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As Brussels seeks a new supply contract with Pfizer from 2022, the US pharmaceutical giant has hiked its EU prices on future orders of its vaccine, potentially raising the cost by more than 60%, to some $23 per dose.
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The unspoken truth is that the novel coronavirus provides a pretext and a justification to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to precipitate the entire World into a spiral of mass unemployment, bankruptcy, extreme poverty and despair.
China has slammed G-7 leaders for pushing an aggressive agenda against itself and Russia. The 47th G-7 Summit in Carbis Bay, United Kingdom, concluded on Sunday, June 13. It was attended by the leaders of the seven global north nations and European Union, who form the core membership of the group, and with India, South Africa, South Korea and Australia as invitees.
Dr. Mike Yeadon walks us through the effects of COVID-19 vaccines on adolescents particularly for school-age children and younger. “I’m genuinely pro-vaccine but I’m pro-safety and these COVID-19 vaccines are not safe. Gene-based design makes your body manufacture virus spike proteins and we know that virus spike proteins trigger blood clots.”
The World Health Organization is awaiting an independent review of an Italian study indicating that COVID-19 could have been in circulation in the country as early as September 2019. The findings will form part of its investigations into the origins of the outbreak.
As it typifies oligarchic rule in Latin America, whenever the elite faces a serious challenge to its dominance it resorts to authoritarian methods, including brutal repression and if need be, mass murder. This is what the Peruvian elite did when in the early 1990s it faced mass opposition to the imposition of neoliberal impoverishment; one of the most extreme manifestations of opposition was the Shining Path guerrilla insurgency.
Health care employees and many other Americans are experiencing pressure to accept vaccination or be fired. For example, a hospital in Texas has made vaccination a condition of employment. I can understand the reluctance of a nurse or doctor, who has witnessed severe injury and death to those who were vaccinated, being unwilling to subject themselves to the risk.
Joe Biden took part in several key international meetings over the last week covering a wide range of issues but with one key goal in mind: intensify the new Cold War with China and construct a global front towards this end. This is the most intensive series of diplomatic summits for the Biden administration yet, and provides key insights about how it plans to manage the affairs of U.S. empire.
A man claiming to be a friend with a British Airways pilot has stated that 3 pilots have just died within the past week shortly after receiving COVID-19 injections, and his recording has gone viral on social media. Here is the recording (let us know if Twitter takes it down as we have a copy.)
Head of the General Federation of Trade Unions Sami Al-Amasi has confirmed that 20 factories were destroyed during the last offensive on Gaza, and 5,000 workers had lost their jobs.
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With 100% of the votes counted, Castillo, candidate of left-wing coalition Peru Libre, won with 50.14 % of the votes, against Keiko Fujimori, daughter of infamous and disgraced corrupt dictator, Alberto Fujimori and right-wing candidate of Fuerza Popular, a coalition supported by the country’s oligarchic elite, obtained 49,86%.
To many, Castillo’s electoral robust performance in the first round with 18% of the vote was a surprise, since up to that point, the main contender for the left was Veronika Mendoza, candidate of the Juntos por el Perucoalition, who obtained slightly less than 8%. Below we examine the main events and developments that would culminate in this extraordinary victory for the Peruvian and Latin American Left.
The ongoing crisis of legitimacy
As it typifies oligarchic rule in Latin America, whenever the elite faces a serious challenge to its dominance it resorts to authoritarian methods, including brutal repression and if need be, mass murder. This is what the Peruvian elite did when in the early 1990s it faced mass opposition to the imposition of neoliberal impoverishment; one of the most extreme manifestations of opposition was the Shining Path guerrilla insurgency. State repression was substantially intensified with the election of Alberto Fujimori as president in 1990.
Fujimori’s dictatorial regime lasted a full decade (1990-2000) but it fell under the weight of its own corruption, engulfed in a constitutional crisis of legitimacy caused by his contempt for democratic procedure: he closed down congress, usurped judicial authority, promulgated a neo-liberal constitution and governed brutally and autocratically. He is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence for his role in killings and kidnappings by death squads during his government’s military campaign against leftist guerrillas.
Fujimori’s successor, president Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006) fared no better, even though, unlike Fujimori, he did not resort to underhand and brutal methods during his presidency. Nevertheless, he is under house arrest in San Francisco, awaiting extradition on charges of receiving multimillionaire bribes.
Then it was the turn of Alan Garcia, leader of APRA, an originally progressive populist party, who succeeded Toledo for the period 2006-2011, and who committed suicide in 2020 as the police came to arrest him for personal graft and corruption during his administration.
Ollanta Humala, briefly depicted as a sort of Peruvian Chavez and even publicly supported by the Comandante himself, defeated Keiko Fujimori at the 2011 elections thereby becoming the country’s president for the 2011-2016 period. But as it seems to befit Peru’s presidents, in 2017 he and his wife were arrested on charges of corruption and money laundering. Both are banned from leaving Peru and are awaiting trial.
The 2017 election crowned Pedro Pablo Kuczynski as the country’s president for 2016-2021, but he was not to break with the ‘cultural tradition’ and was forced to resign in 2018 (to avoid impeachment procedures began in 2017) for lying to congress and for receiving bribes in exchange for government contracts. Kuczynski also claimed to suffer from heart problems (as Fujimori, Toledo and Humala have done) thus benefiting from house arrest. It is evident that being the tenant of the House of Pizarro (the popular name for Peru’s presidential palace) is a tough job full of so many exciting incentives that can gravely affect their cardiac system.
Kuczynski had to be replaced by his vice-president, Martin Vizcarra, who launched an offensive against corruption but was impeached by Congress in November 2020 for taking bribes on several occasions in 2014 in exchange for awarding public work contracts. It is widely believed his impeachment was prompted by his decision to close down congress for obstructing the investigations against corruption.1
Vizcarra (who has not as yet claimed heart problems) accepted the congress decision and was replaced by the Congress’s President, Manuel Merino, as caretaker leader with a cabinet dominated by the business elite. Merino’s brief 6-day government sent strong hints of ignoring popular demands for the reform of the political and judicial systems and even entertained postponing the scheduled 2021 elections justified by the problems brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The country exploded in huge mass demonstrations that were met by brutal police repression with two dead, dozens injured and many more arrested. Merino was forced to resign on 15 November 2020 and Congress then appointed Francisco Sagasti (who had voted against Vizcarra’s impeachment) as interim president, and was entrusted with the task of organising the presidential elections in April 2021.
Thus since Peru’s elite had for decades undermined the rule of law and the credibility of the nation’s institutions, the state key positions had been filled in by corrupt or corruptible members of the political class (involving all mainstream political parties), in a system overwhelmingly dominated by finance capital, mining concerns, raw materials exporters, one media monopoly, and multinational companies. These powerful groups pay almost no taxes whilst taking away the nation’s wealth, leaving the agricultural sector in a state of total neglect. Such was the context surrounding the election that elected Pedro Castillo as president of Peru.
The consequences of Peru’s neoliberal dictatorship
In the last two decades, the country’s economic performance has been impressive receiving praise from the IMF: “Peru continues to be one of the best-performing Latin American economies. With annual real GDP growth averaging 5.4 percent over the past fifteen years, Peru has been one of the fastest-growing economies in the region, which enabled it to make significant progress in reducing poverty.”2
However, a deeper look into it produces a different impression. In 1970 Peru’s level of poverty was 50%, and by 2000 had slightly increased to 54.1%;3 by 2006 poverty had barely declined to 49.1%, and though it went down to about 20% in 2019, with the pandemic it has gone right back up to 30%4. In short, half of the country’s population have remained in a state of poverty for almost two generations and about one third for the last decade. However, 30% is deceptive since the level of labour informality in the country’s economy is a staggering 70%, of people who live day to day as street vendors; they and their families have gone hungry during the lockdown.5
The two decades of macroeconomic economic success and social horror correlate to the coming to office of Alberto Fujimori who successfully defeated Mario Vargas Llosa’s comprehensive neoliberal privatisation plan, at the 1990 election. Fujimori’s government systematised the use of counterinsurgency state terror to purge society from rebellious constituencies, such as those in the Sierra (Peru’s highlands), inhabited predominantly by indigenous people. Already by the end of the 1980s the departments of Ayacucho, Apurimac and Huancavelica were under martial law.
The military campaign against the Left was aided by the combination of extreme sectarianism, intense dogmatism, and the insurrectionary and violent methods practised by the Shining Path, a splinter group from the Communist Party. They enjoyed strong support precisely in the highlands departments mentioned and by the early 1990s had made considerable inroads into Lima’s shanty towns not only challenging the state but also waging a vicious campaign against the rest of the country’s Left.
The government response was the Fujimorazo, a self-coup carried out on 5 April 1992, with the president dissolving Congress and dismantling the judiciary, assuming full executive and legislative powers. He also used these powers to decree stringent and repressive labour laws that destroyed the remnants of an already seriously weakened labour movement. Under Fujimori labour legislation was crafted so as to make Peru a paradise of labour flexibility, management’s right to fire, casualization of labour contracts and workers’ unionisation and collective bargaining action, difficult.6
By 1993 Fujimori had increased the provinces under a military state of emergency from 52 to 66 and by 1994, nearly half of the population lived in such zones, areas where the security forces repressed the whole of the Left not just the Shining Path. It is estimated that by 1995 “insurgents, state security forces, drug traffickers, death squads, and civilian paramilitaries had killed more than 27,000 Peruvians.” And according to Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission the number of fatal victims of internal strife between 1980 and 2000 was 69,000.7 Peru had become a killing field.
The brutal state counterinsurgency offensive launched in 1980 had not only halted but also reversed the development of a Left that was becoming politically and electorally stronger. In the 1980 election it had obtained a combined vote of about 12-15%, though divided between 5 candidates, but in the 1985 election, a united left candidate got an impressive 24%. However, in the 1990 election the Left went down to 12% split between two candidates; it had almost no presence in the elections in 1995, 2000, 2006, and 2011 and began to painfully recover only in 2016.
Fujimori’s 1993 neoliberal structural reforms (the ‘Fuji-shock’) included the elimination of price controls, total deregulation of markets, privatisation of state-owned companies and activities, and a tight monetary policy. The privatisation programme attracted foreign investment (particularly from the US) in natural resources, finances and consumer markets. This resulted in intense concentration of ownership by foreign concerns thereby shrinking the influence and leverage of national industrial capital.8
Over time the country’s income distribution drastically worsened thus by 2019 the top 1% and 10% of income earners got 29.6% and 56.6% of GDP, respectively; 40% of middle income earners got 35.8% of GDP, whilst 50% of low income earners only received 9.4% of GDP; one of the most unequal in the world.9No wonder Covid-19 has wreaked havoc among the poor, since one lockdown day at home for the 70% working in the informal sector (this is millions of people and their families), means one day without income. Decades of neoliberal privatisation and cuts in state expenditure (health, education and the like) having thrown millions into precariousness and hardship made them the unavoidable victims of Covid-19: by 4 June Peru had the highest mortality rate in the world per million people (188,000 with 1,998,056 confirmed cases).10
Castillo’s Long March
It was reported that when it was announced that a teacher had won the first round of elections, the staff at CCN scrambled to obtain information about, and get hold of a photo of Pedro Castillo because they did not have even a picture of him in their database. How did Pedro Castillo and Peru Libre, managed to win the presidency, even though by a whisker? Castillo’s manifesto makes it even more puzzling since the key tenets of his government programme include a frontal attack on neoliberalism, proposes the election of a Constituent Assembly to draft and promulgate a new constitution to substitute the dominant neoliberal economic model, land reform, the nationalisation of the nation’s natural resources ensuring most of the wealth they produce remains in Peru so as to eradicate poverty, increase state expenditure on social services (health and education), and implement income redistribution.11 Even worse (or better) Castillo declares himself a Marxist and a mariateguista (follower of Peruvian intellectual, Jose Carlos Mariátegui, perhaps one the most original and influential Latin American Marxist thinkers).12
The Partido Nacional Peru Libre (PNPL) places political emphasis on the specific demands of Peru’s peasantry: land reform, social rights, education and health, thus expressing the demands and aspirations of the deep, rural, indigenous Peru. Mariátegui, writing in the 1920s, posited there would not be bourgeois revolution in Peru because there was no social class interested in carrying it out, thus the only concrete possibility of society’s structural transformation would come from a socialist revolution, the precondition of which was bringing in the indigenous people as a fundamental agent of such change.
This framework is still basically correct in 2021 Peru. Keiko Fujimori got strong support in key cities (for example, Lima and Callao, with 65% and 67%, respectively), but Castillo got a landslide in the Andean (indigenous) provinces such as Puno (89%), Huancavelica (85%), Cusco (83%), Ayacucho (82%), Apurimac (81%), Moquegua (73%), Cajamarca (71%), Huánuco (68%), and Pasco (66%). It was an indigenous victory13 that is not identical to a victory of rural against urban Peru, as some in the media have portrayed Castillo’s victory. After all, 73% of the population live in cities whilst only 27% live in rural areas, that is, the Marxist teacher could not have won without substantial support in the urban centres. The validity of the PNPL central tenet of refounding the nation as a Plurinational State along the basic lines of Ecuador and Bolivia is therefore undeniable: in Peru there are 4 indigenous languages in the Andes (Quechua, Aymara, Cauqui and Jaqaru) and 43 more in the Amazon region, 500 years after the Spanish Conquest.
The implementation of brutal neoliberal policies coupled with the DEA-inspired ‘war on drugs’ principally in the Amazon region (La Selva) from the 1990s onwards, meant that communities in Amazonia suffered the brunt of the ‘dirty war’ against the Shining Path and the army-led fight against drug trafficking, whilst in the Andes, indigenous communities were further marginalised by aggressive mining from the operation of multinational companies. The racism that supplemented these twin aggressions led to organised resistance and, therefore, to the rise of popular, communitarian and indigenous leaderships.
Hence, for example the election of some of these emerging leaders to the governorships of Puno, Junín and Moquegua. Many more such leaders were elected to lead provinces and municipalities with teachers playing a protagonist role in them (Castillo himself had been mayor of his town, Anguía, in Cajamarca).14 Thus, resulting from a decades-long political development, PNPL is a well-organised, militant, political outfit with strong territorial support in key areas, and with solid association and collaboration with peasant and indigenous communities and organizations (such as the ronderos15), and trade unions, especially, but not exclusively, among teachers. Castillo himself led the 2017 teachers’ strike to defend wages and demand budget increases in education.
In short, the PNPL has had access to local resources, has enjoyed an institutional presence in local, provincial and regional governments, and, since 60% of Peruvians do not have access to internet, for its election campaign it has relied on community radios, personal visits to small towns, and cultural events. Thus, in the context of the 2021 election (first and second rounds) Castillo was not only the outsider, but a breath of fresh air who, in the midst of a criminally managed pandemic and the deep institutional crisis the nation faced, gave hope and voice to the rural and urban downtrodden.16
The tasks ahead
The election result was incredibly tight: 8,883,185 for Castillo against 8,783,765 for Keiko Fujimori. Furthermore, the PNPL got a minority of 37 seats that together with the 5 obtained by Juntos por el Peru, president Castillo will command 42 out of the 130 seats in Congress, whilst Fujimori’s Fuerza Popular and the other right wing electoral coalitions have a combined parliamentary strength of at least 80 seats. The latter, with the full complicity and support of the country’s media, ran an intoxicating electoral campaign of fear charging Castillo with being a Shinning Path sympathiser, a “terruco”, pejorative slang term that means ‘terrorist’ used by Peru’s establishment to stigmatize the Left.
Days before the second round, Keiko deployed arch-reactionary Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa and Venezuelan extreme right-winger and outlawed coup-monger, Leopoldo Lopez, to support her electoral campaign so as to defeat Castillo’s “communism”. Keiko, with no evidence whatsoever, has persisted in accusing the PNPL of election fraud demanding the annulment of the votes of more than 800 voting points in the country’s interior. Then she mobilised 22 right-wing ex-presidents of Latin America and Spain (with Aznar and Uribe being prominent) who issued a statement making similar allegations, demanding Castillo was not proclaimed the winner. In desperation then, she staged marches to military barracks and to the Ministry of Defence (9 June 2021) to request the military to act to prevent the “victory of communism.” However, barely hours after Castillo proclaimed himself the winner, the Defence Ministry issued a statement confirming the political neutrality of the armed forces and calling for respect for the election results.
Such threats have been met with large demonstrations in Lima and the rest of the country with the ronderospromising a march on Lima if through electoral fraud, Castillo’s electoral victory is stolen. On 22 May 2021 the National Coordination of Army, Navy, Air Force and Police Reservists (Retired) – CONAFAP – issued a strong statement warning against any possible election fraud in the second round and in support of Pedro Castillo. Though it is not clear how strong Castillo’s support may be within the armed forces, there is a historic left-wing nationalist influence in them that stems from the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975)17; many of PNPL’s proposals strongly resemble those of Velasco.
With his clean victory, Castillo and his programme of progressive structural change are now being noticed by millions of the poor in the main urban centres, particularly Lima (with 10 million out of a total population of 32). The more his government engages, mobilises and commits to the poor in supporting the implementation of his policies, the greater the chances of being adopted by them as their own political social objectives. This will allow him to prepare the ground for a referendum for a Constituent Assembly to draft an anti-neoliberal constitution as the basis for the creation of a Plurinational State, the premise for the carrying out of a mariateguista socio-economic transformation of Peru.
Contrary to media misrepresentation, the PNLP programme also includes, among many other interesting policies, the decriminalisation of abortion, a head-on attack on the traffic of persons – especially women, the elimination of patriarchy and machismo in state and society, the respect and promotion of women’s reproductive rights and the promotion of the self-organization of women at every level.18 This contrasts sharply with Keiko’s defence of her father’s legacy that among other stains, has his Eugenic plan that led to the forcible sterilization of about 350,000 mainly peasant and indigenous women carried out to deal with the nation’s ‘Indian problem’ (higher birth rates among indigenous people than Peruvians of European descent).19
Castillo’s immediate concern is to ensure a smooth transition of presidential power to guarantee the country’s governability, prevent a run on the currency, prevent financial panic, violent street demonstrations, destabilisation plans and such like that have characterised many electoral victories of presidential candidates of the Left in Latin America. A major cause for concern is the Biden administration’s ‘Trumpian inertia’, maintaining pretty much unchanged US’s aggression against governments of the left in the region of his predecessor, despite his promise to, for example, restore Obama’s constructive policies towards Cuba.
On the other hand, the coming Peru Libre administration does and will benefit from a changing relation of forces for the better in the region with robust left victories in neighbouring Argentina, Chile and especially Bolivia. Castillo has already received the open support of Nicaragua, Mexico, Cuba and from the mass parties of the Latin American Left organised in the Sao Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group, with the latter two issuing strong statements of support calling to respect the will of the Peruvian people. Castillo has also in his favour, the visible deterioration of the US regional machinery of intervention with Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the Organization of the American States (OAS), suffering massive discredit after his disgraceful and criminal complicity in the coup d’état that ousted Evo Morales in 2019 and facing a criminal accusation from Bolivia in the International Criminal Court. He has been openly and publicly repudiated by the governments of Argentina and Mexico, and with the US-inspired Lima group (set up to overthrow the Bolivarian government of Venezuela and led by Almagro) just having lost Lima to a party whose programme includes Peru leaving the OAS and going back to UNASUR. To top it all, the PNLP programme includes strong support for Cuba and Venezuela.
Our job in the imperialist North is to tell the truth about Pedro Castillo’s progressive, anti-neoliberal programme aimed at reversing decades of neoliberal policies to support his beleaguered nation and people by counteracting the unavoidable mainstream media misrepresentations; to remain vigilant and denounce and reject any external or domestic attempt to undermine the victory of the people of Peru by foul means (violence, coup d’état, lawfare, economic blockade, extra-territorial legislation, sanctions, the usual European Union shenanigans, and such like); and to help construct the broadest solidarity movement in their support.
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1 Milan Sime Martinic, The curious case of Peru’s persistent president-to-prison politics, The Week, 17 November 2020.
2 Peru, IMF Country Report No. 20/3, 10th Jan 2020,
3 Carlos Parodi Trece, “Perú: Pobreza y políticas sociales de la década de los 90”, Revista de Ciencias Sociales, Vol. VI, No.3, Sept-Dec. 2001, p.385.
