.

Following the Berlin Blockade (June 1948-May 1949), one of the first Cold War crises, Truman initiated three separate budgetary increases for nuclear bomb production. The desire to create more weapons was increased by the realization that the Soviets had, in late August 1949, tested their first atomic device – which was a replica of the Nagasaki bomb. News of the Soviets’ successful nuclear detonation astonished not only the American public, but many up the chain of US command; it had been thought the USSR would not attain such a goal until the mid-1950s.

Meanwhile, in October 1948 General Curtis LeMay, an especially hawkish US commander, became head of Strategic Air Command when he succeeded General George Kenney. LeMay quickly formulated the Emergency War Plan, which laid down demands for Strategic Air Command to “increase its capability to such an extent that it would be possible to deliver the entire stockpile of atomic bombs, if made available, in a single massive attack” against the USSR. LeMay’s strategy outlined that 133 atomic bombs would be dropped on 70 Soviet urban areas, killing perhaps 2.7 million people, almost all of them civilians. However, the final death toll would likely be far higher than that.

Such a strategy was being devised against a USSR which, in late 1948, had no atomic weapons. Furthermore, the socialist state was still recovering from the Nazi invasion of a few years before, and represented no threat to the American mainland. Nor would it do so for many years. By the following year, October 1949, LeMay’s Emergency War Plan had expanded to call for attacks on 104 Soviet urban centers with 220 atomic bombs, plus a few dozen weapons held back in reserve. In the summer of 1950, the Americans had possession of almost 300 nuclear weapons – they were all of the Nagasaki variety, plutonium implosion bombs, now being churned out on a production line. In 1950, the Soviets had comfortably less than 10 such weapons.

Just a decade later, 1960, the US nuclear arsenal not only further multiplied, but the nature of the bombs had also radically altered. They were almost entirely comprised of the “thermonuclear” variety: That is, hydrogen bombs, also known as H-bombs. These weapons are a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Come the latter stages of the Eisenhower presidency, the nuclear age had reached a point by which it became a grave threat to the human species, as it has done through to today.

The first hydrogen bomb was successfully tested in November 1952 by the Americans (with the Soviets following suit the next year). It had long been in the pipeline. A decade previously, in July 1942, the Hungarian-American physicist Edward Teller had a revealing discussion with his colleague Hans Bethe. Teller, an early member of the Manhattan Project, said

“the fission bomb [atomic bomb] was all well and good and, essentially, was now a sure thing”.

He felt that “what we should really think about was the possibility of igniting deuterium by a fission weapon – the hydrogen bomb”. Teller was later known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb”.

By the mid-to-late 1950s, increasing numbers of hydrogen bombs were entering the US arsenal, replacing the “obsolete” atomic bombs. In 1955, the estimated death toll from atomic weapon assaults on the USSR was 13 million dead. By the following year, 1956, there was a more than tenfold increase in the expected death toll with the new hydrogen bombs. It was thought that 150 million Soviets would be killed.

Come the early 1960s – with Kennedy now in office – the calculated death toll in the entire Soviet bloc, from expanding US nuclear attacks, had risen to over 200 million. Many millions would also die in America’s NATO ally countries, and neutral nations, by the resulting spread of radioactive fallout, which US planners were aware of. Simultaneous American bombings of Communist China were forecast to eventually kill about 300 million Chinese. From late 1949, China was added to the nuclear hit list following the Mao Zedong-led revolution. These enormous killing estimates were kept so secret that very few people, even within the American government, were intimate with the numbers.

By 1983, environmental scientists learnt that any such attacks would have killed almost all humans on earth, with the resulting nuclear winter quickly leading to a global famine.

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Strategic Culture Foundation.

Commemorating Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Blaming Russia for U.S. War Crimes

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, August 09, 2022

Mainstream media lies then and now. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki continues to be presented as a humanitarian undertaking by the U.S., as a means to ending WWII and saving lives. And today, in chorus, in regards to nuclear weapons, the media is placing the blame on Russia.

Punishing Whistleblowers at the United Nations

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, August 09, 2022

On June 21 this year, the BBC added its contribution with a documentary about whistleblowers within the UN and the malicious treatment they have received at the hands of their superiors.  The test and merit of any organisation lies in how it treats those who expose defects and faults.

Canada’s Actions, Inactions Leading Us Closer to Nuclear War

By Yves Engler, August 09, 2022

Humanity is a mistake away from “nuclear annihilation”, according to the head of the United Nations. But the Canadian government refuses to support efforts to lessen that risk. In fact, they’ve pursued policies that increase the likelihood of nuclear war.

Cuban Vaccine Against Lung Cancer Makes Its Way in the United States

By Granma, August 09, 2022

Cimavax-EGF, a Cuban therapeutic vaccine against lung cancer, conquers the scientific community and the population of the United States based on the achievements compiled in studies carried out. The vaccine was obtained after more than two decades of research and have shown satisfactory results in patients in advanced stages of lung cancer.

COVID Vaccination and Turbo-Cancer. “Multiple Tumors in Multiple Organs”. Dr. Ute Kruger

By Etana Hecht, August 08, 2022

Dr. Kruger initially thought that these turbo cancers, as she calls them, were due to delayed doctor appointments from Covid lockdowns, but that period is long over, and the tumors are still growing aggressively, and in younger patients. She reported some of these cases to the FDA, and while some higher-ups initially agreed to meet with her, they canceled the meeting with no explanation the next day and sent a phone agent to take her report instead.

All Roads in Gaza Led to Jenin, The Center of Palestinian Resistance

By Steven Sahiounie, August 08, 2022

Gaza is separated from Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank by Israeli territory, and yet the current Israeli attack on Gaza, and the deaths, injuries and destruction of homes is directly connected to Jenin, the center of Palestinian resistance.

How the Pentagon Dictates Hollywood Storylines. “War Propaganda Passed off as Entertainment”

By Jonathan Cook, August 08, 2022

In what should have been an extraordinary television confession this month, John Bolton, national security adviser in the previous administration of President Donald Trump, admitted to CNN in passing that he had helped to plot the overthrow of foreign governments while in office.

The Phoney Nitrogen Crisis: The Netherlands Is Ground Zero for Global Famine Agenda. Precipitating “30,000 Farmers Out of Business”

By TheCOVIDBlog.com, August 08, 2022

Before we dive into this, it’s important to understand nitrogen and its role on Earth. The air human beings breathe is 78% nitrogen, 22% oxygen and 1% other stuff. Humans have been breathing nitrogen throughout their existence on Earth. Most nitrogen in Earth atmosphere is N2 molecules, which are mostly inert (chemically non-reactive).

As the COVID Myths Explode, Delusions Are Shattering: Our Exit from Subservience Leads to Nuremberg 2.0

By Prof. Anthony J. Hall, August 08, 2022

The steady unmasking of some nasty realities is finally infusing added intellectual oxygen into the public’s heightened awareness of the pervasive speciousness permeating the misnamed pandemic. As we move towards the final months of 2022, many open veins of fraud are being unearthed.

US Ambassadorial Nominee Confirms Role of NGOs in the Hybrid War Against Nicaragua

By Miguel Santos García, August 08, 2022

The US continues its foreign policy of a ‘rules-based order’ executed under ultimatums, political deception and hybrid warfare across the globe in its resistance to the global systemic transition to multipolarity. The article will focus on how Nicaragua’s government has dealt with the trending New Cold War.

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Punishing Whistleblowers at the United Nations

August 9th, 2022 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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The United Nations prides itself on exposing, monitoring and noting the travails and vicissitudes to be found on this troubled planet.  It also prides itself on being the premier international institution that protects, or at the very least keeps an eye out for, the principles of the Charter that underpin its existence.  But as with all bodies with mighty aspirations but skewed power, the grime of reality often supplies a different, less impressive picture.

Every organisation replicates its own rationale for existence, including mechanisms to cope with problems of its own making.  Such problems are rarely resolved: they are inherent in the nature of the organisation itself, essential to its functioning.  The United Nations, like many labyrinthine orders, has proven to be impenetrable , bureaucratic and dispiriting.  For years, it has been dealing with a range of conduct issues regarding UN personnel and, for want of a better term, the workplace.  Over that time, it has also sought to keep such misbehaviour, and in some cases blatant criminality, concealed, preferring to focus the ire upon those who spill the beans.

Consulting the range of measures supposedly in place does little to encourage optimism.  In February 2016, we are told of Jane Holl Lute’s appointment as Special Coordinator on improving the UN responds to “sexual exploitation and abuse” which, on first reading, looks like an encouragement rather than a counter.  “Her role is to work across the United Nations systems’ many offices, departments and agencies to strengthen the UN response to sexual exploitation and abuse, wherever it may occur, from headquarters locations to the most remote field bases.”

The remit is a cool, procedural one, a case of making sure that the stars of administration align with the requisite paperwork.  Lute’s task was to “align approaches, enhance coordination, cooperation and coherence system-wide through the development of aligned mechanisms and procedures, standardized protocols and tools.”  This is the sort of language that murders the cause and obscures the victim, which is precisely the sort of rationale that thrives in New York and those “remote bases”.

But there is more.  Jane Connors comes shooting up the ranks as the appointed Victims’ Rights Advocate at UN Headquarters in August 2017.  Her role: to “ensure that the United Nations provides tangible and sustained assistance to the victims of sexual exploitation and abuse.”

These are but a few examples, and have done nothing to stem, let alone stop the rot.  On June 21 this year, the BBC added its contribution with a documentary about whistleblowers within the UN and the malicious treatment they have received at the hands of their superiors.  The test and merit of any organisation lies in how it treats those who expose defects and faults.  The brave and the responsible will take such exposures to heart, punish those responsible for breaches and apply the appropriate treatments.  Most, however, prefer to punish the well-meaning discloser while sparing the perpetrator.

