Putin’s Bombers Could Devastate Ukraine But He’s Holding Back. Here’s Why

May 22nd, 2022 by William M Arkin

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The following text by William Arkin published in Newsweek based on analysis and interviews within the US intelligence establishment provides an incisive understanding on the nature of Russia’s military operation.

See William Arkin’s author’s archive

William M. Arkin is a former US intelligence official and award-winning best-selling author. Global Research has posted several of earlier writings. Our thanks to Newsweek. Below are selections from the article with a link to the complete Newsweek text.

 

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As destructive as the Ukraine war is, Russia is causing less damage and killing fewer civilians than it could, U.S. intelligence experts say.

Russia’s conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely accepted view that Vladimir Putin is intent on demolishing Ukraine and inflicting maximum civilian damage—and it reveals the Russian leader’s strategic balancing act. If Russia were more intentionally destructive, the clamoring for U.S. and NATO intervention would be louder. And if Russia were all-in, Putin might find himself with no way out. Instead, his goal is to take enough territory on the ground to have something to negotiate with, while putting the government of Ukraine in a position where they have to negotiate.

Understanding the thinking behind Russia’s limited attacks could help map a path towards peace, experts say.

In nearly a month since Russia invaded, dozens of Ukrainian cities and towns have fallen, and the fight over the country’s largest cities continues. United Nations human rights specialists say that some 900 civilians have died in the fighting (U.S. intelligence puts that number at least five times UN estimates). About 6.5 million Ukrainians have also become internally displaced (15 percent of the entire population), half of them leaving the country to find safety.

“The destruction is massive,” a senior analyst working at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) tells Newsweek, “especially when compared with what Europeans and Americans are used to seeing.”

But, the analyst says, the damage associated with a contested ground war involving peer opponents shouldn’t blind people to what is really happening. (The analyst requested anonymity in order to speak about classified matters.) “The heart of Kyiv has barely been touched. And almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets.”

In the capital, most observable to the west, Kyiv city authorities say that some 55 buildings have been damaged and that 222 people have died since February 24. It is a city of 2.8 million people.

“We need to understand Russia’s actual conduct,” says a retired Air Force officer, a lawyer by training who has been involved in approving targets for U.S. fights in Iraq and Afghanistan. The officer currently works as an analyst with a large military contractor advising the Pentagon and was granted anonymity in order to speak candidly.

“If we merely convince ourselves that Russia is bombing indiscriminately, or [that] it is failing to inflict more harm because its personnel are not up to the task or because it is technically inept, then we are not seeing the real conflict.”

In the analyst’s view, though the war has led to unprecedented destruction in the south and east, the Russian military has actually been showing restraint in its long-range attacks.

As of the past weekend, in 24 days of conflict, Russia has flown some 1,400 strike sorties and delivered almost 1,000 missiles (by contrast, the United States flew more sorties and delivered more weapons in the first day of the 2003 Iraq war). The vast majority of the airstrikes are over the battlefield, with Russian aircraft providing “close air support” to ground forces. The remainder—less than 20 percent, according to U.S. experts—has been aimed at military airfields, barracks and supporting depots.

A proportion of those strikes have damaged and destroyed civilian structures and killed and injured innocent civilians, but the level of death and destruction is low compared to Russia’s capacity.

“I know it’s hard … to swallow that the carnage and destruction could be much worse than it is,” says the DIA analyst. “But that’s what the facts show. This suggests to me, at least, that Putin is not intentionally attacking civilians, that perhaps he is mindful that he needs to limit damage in order to leave an out for negotiations.”

Russia began its invasion of Ukraine on February 24 with an air and missile attack targeted against some 65 airfields and military installations. On the first night, at least 11 airfields were attacked. Some 50 additional military installations and air defense sites were hit, including 18 early-warning radar facilities.

…

 

In fact, there has been no methodical bombing campaign to achieve any systemic outcome of a strategic nature. Air and missile strikes, which initially seemed to tell one story, have almost exclusively been in direct support of ground forces.

“Think of the Russian Air force as flying artillery,” says the retired senior U.S. Air Force officer, who communicated with Newsweek via email. “It’s not an independent arm. It has undertaken no strategic air campaign as American observers might be used to from the last 30 years of American conflict.”

Ukrainian air defenses, both fixed and mobile missiles, have proven resilient and deadly.

“The Air Defense’s survivability and efficacy have surprised many, not only in Kyiv, but also across the country,” Kyiv-based military expert Oleg Zhdanov told the Kyiv Independent.

Ukrainian military reporter Illia Ponomarenko says that the air defense system defending Kyiv from aircraft and missiles “has been particularly effective.

“Most missiles targeting the city are successfully intercepted,” Ponomarenko says.

Russia did not bomb stationary air defense emplacements protecting cities. U.S. analysts say Putin’s generals were particularly reluctant to attack urban targets in Kyiv.

As a result, regardless of the Kremlin’s plans—whether Russia was actually seeking air superiority or intended to limit damage in Kyiv—there is no question that Putin has had to revise the long-range attack plan.

Over the course of almost four weeks, missiles fired at Kyiv have been scarce. Ukrainian media have reported just more than a dozen incidents involving Russian cruise and ballistic missiles intercepted over the city and its closest suburbs since February 24. And all of them, U.S. experts say, have been clearly headed for legitimate military targets.

“The fact that the mobile S-300 SAM systems are still operating is a powerful indictment of Russia’s ability to conduct dynamic or time-sensitive targeting,” the Atlantic Council asserted this week in a military brief.

The DIA analyst disagrees: “For whatever reason, clearly the Russians have been reluctant to strike inside the urban megalopolis of Kyiv.

“Yes they might not be up to the U.S. task [in dynamic targeting] or in establishing air superiority … But this is the Russian air force, subordinate to the ground forces. And this war is different: it’s being fought on the ground, where everything strategic that Russia might destroy in front of its forces—bridges, communications, airfields, etc.—also becomes unusable to them as they move forward.”

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What’s the Deal with Germany?

May 22nd, 2022 by Mike Whitney

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Why is Germany sending weapons to Ukraine? Don’t they realize these weapons will be used to kill Russian soldiers? Don’t they realize these weapons will be given to Nazi combatants who tattoo swastikas on their arms and march in torchlight parades? Don’t the German people care about that?

In World War II, the German Wehrmacht killed 27 million Russians. Isn’t that enough? How many Russians have to die to satisfy Germany’s bloodlust? Another million or so? 5 million? 27 million? How many?

And, how does a country with Germany’s history justify the killing of more Russians today? Alot of people would like an answer to that question? I know I would.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz thinks that Germany has a moral obligation to back Ukraine in its war against Russia. In a televised speech to the nation he said, “We defend law and liberty on the side of the party under attack. We support Ukraine in its battle against the aggressor.”

What Scholz failed to mention were the numerous (Ukrainian) provocations that took place prior to the Russian invasion. He failed to mention Kiev’s stepped-up bombardment of east Ukraine where 14,000 ethnic Russians have been killed in the last eight years.

He failed to mention the 30-or-so Ukrainian bio-weapons labs where lethal pathogens –that target specific ethnicities and spread highly-contagious diseases around the world– are being secretly developed.

He failed to mention that President Zelensky had threatened to rebuild Ukraine’s nuclear weapons program which would put nuclear missiles on Russia’s western border.

And he failed to mention that Ukraine had become a defacto member of NATO via its joint-military drills, logistical support, training and arms shipments from the Alliance. All of these have created a grave threat to Russia’s national security. But Scholz failed to mention any of them. Instead, he used the entire presentation to whip up support for another US-led bloodbath.

“We cannot allow ourselves to be paralyzed by fear,” Scholz said emphatically. “So, we have decided to deliver arms.”

Scholz is simply acknowledging what everyone already knows, that he got his marching orders from Washington, and he is complying with those orders. That much is obvious. Here’s how the World Socialist Web Site summed it up in a recent article:

“The historic decision to let German tanks roll against Russia once again is not driven by “security and peace” and least of all the protection of the Ukrainian population. Instead, Germany and the other NATO powers have systematically provoked Russia’s reactionary invasion to allow them to wage a proxy war against Russia on the backs of the Ukrainian population….

In the months leading up to the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian government, with massive support from the US and Germany, has been preparing to bring the areas held by pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country under its military control. A war against Russia in Crimea was also planned…. All restrictions imposed on Germany after the world war are to be removed, and the Bundeswehr will be rebuilt into the largest European army….

The German government has already delivered tanks from former East German stockpiles to Ukraine and announced further heavy arms deliveries. These include anti-aircraft tanks and self-propelled howitzers that are capable of enormous destruction. Germany and NATO are ready to lay waste to Ukraine in order to defeat Russia…

With its heavy weaponry, Germany is equipping the Azov Battalion and other neo-Nazi units. These groups are the political descendants of Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which was responsible for the murder of thousands of Ukrainian Jews.” (“On anniversary of defeat of Nazi regime, German Chancellor Scholz delivers war speech”, World Socialist Web Site)

How did we get here? How did we reach a point where no one is concerned about the reemergence of German militarism?

It can all be traced back to Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev.

In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev lifted his objections to German reunification and “agreed that a unified Germany will be free to choose which alliance it will belong to, and Chancellor Helmut Kohl told Gorbachev that Germany wanted to stay in NATO.”

Got that? Gorbachev gave Germany the green light to join NATO.

Can you see what a terrible mistake that was? Can you see that German reunification and the entry of Germany into a hostile, Russophobic military alliance (NATO) paved the way for the current conflagration?

Germany’s entry into NATO was followed by three waves of expansion that pushed the Alliance further and further eastward until today, NATO’s combat troops, military bases and missile systems are on Russia’s doorstep just a few hundred miles from Moscow.

And NATO’s eastward push will not stop at Ukraine either, any more than Hitler or Napolean stopped at Ukraine. Ukraine is just the last whistlestop on the way to Moscow. That’s the real strategic endpoint; Moscow. So, eventually, NATO will push deeper and deeper into Russian territory destroying everything in its path and killing anyone who gets in its way. That’s where all this is headed, in fact, the Pentagon warlords don’t even try to hide it anymore. “We want weaken Russia,” they say. “We want to break Russia’s back”. And, that is the plan. They want to crush Russia and seize its resources. Nothing is concealed. All of this is being stated publicly.

And it’s all Gorbachev’s fault. The crisis Russia faces today, can be traced back to Gorbachev.

What was he thinking? Was he thinking that NATO would honor its word and not “move one inch east” like they promised? Was he thinking Germany would not eventually ‘get back on its feet’ and resume its habitual march eastward? Was he thinking that leaders in the west had miraculously changed their spots and become more trustworthy, unselfish and peaceful?

What a stupid, stupid man. Gorbachev’s breezy liberalism has brought NATO’s weapons systems and NATO’s shock troops to Russia’s doorstep. He has cleared the path for another agonizing and bloody conflict that will plunge the entire region into chaos and ruin. Is it any wonder why western leaders sing Gorbachev’s praises at every opportunity? Check out this excerpt from an article at RT:

“Large-scale NATO military drills started in Estonia on Monday. The exercise dubbed ‘Hedgehog 2022’ is one of the largest in the Baltic nation’s history, according to the military bloc. The drills will involve some 15,000 troops from 14 nations, including both military bloc members and their partners.

Soldiers from Finland, Sweden, Georgia and Ukraine are among those that will take part in the exercise… The drills will include all branches of the armed forces and will involve air, sea and land exercises, as well as cyber warfare training, according to the broadcaster. According to a NATO statement, the drills will also see the US Navy Wasp-class landing ship ‘Kearsarge’ take part in the exercises….

The drills started just a day after Finland and Sweden officially announced their plans to join NATO...

The exercises in Estonia are, however, just one part of NATO’s large-scale military activities near the Russian border. Another Baltic state, Lithuania, is hosting the ‘Iron Wolf’ exercise, which involves 3,000 NATO troops and 1,000 pieces of military equipment, including Germany’s Leopard 2 tanks.

Two of NATO’s biggest exercises – ‘Defender Europe’ and ‘Swift Response’ – are taking place in Poland and eight other countries, involving 18,000 troops from 20 nations, according to NATO’s statement on Friday….

The NATO Response Force is currently taking part in the 7,500-strong ‘Wettiner Heide’ drills in Germany. The Mediterranean Sea is about to witness ‘Neptune series’ naval drills involving the USS ‘Harry S. Truman’ carrier strike group that will be placed under NATO command. This will only be the second time since the end of the Cold War that a US carrier group has been transferred under the military bloc’s command, NATO has said.

In June, the Baltic States and Poland will host what NATO describes as “Europe’s largest integrated air and missile defense exercise,” which would involve 23 nations. In late April, Finland hosted NATO naval drills. Now, it is also hosting a joint land exercise, in which troops from the US, the UK, Estonia and Latvia are participating.

The massive military wargames are taking place amid heightened tensions between Russia, NATO and some of the military bloc’s partners. Finland, which shares a long border with Russia, and Sweden decided to reconsider their long-standing policy of non-alignment following a major change in public opinion after the launch of Russia’s attack on Ukraine.” (“NATO starts drills near Russian border”, RT)

What will it take for the American people to see what’s going on right before their eyes?

NATO and the US are simulating a war on Russia because that’s the plan. These are massive, integrated, combined-arms exercises that are structured in a way that best addresses the strengths of a particular​ enemy. And that enemy is Russia. Can’t you see that?

And have you noticed how it’s suddenly okay to talk openly about war with Russia? Among the cadres of retired generals that appear regularly on the cable news channels and their chest-thumping allies in the Democrat party, all sense of caution has been completely abandoned. They’re no longer deterred by the threat of nuclear war because– according to them– the US will prevail in a nuclear war and, besides, they all agree that it is worth the risk. Maybe you think I’m kidding, but I’m not kidding. The prevailing view among establishment elites has fundamentally changed. These people want a war with Russia and they want it now. Their lust for war has completely eclipsed their fear of nuclear annihilation. It’s madness.

And Germany has joined the rush-to-war despite the fact that it will trigger an unprecedented energy crisis followed by a severe economic slump that could last for years. In short, Scholz has committed economic hari-kari to placate his masters in Washington. Here’s more from the WSWS:

“Germany is using the war to remove all obstacles that previously stood in the way of unrestrained rearmament… First, the German government increased the arms budget by €100 billion… and abandoned the principle of not supplying weapons to war zones. Ukraine was first supplied with light and then with heavy weapons. In the meantime, Ukrainian soldiers are also being trained on German soil...

The German government’s preparations for a Third World War are not limited to arming the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) and providing military support to Ukraine…. The former editor-in-chief of finance daily Handelsblatt, Gabor Steingart, speaks bluntly about this in his “Pioneer Briefing” on Tuesday. Without the slightest qualms, he discusses the question of what is required to make a world war “manageable”:

“The waging of a Third World War is not just a military issue,” he proclaims. It is “first and foremost an economic issue. For without economic disentanglement along the power and military blocs, effective warfare that can be sustained over a longer period is impossible, as we can already see from Germany’s dependence on Russian natural gas.”

“Whoever wants to make world warfare manageable must first unbundle world trade,” Steingart emphasises. “Economic independence is more important than billions more for the Bundeswehr. So, it is not only the soldiers and their military equipment that must be gathered into an offensive formation, but also economic resources.”

“Viewed with this economic eye,” he then states, “the preparations for making a Third World War manageable are in full swing.”..

The insane policy of preparing a third world war and making it “manageable” is supported by all parties represented in the Bundestag… Germany must “urgently define its national interests against the background of the new reality” and “adopt a national show of strength to implement and safeguard them,” it says. “To meet this challenge, comprehensive military capabilities are needed, which will also entail many a sacrifice and burden.” (“Germany’s preparations for a third world war in full swing“, World Socialist Web Site)

Do you still think the idea of a Third World War is far-fetched?

Of course, not. The preparations are already underway. The elites want war because they see no other way to preserve the western-centric world order. That is why the threat of German militarism has been ignored by the media and foreign heads-of-state. Because they now think that German militarism can be used to defend America’s global primacy. And that’s what they want.

Here’s a bit more background from an interview with Norman Finkelstein

“The Russians were promised that there would be no NATO expansion to the East, that was the quid pro quo for the reunification of Germany after the decomposition of the Soviet Union. The Russians were promised that but the West went ahead. We’re talking about the 1990s: the promises were given, but the West then went ahead and started to expand NATO …. there was the first tranche, then the second tranche … Then NATO starts expanding in Georgia and in the Ukraine (which crosses) a red line.

To stop this, (Russia) offers a perfectly reasonable resolution: just neutralize Ukraine like we neutralized Austria after World War II, neither aligned with an Eastern bloc nor aligned with a Western bloc. That seemed to me perfectly reasonable…

And then the reasonableness of those demands,… have to always be seen in context. So, what’s the context? The context is the Soviet Union, the former Russia, it lost… the estimates are about 30 million people during World War II….

And now there’s this Ukraine, where Nazis are playing an outsized role. (and they), are aligned with a formidable military bloc called NATO (and) NATO keeps advancing and advancing and advancing, closing in on Russia, trying to suffocate it… And beginning around 2016, under Trump, begins to arm the Ukraine, pouring in weapons, engaging in military exercises with NATO, behaving very provocatively. And then the Foreign Minister Lavrov finally says we’ve reached the boiling point.

… (So, for) more than 20 years… Russia has tried to engage in diplomacy; (to make Ukraine neutral) like Austria after World War 2… (So) if you agree that was a legitimate demand, and if you agree that the West was expanding and expanding NATO, and if you agree that Ukraine had de facto become a member of NATO, with weapons pouring in and engaging in military exercises with NATO; and if you agree… that Russia lost 30 million people during World War II because of the Nazi invasion,…, then the simple question is: What was Russia to do?

… I’m not a general and I’m not a diplomat, so I’m not going…. so, I’m not going to say it was the wisest thing to do…. But I will say … that they had the right to do it….They had …. the historic right to do it. 30 million people (killed during WW2), and now you’re starting again, now you’re starting again? No, no,… I can’t go for those who acknowledge the legitimacy of the arguments made by Putin but then call the invasion criminal. I don’t see that.” (“Norman Finkelstein : Russia has the historical right to invade Ukraine“; Listen to the whole interview, The Saker)

Yes, Putin has every right to protect his country from another foreign invasion. And, he’d be foolish to think that that’s not what Washington has in mind, because that’s precisely what they have in mind. What Washington really wants is a subjugated Russia languishing permanently beneath Uncle Sam’s bootheel.

So, Putin must do everything in his power to prevent that from happening. And, so far, he’s done just that.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace.

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

Featured image is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Australian Disinformation Wonderland: The Federal Election 2022

May 22nd, 2022 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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All elections are filled with the half-truths, mistruths and full-fledged lies.  Victory is rarely bought on a platform of complete honesty.  But the road to the current Australian federal election has been potholed by more deception than most.  This is bound to happen when policy platforms are weak and rickety, leaving the opponents large scope to undermine each other.  The personal prevails over the substantive; ideas play little to no role.

Much of the influence of misinformation and its more aggressive twin, disinformation, is given a legendary status ahead of time.  Commentaries abound about how to spot “fake news” from outlets that have themselves been prone to promote counterfeit material.

A study commissioned by Digital security and privacy company Avast filled electors with little confidence about either the content of news or their talents in spotting irregularities and fictions.  38 percent of those surveyed revealed they were not confident in identifying fake news online.  The age group between 18-24 were said to be the least confident.

Misinformation has a tendency to multiply and amplify in the wildfire environs of the Internet.  “In recent research,” claimed Avast security expert Stephen Ko, “our AI team found that 17.9 percent of hyperlinks of misinformation sites link to other misinformation domains.  If users visit a misinformation site, the risk is higher that they end up in a rabbit hole of misinformation sites.”  His advice, resembling those cautionary words of an impatient parent to an inattentive child, is to check such matters as the publication date.  News should, he remarked, be “current”.

The Australian Electoral Commission has also gone out on a limb in establishing what it calls a “disinformation register”.  Doing so comes with a caveat.  “The AEC is not the arbiter of truth regarding political communication and does not seek to censor political debate in any way.”  A fine objective, except that the AEC is also authoritative in pointing out that, “when it comes to the election process we conduct, we’re the experts and we’re active in defending Australia’s democracy.”

A list of “prominent pieces of disinformation” follows, though the actual source is not overly specific beyond the platform.  The first example: “The AEC has sent multiple copies of unsolicited postal votes to a single voter proving voter fraud occurs.”  The unsurprising source: Facebook.

Others include claims that First Nations people “have been wiped from the electoral roll without their knowledge”; that applications for postal votes “are being submitted and processed for deceased Australians” and “Dominion voting machines will be used and will be ‘rigged’ to favour one of the major political parties.”  That old favourite – that the AEC is itself politically aligned – also features.

Various ethnic groups have been the subject of interest in disinformation strategies.  The ABC has reported instances of Liberal Party supporters using the WeChat platform to spread falsehoods about a number of Labor supporters and critics of the Morrison government.

Not to be outdone, some Labor supporters have targeted the incumbent Liberal member for the seat of Chisholm, Gladys Liu, the first ethnic Chinese woman to serve a term in the House of Representatives.  According to a Facebook page hosted by an ALP branch located in the Queensland electorate of Wright, Liu’s loyalties were malodorously suspect.  A post from April 19 insinuated that Liu was potentially linked to a Chinese plot to infiltrate the Australian parliament.

A particularly aggressive campaign of media disinformation has also blown through some seats where independents are running against threatened incumbents.  Earlier this month, the New South Wales electorates of Mackellar, Warringah and Hughes woke up to a number of posters with independent candidates branded with the Greens logo.  A statement from the Greens leader Adam Bandt made much of the deception, suggesting that there was “a good chance that whoever is behind this has also committed a criminal act.”

In the Melbourne electorate of Kooyong, a simmering campaign alleging the hidden allegiances of independent Monique Ryan has also been marked by the stain of inaccuracy and mistruth.  Stickers have emerged at points claiming that a vote for Ryan is a vote for Labor.  This has not been helped by an aggressive campaign waged by the Liberal Party and the Murdoch-News Corp cheer squad alleging much the same thing.

Zoe Daniels, running against the Liberal Party’s Tim Wilson in the Victorian seat of Goldstein, expressed dismay in a tweet about voting strategies set to undermine her candidacy.  “In a new low, ‘people’ on social media are spreading the lie that it’s only necessary to mark me number 1 for the vote to be valid.”  This was a matter of “orchestrated DISINFORMATION,” she capitalised in anger, “designed to cause informal voting.”  Every box, she fumed, had to be numbered.

In its response to the message from Daniels, the AEC expressed its own disappointment. “Formality rules are very clear – in addition to them being printed on our ballot papers, our staff will also walk voters through what’s required.”  In some cases, it will take more than just a walk through to dispel the miasma of falsehoods that will mark this election as voters cast their ballots.

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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]

Far-reaching U.S. Proposals to Amend the International Health Regulations at the Upcoming 75th World Health Assembly: A Call for Attention

May 22nd, 2022 by Dr Silvia Behrendt

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The upcoming 75th World Health Assembly (WHA) to be held in Geneva from 22-28th May 2022 will potentially adopt far-reaching amendments to the 2005 International Health Regulations (IHR). The IHR is currently the most important multilateral treaty regulating the global architecture for health emergency, preparedness, response and resilience (HEPR architecture). The extensive amendments to the IHR have been initiated by the United States (US), listed as agenda item WHA75/18 for the 75th WHA. The amendments are already backed by 19 co-sponsor states and the EU.   

As of yet, there has been almost no public awareness or debate of the substantial amendments to the IHR although the WHO Secretariat circulated the US initiative first in January 2022 to state parties. The US initiative contradicts the gist of a report by the WHO Director-General issued in November 2021 which sketched out some of the amendments now tabled by the US, but which also indicated that the IHR will not be renegotiated, raising a number of concerns about amending the IHR. Attention to the US amendments was further drowned by the stir made around the launch of the negotiations to draft a new treaty on pandemic preparedness and response by 2024 with a hitherto uncertain scope, content and outcome, as well as an uncertain relationship to the existing legal framework of the IHR. The scope of the proposed US amendments might therefore come as a surprise to a number of delegations to the 75thWHA.

The following is a brief comment on the extensive amendments proposed by the US that, if adopted, will lead to a considerable extension of WHO’s emergency powers.

Increasing the WHO General Director’s executive emergency powers and its implications

Under Article 12(1) of the current IHR, read in conjunction with Article 1(1) IHR, the WHO Director-General already has the broad executive power to declare a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) when faced with an ‘extraordinary event’ in one state which is determined ‘to constitute a public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease and to potentially require a coordinated international response’. In this process, the Director-General shall inter alia enter into extensive consultations with the state party in whose territory the ‘event’ occurs and come to a mutual conclusion within 48 hours on whether the event indeed constitutes a PHEIC (Article 12(2) IHR). The proposed US amendments to Article 12 IHR will both considerably extend the executive powers of the WHO Director-General to declare global emergency-like situations and centralise this power further by removing the need to consult and find agreement with the respective state party.

The former is achieved first via the introduction of a new category of an ‘intermediate public health alert’ that requires ‘heightened international awareness’ of a hitherto undefined low threshold (proposed new Article 12(6) IHR). Second, the US amendments suggest granting new overlapping layers of executive emergency powers to the six WHO Regional Directors to declare a ‘public health emergency of regional concern’ (PHERC) (proposed new Article 12(7) IHR). There is no indication as to the division of powers between the regional and international levels to declare health emergencies, nor are there any proposals as to how the increase in the WHO Director-General’s and Regional Directors’ executive powers is to be safeguarded against abuse. The importance of these questions becomes clear when practical and legal consequences of PHEIC/PHREC/‘intermediate public health alert’ declarations are considered: the powers of Emergency Committees (see Articles 15-17 and 48-49 IHR) set up by the WHO Director-General in response to such emergencies to issue recommendations to states to adopt medical and non-medical countermeasures, which, as has become clear with regard to the responses to Covid-19, can have far-reaching implications for the livelihoods, lives, health and human rights of individuals around the world. In addition, WHO emergency declarations can trigger the fast-track development and subsequent global distribution and administration of unlicensed investigational diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines. This is done via the WHO’s Emergency Use Listing Procedure (EULP). The introduction of an ‘intermediate public health alert’ in particular will also further incentivise the pharmaceutical industry’s move to activate domestic fast-track emergency trial protocols as well as for advance purchase, production and stockpile agreements with governments before the existence of a concrete health threat to the world’s population has been detected, as is already the case under WHO’s EULP via the procedures developed for a ‘pre-public health emergency phase’ (see here, pp. 10-15).

As indicated, the proposed US amendments to Article 12 IHR also increase WHO’s powers towards the state in whose territory an ‘event’ occurs, i.e. on whose territory a new, emerging or re-emerging pathogen is detected. This, in turn, further restricts states’ ‘sovereign rights to legislate and to implement legislation in pursuance of their health policies’ as set out in Article 3(4) IHR, should they disagree with the assessment of WHO’s Director-General and the Emergency Committee. This would be so even if the legislation is adopted and implemented in line with the respective states’ obligations under international human rights law as specified in Article 3(1) IHR. The US amendment proposals to Articles 9 and 10 IHR moreover strengthen WHO’s powers to assess alleged global health risks by relying on information received outside official channels, giving the respective states only 24 hours to verify such information, and to accept WHO’s ‘offer’ to collaborate in ‘assessing the potential for international disease spread, … and the adequacy of control measures’. The rejection of such an ‘offer’ results in the disclosure of the health information, giving the respective state no possibility to express its views on the matter, including on potentially unjustified allegations. The US proposals also do not envisage WHO consultations with the respective state parties concerning information indicating the potential existence of an ‘intermediate public health alert’ or a PHREC. Given the substantive economic consequences (especially concerning tourism and international trade) WHO declarations of such emergency situations can have for affected states, these provisions are unlikely to promote friendly relations between governments, and between WHO and its member states.

WHO deployment missions as default option during PHEICs 

A related US proposal for the amendment of Articles 13(3) and (4) IHR has a similar effect of increasing WHO powers in relation to member states’ freedom to determine their own health policies during a PHEIC in light of local circumstances and preferences. By deleting the phrase ‘at the request of the State Party’, and replacing ‘may’ with ‘shall’, assistance offered by WHO to a state in the response to public health risks becomes the default option. If a state does not accept such offers for assistance within two days, it must justify this by declaring the ‘public health rationale for the rejection’ to all other WHO member states, potentially resulting in far-reaching economic and financial consequences for the rejecting state. WHO assistance offered includes ‘mobilisation of international assistance’, including on-site assessments, supported further by suggested amendments to Article 15(2) IHR, allowing the WHO Director-General and the Emergency Committees set up by him/her to recommend ‘the deployment of expert teams’ to states experiencing a PHEIC.

The proposal to grant WHO – and the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which is closely associated with WHO due to its technical skills in epidemiological investigations – the right to carry out on-site assessments/send expert teams that the state party in question cannot easily reject, should be carefully analysed also in light of similar US proposals made in 2004 during the then thorough revision process of the IHR (lasting from 1995-2005). At the time, some WHO regions rejected the proposal as they suspected a US’ intention behind them to gain access to biodefence research facilities around the world, thus fearing espionage. This appeared against the background of the Iraq war which started in 2003 under the pretext of the existence of Iraqi bioweapons that UN investigators had been unable to find (see more here at p. 24).

Issues not considered: detection of SARS viruses automatically constituting PHEICs and default end to PHEICs  

US proposed amendments miss the opportunity to question the fact that the detection of a SARS virus automatically leads to the declaration of a PHEIC in accordance with current Annex 2 of the IHR without there being a requirement that the actual severity of the illness caused by the new respiratory virus is assessed. Considering the experiences with SARS-CoV-2, it can rightly be questioned as to whether such an approach is justified. The SARS-CoV-2 PHEIC declared by WHO on 30 January 2020 resulted in the adoption of unprecedented medical and non-medical countermeasures around the world having extensive second and third order effects (analysed e.g. here, here and here), despite the fact that the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) for Covid-19 is low, in particular for persons under the age of 70.

In light of the fact that the SARS-CoV-2 PHEIC should – in accordance with Article 12(4) IHR – have been terminated by now (May 2022), amendments could have suggested the inclusion of an automatic expiry date for PHEICs, similar to the expiry of temporary recommendations after a three months period issued by the Director-General and Emergency Committees (according to Article 15(3) IHR). This would also terminate the global distribution of investigational EUL diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines, transferring them back into regular clinical trial procedures to ensure their full safety and effectiveness.

Compliance Committee and Universal Peer Review Mechanism

The US amendments include a proposed new chapter IV to the IHR on a Compliance Committee tasked to monitor state compliance with their obligations under the IHR. Consisting of six government experts from each WHO region, it shall inter alia be authorised to request information from state parties, undertake information gathering in state parties (with their consent), seek services of experts and advisers (including a wide range of non-state actors), and recommend how states shall improve compliance, including by offering financial and technical assistance. Questions can be asked as to whether a group of nominated ‘governmental experts’ are suitable to independently judge whether a state party violated their obligations under international law. Proposed amendments to Article 5 IHR furthermore envisage the introduction of a Universal Peer Review Mechanism to review states’ capacities to detect, assess, notify and report new, emerging and re-emerging pathogens. If implemented, these mechanisms are likely to contribute to restructuring of domestic health systems and allocation of domestic health budgets away from primary health care centred around the implementation of the core human right to health towards pandemic surveillance, preparedness and response activities, regardless of how disease burdens are spread locally.

Adoption and entry into force of the amendments

Finally, the US amendments propose to reduce the time during which state parties to the IHR can reject, or enter reservations to, future IHR amendments that were adopted by a simple majority of the WHA from 18 months to six months (proposed US amendments to Article 59 IHR). Thus, in future, if states do not opt out within six months, amendments enter into force for them automatically in line with Article 22 WHO Constitution and the amended Article 59 IHR. This leaves states rather limited amount of time thoroughly evaluate the legal and practical implications of IHR amendments, including for their domestic health policies and budgeting.

Concluding remark

This short review of the US proposals to amend the IHR would like to end with a call on members of the WHA to discuss and carefully consider the implications of the proposed amendments before endorsing and adopting them. Have technocratic, biomedical approaches, developed and implemented from the top down primarily through executive action, worked well in response to Covid-19, justifying a further extension and centralisation of global emergency powers at WHO? And, if WHO’s powers are extended in this way, is there a need to also answer the question quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who guards the guards?), and to thus set up mechanisms ensuring that WHO complies with its obligations under the IHR and its Constitution, as well as its responsibilities for human rights deriving from customary international human rights law?

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Thousands of Covid-19 Vaccine Related Deaths and Adverse Reactions Deleted from VAERS

May 22nd, 2022 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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The U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) was created as an early warning system to identify vaccines that may be triggering a higher than expected number of adverse events

Publicly available VAERS data clearly reveal that the COVID shots are the most dangerous “vaccine” ever created, accounting for more injuries and deaths than all previous conventional vaccines combined over the last three decades

Data analyst Albert Benavides has been analyzing VAERS data since the release of these novel shots. According to Benavides, at least 10,000 reports of death or serious injury following COVID “vaccination” have vanished since the rollout of the shots — and they were not duplicate reports, which is a common “explanation” for their removal

About 2% of all COVID jab-related reports are deaths, and about 5% of death-related reports are being deleted

Only the initial VAERS reports are available to the public. Updated reports are only viewable internally. That means we have no way of knowing how many of those who were injured have since died from those injuries. This is a loophole that can make a vaccine appear less deadly than it actually is

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The U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) was created as an early warning system to identify vaccines that may be triggering a higher than expected number of adverse events. One of its primary objectives is to:1

“Provide a national safety monitoring system that extends to the entire general population for response to public health emergencies, such as a large-scale pandemic influenza vaccination program.”

It’s far from perfect, but it’s still incredibly useful and does serve its purpose. Publicly available VAERS data clearly reveal that the COVID shots are the most dangerous “vaccine” ever created, accounting for more injuries and deaths than all previous conventional vaccines combined over the last three decades.

But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which jointly run VAERS, continue to insist the shots are “safe and effective,” and that not a single death has been directly attributed to the shot.

Such claims are outlandish in light of the available data, and perhaps they’re starting to realize the pickle they’re in as well, because in recent months, investigators have discovered that VAERS reports are being deleted in ever growing numbers. As noted by Stew Peters of the Stew Peters Show (above):

“VAERS is supposed to simply collect reports filled out by doctors and other medical professionals from around the country — reports of people suffering injuries and illnesses and even death after taking vaccines.

Nobody is supposed to be editing or curating or fact-checking it. It’s supposed just be the reports of doctors for the entire world to see. But now we have evidence that that’s, in fact, not what’s happening at all.”

Who’s Deleting VAERS Reports?

Peters interviews Albert Benavides, an RCM expert, data analyst and auditor, who’s been analyzing VAERS data since the release of these novel shots.2,3 According to Benavides, at least 10,000 reports of death or serious injury following COVID “vaccination” have vanished since the rollout of the shots — and they were not duplicate reports, which is a common “explanation” for their removal.

Benavides cites the case of a young child in Alaska who reportedly died after the jab. That death report is now gone, and there’s no other remaining report that matches it.

VAERS ID 18150964 is another example. This is the case of a 13-year-old girl in Maryland, who died 16 days after her first jab. This report was entered October 25, 2021, and deleted April 15, 2022. VAERS claims it was deleted because it was a duplicate, but there are no 13-year-old girls in Maryland who died, anywhere else in VAERS.

According to Benavides, over the past 30 years, some 4,000 non-COVID reports have been deleted, and of those only a couple of hundred were deaths. For the COVID jab, VAERS is deleting a far higher proportion of severe injuries and deaths. About 2% of all COVID jab-related reports are deaths, and about 5% of death-related reports are being deleted.

The result of this is that the ratio of deaths to other injuries appears lower than it probably is. Overwhelmingly, it’s reports of severe injuries and death that are being deleted, which gives the distinct appearance that they’re trying to hide the true extent of the harm of these shots. Who could possibly be doing this? Benavides insists the direction to delete valid reports must be coming from the very top of the FDA and/or CDC.

If you want to dive deeper into Benavides’ data, you can find his VAERS Analysis Dashboard here. Another resource you’ll want to bookmark is the VAERS Wayback Machine on MedAlerts — a search system specifically for deleted VAERS reports.

Other Factors That Downplay COVID Jab Risks

Benavides also points out that only the initial VAERS reports are available to the public. Updated reports are only viewable internally. What that means is, we have no way of knowing how many of those who were injured have since died from those injuries. This is a loophole that can make a vaccine appear less risky than it actually is.

What’s more, Benavides is finding that they’re routinely misclassifying the event level of severity; 65% of all COVID-related reports have the lowest severity classification, meaning they’re not serious and didn’t require medical intervention or hospitalization.

However, when you actually read the reports, you find heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary embolisms and other clearly serious injuries. So, many are clearly misclassified, or mis-coded. Benavides has also found 65 reports where the patient died after the COVID shot, but because the box for death is not checked, they are not included in the total death tally.

We also have evidence that VAERS is throttling the release of reports. It can take months before a filed report is actually published, as COVID jab victim Brittany Galvin has discovered.

In January 2022, she was eight months into the reporting process to VAERS and was advised by VAERS staff that it would likely be another six to 12 months before her case would be posted.5 In early June 2021, Peters interviewed her about her injuries and experience with the VAERS process (video below).6

VAERS Analysis Reveals Hundreds of Serious Side Effects

An earlier VAERS data analysis by Benavides, reported by Steve Kirsch in November 2021,7 revealed there were by then already hundreds of serious adverse events associated with the COVID shot that were far more elevated than the admitted risk of myocarditis, identified by the Department of Defense (although that fact was for a time dismissed as “conspiracy theory”).

“The evidence in plain sight shows that they are either lying or incompetent. Or both,”Kirsch wrote.8 “In a … VAERS data analysis performed by our friend Albert Benavides (aka WelcomeTheEagle88), we found hundreds of serious adverse events that were completely missed by the CDC that should have been mentioned in the informed consent document that are given to patients.

And we found over 200 symptoms that occur at a higher relative rate than myocarditis (relative to all previous vaccines over the last 5 years). All together, there were over 4,000 VAERS adverse event codes that were elevated by these vaccines by a factor of 10 or more over baseline that the CDC should have warned people about …

The FDA and CDC have basically been batting .000 in terms of spotting safety signals that have been sitting in plain sight the entire time … The CDC has repeatedly said you can’t ascribe causality to data in VAERS. Not true.

The VAERS data analysis (temporal data, the dose dependency, and the elevated reporting rates compared to baseline) provide ample signal to enable us to show causality on all of these events using the five Bradford-Hill criteria applicable to vaccines.”

Of the hundreds of side effects Benavides identified, neurological, cardiovascular and female reproductive problems topped the list. (You can view and download the data from Kirsch’s article.9) Here are some selected highlights from Kirsch’s comprehensive review of Benavides’ findings:10

High Rates of Post-Jab Myocarditis Confirmed

Getting back to myocarditis (heart inflammation), which is the only side effect the FDA and CDC have really admitted, a recent JAMA study found that:12

“Both first and second doses of mRNA vaccines were associated with increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis. For individuals receiving 2 doses of the same vaccine, risk of myocarditis was highest among young males (aged 16-24 years) after the second dose.”

Among double-jabbed men (age 16-24), there were four to seven excess myopericarditis events per 100,000 vaccinees in the first 28 days after the second dose of Pfizer’s mRNA shot, and anywhere from nine to 28 excess myopericarditis events per 100,000 after the second dose of Moderna.

According to the authors, “The risk of myocarditis in this large cohort study was highest in young men after the second SARS-CoV-2 vaccine dose” and “this risk should be balanced against the benefits of protecting against severe COVID-19 disease.”

Rheumatologist Reports High Rate of Jab Injuries

While fact checkers are hard at work trying to debunk VAERS data as too unreliable to pay any attention to, doctors and specialists around the world — those brave enough to speak — are reporting absurdly high rates of side effects among their COVID jabbed patients.

One of the latest ones is Dr. Robert Jackson, an award-winning rheumatologist in Missouri. Kirsch recently interviewed Jackson (video above),13 who reports that 40% of his COVID jabbed patients have been injured by the shots; 5% remain unresolved, 5% have developed a new clotting disorder and 12 have died. For comparison, he normally sees only one or two deaths a year.

Of his 5,000 patients, about 3,000 got the shot. That means just over 1 in 300 were killed by the shot. Jackson’s clinical experience matches nicely with data from other rheumatologists, published in the BMJ.14 They report a 37% adverse event rate among jabbed patients; 4.4% of patients also had a flare up of their disease after the jab.

In the interview, Jackson also discusses some of the treatments he’s using on these vaccine injured patients. Interestingly, he’s seen significant improvement using a 30-minute infusion of mesenchymal stem cell derived exosomes.

Non-COVID Excess Deaths Are Exploding

Across the world, and in most U.S. states, we are now seeing excess deaths rates skyrocketing, and it’s not due to COVID. For U.S. data, check out USmortality.com,15 where the excess mortality for each state is listed.

In California, the excess death rate rose from 13.5% in 2020 (38,799 excess deaths) to 18.7% in 2021 (52,278 excess deaths). And, less than five months into 2022, California’s excess mortality has already breached the 20% mark.

For the U.S. as a whole, there were 3,440,546 deaths of all ages for the year 2020. The expected numbers were 3,028,959, so that was an excess of 13.6% (411,587 above expected). In 2021, there were 3,459,496 deaths of all ages, which was 16.4% above expectations. As of mid-April 2022, the excess death rate was already at 14.1%, with 1,041,538 reported deaths of all ages. Among working age Americans, deaths are up 40%, compared to prepandemic levels.16

If the COVID jabs worked, you’d expect excess mortality to drop, yet that’s not what we’re seeing. We’re also not seeing mass death from COVID. The only clear factor that might account for these discrepancies is mass injection with an experimental gene transfer technology.