4 Covid-19 and its impact on Poverty in Peru, Project Peru, 10th Jan 2021
5 Whitney Eulich, ‘We’re invisible’: Peru’s moment of reckoning on informal workers,The Christian Science Monitor, 30 June 2020
6 Bart-Jaap Verbeek, “Globalisation and Exploitation in Peru: Strategic Selectivities and the Defeat of Labour in the US-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement”, Global Labour Journal, Vol. 5, 31 May 2014,p.223-4.
7 Eduardo Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2009, pp. 236-245.
12 For an analysis of Mariátegui’s significance in Latin America see Francisco Dominguez, “Marxism and the Peculiarities of Indo-American Socialism”, in Mary Davis (ed.), MARX200 The Significance of Marxism in the 21st Century, Praxis Press 2019, pp.49-58.
14 The Aymara ecologist, Walter Aduviri Calisaya, was elected governor of Puno and current PNPL general secretary, Vladimir Cerrón, its key Marxist intellectual, was elected governor of Junín, but the élite resorting to lawfare, managed to imprison Aduviri, who served 8 years in prison, and Cerrón was suspended as a governor and was banned from being a presidential candidate.
15 Peasant, indigenous and communitarian self-defense organization present in the country that has exponentially grown in the last 10 years; it is claimed that it can mobilize two and half million people; Castillo was an active member.
17 See the insightful analyses in Carlos Aguirre & Paulo Drinot (eds.), The Peculiar Revolution, Rethinking The Peruvian Experiment Under Military Rule, University of Texas Press, 2017.
18 See (in Spanish) especially Chapter XVI, The Socialist Woman, https://perulibre.pe/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ideario-peru-libre.pdf; in interview Castillo said he personally was against abortion, but was prepared to bring the issue to the proposed Constituent Assembly to be discussed.
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A reported 3.9 magnitude earthquake off the Florida’s east coast Friday was actually an “experimental explosion,” the U.S. Navy confirmed.
A spokesperson with the Navy told Action News Jax that what was measured were a result of military “shock trials” and they are not unusual, nor is it unusual for them to register as earthquakes.
Shock trials test a ship to see how it holds up in an undersea explosion. This is to test strength of the ship’s hull, making sure it can perform in battle.
Action News Jax has reached out to the Coast Guard for more information.
3.9 Experimental Explosion (USGS)
BREAKING UPDATE: NS Mayport spokesman @AustinBill13 tells @ActionNewsJax it was the result of a Navy Shock Trial off Daytona Beach. Says it’s not usual for a shock trial to register as an earthquake & that it happened before in 2016. Interesting stuff. Let us know if you felt it! https://t.co/J0XY8iXrzS
— Tenikka Smith Hughes (@TenikkaANjax) June 18, 2021
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The Gaza Strip, measures only 25 miles long and five miles wide. It is one of the most densely populated places on the planet.
Since 2007, Israel has imposed a full blockade on Gaza from the air, land, and sea. The two million Palestinians living there (half of which are under the age of 18) are trapped in an open air prison where food, potable water, electricity, medicine, building materials, etc. are severely restricted by the Israeli authorities.
The latest Israeli military operation in Gaza was called “Guardian of the Walls,” a reference no doubt to the walls enclosing the Palestinian population of mostly refugees, victims of Zionist settler colonialism, forcibly prevented from returning home. Highlighting the unfairness of the fight, at the war’s onset reports described Israeli tanks and 80 aircraft, including F-35’s, being deployed against a people militarily conquered and occupied since 1967. The Gazans have no air force, no navy, and no control over their borders, airspace, or coasts.
Following 11 days of bombing, an Egypt brokered ceasefire was accepted after multiple offers were rejected by Tel Aviv.
Ethnic Cleansing in Jerusalem
Last month’s war on Gaza was largely precipitated by an ethnic cleansing campaign occurring in East Jerusalem, illegally occupied by Israel. The threatened evictions of dozens of families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood sparked protests among the Palestinians.
Writer and researcher Yanis Iqbal provides some background;
Beginning from May 2, 2021, Israel has begun its attempts to forcibly evict 26 Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah. These families consist of refugees since the Nakba (the 1947-49 expulsion and forced exile of over two-thirds of the population by Zionist forces) and have been denied their United Nations (UN)-mandated right to return home. They were relocated in the neighborhood when it was under Jordanian control between 1948 and 1967.
Israeli propaganda attempts to present the idea that the homes being seized were once owned by Jews. This is a complete lie – the Jordanian authorities were the ones to finance the construction of the homes. Since the early 1970s, Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah have been battling a series of Jewish settler organizations who filed lawsuits claiming the land belonged to them. Many Palestinians have been kicked out of the neighborhood and replaced by Israeli settlers. The current standoff and protests came about after an Israeli court ruled in favor of Nahalat Shimon International – an organization based in the US – and Ateret Cohanim, another settlement group that seeks to take over the properties.
In its bloody quest to eliminate Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah, the settler state has left no stone unturned. Combat-clad murderers have been sent in to terrorize Palestinian sit-ins with skunk water, tear gas, rubber-coated bullets and shock grenades. Protesters have been physically assaulted, kneeled on, choked, and shot at with live rounds. On May 7, 2021, the Israeli police forced its way into the neighborhood as Palestinians and solidarity activists gathered to break their Ramadan fasting in solidarity with 40 Palestinians, including 10 children.
Far right violence had already been ramping up in Jerusalem. In one illustrative example from late April, a Israeli brownshirt-like group named Lehava led marches with memorable choruses such as “your village will be burnt down,” “may your village burn,” “Arabs get out,” and “death to Arabs.” The demonstrations saw large groups of Jewish youths hurling rocks at Palestinians, including inside their homes and vehicles. Participants were encouraged to arm themselves and get violent. Haaretz reported on a social media group administered by far right Knesset member, Itamar Ben-Gvir, that included somebody enthusiastically promoting plans to burn Palestinians with Molotov cocktails. A video shared on social media showed an Israeli man driving through East Jerusalem firing his gun in the air to frighten the occupied Palestinian residents. The Lehava event was explicitly promoted to “restore Jewish dignity” to Jerusalem. Palestinian counter protests at Damascus Gate in the Old City were responded to by police using similar measures to those deployed against the sit ins described above by Iqbal: 105 people were injured, with 22 hospitalized.
During Israel’s crackdown on early May protests against the planned dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah, settlers again chanted “death to Arabs” and the police used cannons to fire the aforementioned “skunk water” into people’s houses. The pervasive stink spray smells like sewage and remains for weeks. After drying, it is only made worse when it coming into contact with water making it especially arduous to clean.
In an interview with Scott Horton, journalist Alan Macleod discussed the corporate media’s cynical efforts to create a “both sides narrative” despite the huge power disparity painted by vivid scenes of occupied civilians armed with “stones and prayer rugs” standing off with the Israeli security forces sporting their “machine guns and stun grenades.”
Even clinics were not spared. At Mondoweiss, Yumna Patel reported “[v]ideos from a clinic in East Jerusalem where injured Palestinians were being treated showed Israeli forces firing sound bombs into the clinic itself.”
As a result of consecutive days of Israeli violence and “clashes,” hundreds of Palestinians were injured and hospitalized. On May 10th, even before the rockets and bomb attacks, those at the Mosque and the surrounding neighborhood described the area as a “war zone.”
Hamas Retaliates on Behalf of The Palestinians
The armed brigades of Hamas, the militant group ruling the Gaza Strip, gave Israel an ultimatum that evening to withdraw from Sheikh Jarrah, the al Aqsa Mosque, and release Palestinian prisoners. The Israelis refused. Hamas retaliated on behalf of Palestinians throughout the occupied territories. Those Palestinians have essentially no other armed force to deter or defend against Israeli aggression. The first of the crude rockets launched by Hamas into Jerusalem killed nobody and “lightly injured” one Israeli. Israel responded with airstrikes on Gaza that killed 20 people, nine of which were children.
Most of the children belonged to the same extended family. Two siblings, 11-year-old Ibrahim and seven-year-old Marwan, were the only children of Yousef al-Masri.
The children were playing outside their homes before the Ramadan iftar meal in Beit Hanoun, in the northern Gaza Strip, before two explosions rocked the street.
Youssef al-Masri, the father of the siblings was quoted in the media as well, “My children were martyred. I cannot find any justification whatsoever for targeting someone passing through overcrowded civilian neighborhoods where dozens of children usually play.”
For nearly two weeks Israel then proceeded to pummel Gaza with high explosives.
Disgracing The American People
Along with the already massive but growing military and financial aid to Israel, the American government underwrote every bit of the massacre with diplomatic cover as it ensued. At the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. blocked three successive statements urging a ceasefire and cessation of attacks against Palestinians in just the first week of bombings. The third statement blocked was introduced by Norway, China, and Tunisia.
The French later introduced a draft Security Council Resolution demanding a ceasefire which the U.S. threatened to veto.
On the domestic scene, mainstream media sprang into action providing an abundance of hasbara to American audiences attempting to muddy the waters sufficiently to keep people from taking the obvious moral positionagainst the U.S. backed canned hunt.
Indeed, both the executive branch and much of the legislature are eager to provide “more for Israel” at the American people’s expense. In early June, Defense Minister Benny Gantz, who in a video messageduring the war threatened “Gaza will burn,” visited Washington D.C. to request another billion dollars in military aid. Many in Congress are thrilled at the opportunity to fulfill his request and Biden has promised to “replenish” Israel’s U.S. funded Iron Dome missile defense system.
Once again, Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a complete mockery of his post as America’s top diplomat. As Dave DeCamp, news editor at Antiwar.com, has written:
In a pathetic attempt to pretend that the Biden administration cares about the suffering Israel is causing… Blinken announced additional aid for the Palestinians after the truce was reached. The assistance includes about $5.5 million to rebuild Gaza, a pittance compared to what the US is poised to give Israel.
In an interview with Israel’s Channel 12, Blinken somehow claimed that Israel took “significant steps” to avoid killing civilians in Gaza. This ignores the deliberate targeting of civilian homes. In one Israeli air raid, bombs hit a residential building in the al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza, killing 10 people; two women and eight children…
The violence was not limited to Gaza. In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, at least 29 Palestinians were gunned down by Israeli security forces.
Not to be outdone by the Democrats, in the neoconservative wing of the Senate, Marco Rubio used Israel’s slaughter in Gaza as a political opportunity to sabotage renewed talks with Tehran. Rubio led an effort, backed by more than forty other Republican lawmakers, to thwart all sanctions relief and end talks with Iran. Rubio was hoping to preclude any U.S. return to the nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The JCPOA constitutes the most intrusive international inspections regime in history over Iran’s civilian nuclear program. Iran is a long time signatory of the Non Proliferation Treaty unlike Israel, who has a clandestine but well known nuclear weapons arsenal.
On top of the annual $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel, five days before the war, Biden approved another $735 million weapons sale. The sale consists primarily of Boeing’s Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs). The JDAMs are used to convert unguided bombs into precision guided munitions or “smart bombs.” JDAMs were a weapon of choice during the assault on Gaza.
In one instance, Israel dropped a “smart bomb” on a building that contained offices used by the Associated Press, Middle East Eye, and Al Jazeera.
The targeting and destruction of Al-Jalaa Tower have been condemned by a number of local and foreign media groups, including two of its occupants, The Associated Press and Al Jazeera, which launched its own investigation identifying the weapon that wrecked its offices as a GBU-31, one of several JDAM variants known to have been exported by the U.S. to Israel in past years.
Israel even bombed roads around hospitals impeding ambulances from helping victims reach healthcare centers. A week into the war, Gaza’s Ministry of Information was reporting $18 million worth of damage done to streets and other key infrastructure alone.
“Why Do They Hate Us?” 20 Years Later
In the wake of the events of September 11th, 2001, Americans often pondered “why do they hate us?” The best way to answer this question is to analyze the words of Osama Bin Laden, the words he used to convince others to follow him and join his cause.
Throughout the 1990s, he called for violence against the U.S. explicitly for the U.S. Army and Air Force bases occupying Muslim holy land on the Arabian Peninsula. He railed against America, under then President Bill Clinton, for making the Peninsula a “staging post” for the bombing and blockade of Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims. He also pointed to U.S. support for myriad authoritarian Middle East dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. He hoped to bait us into a protracted war that would bleed us dry. The plan is for us to eventually leave, but only after bankrupting ourselves and destabilizing the region, making al Qaeda’s long desired local revolutions more plausible. His plan is working better than expected.
In 1996, Bin Laden issued his first “fatwa” against the United States, he did not incite hate against Americans for their love of freedom and liberty. Contrarily, he specifically complained about U.S. support for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.
The youths hold you responsible for all the killings, evictions, and displacements of the Muslims and the violation of their sacred places which were carried out by your Jewish brothers in Palestine using moneys and arms you supplied them with. [emphasis added]
We declared jihad against the U.S. government because the U.S. government is unjust, criminal, and tyrannical. It has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous and criminal, whether directly or through its support of the Israeli occupation of [Palestine]… we believe the U.S. is directly responsible for those who were killed in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq. [emphasis added]
Along with some of the other fellow lead hijackers, Mohammed Atta, the man who piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, was motivated to attack Americans over their government’s support for Israel. In the book Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, Scott Horton details Atta’s trajectory,
…as Lawrence Wright reported in The Looming Tower, in April 1996, after Israel launched their Operation Grapes of Wrath campaign in Southern Lebanon,… Atta signed his last will and testament, a symbol of his willingness to die in the fight against those he blamed for the war. As journalist Terry McDermott explains in Perfect Soldiers, his book on Atta’s so-called “Hamburg cell” of September 11th plotters, they had all agreed it was the Americans who were responsible for what Israel was doing since the U.S. government gives Israel so many billions of dollars in military equipment and other financial aid.
During Operation Grapes of Wrath, in what is called the First Qana Massacre, the Israelis infamously bombed a U.N. compound killing more than one hundred civilians seeking shelter. Qana was referenced often by Bin Laden in the speeches and writings that influenced Atta and his associates to join up the jihad.
In reality, Israel is ruthlessly occupying about six million people in Palestine with virtually no rights while expanding settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The so called “Two State Solution” is dead. Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, Israel’s top human rights organization, issued reports this year calling the situation in Israel/Palestine a one-state situation akin to apartheid. As Sheldon Richman says, one state “dedicated to Jewish supremacy or domination.” Lately, Israeli ultra-nationalism, with the accompanying street violence, has been on full display without the establishment media’s filters. During the war, evidence proliferated across social media with videos exposing, yet again, the dystopian reality that is the life of Palestinians not just in the occupied territories but, within the 1948 borders too, in what is called Israel proper. In cities like Bet Yam and Lod, Arabs were attacked in the streets by roving mobs of Israelis destroying Palestinian owned businesses and storefronts.
What Must Be Done
It’s been 20 years since the 9/11 attacks. On Memorial Day, neoconservative spokesman and Senator Lindsey Graham, with an ear to ear grin, stood next to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and lied to the American people’s faces. He said “nobody does more to protect America from radical Islam than our friends in Israel.” He was lobbying his own country for another billion dollars in weaponry for the Israelis. Ironically, Tel Aviv has, for years, supported al Qaeda during the war in Syria against their common enemy in Damascus. So much for our ‘greatest ally’ in the Middle East.
From the beginning, the al Qaeda/terrorism issue was framed in a kind of unreality that shared little to no resemblance with the truth. At the time of the 9/11 attacks, Al Qaeda was only a few hundred men, formally backed by Ronald Regan against the Soviets, tucked away in Nangarhar Province. It was the U.S. and its allies that started this fight when we supported Israel’s occupations, put troops on Saudi soil and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
And therefore, aside from dealing with those directly responsible for the attack, whom the Taliban offered to hand over anyway, there was no need to become further bogged down in the region. As it would only kill exponentially more innocent people, create more enemies, more war, more blowback, and destroy our economy.
But we were ceaselessly told by our government that September 11th, 2001 changed everything. Under the spell of the Cathedral, our society accordingly goosestepped into an era of totalitarianism at home to defeat the artificially inflated threat abroad. And what do we have to show for it? Record breaking “defense” budgets, unending mass surveillance, trillions of dollars in crushing debt, indefinite global wars against vaguely defined enemies, millions killed and displaced, torture prisons, assassinations of American citizens, thousands of dead and maimed soldiers, a suicide epidemic among veterans, militarized police, hyper divisive fake corporate news, ongoing economic crises and moral decay. In the end, we sacrificed our character and our way of life. And none of it was necessary.
U.S. support for Israel is a travesty, a stain on our history and present. And because of our own corrupt, imperialist government, Americans are still in the line of fire as Tel Aviv continues to kill men, women, and children on our dime and in our name. We can no longer morally, financially, legally, or strategically afford to offer aid to a regional superpower violating international law. Israel, an internationally notorious apartheid state, killing civilians, perpetually at war, armed with nuclear weapons, and comfortably surrounded by friendly dictatorships, has received well over $200 billion in U.S. money, adjusted for inflation, since its founding. Netanyahu himself once remarked, it is “absurd.”
As Jason Ditz, news editor at Antiwar.com, points out, “Israel’s relationship to the US has long centered around intense lobbying and getting embarrassingly large amounts of military aid ($58 billion in 20 years, more than all other US aid recipients combined).”
Israel uses its American taxpayer-funded, state of the art military to subjugate Palestinians, stealing their property in East Jerusalem and the West Bank while bombing those held prisoner in the Gaza concentration camp. Israel is also constantly attacking its neighbors, such as Syria, whom the Israelis conduct airstrikes against on a weekly basis.
It is a supreme disservice to the victims of 9/11, their memory, and their survivors, to continue down this road, year after year, still funding Israel’s atrocities and fighting the endless Middle East wars. It is time for the American people to not only renounce Washington’s permanent war agenda but emphatically refuse to foot the bill for Israel’s crimes against humanity.
Or have we learned nothing?
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Connor Freeman is a writer at the Libertarian Institute, primarily covering foreign policy. He has been featured in media outlets such as Antiwar.com and Counterpunch, as well as the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. He has also been a guest on Conflicts of Interest. You can follow him on Twitter @FreemansMind96
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“The Peruvian people have raised their heads to say democratically that we are going to save this homeland,” farmer-turned-teacher, unionist organizer and socialist Pedro Castillo, 51, told supporters the evening of June 15, following the end of ten days of counting ballots.
“We are not Chavistas, we are not communists, no one has come to destabilize this country,” he said, a reference to a common refrain from Fujimori’s party and supporters comparing him to Venezuela’s late leftist President Hugo Chavez.
On June 15, Peru’s National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE) concluded counting all votes cast in the June 6 elections. Free Peru candidate Pedro Castillo received 50.12% of the votes while Popular Force candidate Keiko Fujimori received 49.87%. (Details are shown here: ONPE)
In absolute terms, Castillo received 8,835,579 votes, 44,058 votes over the far-right politician charged with committing several crimes, Keiko Fujimori, 46, who garnered the support of 8,791,521 voters. This is her third time running for the presidency for the party she formed, Popular Force, following the 25-year sentence of her father, former President Alberto Fujimori. She was his First Lady and is charged with some of the same crimes that he was.
More than 18.8 million Peruvians cast their votes in the country and abroad. The electoral authorities counted 17.6 million valid votes, over one million invalid votes, and 121,477 blank votes.
This is a historic election for Peru, and an outstanding inspiration to workers like Castillo throughout Latin America and beyond. Non-politician Pedro Castillo is to take office on July 28.
Source: DPA
This historical moment for the poor, workers, indigenous could still be lost if it is up to right-wing militarists, former commanders, and pro-Fujimori judges.
As of June 20, still no final word of who actually is the next president. Keiko Fujimori appealed 200,000 votes at 943 polling stations for being “manipulated” with “fraudulent signatures,” and claimed that there were “impersonations of polling station members” in polling stations.
The Special Electoral Jury (JEE) completed its recount of those cases, on June 19, and found the claims all to be “inappropriate” and “unfounded.”
“[Sixty-three] retired generals and other high-ranking officers issued a communique demanding the resignation of the head of the election board, warning of the danger of a Castillo victory and calling for the ‘strengthening of confidence in the armed forces and the police.’ The Defense Ministry felt compelled to issue a statement in response deploring the use of official military symbols in the communique.”
Telesur followed this announcement up on June 15:
“Peru’s Armed Forces on Monday stated their respect for the constitutional order and disassociated themselves from versions of a coup d’état in this South American country, which is still awaiting the official declaration of Free Peru candidate Pedro Castillo as the winner of the June 6 presidential elections.”
“’We regret the political use of the Armed Forces because this not only undermines their institutionality, but also generates alarm, anxiety, and division at a time when the country requires unity and calm,’ the Defense Ministry said.