The revelations in the documentary, informed by a number of whistleblowers, are disturbingly extensive.  There is James Wasserstrom, who claims to have found evidence that the construction of a power station in Kosovo came from a tendering process compromised by generous kickbacks.  There is John O’Brien, who brought attention to the fact that an environmental programme based in Russia had been tarnished by money-laundering.

In all these instances, organisational vindictiveness duly kicked in.  Wasserstrom, despite being promised the protections one would expect for a whistleblower, had his name leaked to his accusers.  O’Brien was accused of misbehaving in viewing nude photographs on his phone at work, the whistleblower as deviant.

All this pales before the crimes committed by the Blue Helmet peacekeepers in such countries as the Central African Republic and Haiti.  Locals became prey to sexual assault, vulnerable quarry to be pursued rather than protected.  Former assistant secretary-general Tony Banbury was particularly concerned about the welfare of a rape victim in CAR. He was left disgusted and despondent.  “I needed the organisation to prioritise that girl.  They prioritise the perpetrators.”

Those reporting sexual misconduct by highly placed UN personnel became rich targets for retribution.  Their careers were prematurely frustrated or ended.  Purna Sen, who was appointed spokeswoman on harassment, assault and discrimination in 2018, could only lament to BBC Newsnight that there was “a real tension within an organisation which not only upholds and advocates for human rights, but is actually the birthplace of most of these human rights – yet hasn’t learned to bring them home to the people who work for that organisation.”

The Government Accountability Project, Transparency International and the Whistleblowing International Network responded to the revelations in the documentary by repeating their own concerns.  “We again urge UN Secretary General António Guterres to immediately order an independent inquiry and use his power to remedy the harm caused to UN staff who have already suffered for trying to do the right thing.”  The three groups insist that, “Serious structural reforms are needed to bring the UN systems in line with international consensus for best practice principles and to ensure UN staff feel safe to speak up when they witness harmful conduct at work.”

The core problem for such a body as the UN, like others wielding enormous and iniquitous power, is suggested by the proliferation of policies without action or spirit.  They function like economists in the service of a bankrupt state, with guardians and investigators merely serving as advisors who never solve the problem.

One such individual is spokesman for the UN Secretary General himself, Stéphane Dujarric, who seems to genuinely believethe piffle he is spouting.  “We continue to do whatever we can to support victims and are focused on improving the systems and ensuring that people feel safe to report abuse.”

For those who seek change, punishment and banishment await.  With that state of affairs, everyone, from leader to cleaner, will be assured that this will remain the ugliest of family affairs, ensuring that all whistleblowing will never perform the role it should.

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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]

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.

***

First published on July 23, 2022

Read the original German version:

Video: Interview mit Wirtschaftsexperte Peter König: Mit dem QR-Code zur absoluten Kontrolle

By Peter Koenig and Kla TV, July 19, 2022

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“I am an economist and geopolitical analyst and try as best as possible to reflect the ever-changing “today’s”/ resp. to analyze “tomorrow’s” situations. In other words, to connect the dots: the dots between Covid, the Ukraine war, the reset, the QR code that is becoming more and more obtrusive, the planned “4th Industrial Revolution” by Klaus Schwab. This includes the plan to digitize everything, including the human brain, etc. etc.”

“This personal QR code is then spread out over or used further via an app on your cell phone. 

And this app is of course connected to a control center, we can’t do anything there, the phones, these mobile phones, they’re all already set up in such a way that they can be accessed from anywhere, even if you turn off the GPS, they know exactly that it’s there accompanied us, even without GPS – that’s quite clear. Then you would have to throw it away or leave it at home.”

“That’s why they don’t even know that they probably already have their QR code somewhere in their body. And those who haven’t done it yet have it on their cell phones. And we have to do something about it.”

Video  in German

Transcript. Translated from German

Kla.TV: Peter König worked as an economist at the World Bank for over 30 years and has implemented water projects in developing countries on various continents. I am pleased to welcome Peter König to Kla.TV. Can you tell us something about your current job?

Peter Koenig:  First: Thank you for allowing me to be with you and speak to you. I am an economist and geopolitical analyst and try as best as possible to reflect the ever-changing “today’s”/ resp. to analyze “tomorrow’s” situations. In other words, to connect the dots: the dots between Covid, the Ukraine war, the reset, the QR code that is becoming more and more obtrusive, the planned “Fourth Industrial Revolution” by Klaus Schwab.

This includes the plan to digitize everything including the human brain etc etc. So there are a lot of dots that can and must be connected in order to understand what is going on and what is planned. We have to know that in principle nothing is and remains stagnant, except for the big goal at the moment: The Great Reset, UN Agenda 2030, and the 4th Industrial Revolution. These are different descriptions for the same goal. You have to know that. They may have been made that way to confuse. But in principle it’s the same.

Kla.TV: How would you describe the current financial situation? For the average consumer, everything is still – yes – pretty much in balance. He’s actually still doing pretty well.

PKYes, that’s right. The average Joe living in Switzerland is relatively well off. But here in Switzerland, too, poverty has increased, and considerably so. Only here in Switzerland we don’t talk about it. It is taboo to be poor. The official unemployment figures in Switzerland in May this year were 2.1%, in April it was 2.3%, while at the end of December last year it was almost 5%. In my opinion, these figures are greatly manipulated. It’s the same everywhere in the West, by the way. 

One would also need to know the unemployment criteria: what is classified and considered as unemployment? How is day work, part-time work assessed? How are the different “classes” of jobs – construction work, clerical work, managerial/elite work, etc. – how are they included in the statistics? They’re not uniform. And I suppose I’m assuming that’s not being said either – these analyzes are available, that’s quite clear (in the statistics) – but they’re never published. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a lot of people today had to deal with part-time work and were classified as full-time employees.

In 2020 – the last number you can find openly – it was officially 8.5% of the people who were poor. How is poverty defined? A family of four with an income of less than 4,000 francs a month is poor in Switzerland. However, this criterion is not officially applied in Switzerland. Unofficially yes. But there is, I think, only in the canton of Geneva – recently – CHF 4,400 was named as an official poverty threshold number.

Kla.TV : You say that we are in the final phase of a demonic plan. They set this with the UN Agenda 2030, the so-called ‘Great Reset’ or the ‘4. Industrial Revolution’; they are the same. Can you tell us what you think are the goals of this plan or of the ‘Great Reset’?

PK : Yes, I would like to say very briefly as an introduction: The entire ‘Great Reset’ – the Ukraine war, by the way, is an integral part of it. You just don’t notice it. The war is typically another… – a divider of people. True, war can never be justified, nor any kind of killing. But one can explain how it came to this: The constant provocation of NATO, which opposed the promise of the Allies “Not One Inch Further East than Berlin” at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union – that was what the US Secretary of State, then James Baker, said and actually promised. And nobody respected that.

On the other hand, if you mention even a half-hearted argument for Putin, you are a frowned upon and hated as a Putin lover. There are even Swiss officers who did that, who worked in Ukraine, who were in NATO and see the matter clearly. That’s what they said. They are now censored. Imagine that. This is also known as “divide and conquer”. The media play a powerful role in indoctrinating the population with lies practically 24 x 7 and for the last – more than two years – they have been very successful. They are literally subsidized with billions, these lies. So that means the media were and are “subsidized”, or rather corrupted.

In short, what the West, especially the United States, has always wanted is control of the largest and richest country in the world, Russia. With by far the most mineral resources in the world. All natural resources that the West needs, not least for their war industry. The “rare earths”. So these are metals that are used primarily in electronics. The biggest consumer in electronics is the war industry and of course our western luxury lifestyle. In order to maintain that, we also need these raw materials, which can mainly be supplied by Russia and China.

In my view, the ‘Great Reset’ has three equal and devastating but related goals:

First: depopulation: That means massive depopulation. The eugenists are at work.

That was a plan of the ‘Club of Rome’ 50 years ago. And it was clearly stated in their report “Limit to Growth” from 1972. It was also part of the basis for the first formulations for the European Union.

Covid-19 was the targeted and psychologically sophisticated method of intimidation with a virus that you don’t see, of course, that never existed as such.

A new virus that has never been identified. It is flu-like and has a mortality rate roughly equal to that of the annual flu. About 0.07 to 0.1 percent of infections.

And this applies above all to older people who are already suffering from other comorbidities. But the fear mongering has caused that, mostly under pressure and blackmail, between 60 and 80% of the western population let themselves be “vaccinated”.

And so I put “vaccination” in quotation marks, because it’s not a vaccination. And that’s why I prefer to call it, they got vaxxed.

With a substance or substances containing genetically alterable components mRNA plus various toxins, like graphene oxide that cause serious diseases like heart failure , various types of cancer , kidney failure and so on. And in many cases, as we have seen, they are obviously fatal.

In fact, far more people have died from the effects of the so-called vaccination than from the effects of Covid. In addition, there is not one vaccination, there are different injections with different biochemical compositions. And we have to keep this in mind: There isn’t just one vaccine, one type of chemical that’s injected, there are different ones. I think to remember that real scientists once pointed out that there are at least five different species. But probably even more. And some of them are used in a targeted manner in certain countries and certain societies. So fear is the enemy’s greatest and strongest weapon, we must always keep that in mind.

Second: So the second reason behind this trilogy is the shift of private and public-private capital, i.e. the combination of public and private, from the bottom and the middle to the top.

Through artificially created economic crises, bankruptcies, etc., capital is shifted from below and from the middle up to a relatively thin layer of control-seeking, I would even call them criminal elites.

One can also call these groups a cult. And I actually think they live by certain cult standards. In the cults, certain habits and certain groups of people are classified as a cult because they have to follow these norms in order to be successful.