Cyprus is also reporting elevated all-cause mortality for 2021 (16.5%, perfectly matching that of the U.S.).17 Third and fourth quarter rates are particularly elevated, which corresponds with the rollout of booster shots. Canada, meanwhile, is seeing a shocking 70% excess death rate for ages 0 to 44, compared to 2014 through 2019,18 and U.K. data show COVID-jabbed children, aged 10 to 14, are dying at 28 times the rate of their unvaccinated peers.19,20

I’ve provided other data examples in other articles, and they’re all showing the same trend. The most tragic part of this is that it’s intentional. None of the agencies charged with protecting public health have lived up to their mandate. Instead, they’ve been serving the Great Reset agenda.

Eventually, though, I believe the truth will simply be too overwhelming and obvious to be ignored by the masses. FDA and CDC can’t delete enough reports to make the jabs look safe. People’s personal experiences also trump that of any data set, and now, vaccine injuries are so commonplace, most people know of someone who had a bad reaction, got COVID anyway or died from it. And they can’t scrub that.

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Notes

1 VAERS, About

2 Audible, The Real Number of Vaccine Deaths in the US with Albert Benavides

3 COVEXIT August 28, 2021

4 Medalerts VAERS ID 1815096 Deleted Report

5 Odysee, January 20, 2022, Min 18:10

6 BitChute, June 5, 2021

7, 8, 9, 10 Steve Kirsch Substack November 9, 2021

11 Bitchute July 14, 2021

12 JAMA Cardiology April 20, 2022 [Epub ahead of print]

13 Steve Kirsch May 1, 2022

14 Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases 2022;81:695-709

15 US Mortality

16 ZeroHedge January 3, 2022

17 Cureus April 20, 2022; 14(4): e24325

18 Twitter Kelly Brown April 11, 2022

19 Deaths by Vaccination Status England

20 Steve Kirsch Substack May 4, 2022

Video: Iran: Digital Food Rationing Rolls Out Using Biometric IDs Amid Food Riots

May 22nd, 2022 by Ice Age Farmer

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Iran is set to be the first country to roll out a food rationing scheme based on new biometric IDs. Where vaccine passports failed, food passports will now be eagerly accepted by hungry people who can’t afford rapidly inflating food prices. This is the realization of a longstanding agenda by the Rockefeller/UN/WEF crowd to, as Kissinger put it, “control food, and control people.”

Christian breaks it down in this Ice Age Farmer broadcast.

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Bush Admits US Broke Promise on NATO Expansion; Says Ukraine Should ‘Destroy as Many Russian Troops’ as Possible

May 22nd, 2022 by Joe Lauria

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GR Note. The authenticity of this video is yet to be fully ascertained. It should be noted that it is confirmed by Newsweek

A pair of well-known Russian pranksters claim to have tricked former U.S. President George W. Bush into speaking to them about the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexei Stolyarov posted a brief video to the Russian video sharing site Rutube on Tuesday that appears to show Bush speaking to the duo about the conflict. Kuznetsov and Stolyarov, who are also known as Vovan and Lexus, have made headlines in the past for pranking high-profile individuals including musician Elton John and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

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Believing that he was actually speaking with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, former U.S. President George W. Bush has been duped by a prankster into admitting that NATO expansion eastward towards Russia had violated a U.S. promise not to do so. “Listen, times change,” Bush says in a video created by the Russian prankster duo known as Vovan and Lexus. 

After “Zelensky” calls Bush “a very, very wise person,” the former U.S. president says he didn’t want Russia to become a member of NATO either, but rather, “I wanted them on the fringe of NATO. I wanted Ukraine in NATO.”

Bush tells “Zelensky” that “your mission is to destroy as many Russian troops as you can.”

He then condemns Russian President Vladimir Putin for essentially putting an end to Wall Street and Washington’s domination of Russia under President Boris Yeltsin.

“I thought for a while that Russia would be more cooperative and then Putin changed dramatically,” Bush tells the fake Zelensky.

NATO’s expansion eastward is one of the causes of the Ukraine war, especially after the West in December rejected Moscow’s treaty proposals for a new security arrangement in Europe. Russian pranksters (who have been banned from YouTube) put out a short video. Here is a longer clip:

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What’s Behind the Outbreak of Sudden, Severe Hepatitis in Kids?

May 22nd, 2022 by Dr. Julie Comber

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As researchers seek answers to why in recent months more than 500 previously healthy children worldwide have developed sudden-onset, severe hepatitis, two leading hypotheses have emerged linking the outbreak to adenovirus and coronavirus.

In a May 18 update, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it is investigating 180 cases of hepatitis in children, up 71 from the 109 cases the agency reported on May 5.

The cases occurred in 36 states and territories over the past seven months.

The CDC reported on May 5 that 90% of the children were hospitalized, and 5 deaths were under investigation.

According to the May 18 update, no deaths were reported since February, and the proportion of patients requiring liver transplants decreased since May 5 from 15% to 9%.

The U.S. now has as many cases as the U.K., which on May 12 updated its numbers to 176 cases. As of May 3, 11 U.K. children had received liver transplants, and there were no deaths.

On May 11, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control reported a total of 449 probable cases of sudden and severe hepatitis in children in 27 nations, but with the updated numbers from the U.S. and the U.K., the total number is now 533.

The highest numbers of cases per country so far are in: the U.S. (180), the U.K. (176), Italy (35), Spain (22), Brazil (16), Indonesia (15), Israel (12), Sweden (9), Argentina (8), Japan (7) and Canada (7).

Hepatitis is the medical term for inflammation of the liver. It typically is caused by one of several known viruses, medications or exposure to certain chemicals, according to Healthline.

However, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported these common causes were ruled out in the hepatitis cases, which is what makes the cases so unusual.

Severe and sudden hepatitis in healthy children

Affected children were between 1 month and 16 years old. More than three-fourths of the children in the U.K. were under 5, and those in the U.S. had a median age of 2 years, according to the WHO.

Overall, 11 children died so far, and 31 were reported to require liver transplants.

“It’s extremely unusual because these are healthy children,” and most of them are younger than 5, Dr. Elizabeth Whittaker told the Washington Post. Whittaker, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at Imperial College in London, is assisting the investigation in the U.K.

Mild hepatitis is fairly common in children, Whittaker said. But this outbreak is different. Doctors are seeing previously healthy children with liver injury severe enough to require transplants.

Typically, the U.K. might have eight to 10 liver transplants in a year. This year, there were 11 transplants in three months, Whitaker said.

Possible causes: Adenovirus? Link to COVID-19?

The growing number of cases has spurred an international race to identify the cause, with doctors and researchers from global health agencies, including in the U.S., the U.K., Israel, Italy and Japan, sharing data and hypotheses.

According to the WHO, the common viruses that can cause acute viral hepatitis (hepatitis viruses A, B, C, D and E) were not detected in any of the cases, nor does international travel appear to be a factor.

Seven months in, Whittaker said, “We have not had any ‘aha’ moments.”

“At present, the leading hypotheses remain those which involve adenovirus — with also still an important consideration about the role of COVID as well, either as a co-infection or a past infection,” said Philippa Easterbrook, with the WHO’s global hepatitis program, during a May 10 press conference.

Easterbrook also said (on May 10) that within the week, there would be data from the U.K. on a case control study comparing whether the detection rate of adenovirus in children with acute hepatitis differs from that of children hospitalized for another reason.

“That will really help hone down whether adeno[virus] is just an incidental infection that’s been detected or there is a causal or likely causal link,” Easterbrook said. At the May 17 WHO press conference, no further information was provided about this study.

Adenoviruses are a common family of viruses that cause symptoms ranging from the common cold to pinkeye.

The strongest evidence that adenovirus may be the cause of the hepatitis outbreak are test results that detected adenovirus in the blood of more than half the children in the U.S. and nearly three-quarters of those in the U.K.

Some of the children in the U.S. also tested positive for the adenovirus 41 strain, which is associated with severe stomach illness.

However, adenovirus was not detected in the children’s liver tissue, which would be expected if it was causing the liver injury.

Adenovirus on its own is rarely associated with severe liver damage in healthy children, but other factors could increase vulnerability.

These factors include:

  • An abnormal susceptibility or host response, perhaps because young children had fewer social interactions during the pandemic and may be more susceptible to adenovirus.
  • The possibility that adenovirus is more prevalent than usual.
  • Priming of the immune system through a previous infection or co-infection with SARS-CoV-2, or from other pathogens, toxins, drugs or environmental exposure.

Another possibility is that SARS-CoV-2 could be the cause, and some doctors suggest this could have contributed to liver inflammation through an old infection or a co-infection that triggered the immune system to overreact.

“The big focus over the next week is looking at serological testing for previous exposure and infections with COVID,” Easterbrook said.

Doctors in Israel favor the hypothesis that COVID-19 is a possible cause.

“Some of us think that the only thing that changed in the last year is COVID-19,” said Dr. Eyal Shteyer, head of the pediatric liver unit at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, where seven children were treated.

A letter published on May 13 in The Lancet presented the idea that part of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein resembles a bacterial toxin that could provoke an abnormal response in the immune system when there is a co-infection with adenovirus 41.

U.S. and U.K. doctors noted that few of the children they treated for hepatitis had documented COVID-19 infections.

However, studies show three-quarters of children in the U.S. and more than 95% of those in the U.K. have COVID-19 antibodies, which indicates past infection. In addition, active SARS-CoV-2 infection was confirmed in 18% of affected children in the U.K.

Other leading hypotheses include a post-infectious SARS-CoV-2 syndrome, a new variant of adenovirus, non-infectious causes, a novel pathogen or a new variant of SARS-CoV-2.

COVID-19 vaccines not thought to be the cause

In the U.K., no COVID-19 vaccinations were recorded in cases of children under the age of 5 who developed hepatitis, and this age group makes up more than 75% of the hepatitis cases, according to the U.K. Investigation report.

The report states:

“There are fewer than 5 older case-patients recorded as having had a COVID-19 vaccination prior to hepatitis onset. There is no evidence of a link between COVID-19 vaccination and the acute hepatic syndrome.”

In the U.S., none of the nine children in Alabama had received a COVID-19 vaccine.

Cause for concern, but rare

The CDC noted on May 18 that while the 71 cases reported since May 5 may appear to be a large increase, “it’s important to understand the vast majority of these are what we consider ‘retrospective’ patients.”

According to the CDC:

“Since CDC’s investigation looks at patients reported back to October of 2021, most of these numbers involve patients that are just now being reported, rather than new cases of hepatitis — so not all are recent, and some may ultimately wind up not being linked to this current investigation.”

The CDC recommends everyday hygiene, such as regular hand-washing, to prevent infectious disease.

According to the WHO, many cases globally have included reports of gastrointestinal symptoms including stomach pains, diarrhea and vomiting, prior to requiring hospitalization. Fever wasn’t reported as a symptom.

Hepatitis symptoms can be mistaken for stomach flu, but parents should watch for “yellow discolouration of the skin and yellow discoloration of the white of the eyes,” both of which are signs of jaundice, Dr. Dina Kulik, a Toronto-based pediatrician, told CTV’s News Channel.

Jaundice is an indication that something is wrong with the liver, and medical attention should be sought immediately.

Parents should also watch for symptoms that include dark urine, loss of appetite and light-colored stools.

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Julie Comber is a freelance science reporter for The Defender.

Featured image is from CHD

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Israel’s Ruling Coalition Crumbles as Lawmaker Quits, Citing Abuse of Palestinians

May 22nd, 2022 by The Cradle

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The Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, has become a minority in the Knesset, after Arab-Israeli lawmaker Ghaida Rinawie Zoabi resigned, citing the occupation army’s deadly harassment of Palestinians.

“The scenes from the Temple Mount of violent policemen confronting a crowd of worshippers, and the funeral of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Aqla, led me to only one valuable conclusion: no more,” Rinawie Zoabi wrote in a letter released on 19 May.

“I cannot continue to support the existence of a coalition that disgracefully harasses the society I came from,” she added.

The former member of the Knesset (MK) also called the abuse perpetrated on Palestinians throughout the holy month of Ramadan “unbearably difficult.”

With this latest loss, the Israeli premier finds himself facing down the likely possibility of a snap election – Israel’s fifth in three years.

On 9 May, Israeli media reported that Bennett himself expected his government to collapse soon.

According to informed sources, Bennett held a meeting with a senior policy adviser on what to do in the event of the resignation of his government, and in strategies in case of a new election.

Last month, MK Idit Silman resigned her seat in parliament, ending the coalition government’s parliamentary majority and dropping Bennett’s support base of lawmakers from 61 to 60 out of 120.

According to Israeli media, Silman was offered a deal by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be on the Likud list in the next Knesset elections and a spot as minister of health in the next government.

As this new political crisis bears down on Israel, Netanyahu has been gearing up to attract the Jewish supremacist vote under the rallying cry of “the Arabs are taking over the country.”

A report by The Times of Israel from 18 May claims the Likud Party has several new laws in mind, tailored to attract voters upset with the waves of Palestinian retaliatory operations against the Israeli occupation.

Over recent weeks, operations by Palestinians in Tel Aviv, Ariel, and Elad have left 20 Israelis dead.

Recent polls also show that a large portion of Israeli citizens have lost faith in the future of their nation.

In response to this trend, Likud promises to introduce legislation that would deport relatives of Palestinian resistance members who hold Israeli citizenship; criminalize the flying of the Palestinian flag or burning the Israeli flag, punishable by imprisonment; and revoke the citizenship of those who protest during “times of war.”

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Sailors Are Deserting the Navy at a ‘Staggering’ Rate

May 22nd, 2022 by Haley Britzky

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The number of sailors who deserted the Navy last year is more than double the number who deserted in 2019, a statistic that one expert described as “staggering.” 

According to a new report from NBC, 157 sailors deserted the Navy last year, compared to 98 in 2020, and 63 in 2019. While Navy officials couldn’t explain the increase to NBC, they pointed to the “many different stressors” in the service. And there have been many stressors made public in the last several months.

The service started the year amid a water contamination crisis in Hawaii that displaced thousands of service members and their families from their homes. In February, junior soldiers and sailors told Navy Times they were living without “basic qualities of life” at the Naval Support Activity Bethesda barracks, which houses the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Navy Times described barracks that went without air conditioning for several months in the summer, had no hot water, and even had doors that wouldn’t lock. And at Naval Air Station Key West, Florida, junior sailors are on their own to find housing after the Navy recently announced it was shutting down a barracks for repairs.

Sailors are deserting the Navy at a ‘staggering’ rate

Naval Air Station Key West’s sign (Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Cody R. Babin/U.S. Navy)

The Navy has also seen a string of deaths, many of which are suspected to be suicides, aboard the USS George Washington as it undergoes extensive repairs. Sailors told Military.com last month that the people who had to move back on board despite it still being worked on meant they were living in “a construction zone,” with constant problems that have added up over time and “never goes away.”

“There’s grinding, needle gunning, there’s always problems with ventilation, there’s always problems with hot water,” one sailor said. In response to sailors’ questions about their living conditions, the message from Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Russell Smith was essentially, things could be worse.

“I hear your concerns and you should always raise them but you have to do so with reasonable expectations and then understanding what…what this is like,” Smith recently told sailors during a visit to the aircraft carrier. “What you’re not doing is sleeping in a foxhole like a Marine might be doing. What you are doing is going home at night, most nights, unlike the Harry S Truman.”

Two of the Navy deserters still at large as of May 9 were from the USS George Washington, according to NBC. But the USS George Washington is just one of multiple housing issues that have come to light this year.

Nevertheless, improving housing and living arrangements don’t appear to be a top concern for Navy leaders. As Military.com reported on Thursday, the Navy is “still prioritizing other construction issues” such as shipyards over their housing.

Sailors are deserting the Navy at a ‘staggering’ rate

Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Russell Smith speaks to Sailors assigned to Assault Craft Unit 5 (ACU 5) during an all hands call July 12. (Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class David Mora Jr./U.S. Navy)

During a congressional hearing this week, Meredith Berger, assistant secretary of the Navy for Environment, Installations, and Energy said the service’s construction budget of almost $3.8 billion would be be used to “continue to optimize our naval shipyards [and] enable operating capability of platforms such as the Columbia-class submarine and the F-35,” according to Military.com.

Later in the hearing, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) told Navy officials that “toys, for lack of a better term, should not be a higher priority than making sure [of the] quality of where our troops live.” Master Chief Petty Officer Smith responded that those “toys” are “things we use to fight,” Military.com reported.

But for many watching the problems unfold, it’s a question of leadership and mental health awareness. One military law attorney, Stephen Karns, told NBC that of the almost 1,000 desertion cases he’s handled, mental health has been a factor in nearly every one. And one Navy veteran, Julien Napoli, recently wrote at Task & Purpose that the Navy has been “mired in a crisis of leadership” for years, leaving sailors overworked and feeling that they can’t seek help if they need it. He pointed to a quote from retired Navy SEAL and Medal of Honor recipient Mike Thornton, “Take care of your people and your people will take care of you.”

“This simple but powerful principle, if truly followed by naval leadership, would drastically increase combat effectiveness,” Napoli wrote. “It is much to the dismay of sailors that mental health awareness is such a low priority in today’s Navy.”

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Haley Britzky joined Task & Purpose as the Army reporter in January 2019. She previously worked at Axios covering breaking news. She reports on important developments within the service, from new uniforms to new policies; the realities of military life facing soldiers and their families; and broader cultural issues that expand outside of the Army, touching each of the military services. Contact the author here.

Featured image: U.S. Navy sailors stand at attention during the commissioning of the USS Frank E. Petersen Jr. in Charleston, S.C., May 14, 2022. (Lance Cpl. Dylon Grasso/U.S. Marine Corps).

Video: Dr. Syed Haider: Healing Vax Injuries and Long COVID

May 22nd, 2022 by Dr. Syed Haider

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As the numbers of vaccine injured and long covid sufferers rise after taking injections of pharmaceutical products that long ago met the FDA’s death and injury threshold for declaring a drug too dangerous for public consumption, all too few physicians are effectively addressing their devastating health issues. Dr. Syed Haider, who treats these patients, explains what he’s used that works, which in some cases includes Ivermectin, that has shown to be very effective.

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This article was originally published on The Whistleblower Newsroom.

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Famine is the Name of the Game

May 21st, 2022 by Peter Koenig

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In the Horn of Africa every 48 seconds a child dies from the consequences of famine, Oxfam reports. The worst famine in decades, allegedly caused by drought-ravaged Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, further stressed by the war in Ukraine… See this.

When a child dies from hunger it is particularly sad. Children are the most vulnerable category of humanity. Famine is not the result of a worldwide food shortage. But famine has to do with food hoarding for speculation, with a lack of well- and equalitarian food distribution system. There is no lack of food per se in the world. According to FAO, with current technologies we are able to produce sufficient food for 12 billion people.

The “post-covid” (really?) Ukraine-Russia war period, is generating a wanton food crisis – leading to a cruel, but well planned, hunger catastrophe. The first victims are usually the poverty-stricken populations, but this time its planned not to stop at the borders of “developed” countries in the Global North.

The cause is not just drought, it’s the consequence of poverty and mass unemployment triggered by the Covid-19 lockdown measures initiated Worldwide in March 2020, not to mention the string of bankruptcies affecting agriculture, food production and  distribution.

Is it part of the unspoken “depopulation agenda” under the auspices of the Great Reset, of UN Agenda 2030, of Klaus Schwab’s 4th Industrial Revolution, all inter-changeable programs with the same objectives?

Even a drought of such severity is suspicious.

Weather Modification Technologies

Remember the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) developed in the 1990s, which was initiated in Alaska, as an ionospheric research program, jointly funded by the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Pentagon and US Secret Services.

HAARP, Gakona Alaska, 1990s

Earlier weather modification technologies were applied in the 1960s, during the US-war against Vietnam, when extreme Monsoons were “created” (through cloud seeding), so as to impede the transit of the communist Vietcong soldiers and mercenaries from North-Vietnams to the South, through the jungles of Vietnam.

Owning the Weather 

Since the 1990s, HAARP has become highly sophisticated and is suspected (without firm evidence) of being responsible for several world-wide occurring extreme weather phenomena:

Weather-modification, according to the US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report, ‘offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary’, capabilities, it says, extend to the triggering of floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes:

‘Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally… It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog and storms on earth or to modify space weather… and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of [military] technologies.’

Creating famine in any way possible, through modified weather patterns, or wantonly deficient food distribution systems, or food retention by other politically influenced means, is a crime against humanity, a crime of biblical proportion, for which apparently, so far, nobody has been held accountable.

Western populations – predominantly Europe and the US – are being warned, repeatedly, that they will be hit by devastating food shortages, as well as a huge, unheard-of in the west, accompanying inflation. See this.

What we are witnessing is one of the most inhumane, cruel ways of killing people, by famine.

The rich will survive, they will also get their food. The poor and middle segments of society may suffer the most. Many will die.

WEF advisor, Yuval Noah Hariri, calls them “useless eaters”. Lack of food will create riots, for sure, and the riots itself – all planned, foreseen, counted with and funded by “philanthropic” oligarchs – create more havoc and death, interrupting the remaining food chains.

That’s not all. Food shortages will also affect the Middle East and North African countries that are already in conflict, some in war-like situations. They may cut off or reduce Middle-Eastern hydrocarbon production, with all the consequences of spiraling oil-related shortages. Refugees from these lands will migrate to Europe, where they hope to find a better life, food, and shelter. The refugee influx in Europe will exacerbate the food and everything-shortages by a multiple.

Groomed Proxy Politicians, Acting on Behalf of Powerful Financial Interests

But all of that is known and planned that way, by the very “leaders” (sic) of Europe and the west in general – many of them scholars of Klaus Schwab’s Academy for “Young Global Leaders” (YGL).

For a full list of such proxy politicians, who were taught to apply tyrannical measures on the very people who allegedly elected them, who pay for them, who still live under the illusion that their leaders serve them, want the best for their people, in whom they trust – see this. In the words of Klaus Schwab:

I have to say then I mention names like Mrs Merkel, even Vladimir Putin and so on they all have been Young Global Leaders of The World Economic Forum. But what we are really proud of now with the young generation like Prime Minister Trudeau, President of Argentina and so on, is that we penetrate the cabinets… It is true in Argentina and it is true in France now… (Klaus Schwab)

Click here or image to access Video 

 

Famine is the Name of Game

Famine will be the name of the game, accompanied by a collapsed western economy, joblessness, freezing cold winters, due to lack of heating oil / energy, homelessness. As the debt burden increases, so does dispossession of shelter.

The banks and oligarchs get richer – exactly the script of the 4th Industrial Revolution, and the useless eaters are driven into mass poverty.

 

The construct, the plan, the UN Agenda 2030, the Great Reset, are inter-changeable. They become increasingly visible – and people, who are not (yet) reacting, may be doomed.

Death by famine, follows death by vaccine, and embraces death by despair.

People have no clue of what’s going on behind the scenes – what really causes famine and why – it’s a wanton population reduction scheme, à la Bill Gates, the Rockefellers, Kissinger… and more.

These are just the most blatant perpetrators. Killing people, mostly children, the weakest link of society, is just about the worst crime that humanity can commit.

Mainstream media does not inform us. They are paid to keep silent, or worse, to trick us into believing it’s our fault either because we do not decry loud enough the Russian aggression on Ukraine, the timing of which is no coincidence.

The war in Ukraine also decimates harvests, and oil and gas production, which, in turn, reduces fertilizer production, and by extension, what is produced cannot be shipped, because of delivery disruptions, due to covid, bankruptcies, labor fallouts, because we didn’t vaxx enough, to keep the “social and industrial machinery oiled to function”, and so on. A perpetual spiral to misery.

The Pandemic Treaty, the QR Code. Towards Digital Tyranny 

Hence, we are supposed to be inclined voluntarily to submit to the soon-to-come vaxx mandates; and that, before its possibly military enforced through the “coming” WHO-designed and managed worldwide “Pandemic Treaty”, whose flagship is the multi-purpose international vaxx certificate, via QR-coded electronic data collection and full and absolute surveillance, leading many scared and desperate victims of the 24/7 propaganda to the 4th, 5th, 6th and so on boosters, until death does us part from this wonderful world of the Great Reset.

Famine is already ongoing in Africa, India and parts of Latin America. Will the famine disaster hit the Western “Developed Countries”, later in the fall, as predicted by some analysts?

All has to do with the western insane, suicidal act of sanctioning Russia for her aggression on Ukraine. So, say many pundits, analysts and free-thinkers. Do they truly believe that the west, especially Europe, doesn’t know what they are doing by sanctioning Russia?

They know exactly that Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan together account for about 30 to 40 of the world’s food supply, mostly grains.

They know that much of the grain may not be produced, as a result of the war.

What is produced and supposed to be shipped to the world’s market places, may be stranded, due to lack of labor, transport, fuel, it’s a self-perpetuating spiral of disruptions and shortages, that will impact vital food supplies – and cause famine.

For self-protection and to guarantee least damage to her food supply, India, also an important wheat and grain producer, has just banned all wheat exports, mostly to keep local prices down and to secure as much food as possible for her local population – some 1.4 billion people. See this India prohibited all exports of wheat on Friday in an attempt to reduce local prices.

Also, no coincidence – fires destroy food manufacturing plants, storage and transport facilities throughout the western and mid-western Unites States. See the video below. A further planned contribution to food shortages.

 

The Bird Flu H5N1 Outbreak

A new kind of Bird Flu H5N1 – lab-made, indeed, is already making sure that for our, human protection tens of millions of poultry are already being euthanized.

Perhaps hundreds of millions more around the globe may follow the same fate. For your health protection, of course. Unfortunately, this health protection move will eliminate vital sources of protein, especially for the common people. But, so what, as Yuval Noah Harari would say – it may help neutralizing some of the “useless eaters”.

All this results in food shortages, leading to famine and misery. But no worries, Bill Gates and his artificial meat production scheme will soon come to rescue. We then may have an abundance of Monsanto produced GMO plant food and Bill Gates sponsored artificial meat production. Bon appetit!

Nothing is “bad-management” or unwise decision-making. Nothing is coincidence. No, it’s all been planned that way for years, decades. The ongoing phase, total destruction of the western economy, is only a stepping stone to the larger objectives, total control of the world economy shifted from the bottom and the middle to the top – massive population reduction, and the ringing in of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (FIR).

But they will not win.

Mind you FIR has little to do with “industrial”, and even less with “revolution”, but it has all to do with transforming the remaining world population into a herd of gnomes, computer and robot- manipulated slaves, or transhumans, as per Yuval Noah Hariri, Darwinist, author of “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus”.

Hariri is also the closest personal advisor of Klaus Schwab – WEF creator, eternal WEF CEO (acting on behalf powerful financial interests), and continued Mastermind of eradicating nation states’ sovereignties and creating an artificial world, a One World Order (OWO), under a One World Government (OWG), the most anti-nature and anti-social proposal imaginable.

This will never happen. The collective human mind is strong and in solidarity capable of over-coming all evil attempts to control us. We must abandon the illusion to have national governments serving the people. We must escape form this Cognitive Dissonance.

We must wake up and come to senses and to grips with reality. If we do, we are safe. We will be able to resist this soul- and heartless cult of dark and sick people, and we shall resist their criminal machinations.

People, compatriots of Mother Earth, wake up!

Open your eyes to what this  Elite Financial Cabal has in store for us.

They are at the beginning of their agenda – UN Agenda 2030 – The Great Reset – the 4th Industrial Revolution – different names for the same killing game.

We must take over the next eight years, acting in solidarity, converting this sinister economic and social agenda into broad grassroots process for humanity.

In the next eight years, we must put a term of what is tantamount to genocide, namely an all-controlling, totalitarian world governance – the digital tyranny – the transformation of humans to transhumans and mind-manipulation through an sophisticated brain control scheme that will give us a robotized smile since we own nothing but are happy.

We must stop it.

And we will.

We have the Human Power.

We are the Spirit of Light.

They are the darkness.

We aspire for Community, Peace and Love.

We shall overcome!!!

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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).

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 NaturalNews.com

Global Tyranny: The WHO “One Health” Directive that Supersedes the Laws of Democratically Elected Nation States. Letter to the US HHS Office of Global Affairs

May 21st, 2022 by Margaret Anna Alice

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“Governments do like epidemics, just the same way as they like war, really. It’s a chance to impose their will on us and get us all scared so that we huddle together and do what we’re told.” —Dr. Damien Downing, President, British Society of Ecological Medicine

I represent the World Council for Health, and I am writing to voice my solemn concerns about the amendments to International Health Regulations (IHR) Articles 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 18, 48, 49, 53, and 59 proposed by the US Department of Health & Human Services on January 18, 2022.

You have the unique opportunity to stop the greatest threat to national sovereignty in history by rejecting these amendments.

Conversely, advancing these amendments would constitute a shameful act tantamount to treason against the people of the world.

I implore you to choose courageous action over cowardly capitulation to globalist pressures.

If approved, the IHR amendments would grant the WHO director-general dictatorial power to declare a public health emergency—even if the member state objects.

That means an unelected bureaucrat would have the ability to impose a “One Health” directive that supersedes the laws of a democratically elected nation-state and the will of its citizens.

Empowering a single individual with such absolutist authority is egregious enough, but it represents an even deadlier danger when that person is a likely war criminal.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has been credibly accused of “systemic genocidal violence and gross human rights violations” by the Amhara Professionals Union Research Department. Furthermore, Nobel Peace Prize nominee David Steinman has lodged a complaint with the International Criminal Court against him for being “a crucial decision maker in relation to security service actions that included killing, arbitrarily detaining, and torturing Ethiopians.”

Catapulting an alleged war criminal to an omnipotent role would fulfill Joost Meerloo’s admonition in The Rape of the Mind at a global level:

“In a state where terror is used to keep the people in line, the administrative machine may become the exclusive property and tool of the dictator.”

Additionally, the proposed IHR amendments would equip WHO “regional directors” with the authority to declare a Public Health Emergency of Regional Concern (PHERC).

Meerloo warns about these petty bureaucratic tyrants as well—what Christopher Browning calls “desk murderers”:

“This creeping totalitarianism of the desk and file goes on nearly everywhere in the world. As soon as civil servants can no longer talk humanely and genially but write down everything in black and white and keep long minutes in overflowing files, the battle for administrative power has begun. Compulsive order, red tape, and regulation become more important than freedom and justice.…

“The burning psychological question is whether man will eventually master his institutions so that these will serve him and not rule him.”

The answer to that burning psychological question has been made resoundingly clear over the past two years of COVID tyranny, during which countries around the world seized exponentially multiplying authoritarian powers to institute a range of failed, hazardous, and even lethal guidelines in the name of a mild condition that even Bill Gates now admits had a “fairly low fatality rate” and is “a disease mainly of the elderly, kind of like flu is.”

Taking this runaway absolutism to the international level would be equivalent to imposing a planetary dictatorship.

In 1976, Paddy Chayefsky prophesied the arrival of such a world in Network:

Should the proposed amendments pass, the director-general could unilaterally issue an “Intermediate Public Health Alert (IPHA)”—the equivalent of a deafening transnational air-raid siren that would send the world into a state of terrorizing fear and panic, which Meerloo says “can be used to deepen man’s sense of insecurity and further his passive surrender to the totalitarian environment.”

It is now evident that was squarely the intention of those orchestrating the fear-fueling propaganda campaign that has been waged against the public since early 2020, and formerly submissive people are waking up to that fact in indomitable numbers.

The amendments would usher in a universal health surveillance system capable of enslaving the citizens of the world, and you would make that possible if you greenlight them.

Don’t let their pretty words about protecting the public health fool you. As Thomas Paine cautions:

“The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes.”

Article 5, for example, would involve the formulation of early warning criteria that would enable the WHO to deploy the same outrageously erroneous modeling used as an excuse to transform the world into an open-air prison.

One of the architects of those panic-mongering models, the notorious Neil Ferguson, expressed his amazement that they were able to “get away with” emulating the containment policy of a totalitarian government in a democratic nation:

“It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought.… And then Italy did it. And we realised we could …”

These despotic measures turned out to not only be ineffectual but also catastrophically destructive and fatal, causing infinitely more harm than the 98.8% survival rate diseasethey were purportedly introduced to curb.

Under the proposed amendments, Articles 6, 10, 11, and 13 would give a member state forty-eight hours to accept or reject on-site assistance following a WHO risk assessment. Nations that fail to comply could face penalties such as economic sanctions, loss of international aid, and multinational disdain, stoking potential conflicts and heightening the risk of starvation, rioting, violence, and wars.

Article 9 would permit the reliance on secret sources to decree a public health emergency. Eliminating transparency and accountability guarantees corruption. Pharmaceutical corporations, world-bossing foundations, and other dubious entities that profit grotesquely both financially and hegemonically from such emergencies could provide fabricated evidence.

Does “yellow cake” ring any bells?

Via Article 12, the WHO director-general could declare a suspected Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) without even consulting the WHO Emergency Committee and member state(s), effectively overriding national sovereignty.

Article 59 gives member states six months to say no to the proposed IHR amendments after the World Health Assembly adopts them—in other words, starting in November 2022, nations could lose their sovereignty. Failure to reject the amendments constitutes de facto approval.

Søren Ventegodt considered the WHO such a menace that he titled his 2015 Journal of Integrative Medicine & Therapy article, “Why the Corruption of the World Health Organization (WHO) Is the Biggest Threat to the World’s Public Health of Our Time.”

Below are a few salient excerpts from this article, whose criticisms of the Swine Flu fiasco map directly to the WHO’s disastrous handling of COVID:

  • “[I]t seems that the pharmaceutical industry has gained control over the WHO system, leading to an extreme bias towards the use of not only ineffective and unnecessary influenza vaccines and medicines, but also to the use of antipsychotics, antidepressant, antianxiety and other psychopharmacological drugs, cytotoxic anti-cancer chemotherapy, and a number of other drugs, which according to independent meta analyses and Cochrane reviews are found to be without significant beneficial effect—and often harmful.”
  • “Ten years ago WHO changed its financial policy and allowed private money into its system, instead of only funding from the member states. WHO has since been extremely successful in raising funds and is now receiving more than half of its yearly budget from private sources. Bill Gates has for example given more than one billion dollars to the WHO. The new system of private funding of WHO has brought WHO much closer to the pharmaceutical industry.”
  • “The Danish director of the Nordic Cochrane Center openly addressed what he called ‘the criminal practices of the pharmaceutical industry’ and documented in his book the problem that ‘Big Pharma’ already has taken patient’s lives and caused harm to patients from the use of poisonous, poorly documented, and ineffective medicine.”
  • “Recent scandals, like the Swine Flu scandal in 2009, has shown that WHO unfortunately has succumbed totally to the power of the pharmaceutical industry.”
  • “In an interview the Polish health minister revealed everything about the horrible industrial contracts, where the pharmaceutical companies—helped by WHO—sold vaccines that were not even properly tested! The minister pointed to the fact that the test groups were extraordinary [sic] small—so small that the adverse effects of the vaccines could not even be evaluated.”
  • “So the world learned that the pharmaceutical industry was running WHO! Wow. So the industry itself declared the pandemic that forced all European countries and many more to buy enormous amount of ineffective and dangerous medicines.”

Had Ventegodt’s recommendation of a “fundamental revision of the WHO-system” been heeded at the time, the millions of lives lost to and incalculable harm caused by the WHO’s abominable management of COVID—through lockdowns, through hospicide, through unsafe and ineffective injectable products, through the denial of early-treatment protocols, through the refusal to recognize natural immunity, through masking, through the losses of human rights, through poverty, through suicides, through deaths of despair—could have been prevented.

If we fail to act on that exhortation again, we will continue to repeat these annihilatory policies over and over and over again, only at significantly greater scales given the boundless tyrannical powers you are considering bestowing upon this malfeasant organization.

In keeping with the autocratic approach demonstrated throughout the proposal process, the public is being deprived of the opportunity to voice its concerns about the amendments, and stakeholder communities have been given a mere twenty-four hours to submit their comments.

Consequently, we must rely on you to decide in favor of the people and against an organization captured by the pharmaceutical industry and profiteering foundations.

By sanctioning these amendments, you would be building your own concentration camp—and if you think you will be exempt from this worldwide panopticon because you’re a leader, you’re as naïve as the menticided Good Germans begging for subjugation.

Soft totalitarianism can harden as quickly as molten steel into a bullet.

The only way to prevent future atrocities is to dismantle the mechanisms that facilitate them. Heroic trailblazers are already building a better way.

You have the historic privilege of being able to stop one-world tyranny.

Do you have the integrity, fortitude, and temerity to do so before it’s too late?

Reach into the deepest part of your being and discover your invincible summer:

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger—something better, pushing right back.” —Albert Camus

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The Impact of the Corona Crisis on Mental Health: Suicides, Drug Overdose, Alcoholism

May 21st, 2022 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

The following text is Chapter VI of Prof. Chossudovsky’s E-Book.

To access the full document consisting of 14 Chapters, click below:

The 2020 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset”

 

***

“There has been another cost that we’ve seen, particularly in high schools. We’re seeing, sadly, far greater suicides now than there are deaths from COVID. We’re seeing far greater deaths from drug overdose,” (Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the CDC, July 14, 2020).

***

The corona virus mental health predicament of several million people Worldwide is the result of

  • social engineering including confinement, isolation, social distancing and the mask,
  • the incessant 24/7 fear campaign waged by the media and the governments,
  • the spike in unemployment, mass poverty and despair triggered by the Worldwide destabilization of national economies.

Psychiatrists have addressed the “negative impacts” on mental health pertaining to the factors mentioned above. Confirmed by peer reviewed reports, the lockdowns have also been conducive to triggering depression, uncertainty, and anxiety.

“There is concern the Coronavirus Disease (COVID)-19 pandemic is having a negative impact on the mental health of the general population through a range of suggested mechanisms: fear, uncertainty, and anxiety; social distancing/isolation; loneliness; and economic repercussions”

The overall picture of the impacts of the corona crisis on mental health is yet to be fully addressed. Our analysis will focus on the following issues for which data is available:

  1. the dramatic increase in suicides Worldwide in countries where the lockdown was imposed,
  2. the increase in mortality attributable to drug overdose (cocaine, opioids),
  3. the rise in alcoholism resulting from a hike in alcohol consumption.

Worldwide Rise in Suicides

The frequency of suicides has increased in numerous countries. The complete data and tendencies remain to be firmly established. US data on suicides in 2020 (CDC) are not yet available. In 2019, suicides were the 10th leading cause of death in the US, 47,511 Americans died by suicide. In 2019, there were an estimated 1.38M suicide attempts. (See AFSP statistics)

Suicides in the US

A CDC sponsored peer reviewed report (Mark É. Czeisler, Rashon I. Lane, Emiko Petrosky, et al) suggests that the loss of employment and purchasing power by “vulnerable” social and low income groups often triggers a wave of depression and anxiety, which results in “suicide ideation”(thinking about different ways to die). The authors confirm that:

Symptoms of anxiety disorder and depressive disorder increased considerably in the United States during April–June of 2020 [in the immediate aftermath of the mid March 2020 lockdown], compared with the same period in 2019 (1,2). ….

The percentage of respondents who reported having seriously considered suicide in the 30 days before completing the survey (10.7%) was significantly higher among respondents aged 18–24 years (25.5%), minority racial/ethnic groups (Hispanic respondents [18.6%], non-Hispanic black [black] respondents [15.1%]), self-reported unpaid caregivers for adults (30.7%), and essential workers (21.7%).

Another study confirms that: Social distancing/ isolation and loneliness‘ resulting from the lockdown policies are factors which may contribute to suicide:

“Secondary consequences of social distancing may increase the risk of suicide,” researchers noted in an April 10 paper published by the American Medical Association. “It is important to consider changes in a variety of economic, psycho-social, and health-associated risk factors.” (See FEE)

Essentially, researchers warned, forced isolation could prove to be “a perfect storm” for suicide. (emphasis added)

The central issue –which is not always addressed by the peer reviewed reports— is how the engineered loss of employment and purchasing power coupled with confinement leads to depression and despair.

Anxiety and depression resulting from unemployment and loss of income is a Worldwide phenomenon, unprecedented in World history. Country by country, one can observe similar tendencies. Low income developing countries such as India are experiencing a situation of total despair affecting large sectors of an impoverished population.

Suicides in India

The lockdown in India has been conducive to a spike in suicides which is a consequence of: “severe hardship … as entire livelihoods have come undone, amid an escalating job crisis”.

“It should come as little surprise then that the spectre of suicide has raised its ugly head, with spikes in reports of people, who see no change in fortune on the horizon, taking their own lives.”

The Brookings Institute has also addressed the role of the the corona crisis in triggering suicides in India:

Anecdotal evidence for India, meanwhile, suggests increases in rural suicides. India instituted one of the world’s strictest lockdowns amidst high rates of poverty. … Lockdowns resulted in millions of more Indians entering poverty and exacerbated one of the highest suicide rates in the world. The additional numbers of suicides are estimated to be well into the thousands.