“The statement pointed out that the Armed Forces had ‘an exemplary role’ in the elections guaranteeing the free exercise of the right to vote and protecting electoral officials. ‘Their mission in this electoral process has been fulfilled.’” See Peru’s Armed Forces Disassociate Themselves From Coup Attempts.
By June 18, the daily La Republica reported that nothing substantial had yet occurred to ward off this threat. Its front page article was headlined: “Retired former military high-ranking officers instigate rebellion of armed institutes!”
The next day, Minister of Defense Nuria Esparch “sent the letter to the Attorney General (Fiscalía) asking for it to determine if the letter is evidence of a ‘crime of conspiracy.” She also stated that there were no signatures on the letter and that six of those named were dead.
Although Ecuador’s socialist presidential candidate Andrés Arauz lost to Ecuador’s former Coca Cola director, banker millionaire Guillermo Lasso, last April, the Latin American pink tide from the beginning of the 21st century appears to be reviving after other recent defeats.
Bolivia’s new socialist President Luis Arce, Argentina’s President Alberto Fernandez, Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega, Ecuador’s former President Rafael Correa, Brazil’s ex-Presidents Lula Da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, and Colombia’s ex-Senator Piedad Cordoba sent joyful messages.
In the April 11 general election, Castillo led the race of 18 candidates with 19% of the voters. He had never engaged in parliamentary politics. Keiko Fujimori, a congresswoman from 2011 to 2016, took second place with 13.36%. In 2011, she barely lost to liberal-leftist Ollanta Humala with 51.5%. In 2016, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski squeaked by with 50.12% of the voters.
The fact that the JNE has delayed announcing the official victor has encouraged turmoil and demonstrations in front of JNE and ONPE leaders’ houses.
“A group of supporters of the presidential candidate of The Popular Force, Keiko Fujimori, approached the exterior of the house of Magistrate Jorge Rodríguez Vélez, a member of the plenary session of the National Elections Jury (JNE), to hold a sit-in.” They shouted, “Respect my vote, JNE.”
“Another call is being made today, so I can say it’s a systematic thing … They are not going to scare us,” Rodríguez responded.
Keiko Fujimori backers claim ”election fraud” in front of JNE president’s house. [Source: larepublica.pe]
Peruvian voters were faced with two extremes unlike in previous elections, and many were unhappy that a moderate candidate did not make the run-off. Peruvians had the choice of taking a chance with a major change in the economy towards benefiting the poor and the working class, or bringing in the daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori.
He is serving time for ordering the murder of 25 persons by a secret death squad whose killers were military men, in addition to massive corruption, receiving bribes and other crimes committed while his daughter was his adviser.
On October 10, 2018, Keiko Fujimori was arrested on charges of money laundering, illegally receiving money for her 2011 and 2016 presidential campaigns from the Brazilian Odebrecht real estate and construction company, for several other corruption cases, including leading a criminal organization.
She was sentenced to three years’ pre-trial detention as a “high escape risk.” The prosecution seeks 30 years’ imprisonment. Keiko Fujimori was released on bail under house arrest on May 5, 2020.
On June 10, Peru’s anti-corruption prosecutor José Domingo Pérez asked the judiciary to order a new pre-trial detention for Keiko Fujimori’s interference in the ongoing criminal investigations.
“It has been determined once again that the defendant Fujimori Higuchi does not comply with the restriction of not communicating with witnesses,” said the prosecutor.
Fujimori is still under investigation for the Odebrecht case, one of the most significant bribery and graft scandals in Latin America. The prosecutor told the court that she “is communicating with Miguel Torres Morales,” a witness to alleged illegal campaign financing for Fujimori’s 2011 and 2016 presidential bids.
For Keiko Fujimori, this election determines whether she goes to prison for a long time or takes the reigns as chief of state.
Keiko Fujimori in prison, and awaiting the conclusion of judicial investigations into crimes of corruption, accepting bribes, leading a criminal band. She is out on house arrest. [Source: peruactu.com]
Daniel Espinosa, a Peruvian journalist compared what Keiko Fujimori is doing—“attempting to compel the masses into the streets in a move that is as irresponsible as it is dangerous”—to what Donald Trump did by “inciting his fanatics to storm the U.S. Capitol.”
Keiko Fujimori originally filed a lawsuit of 802 cases of fraud against electoral authorities and requested a computer audit of the digitalized electoral records before the current 943 claims of fraud in the country and abroad.
The electoral juries rejected most of them, because they were presented after the legal deadline, and there was little or no evidence of fraud at the polling stations.
From the start of counting the votes following 12 hours of casting ballots on June 6, who led had been nip and tuck. One or the other candidate had led by from 0.1 to 0.5% of the votes. Following a short-held lead by Castillo, Fujimori led in urban areas.
She held the lead throughout Sunday evening and early Monday. Later in the day with more rural votes counted, the tide turned in Castillo’s favor. Fujimori immediately claimed that his party had “distort[ed] or delay[ed] results that reflect[ed] the will of the people.” How this was to have happened was not forthcoming, but she called upon her supporters to protest.
Peru’s currency (sol) “headed to its biggest drop in more than a decade and the S&P/BVL Peru General Index fell as much as 5.8%, the most since November, with mining companies and financial firms among the hardest hit.
Overseas bonds were steady in light trading while the cost to insure against a default edged higher … after investor favorite Keiko Fujimori saw her early lead over leftist opponent Pedro Castillo fade overnight and in the early morning.”
With almost 93% of votes counted [morning of June 7], Fujimori had 50.1% support to 49.9% for Castillo, a former farmer and then school teacher and union organizer from the Peruvian highlands. Castillo traded places once 94% were counted: 50.7% to Fujimori’s 49.92%.
Vote counting slowed. One day, only 451 votes were counted. In one example of alleged “fraud,” a village where 197 people voted, only one favored Fujimori. Vote counters, election observers and ONPE found no fraud. Even the pro-U.S. Organization of American States leadership stated that there had been no fraud.
While Fujimori won every district in Lima’s capital region, the unionist teacher, who had led an important teacher strike in 2017, and whose parents are illiterate peasants, is overwhelmingly supported in the countryside.
Castillo stands for reforming the economy with greater state control over markets and natural resources; curtailing mining; increasing public works and social welfare spending with a 30% cut from corporate profits gained from the use of fossil fuels; and increasing pensions and wages. Fujimori wants more of the same “free market economy,” and spreads fear of “communism” taking over the country internally.
The corporate and White House favorite is also supported by Peruvian middle and upper class urban women simply because she is a woman. Fujimori is supported by celebrities, wealthy players on the national soccer team, and the nation’s most famous author, Mario Vargas Llosa.
The former communist sympathizer turned extreme conservative was the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. He even campaigned for Fujimori without regret. According to Vargas Llosa, she is the best of the “lesser of evils”; he said that her conduct is “very decent.”
Fear Tactics
Upon completion of voting, National Elections Board (JNE) chairman Jorge Luis Salas stated that there were 166 international observers and 1,400 Transparency Civil Association observers monitoring the voting process.
Furthermore, tens of thousands of police and soldiers were on patrol on election day. They reported no instances of chaos or violence. There were, however, a few hundred reports of bringing candidate propaganda into voting areas.
Many people fear that the military, or parts of it, will align with Fujimori to prevent the worker socialist from leading the country.
Three days before the final count, Daniel Espinosa wrote:
Fujimori and her rich backers are endeavoring to destabilize the country, to prevent Castillo from assuming the presidency, or lay the basis for his overthrow once in office—a strategy she may have learned from the CIA and her years in the United States.
Waya, another Peruvian paper, wrote that this election will be remembered for “citizen polarization, the psycho-socials, the false news and the fear campaigns that have been deployed at the national level to direct the vote towards the presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori.”
For the business elite, its media, the police and military leaderships, the only real danger to “democracy,” as they see it, is Pedro Castillo. All the endemic pro-capitalist political corruption, bribes, swindles and murders are apparently of no consequence when confronting socialism, which aims to equalize rights and benefits, end military “solutions” to struggles resisting poverty, injustices, and wars for profit.
The hundreds of U.S. businesses in Peru include scores of chemical companies. Peru is the world’s second largest copper producer. It is also a large source for silver, gold and zinc.
Conclusion
In the last days of the campaign, both candidates concentrated on promising total battle against the coronavirus, which, as of June 17, had taken 189,522 Peruvian lives and infected 2,015,190. Peru leads the world in percentage of deaths per capita: 572.3 per 100,000. Of its 33.3 million population, more than two million have been infected. Peru’s per capita death rate is nearly double that of Hungary, the country with the second highest rate of deaths per 100,000 population at 305.
At the end of the ballot tally, the state announced a curfew in Lima and Callao from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m., in an effort to curtail the spread of Covid-19 infections and deaths.
Peru’s ethnic makeup (self-identified) is 60% mestizo; 27% indigenous (85% are Quechuas, the remainder are Aymaras and Amazonians); 5% white, ca. 2% black/mulatto, and 6.7% others.
Voting is mandatory in Peru for all persons aged 18 to 70. Turnout in this election, at 74%, was lower than the 82% in 2016 but still high.
Latin America’s poor and Indigenous peoples will be watching with hope to see what this feisty farmer-teacher-unionist will attempt to accomplish as a socialist president. Peru’s rich, its military and police leaderships, and Wall Street/Pentagon/CIA will be watching too.
Just in the last generation, the U.S. has backed at least nine coups or coup attempts against progressive or socialist presidents.
In 2002 against Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez (unsuccessful); in 2004 against Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide (successful); in 2009 against Honduras’ Manuel Zelaya (successful); in 2010 against Ecuador’s Rafael Correa (unsuccessful); in 2018 against Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega—the former revolutionary and progressive (unsuccessful); and in 2019 against Bolivia’s Evo Morales (successful).
The U.S. has also blessed right-wing parliamentary coups—in 2012 against Honduras’s Supreme Court; in 2012 against Paraguay’s President Fernando Lugo; and in 2016 against Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff.
Records show, in the last century, at least 87 coups in South America and the Caribbean, all either conducted directly by the self-proclaimed “greatest democracy,” the United States of America, or by its wealthy Latin American and military proxies.
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Ron Ridenour is a U.S.-born author and journalist, anti-war and civil rights activist since 1961. After joining the U.S. Air Force at 17, he saw the inner workings of U.S. imperialism first hand and resigned. In the 1980s and 1990’s he worked with the Nicaraguan government and on Cuban national media. Ron can be reached at [email protected].
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How many Americans are as brave as Buffalo Bills wide receiver Cole Beasley, who announced he would give up playing football before he submits to the NFL’s vaccine protocols? See this.
Health care employees and many other Americans are experiencing pressure to accept vaccination or be fired. For example, a hospital in Texas has made vaccination a condition of employment. I can understand the reluctance of a nurse or doctor, who has witnessed severe injury and death to those who were vaccinated, being unwilling to subject themselves to the risk. They have exposed themselves for 16 months to risk of infection by treating those who are infected. Now they are declared to be a risk to patients because they are not vaccinated and are pressured to accept the high risk of injury from the vaccine.
David Ramsey offers advice to one nurse:
Notice how quickly American corporations have taken to the idea that they have the right to make deeply personal decisions for employees.
It is no longer just US presidents, such as Bush and Obama, who claim authority to set aside our constitutional protections and throw us in prison and execute us without due process, private profit-making corporations are now asserting the right to make our personal decisions.
What does this tell us about the belief in freedom in America? It tells us that it is the last thing public and private leaders think about. Freedom? What is that? The right to disagree with the government, the boss, the media? That’s terrorism. That’s conspiracy theory. That’s being uncooperative. Take off the tinfoil hat and do as you are told.
This is what everyone who works for a US corporation experiences. Take the vaccine. Don’t use these pronouns. Go to sensitivity training. Submit! Submit! Submit!
That is America today. Notice how quickly it came on us. Compare today with 16 months ago and observe the rapid erosion of freedom.
During the 20th century Cold War, Americans heard about “captive nations.” Today America is a captive nation.
Employers’ demands that employees submit to vaccination are not merely assertions of authority over personal decisions and violations of freedom. A lot of evidence indicates that vaccination mandates endanger people’s lives. Much evidence indicates a high incidence of death and serious injury associated with Covid vaccination and that the vaccine itself is causing the variants. See below for one such warning.
The scientific evidence should be publicly debated. Instead, the evidence is suppressed. If the evidence is mistaken, it should be easy to show that to be the case. So why is it suppressed instead of examined and debated? How can it be that corporate executives and boards can be ignorant of the dangers to which they demand employees subject themselves?
Is this a plot against life as people increasingly believe, or is it just stupidity and incompetence on the part of those in leadership positions. Neither answer is reassuring.
Dr. Peter McCullough provides one of the many unambiguous warnings issued by highly qualified experts, people far more knowledgeable than Tony Fauci, a medical bureaucrat whose lifetime work has been to maximize the profits of the pharmaceutical industry: see this.
Dr. Peter McCullough – COVID Vaccines Have Already Killed 50,000 Americans. Is the United States gearing up to force people to submit to vaccination?
Dr. McCullough is Vice Chief of Internal Medicine at Baylor University, editor of Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine, senior editor of the American Journal of Cardiology, editor of the textbook Cardiorenal Medicine, and president of the Cardiorenal Society.
“The first wave of the bioterrorism was a respiratory virus that spread across the world, and affected relatively few people—about one percent of many populations—but generated great fear,” McCullough explained during the Oval Media webinar with other doctors. He noted that the virus targeted “mostly the frail and the elderly, but for otherwise well people, it was much like having the common cold.”
Dr. McCullough has treated many patients with the disease, written papers on it, had the disease himself, and has also seen a death in his own family due to COVID.
He believes that fear of the virus was used very quickly to generate policies that would hugely impact human life, such as the draconian lockdowns.
“Every single thing that was done in public health in response to the pandemic made it worse,” he pointed out.
McCullough explained that early on, as a doctor treating COVID patients, he came up with an early treatment regimen for those struck with the virus, which reduced hospital stays by about 85 percent, and said he began publishing papers on what he had learned. The doctor noted that he was “met with resistance at all levels” in terms of actually treating patients and publishing his papers.
“Fortunately I had enough publication strength to publish the only two papers in the entire medical literature that teaches doctors how to treat COVID-19 patients at home to prevent hospitalization,” he said.
“What we have discovered is that the suppression of early treatment was tightly linked to the development of a vaccine, and the entire program—and in a sense, bioterrorism phase one— was rolled out, and was really about keeping the population in fear, and in isolation preparing them to accept the vaccine, which appears to be phase two of a bioterrorism operation.”
McCullough explained that both the coronavirus and the vaccines deliver “to the human body, the spike protein, which is the gain of function target of this bioterrorism research.”
He acknowledged that he couldn’t come out and say this on national television because the medical establishment has done such a thorough job of propagandizing the issue.
“What we have learned over time is that we could no longer communicate with government agencies. We actually couldn’t communicate with our propagandized colleagues in major medical centers, all of which appear to be under a spell, almost as if they’ve been hypnotized.”
“Good doctors are doing unthinkable things like injecting biologically active messenger RNA that produces this pathogenic spike protein into pregnant women. I think when these doctors wake up from their trance, they’re going to be shocked to think what they’ve done to people,” he said, echoing what he, and Dr. Harvey Risch, professor at the Yale School of Public Health, told Fox News host Laura Ingraham during an interview last month.
Last summer McCullolugh started an early treatment initiative to keep COVID patients out of the hospital, which involved organizing multiple groups of medical doctors in the United States and abroad. The doctor noted that some governments tried to block these doctors from providing the treatments, but with the help of the Association of Physicians and Surgeons, they were able to put out a home patient guide, and in the U.S., organized four different tele-medical services, and fifteen regional tele-medical services.
This way, people who were stricken with COVID-19, were able to call in to these services and get the medications they needed prescribed to local pharmacies, or mail order distribution pharmacies, he explained.
“Without the government really even understanding what was going on, we crushed the epidemic curve of the United States,” McCullough claimed. “Toward the end of December and January, we basically took care of the pandemic with about 500 doctors and telemedicine services, and to this day, we treat about 25 percent of the U.S. COVID-19 population that are actually at high risk, over age 50 with medical problems that present with severe symptoms.”
“We know that this is phase two of bioterrorism, we don’t know who’s behind it, but we know that they want a needle in every arm to inject messenger RNA, or adenoviral DNA into every human being,” he said. “They want every human being.” The doctor later warned that the experimental vaccines could ultimately lead to cancers, and sterilize young women.
Dr. McCullough said his goal is to set apart a large group of people that the system cannot get to, which would include those who have already had the virus, those with immunity, children, pregnant women, and child-bearing women.
The cardiologist went on to say that because there is no clinical benefit in young people whatsoever to get the vaccine, even one case of myocarditis or pericarditis following the shots “is too many,” yet even though the CDC is aware of hundreds of alarming reports of cases of heart swelling in teenagers and young adults, they’re only going to reevaluate the matter later on in June. He accused the medical establishment of neglecting to to do anything to reduce the risks of the vaccines.
As someone who has chaired over two dozen vaccine safety monitoring boards for the FDA, and National Institute for Health, McCullough had room to criticize how the vaccines have been rolled out.
“With this program, there is no critical event committee, there is no data-safety monitoring board, and there’s no human ethics committee. Those structures are mandatory for all large clinical investigations, and so the word that’s really used for what’s going on is malfeasance, that’s wrongdoing of people in authority,” the doctor explained.
“Without any safety measures in place, you can see what’s going on,” he continued.
“Basically it’s the largest application of a biological product with the greatest amount of morbidity and mortality in the history of our country.”
“We are at over 5,000 deaths so far, as you know, and I think about 15,000 hospitalizations. In the EU it’s over 10,000 deaths. We are working with the Center for Medicaid (CMS) data, and we have a pretty good lead that the real number is tenfold.”
McCullough explained that because the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database only amounts to about 10 percent of the bad reactions to the vaccines, his team has had to go to other sources for information.
“We have now a whistleblower inside the CMS, and we have two whistleblowers in the CDC,” the doctor revealed. “We think we have 50,000 dead Americans. Fifty thousand deaths. So we actually have more deaths due to the vaccine per day than certainly the viral illness by far. It’s basically propagandized bioterrorism by injection.”
Dr. McCullough said he’s seen people in his office with cases of portal vein thrombosis, myocarditis, and serious memory problems post-vaccination. “It’s so disconcerting,” he said.
“If you said this is all a Gates Foundation program to reduce the population, it’s fitting very well with that hypothesis, right? The first wave was to kill the old people by the respiratory infection, the second wave is to take the survivors and target the young people and sterilize them,” he said.
“If you notice the messaging in the country, in the United States, they’re not even interested in old people now. They want the kids. They want the kids, kids, kids, kids kids! They’re such a focus on the kids,” he said, noting that in Toronto, Canada, last month, they lured the children with promises of ice-cream to get the jab. According to one report, the government of Ontario—-which doesn’t require parental consent for children to get vaccinated—-encouraged the kids to get the Pfizer vaccine at a pop-up vaccine event.
“They held the parents back, and they were vaccinating the kids,” the doctor reported. He said his Canadian wife’s mother was forcibly vaccinated against her will.
McCullough predicted that the United States is gearing up to force people into getting the injections.
“We have to stop it, and we have to see what’s behind it,” he concluded.
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We have uploaded a copy of the film Cancer: The Forbidden Cures, to our Rumble and Bitchute channels.
This film was produced years ago, but it still stands as one of the best documentaries explaining how the FDA and Big Pharma have gone out of their way to suppress effective therapies that have been proven to treat cancer, to protect their monopoly on the Cancer Drug industry.
Here is the 3 and half minute trailer:
Since the roll out of the COVID-19 Plandemic at the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 bioweapon shots have become the new cash cow for the pharmaceutical industry, and in order to get the FDA to issue emergency use authorizations to use the public as lab rats to complete their Phase 3 trials, they had to pull out a very familiar and often-used page from their playbook in the past: suppress natural and effective treatments so that consumers have only one source, creating a monopoly on a disease that only the FDA can approve “cures” to be sold to the public.
To understand their strategy, one only needs to review their monopoly on the cancer industry, and this documentary is an excellent source to understand it.
Here is a review on the documentary that we published back in 2013.
REVIEW BY DAVID BONELLO – INTERNATIONAL WELLNESS DIRECTORY
Not what it seems. When I popped in the DVD, I went to the chapters to see what they were. I felt, no, not again…the same old stuff.