According to Forbes, the economics analyst, there were 2,668 billionaires on April 5 of this year (2022).

An Elon Musk is apparently number one with 219 billion.

You can clearly see that while the world population has become poorer, the wealth of the rich and especially the super-rich has multiplied. Bill Gates’ wealth, just one example, has increased from $96 billion in 2019 to $129 billion this April (note: 2022). That’s about 34 percent more.

While he is partially responsible for this plandemic – I call it a plandemic because it wasn’t a pandemic but a planned pandemic – for which he is responsible, for tens and tens of thousands of vaxx deaths.

Then there are the financial companies like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and also Fidelity and many others. And most importantly, the top three intertwined co-shareholders BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street are estimated to control somewhere between US$20 and US$25 trillion (1 trillion = 1 with 12 zeros).

They have leverage power of over $100 trillion. In contrast, the world gross national product is about US$ 95 trillion, that was at the end of last year (note: 2021). And with that power, they can coerce and blackmail literally any country, any government, any society. And we’ve seen that before. Those who do not participate are so-called “neutralized”. There are quite a few of them, especially in Africa.

These are people, behind BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street et al – along with other billionaires – that you can in good conscience – I would say, call sick. That’s why they, who have such capital powers at their disposal, have to control people. But actually – we can’t imagine that, at least I can’t – what that can do for you.

This is the state of the world today and we are only at the beginning of the 2030 Agenda. As long as people, the majority of people, suffer from what is called cognitive dissonance, we will continue to be dominated and manipulated until it comes to the next step. And so far this has been true. There are so many people, psychologists say, that this kind of affection, you can call it a disease, which is called cognitive dissonance, is one of the worst psychologically because it’s almost impossible to get rid of.

Kla.TV : What do you think is the next step then?

PK: This is precisely the third item in this diabolical trilogy, the ‘Reset’. This is total digitization. Money, people, surveillance and control of everything. Humans become transhumans. Klaus Schwab even said that in an interview on Swiss French television in 2016.

On top of that, we have the so-called QR-code. QR stands for “Quick Response”. And the associated technology that allows storing at least 30,000 data of each individual– up to now, and that can be increased. What and where you are, buy, where you go, who you circulate with, who you talk to, your health status, your bank account, your police report – everything, everything, is being watched and recorded.

The most important tool for full digitization is 5G. That’s why we already find antennas everywhere. And 5G is already active in certain cantons. I was in Ticino the other day and my phone already showed 5G. Not yet here in the Geneva area. And 6G will probably come soon. Because the only reason, by far the biggest reason for this is the digitization of everything and above all of people.

So: the QR code and the so-called VC derived from it – i.e. the “vaccine code” or “vaccine certificate code” (“vaccination certificate” in English) are the most dangerous thing that threatens us, what we face if we do nothing do about it. Because that means total surveillance. And once we’re there, it’s very, very difficult to get out of there.

Kla.TV: But let me tell you: the QR code is now an integral part of everyday life. We have that everywhere. And you see it as the most dangerous thing that can happen to us. Can you describe the danger of this QR code in a little more detail?

PK: We can even be condemned to starvation via the QR code. How so?

To do this, the QR code – or its successor, whatever it is called – has to be implanted in people in some way. And that’s what Klaus Schwab said back then in this short interview with Swiss-French television in Geneva, and that six years ago – he said: In about 2025, we will all have a chip either in our clothes or under our skin. Well, that was, maybe that’s his dream, I hope it doesn’t come to that, but he already announced it.

And so we’re in an electro-… we become an electromagnetic field. We people. There are already test groups in Sweden, volunteer test groups, who have implanted a chip in their hand, about the size of a grain of rice. At the moment, as I said, these are only volunteers who are involved. And so they need this code, i.e. this chip, mainly for digital payment transactions. But they can of course be expanded. Their potential is practically unlimited.

This is the basis for the QR-code, implanted into your body, and manipulable via 5G, or later 6G. One can easily imagine that someone who doesn’t live conform to the systems / the dictatorship’s requirements will be excluded form the payment system. That could mean, the person would not be able to buy food. The perso’s digital bank account may also be blocked, including the money in the account.

The west is doing this routinely – maybe less with individuals, but with countries that dare not living up to the demands of the US empire. Europe, especially NATO countries usually follow suit stealing other countries’ assets. Mind you, this is totally illegal under internatioal law. But nobody even cares anymore about international law.

Among the most sanctioned countries are Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Syria – and many others.

See also this on 5G.

Kla.TV : Mr König, you said that everyone now has a QR code, how do you understand that?

PK: Yes, well I’m assuming that everyone has at some point paid an invoice with a QR code on it. Even if you don’t need it to pay the bill, you still have associated your name, i.e. your own name, with this QR code and paid the bill, because that is an integral part of the payment slip that you use via the Bank paid or paid at post office counter.

But more importantly, probably all of us – or almost all of us I’m assuming – have done a PCR test, either because we wanted to travel or because we wanted to go to a theater somewhere, or something… In the last two years you could yes hardly go to a restaurant or in many restaurants you could not go at all around here without either being vaccinated or having a QR test. Then. everyone who has a PCR test, has a QR code, and a personal QR code at that.

This personal QR code, which is then just spread over or further used via an app on your cell phone. And this app is of course connected to a control center, we can’t do anything about it. The mobile phones are all already set up in such a way that they can be accessed from anywhere, even if you turn off the GPS, they know exactly where we are and what we do. If you don’t want this control, you literally have to throw your phone away. Or leave it at home. Very few people are willing do that.

But apart from that: at some point you need this cellphone again and then you are connected to it, and if you just like I said, we talked about the injection that contains graphene oxide and graphene oxide is very, very electromagnetic. That’s the substance that’s needed, probably one of the substances, maybe the most important, that’s needed to manipulate us with 5G. It may be soon. I don’t know when that will happen, but it certainly can… maybe it’s already started for certain people.

And then when that happens, the graphene oxide injection, we’ve practically got this substance of a QR code already built into our system. That’s how it works. And we can’t do anything about it, we don’t even know anymore. Most people… – I suppose very few people know that they have been vaccinated with a vaccine, so-called vaccine, which consists of graphene oxide, a highly magnetizable and electronically manipulable substance, very few people know that.

And that’s why they don’t even know that they probably already carry their QR code somewhere in their body. And those who haven’t done it yet have it on their cell phones. And we have to do something about that. There are people, there are effectively people, who say: We should try to go back in time, not to use cell phones anymore.

The smart phone has been gradually and persistently – and ever more persistently, infiltrated into our lives that we cannot imagine a life, especially the younger people, the younger generation, without this cellphone at all can no longer imagine. Most people find this QR code great. When I talk to people, especially younger people, they think it is superb, because you use it to pay a bill in the supermarket or restaurant directly with your phone, just swipe it by a cashier’s device – and bingo, the bill is paid. They have absolutely no idea what the aim is, no idea at all, and they don’t want to listen either. I’m a weirdo. I’m sorry, this is unfortunately our world today.

The digitized way of life, is driven into our brains with a flagrantly sophisticated lie-propaganda. When you know how much even the Swiss government, subsidized the media, or corrupts the media, it sounds unbelievable. The amount per capita in Switzerland – we only have 8.4 million inhabitants – is significantly higher than in the USA. A figure that has circulated is 1.7 billion Swiss francs (about the same in US dollars) over a period of 2 or 3 years. Just so, that the media say what the Swiss government and very likely WHO and the WEF wants them to say.

Kla.TV : Would that be the transformation from “human” to “transhuman”, as Klaus Schwab had specified somewhere or was also prescribed or advertised by his diabolical top advisor, the author and historian Yuval Noah Harari? Harari talks about how “humans” will be hacked in the future…?

PK: Harari literally calls us humans “animals that can be hacked”. Those are his words, meaning “animals that can be hacked”. “Hacked” in the sense of “electronically infiltrated” and can be manipulated. “Animals that can be hacked” are us.

I’m assuming that this arrogant kind of impudence from Harari was exploited by Klaus Schwab, probably even encouraged, to scare people. The first motto of avoidance, of resistance, is not to be afraid – NEVER.

I’ve said that before and I’ll keep repeating it. Have no fear. Fear is their greatest weapon. That’s the worst. In other words, many of those who have already been vaccinated, i.e. the so-called vaccinated, have had graphene oxide injected. And graphene oxide works very well as an electromagnetic field through which one may be manipulated.

And already with this manipulation a certain transhumanism is present. Most people don’t even know that. With 5G you can easily make remote-controlled transhumans out of it. That would be the total enslavement of the survivors; those who have just survived the reduction in world population. From my point of view, this would be a life no longer worth living, but we would probably hardly notice it, because we are under the spell of artificial intelligence (AI) [= artificial intelligence (AI)], algorithms or just as Klaus Schwab called it “You will own nothing but be happy.”

The dark cabal or cult’s goal as I like to call it, to reach this point by 2030, upon fulfillment, after the implementation of the UN Agenda 2030 – so there are still 8 years to go – or also with the fulfillment of the ‘Great Reset’, or the fulfillment of the ‘4. Industrial Revolution’. As already mentioned, these are goals that are identical in the three synonymous programs, the terminologies are just different in order to confuse us.

Kla.TV: Yes, do you see a possibility that these goals of total enslavement can still be prevented?

PK: Yes, there is still a lot missing, providing time to really wake people up, to wake up the majority. But it has to come to that. It is impossible for nature to be intimidated by such people — I can hardly call them people anymore, they are no longer humane.

So: take consciousness to a higher level to avoid the manipulation of the dark cult. That’s a priority.

In order to do that, we must–so I repeat–we must not be afraid. We must accept the acknowledgment of the lie that we have probably been exposed to for a lifetime. Because that is the power for overcoming of the so-called cognitive dissonance.