Suicides in Japan

Within a different context, the developed high income countries are also experiencing an unprecedented rise in suicides. In Japan, a significant increase in the number of suicides were recorded in the wake of the lockdown:

“Far more Japanese people are dying of suicide, likely exacerbated by the economic and social repercussions of the pandemic, than of the COVID-19 disease itself. …  Provisional statistics from the National Police Agency show suicides surged to 2,153 in October alone, marking the fourth straight month of increase.”CBS November 2020 report  (emphasis added)

Deaths Resulting from Drug Overdose

The main drug opioid categories (CDC) are as follows:

  • illegal heroin,
  • synthetic opioids such as fentanyl,
  • so-called “pain relievers” including oxycodone (OxyContin®), hydrocodone (Vicodin®),
  • codeine,
  • morphine,
  • etc.

The drugs listed above are “chemically related and interact with opioid receptors on nerve cells in the body and brain” (CDC).

Recorded in 2020, the corona crisis has contributed to a significant increase in both opioid and cocaine sales. According to the CDC:

Synthetic opioids ([categorized by the CDC as] primarily illicitly manufactured fentanyl) appear to be the primary driver of the increases in overdose deaths, increasing 38.4 percent from the 12-month period leading up to June 2019 compared with the 12-month period leading up to May 2020.  …

Overdose deaths involving cocaine also increased by 26.5 percent. … Overdose deaths involving psychostimulants, such as methamphetamine [produced by GSM], increased by 34.8 percent. The number of deaths involving psychostimulants now exceeds the number of cocaine-involved deaths. (CDC December 2020 Report) (emphasis added)

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in December 2020  “that the pandemic may have contributed to “a rise in deadly drug overdoses”. While the data is incomplete, the CDC report confirms a sizeable increase in the number of deaths attributable to drug overdose (related to consumption of cocaine and opioids):

Drug overdoses were linked to more than 81,000 people’s deaths between June 2019 and May 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, jumping 18 percent compared to the previous 12-month period. Such deaths rose 20 percent or more in 25 states and the District of Columbia, the report said. (PBS report)

The  CDC graph based on both the predicted as well reported values (ie. numbers) of deaths attributed to drug overdoses reveals the that the monthly count started to accelarate in February 2020.

Screenshot of CDC graph

In April, 2,146 people died of opioid overdose, followed by 3,388 deaths in May, marking the largest monthly increases since 2015 when the federal government began collecting this data. (quoted in PBS report)

The following graph indicates the US monthly data. In the months prior to the corona crisis (July 2019 to January 2020), the monthly drug overdose death count was substantially below 1000.

The hike starts in February (coinciding with the financial crash). Following the mid-March lock down, drug overdose deaths go fly high.

In May 2020 the overdose death count was in excess of 3000, i.e. a more than three fold increase in relation to the  drug overdose deaths recorded prior to the corona crisis.  In the US, the recorded monthly drug overdose deaths in 2020 have more than tripled.

 

Graph based on CDC data quoted above, Source PBS

.

Opioid Related Deaths in Ontario

The tendency in Canada is consistent with that observed in the US. A dramatic increase in opioid related deaths was recorded in Ontario following the March 17, 2020 lockdown emergency which was coupled with mass unemployment following the closing down of economic activity:

The number of opioid-related deaths increased quickly in the weeks following the state of emergency declaration in Ontario on March 17, 2020. Overall, there was a 38.2% increase in opioid-related deaths in the first 15 weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic (695 deaths; average of 46 deaths weekly) compared to the 15 weeks immediately prior (503 deaths; average of 34 deaths weekly).

 

Source: Screenshot Public Health Ontario

The following graph provides a clearcut picture of the dramatic rise in opioid overdose emergency visits in Ottawa starting from January 2020 through December 2020.

 

The Production and Trade in Opioids

According to UN sources, Afghanistan currently produces 94% percent of the World’s opium supply, which is transformed into heroin, morphine as well pharmaceutical opioids. The heroin trade is protected. US military presence in Afghanistan plays a key role. It’s a multibillion dollar operation involving both the Drug Cartels (illegal heroin) and (indirectly) Big Pharma  which is involved in the sale and distribution of pharmaceutical opioids.

Several Big Pharma’s companies involved in the marketing of the Covid-19 vaccine including Pfizer, and Johnson and Johnson are also involved in the highly profitable and (legal) sale of pharmaceutical opioids, which in the course of the corona crisis (2020-2021) have become one of the main causes of drug overdose.

Corrupt Big Pharma Companies

Local communities across America took a stance against the Pharma Giants in regards to opioids. In 2019.  The Purdue opioid multibillion dollar settlement was reached “with thousands of [US] cities and counties”,

In October [2020], Oxycontin-maker Purdue admitted to enabling the supply of drugs “without legitimate medical purpose”, paying doctors and others illegal kickbacks to prescribe the drugs, among other claims. It agreed to pay $8.3bn.

.

More recently at the height of the corona crisis (November 2020):

“Four major Big Pharma distributors  (Johnson & Johnson, McKesson, Cardinal Health, Amerisource Bergen) involved in the production (J &  J) and distribution of prescription opioids  “reached a tentative $26 billion settlement with counties and cities that sued them for damages”.

 

The settlement was referred to as the “Opioid Epidemic”. What relationship to the corona crisis?

These same Pharma distributors benefited from the spike in the sales of opioids resulting from the lockdown, which in turn contributed to a significant increase in drug overdose deaths in the course of 2020-2021. (see graph above)

In a bitter irony, the spike in drug overdose has led to increased profits for Big Pharma”.

Alcoholism

Drug abuse and alcoholism are often related.

“Drug and alcohol abuse have increased with COVID, and so has suicide. Help hotlines are flooded and certain statistics — online alcohol sales increased in the U.S. by over 200% — paint a dark picture.”

“Addiction is skyrocketing. says addiction therapist Cindi Brand, who worked formerly with CAMH.

The pandemic has increased all forms of anxiety and stress even … Social distancing means people with addiction issues “can’t possibly get the help they need right now,” she says. (emphasis added).

Increase in Sales of alcohol

An upward trend in alcoholism during the corona crisis in the US is confirmed by a significant increase in the sale of alcohol. According to a Nielsen study, the stay at home orders in March 2020 resulted in “a 54% increase in national sales of alcohol for the week ending March 21, 2020, compared with 1 year before; online sales increased 262% from 2019.”

A RAND corporation sample survey study conducted with the support of the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) consisted in comparing adults’ drinking habits in 2019 with those prevailing during the corona crisis (2020):

“American adults have sharply increased their consumption of alcohol during the shutdown triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, with women increasing their heavy drinking episodes (four or more drinks within a couple of hours) by 41%” (RAND Corporation study)

A national survey found that the overall frequency of alcohol consumption increased by 14% among adults over age 30, compared to the same time last year. The increase was 19% among all adults aged 30 to 59, 17% among women, and 10% among for non-Hispanic white adults. (Rand Corporation)

While the Rand Corporation study on drinking habits reveals an increase in the consumption of alcohol, the results must be interpreted with caution. The recorded increase in the actual sale of alcohol (54%) was significantly higher than the estimated increase in drinking, based on the Rand sample survey. Concurrently, however, under the lockdown, consumption of alcohol has largely been taking place in homes, rather than in (closed) bars and restaurants.

According to Michael Pollard, lead author of the study at RAND: “People’s depression increases, anxiety increases, [and] alcohol use is often a way to cope with these feelings.”

***

The above text is Chapter VI of Prof. Chossudovsky’s E-Book.

To access the full document consisting of 14 chapters, click below:

The 2020 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset”

 

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The Biden Administration and Two Looming Crises: An Economic and Financial Crisis and a Hegemonic War

May 21st, 2022 by Prof Rodrigue Tremblay

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First published on August 31 2022

***

“Our economic leadership does not seem to be aware that the normal functioning of our economy leads to financial trauma and crises, inflation, currency depreciations, unemployment and poverty in the middle of what could be virtually  universal affluence—in short that financially complex capitalism is inherently flawed.“ Hyman Minsky (1919-1996), American economist, (in ‘Stabilizing an Unstable Economy’, 1986)

“War deficits are the worst fiscal policy imaginable. They add to civilian demand but generate no marketable output of consumer products or capital goods. Accordingly, war deficits tip the economy toward excess demand, inflationary bottlenecks, rising interest rates, and financial instability. They destroy wealth and lower living standards.” A. Stockman (1946- ), American politician, former U.S. congressman and budget director under President Ronald Reagan, and private equity investor, (in ‘The Great Deformation, 2013, p.214)

“The survivors of a generation that has been of military age during a bout of war will be shy, for the rest of their lives, of bringing a repetition of this tragic experience either upon themselves or upon their children, and… therefore the psychological resistance of any move towards the breaking of a peace… is likely to be prohibitively strong until a new generation… has had time to grow up and to come into power. On the same showing, a bout of war, once precipitated, is likely to persist until the peace-bred generation that has light-heartedly run into war has been replaced, in its turn, by a war-worn generation.” Arnold. J. Toynbee (1889-1975), British historian, (in ‘A Study of History’, vol. 9, 1954

“The tragic truth is that if the West had not sought to expand NATO into Ukraine, it is unlikely that a war would have raged in Ukraine today, and Crimea would most likely still be part of Ukraine.” John J.Mearsheimer (1947- ), political scientist at the University of Chicago, (in his lecture given at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy, on Thursday, June 16, 2022)

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Albert Einstein (1879-1955), in an interview in ‘Liberal Judaism’, April-May, 1949)

***

Besides the lingering Covid-19 pandemic and the on-going climate crisis, which will be accompanied by an energy crisis, not to mention the coming migration crisis, the world could be facing two man-made major crises in the years to come, i.e. an economic and financial crisis and a hegemonic war crisis.

Fundamental imbalances in the world economy

Indeed, fearing a persistent shortage of aggregate demand in the largest industrial economies (U.S., E.U., Japan, etc.), central banks adopted the unconventional monetary policy of pushing nominal interest rates toward zero and real interest rates into negative territory. This has resulted in investments whose profitability cannot be sustained in the long run when interest rates return to normal levels.

Secondly, the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-2022 and demographic shifts have caused a slowdown in aggregate supply with supply shortages and supply chain disruptions for many commodities and products. Additionally, in the wake of the pandemic, many workers have withdrawn from the labor force, thus creating labor shortages in certain  sectors.

Thirdly, one negative consequence of economic and financial globalization has undoubtedly been its fiscal impact on the budgets of national governments. Less able to raise tax revenues on international corporations and other entities operating in their countries, governments felt obliged to raise their budget deficits and to go deeper into public debt. Any substantial rise in interest rates will result in a fiscal crisis for many governments.

Fourthly, central banks were pressured by treasuries to purchase increased amounts of public debt, thus increasing their balance sheets and the monetary base of the economy. In the case of the American Fed, its balance sheet was around $4 trillion in early 2020, and it has ballooned to around $9 trillion in mid-2022, mainly as a consequence of buying treasury securities and mortgage-backed private securities.

Similar actions by other central banks have also resulted in large increases in their balance sheets. This has pumped excessive liquidity into many economies and that is the first cause of higher inflation worldwide and the depreciation of fiat currencies. Higher inflation, for people on fixed incomes, means a rise in their cost of living and a drop in their standard of living. Economically, this is also the main cause behind the current condition of stagflation, i.e. a condition of slow economic growth with rising prices.

It would seem that economic and financial globalization has reached its potential, and its negative consequences have become more important. The fact that the U.S. government imposes unilateral economic and financial sanctions on other sovereign nations raises important legal and political issues about the sovereignty of independent states.

Indeed, due to the resurgence of international military and geopolitical tensions (see below), the system of economic and financial globalization erected after the Second World War is rapidly weakening. If such geopolitical tensions were to escalate, this could lead to a dislocation of the global economy and to a global economic slowdown, which could last many years.

 A centenary hegemonic war could be in the making

Small-scale regional wars have been numerous an prevalent since World War II, but this does not mean that world wars have been eradicated from the international system.

History shows that such large-scale wars seem to occur in each century. It is an observed historical fact that countries with great military power always attempt to bend the international economic, financial and political systems to their advantages. And such dominating states in international politics do not hesitate to resort to a cold-blooded game of power politics to achieve their objectives.

Indeed, through the ages, such behavior has resulted in horrific hegemonic wars that peoples had to suffer, time and again, when empires engaged in the deadly game of “great power competition”.

The cycles of murderous and destructive hegemonic wars and efforts to avoid them have been well analyzed by British historian Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), Charles Kindleberger (1910-2003) and other international scholars.

This time around, as far as U.S. foreign policy is concerned, a cohort of neoconservatives in positions of authority within the Biden administration, supported by a score of Washington-based hawkish think tanks and weapons-making firms, is de facto calling the shots, along the lines of the doctrine of permanent war for the United States.

The United Nations is presently powerless to prevent hegemonic wars

After World War II, the creation of the United Nations, in 1945, raised the hope that such hegemonic wars would be a fixture of a more barbaric past. The purpose was “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”.

The central article of the U.N. Charter, which spells out the way to avoid war, is ‘Article 33’.

It reads:

1. The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.

2. The Security Council shall, when it deems necessary, call upon the parties to settle their dispute by such means.

But lo and behold, the great powers of the time (U.S., Russia, China, U.K. and France) did find a way to exclude themselves from the rules designed to maintain world peace. This was done mainly in obtaining a veto for themselves at the 15-member U.N. Security Council, a body whose decisions are binding on all UN members. And that is where the world stands today. Great powers can always wage aggressive wars with impunity.

The United States government in particular has de facto sidelined the United Nations. This was done behind the screen of NATO, originally a defensive alliance to contain the old Soviet Union, but redefined for the purpose nowadays as a de facto offensive military alliance, under U.S. control. NATO should have been abolished in 1991, when the USSR collapsed. Many European countries and Canada have fallen in line in backing the new warmongering NATO.

Suddenly, militarism is on the rise in the United States and some parts of the world, at a time when the United Nations has been rendered impotent. The Biden administration, as the head of the so-called ‘free world’, has not shown much interest in diplomacy and in negotiations to solve international conflicts, along the lines of a rule-based international system centered on the U.N. Charter and the legal prohibition of the use of force in international relations.

Joe Biden and the U.S. commitment to militarism and permanent global war

Image source: The Last Refuge

By coincidence or not, the arrival of Democratic U.S. President Joe Biden (1942- ) in the White House, less than two years ago, has been followed by a chaotic period of unfolding international and domestic tensions.

President Biden’s choices for his foreign policy team may have revealed his real bellicose intentions. This was the case when he diverted from tradition and named a career general (Lloyd Austin) instead of a civilian as Secretary of Defense. He also chose a known neoconservative (Antony Blinken) as Secretary of State. Mr. Biden probably knew what he was doing and that he had no real desire to put diplomacy ahead of warmongering in his international dealings. Numerous members of Biden’s national security advisors are in the same bellicose camp.

During the 2020 U.S. presidential election campaign, the media did not report much about Senator Joe Biden’s warmongering past. Rightly or wrongly, the Democratic candidate was considered more mentally stable, less arrogant and less ‘dangerous’ than outgoing incumbent Donald Trump. At least, that was what Mr. Biden’s campaign promises conveyed.

There is a lesson here, and it is about the necessity to know about a presidential candidate’s past to predict future U.S. government policies. The other lesson is that American policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and by a small group of affluent Americans. In American politics—money rules.

Therefore, after the botched and chaotic American withdrawal from Afghanistan, it was not a complete surprise when the Biden administration adopted an aggressive foreign policy, especially against Russia, Iran and China. It is a policy based on ‘power politics‘ in international relations. And it is characterized by provocations, threats and economic and proxy wars.

The military conflict in Ukraine could have been avoided

The Russo-Ukrainian war is a good example of a proxy war between the United States and Russia. It is a war that could have been avoided with a modicum of diplomacy. Indeed, everything was in place for this to be the case.

Image: Ukrainian troops prepare to fight Russian forces in Donbass (Source: Indian Punchline)

When the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2199 on February 12, 2015, which called on the countries involved (mainly Ukraine, Russia and the United States) to respect the two Minsk agreements of September 5, 2014 and of February 12, 2015, a diplomatic solution seemed possible.

❲As a reminder, these agreements provided for the establishment of a federal system in Ukraine, so that the Russian-speaking Ukrainian minority of the Donbas mining basin contiguous to Russia, and mainly located around the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, could enjoy autonomous status, in order to preserve its language and culture. —France and Germany had brokered such agreements.❳

Although the Security Council resolution was binding on all UN members, its guidelines were not followed. This failure prompted the Russian government to officially recognize the independence of the Russian-speaking territories and to invade the region militarily on February 24, 2022.

The alleged objective was to defend the inhabitants against the ongoing military attacks by the Ukrainian government, which took place after the ‘coup d’état’ against the pro-Russian Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych, on February 22, 2014, (with a strong implication by the U.S. government.) —Yanukovych and his Party of Regions had been elected in the February 2010 Ukrainian Presidential election with 48,95% of the popular vote.

Over the last six months of this year, there has been an escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian war. There lies a real danger of an all-out military confrontation of the United States and NATO against Russia. European countries would then be on the front line of such a devastation. The world could then be facing a World War III, which could possible degenerate, by accident, into a nuclear World War. a first in history and probably the last.

Leadership crisis in the West

Currently, many countries are facing a major leadership crisis, with several nations having political leaders who do not seem to be able to solve problems, some even welcoming a thermonuclear war. In other cases, they even seem to enjoy throwing gasoline on the fire and making matters worse.

European leaders are actively supporting a dangerous military escalation in Ukraine, where the war has become a daily disaster for civilians because of severe violations of international humanitarian law.

In their unconditional support of the Ukrainian Zelensky regime, it is as if such leaders were ready to accept a world war on European soil. If so, this would be the third major European war in a century. One has no need to look any further to understand Europe’s decline and marginalization in world affairs during the last quarter century.

Conclusion

Many people alive today have never experienced a period characterized by difficult economic times and war. However, this is the type of world that leaders without much substance and judgement have been trying to create for the past few years.

On the economic front, a perfect storm is brewing, as economic and financial imbalances, coupled with demographic problems and costly environmental policies, risk being a drag on future economic progress for years to come.

On the geopolitical front, the post World War II uni-polar world order is crumbling before our very eyes, leading to more frequent hegemonic military conflicts.

The combination of a global economic and financial crisis and a serious geopolitical crisis could throw the world into a devastating perfect storm.

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This article was originally published on the author’s website, Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay.

International economist Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay is the author of the book about morals “The code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles” of the book about geopolitics “The New American Empire“, and the recent book, in French, “La régression tranquille du Québec, 1980-2018“. He holds a Ph.D. in international finance from Stanford University.

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

US Weapons to Ukraine: Entering the Black Market?

May 21st, 2022 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

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As the US systematically sends weapons to Ukraine, concerns are growing about who is actually receiving such equipment. Recently, a series of reports have been made by journalists, pointing out that the material sent by Washington was possibly entering the black market, which would be a repetition of the American experience in Afghanistan and Syria. The case is really serious and reiterates the importance of demanding an end to the shipment of arms to Kiev.

In the recent history of conflicts involving the US, there has been an increasing number of incidents of war material diversion, with US weapons falling into the “wrong hands”. In most cases, the weapons officially sent by the US are somehow diverted when they arrive in the destination country, falling into the domain of contrabandists who sell them on the international black market. The result is that terrorist organizations, extremist militias, paramilitary groups and drug traffickers around the world benefit from this, purchasing such weapons illegally.

US forces have had experience with weapons diverted from the battlefield in virtually every recent war the country has been involved in, most notably in Afghanistan and Syria, which are supposed to be the origin countries of many of the weapons that are now used by terrorists across Central Asia and the Middle East – as well as in other continents, considering the influx of such organizations to different parts of the planet, mainly Africa. It is worth noting that in these conflicts there was direct participation of the American forces, which maintained military personnel in the countries that were receiving the weapons, which is not the case now in Ukraine. Therefore, there is even greater fear that the weapons sent to Kiev will be diverted considering that there are no American troops to supervise the direction of the material on Ukrainian soil.

In this sense, American investigative journalist Daniel Lazare believes that such a deviation will certainly happen, also emphasizing the issue of Ukrainian corruption, which is recognized as one of the biggest in Europe:

“Vast amounts of western armaments are entering the country but are then being lost in the fog of war (…) Much of the aid will presumably find its way to battlefield forces. But since Kiev is far and away the most corrupt government in Europe, it’s a sad bet that some portion will end up in the hands of third parties involved in the illicit international arms trade. Once the fighting stops we can expect much of what’s left over to find its way to the black market”.

The corruption factor is really important to be analyzed. Ukraine is home to one of the largest black arms markets on the European continent. In short, trafficking networks operate freely in the country, without any state interest in capturing and prosecuting such criminals, which is certainly a consequence of the widespread corruption of Ukrainian public agents. Police officers, politicians, judges and other agents who should uphold the law not only fail to fight arms trafficking, but they also certainly benefit financially from the operation of organized crime due to their corrupt schemes.

The result of all this is catastrophic. The US-funded 2021 Global Organized Crime Index points to an exponential growth of the illegal arms trade in Ukraine since the beginning of the civil war in Donbass, mainly in the cities affected by the hostilities. In the same vein, journalists and academic researchers linked to the Small Arms Survey, an independent investigative project based in Geneva, point out that between 2013 and 2015, more than 300,000 weapons “disappeared” from Ukraine, of which only 13% were later recovered, being the rest lost in the midst of international smuggling networks.

Concrete examples of corruption also demonstrate the seriousness of the case. In 2019, unidentified Ukrainian soldiers were caught trying to sell a package of 40 RGD-5 grenades, 15 RPG-22 rockets and 2,454 firearm cartridges, according to a report by journalists from Responsible Statecraft. The following year, 2020, Ukrainian intelligence exposed data that confirmed the diversion of dozens of grenades and anti-tank mines from a military base in Odessa that were never recovered.

It is necessary that before sending weapons to Ukraine the American authorities question themselves about their ability to supervise what will be done with such equipment. If Ukrainian agents have been repeatedly diverting weapons from their own state since 2013, they are expected to do the same with what they now receive from the US. And surely the scenario resulting from the diversion of billion-dollar packages to arms smugglers would be catastrophic for global security.

Once again, it is clear that an immediate end to the shipment of weapons to Kiev must be a priority and the whole of international society must mobilize to achieve this.

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

Featured image is from InfoBrics

The Spread of the Culture of War

May 21st, 2022 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

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***

Updated on May 22 to embed the video interview.

Participating in this special episode of Grandangolo is Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, director of the Center for Research on Globalization (Canada), who traces the historical and geopolitical scenario of the war in Ukraine: provoked by the US-NATO strategy against Russia, it threatens to lead the world to nuclear war.

For the one hour TV video production broadcast nationwide in Italy on May 20, 2022, click image below 

You can watch below the video interview from May 20, 2022.

The gravity of the situation is confirmed by the fact that large NATO military exercises “planned long ago,” that is, before the Russian military operation in Ukraine, are underway throughout Europe, especially close to Russia. About 40,000 soldiers with land, air and naval weaponry are participating. In Italy, the Navy’s Mare Aperto 2022 exercise is underway, centered on Sardinia, with 4,000 military personnel from 7 countries and more than 65 ships, submarines, fighters and helicopters. 
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Participating in the exercise alongside the military are university students from 11 Italian universities, including Milan’s Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Venice’s Ca’ Foscari, Bologna’s Alma Mater Studiorum, Pisa’s Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Rome’s La Sapienza and Naples’ Federico II. Students are embarked on warships in the roles of political advisor and legal advisor, to “provide political legitimacy and legal framing” for military action. This operation is part of the dissemination of the culture of war, which is functional to the military preparation for war.

The culture of war is disseminated by the political-media apparatus in several ways: the very serious risk to which Europe is exposed with the further enlargement of NATO to Sweden and Finland is concealed; Ukrainian neo-Nazism is made to disappear by presenting the Azov regiment as a bulwark of “resistance”; anti-Russian hatred is stoked by going so far as to expel a Russian violinist from an international competition in Gorizia.

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This article was originally published in Italian on byoblu.

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

Featured image: Ukrainian troops prepare to fight Russian forces in Donbass (Source: Indian Punchline)

“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  

Vaccine Passport, Digital Identity, Social Credit System, Digital Currency (CBDC): An Invisible Prison Has Been Built Just for You

May 21st, 2022 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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First published on December 6, 2022

***

An international vaccine passport, digital identity, a social credit system and a central bank digital currency (CBDC) form a digital control system that will lock down the population in perpetuity

Facial recognition is an essential part of the control structure, as it’s the “password” to your digital identity.

By the end of 2022, there will be 1 billion data collecting surveillance cameras in the world, all connected to the internet and artificial intelligence (AI). Cameras and audio recording devices in cell phones, automobiles and smart appliances also collect and share data.

All these data are then used to give each person an individual score, based on their behavior, expression and interaction with the world. Ultimately, your social credit score, will dictate what you can and cannot do, what you can buy and where you can go.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an absolutely crucial component, without which the control system cannot work. The easiest way to push against this system is to starve AI of data by refusing to use technologies that collect and share your personal data.

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In the video above, Maria Zeee with ZeeeMedia interviews computer scientist Aman Jabbi about the coming international vaccine passport, digital identity, the social credit system being built in the West, and central bank digital currency (CBDC).

All these factors are now coming together to control the global population. As noted by Zeee, this digital prison, which is already mostly built, will be the final lockdown of mankind.

Your Digital Identity Will Be Your Digital Prison

In the video, Jabbi goes through a presentation that explains the digital prison that is your digital identity — in other words, how your digital identity ties in with the coming social credit system and will control what you can and cannot do in your everyday life.

As noted by Jabbi, surveillance cameras with facial recognition software have already been erected around the world. They are an essential part of the control structure, and this surveillance will be linked together with digital identity, the social credit score system, carbon footprint tracking, CBDCs and more.

Facial recognition has been sold as a great convenience and security feature. With facial recognition, you don’t need to remember pins or passwords, and since no one has your exact face, it’s supposed to keep your personal accounts more secure.

But, as with most other technologies sold under the guise of convenience and security, facial recognition is ultimately a tool for mass control and an essential part of your individual digital prison. As explained by Jabbi, the Chinese control system is based on facial recognition in combination with a social credit system.

He describes the Chinese social credit system as a feedback system that responds based on your behavior. Unbeknownst to most Westerners, an identical system has already been set in motion behind the scenes in Western countries — they just haven’t told you yet.

Weaponized Surveillance

By the end of 2022, there will be 1 billion data collecting surveillance cameras in the world, all connected to the internet and artificial intelligence (AI). The United States actually has the most surveillance cameras per capita. China is second place and the U.K. in third.

In addition to all of that data collection, cameras and audio recording devices in cell phones, automobiles and smart appliances also collect and share data, even when you’re at home.

All these data are then used to give each person an individual score based on their behavior, expression and interaction with the world. Ultimately, that score — your social credit score — will dictate what you can and cannot do, what you can buy and where you can go.

As noted by Jabbi, there are also additional control mechanisms already built into the hardware being erected. For example, many smart light poles have built-in charging stations for drones, which in the future will be used for law and behavioral enforcement purposes. We will largely be policed by AI and machines.

These smart light poles can also be weaponized. Built-in are LED incapacitators. Sometimes referred to as “puke rays” for their ability to induce severe nausea, LED incapacitators are weapons designed like a flashlight that emit an extremely bright, rapid and well-focused series of “differently-colored random pulses.” According to Jabbi, these lights can also induce brain damage, spinal damage, sickness and likely even death.

LED combined with radar on some smart poles can also be used to identify people carrying guns, and could theoretically be used as a weapon to selectively take out people carrying weapons.

A New Chapter in the ‘Social Contract’

Digital identity has been described by the World Economic Forum (WEF) as a new chapter in the social contract. The problem, as noted by Jabbi, is that the WEF’s new social contract is one that none of us has agreed to. It’s being revised by the WEF and its allies and thrust upon the rest of us, without our consent.

The vast majority of people don’t even know what this new social contract actually entails, or how it will affect their personal day-to-day lives and individual decision-making ability. That, for obvious reasons, has never been fully delineated because, if fully understood by everyone, virtually no one on earth would accept it. After all, few people with normal intelligence relishes having their lives dictated by someone else.

digital identity

Source: World Economic Forum

As shown in the graphic above, your digital identity will be required to unlock all aspects of life, from logging onto the Internet to accessing social services, travel, food, shopping and financial services. If your social credit score is too low, one or more of these aspects can be turned off and made unavailable to you. “So, by default, you’re always a prisoner,” Jabbi says.

Your digital identity is confirmed through facial recognition, and is tied to your social score, carbon footprint score and CBDCs. As your social and carbon footprint scores go down, so does your purchasing ability.

As noted by Zeee, the international vaccine passport proposed at the 2022 G20 meeting is, at least right now, THE key to the entire effort to get everyone into the digital ID system. So, preventing the adoption of vaccine passports is a central component of resistance to the digital prison system in its entirety.

You must also reject the vaccine passport unless you’re willing to be a medical lab rat for the rest of your life. Zeee cites documents stating 500 new vaccines will be ready by 2030 that are targeting most common diseases. It is likely that having an up-to-date vaccination status will be one of the requirements to maintain a valid passport, which will also serve as your digital identity.

In other words, vaccine refusal can be used to nullify or “lock” your digital ID, leaving you unable to do, go or buy anything. The question is, what will those vaccines be? Basically, you’ll have no choice but to comply, even if you believe or know that a vaccine can injure or kill you, as is the case with the COVID jabs.

Zero Trust System

As explained by Jabbi, the new social contract created by the WEF and its allies is a zero-trust system. In a physical prison, prisoners are under a zero-trust policy. In other words, the guards don’t trust the prisoners and there are security measures in place to make sure they behave. The new open-air prison system envisioned by the WEF is based on the same premise.

Everywhere you go, you must prove who you are and that your compliance metrics are in alignment with the prevailing rules. So, to buy food, you have to not only identify yourself so that your purchase can be permanently logged as one of your purchases, but you also have to meet certain compliance standards, or else your CBDC won’t work.

The default in this system is denial, so everything you want to do — absolutely everything — must be unlocked by your digital ID. As noted by Jabbi, “Once we accept digital identity, it’s Game Over for humanity.”

Geofencing and Smart Cities Form the Walls of Your Prison

To enforce your conditional access to life, geofencing will be used. Smart light poles equipped with LED incapacitators can be used to prevent you from going beyond your designated geofence, but there are also other geofencing mechanisms. For example, your CBDC can be programmed to not work outside your district, and your smart car can be programmed to shut down past a certain perimeter. Jabbi also reviews the inexorable push toward smart cities, which will:

  • Limit your mobility and eliminate car ownership
  • Control you through weaponized surveillance
  • Ration water, electricity and gas consumption
  • Surveil your speech
  • Track your actions and whereabouts 24/7

Starve the Beast

Jabbi cites a formula created by the WEF’s philosophical guru Yuval Noah Harrari, to describe technocrats’ ever-growing ability to hack humans: B x C x D = AHH

B stands for biological knowledge, C is computing power, D is data and AHH is the level of ability to hack a human being. As noted by Jabbi, the ability to hack humans is dependent on AI being fed a constant stream of data.

It’s a “beast system” in the sense that AI is the beast, and it needs to be fed. Its food is data, gathered through a vast array of data conduits such as cameras, recording devices, facial recognition, GPS and sensors of all kinds that make up the Internet of Bodies. You can learn more about this in “Manufactured Dystopia — Globalists Won’t Stop Hacking Humans.”

AI is an absolutely crucial component for success of the digital prison. Without it, it cannot work. The answer then, is to starve the beast, and we do this by withholding our data. “No amount of legislation can stop this,” he says, “it has to be done by the people.” In short, we must refuse to use the technologies that gather our data.

We won’t be able to avoid them all. Smart light poles and traffic cameras, for example, cannot be avoided unless you avoid certain areas, which could include your own street. But there are many we can avoid, such as smart watches, fitness trackers, smart thermostats, smart TVs, AI assistants and Ring surveillance cameras just to name a few.

We can also fight, on a local level, to prevent the expansion of facial recognition cameras and 5G, and we can refuse the coming vaccine passport, and the push toward virtual reality. As noted by Jabbi, one way in which people are surreptitiously led into the digital prison is by relying on apps that offer convenience, such as apps that allow you to order food or transportation.

Eventually, they’ll phase out apps on your phone and transfer them to virtual reality googles, so that you have to be in the virtual world in order to use them. It’s important to understand why this is done. It’s to force you deeper into the digital prison system, which includes digital clones and living much of your life in a virtual reality.

China Demonstrates Coming Prison State

At present, China is being rocked by massive protests against the Zero-COVID policy that is used to imprison tens of millions of people in their homes for weeks on end. You’d think an American company like Apple would stand for American values like freedom but, no, it does not. It’s working with the Chinese government to quell dissent.

As reported by Bloomberg1 November 9, 2022, Apple is limiting its iPhone file-sharing tool, restricting AirDrops from non-contacts to 10 minutes. The wireless file-sharing feature was used to share pictures and videos from the protests, thereby encouraging more people to join.

According to Bloomberg, while the change was only made to phones sold in China, Apple says it plans to roll out the same limitation globally. Why? Are they predicting anti-government protests elsewhere?

According to a Twitter user named Songpinganq,2 the video above shows iPhone workers clashing with police over the country’s Zero-COVID policy. In response, the Chinese government is alleged to have remotely switched all of the protesters’ COVID passports to “red,” which prevents them from entering public spaces.

If they try to enter a building, for example — including residential complexes — an alarm will go off and they’ll be detained and escorted to a quarantine camp which, by the way, they have to pay for. That’s how easy it is for the government to eliminate undesirables from society once this kind of control system is in place.

(For the record, I cannot confirm that the featured video is indeed iPhone workers, or that they’re specifically protesting the COVID measures. Regardless, the basic premise remains true, which is that government would be able to control large masses of people remotely, through their digital identity/vaccine passport.)

The video3 below is said to be from a Chinese quarantine camp. A health worker walks through the complex measuring the detainees’ body temperature. The second video4 shows the inside of a quarantine cubicle.

The World Is Starting to Catch On

The good news is that people around the world are starting to realize what’s happening.

As explained by legal philosopher Eva Vlaardingerbroek (video above), the reason there are now mass protests around Europe is because they’re realizing that the COVID vaccine passport system rolled out in Europe is a control system that has no expiration date. They’re realizing it’s meant to be permanent, and that it will be expanded.

In the video below, a young Chinese man describes how the digital ID, CBDCs and the social credit system operates in China. By 2017, they already had the technology to automatically deduct fines from your account for infractions such as jaywalking, and the control network is only getting larger and more sophisticated.

Is this what we want in the West? Is this what you want for your children and your grandchildren? If not, you need to participate in the movement to prevent it, and that starts with making changes in your own life to starve the beast of your personal data, and educating your family and friends about this necessity.

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Notes

1 Bloomberg November 9, 2022

2 Twitter Songpinganq November 22, 2022

3 Twitter Songpinanq November 22, 2022 Video 2

4 Twitter Songpinganq January 9, 2022

Ukraine: A Crusade for NATO and the Western Powers

May 20th, 2022 by Michael Jansen

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For Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Ukraine war is, in the immediate-to-short-term, a strategic defeat on the military, economic and political fronts.

First and foremost, the Russian units sent into Ukraine were too few to mount a successful offensive, as the military high commanders did not stick to the iron-clad ratio of three-to-one for attackers to defenders.

Secondly, the Ukrainian army and national guard were unexpectedly well trained and armed and unexpectedly effective in halting the initial Russian thrust into Ukrainian territory.

Thirdly, the Russian forces performed unexpectedly poorly although technological and tactical improvements had, reportedly, been made in recent years. Although the Kremlin appeared to believe its troops and tanks would capture or besiege Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, within days, the advance of hundreds of armoured vehicles stalled enroute and many were picked of by Ukrainian drones, mortars and artillery fire. The failure to achieve this objective undermined Russian morale from the outset and appears to have confounded Russian military commanders and caused them to adopt a scorched earth policy while exerting little control over Russian troops, prompting them to kill, abuse and rob civilians.

The Russian army’s poor performance can, partly, be explained by the fact that from early December last year until February 24th, 90,000 Russian troops were reported to have massed on the Ukrainian frontier and their number had swelled to 120,000 when they crossed the border. During the 11 months the troops remained in encamped in snow in freezing winter weather, they lost their edge, their equipment was not properly maintained, food was not sufficient, and fuel was in short supply. Therefore, the attacking army was physically unable to achieve the objectives set by the generals.

Fourthly, while not expecting NATO to intervene directly, Moscow clearly did not predict that the West would pour billions of dollars worth of weapons into Ukraine to enable its armed forces to halt Russian advances and defend the country. The Ukraine war has become a crusade for NATO and the Western powers. Their media have whipped up public opinion in favour of the war in order to sustain it and justify expenditures to taxpayers. It is impossible to read, listen to or watch news these days without being overwhelmed by events in Ukraine, although wars and suffering elsewhere has not paused and needs to be tackled. The flow of news has become a constant barrage of propaganda against Russia.

On the economic front, Putin clearly did not believe the divided Western powers capable of uniting to impose a wide range of punitive sanctions on Russia. But, the West has frozen $600 billion in hard currency reserves in foreign banks, sanctioned Russian business and banking, closed down Western firms in Russia, and pressed European countries to cut their dependency on Russian oil, natural gas and coal. No such comprehensive sanctions have been previously imposed elsewhere. Instead, other aggressors and violators of human rights have not been punished. For example, Israel enjoys impunity for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians.

On the political front, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has united and strengthened NATO, which had been moribund until February 24. Isolated and derided during the Trump administration, the US has taken the lead in NATO and on the international scene and has pretentions, once again, of being the global hyperpower. This is bad news for everyone. The US vows adherence to but does not enforce the rule of law and accountability and has long been committed to weakening rather than coexisting with Russia which Washington’s ideologues continue to see as the heir of the Soviet Union rather than its orphan.

Despite these strategic losses, the outlook for Russia is not as bleak as it appears. NATO is not as firmly united as it would appear. Some 20 countries, not all members of NATO, have been providing arms for Ukraine. While 21 of the 27 European Union (EU) states are NATO members,

those involved in supplying weaponry are doing so not as members of the alliance or the EU but as individual states, due to the fiction they are observing “neutrality”. This has not fooled Moscow, which has threatened to bomb NATO weapons as soon as they are delivered and has carried out airstrikes on Ukraine’s railway lines to prevent the dispersal of weapons to hot fronts.

The original list of suppliers consisted of Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Holland, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Britain and the United States.

Hungary not only refuses to arm Ukraine but also does not permit weapons to transit its territory to reach Ukraine.  Before the war Turkey supplied Ukraine with drones, which have played a large role in the battle against Russia, but has refused to send more drones and other weaponry to Ukraine since war erupted. Bulgaria is upgrading its own defences rather than sending arms from its small arsenal to Ukraine. As Iceland does not have its own military, it has offered to transport but not supply weapons for Ukraine.

The EU has been divided from the outset, with France and Germany, which sought to prevent the war the US and UK promoted, reluctantly decided to provide arms. Slovakia and Hungary do not support sanctions on Russia while Cyprus, Malta and Greece object to the full range of sanctions. Italy, Hungary, Greece, Cyprus and Austria, which, traditionally, have close relations with Russia, call for exemptions and the early removal of sanctions.

Once a ceasefire is in place and credible negotiations begin between Ukraine and Russia, pressure is certain to mount for the lifting of sanctions despite US President Joe Biden’s determination to “weaken” Russia permanently. This pressure will come from the Eastern Arab World, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, Asia, and Latin America as well as global big shots China and India. Many countries across the world do not want to return to the immediate post-Soviet Union era when the US was the hyper-power, particularly since disruptive and dangerous Donald Trump could very well be elected to a second term in office in 2024.

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$65 Billion in Western ‘Aid for Ukraine’ Is Neither Aid Nor Is It for Ukraine

May 20th, 2022 by Drago Bosnic

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In recent weeks, much has been said about the political West’s (primarily US) “aid” to the embattled Kiev regime. The US Congress has so far approved or is in the process of approving at least $54 billion to Ukraine. In addition, various reports put the amount of EU “aid” at up to €10 billion thus far, although the actual number is most likely orders of magnitude greater. When put together, this pushes the publicly acknowledged figure to a staggering $65 billion, which is equivalent to Russia’s annual military spending in nominal USD exchange rates.

The number seems rather impressive and may give an outlook that Ukraine will be able to defeat Russian forces. However, the situation on the ground says otherwise. With the political West’s postindustrial economy, their ability to mass-produce affordable and easily replaceable military hardware has increasingly been called into question. Thus, most of the “aid” from the US/EU is essentially a half measure. Throwing money at a problem is highly unlikely to resolve it, as actual situations require genuine, not monetary action.

The amount of hardware Ukraine lost so far is difficult to determine, as both sides provide diametrically opposing data, while independent confirmation from the ground is virtually impossible due to ongoing military operations. However, war footage taken by civilians, alternative media embedded with frontline troops, and soldiers themselves, clearly shows that Ukraine’s losses in manpower and equipment have been massive.

To replace lost hardware, the Kiev regime will require enormous resources. However, this will be quite challenging, as the country’s Military-Industrial Complex has been virtually annihilated by Russia’s long-range strikes. Thus, the regime will need to acquire additional military hardware elsewhere. The political West is the go-to address for this purpose, as Ukraine has been getting NATO weapons for years. Still, this hardware has had a limited impact on the battlefield. To change that, NATO powers decided to ramp up the so-called “lethal aid”.

However, in reality, the prospect of Ukraine getting the promised “aid” is rather grim. An obvious question arises, what will happen to nearly $65 billion? The first go-to address for such a question should be the US Congress. With the lawmaking body trying to fast track the deal, some US congressmen have voiced concerns that corrupt officials would be able to steal the “aid”, as was the case for decades during numerous US invasions across the globe. However, corruption and embezzlement, which geopolitical expert Paul Antonopoulos recently covered in a superb analysis, is the lesser problem in this situation.