What a pleasant surprise. I’ve researched and written about these “forbidden” cures for years. What a delight to actually see an interview with Rene Caisse. We even see a party thrown for Rene a year before she died filled with people whom she had helped with their cancers.
Harry Hoxsey shows up, and you get to see scenes from a rare movie that Hoxsey himself made in 1957 called You Don’t Have to Die. It is so rare, you can’t even find a mention of it at the Internet Movie Database.
I loved the research they did on this film. It must have taken years to compile all the archived photos, audio, and films.
They even got Morris Fishbein on film. This is the creep who ran medicine for nearly 50 years. He destroyed many people, many companies, and the damage he did to the health care system of the time killed untold numbers of suffering humans. However, the Hoxsey affair was his downfall. He was forced to resign after libeling Hoxsey and eventually had to admit that Hoxsey was curing cancer.
The section on Max Gerson was interesting, especially the deja vue section: they borrowed scenes from Dying to have Known. The scenes they used were the most powerful, the contraposed scenes of so-called medical experts proclaiming that no one has ever been cured of cancer at the Gerson clinic, juxtaposed with patients telling their story.
Finally, you’ll see some of the latest advances in alternative therapies, including a physician who is curing cancer with baking soda even after he’s lost his license to practice medicine. For you history buffs, this is a must have. For you people looking for options outside of conventional medicine, this could save your life. It is very well done and well worth a watch.
– David Bonello, International Wellness Directory
Here is the full length film.
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With Joe Biden in the White House you can expect to hear the name “Blackrock” in the headlines connected to a variety of issues from real estate purchasing to green energy projects with massive domestic and international investments.
BlackRock, Inc. (together with its subsidiaries) is a massive publicly traded multinational investment firm with over $8.68 trillion in assets under management [December 31, 2020 financial statement] in more than 100 countries across the globe. To say that Blackrock is invested in globalism, climate change and leftist politics, would be a severe understatement {See Here}. Larry Fink is the CEO and people like Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s attorney of record, are on the board.
Inside BlackRock there is a division called the BlackRock Investment Institute (BII) {See Here}.
Essentially the role of the BII is to tell BlackRock what is going to happen around the globe, and be the tip-of-the-spear in directing BlackRock where to invest money by predicting political events.
The Chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute is Tom Donilon, President Obama’s former National Security Advisor (before Susan Rice), and a key advisor to Joe Biden throughout his career in politics.
You cannot get more deeply connected in the swamp financial schemes than Tom Donilon.
Donilon has been in/around government for 35+ years, deeply connected. Before joining the Obama administration Donilon was a registered lobbyist from 1999 through 2005 for O’Melvney & Myers. {Bio Here} Tom’s sole client was Fannie Mae. Fannie Mae is a government-backed private corporation that sells mortgages to investors.
Donilon took the lobbying gig because he was previously Executive Vice President for Law and Policy at Fannie Mae where he was responsible for Fannie Mae’s legal, regulatory, government affairs, and public policy issues. Tom Donilon’s BlackRock Biography reads like a who’s-who of connections to the swamp {READ HERE}
Here’s where it really gets interesting.
Tom Donilon’s brother, Mike Donilon is a Senior Advisor to Joe Biden {link} providing guidance on what policies should be implemented within the administration. Mike Donilon guides the focus of spending, budgets, regulation and white house policy from his position of Senior Advisor to the President.
Tom Donilon’s wife, Catherine Russell, is the White House Personnel Director {link}. In that position Donilon’s wife controls every hire in the Office of the Presidency.
Tom Donilon’s daughter, Sarah Donilon, who graduated college in 2019, now works on the White House National Security Council {link}
So let me just summarize this…. The Chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute, the guy who tells the $8.7 trillion investment firm BlackRock where to put their money, has a brother who is the Senior Advisor to Joe Biden; has a wife who is the White House Personnel Director; and has a daughter who is now on the National Security Council.
Put another way… Tom Donilon’s literal job description for BlackRock is to: “leverage the firm’s expertise and generate proprietary research to provide insights on the global economy, markets, geopolitics and long-term asset allocation,” and his wife is in charge of White House personnel, his brother is Senior Advisor to the President, and his daughter is on the National Security Council.
You seeing this? Conflicts and insider information much?
The only thing missing is Hunter Biden being moved to the BlackRock board.
Now, I say again: Watch Where “BlackRock” and Biden Put Their Money…
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The World Health Organization is awaiting an independent review of an Italian study indicating that COVID-19 could have been in circulation in the country as early as September 2019.
The findings will form part of its investigations into the origins of the outbreak.
CGTN’s Hermione Kitson spoke with scientists in Tuscany at the forefront of the study.
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Dr. Mike Yeadon walks us through the effects of COVID-19 vaccines on adolescents particularly for school-age children and younger.
“I’m genuinely pro-vaccine but I’m pro-safety and these COVID-19 vaccines are not safe. Gene-based design makes your body manufacture virus spike proteins and we know that virus spike proteins trigger blood clots.”
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On the “Dark Horse Podcast,” Dr. Robert Malone, creator of mRNA vaccine technology, said the COVID vaccine lipid nanoparticles — which tell the body to produce the spike protein — leave the injection site and accumulate in organs and tissues.
From 1950 through May 23, 2021, the mandate of the UN Security Council has been either violated or ignored, contributing to the gross destabilization of the world, and the Security Council has authorized four virtually genocidal wars through resolutions based upon fabricated justifications.
The idea of children, including preschoolers, walking around with bacteria traps on their breathing orifices all day so shocked the conscience that last summer, a bunch of internet parodies were produced illustrating such absurdity. Then, within weeks, most local governments mandated this cruel form of child abuse for an entire year without any study of the side effects.
Independent MP Derek Sloan holds a news conference on Parliament Hill to raise concerns about the alleged censorship of doctors and scientists as well as medical information related to vaccines.
Governments are using fear to control and manipulate their citizens. That has now been admitted by members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior (SPI-B), a subcommittee that advises the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) in the U.K. And they should know, because they advocated for it, and now say it was a regrettable mistake.
On 3 June 1941 a meeting of the Soviet Supreme Military Council was chaired in Moscow. Its goal was to ratify instructions for the Red Army’s political workers, which would stress the need for vigilance and caution against the growing Nazi threat.
Good doctors are doing unthinkable things like injecting biologically active messenger RNA that produces this pathogenic spike protein into pregnant women. I think when these doctors wake up up from their trance, they’re going to be shocked to think what they’ve done to people.
Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government. Think about it.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) summit in Brussels on Monday reminds us once again of what a hoax the United States had perpetrated on the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 by assuring him that the western alliance would expand “not one inch eastward” once Moscow allowed German Unification and disbanded the Warsaw Pact.
Residents of Sheikh Jarrah’s resistance to eviction by Israeli Jews evolved into a military confrontation so lopsided, the Israeli bombardments against Gaza so terrifying, it drew widespread condemnation (the US government excepted).
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A man claiming to be a friend with a British Airways pilot has stated that 3 pilots have just died within the past week shortly after receiving COVID-19 injections, and his recording has gone viral on social media. Here is the recording (let us know if Twitter takes it down as we have a copy.)
HUGE …. 3 British Airways pilots have DIED of the COxxVID vaxxine in the past 7-days, and BA are now in crisis talks with the UK Government about whether or not their vaxxinated pilots should be allowed to fly.
This brought out the usual corporate media “fact-checkers” to try and debunk the man’s claims.
Reuters responded with a “fact-check,” but in their own investigation and report they confirmed that not only did these three die, but a fourth one as well.
They gave the usual corporate media response by quoting some health “authorities” who categorically stated that their deaths had “nothing to do” with the shots, while not denying that they died, nor giving any other explanation for their deaths.
Shared in the form of a voice recording on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, an unidentified male says he has spoken to a “friend who’s a BA pilot” and explains “things are getting crazy” after three fellow pilots passed away (here , here and here).
“They’ve had the third BA pilot die in the last seven days, yeah? Third pilot dead in the last week,” says the man heard in the recording. “The first two guys were in their forties and fifties; this guy, mid-thirties, perfectly fit, no underlying conditions. He gets his second jab and he’s dead within days, exactly the same with the first two.
“Because of this, BA are now in crisis talks with the government about whether to allow vaccinated pilots to fly. The issue with that of course is that about 80%, according to my friend in BA, 80-85% have been injected.”
The man then goes on to say only “10% of pilots will be able to fly,” branding it a “serious issue”.
Reuters presented the claims to British Airways, which said they were unfounded and that no such talks were underway with the government.
The spokesperson, however, confirmed the authenticity of the four condolence books, as four company pilots had recently passed away.
“Our thoughts are with their family and friends,” they said, adding that none of the deaths was linked to vaccines.
In a statement to Reuters, the UK’s Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) also denied any such crisis talks with Britain’s flagship air carrier.
“We have not been made aware of deaths of BA pilots after receiving the Covid-19 vaccine and have not had discussions with BA or other airlines, about preventing pilots from flying after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine,” said Dr. Sarah Branch, the director of vigilance and risk management of medicines for the MHRA. “There are currently no restrictions on aviation or other industries and activities post vaccination.” (Source -Emphasis added.)
Meanwhile, Sky News out of Australia is reporting that airline companies in Spain and Russia are warning COVID-19 “vaccinated” people not to travel because of the risk of blood clots.
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The Ethiopian government is committing massacres and other crimes against humanity in different regions of the country. At the recent G7 meeting in Britain over 1,000 protestors marched outside calling for urgent action to prevent more killings of civilians in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. The United States and its allies ignored this.
Instead, they repeated their claims that China is guilty of massive human rights violations in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. This reveals their fear at the threat posed by China to American hegemony over the global economy.
The G7 discussed plans to contain China’s economic development through the “Build Back Better World’’ initiative. This infrastructure programme is designed to counter China’s Belt and Road project. This reveals their fear at the threat posed by China to American hegemony over the global economy.
Last November Ethiopia’s army launched an invasion a devastating war on the Tigray region that has led to the deaths of tens of thousands, mass ethnic cleansing and weaponized rapes of women.
Both the ineffectual UN and pro western human rights group Amnesty International have called for urgent investigations into the massive wave of violence directed against civilians in the Tigray region.
“Thousands have been killed, millions displaced, cities demolished and looted, and millions are starving and suffering from a lack of essential services. ”
Since then the central government’s bloody repression has triggered another civil war in the Oromia region which wants independence for its region.
Investigative journalist Rene Lefort has commented:
“While more than half of the country is under a de facto state of emergency managed by martial law (“Command Post”), basic order is still far from prevailing in these [non-war] zones. Barely a week passes without a massacre, or pogrom, with dozens of victims.’’
“The conditions for genocide against Tigrayans are ripe, and there really are intentions and deeds to destroy Tigray, and cleanse and exterminate Tigrayans. International intervention is needed to avoid a 21st century genocide of Rwandan proportions and a silent massacre of millions of Tigrayans by starvation.’’
The civil wars engulfing the country also encompasses the Oromia region where the Oromo Liberation Army has advanced to the Shewan part of Ormomia near the capital Addis Ababa. This is in response to civilian deaths caused by the violent repression of the Ethiopian army in the region.
The US and its Western allies claim that China is guilty of genocide in its Xinjiang region without producing any solid evidence to support these claims. Meanwhile, they ignore the atrocities being committed by the Ethiopian government on a daily basis. The hubris and hypocrisy of American imperialism and its allies knows no bounds as they step up their Cold War propaganda against China and Russia.
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Vaccine: Residents of Pakistan’s Punjab and Sindh provinces who refuse to take the covid-19 vaccine could have their cell phone signal blocked. The measure was one of the solutions found by local authorities to encourage the population to immunize, as reported by The New York Times on Tuesday (15).
With 216 million inhabitants currently, the Asian country began vaccination for covid-19 in February, with the expectation of serving between 45 and 65 million people by the end of this year. However, only 3 million had received the two doses in early June, according to official data.
The suspicions regarding the immunization against the new coronavirus are related to the fake news about the subject circulating in the country, according to the publication. One of the most talked about conspiracy theories among Pakistanis is that whoever receives the doses will die within a period of up to two years.
But misinformation about vaccines is old in Pakistan, mainly associated with polio, resulting in a large number of cases there. Believing that it is a formula produced by the United States for the purpose of sterilizing children, many parents prohibit their children from being vaccinated against the polio virus.
Pay cut
Cutting the cell phone signal for those who do not get vaccinated should be just one of the efforts of Pakistani authorities to encourage immunization. In Sindh, the government also plans to suspend pay for civil servants who refuse to be served.
Sanctions are expected to start in July, but there is not much information yet on how they will work. While the measures do not go into effect, many Pakistanis rush to get fake vaccination certificates, sold for the equivalent of US$12 each (just over R$60 in direct conversion, at the rate of the day).
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Royal Caribbean’s Odyssey of the Seas was scheduled to leave Port Everglades on July 3rd. The cruise was halted after eight crew members tested positive for COVID. Strange enough, all eight COVID-positive crew members were “vaccinated” for COVID, proving yet again that these spike protein bioweapons do not stop people from testing positive for COVID or transmitting infection. Royal Caribbean has discovered that the VACCINATED cause outbreaks, and vaccines are not magic elixirs that prevent infection at all times.
The good news is that only two of the positive COVID cases showed any kind of symptoms, and these symptoms were mild, like any other cold virus. Testing positive for COVID and not having any sign of sickness is a pattern that has occurred for both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated populations for over a year. Even though NONE of these positive cases on the Odyssey of the Seas represent a viable public health concern, the CDC has quarantined hundreds of non-infected, vaccinated crew members and halted the ship’s operations! The ship’s inaugural sailing date is now July 31st. Under the current testing standards, the CDC will always find a “COVID CASE” no matter if a person is vaccinated or not. Under the current quarantine standards, ships will never sail again and people’s lives will be disrupted for no reason!
Cruise ship industry and basic human liberties are under attack
For over a year, Royal Caribbean and the rest of the cruise ship industry have begrudgingly acquiesced to the CDC’s unlawful medical edicts and false authority, hoping that the agency would give people their basic liberties back. But as the industry comes to rely on the CDC for basic economic and personal freedoms, more of those individual liberties are taken away. The cruise ship industry has not been allowed to operate at all under the CDC guidelines, as thousands of cruise ship employees are forced to take part in an experiment that alters their cells and distributes spike proteins into their blood. All this time, the CDC guidelines advertise “safety” while continuing to violate bodily autonomy and informed consent principles.
By targeting the cruise ship industry specifically, the CDC is contradicting their own guidance and discriminating against one industry over all other industries. The CDC no longer responds to infectious disease outbreaks in an evidence-based manner. This rogue agency of unelected officials has abused their authority, locking down an industry without giving individuals a choice to assume their own risks. Individuals have assumed risks with infectious viruses, bacteria and fungi for centuries, without having to take part in an experiment and passport system that further enslaves them and promotes future outbreaks.
There are many reasons someone might seek medical attention on a cruise ship, (including heart attacks, aneurysms, and blood clots caused by COVID vaccines) but in the case of Odyssey of the Seas, COVID is not one of the reasons. Nevertheless, the CDC has the power to shut down the entire cruise for another two months and isolate vaccinated people who did everything to their body that the CDC wanted.
Florida fighting back against CDC to ensure that unvaccinated people aren’t segregated
The CDC has kept the cruise ship industry locked down for over a year in order to implement Fourth Reich vaccine passports in the United States. The Florida state legislature has fought back against vaccine passports, and has passed a law to punish any rogue entity (such as the CDC) which threatens to violate the medical privacy of an individual or discriminate against a person based on their vaccination status. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is poised to enforce that law, putting the rogue CDC on notice. Consequentially, all cruise ships that sail out of Florida cannot legally require passengers to prove their vaccination status. Individuals in Florida will NOT be segregated or abused. They will be treated with dignity and can assume their own level of risk, as was always the case. As for the vaccinated: They will continue to test positive for COVID and spread spike proteins and other diseases; therefore, they SHOULD NEVER receive preferential treatment or be given special privileges.
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China has slammed G-7 leaders for pushing an aggressive agenda against itself and Russia. The 47th G-7 Summit in Carbis Bay, United Kingdom, concluded on Sunday, June 13. It was attended by the leaders of the seven global north nations and European Union, who form the core membership of the group, and with India, South Africa, South Korea and Australia as invitees.
In the three-day long summit, leaders led by United States president Joe Biden pushed for an aggressive stance against China and Russia, two of the emerging global powers. In the final joint communique that was released the seven governments and the EU pushed for “collective approaches” to counter policies of the Chinese government that allegedly “undermine the fair and transparent operation of the global economy.”
The communique also made sweeping statements on the situation in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, made unsubstantiated allegations of forced labor, called for an investigation into man-made origin theories of COVID-19, and called for a “free and open Indo Pacific” in the context of stained relations between mainland China and Taiwan.
The language in the communique and by Biden himself resurrected the same unsubstantiated allegations raised by the previous US administration under Donald Trump.
In response to the meeting, the Chinese embassy in the UK commented that the “days when global decisions were dictated by a small group of countries are long gone.” They added that any matter of global affairs needs to be decided in consultation with all nations as per the “basic norms of international relations based on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, not the so-called rules formulated by a small number of countries.”
The embassy also countered the statements on Taiwan, Xinjiang and Hong Kong and alleged that the leaders distorted the facts, exposing the “sinister intentions of a few countries such as the United States.”
The G-7 nations also pledged a long overdue spending commitment of USD 100 billion for poorer nations to transition to cut carbon emissions and mitigate global warming. In 2009, as part of the Copenhagen Accord, advanced economies had made a pledge to contribute USD 100 billion per year until 2020.
The target was never met, and the G-7 nations have often deliberately derailed the commitments, which led to the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This long overdue funding is now revived as part of measures to counter competition from China and its trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative.
The G7 meeting was followed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit on June 14, Monday, where again the same leaders continued to push an aggressive stand against China and Russia. In the final communique by the 30-member organization, the leaders of the summit called China’s “stated ambitions and assertive behavior present systemic challenges to the rules-based international order.”
Sweeping statements on “lack of transparency and use of disinformation” and “coercive policies” were made in the communique, reiterating the same allegations made in the G7 communique.
Unlike the G7, which emerged as a platform for economic cooperation among some of the richest nations, NATO is a military bloc that emerged during the Cold War with an explicit purpose to contain the Soviet influence and growing communist movements around the world. This, along with a contentious NATO military exercise in South China Sea, indicates that the US and its allies wish to expand their aggression with China into a militaristic competition as well.
Campaign against cold war tactics grow
In the meanwhile social movements and peace movements are coming together to oppose these latest escalation of tensions by western powers. A public meeting scheduled to be held on June 16, Wednesday, will launch the No Cold War Britain campaign, to oppose the “increasingly aggressive statements and actions” towards China by the US.
The organizers of the meeting have described the newly-emerging Cold War with China as “an obstacle to humanity successfully dealing with extremely serious common issues which confront it such as climate change, control of pandemics, racist discrimination and economic development.”
Several prominent progressive public figures including Vijay Prashad from the Tricontinental Institute, Andrew Murray of the Stop the War Coalition UK, Fiona Edwards of the No Cold War, Jodie Evans of CODEPINK, and Ben Chacko (editor of the Morning Star) among others, will be speaking at the event.
“In the midst of a pandemic, the only way forward is for the states of the world to collaborate with each other rather than to intensify competition,” insisted Vijay Prashad, while speaking to Phoenix Media Co-op. “The conflict imposed on China is a distraction from the many compelling problems we face, at the heart of it all being the virus and the economic collapse that has come as a consequence. We need collaboration to deal with both.”
The plan to launch a unified campaign against cold war aggression in the UK, comes at a time when the British government has sent its largest warship, HMS Queen Elizabeth, along with other warships to South China Sea to participate in NATO naval exercises.
Pointing out how the decision to participate in the exercise is both “aggressive and a total waste of resources” Fiona Edwards stated that “instead of wasting billions of pounds on weapons of mass destruction and supporting the US’s military build-up against China, Britain should genuinely pursue dialogue and global cooperation with China to tackle the immense problems facing humanity.”
Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK questioned the anti-China push by Biden.
“Biden says at G7 press conference that the only way we will meet global threats, including ending the pandemic and combating climate change, is by working together. Then why all the trashing of Russia and China?,” she asked in a tweet.