And very important, very important, we must not feel or express hatred towards these perpetrators. Because if we do that – that’s basically what they want, if they scare us or intimidate us, then their aim is to cause hatred. Then we sit down on the same deep level as they are themselves. We’re not allowed to.

So according to the motto – “We shall overcome” – we will master the situation – WITHOUT FEAR, I repeat again, WITHOUT FEAR, live towards the light and decide in peace for humanity. And so we can – I am convinced – save ourselves.

Kla.TV : Yes, Peter König, thank you very much for the interview. Thank you for taking the time. And yes, we will overcome together. Many Thanks.

Peter König : Nothing to thank for. I am grateful to you for letting me speak on your program and hopefully this message will reach some who are willing to get involved – also get involved spiritually. Many Thanks.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

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Humanity is a mistake away from “nuclear annihilation”, according to the head of the United Nations. But the Canadian government refuses to support efforts to lessen that risk. In fact, they’ve pursued policies that increase the likelihood of nuclear war.

At Monday’s opening of the review conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned of the dangers of nuclear weapons. He said, “humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.” Numerous other prominent individuals have made similar statements and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock is set to 100 seconds to midnight.

The war in Ukraine has greatly increased the possibility of nuclear war. By promoting NATO expansion, the overthrow of an elected Ukrainian president in 2014 and subsequent eight-year war in the east, Canada helped precipitate the war. Since Russia’s illegal and brutal invasion, Ottawa has poured in weapons, encouraged Canadians to go fight and sent Canadian special forces. At the same time, they’ve openly opposed negotiations to end the war.

On Tuesday Russia’s defence ministry accused the US of being “directly involved” in the war, which puts the countries with 90% of the world’s 13,400 nuclear weapons in open conflict. Detonating a small share of these nukes could make the planet uninhabitable.

Then, amidst the war in Ukraine, US House leader Nancy Pelosi decided to ramp up tensions with China, which has about 350 nuclear warheads. In the latest move to chip away at Washington’s four-decade-old One China policy, Pelosi visited Taiwan. Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly and Defence Minister Anita Anand both blamed China for the tensions, strengthening the position of the hawks in Washington preparing for an apocalyptic confrontation with the world’s most populous nation.

Growing tension between nuclear-armed powers takes place amidst the shredding of the limited arms control measures built up over decades. The Donald Trump administration pulled out of the Open Skies Treaty and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which have mitigated the dangers posed by nuclear weapons.

But Canadian officials blamed Russia for the demise of the INF Treaty, which banned an entire class of nuclear weapons. In April 2019 Director General of International Security Policy at Global Affairs, Cindy Termorshuizen, said, “we call on Russia to return to compliance with the INF Treaty.” But it’s not clear Russia violated one of the most significant nuclear accords ever signed. The Trump administration, on the other hand, began to develop new ground-launched intermediate-range missiles prohibited under the pact long before it formally withdrew from the INF. US military planners wanted to deploy intermediate-range missiles against China, which is not party to the INF.

In December 2018 Canada voted against a UN General Assembly resolution for “Strengthening Russian-United States Compliance with Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.” At that vote Canada’s representative said Moscow’s position on the INF reflected its “aggressive actions in neighbouring countries and beyond.” But it is Washington thatbroke its word in expanding NATO into Eastern Europe, withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty in 2001 and establishing missile ‘defence’ systems near Russia.

Canada has opposed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which is designed to make weapons that have always been immoral also illegal under international law. Canada voted against holding the 2017 UN Conference to Negotiate a Legally Binding Instrument to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, Leading Towards their Total Elimination. Ottawa then boycotted the TPNW negotiating meeting, which two-thirds of the world’s countries attended. In December 2020 Canada voted against 130 UN members that backed a resolution supporting the TPNW and, despite pressure from the disarmament community, Canadian officials failed to attend (even as observers) the TPNW’s first meeting of state parties in June.

At the NATO Summit in Spain that same month, however, Canada supported the alliance’s statement that it will “remain a nuclear alliance while nuclear weapons remain.”

This position undercuts the NPT, which is supposed to lead to nuclear disarmament. Despite officially supporting the NPT, no Canadian minister has attended the ongoing NPT review conference in New York (the US, German and other foreign ministers attended). The federal government doesn’t even appear to have released an official statement about the NPT conference.

Saturday is the 77th anniversary of the US bombing of Hiroshima. Canada is increasing the likelihood of a similar nuclear horror.

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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

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***

 

 

Have we forgotten that there is no safe place to hide in a nuclear war?

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Featured image is from Pete Linforth/Pixabay

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***

Cimavax-EGF, a Cuban therapeutic vaccine against lung cancer, conquers the scientific community and the population of the United States based on the achievements compiled in studies carried out. The vaccine was obtained after more than two decades of research and have shown satisfactory results in patients in advanced stages of lung cancer.

The Cuban Center for Molecular Immunology (CIM) and the Roswell Park Cancer Research Center in Buffalo, in the United States of America, joined forces a few years ago to facilitate access to equipment and reagents in order to promote the development of the drug, reported Russia Today.

The creation of the only joint venture between Cuba and the United States, the Innovative Immunotherapy Alliance, a biotechnological company to insert the drug in the U.S. society, facilitated Cuba’s access to equipment and reagents which are very difficult to obtain due to the limitations of the coercive measure of the economic, financial and commercial blockade imposed by the United States on the island, and the northern country can have access to a drug with excellent results and prospects.

Doctor Elia Neninger, who participated of in the clinical trials of the therapeutic vaccine from the beginning, assured the Russian TV station that the drug has two great advantages: few adverse reactions and a solution to lung cancer, which is a serious health problem in Cuba.

Deputy director of the Molecular Immunology Center Kalet León Monzón said that the patients who have received the vaccine are recovering from advanced tumor cancer and could have the prospect of survival in normal conditions in the very short term, according to Russia Today.

One of the beneficiaries of the vaccine, Miguel Creus, a patient who began to receive Cimavax 15 years ago, when the disease was in stage four and the vaccine was in clinical trials, assures that the drug has prolonged his life with a satisfactory state of health, and that at present he has no traces of tumors or symptoms of the disease.

Despite the effects of the economic blockade of the United States against Cuba, the collaboration between the two institutions continues and Cimavax overcomes the challenges. At present, there are clinical trials that combine this Cuban vaccine with other successful cancer treatments and their effects in high-risk people or patients in the initial stages of the disease are being studied.

According to some studies, lung cancer is the third most frequent cancer in the United States and the deadliest. This Cuban drug could be a promising relief, a good example of the benefits both nations would obtain if they had a normal relationship. (International News Office)

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Translated by ESTI

Featured image is from Granma

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***

The following statement by President Harry Truman was formulated in late July 1945, 77 years ago.

People in Japan, America and Worldwide should read it:

This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the secretary of war, Mr Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children.

Even if Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital or the new. He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. (Harry Truman, July 25, 1945, emphasis added)

 

Note the rhetoric ”we are the leader of the world for the common good”. The “Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic”

Hasn’t changed. Continuity in US foreign policy.

Extensive crimes against humanity, carefully planned by the US War Department are portrayed as “the common good”.

Harry S Truman:

‘The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base’,

radio broadcast – 1945

9 August 1945, radio broadcast, Washington D.C., USA

 

77 years later, media reports on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (6 and 9 August 1945).  

Mainstream media lies then and now. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki continues to be presented as a humanitarian undertaking by the U.S., as a means to ending WWII and saving lives.

And today, in chorus, in regards to nuclear weapons, the media is placing the blame on Russia.

U.S. “mistakes” are simply not mentioned.

Both the United Nations Secretary General and Japan’s Prime Minister are “toeing the line”:

Humanity is playing with a “loaded gun” as crises with the potential for nuclear disaster proliferate worldwide, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in the Japanese city of Hiroshima on the 77th anniversary of the first atomic bomb attack.

At an annual memorial on Saturday for the dropping of the first nuclear bomb, Guterres warned of the risk posed by crises in Ukraine, the Middle East and the Korean peninsula as he described the horrors endured in the Japanese city during World War II.

“Tens of thousands of people were killed in this city in the blink of an eye. Women, children and men were incinerated in a hellish fire,” the UN chief said.

“We must ask: What have we learned from the mushroom cloud that swelled above this city?” says Guterres.

No mention of Joe Biden’s $1.3 trillion nuclear weapons program. 

No mention of Washington’s pre-emptive nuclear war doctrine (2001 Nuclear Posture Review), which depicts tactical nuclear weapons (with an explosive capacity of 6 times a Hiroshima bomb) as “harmless to civilians”.

Russia is to blame

“Fears of a third atomic bombing have grown amid Russia’s threats of a nuclear attack since its war on Ukraine began in February.

The Russian ambassador was not invited to the ceremony but visited Hiroshima on Thursday to lay flowers at the memorial site.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, President Vladimir Putin has made thinly veiled threats hinting at a willingness to deploy tactical nuclear weapons.

Visibly the mayor of Hiroshima had also been co-opted by Washington. No history, no memories, no US war crimes. Accusations are casually directed against Russia:

Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui, in his peace declaration on Saturday, accused Putin of “using his own people as instruments of war and stealing the lives and livelihoods of innocent civilians in another country”.

Russia’s war on Ukraine is helping build support for nuclear deterrence, Matsui said, urging the world not to repeat the mistakes that destroyed his city 77 years ago.

Three days after the Hiroshima bombing, Washington dropped a second atomic bomb on the Japanese port city of Nagasaki, killing about 74,000 people and leading to the end of World War II.

The US remains the only country ever to have used nuclear weapons in conflict.

Saturday was the first time Guterres attended the Hiroshima memorial in person as UN chief. (Al Jazeera  emphasis added)

Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said at the memorial.