Mainstream media have been portraying the political West as if it will be sending actual, physical money to the Kiev regime. However, nothing could be further from the truth. The funds will essentially stay in the “donor” countries. The largest share of those funds will officially be allocated to arming, or rather, rearming the Kiev regime forces. But who exactly, or more precisely, which companies will be producing weapons for the Ukrainian military? It’s safe to assume we all know the answer – the US Military-Industrial Complex, the largest and most powerful arms manufacturing cartel on the planet. Household names such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, BAE Systems, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, to name a few, will be getting the vast majority of those funds.

For instance, the “Phoenix Ghost” drones, manufactured by the California-based Aevex Aerospace and “Switchblade” drones, manufactured by AeroVironment, both designed to strike tanks and other armored vehicles, as well as infantry units. M113 armored vehicle is also being sent and while old, largely obsolete and not in production since 2007, it’s quite numerous, and getting rid of it will make way for the acquisition of its immediate successor, the AMPV (Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle), a turretless variant of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, produced by the BAE Systems.

Another BAE Systems product is the M777 howitzer, a towed 155 mm artillery piece designed for direct fire support. Ukrainian troops are already using them, while recent videos released by the Russian military show some have already been destroyed in battle. Interestingly, the howitzers delivered to Ukraine lack digital fire-control systems.

The much-touted “Stinger” MANPADS (produced by Raytheon) and “Javelin” ATGMs (co-produced by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon) have been sent in the thousands. However, their effectiveness has been questionable at best, despite Western media trying to portray them as supposed “game-changers”. Russian tanks have been filmed surviving up to 7 “Javelin” hits, even continuing to fight, much to the frustration of Ukrainian forces, which have recently been ordered to stop publicly complaining about the lackluster performance of Western weapons.

Raytheon’s AN/MPQ-64 “Sentinel”, an X-band range-gated, pulse-Doppler radar used to alert and cue short-range air defense systems has also been sent. In addition, 40 million rounds of small arms ammunition, 5,000 assault and battle rifles, 1,000 pistols, 400 machine guns and 400 shotguns have been sent to Ukraine, along with more than 1 million grenades, mortars and 200,000 artillery rounds. These deliveries have been completed by early May. The actual number is most certainly much higher as of this writing.

The weapons in question are not changing the strategic balance between Russia and the Kiev regime, but are prolonging the fight, resulting in even higher military and civilian casualties. Also, logistics-wise, having so many different types of weapons creates a lot of problems for the Ukrainian military, which is barely holding together as it is. There are also issues of training and doctrinal incompatibility.

M777 howitzers are immobile when deployed and are designed with air dominance in mind. US troops are supposed to use them from a safe distance, serving as fire support by striking very specific targets during overseas operations, which is completely opposite to what is going on in Ukraine, where the other side (Russia) enjoys air dominance and uses massed artillery to punch holes in Ukrainian lines, followed by massive and well-coordinated armor assaults. Thus, US weapons not only fail in providing an effective counter to Russian troops, but are even getting Ukrainian forces killed, as they are still not accustomed to using them.

And last, but not least, the “aid” provided (and soon to be provided) by NATO countries are essentially long-term loans which will have to be repaid in the following decades. The WWII-era Lend-Lease program for the USSR, estimated at $160 billion in present-day USD, was repaid in full only in 2006. Thus, we can assume Ukraine will be paying off the current $65 billion “aid” for the rest of this century. That is, provided there will be a viable Ukrainian state to do so after the conflict ends.

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

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“Bye Bye American Pie”. Reasons Why America Will Fall

May 20th, 2022 by Julian Macfarlane

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***

Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry

Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye

And singin’ “This’ll be the day that I die”

 -Don McLean, Bye Bye American Pie

Reasons Why Rome Fell

1. unwinnable wars with “ Barbarian” tribes. …

2. over-reliance on slave labor. …

3. inequality

4. unemployment

5. inflation

6. debasement of popular culture, violent spectacle

7. the rise of the Eastern Empire. …

8. over-expansion and military overspending. …

9. political corruption and political instability. …

10. The arrival of the central and west Asian and east European peoples collectively called the “Huns” and the Barbarians encroachment on imperial provinces such as Britain

Reasons Why the US Will Fall

11. unwinnable wars with “Barbarian” tribes: in the ME, Asia and Latin America, and now Russia

12. over reliance on slave labor. …exploitation of workers at home and abroad

13. inequality

14. unemployment

15. inflation

16. debasement of popular culture, violent spectacle

17. the rise of the Eastern Empire–China and BRI

18. over-expansion and military overspending. …

19. government corruption and political instability. …

20. The arrival of the central and west Asian and east European peoples collectively called the “Huns”, now known as “Russians” and their taking of prospective imperial provinces such as Georgia, the Ukraine and Central Asian republics.

OK. But what about the differences between the Roman and American empires, especially modernization and technology?

Rome was not an industrial state. Nor was it global, although it dominated the Mediterranean and Western Europe. It was ruled by dynastic elites, an aristocracy. The US is a global empire with advanced communications which claims to be a democracy, by also ruled by dynastic elites. Yeah, most of the Billionaire class got their privileged positions, if not money,  from Mommy and Daddy.

However, a closer examination renders these differences essentially meaningless.

All civilizations since the advent of the Neolithic have fallen within a few centuries, or, in the case of the Incas, even less.

The reason lies in the growth of hierarchies that prevent adaptation and change and also in inequality that results in dynastic elites, effectively aristocracies.

Although the US says it has government of the people, by the people, it is actually ruled by a few large corporations owned by just those dynastic elites I mentioned.  The people are like Helots in Rome, a slave class.

Wherever the Romans went, they built roads; they also had a huge merchant fleet, tying the Empire together. All roads, as the saying goes, led to Rome. All ships went there too. Which is one reason the Romans were subject to frequent pandemics. Rats just love empires. Rats love cruises abroad.

Today, all roads lead to Washington— metaphorically only— since the US doesn’t build roads or railroads much, preferring air travel to tie their empire together. Also very effective in spreading disease. Rats rarely travel by air –so we have tourists.

We might think that the Roman Empire was small compared to that of America. But to the Romans, it was global — because they ruled all of the world that mattered to them.

The American Empire consists of the US, Canada, Europe and Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Korea, so it is much more extensive but certainly not the whole world. Most of the World doesn’t belong to it, which used to be fine because the Third World didn’t matter to Americans in the past, except for a cheap vacation or cheap labor.

In the Roman case, the Barbarians learned a lot from the Romans and soon began to challenge the Empire. They were Rome’s Third World.

Today’s Barbarians are Russian and Chinese and Indian.

The Romans fought the evolving, adaptive societies in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, just as the Americans are now doing with the Russians and Chinese. But the Romans lost. As will the Americans.

That’s because a civilization can be dynamic or static. Rome and America both lost momentum.

A major cause was cultural narcissism. Why change or try to evolve when you believe yourself superior?

“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” said Barack Obama, one of many comments to this effect.

Americans think themselves better, somehow chosen by God, even the poorest of them. The Romans believed this too — even the plebeians—despite their short, brutal lives.  As time goes on Americans are living shorter and more brutal lives, too.  In the US, health is indeed wealth.

When a civilization grows too large and powerful, it maintains social consistency largely through group-think, or propaganda, delusionary belief systems. In the American Empire, propaganda is based on media narratives — the best manufactured in Hollywood — stories told on TV, or now on the Internet. It is what Guy de Bord, calls the Society of the Spectacle. Think: the Super Bowl. Think Marvel movies. It is all “show”.  What is the war in the Ukraine but a one season series?

In Rome, they first built theatres modeled on Greek theatre. But Greek drama was for the educated in small city-state cultures. Rome was ever so much bigger and its hoi polloi more numerous wanting excitement and vicarious pleasure to fill out their boring but as mentioned short and brutal lives.

The Romans invented bread and circuses.

The Americans invented film and TV—and McDonalds’—they have their own versions of the Coliseum with endless entertaining and often very bloody spectacles, reaffirming the values of the Empire, in the same way that gladiatorial combat and throwing Christians to the lions did for the Romans and blood and guts makes them reach for the popcorn.

The difference between the US and Rome is really in technology and the sophistication of narratives and mythologies.

Rome split into pieces first– an Eastern Empire and a Western Empire, with chunks falling off each. The US will also devolve. We see that already with political division and Roe vs Wade going back to the States.  Cicero played the fiddle.  Biden can’t even do that.

In the end, Rome was just a much diminished city who had to open it gates to the Vandals. Can we expect the same of Washington?

Listen to the song, “Bye Bye, American Pie.

Listen because it not just the levee that’s dry, it’s your gas tank and your bank account ….

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Julian Macfarlane is a Canadian media analyst / writer. 40 years in Japan. Worked for every major Japanese company including Toyota as media advisor in the Middle East and also most government ministries including the Foreign Ministry and Prime Minister’s Office.  More than 200 articles on political events and propaganda. Author of “Ageing Young: You’re Never Too Old To Rock ‘n Roll”, a seminal study of evolutionary psychology. For more articles go to: https://julianmacfarlane.substack.com/ 

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NATO Expansion and Turkey

May 20th, 2022 by Craig Murray

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***

I am in Turkey because, if there is to be movement in ending the war in Ukraine, it will happen here. President Erdogan’s firm stance on a potential veto of Swedish and Finnish NATO membership is framed in public only in relation to perceived support by those countries for Kurdish resistance groups. But of course it goes much deeper.

Erdogan understands that the spectacular advance by NATO eastward that Finnish enlargement in particular would represent, is a slap in the face for Putin that will make a peace deal in Ukraine far more difficult. Any such deal would have to be based upon Russia giving up some of the Ukrainian territory it holds today. Dramatic NATO expansion is the very opposite of an attempt to create the conditions for that. In fact, that NATO is so actively pursuing this expansion is sufficient evidence that NATO is looking for a long proxy war to bleed Russia, rather than trying to restore peace and stability to Europe.

That the European public are gripped by a wave of emotion over Ukraine was amply demonstrated by the popular vote of tens of millions in the Eurovision song contest. Once the spasm dies down, opinion in Finland and Sweden may revert. It has been obvious for over a decade that Putin has an aim to reintegrate Russian populated areas of the former Soviet Union into the Russian Federation. That agenda is currently causing a ruinous war, but is no military threat to Finland or Sweden.

Turkey retains the prestige of chosen venue and perhaps broker for continuing diplomatic contact between Russia and Ukraine. Erdogan’s robust stance on Finland and Sweden is necessary to maintain Russian trust. Turkey of course has its own lengthy and extremely complex historical and current relationship with Russia, which is much more important than Turkey’s role as a key NATO member might suggest. It is also worth bearing in mind that Turkey is a far more serious military power than Finland and Sweden combined.

There is another, specifically Turkish interest in play here, which is very much a factor in Erdogan’s willingness to stand up to Biden over Swedish and Finnish NATO entry. This of course relates to the permanent tension between NATO members Turkey and Greece.

Turkey is furious over the militarisation of the Eastern Aegean Greek Islands very close to its shores, and the lack of support and understanding it has received from other NATO members over the perceived threat.

The status of Greece’s most Eastern (Dodecanese) islands is not in doubt. It was established by the Treaty of Paris in 1947, to which all the permanent members of the UN security council, and many other states, are parties.

The demilitarisation of the islands is unequivocal, and no treaty since has negated it.

Other Greeks islands including Limnos and Lesbos slightly further West are similarly constrained by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. Greece claims this status was modified subsequently by the 1936 Straits Convention. I don’t think that is right but that is a more complex argument than we need to develop just now. The 1947 Treaty is not modified.

Yet Greece had proceeded and is still proceeding with the militarisation of the Dodecanese islands on a large scale, involving tens of thousands of troops in total, military aircraft, and in particular long range surface to surface missiles. Turkey and Russia both regard these as a threat. The Turkish government are privately convinced that this militarisation is being carried out with active United States cooperation, participation and perhaps instigation.

In February, President Erdogan stated that as the Treaties specifying demilitarisation are the very Treaties which give sovereignty over the islands to Greece, then if Greece was repudiating the treaties it brought sovereignty into question. Erdogan was immediately slapped down by the Biden administration.

So Turkish resentment at US behaviour in the Aegean, seen as encouraging a direct military threat, is another reason why Erdogan is not anxious to defer quickly to the US agenda in the Baltic. Turkish exasperation is further fueled by the fact that this really is bad faith by the USA, in refusing to abide by an international treaty to which it is a party (a position complicated by the fact Turkey itself is not a party to the Treaty of Paris 1947).

I have found this last 17 years of blogging that it only takes a little background knowledge, a little research, and a few affable conversations, to find a picture far more complicated and realistic than that carried in the mainstream media. Sadly there are few left in the mould of Robert Fisk.

Speaking of which the most important piece of UK journalism this year is being totally ignored by the mainstream media. Please do read it; you will learn more about how the UK really works than you ever will from the BBC.

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Finland Says It Won’t Host Nuclear Weapons or NATO Bases

May 20th, 2022 by Dave DeCamp

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***

 

Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said Thursday that Helsinki is opposed to NATO deploying nuclear weapons or establishing bases inside Finland if it joins the military alliance.

Marin said she didn’t think there was much interest in NATO for nuclear deployments or permanent bases inside Finland.

“Nor do I think there is any interest in deploying nuclear weapons or opening NATO bases in Finland,” she said.

Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson has also said Sweden doesn’t plan on hosting NATO nuclear weapons or bases.

While the US, Britain, and France are the only NATO members with their own nuclear stockpiles, US nuclear weapons are deployed in other NATO states under a nuclear-sharing agreement. Under the agreement, there are US nuclear weapons in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that Moscow will respond to the expansion of NATO military infrastructure inside Sweden or Finland. While the two nations have no interest in nuclear weapons or bases, NATO could still send troops and other military equipment to the countries on a rotational basis.

Finland and Sweden formally applied to join NATO on Wednesday, but Turkey blocked the alliance from holding talks on their membership. Ankara is opposed to the Nordic countries joining due to their alleged support for the PKK and the export controls they imposed on Turkey. Finnish President Sauli Niinisto said Thursday that he’s working on getting Turkey to change its position.

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

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US Military Clears Itself of Blame in Syria Strike That Killed ‘Piles’ of Women and Children

May 20th, 2022 by Brett Wilkins

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“It’s the standard government line: Mistakes were made but there was no wrongdoing. But if the same mistakes were being made over and over again for years, shouldn’t someone have done something about it?”

No U.S. personnel will be held accountable for a March 2019 airstrike that killed scores of Syrian civilians including women and children, the Pentagon said Tuesday in announcing that an internal investigation into the massacre found that no laws of war were broken and that there was no cover-up of the incident as alleged in a New York Times exposé.

An executive summary of a classified investigation led by U.S. Army Gen. Michael Garrett stated that “no rules of engagement (ROE) or law of war (LOW) violations occurred” in connection with the March 18, 2019 strike near the Syrian town of Baghuz that, according to an initial battle assessment, killed around 70 people.

While finding that “policy compliance deficiencies at multiple levels of command led directly to numerous delays in reporting” the civilian casualties, and that “administrative deficiencies contributed to the impression” that the Pentagon did not take the incident seriously, the probe concluded there was “no malicious or wrongful intent” by the military, and that there was “no evidence” to support allegations of a cover-up.

However, a former evaluator in the Defense Department inspector general’s office who attempted to investigate the Baghuz strike said he personally witnessed Pentagon brass trying to bury reports of the bombing.

“It’s the standard government line: Mistakes were made but there was no wrongdoing,” Eugene Tate told the Times in response to Garrett’s summary. “But if the same mistakes were being made over and over again for years, shouldn’t someone have done something about it? It doesn’t sit well with me, and I’m not sure it should sit well with anyone else.”

“The investigation says the reporting was delayed,” Tate added. “None of the worker bees involved believe it was delayed. We believe there was no reporting.”

The airstrike remained concealed from the public until the publication of a November 2021 Times investigation, which also revealed that a secretive Special Forces unit, Task Force 9, was responsible for the attack. One strike cell within the task force known as Talon Anvil reportedly killed and wounded Syrian civilians at 10 times the rate of similar units’ airstrikes.

According to Pentagon officials familiar with the contents of Garrett’s classified report, the military concluded that 56 people died in the Baghuz strike—52 Islamic State militants and four civilians—when a U.S. F-15E attack jet dropped a single 500-pound bomb on a large group of people.

However, evaluators appear to have used a standard adopted during the administration of former President Barack Obama under which all military-aged males in a blast zone are classified as combatants regardless of their actual status.

The officials’ claim stands in stark contrast with what U.S. personnel quoted in the Times exposé reported seeing at the time of the attack. According to the report, U.S. troops watching real-time footage of the strike “looked on in stunned disbelief,” according to an officer who was there, with one military analyst stating that “we just dropped on 50 women and children.”

After the strike, civilian observers “found piles of dead women and children,” according to Times reporters Dave Philipps and Eric Schmitt, who spent months investigating the attack.

“A legal officer flagged the strike as a possible war crime that required an investigation. But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike,” the pair explained. “The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized, and classified. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. And top leaders were not notified.”

Responding to Garrett’s summary, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a memorandum Tuesday that

“our efforts to mitigate and respond to civilian harm resulting from U.S. military operations are a direct reflection of U.S. values,” and that “protecting innocent civilians is fundamental to our operational success and is a strategic and moral imperative.”

However, U.S. bombs and bullets have killed more foreign civilians than those of any other armed force in the world in recent decades. According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, at least 900,000 people—including nearly 400,000 civilians—have died during the course of the 21-year U.S.-led War on Terror.

Throughout the war, few U.S. troops—and even fewer people higher up the chain of command—have been held accountable for harming civilians.

When asked during a Tuesday press conference why no one being held accountable for the Baghuz strike, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby replied,

“I understand the questions about accountability, I get it.”

“In this case, Gen. Garrett found that the ground force commander made the best decisions that he could, given the information he had at the time, given a very lethal, very aggressive threat, in a very confined space,” he added. “It is deeply regrettable… we apologize for the loss of innocent life.”

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Putin: If Finns, Swedes Get NATO ‘Military Infrastructure’, We’ll Respond

May 20th, 2022 by Ray McGovern

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***

On May 16, just before I was interviewed for The Critical Hour, Putin addressed Finland’s and Sweden’s plans to join NATO, using words far milder than had most expected:

“Russia has no problems with these states. There is no direct threat to Russia in connection with NATO’s expansion to these countries.”

Then, the kicker:

“But the expansion of NATO’s military infrastructure to these territories will certainly evoke a response on our part. We will see what it will be like based on the threats that are created for us.”

So Who’s Already Got ‘NATO’s Military Infrastructure’?

The interview with The Critical Hour, provided an opportunity to underscore what the Russians seems to fear the most — the emplacement of what they call “offensive strike missiles” in sites near Russia’s border. In other words, THAT kind of “military infrastructure”. For several years Putin has complained that so-called “ABM” sites already completed in Romania and almost complete in Poland can be converted overnight into launchers for “offensive strike missiles” — Tomahawk cruise missiles, for example, and, later, hypersonic ones.

A major concern, of course, is warning time; that is, the shrinking minutes from the missile launch to target.

After Presidents Biden and Putin talked by telephone on Dec. 30, 2021, the Kremlin readout included this:

“Joseph Biden emphasized … that Washington had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine.”

No one challenged that readout at the time. Does anyone know why/how that that key point made by Biden fell into the cracks? We are talking here about one president’s direct personal assurance to the other. The key role played by trust (or distrust) can hardly be exaggerated.

The following short video clip from 2015 provides a sense of how frustrated Putin has been, in trying to get people (in this case Western journalists) to put themselves in his shoes. You may wish to click on the two-and-a-half minute segment — from minute 10:20 to 12:55 — at the following link.

Erdogan Opposed to Finland, Poland in NATO

It takes a unanimous vote by all 30 NATO countries to accept new members. So one big question is whether Turkey’s President Erdogan will relent and acquiesce in Finland and Poland joining the alliance. Hard to predict, but my guess is that NATO will sweeten the pot enough for Erdogan that he will let himself be bought off.  I referred the interviewers to a Tweet I had posted earlier in the day, suggesting that, even though Turkey once faced down the U.S. (on Iraq), I would not bet much on Erdogan facing down the immense pressure on this one. But who knows?

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Mexico Advocates for the End of the US Blockade Against Cuba

May 20th, 2022 by Telesur

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***

During his morning press briefing, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said that President Joe Biden should remove the blockade imposed on Cuba by the U.S., as it is medieval, genocidal, and far away from fraternal ties, which violates human rights.

The Mexican President told reporters that the Summit of the Americas represents an initial step on the right path; otherwise, it should be inclusive, not exclusive as the one convened.

AMLO highlighted that this start is the first procedure towards lifting a blockade policy that is hitting so many Cubans, banning them from accessing basics. Lopèz-Obrador described this policy as violating human rights, saying it should not be done.

The Mexican head of state said that the Summit rejects the country’s sovereign right of its people to govern its own way. He claimed that no nation has the right to intervene in the Island’s internal affairs.

He recalled Benito Juarez’s famous phrase: “among individuals as well as nations, respect for the rights of others is peace.” He added that it is a matter of principle and we are going to wait and see what happens.

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Featured image: Mexican President said Tuesday that the U.S. blockade against Cuba should end. May. 17, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@EmbaCubaNamibia

As Biden Sends Billions to Ukraine, American Families Do Not Have Baby Formula

May 20th, 2022 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

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In recent days, the absence of baby formula in the US has been a central topic in newspapers around the world. Many arguments are provided by analysts to explain the absence of this basic item in the markets, but few experts relate the case to the terrible economic administration of Democrat President Joe Biden, who has as a government priority sending billion-dollars military packages to Kiev, instead of searching for the common good for his own people.

Retailers across the US have struggled to keep shelves fully stocked with everyday necessities, but this has become extremely complicated as problems in the production and distribution chain grow.

One of the items that consumers are most lacking is baby formula, a primary product that is vitally important to the survival of American children, but which has seen a drop of nearly 20% in availability recently. The scenario has driven many families to despair, having to travel for hours to buy formulas in cities or states far from home.

The high demand and lack of supply, consequently, generate high price inflation, which makes it even more difficult for the American citizen to be able to buy milk formulas.

There are a number of factors that explain the absence of formulas in the markets. However, first, it is necessary to understand that American families, over the last few decades, have become extremely dependent on industrial formulas to feed their children. American women breastfeed less than the global average, which is due to both health and social factors. There has always been an incentive from the American pharmaceutical and food industry to provide formulas for children, which has created a dependence problem.

Less than half of American mothers breastfeed during the six-month period recommended by the global scientific community and about 20% of them complete one year of breastfeeding. Not by chance, in 2018, the US criticized a WHO resolution encouraging breastfeeding for one year, with the delegation of American diplomats even threatening the nations that approved the measure with sanctions – all in the name of the billion-dollar formula industry that operates in the country. With that, milk formula has become extremely important in the US – more so than it is in other countries. Without the regular supply of formulas, there is no food for children.

The main problem is that this year the formula production and distribution chain was severely affected by economic and sanitary factors. Analysts attribute the shortage largely to a recent outbreak of bacterial contamination at an Abbott Laboratories’ manufacturing complex in Michigan, which is responsible for a significant portion of American formula production. The result of the outbreak was an automatic drop in the availability of this item in the markets. However, the case cannot be understood only by the sanitary factor.

There is an economic and inflationary crisis that makes the situation even more complex.

Inflation in the US is at the highest level in 40 years, having reached 8.5% in May. Between February and March this year alone, the inflation jump was 1.2%, according to official data from the Labor Department. What is most affected by price rises is precisely what is most basic for a citizen’s life: food, gasoline, housing and primary items. The formula is not excluded from this list. With inflation, the price of infant milk had already risen, but, adding to the recent shortage, some sellers are now charging double or even triple the pre-crisis price.

The immediate reflection of this scenario is on the popularity of President Biden, who once again proves to be ineffective in handling an internal crisis. Currently, the Democrat’s approval rating is at 39% – the lowest since his inauguration. In a recent survey, 56% of respondents said they were not satisfied with current government policies, while 75% said they believed the country was not moving in the right direction. Republicans use the moment to further criticize the disastrous administration and gain popular support. Many conservatives defend exceptional measures to alleviate the formula crisis, such as banning the free distribution of this product to migrants at the border – which has been mandatory by law since 1997. However, it is the systematic sending of money abroad that most bothers Republicans and the American people as a whole.

In a recent speech, former President Donald Trump expressed the opposition’s dissatisfaction with the current situation, pointing out Biden’s mistake in sending military aid to a foreign nation while American children are without food in their own country: “The Democrats are sending another $40 billion to Ukraine, yet America’s parents are struggling to even feed their children (…) It is unthinkable that in the year 2022 American families are unable to get baby formulas for their children. The pain that mothers and fathers are going through who literally cannot get nutrition for their newborns and infants is a mark of eternal shame on the Democrat Party”.

Biden’s inability to manage national crises is evident. The Democrat is more concerned with pursuing an ideological and unrealistic agenda of support for Kiev than with solving the vital problems of his own people. The electorate will certainly not accept seeing their tax money being sent to neo-Nazis waging war in Europe while American children starve. There will be more polarization and social confrontation in the coming months. It remains to be seen whether at some point Biden will realize that contributing to the escalation of foreign conflicts is not in the interests of the American people.

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

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“A Reset” that Serves the People

May 20th, 2022 by Ellen Brown

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Instead of buying into the World Economic Forum’s dystopian “Great Reset,” we can build an alternative system with a mandate to serve the people.

This is part two to a May 4, 2022 article called “A Monetary Reset Where the Rich Don’t Own Everything,” the gist of which was that national and global debt levels are unsustainably high. We need a “reset,” but of what sort? The “Great Reset” of the World Economic Forum (WEF) would leave the people as non-owner tenants in a feudalistic technocracy. The reset of the Eurasian Economic Union would allow participating nations to opt out of the Western capitalist system altogether, but what of the Western countries that are left? That is the question addressed here.

Our Forefathers Had Some Innovative Solutions

Fortunately for the United States, our national debt is in U.S. dollars. As former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan once observed,

“The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.”

Paying government debt by just printing the money was the innovative solution of the cash-strapped American colonial governments. The problem was that it tended to be inflationary. The paper scrip they issued was considered an advance against future taxes, but it was easier to issue the money than to tax it back, and over-issuing devalued the currency. The colony of Pennsylvania fixed that problem by forming a government-owned “land bank.” Money was issued as farm credit that was repaid. The new money went out from the local government and came back to it, stimulating the economy and trade without devaluing the currency.

But in the mid-eighteenth century, at the behest of the Bank of England, the colonies were forbidden by King George to issue their own currencies, triggering a recession and the American Revolution. The colonists won the war, but by the end of it the currency was so devalued (chiefly from British counterfeiting) that the Founding Fathers were afraid to include the power to issue paper money in the Constitution.

Hamilton’s Solution: Debt-for-equity Swaps

That left Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in a bind. After the war, the colonies-turned-states were heavily in debt, with no way to repay it. Hamilton solved the problem by turning the states’ debts into equity in the First United States Bank. The creditors became shareholders in the bank, earning a 6% dividend on their holdings.

Might that work today? H.R. 3339, a bill currently before Congress, would form a National Infrastructure Bank (NIB) modeled on Hamilton’s U.S. Bank, capitalized with federal securities acquired in debt-for-equity swaps. Shareholders would receive a guaranteed 2% dividend on non-voting preferred stock in the bank, with the option of recovering the principal after 20 years.

If the whole $30 trillion U.S. federal debt were turned into bank capital, leveraged into loans at 10 to 1 as banks are allowed to do, the bank could do $300 trillion in infrastructure loans. To start, the Federal Reserve could buy NIB stock with the $5.76 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities currently on its balance sheet, capitalizing potential loans of $57 trillion. The possibilities are breathtaking; and because the money would enter the money supply in the form of low-interest loans to local governments that would be paid back over time, the result need not be inflationary. Loans for infrastructure and other productive ventures would raise supply to meet demand, keeping prices stable.

Lincoln’s Solution: Just Issue the Money

Hamilton’s solution to an unsustainable federal debt was terminated when President Andrew Jackson closed down the Second U.S. Bank. That left Abraham Lincoln in a bind. Faced with a massive debt at usurious interest rates to fund the Civil War, he solved the problem by reverting to the solution of the American colonists: just issue the currency as paper money.

In the 1860s, these U.S. Notes or Greenbacks constituted 40% of the national currency. Today, 40% of the circulating money supply would be $7.6 trillion. Yet massive Greenback issuance during the Civil War did not lead to hyperinflation. U.S. Notes suffered a drop in value as against gold, but according to Milton Friedman and Anna Schwarz in A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, this was due not to “printing money” but to trade imbalances with foreign trading partners on the gold standard. The Greenbacks aided the Union not only in winning the war but in funding a period of unprecedented economic expansion, making the country the greatest industrial giant the world had yet seen. The steel industry was launched, a continental railroad system was created, a new era of farm machinery and cheap tools was promoted, free higher education was established, government support was provided to all branches of science, the Bureau of Mines was organized, and labor productivity was increased by 50 to 75 percent.

The Japanese “Free Lunch”

Another option is for the U.S. government to “monetize” its debt by having the central bank purchase and hold it or write it off. The Federal Reserve returns interest and profits to the Treasury after deducting its costs.

This alternative, too, need not be inflationary, as has apparently been demonstrated by the Japanese. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) started buying government bonds in 1999, after reducing interest rates to zero, then dropping them into negative territory in 2015. Today Japan’s government debt is a whopping 260% of its Gross Domestic Product, and the Bank of Japan owns half of it. (Even the outsized U.S. debt to GDP ratio is only 126%.) Yet annual inflation is now only 1.2% in Japan, not even up to the BOJ’s longstanding 2% target. To the extent that prices are rising, it is not from money-printing but from lockdowns and supply chain disruptions and shortages, the same disruptions triggering price inflation globally.

Hedge fund manager Eric Peters discussed the Japanese experiment in a recent article titled “Can a Modern Nation Pull Off a Debt Jubilee Without Full Monetary Collapse?” Noting that “core prices in Japan’s economy remain almost identical today as they were when its zero-interest-rate experiment began,” he asked:

Could the central bank create money, buy all the outstanding bonds, and simply burn them? Execute a modern version of an Old Testament debt Jubilee? …. [M]ight it be possible for a country to pull off such a feat without full monetary collapse? We don’t know, yet.

A Treasury Issue of Special Coins or E-cash

For future budget expenses, rather than borrowing, the government could follow President Lincoln and just issue the money it needs. As Thomas Edison observed in the 1920s:

If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%.

When the Constitution was ratified, coins were the only officially recognized legal tender. By 1850, coins made up only about half the currency. The total face value of all U.S. coins ever produced as of January 2022 is $170 billion dollars, or less than 0.9% of a $19 trillion circulating money supply (M2). These coins, along with about $25 million in U.S. Notes or Greenbacks, are all that is left of the Treasury’s money-creating power. As the Bank of England has acknowledged, the vast majority of the money supply is now created privately by banks  as deposits when they make loans.

In the early 1980s, a chairman of the Coinage Subcommittee of the House of Representatives observed that the Constitution gives Congress the power to coin money and regulate its value, and that no limit is put on the value of the coins it creates. He said the government could pay off its entire debt with some billion dollar coins. In a 2007 book called ”Web of Debt,” I wrote about this and said in today’s America it would have to be trillion dollar coins.

In 1982, Congress chose to choke off this remaining vestige of its money-creating power by imposing limits on the amounts and denominations of most coins. The one exception was the platinum coin, which a special provision allows to be minted in any amount for commemorative purposes (31 U.S. Code § 5112). In 2013, Georgia attorney Carlos Mucha proposed issuing a platinum coin to capitalize on this loophole, in order to solve the gridlock then in Congress over the debt ceiling. Philip Diehl, former head of the U.S. Mint and co-author of the platinum coin law. He said:

In minting the $1 trillion platinum coin, the Treasury Secretary would be exercising authority which Congress has granted routinely for more than 220 years . . . under power expressly granted to Congress in the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8).

Prof. Randall Wray explained that the coin would not circulate but would be deposited in the government’s account at the Fed, so it would not inflate the circulating money supply. The budget would still need Congressional approval. To keep a lid on spending, Congress would just need to abide by some basic rules of economics. It could spend on goods and services up to full employment without creating price inflation (since supply and demand would rise together). After that, it would need to tax — not to fund the budget, but to shrink the circulating money supply and avoid driving up prices with excess demand.

A more modern option is for the Treasury to issue “e-cash,” an electronic form of cash transferred on secure hardware not requiring an internet connection. The ECASH Act,  H.R. 7231, introduced on March 28, 2022 by Rep. Stephen Lynch, “directs the Secretary of the Treasury to develop and introduce a form of retail digital dollar called ‘e-cash,’ which replicates the off-line-capable, peer-to-peer, privacy-respecting, zero transaction-fee, and payable-to-bear features of physical cash….”

Unlike the central bank digital currencies now being developed by central banks globally, e-cash would be anonymous and not traceable, having all the privacy attributes of physical cash. Various models are in development, including one already introduced in China in 2021, an offline-capable smart payments card that was part of the government’s digital yuan rollout.

A People’s Reset

Those are alternatives for relieving the government’s debt burden, but what about the massive sums in student debt, medical debt, and rent and mortgage payments now in arrears? Biden promised in his presidential campaign to forgive student debt or some portion of it. But whether this can legally be done by presidential order, without congressional approval, is controversial. Arguments have been made both ways.

For most student debt, however, the creditor is actually the Department of Education, a cabinet-level department established by Congress with some limited power to cancel debt. In August 2021, for example, the Department canceled the student debt of the disabled. Congress itself could also write off the debt. The challenge is getting agreement on which debts to cancel and by how much.

What of the student debt, mortgage debt, and credit card debt held by private banks? Private banks have a contractual right to repayment. They also have an obligation to balance their books, meaning they could go bankrupt if unable to collect. But as British economist Michael Rowbotham observed, these debts too could be written off if the accounting standards were changed. Banks don’t actually lend their own money or their depositors’ money. The money they lend is created simply by writing the borrowed sums into the deposit accounts of their customers, so voiding out the debts would be cost-free. The accounting standards would just need to be changed so that the books would not need to balance. The debts could be carried as nonperforming loans or moved off the books in special purpose vehicles, as the Chinese have been known to do with their nonperforming loans. As for which debts to write off and by how much, that is a policy question for legislators.

Would that sort of debt jubilee be inflationary? Yes, to the extent that students and other debtors would have money to spend from their incomes that they did not have before, money that would be competing for a limited supply of goods and services. Again, however, inflation could be avoided by powering up the production of goods and services sufficiently to meet demand.

That means powering up small and medium-sized businesses, which generate most local productivity and employment; and that means providing them with affordable credit. As UK Prof. Richard Werner observes, big banks don’t lend to small businesses. Small banks do, and their numbers are rapidly shrinking. A national infrastructure bank could do it but would have trouble making prudent loans for businesses and farms across the country. The Soviet Union tried that and failed. Prof. Werner proposes instead to form a network of local public, cooperative and community banks.

Arguably, local publicly-owned banks could also be capitalized with debt-for-equity swaps, using the ballooning state bond debts. We have plenty of debt to go around! A network of state-owned public banks on the model of the Bank of North Dakota would be good.

Other Options

To the extent that taxes are needed to balance the money supply, a land value tax (LVT) would go far toward replacing income taxes, without taxing labor or productivity. See “Pennsylvania’s Success with Local Property Tax Reform” in the book “Earth Belongs to Everyone” by Alanna Hartzok. An LVT excludes physical structures (e.g. houses) and taxes only the value of the land itself, including the natural resources on and under it. It thus returns to the public a portion of any appreciation in value due to public works (new schools, subway stops, etc.), without taxing improvements made by the property owners themselves. It helps curb land hoarding and speculation, and ensures that land sites are put to good use.

Independent community currency and cryptocurrency systems are other possibilities for circumventing debts in the national currency, but those topics are beyond the scope of this article.

In any case, if the global economy comes crashing down as many pundits are predicting, it is good to know there are viable alternatives to the technocratic feudalism of the WEF’s Great Reset. In his 2020 book “The Great Reset,” WEF leader Klaus Schwab declared that the COVID-19 pandemic “represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine and reset our world,” making way for a polycentric technocracy. It is also a rare opportunity for us to implement an alternative system with a mandate to serve the people. We might call it the People’s Great Reset.

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This article was first posted on ScheerPost.

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

Featured image is from Pixabay

Recasting Attention to the Raging Genocide against the People of Palestine: High Level Independent Investigation is Required

May 20th, 2022 by Shad Saleem Faruqi

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Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was a leading media voice since the intifada or uprising in Palestine in 2000. For over two decades she reported fearlessly on human rights abuses in the occupied territories. She wrote with anguish at the 74-year old genocide raging in Palestine and the Western world’s callous indifference to the dehumanisation and brutalisation of the Muslim and Christian population of the occupied territories.

But on May 11 her voice was silenced for ever when she was shot and killed while reporting on an Israeli raid on a Palestinian house on the West Bank city of Jenin.

Much sorrow has been expressed around the world about her killing. We, the members of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), in solidarity with the global outcry against her assassination, wish to add our condemnation of her cold-blooded execution. To be silent would amount to complicity with the atrocity of her killing and the degrading and inhuman treatment meted to her in death by the belligerent behaviour of the Israeli forces at her funeral. As the casket was being carried to the Christian cemetery, Israeli police attacked the mourners with batons and stun grenades almost causing the pallbearers to drop the coffin!

For such targeted and senseless killings to cease, a high-level independent and international investigation is called for. Besides the atrocity of Shireen’s killing, the wider aggression against Palestinian journalists must be investigated. It is noteworthy that the International Federation of Journalists filed a complaint against the State of Israel with the International Criminal Court (the ICC) in April. One also notes that Shireen’s targeted killing follows the fourth anniversary of the death of Palestinian journalist Ahmed Abu Hussein who also fell victim to an Israeli sniper while covering the “Great March of Return” in March 2018.

A bleak reminder of this type of systematic aggression against journalists is recanted by Reporters without Borders which registers the number of journalists who have been killed while covering the plight of the Palestinians.  The number of killings is more than 40 since 2000. This is despite the protection afforded to journalists by international humanitarian law.

We note with sorrow that though a multitude of international organisations have voiced condemnation over Shireen’s killing, there is deafening silence from certain states that preach human rights to the rest of the world.

We wish to stand in solidarity with the family, friends, colleagues and the people to whom Shireen Abu Akleh gave her voice. We are adding our small voice to a larger call for justice.

We wish to reiterate that though the global attention these days is focused on the Russia-Ukraine war, the world needs to recast its attention and conscience to the genocide, protracted aggression and injustices in the illegally occupied territories of the West Bank. Shireen’s assassination underlies the daily reality of apartheid in occupied Palestine, the systemic violence against innocent civilians, and Israel’s aggression against anyone reporting these crimes. Preventing the media from conducting its duty is one of the messages behind this atrocity.

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Prof Dr Shad Saleem Faruqi is Vice President of International Movement for a Just World.

Dr Jaspal Kaur Sadhu Singh is Asst. Secretary-General of International Movement for a Just World.

Featured image: Shireen Abu Akleh was an icon in Palestine and throughout much of the Arabic speaking world for her reporting from the occupied territories (Illustration/MEE)

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Five Signs They Are Creating a Food Crisis

May 20th, 2022 by Kit Knightly

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It’s no secret that, according to politicians and the corporate press, “food shortages” and a “food supply crises” have been on the way for a while now. They have been regularly predicted for several years.

What’s really strange is that despite its near-constant incipience, the food shortage never seems to actually arrive and is always blamed on something new.

As long ago as 2012, “scientists” were predicting that climate change and a lack of clean water would create “food shortages” that would “turn the world vegetarian by 2050”.

In 2019, UN “experts” warned that “climate change was threatening the world’s food supply”.

Later the same year, the UK was warned that they could expect a food shortage as a result of “post-Brexit chaos”.

By early March 2020 supermarkets were already “warning” that the government had been too slow to act on the coronavirus outbreak, and they might run out of food. (They never actually did).

A month later, in April 2020 when the “pandemic” was less than three months old, “officials” warned Covid was going to create a global food crisis. Three months later it had ballooned into “the worst food crisis for 50 years”.

In the Summer of 2021 the British press was predicting the “worst food shortages since world war 2” and “rolling power cuts”, allegedly due to a lack of truck drivers blamed equally on Covid and Brexit (neither the shortages nor power cuts ever really materialised).

By September 2021, the UK was told the gas price spike would create a shortage of frozen food, and just a month later, that we may have to ration meat ahead of Christmas, due to the gas crisis. (There never was any rationing)

In January 2022, Australia saw “empty supermarket shelves” blamed on the Omicron variant crippling the supply chain, while the US had the same empty shelves blamed on bad winter weather.

Moving into the spring of 2022, the food crisis is still on its way…only now it’s because of the war in Ukraine, or China’s “Zero Covid” policies, or the bird flu outbreak.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that – since the food crisis is always expected but never arrives, and is always blamed on the current thing – that it doesn’t really exist. That it’s nothing but a psy-op designed to spread panic and give suppliers an excuse to jack up their prices in response to fake “scarcity” created by the press.

However, there are indications that this may be about to change.

In a Brussels press conference on March 25th of this year, Joe Biden said…

Regarding food shortages – yes, we did talk about shortages, and they’re going to be real.”