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Featured image: Anti-NATO and anti-war protest in Brussels, on the day of the NATO summit in the city on June 14, 2021. Photo: PTB
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Before entering the Trump administration to serve as U.S. envoy to Venezuela and Iran, Elliott Abrams penned a revealing essay in May 2017, entitled “Why I’m Rooting for the Hardliner in Iran’s Elections: Two cheers for Ibrahim Raisi!”
Abrams was well aware of Raisi’s bloody track record as a judiciary official, where he was among the judges who oversaw the execution of thousands of political prisoners in the 1980s. Abrams was also well aware that a Raisi presidency could make him the apparent successor to the aging Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, which could have far-reaching consequences for decades to come.
However, Abrams’ support boiled down to his belief that Raisi represents “the true face of the Islamic Republic, while Rouhani is a façade.” According to Abrams, elevating a hardliner like Raisi would bring the Islamic Republic closer to collapse and provide a “clearer view” of the nature of the regime. Such an understanding would make it easier to advance the pressure policies that Abrams and his like-minded compatriots favored, regardless of their interlocutor in Iran and what could be achieved through diplomacy.
Abrams was far from alone in his belief. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the architect of Trump’s maximum pressure policies, published a memo for the Trump administration arguing that Iran was susceptible to “coerced democratization” and suggesting that the administration “work to prevent Rouhani’s reelection.” This dynamic was not new, either, as some U.S. hawks revealed their preference for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ahead of Iran’s notorious 2009 election.
Of course, Raisi was soundly defeated by the incumbent and relatively moderate President Hassan Rouhani four years ago, 57 to 38 percent. Amid high turnout, that outcome signaled continued support for international compromise, the lifting of sanctions, and promises of domestic reforms at home.
But what a difference four years, and a damaging U.S. pressure campaign, makes.
While Rouhani entered his second term with a mandate to pursue broader sanctions relief, U.S. hardliners promptly scuttled his prospects. At the urging of hawks like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo inside the Trump administration, and outside groups like FDD, Trump exited the nuclear deal that many Iranians had publicly celebrated just a few short years before. In the months that followed, sanctions increased to heights not even seen during the height of the Obama administration. Rouhani’s moderation had been met with pressure, vindicating Rouhani’s critics who had warned that the United States could never be trusted.
Now, Rouhani is set to leave office with little to show for his engagement, and people in Iran are desperate and disillusioned amid continuing repression, dramatic sanctions-induced inflation, and a devastating pandemic. Amid widespread voter apathy triggered in large part by the continuation of sanctions, Iran’s leaders have brazenly rigged the game to the benefit of the candidate that U.S. and Iranian hardliners have actively rooted for: Ibrahim Raisi.
Now that the project of installing a hardline Iranian president with minimal voter participation is near complete, U.S. hawks will undoubtedly urge President Biden to finish what Trump started. Even in the face of continual blowback — on the nuclear issue, across the region, and for the people of Iran — direct military confrontation and the removal of the regime in Iran is the only outcome that will satisfy U.S. hawks.
As Abrams’ essay shows, U.S. and Iranian opponents of diplomacy pursue mutually reinforcing policies. Raisi recovered from a decisive defeat in large part thanks to maximum pressure, vaulting to the top of powerful judiciary and, almost certainly, soon to the presidency while the people of Iran bore the brunt yet again of America’s powerful sanctions. And, as Iran tips in a reactionary direction, U.S. hawks will find further justification to push even more escalatory policies.
President Biden has signaled a desire for a new approach and rightly invested significant energy in reviving the nuclear deal with Iran. But he also moved slowly, failed to take significant steps to open up humanitarian trade amid the pandemic and kept his predecessor’s sanctions in place. Now, with Raisi’s elevation, Biden’s options narrow even further. He can continue his predecessor’s pressure-only approach that decimated moderates, empowered Raisi and his fellow hardliners, and closed the door on broader diplomacy. Or he can restore the agreement Trump worked so hard to kill, ease the pressure on the people of Iran and restore some semblance of faith that diplomacy can deliver for each country. Only the latter has delivered any success — for both the United States and the people of Iran.
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The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.
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As the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday easily passed a bill by Rep. Barbara Lee to repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002, peace advocates called on Congress to enact similar legislation to end the 2001 AUMF upon which the open-ended so-called Global War on Terror has been waged for nearly 20 years.
Appearing on NBC‘s “Meet the Press Daily” on Thursday, Lee (D-Calif.), who was the only member of Congress to vote against the post-9/11 AUMF (pdf)—passed one week after the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the United States—told host Chuck Todd that H.R. 256, her bill repealing the 2002 AUMF that passed by a bipartisan vote of 268-161, “is an important step toward repealing the 2001 authorization.”
“We must keep up our fight to repeal the 2001 AUMF so that no future president has the unilateral power to plunge us into endless wars,” Lee said separately ahead of Thursday’s House vote.
Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) also called to repeal the 2001 AUMF, tweeting Thursday that “the power to declare war belongs to Congress because we are the branch most accountable to the people.”
“Today, the House voted to repeal the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which has enabled endless war in Iraq,” Porter added. “Let’s do the 2001 AUMF next.”
The anti-war group Peaceful Tomorrows, founded by relatives of 9/11 victims, published a statement Thursday calling for a repeal of the 2001 authorization.
“It has been almost two decades since the deaths of our loved ones, and for the entirety of that time, the U.S. has been at war,” the group tweeted. “These wars have not brought justice for the crimes of 9/11. Instead, they have caused untold suffering and deaths among innocent civilians who bore no responsibility for 9/11. Rather than keeping Americans and other people throughout the world safer, these wars have inflamed and provoked violence.”
Now onto a Senate vote on S.J. Res. 10, then (hopefully) an effort to repeal the 2001 AUMF as well. See our full statement, backed by >250 family members of 9/11 victims, on the need to reject authorizations for endless war and bring the forever wars to a long overdue end. pic.twitter.com/MB9jJ3Wfno
— Peaceful Tomorrows (@PeacefulTomorro) June 17, 2021
Peaceful Tomorrows noted that while the 2001 AUMF gave then-President George W. Bush “the authority to use force against those responsible for the 9/11 attacks,” the law “has been used by the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations to authorize the use of force in 19 countries, against groups that did not even exist in 2001, and have no connection to the attacks.”
“To end the forever wars and end this chapter in American history, Congress must sunset the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force,” the group said.
In 2001, Lee presciently warned that the AUMF would allow presidents to wage war “anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation’s long-term foreign policy, economic, and national security interests, and without time limit.”
“That was a blank check; it was passed right after the horrific attacks of 9/11, it was 60 words, and it just authorized the use of force forever,” Lee told Todd of the 2001 authorization. “So it set the stage for perpetual war.”
As debates kick off on H.R.256, you can find some more historical background by reading our joint letter from earlier this year, where we joined 24 other orgs in calling on Congress to repeal the 2002 #AUMF (and sunset the 2001 AUMF!).https://t.co/hmY0I494sj
The U.S.-led anti-terror war—which includes the Afghanistan War, the longest in U.S. history—continues to this day. At least 800,000 Afghan, Iraqi, Libyan, Pakistani, Somali, Syrian, and Yemeni people, as well as thousands of U.S. and allied troops, have died, at a cost exceeding $6.4 trillion, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Costs of War Project, toldEsquire in an article published Wednesday that the 2001 AUMF is even more important than the 2002 authorization because it “grants the president broad authority to extend the war wherever and however he pleases.”
If the Senate Is Serious About Ending Endless Wars, It Should Focus on the 2001 AUMFhttps://t.co/lPtHE9fpHY
— Mass. Peace Action #FreePalestine (@masspeaceaction) June 17, 2021
Esquire politics editor Jack Holmes wrote:
The move to repeal the 2002 AUMF is welcome, particularly because, as the Trump administration demonstrated, it can also be exploited by the executive to justify unilateral decisions of war and peace. But if [Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York] is serious about reclaiming the war powers of Congress—and ending our endless wars—then the 2001 AUMF will have to go, too.
The Biden White House, like every administration, is fused to the extended military and intelligence apparatus… When the smoke clears, there are always new enemies. More bombs to drop, and give to our friends to drop. Eventually, this has to stop. It would help if the legislative branch, and its many individual members who have absolved themselves of responsibility for these endless conflicts by ensuring they never have to go on the record about them, would take some of that responsibility back.
On the House floor ahead of Thursday’s vote, Lee cited some of the “lies and misinformation” disseminated by the Bush administration in its attempt to sell the Iraq War to a largely skeptical American public. And while it was not based on as many outright lies as the Iraq War, the Bush administration nevertheless brushed off multiple opportunities to avoid a protracted war in Afghanistan.
In the weeks following 9/11, the Taliban—whose members were previously supported by the U.S. government and courted by American business interests despite their human rights crimes—offered first to try al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and then to turn him over to the United States as Bush launched the invasion of Afghanistan.
We're grateful to our friends like @WinWithoutWar and champions like @RepBarbaraLee, who have worked tirelessly for peace. We look forward to working with our allies and partners to finally #StopEndlessWar.
— Indivisible Guide (@IndivisibleTeam) June 17, 2021
In April, President Joe Biden announced he plans to withdraw all regular American combat troops from Afghanistan by this year’s anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. According to the Costs of War Project, the nearly 20-year war has claimed an estimated 241,000 lives and cost the U.S. $2.26 trillion.
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Recently the U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider a challenge to the all-male draft. The plaintiffs in the case argued that excluding women from the draft was unconstitutional. Apparently the Court is simply letting Congress decide the issue.
I’ve got an idea — an idea grounded in freedom. How about abolishing the draft — and, of course, draft registration? In fact, better yet, how about enacting a constitutional amendment prohibiting the draft from ever being enacted again?
Young people might think the matter is irrelevant, given that there hasn’t been conscription since the Vietnam War. That is naive, wishful, and dangerous thinking. Every 18-year-old male is required, on pain of a felony conviction, to register for the draft. The reason? Because in the event of some major foreign war, make no mistake about it: The Pentagon will not hesitate to restore the draft because it will need soldiers to fight, kill, and die. Young men — and also most likely young women — will begin receiving draft notices ordering them to report to military facilities for training and “service” to “their country.”
The fact that the national-security establishment continues doing everything it can to gin up such a war — like with Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea — makes the the possibility of a draft even more likely. And once it happens, there is little anyone will be able to do to stop it. In fact, in the event of another major foreign war, I wouldn’t be surprised if they started jailing people for just challenging the draft, as U.S. officials did in World War I.
There is no way to reconcile conscription with the principles of a genuinely free society. Either people are the masters of their own lives or the government is their master. It’s one or the other.
With conscription, the government wields the power to order a person to leave his family and his regular life and report to a government facility to serve the state. That is the opposite of freedom. In a genuinely free society, a person has the right to live his life the way he wants — free of governmental interference, so long as his conduct is peaceful and non-fraudulent.
In fact, there is actually no difference between slavery and conscription. Under slavery, a person is being force to serve his master. That’s what conscription is based on. It’s a system in which the individual is being forced to serve his master, with the master being the federal government, and specifically the Pentagon.
Under 19th-century slavery in America, the slave’s service usually consisted of work on a plantation. Under conscription, the work consists of military training on a Pentagon-run facility and then killing, maiming, or torturing people on orders in some faraway land. But that’s just a distinction without a difference. What matters is that under both systems, the individual is being forced to serve his master.
Proponents of the draft say that sometimes it is necessary to force people to fight for “freedom.” But that’s ridiculous because if you have a system where the government can conscript people, you no longer have a free society. Freedom has been destroyed in the name of protecting freedom.
Moreover, when you have a genuinely free society, you don’t need to force people to fight for their freedom. A free people will fight vociferously to protect their freedom. In fact, foreign regimes that attack and invade a genuinely free society soon find that they have swallowed a porcupine.
The problem is that the U.S. government wages foreign wars — that is, wars in faraway lands, where no foreign regime has attacked or invaded the United States. In those wars, many Americans aren’t interested in giving up their lives to fight the “enemy.” World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam come to mind.
In every one of those wars, Americans had to be forced to go fight, kill, and die. Oh, yes, they were all told that they were fighting for their “freedom,” but that was palpable nonsense.
If any of the enemies in those wars were really invading the United States, there would have been more than enough Americans ready and willing to defend their country, their lives, and their freedom. No one would have had to have been forced to fight.
Yes, I know, in World War II Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. But my hunch is that many Americans realized that President Roosevelt had manipulated Japan into attacking in order to circumvent widespread American opposition to entry into the war. Moreover, many Americans realized that Japan never intended to invade and take over the United States, Instead, it was simply trying to knock out the Pacific fleet to give Japan a free hand to secure oil in the Dutch East Indies, as a way to overcome FDR’s pre-war oil embargo on Japan. Moreover, if FDR had not been successful in maneuvering Japan into “firing the first shot,” Germany would not have declared war on the United States.
If you’ve never read the essay “Conscription” by Daniel Webster, I highly recommend it:
Today, the American people have a unique opportunity to lead the world to a genuinely free society. A great place to begin would be a constitutional amendment, modeled after the 13th Amendment, that prohibits conscription forever.
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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.
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Joe Biden took part in several key international meetings over the last week covering a wide range of issues but with one key goal in mind: intensify the new Cold War with China and construct a global front towards this end. This is the most intensive series of diplomatic summits for the Biden administration yet, and provides key insights about how it plans to manage the affairs of U.S. empire.
The first major event took place in the UK, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson hosted the other members of the “Group of 7” club of advanced imperialist economies from June 11 to 13. Biden took credit for pushing the other leaders to attack China by name for the first time in the closely-watched communique issued at the conclusion of the summit. The communique was designed to provocatively touch on the issues that China considers to be core to its sovereignty and the integrity of its national territory.
The G7 called on China “to respect … those rights, freedoms and high degree of autonomy for Hong Kong enshrined in the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Basic Law”. It also demanded that China “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, especially in relation to Xinjiang”. The communique expressed support for “peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, and encourage the peaceful resolution of cross-Strait issues. We remain seriously concerned about the situation in the East and South China Seas and strongly oppose any unilateral attempts to change the status quo and increase tensions.”
These words are dripping in hypocrisy. For 150 years Hong Kong was ruled in a completely dictatorial fashion by the British Empire with no guaranteed political rights for its residents, who were colonial subjects of the Queen of England. The city returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 after having been stolen in the infamous Opium Wars of the 19th century, a development the G7 leaders are effectively trying to undo by supporting the separatist protest movement. The manufacturing of the “Uighur genocide” issue by the United States and allied powers similarly seeks to slice off a major section of China’s northwestern territory and damage its reputation internationally. And far from promoting “peace and stability”, the United States and others routinely sail warships and fly military aircraft through the Taiwan Strait in deliberate provocations against China. Taiwan, formally known as the Republic of China, was seized by the defeated forces of dictator Chiang Kai-shek at the conclusion of the Chinese Revolution in 1949 with U.S. backing and is rightfully claimed by China as part of its national territory.
The Biden administration along with the other G7 leaders fueled the baseless conspiracy theory that Coronavirus was unleashed onto the world accidentally or intentionally by a virology lab in China. This is clearly intended to compensate for the imperialist countries’ woefully poor performance containing the pandemic relative to China. A similar logic was at play with the pledge by the G7 to donate one billion COVID vaccine doses to poorer nations. Especially considering how wealthy the major western powers are compared to China, the Chinese government’s extensive efforts to aid 66 other countries’ vaccination efforts has put them to shame.
A spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry strongly rejected the G7 communique, which it said sought to, “wantonly smear China and blatantly interfere in its internal affairs.” The ministry affirmed that, “Gone are the days when one country or a group of countries dictated the world.”
The United States and European powers made economic moves to deepen their aggressive posturing towards China. On June 15, a US-European Union Trade and Technology Council was established with the goal of coordinating policies to constrain China’s ability to trade with the rest of the world and pursue its economic development. The U.S. and European leaders pledged the “development and deployment of new technologies based on our shared democratic values”. It is ludicrous that the government that developed the monstrous NSA electronic surveillance state that spies on its own population along with much of the rest of the world feels the right to lecture China on democratic values in technology. To underscore their commitment to coordinating economic policy as part of a united front against China, U.S. and European officials brokered an end to their long-running dispute over subsidies for corporate giants Boeing and Airbus.
NATO Summit
On June 14, immediately after the conclusion of the G7 summit, the leaders of the NATO military alliance gathered in Brussels. There, the leaders declared for the first time that China constituted a “systemic challenge to the rules-based international order”. The “rules-based international order” is a euphemism frequently used to refer to the existing world order dominated by the U.S.-led bloc of imperialist powers.
This represents a historic shift in the mission of NATO. Founded in 1949, the goal of NATO was to prepare for a new world war with the Soviet Union, and ensure that all the major capitalist powers would be united in their global confrontation with the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO has served in large part as a mechanism to threaten Russia — now capitalist but still outside of the control of the traditional imperialist powers.
The elevation of China to the status of a “threat” of the same magnitude as Russia is a serious escalation. It also further disproves NATO’s assertion that it is a “collective defense” organization for the North Atlantic, considering that it has now taken up stoking war in East Asia as a core task.
Biden-Putin meeting
Biden capped his week of diplomacy with a highly-anticipated meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Biden has a long history of hostility towards Russia. He was effectively put in charge of Ukraine by the Obama administration following the 2014 coup that installed an anti-Russian government, is a proponent of the debunked conspiracy theory that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign in the 2016 election, and shortly after taking office as president called Putin a “killer” — which led to the withdrawal of the Russian ambassador to the United States and subsequently the withdrawal of the U.S. ambassador to Russia.
Anti-Russia hardliners in the U.S. political elite were disappointed that Biden expressed something less than absolute, unmitigated hostility at the Putin summit. The tone of the meeting was in marked contrast to for instance the Alaska summit with top Chinese officials in March, where the U.S. side was senselessly belligerent and saw the meeting as little more than an opportunity to raise ideologically-charged criticisms of China’s system of government. But at the same time little was done in the way of concrete action to change the status quo of simmering tension.
Biden described his policy towards Russia as “strategic stability”. This essentially means the preservation of the status quo instead of a further deterioration in relations. Towards that end, Biden and Putin agreed to hold ongoing talks between their respective countries’ officials on the issues of cybersecurity and arms control. They also put Biden’s “killer” remark behind them and agreed to send their ambassadors back to their posts.
But the core issues that have put the United States and Russia on a collision course remain unchanged: the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe, the conflict in Ukraine, efforts at regime change in Russia-aligned Belarus, the war in Syria, and others. “Strategic stability” suggests that Biden does not intend to make any major moves to resolve these conflicts.
Biden’s preference for “strategic stability” is likely motivated in large part by his desire to focus on the new Cold War with China. Russia and China have been developing progressively closer relations in the face of deepening hostility from the United States in recent years. Keeping China and Russia divided has long been a key goal of U.S. foreign policy, and its ability to achieve this was key to its success in the original Cold War. Momentarily softening pressure on Russia to foster suspicion in China (and vice versa) is a tried and true tactic in the toolkit of U.S. imperialism.
On the road to war
While Biden and his top officials were busy escalating global tensions with statements, press conferences and communiques; bombers, fighter jets and warships in East Asia were demonstrating the real-world consequences of these reckless moves.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Navy announced it had deployed the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier along with a guided-missile destroyer and a guided-missile cruiser to the South China Sea. The South China Sea is the site of numerous territorial disputes between neighboring countries including China, which the United States has long sought to inflame by sailing warships through contested waters.
Also on Tuesday, China’s air force flew 28 planes into an area around Taiwan’s airspace known as an Air Defense Identification Zone — the largest number of mainland aircraft yet to be sent into the ADIZ. This maneuver was carried out in retaliation to the G7 communique that raised the issue of Taiwan for the first time. China needed to demonstrate that it would not back down from its rightful claim to sovereignty over all of its territory.
Reports surfaced this week that the Pentagon was mulling the creation of a permanent naval task force to patrol the waters surrounding China. This task force would be led by the United States but also involve forces from U.S. allies. While it has yet to be confirmed, the task force is conceptualized along the lines of the Standing Naval Forces Atlantic that operated during the original Cold War. Should this come to pass, it would represent a major ratcheting up of military pressure on China.
The Biden administration is pursuing a foreign policy completely at odds with the interests of workers in the United States. If a war between the United States and China were to ever break out, the consequences for every person on the planet would be catastrophic. In the meantime, trillions of dollars that could otherwise be used to solve social problems will instead be wasted on instruments of destruction. And for what? The continued domination of U.S. banks and corporations over the whole world is not a cause worth dying for.