“I must raise my voice to appeal to the people around the world that the tragedy of nuclear weapons use should never be repeated,” (Al Jazeera  *emphasis added)

While the above report tacitly blames Russia with various innuendos, what it fails to mention is that barely two weeks after the end of World War II, on September 15, 1945, the US War Department issued a TOP SECRET plan consisting of a coordinated nuclear attack directed against 66 major cities of the Soviet Union.

The Infamous “WW III Blueprint” to Wage a Nuclear Attack against the Soviet Union (September 15, 1945)

The War Department had estimated that a total of 204 atomic bombs would be required to “Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map”.

Read the Memorandum for General Lauris Norstad  (below) “on the number of atomic bombs which should be available to ensure our national security”. This was before the Cold War at a time when the US and the Soviet Union were allies.

Was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a dress rehearsal for a much larger attack against the Soviet Union?

The declassified documents speak for themselves.

Reference to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the documents below pertains to “areas of total destruction” as a means to assessing the atom bombs required in the plan to bomb 66 cities of the Soviet Union.

“It is not essential to get total destruction of a city in order to destroy it’s effectiveness. Hiroshima no longer exists as a city even though the area of total destruction is considerably less than total”. (Memorandum dates 26 September 1945)

Key documents were released in September 1945. This plan of the Manhattan Project against the Soviet Union was formulated at an earlier stage, at the height of World War II.

 

 

For further details and analysis, see

Today the Threat of Nuclear War is Real: “Wipe the Soviet Union Off the Map”, 204 Atomic Bombs against 66 Major Cities, US Nuclear Attack against USSR Planned During World War II

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, August 06, 2022


Full text of Hiroshima Peace Declaration on 77th anniversary of atomic bombing

[Not a word directed against the United States and its 1.3 trillion dollar nuclear weapons program,

Not a word pertaining to the extensive war crimes committed against the people of Japan]

***

The following is the full text of the Peace Declaration read Saturday by Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui at a ceremony to mark the 77th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city.

“I adored my mother; she raised me with such kindness and care.” The woman speaking was 16 when she left home carrying the lunch her mother had lovingly prepared. She never imagined it would be their final parting. Summer, 77 years ago. That morning, without warning, the first nuclear weapon was dropped and detonated over humanity. Standing near Hiroshima Station, the girl saw a terrifying flash. Then came a thunderous roar. Striking from behind, the blast blew her through the air and knocked her unconscious. When she came to, she wandered through the smoldering city, searching for her mother. She saw a horrifying number of blackened bodies. One charred corpse still stood, clinging to the neck of a cow. Bodies floating in the river drifted up and down with the tide. She still remembers the morning when everyday life vanished violently into scenes from hell.

In invading Ukraine, the Russian leader, elected to protect the lives and property of his people, is using them as instruments of war, stealing the lives and livelihoods of innocent civilians in another country. Around the world, the notion that peace depends on nuclear deterrence gains momentum. These errors betray humanity’s determination, born of our experiences of war, to achieve a peaceful world free from nuclear weapons. To accept the status quo and abandon the ideal of peace maintained without military force is to threaten the very survival of the human race. We must stop repeating these mistakes. Above all, entrusting a nuclear button to any world leader is to sanction continued nuclear threats to humanity and potential recreation of the hellscape of August 6, 1945. We must immediately render all nuclear buttons meaningless.

Must we keep tolerating self-centeredness that threatens others, even to the point of denying their existence? We should take to heart the words of Leo Tolstoy, the renowned Russian author of War and Peace, who advised, “Never build your happiness on the misfortune of others, for only in their happiness can you find your own.”

Earlier this year, the five nuclear-weapon states issued a joint statement: “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” They further declared their intent to “…remain committed to our Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations.” Having issued such a statement, why do they not attempt to fulfill their promises?

Why do some even hint at using nuclear weapons? The nuclear powers must act now to build bridges of trust among nations. Rather than treating a world without nuclear weapons like a distant dream, they should be taking concrete steps toward its realization. I call on the leaders of the nuclear-weapon states to visit the atomic-bombed cities where they can personally encounter the consequences of using nuclear weapons and strengthen their will to take these steps. I want them to understand that the only sure way to protect the lives and property of their people is to eliminate nuclear weapons. I fervently hope that the leaders who attend the G7 Summit in Hiroshima next year will reach this conclusion.

With the hibakusha’s will to peace at our core, and inheriting the “never-give-up” spirit of hibakusha leader Tsuboi Sunao, who dedicated his life to the cause, Hiroshima will continue striding toward nuclear weapons abolition, however arduous the path.

Mayors for Peace, now a network of 8,200 peace cities around the world, will hold its 10th General Conference in Hiroshima this year. That conference will work toward a civil society in which each and every citizen shares the conviction that happy lives require an end to war, an end to armed conflict, and an end to life-threatening social discrimination. In that pursuit, we will intensify cooperation among our peace-minded member cities to promote a “culture of peace” that rejects all forms of violence. Mayors for Peace encourages policymakers to pursue foreign policies through dialogue without relying on nuclear deterrence.

This past June, the First Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) adopted a declaration that, against the backdrop of the Russian invasion, categorically rejects the threat of nuclear weapons. With nuclear weapons-dependent states participating as observers, the meeting specifically stressed that the TPNW contributes to and complements the NPT. Therefore, I demand first that the Japanese government serve as mediator at the NPT Review Conference. Then, Japan must participate in the next Meeting of States Parties to the TPNW, promptly become a State Party itself, and wholeheartedly support the movement toward nuclear weapons abolition.

The average age of the hibakusha now exceeds 84, and their lives are still impaired by radiation’s adverse effects on their minds and bodies. Thus, I further demand that the Japanese government empathize with their suffering to better offer them enhanced support measures.

Today, at this Peace Memorial Ceremony commemorating 77 years since the bombing, we offer heartfelt condolences to the souls of the atomic bomb victims. Together with Nagasaki and likeminded people around the world, we pledge to do everything in our power to abolish nuclear weapons and light the way toward lasting world peace.

 


Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

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’.”
John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“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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Author’s Note: This is written in honor of a dear family friend who pulled through her recent cancer with flying colors.

I hate the title of this post, but there was no other title for this post. We’re at the point where information is coming through fast and furious, and while that helps push us to that tipping point we’re all working towards, it comes with so much pain and suffering.

Chief of Pathology

Dr. Ute Kruger is a researcher and senior physician at Lunds University in Sweden. She’s the former Chief of Pathology, a field that she’s worked in for the last 25 years, with a specialty in breast cancer diagnosis for the past 18 years. She’s studied thousands of autopsies and breast cancer samples. She’s extremely familiar with the industry and patient age, tumor size, and malignancy grade are all within her field of expertise and have had a natural rhythm throughout her career. That natural rhythm came to a halt in 2021 once the vaccine rollout began.

Doctors for Covid Ethics posted an interview with her where she shared her concerns about unusual features that have been showing up in samples from the past year.

  • Age – The average ages of the samples she received dropped, with a rise in the number of samples from people in their 30’s-50’s.
  • Size – It used to be unusual for Dr. Kruger to find a tumor 3 cm in size. In this new environment, she’s regularly seeing tumors of 4 cm, 8 cm, 10 cm, and the occasional 12 cm. In a shocking anecdote, 2 weeks ago she found a 16 cm tumor that took up an entire breast.
  • Multiple Tumors – Dr. Kruger has begun to see more cases of multiple tumors growing in the same patient, sometimes even in both breasts. She had 3 cases within 3 weeks of patients who had tumors growing in multiple organs. One had tumors in his/her breast, pancreas and lungs within months of getting vaccinated.
  • Recurrence – There has been an uptick in patients who have been in remission from their cancer for many years, suddenly getting an aggressive recurrence of their cancer shortly after vaccination.

Speaking Out

Dr. Kruger initially thought that these turbo cancers, as she calls them, were due to delayed doctor appointments from Covid lockdowns, but that period is long over, and the tumors are still growing aggressively, and in younger patients. She reported some of these cases to the FDA, and while some higher-ups initially agreed to meet with her, they canceled the meeting with no explanation the next day and sent a phone agent to take her report instead.

Six months ago Dr. Kruger appeared at a panel in Germany to present her theory that vaccination is causing aggressive tumors, and she asked for help from the doctors at that summit in collecting data. Unfortunately, few of them have been willing to collect that data and share it with her.

Autopsies

Part of Dr. Kruger’s time is spent on autopsies, and she drew attention to numerous concerning anomalies.

  1. A 60-year-old had multiple malignant diseases. He got 2 doses of the Covid vaccine during chemotherapy and then developed Guillain Barre Syndrome. She found inflammation in the spinal cord, brain, and blood vessels.
  2. An 80-yr-old woman became paralyzed one month after vaccination. Dr. Kruger found a hemorrhage in the spinal cord near the neck, which is something she’s never seen before. Under the microscope, she saw inflammation in the vessel that caused the rupture and caused bleeding. She also found inflammation in the heart muscles, which is myocarditis.
  3. Dr. Kruger was called to settle a dispute between a family of a deceased person, and the doctors who signed the autopsy. The family and their physician believed the death was a result of the Covid vaccine, yet the ones who performed the autopsy didn’t come up with any findings to support that and did not link the death to the vaccine. When Dr. Kruger performed her own autopsy, she found evidence of myocarditis and vasculitis- inflammation of blood vessels in the lungs. The original autopsy either missed those signals or didn’t look for them, and the family was correct. Dr. Kruger shared her opinion, supported by another senior-level pathologist from Germany, that the death was indeed due to the Covid vaccine.