…which is a decidedly odd thing to say.

Most of the time the only reason to strongly affirm something is “going to be real” from now on, is that up to that point it was not.

Indeed, there are a few signs that the food supply is about to genuinely come under attack.

1. Ukraine war and Western sanctions

It’s well documented that Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine has driven up the prices of oil, gas and wheat. Partly due to disruption on the ground, but mostly due to Western sanctions.

Russia is the largest exporter of wheat and other grains in the world, and these products are used not just for making food for humans, but also as animal feed. Western nations boycotting Russian wheat will therefore potentially drive up the price of a huge variety of foodstuffs.

We have already seen rationing of sunflower oil (a major Ukrainian export), with reports that this could extend to all kinds of other products including sausages, chicken, pasta and beer.

This war did not need to happen, it could have been prevented (and could still be stopped) by a simple agreement on Ukrainian neutrality. Combine that with the sweeping nature of the anti-Russian sanctions – unmatched in recent history – and you can reason that the chaos on the ground and concomitant increase in food prices is part of a deliberate policy serving the Great Reset agenda.

2. Increasing the price of oil

The increased price of oil has natural and obvious knock-on effects for every industrial sector – most especially transport, logistics and agriculture. Despite fears of a cost of living crisis, warnings of food shortages and Russia’s status as the largest exporter of oil and gas in the world, Western nations and their allies have made virtually zero effort to lower the cost of oil.

The high oil price has already seen the Russian ruble bounce back to pre-war strength, and yet Saudi Arabia has been increasing their prices, not flooding the market to tank the price as they did in 2014/15.

Keeping the cost of petroleum high is a deliberate policy decision, and one that shows the cost of living crisis – and any resultant food shortages – are being engineered on purpose.

3. Bird flu

The press is claiming there is a major bird flu outbreak going on. As we published last week, the dynamics of “bird flu” seem to be identical to Covid. Birds are tested for the virus using PCR tests, culled if they are “positive”, and these culls are then labelled “bird flu deaths”.

This process has already seen at least 27 million poultry birds destroyed in the US alone, the world’s largest exporter of both chicken and eggs. France, Canada and the UK have also culled millions of birds.

Bird flu has already (allegedly) caused the price of chicken and eggs to skyrocket.

(As a potentially important aside, a new report has also warned that pigs can pass “superbugs” to humans, so pigs may be for the chop sometime soon, too)

4. UK & US paying farmers to stop farming

Going back to last May, the Biden administration began pushing farmers to add agricultural land to the “conservation reserve program”, a federally funded program allegedly aimed at preserving the environment. The program is essentially paying farmers not to farm. A very odd policy decision, given the widely predicted food shortages.

A state-level plan in California is going to pay farmers to grow less, this time in the name of saving water.

Interestingly, the UK has a similar program going on for (again, allegedly) totally different reasons. Starting this past February, the British government is paying lump sums of up £100,000 to any farmers who want to retire from farming. Again, a strange policy during a period of geopolitical unrest impacting the food supply.

5. Manufactured fertiliser shortages

Russia and Belarus are two of the biggest exporters of fertiliser and fertiliser-related products in the world, accounting for around 10 billion dollars worth of trade manually. So, the war in Ukraine (and the sanctions) are already hitting the fertiliser market hard, with prices hitting new all-time highs in March.

China, the third biggest exporter of fertiliser in the world, has had a self-imposed export ban on the product since last summer, allegedly in an effort to keep domestic food prices low.

Given that, it is very strange that America’s Union Pacific Railway has suddenly placed a limit on the number of fertiliser deliveries it will make, informing fertiliser giant CF Industries they will need to cut their train car use by as much as 20%.

In their public response, CF Industries stated:

The timing of this action by Union Pacific could not come at a worse time for farmers…Not only will fertilizer be delayed by these shipping restrictions, but additional fertilizer needed to complete spring applications may be unable to reach farmers at all. By placing this arbitrary restriction on just a handful of shippers, Union Pacific is jeopardizing farmers’ harvests and increasing the cost of food for consumers.”

Bonus: Fires at Food Processing Plants

This get’s a bonus slot, not an official spot, because of the multiple unknowns in this case.

In the strangest and most ephemeral story on the list, it seems there has been a rash of fires at food processing plants all over the United States in the last six months. Since August 2021 at least 16 major fires have broken out at food processing plants all across the country.

In September last year a meat processor in Nebraska burned down, impacting 5% of the country’s beef supply. In March of this year fire shut down a Nestle frozen food plant in Arkansas and a major potato processing site in Belfast, Maine was almost levelled by a huge fire.

The examples just keep on coming.

In just the last week two different single-engine planes have crashed into two different food plants, causing major fires. One at a potato processing plant in Idaho, another at a General Mills plant in Georgia.

Right now we can’t prove this is a deliberate campaign, or even statistically unusual, but it certainly warrants some further investigation.

There’s a good write-up on this story on Tim Pool’s website, and an in-depth twitter thread covering all the recent events from Dr Ben Braddock here.

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In summary…

  1. A war which did not need to happen is driving up food and oil prices.
  2. Sanctions which did not need to be put in place are also driving up food and oil prices.
  3. Western allies are intentionally raising their oil prices.
  4. Despite warning of a food crisis, US and UK are paying farmers not to farm.
  5. A “bird flu epidemic” very much like the fake Covid “pandemic” is driving up the price of poultry and eggs.
  6. Western companies are actively making the fertiliser shortages worse.
  7. Bizarre fires are crippling large sections of the US food industry.

Taken individually maybe these points could all be seen as mistakes or coincidences, but when you put them all together it’s not hard to spot the pattern. The press may claim we are “sleepwalking” into a food crisis, but it looks more like they’re running head-first into it.

After years of saying there’s a food shortage on the way, it looks like they might be about to finally actually create one.

For regular, detailed news on potential threats to the food supply, we recommend following Ice Age Farmer.

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Biden Redeploys Pentagon Troops to Somalia While Humanitarian Crisis Looms

May 20th, 2022 by Abayomi Azikiwe

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President Joe Biden of the United States has announced through the Department of Defense the redeployment of Pentagon troops to the Horn of Africa state of Somalia. (See this)

This is not the first time that U.S. troops have been sent into Somalia due to the strategic geopolitical significance of the country as an oil producer and oceanic gateway to critical trade routes within the world economic system.

The redeployment in Somalia coincides with the escalation of a Washington-engineered war in Eastern Europe over the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and efforts designed to weaken the Russian Federation. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a surprise visit to Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, on April 25, emphasized the objectives of Washington and Wall Street in the funding of a conventional war in the region. (See this)

Somalia and other East African states are facing the worst drought in sixty years due directly to climate change. However, the humanitarian crisis which is rapidly increasing in Somalia, Kenya and other states, has been largely ignored by the U.S.-based corporate and government-controlled media whose resources are exclusively being utilized for the purpose of generating public support for the imperialist intrigue in Eastern Europe.

Image on the right: Pentagon deployment of US Forces in Somalia (Source: US Air Force)

Although the Ukraine military and civil society is thoroughly infiltrated by neo-nazi political groupings and militias, the people of the U.S. are being told that President Volodymyr Zelensky is a paragon of democratic practice in the geopolitical area and that the only solution available to working and oppressed peoples is to line up behind the White House and the Congress in funding the continuation of the war. The Ukraine policy of the Biden administration is costing the people of the U.S. on a daily basis where the prices of gasoline, food, transportation, housing and other essentials are rising astronomically.

In addition, the precipitous decline in the stock markets in New York City illustrates the uncertainty of the ruling class as it relates to the domestic and foreign policy of the Biden administration. Consequently, the militarized response to the global decline can only imperil the lives of billions across the world.

Climate Change Impacts the Horn of Africa

The drought in East Africa, Somalia in particular, can only be addressed through the adequate humanitarian assistance coupled with diplomatic initiatives to resolve the persistent internal conflict which are fueled by U.S. foreign policy. Nonetheless, the recent political governance crisis in Somalia which led to the re-election of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, is obviously connected with the redeployment of U.S. troops. The presence of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) in Somalia and across East Africa, has not brought stability and development to the region.

According to a report published by Daily Sabah, it notes:

“In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Somalia is suffering one of the worst droughts in a generation after three successive poor rainy seasons and harvests. The food shortage has reached crisis proportions in the country and an unrelenting surge in food prices is fueling inflation. According to the U.N., ‘the drought could leave 4.6 million people without enough food by May 2022.’ When drought strikes Somalia, many people recall the horror of the 2011-2012 famine. The death toll was staggering. An estimated 258,000 people, half of them children, lost their lives during that period. But is nature the main culprit for Somalia’s famine? (See this)

A State Department press release for May 16 issued under the name of Secretary Antony Blinken, praises the installation of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud claiming that it will foster stability and economic development in the country. Yet, there is no mention of the further militarization of the Somalian state at the aegis of the Biden administration.

History of U.S. Military Interventions in Somalia

U.S. military personnel have engaged in drone attacks and other bombing operations in Somalia since the period of 2006-2007, when the previous administration of President George W. Bush, Jr. encouraged the-then governments of Ethiopia and Kenya to intervene in the internal affairs of Somalia. Today, the political situations in Ethiopia and Kenya have undergone transitions which have not always benefited the foreign policy imperatives of the U.S. and its allies in the European Union (EU).

The formation of the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) in 2007 has served the interests of successive U.S. and Western European administrations. Funding for AMISOM has been provided by the U.S. and other NATO countries along with the United Nations. Every year the presence of AMISOM has been renewed by the UN, although in 2022, the operation has been reconfigured in order to further carry out its military mission. (See this)

Although AMISOM has been funded, trained and provided with diplomatic support by the NATO states, the overall security situation in Somalia has not improved. Al-Shabaab, an armed Islamist rebel group, has continued to launch bombings and other deadly attacks against government installations, AMISOM bases and civilians not necessary involved in the political structures in the country.

Moreover, there was a direct U.S. and UN military occupation of Somalia between 1992-1994, when many resistance forces mobilized to drive the foreign military units out of the country. In fact, the recent preoccupation with Somalia by the U.S. government can be viewed as a continuation of the efforts by imperialism stemming from the late 1970s. During this period, the administration of former President Jimmy Carter encouraged the Somalian government of Gen. Mohamed Siad Barre, which had suddenly shifted allegiance from the Socialist countries to Washington, to invade the Ogaden province of Ethiopia in order to break away the area so that it could ostensibly join Somalia.

These efforts in 1977-78 were an abysmal failure. The Cuban Internationalist forces were present in Ethiopia under the Dergue and assisted the armed forces of Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam to decisively defeat the U.S.-backed invasion by Somalia. By 1991, the Siad Barre regime had collapsed leading to a period of instability which has lasted for more than three decades.

In the most recent period under former U.S. President Donald Trump, AFRICOM ground troops were withdrawn from Somalia. The Biden administration has reversed the decision by his Republican predecessor based upon an assessment made by the Pentagon and the Department of State in Washington.

AFRICOM in a recent report published on May 16 affirms the holding of a summit involving numerous U.S. governmental agencies in neighboring Djibouti, the location of Camp Lemonnier, a Pentagon and French military base where thousands of imperialist troops are stationed. Overall AFRICOM has thousands of its forces on the continent with its highest concentrations in Djibouti and other makeshift bases in West Africa.

According to AFRICOM:

“Maj. Gen. William Zana, commander, Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), hosted the forum, which provided a face-to-face platform for representatives with the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, U.S. Agency for International Development, and National Security Council. The discussions ranged from overarching long-term strategy to specific security threats in the region. More than 50 U.S. government interagency officials working in more than 10 countries throughout East Africa met together in Djibouti for the 2022 East Africa Security Forum on May 11, 2022…. ‘Africa is home to a complex security environment – ripe with opportunity and challenges alike. This is especially true in East Africa,’ said U.S. Army Gen. Stephen Townsend, commander, U.S. Africa Command. ‘Al-Shabaab, the largest, wealthiest and most lethal al-Qaeda affiliate in the world, continues violent attacks like the one in Ceel-Baraf last week. Left unchecked, violent extremists and other security challenges will continue to put East Africa at increasing risk. These challenges, including democratic backsliding, conflict, drought and famine, are exactly why the East Africa Security Forum exists.’”

Nonetheless, even prior to the existence of al-Shabaab and even al-Qaida, the Pentagon has sought to dominate the Horn of Africa region. As the rationale for intervention in Ukraine is being questioned and opposed by genuine anti-imperialist movements internationally, so should the latest announcement by the Pentagon of a redeployment to Somalia should not only be treated with skepticism it should be opposed as an act of solidarity with the peoples of Africa.

U.S. war policy in Ukraine and Eastern Europe has prompted hyperinflation, food deficits and economic underdevelopment around the world. The recent diplomatic and military maneuvers in the Horn of Africa as well will prove detrimental to the people of the region and indeed throughout the world.

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

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Detroit Organizations File Memorandum with Justice Department on Police Misconduct

May 20th, 2022 by Abayomi Azikiwe

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A press conference held by numerous community organizations in Detroit on May 19 demanded that the administration of President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice conduct an investigation into allegations of brutality and institutional racism by the police in the city of Detroit.

This media event was held on the steps of the First Unitarian Universalist Church located in the Midtown District.

Leading activists and Civil Rights attorneys were there to explain the legal and political reasoning behind the memorandum. Since 2020, millions of people have demonstrated across the United States and internationally in response to the police execution of George Floyd in Minneapolis along with others killed by police. Attys. Nancy A. Parker, Jeff Edison and Mark Fancher served as spokespersons before members of the press.

Detroit CPTA press briefing, May 19, 2022 (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

The current administration of President Biden has pledged to increase funding for the police while proving incapable of passing legislation such as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act which would have placed federal guidelines to govern the conduct and accountability of law-enforcement agencies in the U.S. This administration’s lack of action related to police brutality has contributed to the alienation of many African Americans from the president.

Detroit has a long and troubled history of police misconduct. The July 1967 Rebellion was sparked by misconduct against the African American community by the police.

The press conference on May 19, the 97th birthday of Malcolm X (Hajj Malik El Shabazz, 1925-1965), was held under the banner of the Coalition for Police Transparency and Accountability (CPTA). This alliance formed in the aftermath of the police killing of Hakim Littleton (20) during July 2022 on the northwest side of Detroit, encompasses a broad spectrum of community groups.

Detroit CPTA press briefing with Atty. Nancy A. Parker (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

Some of the organizations within the CPTA include: ACLU of Michigan; Black Legacy Coalition; Detroit and Michigan Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild; Detroit Council of Elders; Detroit Justice Center; Detroit Will Breathe; Eastern Michigan Environmental Action Council; The Hush House Black Community Museum; James and Grace Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership; Michigan Coalition for Human Rights; Michigan Liberation; Moratorium NOW! Coalition; National Conference of Black Lawyers, Michigan Chapter; Neighborhood Defender Service of Detroit; Riverwise Magazine; Wayne County Criminal Defense Bar Association; We the People of Detroit, etc.

Detroit Black United Front formed in 1969 (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

CPTA begins the memorandum by stating that:

“The Coalition for Police Transparency and Accountability (CPTA) requests a federal investigation of a pattern of killings and excessive force by the Detroit Police Department (DPD) and an institutional culture within the department that promotes violence and racial discrimination within the Department and against members of the community. The mission of CPTA is to expose police misconduct in all its forms and thereby demand police transparency and accountability as well as garner community support for this effort. The Coalition was formed after the killing of Hakim Littleton in July 2020 by the Detroit Police Department officers. CPTA’s members include concerned community members and organizations that demand an independent investigation into this killing as well as other instances of police misconduct in all its forms. The CPTA is committed to raising community awareness about police brutality, holding the DPD accountable for its actions, and demanding genuine transparency from the department.”

Recent Background Involving Federal Monitoring of Detroit Police

During the administration of former Mayor Roman Gribbs (1969-1973), relations between the African American community further deteriorated after the 1967 Rebellion. Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh (1961-1969) was in office during the Rebellion and its aftermath. A series of violent incidents involving the police such as the March 1969 gun battle between members of the Republic of New Africa and law-enforcement at New Bethel Baptist Church resulted in the shooting of two white police officers, leaving one dead. The response of the police was to fire hundreds of rounds of bullets into the church as RNA members and supporters were leaving a conference to commemorate its first anniversary.

Although the police arrested approximately 150 people still inside the church, then Recorder’s Court Judge George Crockett, Jr., went to the jail where the attendees and others were being held and ordered their release based upon a lack of evidence of their participation in the killing and wounding of the officers. Three people were investigated as suspects in the shootings and killing of the two officers. However, no one was ever convicted in the incident. Between 1969-1973, the Detroit police under the Cavanaugh and Gribbs administrations continued to engage in brutal and deadly activity.

In 1971, a police decoy unit was formed purportedly to address the rise in violent crimes in the city. The Stop the Robberies Enjoy Safe Streets (STRESS) units were responsible for the deaths of over 30 people most of whom were African Americans. A citywide mobilization of community residents organized mass demonstrations demanding the abolition of STRESS. Eventually, at least three youth took up arms against STRESS in late 1972 and early 1973 when several police officers were shot, with at least one being fatal.

This escalation in tensions during 1971-73, set the stage for the election of the first African American Mayor Coleman A. Young (1974-1993). The Young administration implemented reforms utilizing affirmative action in order to diversify the police force. However, towards the end of his administration in November 1992, Malice Green, a 35-year-old African American, was brutally beaten to death by two white police officers on the westside. One of the officers charged and convicted in the killing of Green had been a member of STRESS during the early 1970s. Both officers spent several years in prison where they were eventually released in 1998 on appeal.

After Young left office the administration of his successor, Dennis Archer, became notorious for the sharp increase in police killings of civilians. By 1996, the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality was formed which fought for accountability in the unwarranted killings. Eventually in 2000, the U.S. Department of Justice under President Bill Clinton, launched a federal investigation into the use of lethal force and the deplorable conditions existing in the jails. After three years, two federal consent judgments were leveled against the Detroit police, a series of monitors were contracted to oversee the reform process which lasted from 2003 until it was discharged during the controversial emergency management and bankruptcy of the City of Detroit.

CPTA Documents Continued Abuse by the Detroit Police

By citing a number of police killing of individuals such as Caso Jackson (25) in 2015; Bradley Carey, (54) in 2016; Raynard Burton, (19) in 2017; to only name a few, the CPTA makes a compelling case for a review by the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. The refusal of the Michigan Attorney General’s office under Dana Nessel to even conduct an investigation into the police killing of Hakim Littleton in 2020, where the law-enforcement officers responsible for his death were exonerated by Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, furthers the argument for federal intervention.

During the wave of outrage in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, thousands of people in Detroit took to the streets in righteous indignation mirroring developments across the country and internationally. The former police department Chief James Craig, who had served as head of law-enforcement and deputy mayor, ordered the officers to attack protesters violently. Approximately 400 people were arrested without cause while many suffered severe injuries including wounds inflicted by rubber bullets, clubs, sound grenades and other tactical crowd control weapons.

Craig and Duggan both refused to accept any responsibility for the abuse and injuries to people exercising their rights to assemble. Eventually Craig did resign in 2021 after victims of the police filed lawsuits in U.S. District Court which was instrumental in gaining a temporary restraining order against the DPD. Members of the leading antiracist organization, Detroit Will Breathe, are continuing to be harassed by the city government and the courts.

The CPTA memorandum states clearly that the new leadership of Chief James White has proven to be no better than Craig. The civil litigation filed by victims of brutality remain unresolved due to the legal tactics of obstructionism utilized by the Duggan administration.

In conclusion the memorandum says of the current situation in 2022:

“CPTA has scrupulously directed its concerns and requests to government actors and agencies in Michigan charged with addressing the issues regarding policing that the coalition has raised. Nevertheless, there has been no meaningful, effective response, leaving CPTA with the sole remaining option of requesting federal intervention. Thus, it is respectfully requested that the Department of Justice officials investigate not only the ongoing police killings, escalating violence and racist discrimination perpetrated by and within the Detroit Police Department, but also the institutional culture that inspires and sustains such misconduct.”

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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: Detroit Coaliton Against Police Brutality 2000 (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

Video: Ukraine-Russia War Update. Philip Giraldi and Judge Napolitano

May 20th, 2022 by Philip Giraldi

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The following video is an interview of Philip Giraldi, former CIA Case Officer and Army Intelligence Officer, with Judge Andrew Napolitano.

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This interview was first published on Judging Freedom.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. 

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is a screenshot from the video

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An Intellectual No-Fly Zone: Online Censorship of Ukraine Dissent Is Becoming the New Norm

May 19th, 2022 by Alan MacLeod

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Google has sent a warning shot across the world, ominously informing media outlets, bloggers, and content creators that it will no longer tolerate certain opinions when it comes to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Earlier this month, Google AdSense sent a message to a myriad of publishers, including MintPress News, informing us that, “Due to the war in Ukraine, we will pause monetization of content that exploits, dismisses, or condones the war.” This content, it went on to say, “includes, but is not limited to, claims that imply victims are responsible for their own tragedy or similar instances of victim-blaming, such as claims that Ukraine is committing genocide or deliberately attacking its own citizens.”

This builds on a similar message Google’s subsidiary YouTube released last month, stating, “Our Community Guidelines prohibit content denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events. We are now removing content about Russia’s invasion in Ukraine that violates this policy.” YouTube went on to say that it had already permanently banned more than a thousand channels and 15,000 videos on these grounds.

Journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin was deeply troubled by the news. “It is really disturbing that this is the trend that we are on,” she told MintPress, adding:

It is a preposterous declaration considering that the victim is whoever we are told by our foreign policy establishment. It really is outrageous to be told by these tech giants that taking the wrong side of a conflict that is quite complicated will now hurt your views, derank you on social media or limit your ability to fund your work. So you have to toe the line in order to survive as a journalist in alternative media today.”

The most prominent victim of the recent banning spate has been Russian state media such as RT America, whose entire catalog has been blocked throughout most of the world. RT America was also blocked from broadcasting across the U.S., leading to the network’s sudden closure.

“Censorship is the last resort of desperate and unpopular regimes. It magically appears to make a crisis go away. It comforts the powerful with the narrative they want to hear, one fed back to them by courtiers in the media, government agencies, think tanks, and academia,” wrote journalist Chris Hedges, adding:

YouTube disappeared six years of my RT show, “On Contact,” although not one episode dealt with Russia. It is not a secret as to why my show vanished. It gave a voice to writers and dissidents, including Noam Chomsky and Cornel West, as well as activists from Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, third parties and the prison abolitionist movement.”

Smaller, independent creators have also been purged. “My stream last night on RBN was censored on Youtube after debunking the Bucha Massacre narrative… Unreal censorship going on right now,” wrote Nick from the Revolutionary Black Network. “My video ‘Bucha: More Lies’ has been deleted by YouTube’s censors. The Official Narrative is now: ‘Bucha was a Russian atrocity! No dissent allowed!’” Chilean-American journalist Gonzalo Lira added.

Other social media platforms have pursued similar policies. Twitter permanently suspended the account of former weapons inspector Scott Ritter over his comments on Bucha and journalist Pepe Escobar for his support for Russia’s invasion.

Googe Adsense Ukraine

A notice to MintPress from Google threatening demonetization

Those views are certainly currently in the minority, with testimonies from locals pointing the finger at Russian forces, who have carried out similar acts during other conflicts. Yet even the Pentagon has refused to categorically conclude Russian culpability without a full investigation.

Beyond Bucha, where the line is in terms of accepted speech is being kept vague, leading to confusion and consternation among independent media outlets and content creators. “This is going to limit reporting on the Ukraine crisis because people are going to be scared,” Martin said. “People [in alternative media] are going to opt to not publish or not report on something because of fear of retaliation. And once you start to get demonetized, the next fear is that your videos are going to get blanket banned,” she added.

While support for Russia has essentially been prohibited, glorification of even the most unsavory elements of Ukrainian society on social media is now all-but-promoted. In February, Facebook announced that it would not only reverse its ban on discussing the Azov Battalion, a Nazi paramilitary now formally incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard, but also allow content praising and promoting the group – as long as it was in the context of killing Russians.

Facebook and Instagram also instituted a change in policy that allows users to call for harm or even the death of Russian and Belarussian soldiers and politicians. This rare allowance was also given in 2021 to those calling for the death of Iranian leaders. Needless to say, violent content directed at governments friendly to the U.S., such as Ukraine, is still strictly forbidden.

The Media Demands More Censorship

Leading the campaign for more intense censorship has been corporate media itself. The Financial Times successfully lobbied Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch to delete a number of pro-Russian streamers. The Daily Beast attacked Gonzalo Lira, going so far as to contact the Ukrainian government to make them aware of Lira’s work. Lira confirmed that, after The Daily Beast’s article, he was arrested by the Ukrainian secret police.

Meanwhile, The New York Times published a hit piece on anti-war journalist Ben Norton, accusing him of spreading a “conspiracy theory” that the U.S. was involved in a coup in Ukraine in 2014, while claiming that he was helping promulgate Russian disinformation. This, despite the fact that the Times itself reported on the 2014 coup at the time in a not-too-dissimilar fashion, thereby incriminating its own previous reporting as Russian propaganda.

If referencing The New York Times’s own previous reporting becomes grounds for suppression, then meaningful online discourse is under threat. As journalist Matt Taibbi wrote last week, the West is in danger of establishing an “intellectual no-fly zone,” where deviating from orthodoxy will no longer be tolerated.

An image shared in the NYT hit against Norton

An image shared in the NYT hit against Norton. Credit | Multipolarista

The invasion of Ukraine has also raised a number of troubling questions for Western anti-war figures: How to oppose Russian aggression without providing more political ammunition to NATO governments to further escalate the conflict? And how to critique and highlight our own governments’ roles in creating the crisis without appearing to justify the Kremlin’s actions? Yet this new perilous media environment raises a further quandary: How to express views online without being censored?

Google’s new updated rules are vaguely worded and open to interpretation. What constitutes “exploiting” or “condoning” the war? Does discussing NATO’s eastward expansion or Ukraine’s aggressive campaign against Russian-speaking minorities constitute victim blaming? And is referencing the seven-year-long civil war in the Donbas region, where the UN estimates that over 14,000 people have been killed, now illegal under Google’s policy of not allowing content about Ukraine attacking its own citizens?

For some, the answer to at least some of these questions should be an emphatic “yes.” On Thursday, journalist Hubert Smeets attacked longtime anti-war activist Noam Chomsky, explicitly accusing him of blaming President Zelensky and Ukraine for its fate. Chomsky has previously described Russian actions as incontestably “a major war crime, ranking alongside the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Hitler-Stalin invasion of Poland in September 1939.” Yet he has also for years warned that NATO actions in the region were likely to provoke a Russian response. If Google and other big-tech monopolies decide an intellectual giant like Chomsky’s voice must be suppressed, it will mark a new era of official censorship not seen since the decline of McCarthyism.

Old Propaganda, New Cold War

The United States was allied with the Soviet Union during World War II. However, as the Cold War began to set in, so did attacks on dissenting voices. The postwar anti-communist push began in earnest in 1947, after President Harry S. Truman mandated a loyalty oath for all federal employees. As a result, the political beliefs of two million people were investigated, with authorities attempting to ascertain whether they belonged to any “subversive” political organizations.

Those in positions of influence were most aggressively vetted, leading to purges of academics, educators, and journalists. Many of the most celebrated individuals from the world of entertainment – including actor Charlie Chaplain, singer Paul Robeson, and writer Orson Welles – had their careers destroyed because of their political beliefs. “Socialism was canceled, dissent was canceled after World War Two,” Breakthrough News host Brian Becker recently said, warning that this new Cold War with Russia and China could usher in a new McCarthyist era.

The old Cold War against Russia ended in 1991. However, the new Cold War arguably started 25 years later with the electoral victory of Donald Trump. On November 8, 2016, the Clinton campaign alleged that the Kremlin had used social media to spread fake news and misleading information, leading to Trump’s victory. Despite the lack of hard evidence, corporate media immediately took up Clinton’s message. Only two weeks after the election, The Washington Post published a report claiming that hundreds of fake news websites had pushed Trump over the line and that a credible group of nonpartisan expert researchers had created an organization called “PropOrNot” to track this effort.

Using what it called sophisticated “internet analytics tools,” PropOrNot published a list of over 200 websites that they claimed were “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.” Included on the list were publisher WikiLeaks, Trump-supporting websites like The Drudge Report, libertarian ventures such as The Ron Paul Institute and Antiwar.com, as well as a host of left-wing websites like Truthout, Truthdig, and The Black Agenda Report. MintPress News was also featured on the list. While there were some obviously fake-news websites included, the political orientation of the list was obvious for all to see: this was a catalog of outlets – right- and left-wing – that was consistently critical of the centrist Washington establishment.

A sure sign that you are reading Russian propaganda, PropOrNot claimed, was if the source criticizes Obama, Clinton, NATO, the “mainstream media,” or expresses worry about a nuclear war with Russia. As PropOrNot explained, “Russian propaganda never suggests [conflict with Russia] would just result in a Cold War 2 and Russia’s eventual peaceful defeat, like the last time.”

Despite the blatantly shoddy list, one that even included the websites of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, The Washington Post’s article went viral, being shared millions of times. PropOrNot’s list was subsequently signal-boosted by hundreds of other outlets. And despite calling for McCarthyist investigation into and suppression of hundreds of outlets, PropOrNot categorically refused to reveal who they were, how they were funded, or any methodology whatsoever.

It is now almost certain that it was not a neutral, well-meaning independent organization but the creation of Michael Weiss, a non-resident senior fellow of NATO think tank The Atlantic Council. A scan of PropOrNot’s website showed that it was controlled by The Interpreter, a magazine of which Weiss is editor-in-chief. Furthermore, one investigator found dozens of examples of the Twitter accounts of PropOrNot and Weiss using the identical and very unusual turn of phrase, strongly suggesting they were one and the same. Thus, claims of a huge [foreign] state propaganda campaign were themselves state propaganda.

The reaction to this crude “propaganda about propaganda” campaign was both swift and wide-ranging. In early 2017, Google launched Project Owl, a massive overhaul of its algorithm. It claimed that it was purely a measure to stop foreign fake news from taking over the internet. The main outcome, however, was a catastrophic, overnight collapse in search traffic to high-quality alternative media outlets – drops from which they have never recovered. MintPress News lost nearly 90% of its organic Google search traffic and Truthout lost 25%. Websites that were not on PropOrNot’s list also suffered devastating losses. AlterNet experienced a 63% reduction, Common Dreams 37% and Democracy Now! 36%. Even liberal sources only moderately critical of the status quo, such as The Nation and Mother Jones, were penalized by the algorithm. Google search traffic to alternative media has never recovered and has, in many cases, gotten worse.

Credit | WSWS

This, for Martin, is a sign of the increasingly close relationship between Silicon Valley and the national security state. “Google willingly changed their algorithm to backpage all alternative media without even a law in place to mandate them to do so,” she said. Other social media juggernauts, such as Facebook and YouTube rolled out similar changes. All penalized alternative media and drove people back towards establishment sources like The Washington Post, CNN and Fox News.

The consequence of all this was to retighten the elite’s grip over the means of communication, a grip that had slipped owing to the rise of the internet as an alternative model.

The “Nationalization” of Social Media

Since 2016, a number of other measures have been taken to bring social media under the wing of the national security state. This was foreseen by Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who wrote in 2013, “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first.” Since then, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM have become integral parts of the state apparatus, signing multibillion-dollar contracts with the CIA and other organizations to provide them with intelligence, logistics and computing services. Schmidt himself was chairman of both the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and the Defense Innovation Advisory Board, bodies created to help Silicon Valley assist the U.S. military with cyberweapons, further blurring the lines between big tech and big government.

Google’s current Global Head of Developer Product Policy, Ben Renda, has an even closer relationship with the national security state. From being a strategic planner and information management officer for NATO, he then moved to Google in 2008. In 2013, he began working for U.S. Cybercommand and in 2015 for the Defense Innovation Unit (both divisions of the Department of Defense). At the same time, he became a YouTube executive, rising to the rank of Director of Operations.

Defense Secretary James Mattis chats with Amazon founder and Washington Post owner, Jeff Bezos , during a visit to west coast tech and defense companies. Jeff Bezos | Twitter

Jeff Bezos meets with Trump Defense Secretary James Mattis during a visit to west coast tech and defense companies. Jeff Bezos | Twitter

Other platforms have similar relationships with Washington. In 2018, Facebook announced that it had entered a partnership with The Atlantic Council whereby the latter would help curate the news feeds of billions of users worldwide, deciding what was credible, trustworthy information, and what was fake news. As noted previously, The Atlantic Council is NATO’s brain-trust and is directly funded by the military alliance. Last year, Facebook also hired Atlantic Council senior fellow and former NATO spokesperson Ben Nimmo as its head of intelligence, thereby giving an enormous amount of control over its empire to current and former national security state officials.

The Atlantic Council has also worked its way into Reddit’s management. Jessica Ashooh went straight from being Deputy Director of Middle East Strategy at The Atlantic Council to Director of Policy at the popular news aggregation service – a surprising career move that drew few remarks at the time.

Also eliciting little comment was the unmasking of a senior Twitter executive as an active-duty officer in the British Army’s notorious 77th Brigade – a unit dedicated to online warfare and psychological operations. Twitter has since partnered with the U.S. government and weapons manufacturer-sponsored think tank ASPI to help police its platform. On ASPI’s orders, the social media platform has purged hundreds of thousands of accounts based out of China, Russia, and other countries that draw Washington’s ire.

Last year, Twitter also announced that it had deleted hundreds of user accounts for “undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability” – a statement that drew widespread incredulity from those not closely following the company’s progression from one that championed open discussion to one closely controlled by the government.

The First Casualty

Those in the halls of power well understand how important a weapon big-tech is in a global information war. This can be seen in a letter published last Monday written by a host of national security state officials, including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA directors Michael Morell and Leon Panetta, and former director of the NSA Admiral Michael Rogers.

Together, they warn that regulating or breaking up the big-tech monopolies would “inadvertently hamper the ability of U.S. technology platforms to … push back on the Kremlin.” “The United States will need to rely on the power of its technology sector to ensure” that “the narrative of events” globally is shaped by the U.S. and “not by foreign adversaries,” they explain, concluding that Google, Facebook, Twitter are “increasingly integral to U.S. diplomatic and national security efforts.”

Commenting on the letter, journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote:

[B]y maintaining all power in the hands of the small coterie of tech monopolies which control the internet and which have long proven their loyalty to the U.S. security state, the ability of the U.S. national security state to maintain a closed propaganda system around questions of war and militarism is guaranteed.”

The U.S. has frequently leaned on social media in order to control the message and promote regime change in target countries. Just days before the Nicaraguan presidential election in November, Facebook deleted the accounts of hundreds of the country’s top news outlets, journalists and activists, all of whom supported the left-wing Sandinista government.

When those figures poured onto Twitter to protest the ban, recording videos of themselves and proving that they were not bots or “inauthentic” accounts, as Facebook Intelligence Chief Nimmo had claimed, their Twitter accounts were systematically banned as well, in what observers coined as a “double-tap strike.”

Meanwhile, in 2009, Twitter acquiesced to a U.S. request to delay scheduled maintenance of its app (which would have required taking it offline) because pro-U.S. activists in Iran were using the platform to foment anti-government demonstrations.

More than 10 years later, Facebook announced that it would be deleting all praise of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani from its many platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp. Soleimani – the most popular political figure in Iran – had recently been assassinated in a U.S. drone strike. The event sparked uproar and massive protests across the region. Yet because the Trump administration had declared Soleimani and his military group to be terrorists, Facebook explained, “We operate under U.S. sanctions laws, including those related to the U.S. government’s designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and its leadership.” This meant that Iranians could not share a majority viewpoint inside their own country – even in their own language – because of a decision made in Washington by a hostile government.

In this light, then, Google’s message to creators about victim-blaming Ukraine or trivializing and condoning violence is a threat: toe the line or face the consequences. While we continue to consider tech monopolies such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook to be private companies, their overwhelming size and their increasing proximity to the national security state means that their actions are tantamount to state censorship.

While fake news – including that emanating from Russia – continues to be a genuine problem, these new actions have far less to do with combatting disinformation or denial of war crimes and far more to do with reestablishing elite control over the field of communication. These new rules will not be applied to corporate media downplaying or justifying U.S. aggression abroad, denying American war crimes, or blaming oppressed peoples – such as Palestinians or Yemenis – for their own condition, but instead will be used as excuses to derank, demote, delist or even delete voices critical of war and imperialism. In war, they say, truth is always the first casualty.

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Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

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Video: Biden: “Food Shortages Real” – Bird Flu PCR – PFAS Closes Farms

May 19th, 2022 by Ice Age Farmer

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***

Bread & circuses keep the masses asleep…and they are taking away the bread.

As Biden announces food shortages are coming — prompting many to go stock up, and likely necessitating food rationing — two massive attacks are allegedly being perpetrated against our food supply: a “bird flu” epidemic is sweeping Europe and the US, again fuelled by PCR tests, forcing mass depopulation of poultry & “backyard flocks.”

And farms contaminated with PFAS (Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances) are being shut down as it is finally revealed that the “Biosludge” applied to farms (including organic!) was the equivalent of salting the Earth to destroy food production.

In this Ice Age Farmer broadcast, Christian breaks it down and explores what is going to happen next: a great awakening.

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Get Ready to be Muzzled: The Coming War on So-Called Hate Speech. “The Road towards a Totalitarian Society”

May 19th, 2022 by John W. Whitehead

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***

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech.”—Benjamin Franklin

Beware of those who want to monitor, muzzle, catalogue and censor speech.

Especially be on your guard when the reasons given for limiting your freedoms end up expanding the government’s powers.

In the wake of a mass shooting in Buffalo, NY, carried out by an 18-year-old gunman in military gear allegedly motivated by fears that the white race is in danger of being replaced, there have been renewed calls for social media monitoring, censorship of flagged content that could be construed as dangerous or hateful, and limitations on free speech activities, particularly online.

As expected, those who want safety at all costs will clamor for more gun control measures (if not at an outright ban on weapons for non-military, non-police personnel), widespread mental health screening of the general population and greater scrutiny of military veterans, more threat assessments and behavioral sensing warnings, more surveillance cameras with facial recognition capabilities, more “See Something, Say Something” programs aimed at turning Americans into snitches and spies, more metal detectors and whole-body imaging devices at soft targets, more roaming squads of militarized police empowered to do random bag searches, more fusion centers to centralize and disseminate information to law enforcement agencies, and more surveillance of what Americans say and do, where they go, what they buy and how they spend their time.

All of these measures play into the government’s hands.

As we have learned the hard way, the phantom promise of safety in exchange for restricted or regulated liberty is a false, misguided doctrine that serves only to give the government greater authority to crack down, lock down, and institute even more totalitarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Add the Department of Homeland Security’s “Disinformation Governance Board” to that mix, empower it to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

After all, it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

It’s been a long time since free speech was actually free.

On paper—at least according to the U.S. Constitution—we are technically free to speak.

In reality, however, we are only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

That’s not a whole lot of freedom, especially if you’re inclined to voice opinions that may be construed as conspiratorial or dangerous.

This steady, pervasive censorship creep clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness and inflicted on us by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) is technofascism, and it does not tolerate dissent.

These internet censors are not acting in our best interests to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns. They’re laying the groundwork now to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

The internet, hailed as a super-information highway, is increasingly becoming the police state’s secret weapon. This “policing of the mind” is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”

What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them.

Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.

Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—we have nowhere left to go and nothing left to say that cannot be misconstrued and used to muzzle us.

Yet what a lot of people fail to understand, however, is that it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted.

We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.

With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called “government speech.”

Little by little, Americans have been conditioned to accept routine incursions on their freedoms.

This is how oppression becomes systemic, what is referred to as creeping normality, or a death by a thousand cuts.

It’s a concept invoked by Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Jared Diamond to describe how major changes, if implemented slowly in small stages over time, can be accepted as normal without the shock and resistance that might greet a sudden upheaval.

Diamond’s concerns related to Easter Island’s now-vanished civilization and the societal decline and environmental degradation that contributed to it, but it’s a powerful analogy for the steady erosion of our freedoms and decline of our country right under our noses.

As Diamond explains, “In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism… Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?”

His answer: “I suspect that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper.”

Much like America’s own colonists, Easter Island’s early colonists discovered a new world—“a pristine paradise”—teeming with life. Yet almost 2000 years after its first settlers arrived, Easter Island was reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they failed to preserve paradise for future generations.

The same could be said of the America today: it, too, is being reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they are failing to preserve freedom for future generations.

In Easter Island’s case, as Diamond speculates:

“The forest…vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation… The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect… Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference.Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.”

Sound painfully familiar yet?

We’ve already torn down the rich forest of liberties established by our founders. It has vanished slowly, over the decades. Those who warned against the dangers posed by too many laws, invasive surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids and the like have been silenced and ignored. They stopped teaching about freedom in the schools. Few Americans know their history. And even fewer seem to care that their fellow Americans are being jailed, muzzled, shot, tasered, and treated as if they have no rights at all.

The erosion of our freedoms happened so incrementally, no one seemed to notice. Only the older generations, remembering what true freedom was like, recognized the difference. Gradually, the freedoms enjoyed by the citizenry became fewer, smaller and less important. By the time the last freedom falls, no one will know the difference.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls: with a thousand cuts, each one justified or ignored or shrugged over as inconsequential enough by itself to bother, but they add up.