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Featured image: NATO heads of state at the alliance’s summit in Brussels (Source: Liberation News)
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Four years ago this weekend, I received a phone call. The panicked voice at the end of the line told me a terror attack had taken place.
Someone had rammed their van into worshippers as they left night prayers at Finsbury Park Mosque in north London, and one of the worshippers had been killed.
This was our mosque, our community hub, our space of solace, and my workplace. Now our sense of serenity had been shattered by an act of hate.
The days that followed saw a flurry of activity and chaos. The world’s media camped outside our mosque. Security was heightened, official visits took place, and promises of change were made.
Four years on, we are still waiting for those promises to be fulfilled.
The politicians and media may have moved on, but our community has not. Makram Ali, who was mowed down in the attack, is still dead.
His children are still without a father, and those who knew him and prayed beside him still live in fear that an attack like this could take place again and that their names will be the ones written in obituaries.
Our mosque has received endless calls from Muslim women in the area worried about being the victims of hate crimes and we have had to put on workshops and therapy sessions to help with the trauma people are experiencing.
Our lives as a community were changed forever on 19 June 2017, and we are still feeling the effect of that attack today.
Dark smog
It is why I was pained and horrified to see such a similar attack take place in Canada earlier this month where four members of the same family in London, Ontario, were killed because they were Muslim.
Reading about this incident gave me flashbacks to what took place outside our mosque and the unimaginable terror and horror unleashed that day.
Though these attacks took place hundreds of miles apart, the source of this hatred is the same: Islamophobia.
Islamophobia is the dark smog we have allowed to descend on our societies. What was once exclusively the rhetoric of the far right on the fringes of society has now infiltrated the mainstream and has become the acceptable face of racism.
The Islamophobic attacks that took place in Finsbury Park, Ontario, and Christchurch, to name a few, did not arise in a vacuum.
They are the culmination of decades of institutional Islamophobic discourse and racialised policies that have filtered down from the top to our streets.
Islamophobia is not simply surviving, it is thriving, and we put Muslims at risk when we fail to acknowledge the pattern of hate locally and across borders.
Here in the UK, we have a political class that still refuses to acknowledge Islamophobia and take it seriously, and a media that is complicit in spreading negative coverage of Muslims and demonising them.
Global inaction
From London to Jerusalem, from Christchurch to Oslo, the impact of Islamophobia is clear for everyone to see, yet the response to its rise globally has been met with inaction, silence, and in some cases, celebration.
Following the attacks in London, Ontario, the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared that Islamophobia has no place in our communities. But despite this, Ontario’s government blocked a motion condemning Islamophobia.
Similarly, leaders of the Conservative Party here in the UK reneged on their promise to carry out a truly independent inquiry on Islamophobia in the party, and our prime minister still refuses to apologise for several Islamophobic comments he has made.
Let us be clear: Muslims will never be safe from another attack until the issue of Islamophobia is taken seriously and tackled head-on.
For us at Finsbury Park Mosque and for many Muslims across the world, another Islamophobic attack taking place is not a case of if, but when.
Though these attacks are intended to cause terror and fear, they also draw out the best in people.
From the courage of Imam Mohammed, who protected the attacker from the anger of those he had nearly just killed, to those who sent flowers and cards from across the world to our mosque and Makram’s family, to the hundreds from our local community and beyond that gathered outside our mosque the day after the attack to show their solidarity.
Christchurch and London, Ontario, have their heroes and well-wishers too, and what these acts of solidarity show are that those who tried to divide us have failed.
I hope other communities around the world do not have to experience what we did in order to come together to fight the scourge of Islamophobia and I hope that governments around the world reflect the actions of their citizens who are calling out in one voice against this evil.
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Mohamed Kozbar is a community leader and chairman of the Finsbury Park mosque in North London.
Featured image: Darren Osborne was jailed for life for the attack in 2017 that killed Makram Ali, who was walking home from night prayers (Supplied to Middle East Eye)
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Head of the General Federation of Trade Unions Sami Al-Amasi has confirmed that 20 factories were destroyed during the last offensive on Gaza, and 5,000 workers had lost their jobs.
In a statement, Al-Amasi disclosed that the latest Israeli offensive inflicted a massive blow to the economic sector in the Gaza Strip. He noted that it aggravated the already weak economy, which has been suffering for more than one and a half decades, with increased adversity due to COVID-19.
Al-Amasi indicated that the economy was the main target for the Israeli attacks, pointing to the demolition of the offices of big companies located in the high-rise buildings destroyed during the offensive.
Meanwhile, he stated that the direct and indirect effects of COVID-19 affected more than 160,000 workers during the last year.
Al-Amasi called for Deputy Labour Minister Ihab Al-Ghussein to establish a fund to help workers affected by the Israeli offensive.
He also called for Arab, Islamic and international trade unions to support the Palestinians and their cause, as they are enduring harsh conditions under Israeli occupation.
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Featured image: Flames are seen after an Israeli air strike hit targets in Gaza City, Gaza on 15 June 2021 [Ali Jadallah / Anadolu Agency]
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Last week, the Venezuelan government announced that the Union Bank of Switzerland blocked its latest payments of 10 million USD towards the COVAX initiative for acquiring COVID-19 vaccines
The member countries of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – People’s Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP), on June 13, rejected the decision of the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) to block the payment made by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to acquire COVID-19 vaccines through the COVAX initiative, a global access fund for anti-COVID-19 vaccines. The countries condemned the commercial, economic and financial blockade imposed by the US against Venezuela, which impeded the country from accessing vaccines, which are crucial in the global fight against the pandemic.
In an official statement, the member countries denounced that “the arbitrary blockade carried out by the financial institution” and said that “this illegal action is a consequence of the unilateral coercive measures imposed by the United States government, whose effects on the financial sector threaten the well-being, health, security and right to life of the people.”
The bloc reminded that all this is aimed at “promoting regime change and overthrow of a constitutionally, legally and legitimately elected government by the will of the people and in the exercise of their self-determination.”
The organization emphasized on “the need to fully respect all human rights, especially the right to life and health,” and called to “immediately lift the unilateral coercive measures that prevent the affected countries from combating COVID-19 effectively.”
Los países miembros de @ALBATCP denuncian el bloqueo arbitrario realizado por parte de una institución financiera del pago de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela para la adquisición de vacunas contra el COVID-19, a través del mecanismo COVAX. pic.twitter.com/1wPJt5FuEi
Last week, on June 10, the government of President Nicolás Maduro denounced that the UBS blocked the last four installments of 10 million USD directed towards the COVAX mechanism to complete the payment of 120 million USD for COVID-19 vaccines.
Vice-president Delcy Rodriguez, during a press conference, reported that “we received a notification that the resources deposited for the acquisition of vaccines have been blocked and are under investigation.”
The representatives of the COVAX facility confirmed that Venezuela had transferred 110 million USD for over 11 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines and only 10 million USD remained to be paid. They also confirmed that the UBS bank blocked the last 4 payments and placed the money under investigation.
Como lo acaba de denunciar la Vicepresidenta @delcyrodriguezv, #Venezuela ha pagado LA TOTALIDAD de sus compromisos con el mecanismo #COVAX para adquirir las vacunas. Sin embargo, el Banco ha "bloqueado" arbitrariamente los últimos pagos y están bajo "investigación". ¡Un crimen! pic.twitter.com/L6n9xj41Mo
On June 11, during an event, President Maduro urged his US counterpart Joe Biden to “end the blockade of Venezuela’s financial resources” and allow the country to “purchase vaccines and accelerate the national immunization campaign.”
Venezuelan government is facing additional challenges in fighting the pandemic. The country’s capacity to purchase vaccines has been severely hindered by the commercial blockade and economic sanctions imposed by the US and the EU against it. The country is unable to use its foreign assets worth billions of dollars and resources frozen in foreign bank accounts due to these sanctions.
However, despite all the political maneuvers by the US and its allies, Venezuela has managed to secure Sputnik V and Sinopharm vaccines from Russia and China respectively. On June 5, the Bolivarian government and the Russian pharmaceutical company Geropharm signed an agreement to buy 10 million doses of EpiVacCorona vaccine. The government also plans to buy Soberana 02 and Abdala vaccines from Cuba, after the conclusion of their clinical trials.
Venezuela began inoculating its healthcare workers and other priority sectors against COVID-19 on February 18 with Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine. On June 1, it launched a mass vaccination campaign for the rest of the population. It hopes to vaccinate 70% of its population by the end of the year.
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Ex-Cleveland mayor Dennis Kucinich talks about his bombshell book, DIVISION OF LIGHT AND POWER, in which he describes being repeatedly thwarted by corrupt members of his city’s government while fighting against a relentless campaign to privatize Cleveland’s public electric power systems that included multiple attempts to assassinate him.
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First published on January 29, 2021
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A recent study in the journal Cancer Discovery found that inhalation of harmful microbes can contribute to advanced stage lung cancer in adults. Long-term use of face masks may help breed these dangerous pathogens.
Microbiologists agree that frequent mask wearing creates a moist environment in which microbes are allowed to grow and proliferate before entering the lungs. Those foreign microbes then travel down the trachea and into two tubes called the bronchi until they reach small air sacks covered in blood vessels called alveoli.
“The lungs were long thought to be sterile, but we now know that oral commensals–microbes normally found in the mouth–frequently enter the lungs due to unconscious aspirations.” – Leopoldo Segal, Study Author and Director of the Lung Microbiome Program and Associate Professor of Medicine at New York University Grossman School of Medicine
According to the study, after invading the lungs these microbes cause an inflammatory response in proteins known as cytokine IL-17.
“Given the known impact of IL-17 and inflammation on lung cancer, we were interested in determining if the enrichment of oral commensals in the lungs could drive an IL-17-type inflammation and influence lung cancer progression and prognosis,” said Segal.
While analyzing lung microbes of 83 untreated adults with lung cancer, the research team discovered that colonies of Veillonella, Prevotella, and Streptococcus bacteria, which may be cultivated through prolonged mask wearing, are all found in larger quantities in patients with advanced stage lung cancer than in earlier stages. The presence of these bacterial cultures is also associated with a lower chance of survival and increased tumor growth regardless of the stage.
Additionally, research into the cultivation of Veillonella bacteria in the lungs of mice found that the presence of such bacteria leads to the emergence of immune suppressing cells as well as inflammatory ones such as cytokine IL-17.
“Given the results of our study, it is possible that changes to the lung microbiome could be used as a biomarker to predict prognosis or to stratify patients for treatment.” – Leopoldo Segal
As more evidence emerges pertaining to the long-term effects of mask mandates and lock downs, doctors and scientists are beginning to reconsider whether these authoritarian measures really are doing more harm than good. One Canadian public health expert named Dr. Aji Joffe found in a related study that lock downs cause “at least ten times” more damage than benefit.
In a recent working paper by researchers at Harvard, Duke, and John Hopkins Universities, academics concluded that “for the overall population, the increase in the death rate following the COVID-19 pandemic implies a staggering 0.89 and 1.37 million excess deaths over the next 15 and 20 years, respectively.”
Since forced mask wearing began, dermatologists have coined the term ‘maskne’ to describe an onset of pimples near the mouth caused by masks clogging up pores with oil and bacteria. This can be caused by either disposable or cloth masks.
Dentists have also been warning about a phenomenon known as ‘mask mouth’ in which patients are arriving back to the dental office with an increase in gingivitis and tooth decay as high as 50% in a period of just a few months since mask mandates began.
This discovery sheds light on the growing evidence of harm caused by long-term mask wearing.
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With nearly all votes counted from Friday’s presidential election, Ebrahim Raeisi triumphed by a 62% landslide as predicted by pre-election polls.
Rival aspirants Mohsen Rezaei achieved 11% support, Nasser Hemmati 8% and Amir-Hossein Ghazizadeh-Hashemi 3% — according to near-final results.
Raeisi’s four-year term begins on on August 3. He’ll succeed two-term President Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s head of state since August 2013.
In November 2019, the Trump regime sanctioned Raeisi and other Iranian officials for invented reasons.
No legitimate ones existed then or now.
Trump’s Treasury Department defied reality by falsely accusing targeted Iranian officials — including Raeisi — of “oppress(ing) the Iranian people (sic), export(ing) terrorism (sic), and advanc(ing) destabilizing policies around the world (sic).”
The above accusations apply to hegemon USA and its imperial partners, not nonbelligerent Iran.
In stark contrast to Washington’s war on humanity at home and abroad, the Islamic Republic prioritizes peace, stability, cooperative relations with other nations, and compliance with international law.
If US-dominated Western nations were governed like Iran, world peace would end preemptive wars against invented enemies.
Western societies would be fit to live in instead of the other way around, things worsening, not improving.
According to Iranian Interior Minister Rahmani Fazli, final results showed Raeisi getting 17.92 million votes.
Over 59.3 million Iranians were eligible to cast ballots — over 28.9 million participating for a turnout of 48.8%.
In response to Raeisi’s triumph, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the following:
“Dear Mr. Seyyed Ebrahim Raeisi, the president-elect of the Islamic Republic of Iran, accept my sincere congratulations on the election of Your Excellency as the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” adding:
“(O)ur countries are traditionally gifted with friendship and good neighborliness” — a relationship he looks forward to deepening ahead.
Along with electing a new president, Iranian voters also chose officials to fill vacant parliamentary and Expediency Council seats, as well as city and village council positions.
Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said
“(t)he great winner of (Friday) elections was the Iranian nation, which stood up once again in the face of the propaganda campaign waged by the enemy’s mercenary media and temptations of the ill-wishers and showed off its presence in the heart of the political field.”
Outgoing Iranian President Rouhani said anti-Iranian US/Western propaganda failed to prevent millions of voters from exercising their franchise on Friday.
He also praised national patience and fortitude in light of US/Western war on Iran by other means, and expressed best wishes to his successor.
Along with Vladimir Putin, other prominent officials congratulated Raeisi on his triumph.
Syria’s Bashar al-Assad said the following:
“I wish for your country to move forward on the path of progress and bring about prosperity in all fields for the people, who have withstood all the conspiracies and pressures mean to break their will.”
“I take this opportunity to express my eagerness for closer cooperation in promoting bilateral relations between the Syrian Arab Republic and the Islamic Republic and pursuing common interests.”
Iraqi President Barham Salih and Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi sent congratulatory messages to Raeisi.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan tweeted the following:
“Congratulations to Excellency brother Ibrahim Raisi @raisi_com on his landmark victory in the Islamic Republic of Iran’s 13th Presidential elections.”
“Look forward to working with him for further strengthening of our fraternal ties and for regional peace, progress and prosperity.”
Raeisi was also congratulated by leaders and officials of Kuwait, Qatar, Yemen, Oman, Azerbaijan, the UAE, Armenia, Turkey, Lebanon, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad.
Western nations ignored his triumph — except to unjustifiably criticize him and the Islamic Republic.
On a sour note, Iran’s Foreign Ministry summoned Britain’s envoy to Tehran to protest against Boris Johnson regime obstruction of the right of Iranian ex-pats in the country to vote on Friday.
He was sharply criticized for what Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh called “riotous and terrorist” conduct by UK “anti-Revolution terrorist elements and those opposing democracy.”
US/Western media press agents for power are militantly hostile toward Iran — for its sovereign independence from imperial control.
NYT propaganda falsely claimed that “many Iranians (viewed Friday elections) as rigged (sic),” adding:
President-elect Raeisi “has a record of grave human rights abuses, including accusations (of) mass executions of political opponents (sic).
The above is typical Times rubbish, based on falsified talking points supplied by US hardliners.
Other US/Western media report similar Big Lies against all nations free from US hegemonic control.
Ahead of Friday’s process, the selected — unelected — Biden regime criticized Iran’s electoral system while ignoring its own illegitimacy.
Raeisi has no friends in Washington.
Perhaps Biden regime hardliners will add new illegal sanctions to existing ones — to assure no softening in their war on the country and its people by other means.
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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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Three days after 9/11/2001 — the mother of all state-sponsored false flags to that time — Congress near-unanimously declared war on humanity.
The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) was passed by joint congressional resolution — signed into law by Bush/Cheney four days later.
The measure for endless wars on invented enemies authorized all “necessary and appropriate force (sic)” against parties responsible for “plann(ing), authoriz(ing), committ(ing)…aid(ing) (or) harbor(ing)” those involved in the 9/11 attacks (sic).
Falsely called “just wars,” US aggression on Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Somalia followed, along with deployment of US special forces death squads to around three-fourths of world community countries.
Guantanamo and dozens of other CIA torture prisons were established and continue operating extrajudicially.
Security Council member states alone may legally approve war by one nation against another — permitted only in self-defense, never preemptively.
UN Charter Article 51 allows the “right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member” state.
It’s permitted “until the Security Council has taken measures to maintain international peace and security.”
Self-defense is legally permitted — never an unprovoked attack by one nation on another.
No foreign power attacked the US since Britain in 1812 — none on 9/11.
Nor was Osama bin Ladin or “crazed Arabs” involved in what happened on a day that will live in infamy.
On 9/11/2001, US dark forces were behind what the Nuremberg Charter calls “the supreme international crime against peace.”
Pre-9/11, Bush/Cheney regime officials planned to attack Afghanistan and Yemen in October 2001, then Iraq and other countries on their target list for regime change.
All that was needed was what the neocon Project for a New American Century (PNAC) called a “catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a New Pearl Harbor” — to wage endless war on invented enemies when no real ones existed, nor any today.
Former CIA head of counterintelligence, Vincent Cannistraro, later acknowledged that US war planners “cooked intelligence” to justify what’s always unjustifiable.
At the time, CIA analyst Michael Scheuer said Langley knew in advance “that we were going to war” before 9/11.
By joint resolution in October 2002, Congress Authorized Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq to “defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat of Iraq(i)” WMDs that did not exist.
Bush/Cheney regime deputy war secretary Paul Wolfowitz later admitted that (nonexistent) WMDs were used as a pretext for war on Iraq because it was the thing everyone agreed on to justify what’s always unjustifiable.
He also acknowledged that war on Iraq was part of a larger plan for controlling regional oil by establishing a large-scale US Middle East military presence.
On Thursday, House members voted to repeat AUMF by a 268 – 161 majority.
On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the following:
“I strongly and fully support repealing the 2002 authorization for the use of military force…”
“It is my intention as majority leader to bring this matter to a floor vote this year.”
On Monday, the Biden regime’s White House said the following:
It “supports the repeal of the…AUMF, as the United States has no ongoing military activities that rely solely on” its use, adding:
Its repeal “would likely have minimal impact on current military operations.”
They’re ongoing lawlessly in multiple theaters with no end of them in prospect — along with illegal sanctions wars on around three dozen nations.
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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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The three-day Antalya Diplomacy Forum started in southern Turkey on June 18. According to the Turkish Foreign Ministry, its participants include ten current and three former heads of state and government (presidents and prime ministers), 42 foreign ministers and over 50 representatives of international organizations.
Topics of discussion include the Balkans, the future of Europe, trans-Atlantic relations, refugees and migrants and terrorism (which with Turkey is usually a reference to the Kurdish Workers’ Party and affiliates). A session was scheduled on Turkey’s proposal for an Eastern Mediterranean conference as well.
The conference is another reflection of Ankara’s ambition to establish itself not only as a regional but a latent global power. Evidence of that policy has been seen from the military side in places ranging from Libya to the Caucasus and from Iraq and Syria to Afghanistan.
Speaking on the sidelines on the first day of the event, the foreign minister of Pakistan, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, called for joint Pakistani-Turkish cooperation in Afghanistan after all U.S. and other NATO forces (except Turkey’s) are withdrawn. Qureshi was quoted by a reporter from Daily Sabah as stating: “I will be meeting the Turkish foreign minister on June 20 and I have to hear him out about what is their proposal. I do not know the details yet.”
After meeting with the leaders of several other NATO countries at the June 14 NATO summit in Brussels, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said he intended to invite Pakistan and Hungary to join Turkey in playing a security role in Afghanistan after the departure of U.S. and NATO military forces. Pakistan is an obvious choice for him, as the two nations are solidifying cooperation in several spheres, including the military, but Hungary is not so obvious a selection. One possibility is that the nation has hosted the multinational NATO-supported Strategic Airlift Capability since 2008 and would be best qualified to share control of the Hamid Karzai International Airport with NATO ally Turkey.
Erdoğan, with characteristic lack of timidity, said that his nation was the only one that could continue a foreign security function in Afghanistan after the general withdrawal.