Dr. Kruger outlined 3 major issues with the way autopsies are currently being run in practice:

  1. Patient information is sloppy. Dr. Kruger personally had several cases where clinicians had written that the patient was unvaccinated for the autopsy, when in fact in their medical files it was documented that they were vaccinated for Covid.
  2. The typical autopsy doesn’t run exams deep enough to diagnose the root cause of certain medical issues. They don’t do rigorous histopathological testing of the tissues where vaccine damage would likely show up, but which is necessary to detect markers of vaccine-induced injury, such as immunological infiltrates or spike proteins in myocardial tissues. Dr. Kruger ran more thorough exams and found myocarditis and inflammations that were missed by the original autopsy.
  3. There’s a lack of experience in evaluating these findings, and a lack of desire to properly contextualize cases. In addition, most autopsy clinicians don’t report cases to the FDA.

While Dr. Kruger’s testimony is by nature anecdotal, as a top-level pathologist of many years, her concerns should be taken very seriously and investigated further. Of course, that would require an honest regulation system which seems to be sorely lacking these days.

“I’m Watching People Being Killed”

Dr. Kruger stated that she sees vaccination as a trigger for fast-growing tumors and autoimmune diseases. She’s seeing a lot of inflammation alongside tumors, and of course, it’s not only breast cancer. Many other pathologists have reported to Dr. Kruger that they’re seeing an elevation in cancers, cancers in multiple organs, and rare cancers.

She ended off by saying “I studied medicine because I wanted to help people. But now it feels like I’m watching people being killed and there’s nothing I can do”.

The first step to solving any issue is acknowledging there’s a problem. We have a huge problem, and in order to begin to resolve it, it must be acknowledged. It’s time to start pressuring doctors to speak out. Any doctor who’s aware enough to understand that something is off must begin to address the issue. An additional motivation may be the pressure of knowing that it’s all about to blow up, and they don’t want to be standing on the wrong side of the line when it does.

*

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***

Gaza is separated from Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank by Israeli territory, and yet the current Israeli attack on Gaza, and the deaths, injuries and destruction of homes is directly connected to Jenin, the center of Palestinian resistance.

On Friday, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) carried out a long range assassination of Tayseer Jabari, a leader in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement (PIJ).  He was killed when his home was attacked by Israeli missiles fired at the high-rise residential building Palestine Tower in Gaza.  At least 10 people were killed along with Jabari, including a five-year-old girl, Alaa Kaddum.  After the horrific blast in the residential building, dozens of terrified and injured residents were seen pouring out of the building and into the street where ambulances were arriving.

Jabari was assassinated in an unprovoked attack.  According to Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, “Israel carried out a precise counter-terror operation against an immediate threat.” However, no evidence of any planned attack on Israel was offered in defense of their unprovoked assassination of Jabari  which led to at least 15 collateral civilian deaths and 125 injured.

In response to the attack, the PIJ fired more than 200 rockets from Gaza at Israeli cities and illegal settlements.  Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense shield intercepted most, but sirens sounded in a number of Israeli cities throughout the night.  The IDF continued to fire rockets into Gaza into the early hours of Saturday morning

According to channel 12 of Israel, the medical center in Ashkelon has admitted 20 Israeli citizens with injuries.  The electricity is cut off in Gaza, and Israel has cut off fuel deliveries to produce electricity in Gaza, which will result in medical services being compromised.

A building in Sderot was struck and damaged.  A factory in Ashkelon received a direct hit from Gaza and suffered severe damage.

Hamas is the strongest resistance group in Gaza, and is the governing body.  They have stated they will not keep silent in the current situation and will show a united front with PIJ.

Condemnations for the attack on Gaza have come from Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, China, Russia, the Arab League, Kuwait, Lebanon, Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Ireland, the Arab Parliament, Al-Ashar University in Cairo, and Jordan activists.

Journalist’s assassination

On May 11, Palestinian-American veteran journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, was waiting with other journalists in the early morning to report on the IDF incursion into Jenin.  According to the UN report, the only arms present were the IDF, and several shots were fired at the journalists huddled by a tree.  One bullet hit journalist Ali Sammoudi in the shoulder.  Two more bullets hit the tree where Shireen stood, and finally the bullet meant to kill her hit its mark.

Ravina Shamdasani, of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said from Geneva, “the shots that killed Abu Aqla and injured her colleague Ali Sammoudi came from Israeli security forces and not from indiscriminate firing by armed Palestinians, as initially claimed by Israeli authorities”.

“It is deeply disturbing that Israeli authorities have not conducted a criminal investigation,” she added.

Ms. Shamdasani said the OHCHR had “found no information suggesting that there was activity by armed Palestinians in the immediate vicinity of the journalists”.

Apartheid Israel

Michael Lynk, the UN Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory said,

“There is today in the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967 a deeply discriminatory dual legal and political system, that privileges the 700,000 Israeli Jewish settlers living in the 300 illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.”

Lynk added that

“there are more than three million Palestinians living under an oppressive rule of institutional discrimination and without a path to a genuine Palestinian state that the world has long promised, is their right”.

“Another two million Palestinians live in Gaza, described regularly as an ‘open-air prison’, without adequate access to power, water or health, with a collapsing economy and with no ability to freely travel to the rest of Palestine or the outside world,” said Lynk.

Lynk clearly defined Israel as an apartheid state, which conforms to the definition as a “political regime which so intentionally and clearly prioritizes fundamental political, legal and social rights to one group over another, within the same geographic unit on the basis of one’s racial-national-ethnic identity”.

Some thought apartheid had been abolished with the dissolution of the old colonial South Africa regime, but Israel has picked up the torch of oppression and racism and there is no end in sight to the crimes against humanity in Palestine carried out by the closest ally of the United States of America in the Middle East.

Ban Ki-Moon, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Neledi Pandor and Michael Ben-Yair have all described Israel’s occupation as apartheid.

Lynk delivered his report to the UN’s Human Rights Council adding that Israel’s military rule in the occupied Palestinian territory has been deliberately built with the “intention of enduring facts on the ground to demographically engineer a permanent, and illegal, Israeli sovereign claim over occupied territory, while confining Palestinians in smaller and more confined reserves of disconnected land”.

The international community, headed by the United States of America, have kept Israel in a protected state of impunity, and without threat of accountability.

The Biden administration and the US State Department issued a statement used to cover all crimes by the IDF.  The mantra chanted in Washington, DC. is, “The US recognizes the right of Israel to defend itself.”  No mention is made that the IDF attacked Gaza without any provocation.

IDF enters Jenin and arrests PIJ official

On Monday night, the IDF entered Jenin and arrested Bassem Saadi, the leader thereof PIJ. During the violent arrest in his home, his wife Nawal was injured by the IDF and was later hospitalized.

The IDF also shot dead 17-year-old Dirar al-Kafrini, late on Monday in Jenin., and have arrested 19 members of PIJ in raids across the West Bank.

Where is Gaza?

Gaza, is a Palestinian enclave on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. In 2006 they held elections which had been promoted by the US as democratic.  However, the US didn’t count on Hamas winning the support of the people in the election, and have been governing Gaza since.

Because of the US displeasure in the process of democracy in Gaza, Israel and the US have boycotted Gaza and the residents live under siege and blockade.

In 2012, the United Nations Country Team (UNCT) in the occupied Palestinian territory warned that the Gaza Strip might not be a liveable place by 2020, and as of 2020, Gaza had suffered shortages of water, medicine and power, a situation exacerbated by the coronavirus crisis.

The UN has called for the US-Israeli blockade to be lifted, and warned in 2020 that Gaza’s economy was on the verge of collapse.  The US sustained blockade has kept Gazans unable to leave or enter Gaza, and imports and exports are severely restricted, making even the most basic necessities like medicines unavailable.

The current escalation in Gaza began in Jenin in the West Bank.  The two areas are separated by land, but united in resistance to the occupation of Palestine.

*

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from MD

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***

At 10:13 am today (Thursday), Ukraine began shelling central Donetsk. There were five powerful blasts in the space of ten minutes. The last explosion blew out my hotel’s ground-floor glass, including a sitting room – where journalists often congregate before and after going out to do field reporting – and the lobby. About one minute earlier, I had passed through the latter. A cameraman’s assistant who was there at the time of that fifth explosion suffered a concussion from the force of the blast.

A woman walking outside the building was killed, as were at least four others, including a child. Donetsk Telegram channels are filled with videos locals have taken, of the dead, the injured and the damage, and of grief-stricken people. One such hard-to-watch Telegram post (warning: graphic footage) features a man in shock at the gruesome sight of the bodies of his murdered wife and grandchild on a street two blocks from the hotel.

The total number of injured is still not known, as I write. First estimates placed the number at at least ten, among them two ambulance workers: a paramedic and a doctor.

Reading the news, you have the luxury of graphic image warnings and the choice not to look at the pictures and videos of the carnage that occurred today, as well as over the past eight years of Ukraine’s war on Donbass. The people here on the ground don’t get a warning, or a choice as to whether they will see the mutilated remains of a loved-one or stranger. As uncomfortable as it is to see such footage, it does need to be shown if the world is to know the truth of what’s going on in Donbass, to give voice to the locals, killed and terrorized by Ukrainian forces as Western corporate media looks elsewhere or covers up these crimes.

Chronology of a bomb strike

When the shelling started, I was in my room editing footage from the previous day – from the aftermath of another shelling of a Donetsk district. You wouldn’t know it from most Western media coverage but explosions are so common here that I didn’t think much of the blast other than it was louder than usual and the car alarms were going off.

Seven minutes later, another explosion, much louder and much closer. From the window, smoke could be seen rising to the north, probably 200 meters away. This would have been right near the Opera House, where the funeral ceremony for Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) Colonel Olga Kachura, killed yesterday, was commencing.

A minute later, another loud blast sent me running from the room, which faced the direction of incoming artillery. Luckily, the only damage ended up being a broken window.