Each cut, each attempt to undermine our freedoms, each loss of some critical right—to think freely, to assemble, to speak without fear of being shamed or censored, to raise our children as we see fit, to worship or not worship as our conscience dictates, to eat what we want and love who we want, to live as we want—they add up to an immeasurable failure on the part of each and every one of us to stop the descent down that slippery slope.

We are on that downward slope now.

The contagion of fear that has been spread with the help of government agencies, corporations and the power elite is poisoning the well, whitewashing our history, turning citizen against citizen, and stripping us of our rights.

America is approaching another reckoning right now, one that will pit our commitment to freedom principles against a level of fear-mongering that is being used to wreak havoc on everything in its path.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, while we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle, a tsunami approaches.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

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

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

Nordic NATO Expansion – Or NATO Implosion?

May 19th, 2022 by Peter Koenig

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***

On May 16 2022, Finland and Sweden decided to become members of NATO.

This totally against the 1991 US / NATO promise to then Russian President Gorbachev, that “NATO will not move an inch eastward from Berlin”. Then total NATO members were 14, two in the Americas – US and Canada – and 12 in Europe. By late 1990’s, expansion started rapidly and today NATO counts 30 members, 28 in Europe and the same two in the Americas. Most of the new ones East of Berlin.

Finland shares a 1,340 km border with Russia. Thus, as a NATO country, it would become another real threat for Moscow. Also, during WWII, Finland allied with Nazi Germany fighting the Soviet Union, when the USSR lost some 27 million people, soldiers and civilians. Finland does not have a clean record vis-à-vis Russia.

On the other hand, Sweden shares no border with Russia and has not been at war with Russia in the last 300 years. Sweden like Finland, has not been threatened at all by Russia. So, Sweden teaming up with Finland against Russia – there is something quite weird going on. A country does not overnight seek or make an enemy, when there was absolutely not a minimum threat from the “assumed” enemy. What’s going on?

Given the circumstances of these two “neutral” countries suddenly changing from “neutral” to aggressive” against Russia, must have other reasons than Russia attacking Ukraine. Both of these countries know exactly the background for the Russian war on Ukraine.

While war should under all circumstances be avoided, and replaced by negotiations, one cannot ignore Russia’s worries – preoccupations enhanced by the fact that many proposals for negotiations advanced by Russia before the war were rejected by Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy.

Likewise, after the beginning of the armed conflict, proposal for Peace Talks, notably by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, were, though first accepted, then rejected, which made Mr. Lavrov assume that Mr. Zelenskyy is not his sovereign own man, but follows instructions. See his interview with Al Arabia media below.

Could it be, or is it highly probable that both Finland and Sweden were coerced by Washington, and likely by Europe / NATO to decide and ask for immediate NATO membership? Sweden, because of the North Sea, where Russia has a dominant presence?

The NATO czar, Stoltenberg, has repeatedly said that NATO would apply special measures (or create special rules?) to accelerate NATO membership for these two countries. He reiterated on several occasions that by June 2022 Finland and Sweden could already be active members. Normally, it takes at least a year for a new NATO member to enter the Alliance. So, what’s the hurry, if there is no threat?

Before the Ukraine-Russia war, and before the billion-dollars-worth western anti-Russia-Russia-Russia campaign, only about a third, max. 40% of the people of both countries, were somewhat favorable towards NATO – a clear minority.

After the beginning of the war, and the utterly distorted anti-Russia lie-propaganda campaign, the popular support for NATO-entry allegedly jumped to about 70%. Yet, this figure advanced by the two NATO candidate countries, would have to be scientifically verified, as both nations have a highly educated population. They know the risks they are taking by becoming de facto enemies of Russia by NATO membership.

Ukraine was a candidate for NATO long before the 2014 Maidan Coup. In fact, the Maidan Coup was an instrument to accelerate Ukraine’s NATO membership. Russia – President Putin – from the very beginning said Nyet to Ukraine NATO membership. Not only was he referring to the 1991 promise, but also to the Minks Agreement of 2014. After the US planned and directed Maidan Coup in Kiev, the Minsk Protocol was negotiated by France and Germany. Under the Minsk Accord, Ukraine was to remain neutral, de-militarized, no NATO ‘ever’. The Protocol also demanded a De-Nazification of Ukraine, as well as a special status for the two Donbas Republics, Donetsk and Lugansk.

De-Nazification refers primarily to the Nazi Azov Battalion(s) that were for the last 8 years lambasting and attacking mostly civilians in the two “independent” Donbas Republics, causing some 14,000 deaths, about one third of which are children.

Russia – President Putin and most of the Kremlin – are particularly sensitive to the Ukraine Nazis, as they collaborated with Hitler’s Nazi Germany in WWII, in the war against Russia, when some 27 million Russians were killed.

NATO knows about it. Therefore NATO, under the guidance of Washington and followed by Brussels, kept and keeps provoking Russia with first sending military “advisors” and clandestinely weapons to Ukraine.

For NATO countries a key objective is to conquer Russia – primarily for her riches in natural resources, as well as the enormous landmass, the globe’s largest country – and for the power the dominance of large and rich Russia would bestow in this sick western personal and corporate oligarchy.

In the preparation of the war, weapons were clandestinely delivered from the west to Ukraine. Now, weapon deliveries from the US and from European NATO countries in the tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars-worth equivalent, are fully open. No secret. Not even hidden anymore. NATO countries feel they have the right to indirectly use Ukraine to fight Russia.

But what is RIGHT?

The last two decades at least, were exacerbated by the fake WEF (World Economic Forum)-imposed covid scare, lockdown, killing of the world economy, killing of common people’s livelihood, killing of children’s future – reflected in the skyrocketing teenager suicide rate and more untold misery; all of which eradicated the human notion of RIGHTS and WRONGS.

During this period, International Rule of Law has completely disappeared. Nobody respects it anymore. The judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC) of The Hague, so far have not accepted any claim that goes against the interests of the Cabal, mostly Anglo Saxon-led westerners – plus the insanely wealthy financial corporations, BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and Fidelity – see this.

But now comes the hick. Just a little detail. According to Article 10 of the NATO Constitution, all 30 members of the Alliance have to agree to a new member.

Turkey, a key NATO member, in a particularly strategic geographic and geopolitical position, opposes entry of Finland and Sweden into NATO. And this under the pretext, so Turkish President Erdogan, that “the two Nordic countries are “guesthouses for terrorist organizations.” He [Erdogan] was referring to the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Front (DHKP/C), which have been outlawed by Ankara”.

“These countries do not have a clear unequivocal stance against terrorist organizations. Sweden is the incubation center of terrorist organizations. They bring terrorists to talk in their parliaments… We wouldn’t say ‘yes’ to them joining NATO, a security organization… They were going to come on Monday to convince us. Sorry, they don’t have to bother,” Erdogan said.

The Swedish Foreign Ministry said on Monday [16 May 2022] that senior officials from Helsinki and Stockholm would travel to Turkey to discuss the matter. Erdogan, however, indicated at the press briefing that such talks would be senseless. See this from Le Monde International.

Turkey may be a NATO country, one of the most important ones for the Alliance, due to her geographically strategic location and position. However, Turkey is also an ally of Russia. And in recent months and years, Erdogan has been tilting more towards Russia, to the east in general, than to the west, towards her western NATO allies. Has Erdogan noticed how unreliable and deceptive, and trickery the West / NATO is and behaves around the world? It’s very likely.

Anticipating such a move, Jens Stoltenberg had already said days ago that if Turkey, or any other NATO member, would oppose entry of Finland and Sweden into the Alliance – NATO would apply special measures to overrule NATO’s Article 10. He did not elaborate what measures he would apply.

But in a world without rules, everything is possible.

When in 2017, Turkish President Recep Erdogan brokered a deal reportedly worth $2.5 billion with Russian President Vladimir Putin, for the purchase of the highly sophisticated Russian S–400 air defense system, there was talk of Turkey possibly exiting the Alliance. Indeed, Turkey has been “sanctioned” for doing so, and many, if not all, of the nuclear war-heads stationed in Turkey were removed and placed in Europe, most of them in Italy.

Might this be again a moment for Turkey to say and, indeed, decide to exit NATO and seek closer alliance with Russia and China – and the east in general?

The Eurasian Economic Commission might welcome a strategic Turkey in its fold. For Turkey quite a positive alternative option to the constant threats and sanctions by the west.

Would NATO fall apart, if Turkey decided to leave? Good riddance. That would be a blessing for the world.

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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).

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.

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The New White Supremacist Consensus. The Latest Mass Shooter in Buffalo, New York

May 19th, 2022 by Ajamu Baraka

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***

The latest mass shooter in Buffalo, New York was clearly a racist, and identified with Ukrainian and other neo-Nazis. But white supremacy has a stronger hold on European and U.S. society than is commonly acknowledged. The avowed racist is not the only problem.

The incidents of mindless, mass carnage in the United States have become so routine that they do not even make national headlines unless the incident has a potential attention-grabbing twist.

One of those dramatic twists is when the victims of a mass-shooting are from a common social identity and the perpetrator appeals to be motivated by hatred of the targeted group. This is what makes the shooting in Buffalo stand out. The authorities could not hide the fact that it was a hate crime and the media saw a juicy story, if only for a day or two.

However, for those of us who are members of communities and peoples who are increasingly finding ourselves on the receiving end of state and private racially motivated violence, we have a life-or-death requirement to attempt to understand the complex political and socio-cultural elements that are producing this dangerous environment.. This understanding is not academic but represents a historical imperative for our communities and peoples in order for us to survive the end-days of global white supremacy.

It is important that we understand that the racist assault on the Black community in Buffalo did not occur in a socio-cultural or political vacuum.

The premeditated murder of thirteen human beings, eleven of them Black, by a young white man wearing a sonnenrad or black sun, one of the symbols of white supremacy that the white supremacists wear in Ukraine, had a perverted logic perfectly consistent with the values of the U.S. settler-colonial project. And while the liberal, white supremacist settler corporate press tries to muddle-up the connection between the Buffalo shooter and Ukrainian white supremacists, we must make the connection, including the attempts to obscure the relationship by the media, and we must be clear on its political implications.

When Cristoforo Colombo, better known as Christopher Columbus, the original genocidal gangster, “discovered” a route for a sea bridge between the kingdom of Spain and what became the “Americas,” it ushered in a new historical epoch that would see levels of human degradation, violence, and depravity unlike any other era of the human experience on this planet. At the center of the cosmology of these strange people from Spain and later from other parts of what became Europe was an ideal of human difference, at first informed by religion but very soon intersected with a process of racialization that hierarchize  race with so-called whites and white civilization at the top. That racial hierarchy, rationalized by some of Europe’s greatest philosophers from Locke and Immanuel Kant to Hegel, called into question or even excluded the non-European “others” as full human beings.

As Cedric Robinson argued, European racial consciousness did not emerge as some devious invention by capitalists to divide the working class. Instead, it represented a historically pre-conditioned consciousness of an incipient racialization in Europe that then as a result of the colonial encounter crystalized into a fully developed sense of race and racial hierarchy.

When Bartolome de La Casa made his famous argument that the Indigenous peoples who were being systematically destroyed by slavery were in fact human beings with souls and should not be subjected to inhumane treatment, the switch to enslaved Africans was seamless. Because even though the Indigenous were then seen as a lower form of human, they were eligible to be converted since they had a soul which meant they were at least partially human, but that consideration was not extended to the soulless Africans.

The military conquest of the lands of the Americas and the enslavement of the Indigenous and then the importation of slave labor from Africa created enormous wealth for Europe. Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein but particularly Walter Rodney in his masterpiece, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, demonstrated how colonial subjugation and plunder created a vast material gulf between the conquered, enslaved, and colonized peoples and Europe that further reinforced the racialized idea of European and normalized white supremacy.

From the settlers who shot and killed their way across the lands that were incorporated into the colonial United States, to the brutality, rape and terror of plantation slavery to the lynching and burning of Black communities, the denial of the value of Black life and indeed all non-European life, has been an enduring feature of the Pan-European colonial and settler-colonial project. So, should Dylan Roof who murdered nine Black people in Charleston, North Carolina or the murders by Payton Gendron in Buffalo be seen as aberrant behavior?

That is not to say that all Europeans would condone the wanton violence of spraying bullets at non-Europeans out on a Saturday afternoon just trying to shop. Most would condemn those actions. But this is where the contradiction at the heart of European liberalism comes in.

Morally, what is the difference between the attack on Libya by NATO, an instrument of white supremacist state power that resulted in up to 50,000 African people dying and was largely supported by the public in the West, and the mass shootings of Roof and Payton Gendron?

The Buffalo shooter was clear about where his sentiments were when he prominently and self-consciously displayed the same symbol of white supremacy that the Azov regiments and other white supremacists’ organizations wear in Ukraine. Yet, Biden who traveled to Buffalo and most of the political class along with the neoliberal media have gone out of their way to erase and/or rehabilitate the existence of those elements in Ukrainian society and in the state that are avowed white supremacists like the shooter.

When the largely peaceful Euromaidan demonstrations in Ukraine against the democratically elected government of Victor Yanukovych made a violent turn in late 2013, it was widely acknowledged that it was the neo-fascists element, especially elements from Western Ukraine who assumed the frontlines against the government and turned toward violence. After the coup of February 2014 when four known ultra-right nationalists secured governmental ministries in the new government, along with literal neo-Nazis in the parliament and in the security forces, press reports responsibly covered those developments.

Reports also begin to circulate about Ukraine becoming a symbol and, indeed, the epicenter for a resurgent transnational white supremacist movement. Those concerns were reflected in reports from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and were the object of discussions in the U.S. Congress.

Yet, that history and all of those concerns were minimized when the propaganda objective was to win the public over to supporting an escalating proxy war with Russia. The incredible irresponsibility of this propaganda tactic was reflected when merchandise from Azov appeared on Amazon and the reporting on Ultra-right and neo-Nazis in Ukraine was “disappeared” except to denounce any reference to fascists in Ukraine brought up by social forces opposed to the war as Kremlin talking points.

In fact, while knowing the history and reality of the ultra-right and neo-Nazi elements in Ukrainian society and state, the corporate media made heroes out of elements like the neo-fascist Azov battalion. Is it then hard to understand why an impressionable teen would be attracted to those courageous fighters, especially when he also shares their racial animus?

But instead of engaging in some principled reporting on the shooting in Buffalo, the neoliberal press decides to politicize the event to favor the political objectives of the democrat party by attempting to connect the shooter to Donald Trump and the entire MAGA movement that they are trying to criminalize. Even though the shooter himself made the connection with the movement in Ukraine. Of course, some are falling for it, including the liberal/left that had become cheerleaders for Ukraine, even as Ukrainian president Zelensky shuts down left parties, the press and gives a green light to repressing, including the murder, of any opposition to his policies.

There will be No Proletarian Internationalism or World Revolution Until Northern Leftists Defeat White Supremacy

Zelensky talks about the need to “defend the West,” “Europeanness,” “Western values,” and the liberal/left does not recognize the inherent assumptions of white supremacy in those terms. But Payton Gendron did and is why he enlisted in Zelensky’s fight not in Ukraine but in the middle of an African American community.

An exaggeration?

History will determine that. But what some of us see is a racialized discourse operating just below the surface in which Europe and Europeaness that Ukrainians strive for is also connected to a racialized trope of Europe being ontologically civilized while the less-white Slavs are barbarians, prone to irrational violence, like the Russians who decided “out of nowhere” to just attack Ukraine!

We also understand that downplaying the threat of a resurgent white supremacist fascism in its most sophisticated form represented by Zelensky who has become that slick, right-wing politician with politics as racist as Trump but without the crudeness who many feared could emerge in the U.S. No one could have anticipated that person would emerge in Europe as the lovable face of fascism.

Buffalo closes the loop that connects crude white supremacy with its more polished and dangerous expression. Both of these versions represent a consensus that is committed to using force and violence to ensure that white power will not to be “replaced.” This new consensus has created the ideological foundation for the legitimation of a cross-class white supremacist defense of something called European values and the interests of Europe. The lack of concern for the consequences of the war and sanctions on the rest of the world confirms that this consensus and the interests it defends are in contradiction to the interests of the non-Western global majority.

For us, Buffalo is not a wake-up call but a declaration of war.

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This article was originally published on Black Agenda Report.

Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.

Featured image: Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron wore the black sun insignia used by Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalioon (Source: BAR)

Video: George W. Bush: “The decision of one man [Putin] to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine.”

May 19th, 2022 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

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Former President George W. Bush:

“The decision of one man [Putin] to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine.”

 

Invade Iraq or Invade Ukraine. “That is the Question”

See G. W. Bush Video Below where in his confusion, he accuses Vladimir Putin of “invasion of Iraq, I mean of Ukraine”.

This is not a slip of the tongue. In his subconscious mind he must have recalled his own “unjustified and brutal” decision as POTUS to invade Iraq in March 2003.

Video of Bush’s Blunder at “Elections, A More Perfect Union”

3’01”

Bush Gets His Putins Mixed Up

During his election campaign in 2000, Bush got his “Putins Mixed Up”: 

Vladimir Putin, Jean Poutine and a French Canadian dish called “Poutine”.

Vladimir Putin became acting president of the Russian Federation upon Yeltsin’s resignation in December 1999, a couple of months prior to the outset of the 2000 US presidential election campaign. Putin was confirmed as President in May 2000.

So much for informed US foreign policy. Visibly, presidential candidate George W. Bush did not have the foggiest idea who was the head of state of the Russian Federation.

Moreover, he did not know the name of the Prime Minister of America’s northern neighbor Jean Chretien.

He thought that the Canadian Prime Minister’s name was Jean Poutine: 

“After a rally in Canton, Michigan, two weeks ago [2000 election campaign], a man posing as a Canadian television reporter told Mr. Bush that Canadian Prime Minister Jean Poutine had endorsed him for his presidential run. Bush beamed and responded excitedly to the endorsement. 

But unfortunately for Bush, Canada’s prime minister is Jean Chrétien, not Poutine. Poutine is a popular French-Canadian dish made of French fries and cheese curds smothered in gravy.

The man posing as the journalist was Canadian comedian Rick Mercer. Rick Mercer, host of This Hour has 22 Minutes on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Television.

Here is the video:

And there is A LOT MORE on the sheer stupidity of a former POTUS.

The Taliban. “I  Thought You Were Talking About a Rock Group”

And then there was another failure at the height of his election campaign: He thought the Taliban was a “rock group”:

When a Glamor correspondent asked Governor Bush what he thought about the Taliban, he just shrugged his shoulders, bemused. It took a bit of prompting from the journalist (“discrimination against women in Afghanistan”) for Bush to rouse himself: Taliban in Afghanistan! Absolutely. Reprisals. I thought you were talking about some rock group.  That’s how well-informed about the outside world the prospective U.S. president is. Even about very important present-day developments that are on everyone’s lips – that is, everyone with the slightest pretensions to culture; developments that he, if elected, will have to deal with.

 

Concluding Remarks

GWB was a proxy president, totally ignorant of geopolitics and US foreign policy.

He followed instructions.

Joe Biden has a higher IQ, But he is also a proxy.

He’s an instrument of Wall Street and the military industrial complex.

 

These are the politicians who are responsible for far-reaching decisions including the use of nuclear weapons on a preemptive basis as a means of “self defense”. See: Bush’s Nuclear Posture Review 2001.

Full Video of the Dallas Event

 

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Statement from the Inter-Parliamentary Task Force to Promote Palestinian Human Rights

May 19th, 2022 by Inter-Parliamentary Task Force

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As legislators from North America and Europe, we are calling for a coordinated international response to the deteriorating human rights situation facing the Palestinian people.

We are aware that there is a near consensus among international, Palestinian, and Israeli human rights organizations that Israel’s discriminatory practices against the Palestinians may amount to the crime against humanity of apartheid, as defined by Rome Statue and the Apartheid Convention. This conclusion has most recently been reached by Amnesty International and Michael Lynk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.

These serious allegations, formed by reputable human rights experts and based on their legal analysis and extensive documentation, cannot continue to be ignored or dismissed by our respective governments. The international community has a responsibility to respect and closely examine the findings of the human rights sector, especially those Palestinian organizations which have been persecuted for their activities, and take action when necessary.

The human rights community has appealed to our governments to adopt a series of economic and diplomatic measures as a response Israel’s discriminatory policies, and there are several recommendations in particular which we want to see championed at an international level:

  1. 1  Governments should encourage and support international bodies to investigate and hold Israeli officials accountable for alleged crimes against humanity, including by referring the matter to the International Criminal Court. Other avenues could include the International Court of Justice and the UNHRC’s Commission of Inquiry. Efforts to weaken or deter these bodies from investigating such serious allegations must be condemned.
  2. 2  As members of the UN General Assembly, governments should support the restoration of the Special Committee against Apartheid, so that it may investigate the crime of apartheid wherever it may be found. We note that this recommendation has been endorsed by the governments of post-apartheid South Africa and Namibia, whose people benefitted from the important work of this committee in a previous era.

Signed,

Frances Black, Senator, Ireland (Independent)

Padraig MacLochlainn, Teachta Dála, Ireland (Sinn Féin)

Patrick Costello, Teachta Dála, Ireland (Green Party/Comhaontas Glas)

Gino Kenny, Teachta Dála, Ireland (People Before Profit)

Tommy Sheppard, Member of Parliament, United Kingdom, (Scottish National Party) Steven De Vuyst. Member of Parliament,

Belgium (Workers Party of Belgium) Veronika Honkasalo, Member of Parliament, Finland (Left Alliance)

Sylvana Simons, Member of Parliament, Netherlands (Bij1 Party)

Heather McPherson, Member of Parliament, Canada (New Democratic Party)

Niki Ashton, Member of Parliament, Canada (New Democratic Party)

Leah Gazan, Member of Parliament, Canada (New Democratic Party)

Alexander Boulerice, Member of Parliament, Canada (New Democratic Party)

Ruba Ghazal, Member of National Assembly, Québec (Québec Solidaire)

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How to Confront Censorship: A Message to Our Readers

May 19th, 2022 by The Global Research Team

To our readers,

We’d like to extend our gratitude for your continued support in these challenging times.

As you may all know, Global Research has been unduly censored by the search engines, not to mention the recurrent smears by the “fact-checkers” and mainstream media platforms. In the past weeks, we have experienced a significant drop in our daily readership following a coordinated DDoS (“distributed denial of service”) cyber attack emanating simultaneously from five countries consisting of millions of so-called “malicious requests”.

While the attack was blocked by our security specialists, our readership has nonetheless been affected.

As it is our shared interest to pursue the truth for peace and justice, we would like to appeal to you to employ every creative and effective means to sustain our online presence.

  • Crossposting Global Research articles on your blog sites,
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We need every help we can get so take the liberty to cascade our daily publications in your own ways.

Moreover, we are active on social media (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram). Please feel free to follow and share.

We see all your efforts and we appreciate every bit of them! 

 

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Lindsey Graham Spearheads U.S. Regime Change Effort in Russia

May 19th, 2022 by Patrick MacFarlane

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Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has whipped up U.S. opposition against Vladimir Putin like a would-be Stonewall Jackson.

Even before the invasion, on February 22, 2022 Graham announced he’d be working with his Democratic colleagues to “create a task force of the Department of Justice, Department of State, Treasury, and maybe DOD to go after [Russian] oligarchs,” adding,

“I want to see cops take apartments, fine art, and seize yachts from a bunch of thugs and crooks. I want to put money on the table to have more weapons for Ukraine to fight. I want more protection when it comes to cyber, and I want to go at this big and I want to go at it hard.”

In the wake of the invasion, on March 3 Graham introduced a Senate Resolution condemning Vladimir Putin and other members of the Russian state as war criminals. The Resolution, which unanimously passed the Senate on March 15, also proclaimed support for investigations of Russian war crimes pending in the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). This proclaimed support comes despite the fact that the U.S. has repeatedly undermined the courts’ jurisdiction over itself and investigations it disproves of.

That same day, Graham took to Twitter to voice his desire that “somebody in Russia…take this guy out.” Graham’s comments drew the ire of even his fellow Russia hawks, with Ted Cruz (R-TX) calling Graham’s suggestion an “exceptionally bad idea.”

A week later, on March 10, 2022, Graham appeared on Fox News to pressure the Biden Administration into providing MiG-29 fighters to Ukraine through Poland. In his tough-guy tirade, he repeatedly called the Biden Administration “dishonorable,” saying it “folds at every turn” when it comes to Ukraine. Near the end of the interview, Graham doubled down on his call for regime change in Moscow:

They [the Biden Administration] had a plan where the Ukrainians would fight hard and fold in a week. They’d come in with some BS deal, the [Biden] administration, to carve up the Ukraine and say we saved the world from World War Three. That plan is off the rails now because the Ukrainians have taken the fight to the Russians. We overestimated the Russian capability. So their biggest nightmare in the administration is for this to end badly with Putin because they don’t have a plan for him to go. I want it to end badly for Putin because I want to get rid of him. [Emphasis added].

On March 16, Graham introduced an additional Senate Resolution urging the Biden Administration “to facilitate the transfer of aircraft, such as MiG-29s, and air defense systems to Ukraine.” In a corresponding press conference, he said:

How does this end? We cannot let Putin get away with this. After 20 years of murder and war crimes and thievery, it’s led to this moment. Every time he did something outrageous, the world complained, but not enough. Now he’s crossed the Rubicon where there’s no going back. If he’s still standing when this is over, then you can almost bet that Taiwan goes and that Iran will become more belligerent. [Emphasis Added]

The very next day, on March 17, Graham again took to Fox News. After poo-pooing the possibility of a nuclear exchange, he escalated his rhetoric:

If you’re looking for scum and traitors in Russia, Putin, look in the mirror. You’re the scum, you’re the traitor, you’re the guy who should be facing criminal charges, or be taken out…I don’t consider [Putin] a legitimate leader of Russia. Russia is suffering under Putin maybe as much as any other time in history. So, when I say he has to go, he has to go, because he is a war criminal. He’s a murderer, he’s a thief, he’s a disruptive influence. He wants to recreate the Soviet Union. The way he goes is when the Russian People turn on him. The purge I’m looking for is when the Russian People rise up and take him out…So yes, I want to give my voice to the idea that he’s not a legitimate leader. He’s a war criminal. He needs to  go and I’m urging the Russian People to bring that about, to end this reign of terror. That’s what I believe, I believe it with all my heart…  [Emphasis Added]

On March 24, in his next now regular Fox News appearance, Graham called for Joe Biden to repeat his regime change rhetoric. He said,

“[w]hat would I like the President of the United States to say? I believe Ukraine can win. I am committed to them winning. I will hold Putin accountable—he needs to go. He’s a war criminal on an industrial scale.”

Two days later, President Biden echoed Graham’s call for Russian regime change while delivering a speech in Poland. In his wandering, poorly-enunciated prose, Biden managed to call Putin a “butcher,” saying “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” These comments were quickly walked back by his press corps and framed as a “gaffe.”

However, by April 5, citing the Bucha attack, President Biden doubled down, parroting Graham’s myriad calls for Putin to be tried for war crimes. Graham praised Biden’s remarks, saying:

“There can be no ‘forgive and forget’ when it comes to Putin. We must hold him accountable for the Rule of Law to mean anything.”

On April 22, after returning from a trip to Australia, Taiwan, and Japan to stoke American Cold War efforts against China, Graham again called for regime change in Moscow, saying:

“Right now, there should be nothing left on the table when it comes to Putin, and we should put every form of weapon within reason into the hands of the Ukrainians. They’re willing to fight.”

On May 10, Graham co-authored and introduced yet another Senate Resolution. The resolution, if passed, aims to denounce the Russia Federation as a state sponsor of terrorism and would call on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to designate it as such. To date, it is Senator Graham’s most dangerous concrete step towards regime change in Moscow.

In his press statement, Graham made it clear that the declaration intends to:

“let the Russian people know that our fight is with Putin, and as long as he is your leader, engaging in these activities, you will be isolated on the world stage.”

In conjunction with his press statement, Graham also penned an op-ed for Fox News in support of the Resolution. The op-ed, titled “4 reasons to label Putin’s Russia a state sponsor of terrorism,” does not, in fact, provide four reasons to do so, but instead lists four categories of sanctions Washington could impose through the designation:

First, it would restrict U.S. foreign assistance to Russia.

Second, it would ban U.S. defense and export sales to Russia.

Third, it would impose certain control over U.S. exports of dual use items.

Lastly, it would allow the U.S. to impose additional financial and other restrictions on Russia. Importantly, its designation is a clear message to the rest of the world that doing business with Russia is a bad idea and will come with severe consequences.

Graham’s op-ed accuses Putin of having “terrorized innocent civilians all around the world,” citing Russia’s involvement in Chechnya, Libya, and Syria.

Graham fails to note, however, that the U.S. has no moral standing to accuse Russia of war crimes, especially in Libya, where Washington’s overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi resulted in, inter alia, a humanitarian disaster and a civil war that would see the establishment of open-air slave markets.

In Syria, Washington’s efforts to overthrow Assad would see U.S. leadership, including Lindsey Graham, back ISIS. Senator Graham knows this because it was explained to him by then-Chairman of the U.S. joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, during a 2014 Senate testimony. Graham is also likely aware that the U.S. flew air support for ISIS in Syria.

Further, as former FBI lawyer Coleen Rowley reported, U.S. leadership was involved in Chechnya. She writes: “the Chechen ‘terrorists’ proved useful to the U.S. in keeping pressure on the Russians, much as the Afghan mujahedeen were used in the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan from 1980 to 1989.” Indeed, several U.S. politicians and neoconservative policy makers supported the Chechen cause.

Washington’s support for war criminals extends beyond the cases that Graham cites, most recently in its ongoing support for the Ukrainian Neo-Nazi Azov battalion.

If Russia is declared a state sponsor of terrorism, it will be incredibly difficult to rescind the designation. There are only two ways to remove a nation from the State Sponsor of Terrorism list. The first would require “a fundamental change in the leadership and policies of the government of the country concerned.” Both options would require the President to certify and report to Congress that the subject nation has not provided any support for acts of international terrorism in at least the preceding 6-month period and that the government concerned has provided assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future. Putin is unlikely to ever do this in a way that would satisfy President Biden or US officials.

Last Sunday, when speaking with Fox News Host Bret Baier, Lindsey Graham said: “there is no off-ramp in this war,” adding, “I want to triple down on beating Putin.” For Senator Graham, this is a desired result. If Russia is placed on the State Sponsor of Terrorism list, it would further commit the United States to a path of escalation with Russia.

Washington has arguably become a direct party to the War in Ukraine. The U.S. and its NATO allies are financing the war, supplying Ukraine with weapons and training its military. There are reports that Washington has helped Ukraine kill Russian Generals and sink the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. More broadly, there is evidence to suggest that the U.S. has sabotaged peace negotiations, effectively “ordering Ukraine to subordinate its goals to the larger Western Goals.”

Russian officials largely concur. On April 26, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said “NATO, in essence, is engaged in a war with Russia through a proxy and is arming that proxy. War means war,” The Speaker of the Russian State Duma said on May 7, “the U.S. is taking part in the military operation in Ukraine. Today, Washington is basically coordinating and engineering military operations, thus directly participating in the military actions against our country.” Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned May 12 that NATO is risking “a full-fledged nuclear war” by supplying Ukraine with weapons and intelligence.

Unfortunately, it appears Lindsey Graham’s May 10 Resolution has gained support. On Sunday, May 15, after returning from a surprise visit to Kiev, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) called on President Biden to make the designation, saying “the President could do it on his own, and I would urge him to do it.”

If Graham and company are successful and the U.S. names Russia as a State Sponsor of Terror, Americans will be further committed to the spiraling escalation over Ukraine. It bears repeating that this policy could very well result in the destruction of the human race.

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Patrick MacFarlane is the Justin Raimondo Fellow at the Libertarian Institute where he advocates a noninterventionist foreign policy. He is a Wisconsin attorney in private practice. He is the host of the Liberty Weekly Podcast at www.libertyweekly.net, where he seeks to expose establishment narratives with well researched documentary-style content and insightful guest interviews. His work has appeared on antiwar.com and Zerohedge. He may be reached at [email protected]

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NATO Begins Military Drills Near Russian Border

May 19th, 2022 by Al Mayadeen

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On Monday, large-scale NATO military training began in Estonia. According to the military alliance, the ‘Hedgehog 2022’ exercise is one of the largest in the Baltic nation’s history. The drills will involve 15,000 troops from 14 countries, including members of the military blocs as well as their partners.

Soldiers from Finland, Sweden, Georgia, and Ukraine will take part in the exercise, according to the Finnish public radio Yle. According to the broadcaster, the drills will encompass all branches of the armed forces and will entail air, sea, and land exercises, as well as cyber warfare training.

According to a NATO statement, the drills would also include the participation of the US Navy Wasp-class landing ship ‘Kearsarge.’ Both the military bloc and the deputy commander of the Estonian Defense Forces, Major General Veiko-Vello Palm, have denied that the maneuvers near the Russian border had anything to do with Moscow’s continuing military operation in Ukraine.

The drills began barely a day after Finland and Sweden officially announced their intentions to join NATO, and were planned long before the war in Ukraine erupted, according to Western sources.

However, the drills in Estonia are only one component of NATO’s large-scale military activities near the Russian border. Lithuania, another Baltic state, is hosting the ‘Iron Wolf’ exercise, which includes 3,000 NATO troops and 1,000 pieces of military equipment, including German Leopard 2 tanks.

NATO exercises in Poland

According to a NATO statement issued on Friday, two of NATO’s largest exercises – ‘Defender Europe’ and ‘Swift Response’ – are taking place in Poland and eight other countries, involving 18,000 troops from 20 nations.

“Exercises like these show that NATO stands strong and ready to protect our nations and defend against any threat,” the military bloc’s spokesperson, Oana Lungescu, said, adding that the drills “help to remove any room for miscalculation or misunderstanding about our resolve to protect and defend every inch of allied territory.”

The NATO Response Force is now participating in the ‘Wettiner Heide’ drills in Germany with a force of 7,500 people. The ‘Neptune series’ naval drills featuring the USS ‘Harry S. Truman’ carrier strike group, which will be placed under NATO command, are scheduled to take place in the Mediterranean Sea.

However, according to NATO, this will be only the second time since the Cold War’s conclusion that a US carrier group has been brought under the military bloc’s direction.

In June, the Baltic States and Poland will host what NATO describes as “Europe’s largest integrated air and missile defense exercise,” which would involve 23 nations.

NATO naval drills

Finland held NATO naval drills in late April. It is now also hosting a joint land exercise in which forces from the United States, the United Kingdom, Estonia, and Latvia are taking part.

Massive military drills are taking place amid rising tensions between Russia, NATO, and some of the military alliance’s allies. Finland, which shares a lengthy border with Russia, and Sweden agreed to reexamine their long-standing policy of non-alignment in the aftermath of the war on Ukraine.

The announcement provoked a surge of condemnation from Moscow, which warned that if Finland and Sweden joined NATO, it would have to respond. Moscow also thinks that NATO expansion is a direct danger to national security.

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Much of Washington’s $54 Billion Aid for Ukraine Will be Stolen by Corrupt Officials

May 19th, 2022 by Paul Antonopoulos

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US aid to Ukraine has reached astonishing heights ever since Russia launched its military operation on February 24, with continuous streams of arms, ammunition and intelligence provisions flowing into the country. At a time when living costs is becoming increasingly unbearable for the average American, Congress is poised to approve more than $40 billion in emergency funding to support Ukraine, an amount nearly three times greater than what the US has already committed. However, the efficiency of this aid is put into question considering systemic corruption in Ukraine and the short survival rate of Western weapons once they enter the country.

If Congress were to approve $40 billion, along with the $13.6 billion passed in March, the combined $53.7 billion is about 81% of Russia’s 2021 defense budget. Although it appears that the US is making a serious and committed effort for Ukrainian forces to overcome the Russian military, the difference this military aid would make is questionable since much of it will be destroyed by Russian aviation and missile strikes upon entry into Ukraine.

In March, Congress authorized $13.6 billion in aid, of which $6.9 billion will be sent through traditional foreign aid channels. This aid is supposed to go toward strengthening Ukraine’s security and economy, food assistance, healthcare and emergency assistance to refugees, as well as weapons. It is expected that the extra $40 billion, which will likely be approved by Congress, will be spent much in the same manner.

Ukraine has long been one of the more corrupt countries in the world, and there is no indication this has reversed just because of the war. In this way, it can be expected that much of the $53.7 billion will be stolen in corruption schemes orchestrated by Ukraine’s military, oligarchs and government officials. What is known is that $13.9 billion will indirectly go to the Kiev government so that ministries can continue to operate. $4.4 billion in emergency food aid will go to Ukraine (and other countries too). Finally, $900 million will go to housing, English language training, and trauma treatment for Ukrainian refugees.

According to The New York Times, the US has shown unprecedented generosity towards Kiev when Congress does not want to carry out critical economic stimulation measures. This is at a time when inflation is reaching unprecedented heights, fuel hits new records and grocery prices are unaffordable.

On May 12, Republican Senator Rand Paul opposed the bill to provide Ukraine with additional support. As he said: “We cannot save Ukraine by dooming the US economy.” None-the-less, despite Rand Paul’s opposition, the Senate will likely pass the aid bill as he is the only one who has spoken out against it.

Although the aid package undoubtedly appears generous, Washington never makes such actions just out of charity and it can be expected that all aid is conditional. In early May, Biden signed the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022 to expedite the delivery of US arms shipments to Ukraine.

The Lend-Lease Act was used during World War II to supply weapons to allied countries, partly on a reciprocal basis. The US supplied weapons, strategic materials, and food to Britain, the Soviet Union, the de Gaulle government in France, and China. But due to these aid packages, the UK owed $31.4 billion and the Soviet Union $10.9 billion. Although Washington canceled the UK’s debt, Russia only finished paying off the loan in 2006.

Kiev is not thinking about having to pay back all its debt as it expects that the West will cover the costs seeing as the Ukrainian economy has been struggling due to rampant corruption. Washington will inevitably claim compensation for the Lend-Lease Act – whether it be with the supply of cheap agricultural products, rights to build military bases on Ukrainian territory, the implementation of projects that benefit Western companies, or in a plethora of other ways.

Through such conditional aid, Ukraine is expected to continue its war effort against Russia instead of finding a peaceful solution. However, this will only prolong the suffering in Ukraine as this aid will make little difference considering a lot of the humanitarian aid will be stolen by corrupt officials and military aid will likely be destroyed by Russian forces as it enters the country – but Ukrainian taxpayers will still be expected to foot the bill.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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Why Would US Give a War Guarantee — to Finland?

May 19th, 2022 by Patrick J. Buchanan

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Seeing Russia invade Ukraine, historically neutral Finland has undergone a late conversion and decided to join NATO immediately.

Why? Because NATO membership means the world’s strongest power, the United States, under Article 5 of NATO, would go to war against Russia, should it cross Finland’s border.

Nervous about Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s intentions, Finland wants America legally and morally bound to fight Russia on its behalf, should Putin invade Finland as he invaded Ukraine.

From the Finnish point of view, this is perfectly understandable.

But why would the United States consent to go to war with Russia, the largest nuclear power on earth, for violating Finland’s frontiers?

Finland is not Alaska; it is not Canada; it is 5,000 miles away. And no one ever asserted during the Cold War, or for the decades since, that Finland was a U.S. vital interest.

Why, then, would we consent, in advance, to go to war with Russia over Finland?

President Joe Biden said last week that NATO has an “open door” policy and Finland and Sweden are welcome, and he looks forward to their joining.

Consider what Biden is actually saying and doing here.

He is ceding to Finland, a country of 5.5 million people with an 830-mile border with Putin’s Russia, the right to obligate the United States of America to go to war with Russia, if Russia attacks Finland.

What patriot would commit his own country, in perpetuity, to go to war on behalf of another country not his own?

Why would America surrender to the Finns our freedom of action in deciding whether or not to fight a nuclear-armed Russia?

NATO is not a country club; it is a military alliance Putin regards as an enemy. Every member of that alliance is obliged to treat an attack on any one of its 30 members as an attack on all, and all are obligated to come to the defense of the nation attacked.

By welcoming Finland into NATO, Biden is offering Helsinki the kind of war guarantee Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave to Poland in the spring of 1939, which led to Britain’s having to declare war on Sept. 3, 1939, two days after Germany invaded Poland.

How did that work out for Britain and the empire?

In his farewell address, President George Washington warned his countrymen against “permanent alliances.” In conscious echo of our first president, Thomas Jefferson warned against “entangling alliances.”

NATO is a military alliance that has been in existence since 1949. While it began with the U.S., Canada and 10 European nations, it ended the Cold War with 16. We have since added 14 more.

Six of the nations NATO added since the Cold War — Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania — were members of the USSR’s Warsaw Pact. Three of the newest NATO members — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania — are former republics of the Soviet Union.

The last quarter-century of NATO’s encroachment into Russia’s space and onto Russia’s front porch has been a leading cause of the worsening relationship between the world’s two great nuclear powers.

The repeated refusal of Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to rule out NATO membership for Ukraine was a primary cause of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

This does not absolve Putin of culpability in launching the war on Ukraine, but it should tell us that any new members of NATO, in Russia’s “near abroad,” especially a new NATO member with an 830-mile border with Russia from the Baltic to the Arctic, is running a real risk and raising the possibility of war.

Indeed, with Russia’s war in Ukraine in stalemate, having failed to achieve its objectives in Kyiv, Kharkov and Odessa, Russian officials have repeatedly raised the prospect of a desperate resort to tactical nuclear weapons to stop the bleeding. “Escalate to de-escalate” is the slogan.

Bringing Sweden and Finland into NATO, which has already elicited rage from Moscow and ominous threats, is unlikely to reduce whatever pressure currently exists to escalate to nuclear war.