On June 17 the Afghan Foreign Ministry said that Cihad Erginay, the Turkish ambassador to Afghanistan, met with Afghan Foreign Minister Mohammad Haneef Atmar. Turkey advocated bringing Pakistan into the reconciliation process – by which it might be understood to mean negotiations between the government of President Ashraf Ghani and the Taliban – and its envoy spoke both of continuing a NATO role in the nation and recruiting “the support of regional countries, especially Pakistan” in Afghanistan.
The population of Afghanistan is over 40% Pashtun and some 12% Turkic (Uzbek and Turkmen). The first gives Pakistan and the second Turkey the influence of ethnic and linguistic affinity. The largely autonomous warlord in the north, ethnic Uzbek Abdul Rashid Dostum, has lived in Turkey and owns property there. He recently threatened Afghan President Ghani with the prospect of a South Turkestan (with Turkish backing) if Kabul doesn’t meet his demands.
Turkey dominates the Turkic Council, which also includes its de facto province Azerbaijan and three of Afghanistan’s neighbors in Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
Afghanistan has an estimated population of close to 40 million. Pakistan has a population of 225 million and Turkey of 85 million.
In what is a revealing indication of what may lie at the root of a Turkish-Pakistani alliance not only in Afghanistan but also much further afield, at the beginning of the month the speaker of the Turkish parliament, Mustafa Şentop, was in Pakistan where he met with Pakistani President Arif Alvi. The Turkish parliamentarian was quoted by the Daily Sabah as stating Turkey and Pakistan should lead the Islamic world together.
A Turkish-Pakistani axis, replete as it would be with nuclear weapons, would be a force – a military force – to contend with; a combination of NATO’s largest member state outside North America and the most populous of NATO’s forty partners.
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Rick Rozoff, renowned author and geopolitical analyst, actively involved in opposing war, militarism and interventionism for over fifty years. He manages the Anti-Bellum and For peace, against war website
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
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VAERS data released today by the CDC showed a total of 358,379 reports of adverse events from all age groups following COVID vaccines, including 5,993 deaths and 29,871 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020 and June 11, 2021.
This week’s number of reported adverse events among all age groups following COVID vaccines surpassed 350,000, according to data released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The data comes directly from reports submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed. Every Friday, VAERS makes public all vaccine injury reports received as of a specified date, usually about a week prior to the release date.
Data released today show that between Dec. 14, 2020 and June 11, 2021, a total of 358,379 total adverse events were reported to VAERS, including 5,993 deaths — an increase of 105 deaths over the previous week. There were 29,871 serious injury reports, up 1,430 compared with last week.
In the U.S., 306.5 million COVID vaccine doses had been administered as of June 11. This includes128 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine, 167 million doses of Pfizer and 11 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) COVID vaccine.
This week’s data, from Dec. 14, 2020 to June 11, 2021, for 12- to 17-year-olds show:
The most recent reported deaths include a 15-year-old male (VAERS I.D. 1383620) who reportedly died one day after receiving his second Pfizer dose, a 15-year-old male (VAERS I.D. 1382906) who received Pfizer and a 16-year-old male (VAERS I.D. 1386841) who reportedly suffered a hemorrhage and died four days after receiving a Pfizer vaccine. An autopsy is pending.
Other deaths include two 15-year-olds (VAERS I.D. 1187918 and 1242573), a 16-year-old (VAERS I.D. 1225942) and one 17-year-old (VAERS I.D. 1199455).
974 reports of anaphylaxis among 12- to17-year-olds with 98% of cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine, 1.4% to Moderna and 0.2% (or two cases) to J&J.
109 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis (heart inflammation) with 108 attributed to Pfizer’s COVID vaccine.
Of the 3,516 cases of Bell’s Palsy reported, 54% were reported after Pfizer vaccinations, 42% following vaccination with the Moderna vaccine and 267 cases, or 8%, of Bell’s Palsy cases were reported in conjunction with J&J.
CDC reschedules emergency meeting to discuss reports of young people developing serious heart issues after mRNA vaccines
The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) planned to hold an emergency meeting today to discuss the benefit-risk of COVID mRNA vaccines in adolescents and young adults. The agency rescheduled the meeting late Thursday, after Congress officially established Juneteenth National Independence Day (observed today) as a federal holiday.
The meeting will now be held during a regularly scheduled ACIP meeting on June 23 – 25.
The emergency meeting was announced last week after the CDC acknowledged a higher-than-expected number of reports of heart inflammation in young people after they received a Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.
The CDC on June 10 said it was aware of a total of 475 cases of myocarditis or pericarditis in patients 30 and younger. The disclosure was made during a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) hearing to consider what data the agency would need in order to extend Emergency Use Authorization of COVID vaccines for children under 12.
CDC data showed 196 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis among 18- to 24-year-olds through May 31, compared with an expected rate of between eight and 83 cases. Among 16- to 17-year-olds, 79 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis were reported through May 31. The expected rateamong people in this age group is between two and 19 cases.
A search of the latest available data in VAERS revealed 1,117 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis, among all age groups reported in the U.S following COVID vaccination between Dec.14, 2020 and June 11, 2021. Of the 900 cases reported, 686 cases were attributed to Pfizer, 391 cases to Moderna and 36 cases to J&J’s COVID vaccine.
Parents share horror stories of death, illness after Moderna vaccine
This week, The Defender reported on two cases of young people who developed heart complications after being vaccinated with the Moderna COVID vaccine, including a 19-year-old college freshman who died, and a 21-year-old student who is recovering.
On June 15, The Defender reported that Simone Scott, a 19-year-old freshman at Northwestern University, died of complications from a heart transplant she underwent after developing what her doctors believe was myocarditis following her second dose of the Moderna COVID vaccine.
Scott received the second dose on May 1, and on May 11, visited a doctor on campus because she wasn’t feeling well. On May 16, she texted her father complaining of dizziness and fatigue. He called campus police who, when they checked in on her, had to administer CPR.
After multiple interventions, including hooking Scott to an ECMO machine that mirrors the function of the heart so her own heart could rest, doctors determined she needed a heart replacement. She died June 11.
Scott’s mother told local media, “I still feel like she’s here, even though I know she’s not and it just feels like such a waste.”
Scott’s doctors have not fully confirmed the cause of her death, but they said it appears she suffered from myocarditis.
On June 15, The Defender reported that a 21-year-old New Jersey student suffered severe heart inflammation after receiving his second dose of Moderna’s COVID vaccine. Justin Harrington, whose school required him to get the vaccine in order to attend classes in the fall, experienced flu-like symptoms followed by heart pain within eight to 12 hours of receiving the vaccine.
In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Justin’s father, Timothy Harrington, said his son felt different after the second shot. Every time his heart beat it hurt and he felt pressure,” Harrington said. “Then he developed heart pain down both arms.”
Harrington said his son, who has no underlying medical conditions, did not experience heart pain with his first dose of the vaccine. Although Justin has since been released from the hospital, he has to wear a heart monitor and take four different medications for six months, has to sleep propped up, can’t exert himself and he’s missing out on one of the most important times of his life, his father said.
As for Justin’s recovery, Harrington said, “He has minor scarring on his heart and doctors hope they caught it early enough that there will be no other issues — but it’s pure conjecture at this point.”
8 fully vaccinated die of COVID in Maine, as U.S. breakthrough cases rise
Initial data suggest breakthrough cases in Maine are more common in older individuals and people with underlying health conditions — the same populations that, among the unvaccinated, are most at risk of hospitalization or death from the virus. About half of the vaccinated people in Maine who tested positive for COVID had not experienced symptoms when contacted by case investigators, according to the Maine CDC.
On June 3, Napa County California announced a fully vaccinated woman, who was more than a month past her second Moderna shot, died after being hospitalized with COVID. The 65-year-old woman had underlying conditions and tested positive for the Alpha variant.
As of June 9, the California Department of Public Health had identified more than 5,723 breakthrough COVID cases. Of the 5,723 cases, at least 417 people were hospitalized and least 47 died. Approximately 48% of cases were missing hospitalization data. It is not known if the primary cause of hospitalization or death was COVID or if there were other causes.
Other states continue to report breakthrough cases, among them Texas, which recorded more than 768 breakthrough COVID cases through June 1, with 8% (61 cases) resulting in death.
In Washington, the state’s Department of Health reported 1,837 cases of breakthrough infection through June 9. Of those, 10% resulted in hospitalization and 31 people died from COVID-related illness. The majority of cases occurred in the 35 to 49 age group.
Health officials push vaccines, ignore natural immunity
The CDC conservatively estimates more than a third of Americans (at least 114.6 million) have been infected with SARS-CoV-2.
For example, a December 2020 study by Singapore researchers found neutralizing antibodies (one prong of the immune response) remained present in high concentrations for 17 years or more in individuals who recovered from the original SARS-CoV.
Yet health authorities are largely ignoring this fact as they continue to push for everyone to get the vaccine. As the American Institute of Economic Research reported, it appears in order to promote the COVID vaccine agenda, key organizations are not only “downplaying” natural immunity but may be seeking to “erase” it altogether.
New Cleveland Clinic study found people who had COVID were less likely to be reinfected than fully vaccinated individuals who never had virus—suggesting vaccine is of no benefit to people who already had COVID.#TheDefender: https://t.co/zL66EdwTnDhttps://t.co/zvQMuYwHaa
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) June 9, 2021
102 days and counting, CDC ignores The Defender’s inquiries
According to the CDC website, “the CDC follows up on any report of death to request additional information and learn more about what occurred and to determine whether the death was a result of the vaccine or unrelated.”
On March 8, The Defender contacted the CDC with a written list of questions about reported deaths and injuries related to COVID vaccines. After repeated attempts, by phone and email, to obtain a response to our questions, a health communications specialist from the CDC’s Vaccine Task Force contacted us on March 29 — three weeks after our initial inquiry.
The individual received our request for information from VAERS, but said she had never received our list of questions, even though employees we talked to several times said CDC press officers were working through the questions and confirmed the representative had received them. We provided the list of questions again along with a new deadline, but never received a response.
On May 19, a CDC employee said our questions had been reviewed and our inquiry was pending in their system, but would not provide us with a copy of the response. We were told we would be contacted by phone or email with the response.
We’ve contacted the CDC numerous times since and there is no change in the status of our questions, to re-submit our questions or to callback later. It has been 102 days since we sent our first email inquiring into VAERS data and reports and we have yet to receive a response.
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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.
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Only three days before the 80th anniversary of the German-led Operation Barbarossa invasion of Soviet Russia on June 22, 1941, NATO reports that fifteen German warplanes flew near Russia’s northwest border for four days this month, the 14th-17th.
Altogether over 40 military aircraft from NATO nations participated in Multinational Air Group Days, with the German planes providing the framework for other warplanes from fellow NATO member states Denmark, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the U.S.
For the first time a Multinational Air Group Days deployment was integrated with the mammoth Baltic Operations (BALTOPS) war games in the indicated region, which are led by the U.S.
“The combination of the two training events offered synergies weaving multinational air operations into the maritime play facilitating modern warfighting operations. NATO’s Combined Air Operations Centre at Uedem, Germany – an expert for Allied air operations in the region, controlled the aerial training activities….”
The NATO press release from which the preceding is excerpted also quotes Lieutenant Colonel Rüdiger Gerhart, German Multinational Air Group Days Project Officer at the German Air Operations Command in Kalkar, Germany:
“The way ahead is to achieve an initial operational capability in 2023 allowing Germany to lead an air task force and to further expand and solidify that capability to declare full operational capability in 2026.”
The German Air Force, which appeared in the sky over Yugoslavia in 1999 during NATO’s 78-day air war against the nation, after a 54-year hiatus following the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, is back in business and ready to bomb many of the same cities it did 80 years ago.
German multirole combat aircraft rotate to upgraded air bases in Latvia and Lithuania to participate in NATO’s so-called air policing operations with patrols near the Russian border, particularly near the territory of Kaliningrad, and that of Belarus. Latvia borders the main body of Russia; Lithuania abuts Kaliningrad. Both border Belarus.
NATO stations Enhanced Forward Presence Battlegroups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, all of which border Russia. The battlegroup in Lithuania is commanded by the German military and also includes troops and equipment from fellow NATO member states Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Norway (which also borders Russia). It is located at Rukla, just a few kilometers from Russia.
Thirty German soldiers attached to the NATO battlegroup in Lithuania were sent home two days ago for alleged racist and anti-Semitic behavior and for, to make the anniversary complete, singing a birthday song for Adolph Hitler. Nostalgic for the glory days of their great-grandfathers, no doubt. Surely NATO has provided them with the opportunity to reflect on such matters.
Anyone in Russia or elsewhere who observes that the current configuration of multinational Western military forces along Russia’s entire western border resembles that of 80 years will of course be accused of paranoia. And of “amplifying GRU disinformation.” They will monitored and detected by the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga, Latvia, which will report them to the government of their nation, and they may receive a knock on their door.
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Rick Rozoff, renowned author and geopolitical analyst, actively involved in opposing war, militarism and interventionism for over fifty years. He manages the Anti-Bellum and For peace, against war website
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
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Biden set the trap by warning Putin that it would be disastrous for Russia if Navalny were to die in prison. See this.
With the trap set, ABC “presstitute” Rachel Scott sprang the trap in Putin’s open press conference following the summit. She dressed up an accusation as a question:
“The list of your political opponents who are dead, imprisoned, or jailed is long and you have now prevented anyone who supports [Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny] to run for office. So my question is, Mr. President, what are you so afraid of?”
Putin answered that Navalny had knowingly broken the terms of his parole. Rachel Scott hit Putin again:
“You didn’t answer my question, sir. If all your political opponents are dead, in prison, poisoned — doesn’t that send a message that you don’t want a fair political fight?”
CNN, which headlined Biden’s warning to Putin, made certain that ABC presstitute Rachel Scott’s propaganda coup reached a wide audience by repeating Scott’s confrontation with Putin: see this.
The world’s population was not privy to what was said in the Biden-Putin meeting. What people know of the meeting comes from the press conference afterward. What people took away from the press conference is that Putin is a tyrant who poisons and arrests the opposition.
In other words, Putin’s Russia is the Soviet Union redux.
Whatever Biden’s intentions and Putin’s hopes, there is no possibility of improved relations as long as Washington has hegemonic aspirations and as long as Washington needs the “Russian threat” to justify the annual $1,000 billion military/security complex budget and NATO which Washington uses to control the foreign policy of Europe.
Given the facts, what hope did the Kremlin see in the summit? Were the hopes worth another black eye for Putin?
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Israel’s recent military assault on the Gaza Strip of occupied Palestine intensifies questions of U.S. complicity in the conflict. While the bombs were falling, congressional Republicans demanded that President Biden “strongly condemn Hamas” for firing missiles at Israel. Conservative Democrats demanded that Biden become more “engaged” in the drama. So-called progressive Democrats voiced a desire to place limits on military aid to Israel. On both sides of the political aisle, demands grew for the United States to become more involved in the crises.
Representatives of both parties were mistaken. The U.S. was firmly engaged in the conflict on the side of Israel. President Biden allowed the brutal assault to continue for 11 days by repeatedly intoning that “Israel is allowed to defend itself.” Essentially, Biden gave Netanyahu a green light to destroy Hamas, condemning himself as an accessory to mass murder. The extended bombing campaign gave Israel an opportunity to pulverize the Gaza Strip slaughtering mostly civilians in a gruesome display of state sponsored terrorism. In the end, Israel’s pathological prime minister failed to degrade the fighting capability of Hamas.
Throughout the conflict, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken asked both sides to show “restraint,” as if this was a symmetrical war between countries rather than the 4th most powerful military force in the world bombing a besieged ghetto. Blinken also called for a two-state solution oblivious to the fact that there are now 622,670 Jewish settlers living in permanent settlements in the West Bank. Proposals for a two-state solution are a fiction used to posture for a non-existent peace process that allows Zionist colonization to proceed unimpeded.
On the diplomatic front, U.S. ambassadorLinda Thomas-Greenfield blocked UN Security Council resolutions that called for a cease fire and condemned Israel’s military response to the crisis after having delayed a meeting of the Council. A spokeswoman for the Chinese government eviscerated the double standard whereby the U.S. routinely condemns China for treatment of its Uyghur Muslim minority while allowing Israel to massacre Muslims in Palestine.
The United States sent an envoy to the region to try to “de-escalate” tensions, to no purposeful avail. Secretary of State Blinken eventually visited Israel in late May. All the typical platitudes about Israel’s right to self-defense and the need for a two-state solution were repeated.
The U.S. offered “aid” to Gaza simultaneously offering to replenish Israel’s weapons and its “Iron Dome” defense batteries. The U.S. has approved $735 million in military aid as part of a yearly $3.8 billion gift to Israel that finances purchases of the F-16 and F-35 fighter jets used to bomb Gaza. The advanced fighter aircraft are produced by U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin.
Secretary Blinken offered $360 million to rebuild Gaza, but stipulated the money must not help Hamas whose leaders rejected the help. The aid will be funneled to the Palestinian authority in the West Bank to further divide the Palestinian resistance. The U.S. will also coordinate international assistance to Gaza.
There was no condemnation from the Biden administration of the genocidal assault on Gaza or the vigilante violence that took place against Palestinians living in Israeli cities.
Not a word was uttered to denounce the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians living in East Jerusalem or repeated attacks on the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Biden claimed he talked to leaders of “both sides” during the conflict, speaking periodically with Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas does not represent the Palestinian side in the struggle for self-determination, armed or political. Hamas does. But the U.S. will not talk with “terrorist organizations,” only “terrorist states,” such as Israel and its homicidal prime minister. President Abbas has not stood for elections in 16 years. There have been no Palestinian elections since January 2005 when Abbas was elected to a four-year term as president. He is a puppet of Israel and the United States. The Palestinian people have contempt for the PA government he leads prompting the autocrat to cancel elections scheduled for May and July.
During Blinken’s trip to Israel, he refused to meet with representatives of Hamas. This strategy mirrored U.S. policy in Vietnam, where the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations supported the puppet government in Saigon, refusing to speak with the Hanoi leadership of Ho Chi Minh until Johnson finally agreed to do so in 1968. Ho Chi Minh died in 1969 after leading the national liberation struggle against the French and Americans for 25 years. The Nixon regime was eventually compelled to negotiate with representatives of North Vietnam when it became clear the U.S. could not win the war.
Biden and Blinken could have communicated with leaders of Hamas at the inception of the crisis to bring about an immediate cease fire. The U. S. could have stopped the bombing of Gaza in one second despite Netanyahu’s intransigence by threatening to cut off aid and support U.N. Security Council resolutions condemnatory of Israel. There was precedent.
In 1956, an angry President Eisenhower ordered France, Britain and Israel to cease their attack on Egypt and withdraw their forces from the Sinai desert and Suez Canal. When Israel hesitated, he supported a U.N. General Assembly resolution that deplored Israeli occupation of the Sinai, went on national television to bring his case to the American people and privately threatened Prime Minister David Ben Gurion with sanctions that would have ended all public and private aid to the fledgling state. Israel promptly withdrew.
Biden is no Eisenhower. He fully supports Israel’s reign of terror, rendering persistent claims of U.S. advocacy for human rights a fraud. The U.S. endorses genocide in Gaza. Why?
U.S. imperial interests in the Middle East are tied to Israel. A symbiotic relationship exists between imperialism and Zionism. The interests of the U.S. have merged with the interests of Israel.
A key debate in foreign policy circles is whether Israel functions as a strategic asset or liability of the United States.
With the existence of the Soviet Union in a bipolar world, the U.S. relied on Israel as an attack dog in the Middle East principally aiding its efforts to fight Arab nationalism and counter Soviet influence in the region. In other parts of the world, Israel stood alone with the U.S. to support apartheid South Africa. Israel also provided weapons to right-wing dictatorships supported by the U.S. in Africa and Latin America.
Since the dissolution of the USSR, Israel has become a strategic liability of the U. S. generating fanatical hatred of America throughout the Arab and Muslim world for prosecuting a destructive “war on terrorism” whose architects were neoconservatives closely associated with the right-wing Likud party in Israel.
The neoconservatives advance policies that facilitate U.S. global domination while labeling enemies of Israel as foes of America in a ‘war of terror’ that serves as pretext for interventionism. By rationalizing aggressive designs of U.S. imperialism, the neoconservatives wish to use U.S. power to dominate the Middle East on behalf of Israel.
The evolution of the neoconservative movement that began in the Republican Party during the presidencies of Bush Senior and Bush Junior, has morphed into the Democrat party under Obama and Biden.