Downstairs, journalists who had been in the hotel and others who had been outside ready to go out reporting, took shelter in the hallway for the time being, ready to run to the basement if things escalated.

One told me he had been preparing to go film and was about 10 meters away from where the last shell struck. “I believe they were trying to target the funeral. And journalists also,” he said. He also said there was a woman outside who had lost a leg, and that she was probably dead by now.

One could assume that Kiev’s forces’ only intended target was the funeral service for Colonel Kachura, aiming perhaps to send a message to the DPR military and the civilians who support it. While that would be egregious by itself, it is likely that a hotel housing journalists was not just ‘collateral damage,’ either.

Ukraine routinely persecutes, censors, imprisons, tortures, and targets media personnel, putting us on kill lists.

Kiev’s forces know a lot of journalists stay at this hotel for its central location and strong wifi. Many frequently do their live reports from outside the hotel. And those staying here, as well as in other central Donetsk neighborhoods, have been loudly reporting on Ukraine’s showering of Donetsk with the insidious, internationally-prohibited ‘butterfly’ anti-personnel mines of late – the latest, until today, in the list of Kiev’s war crimes. These explosives are designed to rip off feet and legs, and Ukraine has repeatedly fired rockets containing them, intentionally dropping them on civilian areas in Donetsk and other Donbass cities.

After the explosions rang out in central Donetsk today, Emergency Services arrived at the scene and, following a period of calm, journalists went out to document the damage and the dead. The woman I’d been told about lay in a pool of blood, covered with what appeared to be a curtain from one of the blown-out windows.

The calm didn’t last long. Ukraine soon resumed shelling, and journalists outside ran back inside as we received another four attacks. “It’s like a common thing, they shoot one place and shoot it again. So we’re in the middle of that process right now,” a Serbian guy near me said.  The chief of a local Emergency Services headquarters told me Kiev also makes triple strikes, not only double.

It is said that Ukraine used NATO-standard 155mm caliber weapons in today’s attack. If that is true, this is another instance of Ukraine using Western-supplied weapons to slaughter and maim civilians in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.

If by bombing a hotel full of journalists Kiev wanted to intimidate them away from reporting on Ukraine’s war crimes, it won’t work. Most journalists reporting from on the ground here do so because, unlike the crocodile tears of the West for conflicts they create, we actually care about the lives of people here.

*

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Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years). @evakbartlett

Featured image is from Eva Bartlett

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上海、平壌の市民とともに立ち上がろう

August 8th, 2022 by Emanuel Pastreich

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***

Read the original English version:

The Globalists have Launched a New Offensive against the Citizens of the Earth.

By Emanuel Pastreich, June 01, 2022

***

グローバリスト達は、地球上に住む人々に対して新たな攻撃を開始しました。グローバリスト達は、最も狡猾な方法で、文化、人種、習慣を利用して私達を分断させようとしています。この目的は、世界経済フォーラム(WEF)のような犯罪シンジケートを打倒し、解体することに特化した同盟、連合、さらにはコミュニティまでも形成できないようにさせ、市民達の連帯を妨害することです。世界経済フォーラムはグローバルガバナンスを掌握し、ますますその支配力を国や地方政府にまで猛然と拡大させつつあります。

民間の投資家が雇ったこの影の傭兵は、私達の間でも高い教育を受けた人々に賄賂を贈り、人々をそそのかすことによって、このような所業を行ってきたのです。抜け目のない人達は、高額な対価を得て、悪に対して目をつぶる方が得策であるということをよく分かっているということです。

一方の側である想定上の「西側」と他方の側であるロシア、中国、北朝鮮、イランとの間に「偽」の世界大戦を作り出すと同時に、これらの全ての国、さらには、世界の全ての国の経済的・政治的システムを操作し、支配しようとする現在の試みは、その規模において前例のない、卑劣で巧妙な計画であると言えるでしょう。

しかしながら、そのような絶対的な支配の計画は、歴史上、新しいものではないということは確かであり、単にAI、スーパーコンピューター、CTVカメラ、5G、低軌道衛星、ドローン、そして国境を持たない武器と化したメディアエンターテインメント複合体を使用したものに移り変わったにすぎません。

皆さんがそのような大それたことをするような悪人や、自己中心的な人はいないと思うなら、残念ながら、それは大きな間違いです。

「偽」の世界大戦を生み出すための最初のステップは、ロシアをウクライナに侵攻させるためにとられた(今も機密でありアクセスできない)作戦行動から始まっているのです。

この作戦は長期的かつ複雑であり、米国、ドイツなどのNATO加盟国、その他の国々、そしておそらくはロシア国内の一部派閥も関与していたことは明らかです。ロシアは、世界経済フォーラムとその影の支援者たちの犯罪的なアジェンダに立ち向かってはいませんでした。むしろ、プーチン大統領はこれらのグローバル組織の仲間でした。しかしながら、キエフで運命の分かれ道がありました。そして今、ロシアは今回の襲撃を受けて、WHOからの脱退をはじめとして、グローバル・ガバナンス・システム全体の解体に向かって動き出しているのです。

対話の余地はもう残されていません。ドイツと日本をはじめとする欧州、アジアの国々は、軍事予算と国内の監視体制を抜本的に強化し、核兵器を保有する国の数は今後10年間で簡単に倍増する可能性があるのです。だから、同じように、核兵器の総数も倍増する可能性があるのです。要するに、油断のならない政治家達がそこまでのことを意図していなかったとしても、私達は世界大戦の危機に直面しているのです。

ウクライナへの侵攻の後、目に見えない力によって上海でロックダウンが発生しました。これは大富豪達によって計画されていたものであり、多額の報酬と引き換えに実行されたと見て間違いないでしょう。

上海は監獄となり、特殊部隊はCOVID-19という偽の名目で人々を家に閉じ込め、人々を飢餓におびえさせるようになりました。

全世界に向けて、明確なメッセージが発信されたのです。

もちろん、これまでにも民間の投資家や多国籍企業が上海を支配してきたのは事実です。今回異なるのは、超富裕層を除いた全ての人々がロックダウンされたということなのです。

大手企業系列のメディアは、上海のストーリーをあり得ないほど歪めました。大手企業系列のメディアは、上海を牛耳ったのは寄生虫のような大富豪家達ではなく、むしろ「左翼」、「社会主義」によるものだ、そして何よりも、血で汚れた「中国共産党」によるものだと発表したのです。

「西側」の大手企業系列のメディアは、李克強首相が地方政府を支援し、COVID-19のロックダウンに反対している一方で、現在「共産主義者」として赤いレッテルを貼られた習近平国家主席が全体主義のゼロコロナ政策を推進し続けていることを嬉々と伝えています。

おそらく習近平は、国内外のグローバリストが扇動したロックダウンの責任を押し付けられ、李は西側が手を組める英雄的人物に祭り上げられているのです。グローバリスト達が自分たちの痕跡を慌てて隠している間に、李は、グローバリスト達の勢力下に入りつつあるということなのです。

グローバルファイナンスは上海でこの悪夢を生み出し、それを社会主義のせいにしました。その結果、現在グローバルファイナンスによって完全に支配されている国である米国、英国、そして日本では、市民は、「自分達は自由であり、中国は独裁的な共産主義国家である」と信じ込まされています。

政府がグローバルファイナンスを支配し、富を再分配し、労働者を保護する役割を果たす「社会主義的な」体制は、独裁国家として馬鹿にされ、否定されることになります。

右翼のブロガー達は、欧州、オーストラリア、米国などの先進的な白人諸国が、アジア人によって作り上げられた致命的な計画によって人口減少の標的になっているという、レポートやグラフを発表しています。

この戦争が白人に対するものであるかどうかは疑わしいですが、その視点を裏付けるために提供される統計データ(本物かどうかは別として)は、階級戦争を人種戦争と誤解させるように流布される可能性があります。実際に、第二次世界大戦ではそれが起こりました。米国には、1850年代にさかのぼれば、人種戦争の影に階級闘争を隠すという古い伝統があります。

同様の戦略は、公然に「西側」のもう1つの敵となっているイランでも用いられています。イランは大抵の国々よりもグローバリストの攻撃に対して上手に抵抗していましたが、今では食料の購入に生体認証ID、つまり、デジタルパスポートを義務付ける最初の国として紹介されるまでになっています。

 グローバリストの工作員は、イランを取り込む手段として、貧しい人々や無力な人々を対象にこの政策を推進しています。それはまた、反グローバリストの右派、つまりグローバリストからのキックバックを受け、偏った人種差別的な方法でグローバリズムを攻撃している人達が、イランは敵であり、非キリスト教的に国民を独自に虐待していると主張する機会にもなっているのです。

最後に、朝鮮民主主義人民共和国があります。この国は、COVID-19詐欺に最も長く抵抗し、国民がこの空想上の病気に感染したことを発表したり、ワクチン、社会的距離、マスクなどの医療兵器システムを支持したりすることを、拒否し続けました。

その後、2022年5月12日、北朝鮮の金正恩委員長は、自国でCOVID-19、特に、馬鹿げた変異株であるオミクロン株の感染者が発生したことを突然発表し、平壌がロックダウンの対象になると宣言しました。

発情期にあるハイエナのように、大手企業系列の新聞社はこの捏造された危機に嬉々として飛びつきました。

私達が何が起こったのかを知る前に、北朝鮮人は愚かなマスクを着用し、役立たずで危険な消毒剤を至るところにまき散らし始めました。

北朝鮮は、世界経済フォーラムや超富裕層向けの他のグローバリスト機関を運営している勢力と同じ、裏の勢力の攻撃を受けています。北朝鮮は理想的な国ではありませんでしたが、かつてはこの買収に抵抗することができました。しかし、今ではもはやそうすることができません。おそらく、平壌の意思決定者は脅迫され、買収されたのでしょう。同じことが他の全ての国でも起こりました。