A basic question needs answering: Why, 30 years after the Cold War ended, are we still expanding NATO?

Russia does not threaten the United States. As for any threat that it poses to its European neighbors, let them deal with it. Together, NATO Europe is far more populous and economically powerful than Russia, and militarily capable of providing for their own defense.

Why should this be our obligation more than 30 years after the Cold War — and counting?

With small but modernized military forces, Finland, if attacked, can resist Russia. Why, then, let ourselves be obligated to go to war on Finland’s behalf, a war that could result in an escalation to nuclear war, the avoidance of which was a goal of every president, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan?

Turkey is now warning that it may exercise its rights as a NATO member to veto membership by Sweden and Finland. Anyone think Turkish President Recep Erdogan would declare war on Russia, if it invaded Finland?

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Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.” To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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“Globalist Takeover”: New Food System Will Stop at Nothing to Control You

May 19th, 2022 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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The globalist takeover is coming at us from every possible angle. Whether we’re talking about biosecurity, finance, housing, health care, energy, transportation or food, all the changes we’re now seeing have one goal, and that is to force compliance with a totalitarian slave system

The global food system, and protein sources in particular, are currently under coordinated and intentional attacks to manufacture food shortages and famine

The globalist elite intend to eliminate traditional farming and livestock and replace it with indoor-grown produce and lab-created protein alternatives that they own and control

While the presence of hundreds of food brands gives the appearance of market competition, the reality is that the food industry is monopolized by fewer than a dozen companies, and all of them, in turn, are largely owned by BlackRock and Vanguard

Eventually, your ability to buy food will be tied to your digital identity and social credit score

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The globalist takeover agenda is nothing if not comprehensive. They’re coming at us from every possible angle, and whether we’re talking about biosecurity, finance, housing,1 health care, energy, transportation or food, all the changes we’re now seeing have one goal, and that is to force compliance with a totalitarian slave system.

In an April 27, 2022, blog post,2 investigative journalist Corey Lynn takes a deep dive into the new food system being put into place, and how it is geared to control you.

“‘Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.’ This famous quote by Henry Kissinger is ringing more and more true by the week,” Lynn writes.3

“The globalists already control the majority of the money, are moving ever so swiftly to convert the energy system over into systems they are all invested in, and have been taking drastic measures to control the food industry while running much of it under the radar. If they control the seeds they control the food, and if they control the food they can use the digital ID to control consumer access to the food.

While a rash of fires suddenly destroy food processing, meat, and fertilizer plants, during a time where farmers are hurting and supply chain issues are kicking in, an entire traceable food infrastructure system has already been built in multiple cities and is making its way across the globe …

The USDA and FDA have already approved lab grown meat, genetically modified cattle, and are funding the globalists to research and develop cellular agriculture as well as indoor growers and genetics companies …

Union Pacific is mandating railroad shipping reductions by 20% impacting CF Industries Holdings, the world’s largest fertilizer company. Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street happen to be the top shareholders of Union Pacific, and BlackRock and Vanguard are in the top three shareholders of CF Industries Holdings.

By mapping some of the largest vertical farms, it reveals the crops, grocery stores involved, locations and billions pouring in by globalist investors and shareholders. It quickly becomes evident that this is the global plan to control all produce — ingredients that go into all food products.”

The Secret Monopoly

As noted by Lynn, this monopoly has been locked into place over the course of many years. Slowly but surely, the monopoly has grown, under the radar of public consciousness, which in turn has resulted in food getting simultaneously more expensive and less accessible.4

Now, as the final pieces are being put into place, many are waking up to the realization that we’ve been massively fooled and are now at the mercy of a figurative “handful” of unelected people whose megalomania is unsurpassed in human history.

While the presence of hundreds of food brands gives the appearance of market competition, the reality is that the food industry is monopolized by fewer than a dozen companies,5 and all of them, in turn, are largely owned by BlackRock and Vanguard. The growing fake meat market is similarly dominated by a very small number of large food giants6 which, again, are owned by BlackRock and Vanguard.

food giants

BlackRock alone holds $10 trillion in assets,7 up from $6 trillion in 2017.8 Combined, the three largest investment firms in the world, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, have ownership in nearly 90% of all S&P 500 firms.9

Through their investment holdings they secretly wield monopoly control over ALL industries, so the idea that there is competition anywhere in the marketplace is really just an illusion. You never learned about their ever-expanding monopoly because they also own the centralized media.

It’s hard to tell which of the two is more influential. Vanguard owns a large share of Blackrock. Owners and stockholders of Vanguard include Rothschild Investment Corp,10 Edmond De Rothschild Holding,11 the Italian Orsini family, the American Bush family, the British Royal family, the du Pont family, and the Morgan, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller families.12,13

Blackrock, meanwhile, has been called the “fourth branch of government,” as they are the only private firm that has financial agreements to lend money to the central banking system.14

Food Security Is Undermined by Patentable Food

In 2014, the U.S. Congress established the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research Act (FFAR) through the Farm Bill. After siphoning off $200 million in taxpayer funds to get the foundation started, FFAR became a nongovernmental not-for-profit organization. Bill Gates is one of its funders, and its first board of directors included deputy director Dr. Robert Horsch of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.15

The mission of FFAR is to “connect funders, researchers and farmers through public-private partnerships to support audacious research addressing the biggest food and agriculture challenges.”16 In reality, it’s been used to undermine food security by increasing reliance on gene-edited and patentable foods.

In April 2019, FFAR launched the Precision Indoor Plants (PIP) Consortium, a public-private partnership of indoor growers, breeders and genetics companies with the shared goal of advancing speed-breeding and altering plant chemicals responsible for flavor, nutrition and medicinal value. Five key crops being worked on are lettuce, tomatoes, strawberries, cilantro and blueberries.

In August 2020, Monsanto/Bayer helped found a startup called Unfold, which develops new vegetable seed varieties specifically geared for vertical farms. According to Lynn, “GMOs already account for 75 to 80% of food Americans consume,”17 and once fresh produce is under patent, that percentage will inch closer to 100%.

The University of California is also working on plant-based mRNA vaccines. The idea there is to disseminate vaccines through the conventional food supply,18 which puts a whole new spin on the old adage to “Let thy food be thy medicine.”

“Bill Gates insists that droughts and climate change is destroying our ability to farm and that the future will consist of populations moving into metropolitan cities where indoor vertical farming is necessary to feed people.

If this is the case, why has he acquired 242,000 acres of farmland over the past decade while simultaneously investing in indoor vertical farming? Who gets to sit at the table with healthy produce served up by Gates while the rest of the population eats gene-edited produce from locked-down facilities, delivered to their local grocery store, and accessed only through a digital ID?” Lynn asks.19

“Meanwhile, the Consultative Group of International Agriculture Research (CGIAR) holds the world’s largest private seed banks consisting of 10% of the worldwide germplasm across the globe, which is controlled by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and World Bank, managing 768,576 accessions of hijacked farmers seeds …

[W]hat’s going to happen to the farmers when these astronomically enormous indoor vertical farm facilities have taken over every major city, locked in contracts with all major grocery store chains, and are funded by some of the same billionaire globalists who are seeking to control human beings through every industry for their fourth industrial revolution?

It’s a legitimate concern. Add ‘gene-editing,’ ‘smart,’ ‘traceable,’ and ‘net zero’ to the production of these facilities, and the fact that they are still moving full speed ahead on digital IDs and currency, and it becomes even more concerning …

Whereas this provides a lot of explanation on the absolute intentional demolition to all of our farmers on the seed, vegetable, and produce front, people should also be aware of what’s been taking place with cattle ranchers and the globalists’ plan to take over the meat industry as well.”

Controlled Demolition of the Protein Supply Is Underway

As I explained in yesterday’s weaponized bird flu article, alleged outbreaks of bird flu and COVID-19 in food animals, along with drought and fertilizer shortages, have led to the mass culling of flocks20and cattle herds21 around the world. So much so, we’re now told to expect egg,22 poultry and meat shortages.23

Add to that a global fertilizer shortage that is limiting the amount of animal feed that can be produced this year, and the curious decision to limit U.S. fertilizer shipments on trains, which restricts distribution and raises the cost of what little remains. Experts predict it may take up to three years to replenish global grain stocks,24 and in the meantime, farmers won’t have a readily available supply to feed their livestock.

Canada-based Nutrien Ltd., the world’s largest fertilizer company, recently warned the shortage is likely to extend into 2023. The price of fertilizer has also “skyrocketed to absurd heights that have never been seen before,” The Economic Collapse Blog reports.25

The U.S. and U.K. are also paying farmers to not farm all their available land, California is paying farmers to grow less, ostensibly to save water, and the U.K. is encouraging farmers to retire by offering them a lump sum of £100,000 — all while publicly predicting looming food shortages.26 On top of that, the two largest water reservoirs in California have also fallen to “critically low levels” and wildfires are devastating agricultural land across the western half of the U.S.27

Food production is being blatantly attacked and irrationally restricted on so many fronts, it’s clearly an intentional demolition of primary protein sources28 — meat, egg and dairy.

“February 1, 2016 the Good Food Institute was launched … with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Open Philanthropy Project, and Y Combinator, with the goal to ‘reimagine meat production,’” Lynn writes.29

“In October 2021, the Good Food Institute celebrated the USDA’s $10 million grant for the creation of the first-ever National Institute for Cellular Agriculture at Tufts University so they can back researchers in manufactured meat.

To be certain all of these goals are locked into place and the UN 2030 agenda is achieved, disrupting the fertilizer industry, food supply chain, and a rash of coincidental fires to food processing plants sure would help to seal the deal, wouldn’t it?”

The Emperor Has No Clothes

In a blatantly self-serving gesture, Gates has publicly called for the West to quit eating beef and transition to lab-grown meats, ostensibly to address climate change. He’s also railed against legislative attempts to make sure fake meats are properly labeled, since labeling would slow down public acceptance.30

Not surprisingly, Gates is financially invested in several faux meat companies.31,32,33 As luck or godlike foresight would have it, he’s also invested in genetically engineered fertilizer alternatives.34 Lynn writes:35

“Bill Gates explained his love for fertilizer in 2018 while in Tanzania.36 Coincidentally, Gates-led and Rockefeller-funded Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) has been an epic fail, with a first ever evaluation report37 that came out on February 28, 2022 after a 15-year effort with bold claims to rescue Africa’s small farmers.

Their false promise to ‘double yields and incomes for 30 million farming households by 2020’ was removed from their website in June 2020 after an assessment by Tufts University revealed little evidence of progress, and in fact showed a 31% increase in hunger.

Evaluators stated there were many deficiencies and AGRA’s reporting and monitoring data was weak. Even the German government is considering pulling funding from AGRA over their pesticide use, which is ironic because Gates claims we need to remove pesticides in the U.S. and move to indoor vertical farming …

One of AGRA’s biggest achievements was their participation in 72 agricultural policy reforms in 11 African countries, pertaining to seed, fertilizer and market access. Laws were created to protect intellectual property rights for ‘certified’ seeds, as penalties were created for open-source seed sharing.

Imagine being a farmer, homesteader or gardener and having to share and trade seeds on the black market so you don’t get penalized. Anyone who believes they won’t try this in the U.S. is kidding themselves, especially since the globalists hold the largest private seeds banks, and invest in the largest commercial seed companies …

On March 17, 2022, a notice was published38 to the U.S. Federal Register seeking comments by May 16, 2022 on Competition and Intellectual Property System: Seeds and Other Agricultural Inputs. Remember to read through the proper lens when reviewing this notice that derived from an executive order signed by Biden in July, 2021 on promoting competition in the American economy.

Their ultimate goal — every human being, every piece of food, resource, and product on this planet will be tracked and traced via blockchain. This isn’t a theory — it is their goal. In July, 2021, the FDA released their ‘New Era of Smarter Food Safety’ which consists of using tech-enabled traceability for a digital, traceable food system, from farm to plate using blockchain.

A digital identity to grant access to establishments, control financial spending, and trace everyone’s moves has been rolling out on multiple fronts, including the vaccine ID passport. Eventually they will try to move toward a chip, as it will be easier with biometrics being installed everywhere …

There is no way to sugarcoat this system they are implementing. Whereas vertical farming is brilliant in many ways, and could be beneficial on a smaller scale in communities, the fact that this is the global agenda to remove farms and control all produce by the globalists themselves, makes is incredibly concerning …

We must work together to find a way forward and continue to say no to the digital ID they are creating to control our access and spending, while building self sufficiency and security together.”

For solutions to this rapidly approaching dystopian future, review my previous article, “Why Food Prices Are Expected to Skyrocket,” and Lynn’s article “Finding Sources of Fresh Food.”39

Part of the answer is to grow your own food, to the best of your ability. Another part is to support local growers by buying their produce, or else they’ll get pushed out. Starting local co-ops and community gardens can also go a long way toward creating food security in the long term.

At the same time, we also have to reject globalist solutions like fake meat, gene-edited beef, GMO foods and all the rest of it. It’s time to recognize that none of their solutions are for our benefit. They’re for our detriment. The World Economic Forum has declared that by 2030, you will own nothing. They mean it. They will take everything from us, including the right to grow our own food, if we let them.

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Notes

1 Investment Watch June 11, 2021

2, 3, 15, 17, 18, 19, 29, 33, 35 Corey’s Digs April 27, 2022

4 Civil Eats February 17, 2021

5 Sparkline Capital September 16, 2020

6 Civil Eats September 22, 2021

7 Jacobin March 22, 2022

8 Financial Post December 4, 2017

9 The Conversation May 10, 2017

10 Fintel Rothschild

11 Fintel Edmond De Rothschild

12 SGT Report May 6, 2021

13 Lew Rockwell April 21, 2021

14 Humans Are Free May 5, 2021

16 About FFAR

20 The Guardian April 28, 2022

21 Farm Progress February 24, 2022

22 Local News 8 April 25, 2022

23 Parade March 25, 2022

24, 25, 27 The Economic Collapse Blog May 8, 2022

26 Off Guardian April 25, 2022

28 Ice Age Farmer April 8, 2022

30 Technology Review February 15, 2021

31 CNBC July 3, 2021

32 Beef Central February 17, 2021

34 Business Insider March 6, 2019

36 Gates Notes November 14, 2018

37 USRTK March 17, 2022

38 Federal Register March 17, 2022

39 Corey’s Digs May 9, 2022

FDA Dumps More Pfizer Documents: Why Were So Many Adverse Events Reported as ‘Unrelated’ to Vaccine?

May 19th, 2022 by Michael Nevradakis

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The latest release of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine documents raises questions about how frequently adverse events experienced by clinical trial participants were reported as “unrelated” to the vaccine.

The 80,000-page document cache released May 2 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) includes an extensive set of Case Report Forms (CRFs) from Pfizer trials conducted at various locations in the U.S.

The documents also include the “third interim report” from BioNTech’s trials conducted in Germany (accompanied by a synopsis of this report and a database of adverse events from this particular set of trials).

The FDA released the documents, which pertain to the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the vaccine, as part of a court-ordered disclosure schedule stemming from an expedited Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed in August 2021.

Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, a group of doctors and public health professionals, submitted the FOIA request.

Adverse events during Pfizer vaccine trials in the U.S. usually reported as ‘unrelated’ to vaccination

Pfizer conducted a series of vaccine trials at various locations in the U.S., including the New York University Langone Health Center, Rochester Clinical Research and Rochester General Hospital (Rochester, New York) and the J. Lewis Research, Inc. Foothill Family Clinic (Salt Lake City, Utah).

The Pfizer documents released this month by the FDA included a series of CRFs for patients who suffered some type of adverse event during their participation in the COVID-19 vaccine trials.

As the documents reveal, despite the occurrence of a wide range of symptoms, including serious cardiovascular events, almost none were identified as being “related” to the vaccine.

Such serious yet “unrelated” adverse events included:

Of the CRFs found in the documents released this month, only one adverse event is clearly specified as being related to the vaccination: a participant who suffered from psoriatic arthritis, with no prior history of the condition.

In addition, several CRFs indicated exposure during pregnancy (see here and here), or during a partner’s pregnancy (see here and here). However, the documents provided do not appear to have provided any follow-ups regarding any outcomes or potential adverse events for the participants, their partners or their newborn babies once born.

In some instances, while the CRFs claimed the adverse events suffered by patients were not related to the vaccine, their cause was unspecified, simply indicated as “other,” while in another case, a participant’s “unplanned” small bowel obstruction and panic attacks were listed as being unrelated to the vaccination despite no relevant medical history pertaining to the SAEs (severe adverse events) in question.

Did Pfizer hide critical information from regulators?

It is difficult to draw concrete conclusions about any specific case from the data provided by CRFs and vaccine trial summaries.

However, what raises eyebrows is the very large number of adverse events — often serious and often requiring the hospitalization of the patients involved — that were determined to be “unrelated” to the administration of the COVID vaccine.

Previously released Pfizer documents also included discrepancies in the recording of adverse events.

According to investigative journalist Sonia Elijah, these discrepancies include:

  • Trial participants were entered into the “healthy population” but were, in actuality, far from healthy.
  • SAE numbers were left blank.
  • Barcodes were missing from samples collected from trial participants.
  • The second vaccine dose was administered outside the three-week protocol window.
  • New health problems were dismissed as “unrelated” to the vaccination.
  • A remarkable number of patients with an observation period of exactly the same duration — 30 minutes, with very little variety in observation times and raising questions as to whether patients were adequately observed or were put at risk.
  • Oddities pertaining to the start and end dates of SAEs – for instance, a “healthy” diabetic suffered a “serious” heart attack on October 27, 2020, but the “end” date for this SAE is listed as the very next day, even though the patient was diagnosed with pneumonia that same day.
  • Impossible dating: in the aforementioned example of the patient who sustained a heart attack and pneumonia, the individual in question later died, but the date of death is indicated as the day before the patient was recorded as having gone to a “COVID ill” visit.
  • Unblinded teams, who were aware of which patients received the actual vaccine or a placebo, were responsible for reviewing adverse event reports, potentially leading to pressure to downplay COVID-related events in the vaccinated, or to indicate that adverse events were related to the vaccine.
  • Other adverse events were indicated as “not serious” despite extensive hospital stays, of up to at least 26 days in the case of one patient who suffered a fall which was classified as “not serious,” yet facial lacerations sustained as a result of the fall were attributed to hypotension (low blood pressure).

Many of these practices seem to appear in the trial-related documents released this month.

Medical and scientific experts who spoke to The Defender expressed similar concerns about what this month’s tranche of documents reveals, and addressed cases of “disappearing” adverse events.

Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense, remarked:

“I’m most concerned about ‘disappearing’ patients. One cannot conduct a valid trial and simply omit the results that they don’t like!

“With the stories about Maddie de Garay and Augusto Roux surfacing, I have to wonder how many other participants were dropped in order to hide vaccine adverse events/effects.

“If you look at the data in VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System], COVID-19 vaccines are the most dangerous ever introduced into the population.”

Dr. Madhava Setty, a board-certified anesthesiologist and senior science editor for The Defender, said:

“The ‘unrelated’ label the investigators use to divert attention from AEs [adverse events] is a powerful point that stands on its own. We haven’t pushed back on this enough.

“Equivalently, we can say that the meager and short-lived benefit of these shots is also ‘unrelated’ using their ‘standards.’ On what grounds can they say that their product is preventing infection (which it isn’t anymore), or death (marginally)?

“They cannot have it both ways. They cannot claim a benefit through short-term outcomes while denying that side effects of any kind are related to their product.

“That’s the whole point of doing a trial. You cannot prove causation, only statistically significant correlation.”

Setty provided further context for his remarks in an April 2022 article for The Defender and in a March 2022 presentation, in which he discussed the number of these adverse events and how Pfizer swept them away (timestamp 24:00).

In Setty‘s view:

“There’s a high likelihood of malfeasance going on. [Pfizer whistleblower] Brook Jackson says the PIs [principal investigators] were unblinded. If true, it would make it very easy for the investigators to bump up the AEs in the placebo group while ignoring some of the AEs in the vaccine group.

“Pfizer claims that 0.5% of placebo recipients suffered a serious adverse event compared to 0.6% in the vaccine group. This is how these events were obscured.”

The extant body of evidence indicates Pfizer “is hiding critical information from regulators,” Setty said:

“The clincher is in the memorandum to the VRBPAC [Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee] (Table 2, efficacy populations), where they show us that five times more people in the vaccine group were pulled out of the trial than the placebo within seven days of their second shot for ‘important protocol deviations.’

“In a trial that big the chances that could have happened coincidentally is infinitesimally small (less than 1 in 100,000).

“Moreover, months later, the same thing happened in the pediatric trial (Table 12). This time, six times more children were pulled from the trial after their second dose.

“There are, of course, procedural differences when administering a placebo versus the mRNA vaccine, but why didn’t it happen after the first dose as well?

“Mathematically, that is about as close as you can get to eliminating any ‘shadow of doubt.’ With a formal allegation by a trial coordinator that states the same thing [referring to whistleblower Brook Jackson], we can be assured Pfizer is hiding critical information from regulators.”

BioNTech trials in Germany claim few adverse events ‘related’ to vaccine

The BioNTech trial in Germany tested various dosages of two COVID-19 vaccine formulas, labeled BNT162b1 and BNT162b2 — the latter granted EUA by the FDA.

The latest cache of Pfizer documents suggests a pattern, similar to the one in the U.S. trials, of not reporting adverse events as related to the vaccine.

According to the third interim report, dated March 20, 2021, among trial participants who were administered the BNT162b2 candidate vaccine granted EUA in the U.S.:

  • 87% of younger participants reported solicited local reactions, and 88% reported solicited systemic reactions, with 10% reporting solicited systemic reactions of Grade 3 or higher.
  • 87% of younger participants experienced “mild” solicited local reactions, and 35% experienced “moderate” solicited local reactions.
  • 88% of younger participants experienced “mild” solicited systemic reactions, and 38% experienced “moderate” solicited systemic reactions. As stated in the report:

“The most frequently reported solicited systemic reactions of any severity were fatigue (n=40, 67%), followed by headache (n=32, 53%), malaise (n=24, 40%), and myalgia (n=23, 38%). The remaining symptom terms were less frequent.

“For nausea, headache, fatigue, myalgia, chills, arthralgia and malaise each symptom was assessed as severe in <10% of participants.”

  • 43% of younger participants reported a total of 51 unsolicited TEAEs (treatment-emergent adverse events, referring to conditions not present prior to treatment or that worsened in intensity after treatment) within 28 days of the first or second dose, nine of which were deemed to be “related” to the vaccination. One participant in this category sustained a TEAE assessed as Grade 3 or higher, but “which was assessed as not related by the investigator.”
  • TEAEs among younger participants included hypoaesthesia, lymphadenopathy, heart palpitations, external ear inflammation, blepharitis, toothache, non-cardiac chest pain, cestode infection, oral herpes, tonsillitis, neck pain, insomnia, anosmia and dysmenorrhea.
  • No unsolicited treatment-emergent serious adverse events (TESAEs) or deaths were reported among younger participants, but one discontinued participation due to moderate nasopharyngitis.
  • One younger participant “discontinued due to a moderate AE (nasopharyngitis).”
  • 86% of older participants reported solicited local reactions, with 6% reporting solicited local reactions of Grade 3 or higher, 78% reporting “mild” solicited local reactions and 36% reporting “moderate” solicited local reactions.
  • 72% of older participants reported solicited systemic reactions, with 11% of these participants sustaining solicited systemic reactions of Grade 3 or higher, 69% sustaining “mild” solicited reactions and 36% sustaining “moderate” solicited reactions.
  • 33% of older participants reported a total of 20 unsolicited TEAEs, four of which were determined to be “related” to the vaccination. Among older participants, 8% reported a TESAE of Grade 3 or higher, with “one event assessed as related by the investigator.”
  • One older participant was reported to have sustained a “not related TESAE” (an ankle fracture).
  • TESAEs among older participants included back pain, chest pain, facial injury, increased lipase, increased amylase, muscle spasms, musculoskeletal pain, tendon pain, orthostatic intolerance, renal colic, seborrhoeic dermatitis and “painful respiration.”

Among trial participants who received the BNT162b1 candidate vaccine (not granted EUA):

  • 86% of “younger participants” reported solicited (expected) localized reactions (remaining in one part of the body), with 18% reporting Grade 3 or higher solicited local reactions, 86% of younger participants reporting “mild” solicited local reactions and 54% reporting “moderate” solicited local reactions.
  • 92% of younger participants reported solicited systemic reactions (spreading to other parts of the body), with 44% reporting Grade 3 or higher solicited systemic reactions, 90% reporting “mild” solicited systemic reactions and 74% experiencing “moderate” solicited systemic reactions.

The report states:

“The most frequently reported solicited systemic reactions of any severity were fatigue (n=68, 81%), headache (n=66, 79%), myalgia (n=51, 61%), malaise (n=50, 60%), and chills (n=47, 56%). The remaining symptom terms were less frequent.

“For nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, myalgia, arthralgia and fever each symptom was assessed as severe in ≤10% of participants.”

  • 45% of younger participants reported a total of 83 unsolicited (unexpected) TEAEs within 28 days of receiving the first or second dose.

A total of 51 of these unsolicited TEAEs were reported as “related” to the vaccination, while 2% of participants sustained Grade 3 or higher TEAEs (four in total), “of which three events were assessed as related by the investigator.”

No unsolicited TESAEs or deaths were reported in this category.

  • According to the report, among younger participants, TEAEs included:

“‘General disorders and administration site conditions’ reported by 9 participants (11%),” including influenza-like illness and injection site hematoma.

“‘Nervous system disorders’ reported by 10 participants (12%),” including presyncope, hyperaesthesia, paraesthesia, and headache.

“‘Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders’ reported by 9 participants (11%),” including cough and oropharyngeal pain.

Other symptoms included back pain, musculoskeletal chest pain, cervicobrachial syndrome, taste disorder, sleep disorder, depression, hallucination, dysmenorrhoea, pruritus and pityriasis rosea, while one participant required the excision (removal) of a papilloma.

  • One younger participant discontinued participation in the trial, “due to a moderate AE (malaise),” while another participant discontinued participation “due to dose-limiting toxicity.”
  • 83% of “older participants” reported solicited local reactions, but none were reported as Grade 3 or higher, while 83% of solicited local reactions were “mild” and 42% were “moderate.”
  • 92% of older participants reported solicited systemic reactions, with 28% of participants experiencing Grade 3 or higher solicited systemic reactions, 89% experiencing “mild” solicited systemic reactions, and 61% experiencing “moderate” solicited systemic reactions.

According to the report:

“The most frequently reported solicited systemic reactions of any severity were headache (n=29, 81%), fatigue (n=27, 75%), myalgia (n=18, 50%), and malaise (n=18, 50%). The remaining symptom terms were less frequent.”

  • 36% of participants reported a total of 24 unsolicited TEAEs within 28 days of the first or second dose, nine of which were assessed as “related” to the vaccination.

Of the participants in this category, 11% reported TEAEs of Grade 3 or higher (four events in total), with one of these events assessed as “related” to the vaccination.

  • TEAEs reported by older participants included oropharyngeal pain, nasopharyngitis, bladder dysfunction, sleep disorder, musculoskeletal pain and musculoskeletal chest pain, pollakiuria, migraine, syncope and alopecia.
  • One older participant receiving the BNT162b1 candidate sustained a TESAE (syncope), and there were no deaths in this category.

Of note, none of the participants for either vaccine candidate were pregnant, which raises questions about recommending and administering the vaccine to pregnant women despite the absence of any clinical trial data.

As the documents show, a wide range of adverse effects were reported, including cardiovascular and nervous system conditions, most of which were determined to be unrelated to the vaccination itself.

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

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Scientific Report: The Vaccine is “Worse than the Disease”. Reviewing Some Possible Unintended Consequences of the mRNA Vaccines Against COVID-19

May 19th, 2022 by Dr. Stephanie Seneff

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This important peer reviewed scientific study was first published in May 2021, five months after the commencement of the Covid vaccination program.

Its findings have since then been corroborated by numerous studies, many of which have been featured by Global Research.

The vaccine is more dangerous than the virus.

The vaccine should be withdrawn immediately

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, May 19 2022

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Abstract

Operation Warp Speed brought to market in the United States two mRNA vaccines, produced by Pfizer and Moderna. Interim data suggested high efficacy for both of these vaccines, which helped legitimize Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) by the FDA. However, the exceptionally rapid movement of these vaccines through controlled trials and into mass deployment raises multiple safety concerns. In this review we first describe the technology underlying these vaccines in detail. We then review both components of and the intended biological response to these vaccines, including production of the spike protein itself, and their potential relationship to a wide range of both acute and long-term induced pathologies, such as blood disorders, neurodegenerative diseases and autoimmune diseases.

Among these potential induced pathologies, we discuss the relevance of prion-protein-related amino acid sequences within the spike protein.

We also present a brief review of studies supporting the potential for spike protein “shedding”, transmission of the protein from a vaccinated to an unvaccinated person, resulting in symptoms induced in the latter.

We finish by addressing a common point of debate, namely, whether or not these vaccines could modify the DNA of those receiving the vaccination. While there are no studies demonstrating definitively that this is happening, we provide a plausible scenario, supported by previously established pathways for transformation and transport of genetic material, whereby injected mRNA could ultimately be incorporated into germ cell DNA for transgenerational transmission.

We conclude with our recommendations regarding surveillance that will help to clarify the long-term effects of these experimental drugs and allow us to better assess the true risk/benefit ratio of these novel technologies.

Introduction

Unprecedented. This word has defined so much about 2020 and the pandemic related to SARS-CoV-2. In addition to an unprecedented disease and its global response, COVID-19 also initiated an unprecedented process of vaccine research, production, testing, and public distribution (Shaw, 2021). The sense of urgency around combatting the virus led to the creation, in March 2020, of Operation Warp Speed (OWS), then-President Donald Trump’s program to bring a vaccine against COVID-19 to market as quickly as possible (Jacobs and Armstrong, 2020).
OWS established a few more unprecedented aspects of COVID-19. First, it brought the US Department of Defense into direct collaboration with US health departments with respect to vaccine distribution (Bonsell, 2021). Second, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) collaborated with the biotechnology company Moderna in bringing an unprecedented type of vaccine against infectious disease to market, one utilizing a technology based on messenger RNA (mRNA) (National Institutes of Health, 2020).The confluence of these unprecedented events has rapidly brought to public awareness the promise and potential of mRNA vaccines as a new weapon against infectious diseases into the future. At the same time, events without precedent are, by definition, without a history and context against which to fully assess risks, hoped-for benefits, safety, and long-term viability as a positive contribution to public health.

In this paper we will be briefly reviewing one particular aspect of these unprecedented events, namely the development and deployment of mRNA vaccines against the targeted class of infectious diseases under the umbrella of “SARS-CoV-2.” We believe many of the issues we raise here will be applicable to any future mRNA vaccine that might be produced against other infectious agents, or in applications related to cancer and genetic diseases, while others seem specifically relevant to mRNA vaccines currently being implemented against the subclass of corona viruses.

While the promises of this technology have been widely heralded, the objectively assessed risks and safety concerns have received far less detailed attention. It is our intention to review several highly concerning molecular aspects of infectious disease-related mRNA technology, and to correlate these with both documented and potential pathological effects.

Read the full article here.

Below is Dr. Stephanie Seneff’s video interview with Dr. Joseph Mercola

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Featured image:  A hand holding an mRNA vaccine vial. (Spencer Davis / Unsplash)

Law Enforcement Officials in Santa Fe New Mexico: County Sheriff Deputies Union Wins Case on COVID Vaccine Mandate

May 19th, 2022 by Sean Thomas

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Santa Fe County erred in disciplining sheriff’s deputies who failed to comply with a vaccine mandate, an arbitrator with the New Mexico Public Employees Labor Relations Board decided in March.

Thomas Griego, a hearing officer with the board, recommended the county rescind “any and all discipline” issued against members of the Santa Fe County Deputy Sheriff’s Association over their refusal to comply with a COVID-19 vaccination policy until mediation can occur.

He found the county implemented disciplinary actions, including termination of deputies, after the union had declared an impasse in negotiations.

The result could be the reinstatement of at least three deputies who were union members.

While union President Eddie Webb lauded the hearing officer’s recommendation and said he looked forward to reinstating the three who were fired for noncompliance, he indicated the vaccine mandate has a much broader effect. Five deputies quit before they could be fired, he said, and several deputies in training who were not yet union members were dismissed.

Santa Fe County spokeswoman Carmelina Hart could not be reached for comment on Griego’s recommendation or whether the county would follow through with it.

Griego wrote in his report on the decision,

“The county breached a duty to bargain in good faith by its unilateral imposition of discipline ‘up to and including termination’ because that is an aspect of a new work rule that is grounds for discipline and consequently is a mandatory subject of bargaining not covered by the contract.”

“The union is not anti-vaccine,” Webb said of the Santa Fe County Deputy Sheriff’s Association, a subsidiary of the New Mexico Coalition of Public Safety Officers. “Ninety-five percent of us are vaccinated. But we are pro making sure our deputies’ rights are followed, and this is what this really came down to.”

He added,

“It sucks because we lost very experienced people both in the union and not in the union.”

On Aug. 20, 2021, the county circulated a draft vaccine policy among employees, including those in the sheriff’s office. The deputies union, in response, requested a chance to discuss the proposed policy with county officials.

The county informed the union Nov. 9 it was unilaterally implementing its last, best offer, which required county employees to be vaccinated or provide an exemption by Dec. 10. That prompted the union to declare an impasse.

Still, the policy went into effect on Nov. 11, and terminations began in December, leading to more negotiations in January.

Webb said the policy worsened an already-concerning vacancy issue within the sheriff’s office. Out of 99 deputy positions, 20 are vacant, he said.

“We are working pretty short-staffed, and the idea of getting three experienced people back is pretty nice,” he said.

Webb said the union asked the county for a testing policy in lieu of the vaccine mandate, but it was told the proposal didn’t make sense fiscally.

“It cannot be expensive to administer a testing program for three people,” he said.

Sheriff Adan Mendoza said at a recent forum for sheriff candidates he had fought for a testing option but ultimately supported the vaccination mandate imposed by the county.

His only challenger, Santa Fe police Lt. David Webb, said at the forum he would enforce the vaccine mandate but was personally against the policy.

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Homeland Security ‘Pauses’ Disinformation Board Three Weeks After Creating It

May 19th, 2022 by J. Fingas

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The Biden administration may be struggling in its efforts to fight security-related misinformation. The Washington Post sources claim the Department of Homeland Security has “paused” a Disinformation Governance Board just three weeks after its April 27th announcement. Officials reportedly decided to shut down the board May 16th, but that decision appears to be on hold after a last-minute effort to retain board leader Nina Jankowicz. She resigned from the board and the DHS today (May 18th).

While the leakers didn’t directly explain why the Disinformation Governance Board was frozen, they claim the White House neither had clear messaging nor a defense against misinformation and threats levelled against Jankowicz. The board was meant to examine approaches for fighting viral lies and had no power over content, but far-right influencers and outlets misrepresented it as a censorship tool and villainized Jankowicz. The campaigns led to harassment and threats against the board leader — in other words, the board was the victim of the very sort of attack it was supposed to prevent.

We’ve asked the DHS for comment. In a statement to the Post, the department said the board’s role had been “grossly mischaracterized” and that Jankowicz had been targeted by “unjustified and vile personal attacks and threats.” Previously, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and White House press secretary Jen Psaki have respectively tried to clarify the board’s objectives and debunk falsehoods with little effect.

There is a chance the board could survive depending on a Homeland Security Advisory Council review. If the reports are true, though, the US government may have to rethink its anti-disinformation efforts if they’re going to survive both criticism and internal scrutiny.

Update 5/18 2:20PM ET: Homeland Security provided its full statement to Engadget. The department defended both the board and Jankowicz, and noted that its Advisory Council will conduct a “thorough” review to improve its anti-disinformation efforts as well as increase transparency. Final recommendations are due within 75 days. You can read the full statement below.

“DHS created an internal working group called the Disinformation Governance Board to ensure the Department’s disinformation-related work protects free speech, civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy. It was intended to ensure coordination across the Department’s component agencies as they protect Americans from disinformation that threatens the homeland – including malicious efforts spread by foreign adversaries, human traffickers, and transnational criminal organizations. The Board has been grossly and intentionally mischaracterized: it was never about censorship or policing speech in any manner. It was designed to ensure we fulfill our mission to protect the homeland, while protecting core Constitutional rights. However, false attacks have become a significant distraction from the Department’s vitally important work to combat disinformation that threatens the safety and security of the American people.

“To help instill trust in our work, Secretary Mayorkas has asked former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick to lead a thorough review and assessment, conducted through the bipartisan Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC). This assessment will focus on answering two pivotal questions. First, how can the Department most effectively and appropriately address disinformation that poses a threat to our country, while protecting free speech, civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy. Second, how can DHS achieve greater transparency across our disinformation-related work and increase trust with the public and other key stakeholders. The Secretary has requested the HSAC’s final recommendations within 75 days. During the HSAC’s review, the Board will not convene and its work will be paused, but the Department’s critical work across several administrations to address disinformation that threatens the security of our country will continue.”

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Selected Articles: Will a Weaponized Bird Flu Become the Next Pandemic?

May 19th, 2022 by Global Research News

Will a Weaponized Bird Flu Become the Next Pandemic?

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, May 18, 2022

In early April 2022, news of a highly pathogenic bird flu ripping through chicken and turkey flocks in the U.S., triggering the slaughter of millions of these animals, was reported.2,3 Historically, however, the bird flu has never posed a threat to mankind — that is until scientists started tinkering with it, creating a hybrid with human pandemic potential.

Video: Pfizer Has a Criminal Record. Is It Relevant?

By US Department of Justice, May 19, 2022

In September 2009, Justice Department attorneys and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius held a news conference “dealing with a health care-related settlement”.

Newest Military Killer/Surveillance Drones in U.S. Domestic Airspace

By Barry Summers, May 18, 2022

April 1st was a good news/bad news kind of day for U.S. military drone-maker General Atomics. First, it was reported that the government of Australia had revealed that they were canceling the planned purchase of 12 MQ-9B SkyGuardian drones, made by General Atomics (GA). Since the deal would have been worth a cool one billion dollars to GA, this was definitely the bad news.

Turkey Sponsored Terrorists in Northern Syria Attack Bus with 12 Dead and 14 Wounded

By Steven Sahiounie, May 18, 2022

A Syrian military bus was attacked on Friday, which killed 12 soldiers and wounded 14, between the towns of Nubl and Al Zahra, west of Aleppo at 9:30 am.  The attack was carried out by the Turkish sponsored ‘Sultan Shah’ terrorist group, which used a TOW anti-tank rocket. The Obama administration, by act of the US Congress, sent the Radical Islamic terrorists based in northwest Syria the US made TOW anti-tank missiles.

Pentagon-Funded Think Tank Simulates War with China on NBC

By Caitlin Johnstone, May 18, 2022

NBC’s Meet the Press just aired an absolutely freakish segment in which the influential narrative management firm Center for a New American Security (CNAS) ran war games simulating a direct US hot war with China.

Are France and NATO Shipping Depleted Uranium Weaponry Into Ukraine?

By Freddie Ponton, May 18, 2022

During a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky this past week, President Emmanuel Macron insisted that France would step up its military and humanitarian support for Ukraine.

Massacre in Buffalo Highlights the Legacy of Racist Violence

By Abayomi Azikiwe, May 18, 2022

The 18-year-old shooter, Payton Gendron, has been heavily influenced by the white supremacist ideology of replacement theory which encourages violent attacks against African Americans and other nationalities in the United States.

FDA Authorizes Pfizer Booster for Kids 5 to 11, Bypasses Advisory Panel

By Megan Redshaw, May 18, 2022

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today authorized a booster dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11, without convening its vaccine advisory panel of independent experts to discuss Pfizer’s data on 5- to 11-year-olds — and based on a study subset of only 67 children, CNBC reported.

Video: The World Health Order (WHO) and the “Global Pandemic Treaty”: The Back Door to “Global Tyranny”

By Peter Koenig and Angel Warrior Network, May 18, 2022

The Angel Warrior Network & Punisher Dallas is diving into learning about WHO (World Health Order) actually is. What their agenda is. How are they funded and Why do they want our sovereignty? Peter Koenig gives us some insight after years of working for them and other closely related companies. Join us for details and many links below will be listed for even more information.

Video: Ukraine War: The Azovstal Fortress in Mariupol Is Falling

By South Front, May 18, 2022

On May 16, the main “fortress of the Ukrainian Resistance” fell. Ukrainian militants blockaded at the Azovstal plant in the city of Mariupol raised the white flag and asked for evacuation of the wounded. As a result of the Russian shelling, the members of the Ukrainian nationalist Azov regiment were recently cut off from a water source on the territory of the facility.

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COVID Brain Fade at the Australian Elections. No Candidate Is Mentioning the “Troubling Issue of the COVID-19 Pandemic”

May 19th, 2022 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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It’s the last week of an election between the uninspiring and the unspeakable.  Australia’s conservative incumbents – the unspeakable ones – are even desperate enough to concede to a lack of popularity.  Dislike us, but for heaven’s sake, vote us in.  The times are wretched, the cost of living is rising, and we are going to look after you in the spiral.  The opposition, in contrast, is being stingy on detail and sparing on scope.  Memories of 2019 continue to traumatise the Australian Labor Party.  

Scouring the election platforms, statements, and town hall debates, is a glaring absence of one particular field of policy.  Virtually no candidate or major political party is mentioning that troubling issue of COVID-19 and the global pandemic.  That was the dark past, and, like released jailbirds, voters find themselves preoccupied with other matters.