特筆すべきことは、韓国がマスクの着用要件を緩和し、レストランやショップのワクチンパスポートを廃止したのと同じタイミングで、北朝鮮がCOVID-19の取り締まり始めたことです。この一連の出来事は偶然とは言えないでしょう。

予想通り、大手企業系列のメディアは、これらのイデオロギー的に異質な国々が、開放的で、合理的且つ民主的な「西側」とは対照的に、極端なCOVID-19対策で人々を抑圧していると報道しました。

この計画は中国、北朝鮮、イランに対して、全体主義のイメージを植え付けることです。この瞬間にも大富豪家達は、テレビ、インターネット、学校や研究機関を通じた、CCTVカメラ、ジオフェンシング、5Gによる徹底したターゲット広告を使って、米国、ドイツ、イスラエル(および他の国々)の民間技術企業によって支配されている「西側」諸国で技術専制政治の基盤を築いています。

つまり、新自由主義思想に抵抗した国々は、結果として全体主義の元凶とされているのです。これは、プロパガンダの専門家達による巧妙な仕業であると言えるでしょう。

その渦中において、彼らは企業国家によっていつでも運用を停止することができるデジタル通貨、スマートシティ、そして、スマートカーを私達に強引に推奨しています。これらは、私達を家の中に囚人として閉じ込め、常に監視の対象とすることを可能にしているのです。

シンディ・ナイルズ氏の言葉を借りれば、「地獄への道は、持続可能な開発目標(SDGs)で舗装されている」のです。

つまり、私達はグローバリストの乗っ取りに断固抵抗して、平壌、上海の市民と一緒に立ち向かわなければならないということです。私達は、仲間である犠牲者達を侵略者として扱うように私達を信じ込ませようとする大富豪家の自己陶酔的なレトリックを決して許してはなりません。

地域単位で代替的な臨時政府を形成すると同時に、企業のファシズムに対抗する「グローバリスト」ではない国際的な同盟を形成しない限り、グローバリスト達を打ち負かすことはできないのです。

大富豪家達は、私達が共通の目的のために地球の全ての国で志を同じくする人々を連帯させれば、自分達に勝ち目はない、ということを知っています。大富豪家達は、地球上の過激な構造改革を実行するために、私達を混乱させ、分裂させ、可能な限り多くの公人を脅し、買収しようとします。そして、大富豪家達は、その目的のためなら、幾らでもお金を支払うでしょう。

グローバリストの陰謀の一部として、意図的に敵へと仕立て上げられた国々の国民に手を差し伸べることは、私達の戦いを有利に進めるための、非常に重要な戦略です。

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エマニュエル・パストライヒは、ワシントンDC、ソウル、東京、ハノイにオフィスを持つシンクタンクであるアジアインスティチュートの会長を務めました。パストライヒは、未来都市環境研究所の所長も務めています。パストライヒは、2020年2月に、米国大統領の立候補を独立者として宣言しました。

彼はGlobalResearchの定期的な寄稿者です。

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The US continues its foreign policy of a ‘rules-based order’ executed under ultimatums, political deception and hybrid warfare across the globe in its resistance to the global systemic transition to multipolarity. The article will focus on how Nicaragua’s government has dealt with the trending New Cold War. Many international media outlets have detailed how the Nicaraguan government has withdrawn its approval of Hugo Rodriguez, the US ambassador nominee to the Central American country, for making disrespectful and interfering statements. What has not been sufficiently appreciated is that his statements actually confirm what the Nicaraguan government has been saying since 2018, that networks of NGOs synchronize with the US government serving as proxies of various kinds to execute certain roles within the deployment apparatus of Color Revolutions. 

In the recording of the confirmation process for diplomatic personnel, Senator Tim Kaine asks the nominee for US ambassador to the Central American country if he has a clear picture on how he will support the pro-US factions in Nicaragua, to which the ambassadorial nominee responded that he will represent – as a good leader of proxy groups – US interests by intensifying efforts within and outside of Nicaragua’s territory, seeking to reverse the will of the its government. The crucial transcript reads as follows:

Senator Kaine: What space for US sort of pro democracy, pro human rights activity, or support for organizations that are engaged in pro human rights activities, what space exists within Nicaragua that you could promote, should you be confirmed?

Nominee Hugo Rodriguez: Thank you senator, you are exactly right, it has really been a really lamentable state of events, really since 2018 in Nicaragua, the space has been increasingly limited, however we still maintain a strong and well led USAID contingent in country, working with those human rights defenders and others NGOs that continue to operate in country and increasingly working with those who are operating or directing operations from outside of the country, so those spaces still exist, and if confirmed, I look forward to redoubling our efforts to make sure those voices are able to be heard across Nicaragua and across the region.

The Nicaraguan government took prompt action on this development in the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee by revoking that same day the approval granted to the US ambassador nominee to Nicaragua.

The logistics of operation and deployment of Hybrid Warfare proxy cells / NGOs described by nominee Rodriguez serves as evidence and confirmation that the US coordinates these hostile, sabotage and political deception networks. Non-governmental organizations emerged in Nicaragua in the 1990s under the presidency of Mrs. Violeta Barrios de Chamorro whose government hastily privatized most of the country generating unemployment and extreme poverty.

In 1992 the foundations for an NGO government were created under the General Law on Non-Profit Legal Entities, Law No. 147 to develop social projects that received international funding which until now would be co-opted. As the years went by, certain groups – historically tied to US proxy factions – amassed a large number of NGOs seeking to distort the purpose of these organizations, forgetting their original intentions, they thus dedicated themselves to businesses with nebulous finances, the creation of anti-government cells, corruption and money laundering. Law No. 147, which has been in force since 1992, was recently repealed in March 2022 and replaced by Law No. 606, which is a more sophisticated set of regulations for the NGOs in the country.

Nicaragua recognized the need for reforms in Democratic Security and counter Hybrid Warfare in the legal sphere, first intervening with the NGOs directly involved with the 2018 coup attempt and then focusing on NGOs that are not complying with State regulations. The other NGOs that were not necessarily directly involved in the coup attempt are now being cancelled because they are hiding the information required to properly audit them so they are not complying with the regulations of Law No. 606. Since 2018, several rounds of audits have been carried out in this sector and hundreds of these organizations have had their legal status cancelled, prohibiting their existence on Nicaraguan soil.

Deputies of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN in spanish) indicated in February 2022 that the NGOs in question contravened the Law of Regulation of Foreign Agents, and the legislation against money laundering, the financing of terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction among others. Edwin Castro, FSLN deputy explained that,

“If they don’t present a correct board of directors, don’t present financial statements, don’t present accountability, etc., then the obligation is to call them, if they don’t comply, cancel them, start canceling them, there are thousands that have to be cancelled, but is not because of political reasons, simply a legal matter”.

For his part, Carlos Emilio López, another FSLN deputy spoke on how

“[…] no one is above the law, that is, these associations even if they receive funding from the US, even if they receive funding from Europe, that does not make them organizations that have a shield of impunity to do and undo whatever they want, whatever they desire, no, all natural persons in Nicaragua and all legal persons in Nicaragua have to comply with the Nicaraguan legal system.”

The NGOs based in Nicaragua are required to comply with certain laws passed by the National Assembly and regulated by the Ministry of Public Administration of the country. With this in mind, Nicaragua is practicing a policy of “democratic security”, based on counter Hybrid Warfare tactics and strategies aimed at reinforcing national models of democracy.

Even though the 2018 armed Hybrid War coup d’état was neutralized, it nevertheless has NGO networks that the US continues to support within Nicaragua – just as former nominee Hugo Rodriguez mentioned – waiting for new opportunities to come into play and carry out their primary objective of coup and removal of the Sandinista government from power. The NGOs have created a subversive system in Nicaragua and it is fully exposed in the role played by NED, USAID, Freedom House and other agencies that funded proxy networks to carry out their pro-US agenda in Nicaragua, and these in turn funded secondary organizations – helping them to evade state registration – creating particular funding networks. In this way the NGOs involved that generated destabilization in Nicaragua from April 2018 in violation of the Law had as a consequence the cancellation of their legal status.

The US power finds itself unable to stop its unworkable and obsolete unipolar paradigm, where it has an imperial monopoly on doing business with a given country, and defacto isolating it by making it impossible for that country to enter into bilateral relations with third countries that the West perceives as enemies.

Andrew Korybko pointed out in a recent article how this imperial narcissistic behavior demonstrated by US diplomatic personnel is a reflection of their own ‘Rules Based Order’ – which seeks to falsify authentic international law – from which their dominion operates, by rightly stating that even in India they behave like a viceroy. For we have already seen that this failure in the US approach to diplomacy is systemic whether in India, a state of the Big 8 or in Nicaragua, a sovereign Central American nation, both of the Global South, both of which have been struggling for decades for their sovereignties.

They are now facing, as are many other countries throughout the world, an upsurge in Hybrid Warfare everywhere due to the global transition to multipolarity. The US is in decline, its unipolar window of geopolitical and geoeconomic power has closed and in desperation it is increasing the pressure it puts on countries forcing them to choose between the Western Golden Billion partner countries and the multipolar countries. In the midst of the global systemic transition it seeks to micromanage what are by all means state decisions of the free people of the Global South, as part of the New Cold War, dictating which democratic security policies can or cannot be implemented to protect their societies or limiting with which countries relations can be established.

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Miguel Santos García is a Puerto Rican writer and political analyst who mainly writes about the geopolitics of Neocolonial conflicts and Hybrid Wars within the 4th Industrial Revolution and the ongoing New Cold War.

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Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi warns doctors:

“If you allow yourself to be instrumentalized, you will be complicit in mass murder. Routine introduction of gene-based vaccines spells the downfall of mankind.”

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