Sporadically, mention is made about the Morrison government’s tardy ordering and supply of COVID-19 vaccines – at least in the initial phase.  At that time, Prime Minister Scott Morrison, rather infamously, dismissed the slow rollout.  This wasn’t, he opined, a race.

In his first campaign video, Morrison burnished his own credentials as a warrior against COVID-19, having been responsible for saving thousands of lives.  (The States and Territories, all far more engaged in the matter than Morrison ever was, are ignored.) But the primary message was that of, “A choice between an economic recovery that is leading the world, and a Labor opposition that would weaken it, and risk it.”

Despite Australia’s enviable record, the emergence of the furiously transmissible Omicron variant and a death toll this year surpassing the combined figures of 2020 and 2021, have seen a departure from previous policy.  As Raina MacIntyre of the Kirby Institute remarked in January, Australia “swung from one extreme in pandemic control to the other – having great control of COVID, to now having the world’s highest rise in daily cases.”

Scenes of chaos ensued.  The vulnerable had to queue for hours as testing centres were overwhelmed.  A number of such centres were also closed, often without good reason.  The Commonwealth and State governments tinkered with definitions on eligibility regarding testing, all the time refusing to expand capacity.  MacIntyre was distinctly unimpressed.  “There was no planning for expedited third-dose boosters, expanded testing capacity, rapid antigen tests, hospital in the home, opening of schools or even guidance for people to protect their household when one person becomes infected.”

None of this has made a difference in the political platform, nor, it seems, in voter interest. The COVID brain fade has well and truly set in.  According to data generated by the ABC’s Vote Compass, a mere 1 per cent of Australians consider COVID the most important issue in this election.  Vulnerable members of society are being seen as “collateral” to the overall scheme.  Living with the virus has also meant suffering and even perishing from it.

The only party making much of COVID-19, and not from the perspective of praising vaccines and sound pandemic management, is the United Australia Party. Bankrolled by the quixotic mining magnate Clive Palmer, millions have been spent on media campaigns that have seen no discernible shift in the polls.

By default, health officials and experts have become crying Cassandras and the concerned oracles.  Virologist Stuart Turville has observed, with exasperation, that the federal election campaign has been afflicted by “a case of COVID Fight Club.  Don’t talk about it.”  Future policies on the subject are virtually absent. “What will happen if we don’t get our third or fourth dose?” wonders Turville.  “Will we see the death rate creep up from 40, to 60, to 80 before we start to talk about this again?”

Another figure of some woe and worry is Burnet Institute director, Brendan Crabb, who claims that politicians and governments have resolutely kept their “heads in the sand”.  There was a dangerous sense of “COVID now”.  Continuing high rates of transmission was “bad for business”.  The longer health impacts were also being neglected.  “How many of the 350,000 plus active cases in Australia right now will have chronic impacts?  Overseas data suggests 20 per cent of them.”

Epidemiologist Nancy Baxter, based at the University of Melbourne, is another who can always be relied upon to deter any emerging complacency.  “We’re at a point,” she gravely states, “where COVID is now one of the major killers of Australians, and probably by the end of the year is going to be one of the top three.”  She adds further lashings of doom.  “And with increasing case numbers, new sub-variants [will be] coming in.  This may drive it even further, which would have a bigger impact.”

If the current mood prevails till May 21, we can expect little purchase from such attitudes at the ballot box.  Fiscal responsibility, the consumer price index, climate change and the China bogeyman, are likely to feature ahead of the most disruptive pandemic in a century.

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

Featured image: A woman walks her dogs in Fitzroy Gardens park as police and defence force officers patrol in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia [David Crosling/EPA]

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Pfizer Document Dump Shows Doctor with Ties to Gates Foundation Deleted Trial Participant’s Vaccine Injury

May 19th, 2022 by Michael Nevradakis

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An 80,000-page cache of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine documents released by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sheds light on Pfizer’s extensive vaccine trials in Argentina, including the unusually large size of the trials and the story of a trial participant whose vaccine reaction was “disappeared.”

The case of Augusto Roux in Argentina suggests that in at least one instance, a trial participant whose symptoms were determined to be connected to the COVID-19 vaccine was later listed, in official records, as having experienced adverse events that were not related to the vaccination.

Vaccine trials in Argentina also appear to have glossed over adverse events suffered by other trial participants, and the potential connection between the adverse events and the vaccine.

The FDA on May 2 released the latest cache of documents, which pertain to the Emergency Use Authorization of Pfizer’s vaccine, as part of a court-ordered disclosure schedule stemming from an expedited Freedom of Information Act request filed in August 2021.

As previously reported by The Defender, the documents included Case Report Forms from Pfizer COVID vaccine trials in the U.S., and the “third interim report” from BioNTech’s trials conducted in Germany, both of which listed adverse events sustained by participants in the U.S. and German trials.

Many of these adverse events were indicated as being “unrelated” to the vaccines — even in instances where the patients were healthy or otherwise had no prior medical history related to the injuries they sustained.

Story of ‘disappeared patient’ goes public

Several bloggers and online investigators called into question various aspects of the Argentine vaccine trials, pointing out the number of participants in the Argentine trials dwarfed that of other, typically smaller trials at other locations in different countries.

They also pointed out the large number of participants appeared to have been recruited to the trial in a remarkably short time, and questioned the connections between one of the key figures of the Argentine trial to vaccine manufacturers, Big Pharma and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The large number of trial participants in Argentina may be related to the fact that the trial appears to have been held simultaneously in 26 hospitals.

The large number of participants is revealed in another of the documents released this month, where on page 2,245, the list of randomized participants at trial site 1231 begins, while on page 4,329, the list of participants at trial site 4444 begins.

Site 1231 refers to the main trial site location and 4444 (page 24) most likely refers to the disparate hospitals participating in the trial outside the main location.

Commenting on the revelation, blogger David Healy wrote:

“About 5,800 volunteers were enrolled, half getting the active vaccine. This is almost 4 times more than the next largest centre in this trial.

“Amazingly 467 doctors were almost instantly signed up and trained as assistant investigators in the study.”

In all, 4,501 patients participated in the Argentine trials, representing 10% of all Pfizer trial participants worldwide.

Complete information about adverse events during this extensive trial in Argentina does not appear to have been released as of this writing.

However, Roux’s experience has since become public.

Roux, often referred to as the “disappeared” patient, volunteered for the trial (volunteer number 12312982) and received his first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Aug. 21, 2020.

According to Healy, Roux “felt pain and swelling in his arm right after the injection. Later that day he had nausea, difficulty swallowing, and felt hungover.”

After a series of symptoms, Roux — during a clinical trial visit on Aug. 23, 2020 — was classified as experiencing a “toxicity grade 1 adverse effect.”

He nevertheless received his second dose on Sept. 9, 2020.

According to Healy:

“On the way home by taxi, he started feeling unwell. At 19:30, he was short of breath, had a burning pain in his chest and was extremely fatigued. He lay on his bed and fell asleep. He woke up at 21:00 with nausea and fever (38-39 C) and was unable to get out of bed due to the fatigue.

“Over the next two days, he reports a high fever (41 C) and feeling delirious.

“On September 11, he was able to get out of bed and go to the bathroom when he observed his urine to be dark (like Coca-Cola). He felt as if his heart expanded, had a sudden lack of breath and fell unconscious on the floor for approximately 3 hours.

“Once he recovered, he felt tired, was uncomfortable, had a high heart rate on minor movement, was dizzy when changing posture. He had a chest pain which radiated to his left arm and back.”

On Sept. 12, 2020, Roux was admitted to the Hospital Alemán, where he stayed for two days. It was initially believed he had COVID-19, but he tested negative for the virus. His symptoms also were found to not correspond with viral pneumonia.

After a series of X-rays, CT scans and urine tests, Roux was discharged Sept. 14, 2020, after being diagnosed with an adverse reaction — specifically, an unequivocal pericardial effusion — to the coronavirus vaccine (high probability), according to his discharge summary.

Doctor who altered Roux’s record had ties to Gates, NIH, Big Pharma

However, on Sept. 17, Dr. Fernando Polack, Pfizer’s lead investigator for the Argentine trials according to a Pfizer document released in December 2021, reported in Roux’s record that his “hospitalization was not related to the vaccine.”

Even after Roux’s discharge, his health difficulties continued. As reported by Healy:

“On November 13 [2020], he had negative IgG and IgM SARS COV-2 (QML technique), which is unusual post vaccine.

“On February 24, 2021, a liver scan showed a minor degree of abnormality. In March 2021 and February 2022, his liver enzymes remained abnormal.”

Ultimately, Roux lost 14 kilograms (30.8 pounds) in a period of three to four months, and continued to suffer from fever and bouts of breathlessness for several months afterward.

Polack, who reported Roux’s hospitalization as unrelated to the vaccination, is known for his close ties with various vaccine manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

For instance, he is listed as the lead author in a Dec. 31, 2020, New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) article on the purported efficacy of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.

According to Healy, Polack also appears to be the founder of iTRIALS, a trial site management company, and another organization located at the same physical headquarters, the Fundación INFANT.

Healy wrote:

“When COVID struck Argentina, [Polack] and his Fundación became involved in a trial of immune plasma, taken from patients who had recovered from COVID, given to patients who had recently acquired the disease.

“In May 2020 he speculated that this would make COVID like an ordinary cold, and the Gates Foundation would offer financial support. He used high-profile press conferences to disseminate his exciting message.”

The conclusion of the study published in the NEJM following the plasma study reads:

“Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Fundación INFANT Pandemic Fund; Dirección de Sangre y Medicina Transfusional del Ministerio de Salud number, PAEPCC19, Plataforma de Registro Informatizado de Investigaciones en Salud number, 1421, and ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT04479163.”

According to Healy,

“[a] subsequent systematic review and meta-analysis failed to confirm these findings, noting ‘very serious imprecision concerns.’”

Healy pointed out that Polack, in his NEJM disclosure statement, did not indicate any conflict of interest or financial interest in the COVID-19 vaccine trials in Argentina, but:

“Polack reported grants from Novavax and personal fees from Janssen, Bavarian Nordic A/S, Pfizer, Sanofi, Regeneron, Merck, Medimmune, Vir Bio[technology], Ark Bio, Daiichi Sankyo outside the submitted work.

“At least eight of these companies are engaged in RSV vaccine research in babies and pregnant women. Fernando has mentioned a combined RSV, flu and COVID vaccine.”

And, in relation to Polack’s relationship with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Healy reported:

“[Polack] also doesn’t mention his extensive financial involvement with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This organization supports industry vaccine trials including Covid and RSV. Fernando is heavily involved through his Gates-sponsored Fundación INFANT in Buenos Aires in RSV trials and research.

“Gates sunk $82,553,834 into Novavax’s RSV vaccine ResVax which was shown to be ineffective in clinical trials in pregnant women.”

Polack’s own bio from a 2017 medical conference states

“[h]is work is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Institutes of Health [NIH], the Thrasher Research Fund, the Optimus Foundation and other international organizations.”

That same year, Polack testified at an FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) meeting, where he “acknowledged having financial interests in or professional relationships with some of the affected firms identified for this meeting, namely Janssen [producer of the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine], Novavax, and Bavarian Nordic.”

According to Dr. Joseph Mercola, Polack “also happens to be a consultant for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC),” and “a current adjunct professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.”

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

Newest Military Killer/Surveillance Drones in U.S. Domestic Airspace

May 18th, 2022 by Barry Summers

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***

April 1st was a good news/bad news kind of day for U.S. military drone-maker General Atomics. First, it was reported that the government of Australia had revealed that they were canceling the planned purchase of 12 MQ-9B SkyGuardian drones, made by General Atomics (GA). Since the deal would have been worth a cool one billion dollars to GA, this was definitely the bad news.

Source: breakingdefense.com

Luckily, GA had a good news story in the works. And as luck would have it, it would run on the same day as the bad news story.

Source: ga.com

Back in January, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) handed GA $1.5 million to fly the 79-ft. 12,000 lbs SkyGuardian over North Dakota for 10 hours. (GA apparently didn’t feel the need for a press release and the resulting news article until the day before some bad news from down under was in the pipeline.)

The stated purpose of the FAA grant to GA was “to research Detect and Avoid (DAA) capabilities.” (DAA, the ability for an unmanned aircraft to ‘detect’ another aircraft, and ‘avoid’ it, is the Holy Grail of drone integration. “Integration” is the process of removing restrictions against drones operating in domestic U.S. airspace.)

That’s right—the FAA was PAYING a U.S. arms manufacturer $1.5 million in public monies to demonstrate their newest military surveillance drone over domestic U.S. territory.

If this is all a surprise to you, you’re not alone. The program to integrate military drones into U.S. domestic airspace has been operating for 10 years. It involves various federal agencies—DoD, FAA, NASA, Commerce, Energy, DHS, etc. But it hasn’t been reported on in any major news venue since the day before the bill creating it was signed into law in 2012 by then-President Barack Obama.

Source: latines.com

Of course, the military has been preparing to operate their drones in U.S. domestic airspace since long before that. Here, a U.S. Air Force officer briefs FAA officials on the plans to fly Reaper drones in-and-out of Hancock Field in Syracuse, all the way back in January of 2010.

Source: 174attackwing.ang.af.mil

And then, wouldn’t you know, when the FAA designated six drone integration test sites around the country in 2014 (supposedly after a rigorous competition), one of them was based in New York state. And that USAF officer from 2010 was put on staff to direct the very operation that he had described nine years earlier. Here’s a screengrab of his 2019 presentation on the operation (which has since disappeared from the NUAIR website.)

Source: nuair.com

Less than a year after THAT “Success Story” of Reapers flying over populated areas of New York, one of them crashed upon takeoff at the Syracuse-Hancock Int. Airport. The drone with up to two tons of aviation fuel went down mere seconds from a densely-populated residential and commercial part of Syracuse. It took almost a year before the Air Force released that information to the public.

Source: syracuse.com

Why would they be so secretive about one of their drones nearly causing a catastrophe in a U.S. city? Maybe because it was the second Reaper crash in as many days. One had gone down somewhere in Africa just the day before, because of a maintenance problem GA had known about for months but hadn’t fixed.

More likely, it might have been because at the time, GA was trying to fly the Reaper’s big brother, the new MQ-9B SkyGuardian, over the City of San Diego, supposedly to demonstrate the commercial applications of large military-grade drones. Three weeks before the Syracuse crash, the Voice of San Diego had announced that they were suing the FAA and GA over the secrecy surrounding that attempt.

Source: voiceofsandiego.org

That proposed flight was eventually rejected by the professionals at FAA, but FAA leadership still fought tooth and nail in court to not reveal the reasons why. Whatever the reason, that rejection turns out to have been well-justified. GA was forced to take a consolation flight over the desert, and because the project was supported by NASA, they had to issue a report. That report clearly shows that the crucial DAA system (which Australia had said was the basis for choosing the MQ-9B), had failed repeatedly during the flight.

Source: ntrs.nasa.gov

Don’t bother looking for that overview. Somehow, it never made it into the report…

With all that failure, General Atomics and the federal government are still moving ahead with plans to open U.S. domestic airspace to routine operation of military surveillance drones. In fact, GA is already previewing the opportunity (to commercial AND government customers) to lease their drones for surveillance flights in domestic or international airspace. They’re even considering a ““pay by the hour” scenario”.

The Leasing page on the General Atomics website ends with this odd signoff: “-ISR/24/7/365-”.

“Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.” Over the United States… Coming soon?

Source: ga-asi.com

 

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Barry Summers, an activist living in North Carolina, has been researching military drone integration since 2014. Barry can be reached at: [email protected].

Featured image is from aerospace-technology.com

U.S. Ukraine Policy Most Reckless Since 1962 Missile Crisis. Promote Negotiations to End the War

May 18th, 2022 by Walt Zlotow

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***

In 1952, I was blessed, maybe cursed, to have parents who taught me about war and peace as a second grader. Back then it was the Korean War which didn’t make much sense to this 7 year old. Seventy years on it still doesn’t, just like every other war America has been involved in, whether directly, like Korea, or as with Ukraine today, by proxy. 

That early lesson ignited a lifelong fascination with U.S. foreign policy. What became true during all 70 years is that regarding foreign wars and entanglements, one could depend on America. It always lets us down.

For the first decade I fully bought into American moral superiority regarding our Cold War opposition to Soviet communism. That belief was shattered from America’s reaction to the necessary and inevitable Cuban revolution of 1959.

In April, 1961, we launched a proxy invasion of the tiny Cuban island of 6 million to overthrow revolutionary leader Fidel Castro. As dastardly as that failed venture was, it paled in comparison to the Cuban Missile Crisis just 18 months later that led the world to the brink of nuclear war with Russia. It took a miracle, likely several, to prevent nuclear winter.

Just 17 at the time, I spent 13 days wondering if each day would be my last. At bedtime, I hoped I’d wake up next morning. Surely, I thought afterwards, we’d learned the lesson that foreign adventurism risking nuclear war is madness.

But 60 years on we’re back at first provoking, then prolonging a proxy war with Russia, 5,000 miles from the homeland, with no connection to our national security interests whatsoever. Unlike every other war America has provoked or participated in since October, 1962, this one has the capability to go nuclear in a heartbeat from simple error, stupidity, miscalculation or desperation.

America’s provocations, along with our NATO allies and wannabe member Ukraine go back 14 years to our announcement to extend NATO membership to Ukraine, likely and needlessly putting NATO troops and weaponry on Russia’s doorstep. Six years later we inspired and supported a coup to oust the Russian leaning Ukraine president because he wanted to partner economically with Russia.

That set off a civil war with Russian speaking Ukrainians in the Donbas where over 14,000 were killed, with an all-out Ukrainian invasion against the Donbas in the works early this year since 2014. Any wonder why such provocations might inspire the massive Russian invasion in response?

Once begun, the U.S. had but one sensible response: promote negotiations to end the war. Successful negotiations would have resulted in no NATO for Ukraine and regional autonomy for the Donbas.

The tragedy is that Ukraine agreed back in 2015 to grant that autonomy under the Minsk II Accords brokered by Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France.

But the Ukraine ultranationalists, elevated to power in both the Ukraine government and military after the 2014 coup, sabotaged Minsk II. The U.S. was all in for that sabotage, viewing successful Minsk II as a victory for Russia that had to be isolated and weakened regardless of the risk that posed.

Instead of negotiations, America responded with $14 billion in military aid with $40 Billion more being passed by Congress this week. That’s $54 billion in American treasure, desperately needed to shore up our crumbling society, to prolong a war destroying Ukraine as a functioning nation.

President Biden, 19 at the time, surely remembers our brush with nuclear war sixty years ago over Cuba. He’s said as much to the most vociferous war lovers in government and the media calling for a no-fly zone, possible U.S. ground troops, even contemplating a nuclear response. His refusal to negotiate de-escalation while funneling endless weaponry to prolong the war, risks more than further destruction of Ukraine. It puts the world closer to nuclear war anytime since the ’62 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Time for President Biden, his war cabinet of Defense Secretary Austin, Secretary of State Blinken and the Democratic and Republican Congressional leadership, to be locked in a room to watch the 2000 Kevin Costner flick ’Thirteen Days.’ They might learn how common sense, real concern for the survival of our planet, and willingness to negotiate a ‘win-win’ agreement with Russia, averted WWIII back in ’62. On second thought, fly in Ukraine president Zelensky and NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg as well. Neither are old enough to remember our 1962 brush with nuclear annihilation.

Speaking of time…it’s running out. And this time there may be no miracles.

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Featured image: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, left, shakes hands with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin during their meeting in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, October 19, 2021. [Source: cbs17.com]

“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  

Scott Ritter: Live-Action Role Play. America’s Legionnaires in Defense of Ukraine

May 18th, 2022 by Scott Ritter

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***

Malcolm Nance, Dennis Diaz and Willy Joseph Cancel: Their experiences — one fatal — offer a sobering view of Americans in the International Legion of the Territorial Defense of Ukraine.

It was — literally — a made-for-television moment. A former U.S. Navy chief petty officer turned cable news pundit, dressed in a fresh out-of-the-box camouflage uniform replete with body armor and magazine pouches, wearing matching camouflage helmet and gloves, and cradling an automatic rifle, stared into the camera and announced “I am here to help this country [Ukraine] fight what is essentially a war of extermination.”

With a Ukrainian flag on his left shoulder, and a U.S. flag emblazoned on his body armor, the man, Malcolm Nance, declared that “This is an existential war, and Russia has brought it to these people and is mass murdering civilians.”

A day before, Nance had tweeted a black-and-white photograph of himself, similarly clad, announcing “I’m DONE talking.”

Nance spent 20 years in the U.S. Navy as a cryptologic technician, interpretive (CTI), specializing in the Arabic language, and has turned his career into a thing of legend, so much so that when he speaks of his journey from news desk to Ukraine, it almost sounds convincing.

“Ukraine announced that there was an international force on Feb. 27,” Nance told one reporter,

“and I started looking into it on Feb. 28 … I called the Ukrainian embassy in Washington, and I said: ‘Hey, I want an appointment.’ They were a little slow, so I just went down there and put in my application. The guy asked if I had combat experience and I said ‘Yep.’ Then he looked at my application and said, ‘You’re on the team.’”

Just like that.

But the hype doesn’t match the reality.

Although he sports a combat action ribbon on the lapel of his coat jacket (when not attired in full combat regalia), Nance has never actually participated in ground combat operations, according to a serviceman who served with him. His “combat” experience was limited to providing linguistic support onboard a U.S. Navy ship off the coast of Beirut in 1983. Important work, but not combat.

Despite this resume enhancement, Nance was — according to Nance — a natural for recruitment by Ukraine. In the days before the Russian invasion, Nance was in Ukraine, reporting for MSNBC.

But being Malcolm Nance, he claimed to be doing so much more.

“I spent a month in Ukraine,” Nance recalled, “driving around, mapping out the Russian order of battle, driving up and down the highways and analyzing where the invasion routes would come and go. So I knew the country backward and forwards by the time of the invasion.”

(It might be time to remind the reader that Nance’s Navy specialism in Arabic gave him neither the training nor the experience to conduct the kind of battlefield intelligence preparation that he described.)

The Ukrainians know this. So why would they take on a 61-year old Arabic linguist whose physical presence on any battlefield would be seen as a detriment?

‘Not an Infantry Guy’

“I’m not an infantry guy,” Nance is quick to admit. However,

“combat isn’t about being a murdering, Seal Team Six assassin; it’s mainly about precision, accurate fire, selective fire, keeping people calm, getting on the line and moving forward.”

None of which are skill sets in Nance’s real-life resume.

Despite his larger-than-life televised send-off, and his proclivity for dressing and acting like an aging LARP (live action role play) warrior on a weekend airsoft reenactment, Nance’s real-world duties mimic those he was performing with MSNBC.

Airsoft player. (UNHchabo, CC BY 2.5, Wikimedia Commons)

“Right now, part of my duty is to the press,” Nance admitted during a recent interview.

“They [the Ukrainians] were well aware that I was a high-level asset. So, instead of putting me out on the line, I’m in a safe house talking to people like you.”

Today, Nance is little more than a poorly paid newsroom producer (the Ukrainians pay him and other Legionnaires $600 per month). “I get up at 4 and what I do is I read, I read the news. I try to feel the battlefront based on Ukrainian news and reporting. And then I look at expert analysis from the previous night in the West.”

But he is always hopeful for some action.

“No matter where I am, no matter what I’m doing, I constantly check my gear. If I’m in a safe house on a press junket, like I am now, I go over all of my gear. I reorganize my pack. I assume that I will have to take everything, get up and run with it or move to a forward location.”

This would all be pathetic if it were not irresponsibly dangerous.

Nance fronts for the International Legion of the Territorial Defense of Ukraine, which he describes as “a branch of the Ukrainian army.”

According to Nance, the International Legion is “an organized combat element with contracts signed by the Ukrainian army. We are paid by the Ukrainian army and get a Geneva convention ID card.”

And the mission of the International Brigade? Simply put, per Nance, if a Ukrainian unit is “on the line and they need more reinforcement, they will get a legion unit to give them more manpower.”

Dennis Diaz

Dennis Diaz enlisted in the U.S. Marines in 2000. He was deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, before being honorably discharged in 2004.

In early March, Diaz, an entrepreneur and former 2020 candidate for U.S. president from Waterbury, Connecticut, now 39 and the father of four, volunteered to serve in the International Legion.

“I’m ready to roll,” he told local media before leaving the U.S. “Whatever I have to bring, I’m going to pack it up and we’re going to take care of business.”

His age and obvious lack of physical conditioning did not seem to be an obstacle for the one-time combat Marine. “War,” he told the press, “is 90 percent mental, 10 percent physical.”

Diaz says he has a lot to offer Ukraine.

“I have a lot of military experience,” he said, “I did go to Iraq and Afghanistan … I have some flight experience. Also, I was field artillery in the Marine Corps. Also, I’ve got some experience driving tanks. Enough to be a valuable asset to Ukraine.”

According to his Tik Tok page, Diaz spent some $2,700 of his own money purchasing uniforms and field equipment, including a flak vest and helmet, to take with him to Ukraine.

But by late March, Diaz was still in the U.S., waiting further instructions from the Ukrainian embassy. He never made the trip.

The Ukrainians, it seemed, had cooled to the idea of Americans fighting for the International Legion. Where once they were welcoming (“Foreigners willing to defend Ukraine and world order as part of the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine, I invite you to contact foreign diplomatic missions of Ukraine in your respective countries,” the Ukrainian foreign minister tweeted in early March), by the end of March the Ukrainian embassy stopped publicly commenting on U.S. applications.

The primary reason for this newfound publicity shyness appears to be the poor performance of the International Legion during its first combat experiences, fighting Russian troops in the Kiev suburb of Irpin in mid-March.

Haphazard Approach

The haphazard approach to recruitment was the norm, it seemed, for the entire intake and training processes associated with the legion.

Potential recruits made their own way to Poland, from where they were told to head to the western Ukrainian city of Lvov. The candidate legionnaires were then taken to Livorov, a military camp outside Lvov, where they were subjected to a rudimentary selection process that sought to separate those with and without combat experience.

Those with combat experience were issued weapons and ammunition and sent straight to the front, where they were integrated with Ukrainian Territorial Defense Units. Those without were given a rudimentary four-week basic training course.

The first group of “combat tested” legionnaires were sent to Irpin, where they were tasked with conducting a “hasty defense” against a Russian attack.

While the Ukrainians held, the performance of the legion was “uneven,” resulting in many of the newly minted legionnaires being unceremoniously released from service and sent home. The lackluster performance of the legion had become a domestic political issue, prompting the Ukrainian government to halt recruitment due in large part to the lack of weapons and the lack of military experience.

Some legionnaires, however, were asked to stay, including a four-man team led by a veteran U.S. Army combat engineer with two deployments to Afghanistan named Cameron Van Camp.

Willy Joseph Cancel

One of the Americans under Van Camp’s charge was a 22-year-old former U.S. Marine named Willy Joseph Cancel.

Cancel had enlisted in the Maines in 2017, where he underwent basic training before being trained as an infantryman. Cancel never saw combat and was given a bad conduct discharge. In 2020 he was given a bad conduct discharge from the Marines after serving five months in jail for disobeying a direct order. Upon being discharged, Cancel got married, had a son, and gained employment as a corrections officer in Tennessee.

For whatever reason, Cancel, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, left his job and his family and, on March 12, at his own expense, flew to Warsaw, Poland, where he met up with Van Camp.

Together the two Americans travelled to Ukraine, where they were sent directly to the front lines in Kiev due to their status as “combat veterans.” though Cancel never served in a combat zone.)

Embellishment appeared to be the name of the game with the Americans and the legion; according to Van Camp, he and Cancel were sent to Irpin to assist the Ukrainian military in counter-battery and “sniper” operations, even though neither of them had ever been trained in these highly specialized military occupations, something that would have been painfully obvious to anyone involved.

In any event, Van Camp was able to keep his four-man team in the legion following the post-Irpin “purge” and subsequently his unit saw combat in southern Ukraine, fighting in Kherson and Nikolaev. It was here, sometime in late April, that Cancel lost his life; his remains were not recovered from the battlefield.

Van Camp and the other Americans who had fought with Cancel left Ukraine in early May to bring the deceased former Marines’ belongings home and to speak with Cancel’s widow and family.

Cancel’s presence on the battlefield raises numerous questions about the screening process used by the International Legion.

One of the easiest ways to check the relevant military experience of a U.S. veteran is through an examination of his or her DD 214, or record of service, a copy of which is provided to every veteran upon discharge.

Cancel’s DD-214 would not only have shown that he lacked any combat experience, but that he had not been trained in any relevant combat arms skill set other than basic infantryman — especially sniper or counter-battery operations. Moreover, his bad conduct discharge would have been a red flag for any professional military organization.

Cancel’s death on the front line as part of the International Legion directly contradicted the legion’s own stated standards.

“What we want is for people to come that have already been in the line of fire,” a corporal in the International Legion who was responsible for training declared.

Americans, however, could apparently pass themselves as having what the corporal called “concrete combat experience,” making them “very attractive candidates” for the legion.

This inability to effectively screen genuine combat veterans from LARPers points to a lack of professionalism on the part of the International Legion.

A Canadian who had travelled to Ukraine to help train the Territorial Defense Force in urban combat said he wasn’t impressed by what he had seen; with recruits lacking experience, equipment and proper motivation. In true LARP fashion, they seemed only interested in gaining what the Canadian described as “quick combat exposure.”

“I think that the international legion was something that was conceived to be a propaganda tool to push forward the message that this is the world against [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and that they’re fighting for more than just Ukraine,” the Canadian said. “They don’t have the infrastructure, or the time, to really properly do any sort of international unit.”

This message should be heard by anyone who might be caught up in the “romance” of fighting side-by-side with the Ukrainian army against the Russian invader.

It should be used to counter the propaganda being generated by over-the-hill want-to-be heroes like Nance. It would have been useful for aging veterans such as Diaz before they spent nearly $3,000 outfitting themselves for a war in which they were never going to participate.

But, most importantly, it should have been heard by Cancel and his family, so that he could have been dissuaded from embarking on his one-way journey of personal redemption.

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Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.

Featured image: Malcolm Nancie in 2019. (USC Price, Flickr)

Controversy Surrounding Australia’s Defense Minister Peter Dutton’s Defamation Defeat

May 18th, 2022 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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***

The occasions when an activist, writer or commentator triumph over defamation lawsuits launched by a thin-skinned politician are rare in Australia.  When it comes to matters regarding the law of reputation, Australia remains a place where parliamentarians, as a species, thrive in the knowledge they can use favourable provisions to protect their hurt feelings and soiled reputations.

The country, in also lacking a bill of rights protecting free speech and the press, has further emboldened politicians.  At best, the Australian High Court has only left an anaemic implied right “to protect freedom of communication on political subjects”, which should really be read as a restraint on executive and legislative power, never to be personally exercised.

Defence Minister Peter Dutton, ever the nasty enforcer of the Morrison government, was one who had every reason to feel confident when he took refugee activist Shane Bazzi to court in April last year.  In February 2021, Bazzi published a six-word tweet: “Peter Dutton is a rape apologist.”

The tweet was made some hours after Dutton had told a press conference that he had not been furnished with the finer details of a rape allegation made by former Coalition staffer Britney Higgins.  The context here was also important.  Dutton had, when Home Affairs Minister, characterised refugee women being held on Nauru, one of Australia’s carceral domains, as “trying it on” to get access to the Australian mainland for medical treatment.

The following month, Dutton promised that he would start to “pick out some” individuals who were “trending on Twitter or have the anonymity of different Twitter accounts” posting “all these statements and tweets that are frankly defamatory.” It was an informal declaration of war against critics.

In instigating proceedings against Bazzi, Dutton claimed in the trial that he was “deeply offended” by the contents of the tweet.  He accepted that, “As a minister for immigration or home affairs … people make comments that are false or untrue, offensive, profane, but that’s part of the rough and tumble.”  But Bazzi had gone one step too far.   “It was somebody that held himself out as an authority or a journalist.”  His remarks “went beyond” the tolerably bruising nature of politics. “And it went against who I am, my beliefs … I thought it was hurtful.”

In finding for Dutton in November and awarding $35,000 in damages, Justice Richard White ruled that the tweet had been defamatory, and that Bazzi could not resort to the defence of honest opinion.  Dutton failed to gain damages in three of the four imputations, while also troubling the judge with his hunger in pursuing the defendant for the full legal bill.  But in his remarks on Bazzi’s claim of honest opinion, White was dismissive.  “Bazzi may have used the word ‘apologist’ without an understanding of the meaning he was, in fact conveying.”  If this had been the case, “it would follow that he did not hold the opinion actually conveyed by the words.”

On May 17, Bazzi found that he had convinced the Full Court of the Federal Court that the reasoning behind the six-word tweet, and the purportedly defamatory imputations it conveyed, was flawed.  Justices Steven Rares and Darryl Rangiah, in a joint judgment, found that Justice White had erred in not explaining “how the reader would understand the whole (or any part) of the tweet to convey the imputation.”  They also noted that Justice White had found the meaning of the word “apologist” was not that of an excuser but of a defender.  “When the material is read with Mr Bazzi’s six words, the reader would conclude that the tweet was suggesting that Mr Dutton was sceptical about claims of rape and in that way was an apologist.”  It was “very different from imputing that he excuses rape itself.”

The judges put much stock in the context of the tweet, and the need to read it alongside Dutton’s previous remarks on the women held on Nauru as recorded in The Guardian.  “The reader would perceive that the message in the tweet consisted of both parts, Mr Bazzi’s six word statement and The Guardian material, read together.”  When read together, the reader “would understand that the point that the tweet was conveying was that a ‘rape apologist’ behaves in the way Mr Dutton had in expressing scepticism about the claims of rape.  That is a far cry from conveying the meaning that he excuses rape itself.”

Justice Michael Wigney also found that the primary judge had erred in finding the tweet defamatory and “substantially agreed” with the two other justices.  It was “tolerably clear” that Bazzi’s statement “was about, or responsive to, the extract from The Guardian article.”  The primary judge had erred in how the ordinary reasonable Twitter user would have read the tweet, downplaying, for instance, the significance of the link to the article.

Accordingly, “It was wrong for the primary judge, in analysing whether Mr Bazzi’s tweet conveyed the alleged imputation, to dissect and segregate the tweet in the way he did.”  While the tweet did convey “an impression that is derogatory and critical of [Dutton’s] attitude to rape or rape allegations,” it did “not go so far as to convey the impression that [Dutton] is a person who excuses rape”.

Dutton’s litigious boldness was much in keeping with the Morrison government’s general hostility to social media outlets and the internet, in general.  Prime Minister Scott Morrison has shown a willingness to do battle with social media and making the platforms assume greater responsibility for material hosted on their sites.  Taking advantage of the killings in Christchurch in March 2019, he exploited the chance to pursue a global agenda of online censorship.  “We urge online platforms to step up the ambition and pace of their efforts to prevent terrorist and VECT (violent extremism conducive to terrorism) content being streamed, uploaded, or re-uploaded.”

In the latter part of last year, the government announced that it was drafting laws that would make social media companies gather user details and permit courts to force the divulging of user identities in defamation proceedings.  While a re-elected Morrison government will be a dark day for internet freedoms and expression, Dutton’s defeat is a cause for genuine celebration.  It also heralds the need to water down the persistently draconian nature of laws that do all too much in protecting that strange animal known as the offended politician.

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

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Turkey Sponsored Terrorists in Northern Syria Attack Bus with 12 Dead and 14 Wounded

May 18th, 2022 by Steven Sahiounie

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A Syrian military bus was attacked on Friday, which killed 12 soldiers and wounded 14, between the towns of Nubl and Al Zahra, west of Aleppo at 9:30 am.  The attack was carried out by the Turkish sponsored ‘Sultan Shah’ terrorist group, which used a TOW anti-tank rocket. The Obama administration, by act of the US Congress, sent the Radical Islamic terrorists based in northwest Syria the US made TOW anti-tank missiles.

The Al Qaeda branch in Syria, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), formerly known as Jibhat al Nusra, posted a video on its Telegram channel on Friday showing a rocket hitting the bus.  HTS is in control of Idlib, which is the last terrorist controlled area in Syria.

In 2017, President Trump shut down the CIA program which was funding and providing weapons to the Radical Islamic terrorists fighting to over throw the Syrian government to establish an Islamic State in Syria. President Obama had devised the war on Syria for regime change while utilizing Radical Islamic terrorists from Syria and around the world, including the US, UK, France, Belgium, and Australia.

Hours after the deadliest attack against Syrian government forces so far this year, Russian warplanes carried out air strikes on terrorist areas in the northwest.

The Syrian people have suffered under attack since March 2011 by a US-NATO backed war for regime change.  The Muslim Brotherhood was utilized in Turkey to establish the political arm of the terrorists, as the US and EU recognized the Syrian opposition Coalition in Istanbul as the only legitimate representative of the Syrian people. The Muslim Brotherhood is recognized as a terrorist group by Egypt, UAE, Russia and Syria.  US Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has tried repeatedly to get the US Congress to recognize the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group, but has not been successful due to the strong support for the terrorist group by members of Congress, both Democrat and Republican. The Muslim Brotherhood is an ally of Israel, who is a close ally of the US.

Since the 2018 invasion of Syria by Turkey, the northwest of Syria along the Turkish border has become a safe-haven for Radical Islamic terrorist groups who receive full support from the administration of President Erdogan, who heads the AKP party in Turkey, which is a Muslim Brotherhood allied party.

The Syrian war is long over, but Idlib remains a hot-spot due to the protection and occupation of Turkey.  Russia and Turkey reached agreement in Sochi, that Turkey should remove the Al Qaeda linked groups from the civilians in Idlib, and to allow the M4 highway linking Latakia to Aleppo to be used safely by trucks and civilian cars.  However, Turkey never fulfilled their side of the agreement, and the highway remains unsafe for use due to the occupation of the Radical Islamic terrorists supported by Turkish outposts.

Russian and Syrian air force targeted several positions of the ‘Sultan Shah’ terrorists in retaliation for the deadly bus attack.

Mohammad al-Jassim, also called Abu Amsha, is the leader of the Turkish-backed ‘Sultan Shah’ terrorist group, which is known among the people as al-Amshat faction. In 2019 he chanted, “Thank you Turkey, Thank you Recep Tayyip Erdogan.”

Abu Amsha is detested among the people because his faction members practice war crimes and steal from the citizens in Afrin, and other Turkish occupied locations.  They kidnapped a citizen in Alkana village, and demanded his relatives to pay $20,000 USD in order to be released.  They have extorted money from citizens while promising protection.

Since the 2018 Turkish invasion, which they called Olive Branch Operation, the security situation in Syria has deteriorated in those areas Turkey occupies and allows their Radical Islamic terrorist groups, such as ‘Sultan Shah’ to operate freely.  Turkey is carrying out an ethnic cleansing campaign, removing Syrians at gun-point using the terrorist groups to hand over Syrian lands, homes and businesses to Syrian refugees returning from Turkey and to the terrorists and their families who were brought to the northwest under negotiations brokered by Russia to liberate areas under terrorist control.

Syrian refugees in Turkey were deported and resettled in Afrin and areas of Turkish occupation. Afrin is an agricultural area between Idlib and Aleppo which is famous for its olive trees and the production of olive oil.  Turkey has allowed the terrorists, including the ‘Sultan Shah’ group to steal the olive oil and send it to Turkey which is then bottled and sold both inside Turkey and abroad as a Turkish product.  Customers in Los Angeles saw bottles of olive oil labeled as made in Kessab and Afrin and sold in the US by Turkish companies.

Turkey’s occupation of Syria should be called operation Olive Oil not operation Olive Branch.  Turkey is in a domestic economic crisis, Erdogan needed a way to support financially the terrorists he was using in Syria, so the sales from the stolen olive oil are the method he is using.  But, the theft of olive oil is just one source.

Syrian antiquities, using Turkish bulldozers and excavators manned by terrorists of the ‘Sultan Shah’ group and others, have been unearthed, with the  valuable artifacts then taken to Turkey and sold to antiquities dealers in the US and Europe.  This illegal revenue brings in much more than the stolen olive oil.

The ‘Sultan Shah’ group extorts taxes on owners of farm tractors and agricultural machinery. The group also extorts money from relatives of those they have kidnapped in the form of ransom, sometimes up to $200,000 USD. The group devised a tiered tax on all agricultural lands: 15%, 25%, and 35% of the crop production to be paid to the terrorists.

In August 2021, the head of the Syrian opposition Coalition, Salem Abdel Aziz al-Muslat, honored  Abu Amsha, the head of ‘Sultan Shah’, and gave him a Medal of Honor.  This is the US supported opposition Coalition, regarded by President Biden and the US Congress as the only legitimate representative of the Syrian people. The ‘Sultan Shah’ group is well documented by human rights groups and international activist groups as having carried out murders, kidnapping, extortion and ethnic-cleansing.

When Americans pay their taxes, do they ever consider where their tax dollars are going to?  The White House and the US Congress belong to the American people, and it is the American people who are responsible for war crimes and atrocities committed abroad by US supported groups.  President Biden, President Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and others have chanted a mantra for 11 years, “The only solution for Syria is a political solution.”  Yet, the group that the US recognizes as the only legitimate representative of the Syrian people is handing out a medal of honor to a documented war criminal, murderer, kidnapper and extortionist.  American values are touted as freedom, democracy and justice.  American values have become a hollow phrase, and a source of ridicule by people throughout Syria.

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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.

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