Neoconservatives now dominate the foreign policy establishment so thoroughly, that any aversion to U.S. hegemony is considered treason. Critics of the U.S. relationship with Russia or Syria are quickly targeted as apologists for Putin and Assad, respectively. Pragmatic alternatives to the exercise of assertive power are nonexistent in official circles. The Wolfowitz Doctrine failed to prevent the emergence of competitors to U.S. power, but animates the New Cold war against Russia, the Pivot to Asia, sequential wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria and coups in Honduras and Ukraine.
The ascendancy of neoconservative political ideology that equates the interests of imperialism with those of Zionism in the corridors of power and prominence of an Israel Lobby that advances this perspective, explains America’s unconditional support for Israel despite the liabilities.
The Zionist power structure comprising the Israel Lobby led by American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (CoP) and Christians United for Israel (CUFI); pro-Israel think tanks such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), Center for Security Policy (CSP), Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) and the Saban Center at Brookings (SCB); political donors; supporters in government, media and myriad national organizations work tirelessly to equate U.S. interests with the interests of Israel. The power configuration also labels any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.
The Lobby can be defied on a particular issue such as Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran that was vehemently opposed by the organized Zionist movement in the U.S. and Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu. But it cannot be defied on essential policies involving U.S. financial, military, diplomatic and political support for Israel. Obama, despite his intense dislike of Netanyahu, gave Israel $38 Billion to be distributed over a ten-year period.
Trump was fanatically pro-Israel in part because of his friendship with Netanyahu, business connections with the Kushner family in the real estate industry and massive campaign contributions by the late ultra-Zionist casino magnet Sheldon Adelson, Paul Singer and other pro-Zionist Republican mega-donors.
Trump named his personal bankruptcy lawyer, David Friedman as U.S. ambassador to Israel and appointed his son-in-law Jared Kushner as point-man in the Middle East. Both Friedman and Kushner are donors to illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Friedman also gave money to the Jerusalem Reclamation Project that buys property for Jews in Muslim East Jerusalem to Judaize the city. Kushner’s father is a lifelong friend of Netanyahu.
Trump’s rabidly pro-Israel agenda resulted in the U.S. embassy being moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, official recognition of Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights, Kushner’s “Deal of the Century” that failed to resolve conflict with Palestinians and the Abraham Accords of 2020 that normalized relations between Israel and United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.
Taken together, the Deal of the Century and Abraham Accords intended to subjugate the Palestinian struggle and eliminate isolation of Israel in the Muslim world.
Resistance continues with Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syria and Iran. The strategic goal of the U.S. and Israel is to smash the “Arc of Resistance.” Obama launched a dirty war in Syria to topple the Assad government and break a link in the chain connecting Iran with Hezbollah and Hamas. The U.S. supported Islamic jihadists, including ISIS fighters, in the covert war. Trump tore up the nuclear agreement with Iran and imposed killer sanctions on the country, cheered on by U.S. media propagandists.
Biden, a consummate supporter of Israel, supports the hostile agenda.
Passage of the Jewish Nation-State Law in 2018 codified apartheid in Israel. In June 2021, Benjamin Netanyahu was forced out and Naftali Bennett, a right-wing ultra-nationalist more hawkish than his predecessor, was moved in as prime minister. Bennet is doctrinaire. No Palestinian statehood, no two-state solution, no removal of settlements, no ending the occupation, no right of return, no peace. For Bennet, Israel is a Jewish state not a state for all its citizens.
By providing unconditional support for racists in Israel, the U.S. openly promotes apartheid, nurtures barbarism and condones savagery. The U.S. is fully complicit in the crimes of the settler state. As Israel continues to consolidate what B’Tselem describes as a regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, an irresistible force continues to meet an immovable object. Israel cannot expel seven million Arabs living among seven million Jews in historic Palestine. Torture, abuse, oppress and kill, yes. Eliminate or exterminate, no.
The Zionist war on the Palestinian people is relentless. Zionist demands for a supremacist Jewish state and Palestinian demands for self-determination are irreconcilable. Occupied Palestine is the epicenter of resistance to settler colonization and the struggle in Jerusalem is its core. By fighting a ‘war of terror’ against the resistance, the U.S. and Israel have unleashed a torrent of anger, hatred and violence that breeds a whirlwind of incessant and ever worsening strife.
When rationalizing Israel’s “right to defend itself” from Hamas rockets, the racketeer and war criminal Hillary Clinton recently claimed the U.S. shares similar values with Israel. It does. It shares the values of a racist colonial settler state, not the values of democracy hypocrites like Clinton and the murderous Netanyahu pretend to extol.
Ending U.S. criminality in Occupied Palestine means ending the American empire. As long as the empire persists, it will support the apartheid state. Liberation in Jerusalem begins with liberation in Washington.
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Donald Monaco is a political analyst who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He received his Master’s Degree in Education from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1979 and was radicalized by the Vietnam War. He writes from an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist perspective. His recent book is titled, The Politics ofTerrorism, and is available at amazon.com
Featured image: The Israeli and American flags displayed on the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem (Photo: Yonatan Sindel)
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“There are two ways in which people are controlled: first of all frighten them, and then demoralise them. An educated healthy, and confident nation is harder to govern.” –Tony Benn
Biologists tell each other stories. These stories might involve lots of acronyms and use strange and wonderful verbs and nouns but, unlike say mathematics, the mechanism by which biologists convey their science is at heart through the use of language. But unlike works of creative writing, the language used by biologists needs to be precise because bad English can lead to bad science. Which is why it jarred so much when I first read the following statement:
A third of people with COVID-19 have no symptoms.
The more technically correct statement (assuming that “a third” is accurate) is:
A third of people infected with [more correctly, testing positive for] the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus have no symptoms.
So why did the first statement raise my biological hackles so much when at first glance these two statements might appear to be essentially very similar? It is because from a biological perspective they are profoundly different. The first statement asserts the existence of a disease with no symptoms i.e., a sickness that is indistinguishable from being healthy, while the second statement asserts that a viral infection does not necessarily result in a disease. It is not a question of semantics but accuracy and mixing these two concepts up is the sort of thing that would have resulted in an ‘F’ if I were to have submitted it in an essay to one of my professors. Yet, this is exactly the inaccurate language that has been used throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and not by students learning their discipline, but by experienced senior scientists who, one assumes, are well aware of what they are saying.
One could argue that this is unimportant as surely the point is to convey the idea that you could be infectious with coronavirus and be unaware of it and the first statement is an easy way to do this for the layman. Not only does this assumption treat the public as if they were children unable to understand the nuances of infection and disease, but I’d argue that the second statement is just as easy to understand as the first. No, the reason to create a disease with no symptoms is based on a profound decision, one that I believe was made with the intention of ensuring compliance but has, since its inception, grown to dominate our entire response to COVID-19.
First, let’s see why defining having a disease based purely on the presence of a pathogen is a flawed concept. This is best illustrated by reference to another virus, Epstein-Barr Virus or EBV. You’ll be forgiven if you’ve never heard of this virus, but it could be argued to be one of the most successful human pathogens because almost everyone is infected by it. Most people are infected early in life and if this happens then EBV takes up residence in your B-cells (the cells in your immune system responsible for making antibodies) where it quietly persists throughout your life. Every now and then the virus goes into active replication and makes copies of itself which get shed into your mouth, a process that you are blissfully unaware is happening. The problems with EBV generally occur if you don’t get infected early in life but avoid infection until you’re much older. Now when you get infected with EBV, you can develop a disease called infectious mononucleosis or, more commonly, glandular fever. This often happens in young adults when they become interested in close physical contact with members of the opposite (or same) sex… which is why glandular fever is sometimes referred to as “the kissing disease”.
Now let’s apply the new asymptomatic COVID-19 orthodoxy to EBV where we define having a disease purely through the presence of a viral genome. So, according to this definition, almost everyone in the U.K. (and the world) is suffering from a new disease, asymptomatic glandular fever, and if we were to do a large-scale mass screening campaign we’d discover that there were millions of ‘cases’ of asymptomatic glandular fever in the U.K. alone!
Of course, this is complete nonsense. We aren’t all ‘suffering’ from asymptomatic glandular fever. Glandular fever requires infection by EBV, but EBV infection does not necessarily lead to glandular fever. The same is true of COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 and so the concept of asymptomatic COVID-19 as a disease is as ridiculous as that of asymptomatic glandular fever.
But as is the case with EBV, being infected with SARS-CoV-2 means that you can still pass it on even if you aren’t sick. However, it is a matter of degrees and the reason that people can be healthy carriers is simply because they have less viral replication and a lower viral load, which is why they aren’t sick. Of course, if the lower levels of SARS-CoV-2 in an asymptomatic individual were sufficient to mean such an individual was as infectious as someone with symptoms, then from an infectivity perspective the distinction between asymptomatic carriers and people with COVID-19 is unimportant and our statement would need to read:
A third of people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus have no symptoms but are just as infectious as those with COVID-19.
However, this situation would mean that the R number for SARS-CoV-2 would likely be much greater than it is, and that coronavirus infection and COVID-19 would have crashed through the population in one huge tsunami at the start of last year. This wasn’t the case, and all the evidence is that healthy, asymptomatic carriers (and pre-symptomatic sufferers) are much less infectious than those with symptoms and a disease (see Will Jones’s summary of COVID-19 facts for links to supporting evidence).
Given that this is all so blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever been near a biology textbook, the only reasonable conclusion we can draw about the creation of an asymptomatic disease is that it wasn’t done by a biologist but instead by individuals (probably on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B)) whose agenda is not to convey accurate information to the public but something different: fear and uncertainty.
The effect of the asymptomatic disease is to blur the lines between being healthy and being sick and means that people will consciously, or subconsciously, transfer some of their understanding of symptomatic COVID-19 and apply it to asymptomatic COVID-19. The implication being that the absence of symptoms is somehow not relevant and that just because you feel fine, you are in fact suffering from a deadly disease. This naturally creates fear, fear for oneself (what if I have it?) and fear of everyone else (they look O.K., but what if they have it?). This fear is useful if you now want to control the behaviour of people and drive compliance with policies designed to limit the spread of COVID-19, but the problem is that having created the asymptomatic monster as a mechanism to ensure compliance, it soon starts to consume everything because you now need to manage this disease with no symptoms.
The first thing asymptomatic disease needs is a way of identifying who has it. By definition, asymptomatic individuals have no symptoms and so in order to identify who is sick we need a test. Not only do we need a test, but because anyone who is healthy could be silently suffering from this illness, we will need a lot of tests. And because healthy people can become sick without any change in how they feel or look, then the testing needs to be endless. Also, because the disease is only defined by the presence of the virus, then positive screening results (real or false positives) naturally become ‘cases’, confirming the ongoing presence of the asymptomatic disease. Testing begets more testing.
The whole host of non-pharmaceutical interventions – including lockdowns – can also be seen as logical steps to take in fighting an asymptomatic disease. If sick people have no symptoms, then we need to employ strategies in everyday life to manage them. In effect, we have to treat the entire population as if it were ill and deploy measures across the whole of society with this in mind. This effectively leads to ‘reverse quarantine’ where we lock up the healthy to try and protect the few genuinely sick people.
Likewise, vaccine passports are also driven by the need to manage asymptomatic disease because it is only by proving that you’ve had a medical intervention that we can be sure that your lack of symptoms are not a cause of concern. But being immune doesn’t stop an individual from becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2, it just means their immune system more rapidly and effectively recognises and deals with this infection and as a result they may never develop symptoms. In other words, vaccination is no protection from asymptomatic COVID-19 and suitably sensitive screening will continue to detect asymptomatic ‘cases’ amongst the immune population. Proponents of vaccine passports acknowledge this and argue (correctly) that if immune individuals are infected with coronavirus, they will carry a lower viral burden and so are less infectious. However, they then go on to demonise unvaccinated, naïve healthy individuals because they might be asymptomatic carriers. In reality, healthy people are healthy and even if they are carriers are unlikely to infect other people in normal social situations regardless of vaccination status. In fact, if you support the notion of asymptomatic COVID-19 ‘sufferers’ being a significant source of infection, it could be argued that we need vaccination certificates to protect the non-vaccinated from the vaccinated!
Finally, there is the whole question of variants. Clearly, a new, virulent more deadly strain of coronavirus that evades current immunity is a very concerning thing as it would essentially reset the clock back to the start of the pandemic: in effect it is a new disease. But because we have blurred the distinction between infection and disease and our focus is on the presence (and sequence) of viral genomes, every new variant is now treated as if it actually were a new disease. This in turn drives the need to continue to monitor (picking up more and more new variants) and manage ‘the spread of cases’ irrespective of the severity of disease they cause or the prior immunity within the population. Again, testing begets more testing in an endless cycle that will never stop unless we decide to stop it.
What all this means in practice is that the management of asymptomatic COVID-19 has become the the focus of the Government’s coronavirus policy, but if we go back to the original (mis)statement about asymptomatic COVID-19 and swap it around we get:
Two thirds of people with COVID-19 have symptoms.
Of course, this should read “three thirds (all!) of people with COVID-19 have symptoms” but the point I’m making is that hiding in plain sight is the fact that most people infected with SARS-CoV-2 get ill to varying degrees. We also know that people with symptoms account for the majority of onward transmission of the infection (again see Will’s summary for evidence). So, if we were designing an effective policy to manage COVID-19 we would focus our efforts on the sick as this is where we’re going to get the most bang for the buck.
What would this mean in practice? First, we would only need diagnostic testing capacity for the minority of the population with symptoms, rather than the industrial-scale screening that we have had to deploy to deal with asymptomatic COVID-19.
Second, restrictions would be focused on ill people, and this would be much easier, not only because these individuals are easier to find, but because sick people behave as if they were, well, sick and as such may not require much encouragement to prevent others getting ill. (“Don’t come too close, I’m not very well.”) They also probably wouldn’t want to go to work, or the gym, or the pub, or visit Granny. These restrictions would be time limited as they only apply to an individual while they are ill. We could use the billions of pounds saved on not destroying the economy in a futile attempt to quarantine the entire healthy population to ensure that these individuals were supported until they got better. We could invest in extra capacity in the healthcare system to manage any increase in hospitalisations and focus resources on improved treatments rather than testing and managing healthy people. The need for vaccination certification becomes irrelevant because healthy people are treated as healthy people and new variants only become of concern if they make individuals sicker. Essentially, we could stop treating COVID-19 as a special case with all the collateral damage this causes to non-COVID-19 related health and manage it as we would any other potentially serious infection. None of this is surprising as it is based on centuries of accumulated wisdom about how to manage infectious diseases. Unfortunately, the creation and focus on asymptomatic disease has drawn our eye away from the real illness and devoured huge amounts of time, effort, and money.
Being told that you are sick with a major illness can be a devastating piece of news, not just for the individual themselves but for those around them. Even if this news is couched in terms of positive treatment outcomes, it would be impossible to not be fearful and run hundreds of ‘what if’ scenarios through one’s mind. Regardless of how you feel today, the worries are all about progression and how you will feel tomorrow. Normally, clinicians would have a duty of care to their patients and spend time in discussing a diagnosis and helping their patients come to terms with this news. But for COVID-19, people receive the results of their diagnosis with no support. Worse through track-and-trace they might even receive this news completely unsolicited; imagine if a complete stranger phoned you to tell you that you might have cancer? Then, rather than offer support and comfort, we demand that individuals cut themselves off from others (self-isolate); you’re ill but on your own.
All of this has consequences, especially for those who have bought into the concept of asymptomatic COVID-19, and so is it not surprising that some people want to cling to mask wearing, social distancing and lockdowns. In the end, it turns out that – ironically – asymptomatic COVID-19 might not be asymptomatic after all because for any number of vulnerable people the very existence of this asymptomatic disease has the potential to make them sick – sick with fear, worry and anxiety.
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At the initiative of Paris, an international conference took place on June 17 with the focus of aiding the Lebanese army. Through this support, France and the U.S. want to prevent Lebanon from falling under Hezbollah domination and count on the commander-in-chief of the Lebanese armed forces for the next election. After Paris cooled its relations with Saad Hariri, leader of the anti-Hezbollah March 14 Alliance political coalition, it re-established contact with civil society and started to strongly support the Lebanese army.
French Defense Minister Florence Parly organized the June 17 meeting to bring together emergency aid for the Lebanese army as it is a “pillar institution which prevents the security situation in the country from deteriorating.” About twenty countries participated in the French conference, including the U.S., Germany, Italy, Russia, China and some Gulf countries. Paris and the international community are planning to send medical aid and spare parts for military equipment.
The Lebanese currency has plummeted to 15,000 to the dollar on the black market, the minimum wage has lost about 90% of its value and the country is experiencing a shortage of gasoline and electricity. Before the crisis, an officer in the Lebanese army earned about $4,000 a month, today it is only about $400. However, for the regular soldier, the situation is even more dramatic.
Last May, the U.S. increased its aid to the Lebanese army by 12% – about $120 million for 2021. This financial support is multisectoral and aims to improve the equipment of the army – from armoured vehicles to combat helicopters and night vision systems. In addition, since 2014, more than 6,000 Lebanese soldiers have been trained by the U.S. military. France is also very active and signed three conventions last February with Lebanon on defense and naval cooperation, the fight against terrorism, and mountain combat training. Since 2016, Paris has reportedly delivered €60 million of equipment to Lebanese military units.
Western powers hope that the Lebanese military will prevent Hezbollah from spreading its influence over the country, especially since the Shi’ite movement is less affected by the economic crisis due to direct support from Iran. While other political parties struggle to receive state support, Hezbollah in 2020 received at least $700 million from Iran.
The difficulty that the West faces is the fact that Hezbollah is undisputedly the most powerful military force in Lebanon. The Lebanese Army and Hezbollah do share some objectives, such as the fight against jihadist’s and opposing any potential invasion from Israel.
As France and the U.S. have a very specific agenda with the Lebanese army, it explains why they maintain a good relationship with the commander-in-chief, Joseph Khalil Aoun. The Lebanese general went to the Elysee Palace in Paris last May and was received by President Emmanuel Macron. They reviewed the economic, security and social challenges in Lebanon and Paris stressed that the Lebanese army was the “real pillar of stability in the country.”
Aoun’s visit was the first time in history that the head of the Lebanese army was received by the French President, a maneuver which could be explained in part by the presidential ambitions of the army commander. He also visited Washington in 2019 and plans to return this month.
Despite the economic problems, the pressure from the streets and the immobility of the political class, the army still enjoys certain sympathy across the country. In 2019, it was the only state body not to suffer the horrors of the Lebanese revolution. It is also the only true multi-faith institution and serves as an example in a country that is ravaged by religious communalism.
The head of the Lebanese army will now set himself up as a presidential candidate, especially since he has the support and backing of the West to oppose Hezbollah’s domination. In fact, since Lebanon’s independence in 1943, most former presidents have been from the military. France is therefore hedging its bet on next year’s Lebanese presidential elections – but will their support be enough to convince the Lebanese people to turn their back on Hezbollah after the group played a prominent role in expelling Israeli forces from the country in 2000 and was a key player in preventing ISIS from gaining a foothold near the Syrian-Lebanese border?
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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
First published on July 10, 2020, this article reviews the biometric vaccine project sponsored by GAVI.
“A new biometric identity platform partnered with the Gates-funded GAVI vaccine alliance and Mastercard will launch in West Africa and combine COVID-19 vaccinations, cashless payments, and potential law enforcement applications.
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A biometric digital identity platform that “evolves just as you evolve” is set to be introduced in “low-income, remote communities” in West Africa thanks to a public-private partnership between the Bill Gates-backed GAVI vaccine alliance, Mastercard and the AI-powered “identity authentication” company, Trust Stamp.
The program, which was first launched in late 2018, will see Trust Stamp’s digital identity platform integrated into the GAVI-Mastercard “Wellness Pass,” a digital vaccination record and identity system that is also linked to Mastercard’s click-to-play system that powered by its AI and machine learning technology called NuData. Mastercard, in addition to professing its commitment to promoting “centralized record keeping of childhood immunization” also describes itself as a leader toward a “World Beyond Cash,” and its partnership with GAVI marks a novel approach towards linking a biometric digital identity system, vaccination records, and a payment system into a single cohesive platform. The effort, since its launch nearly two years ago, has been funded via $3.8 million in GAVI donor funds in addition to a matched donation of the same amount by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In early June, GAVI reported that Mastercard’s Wellness Pass program would be adapted in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Around a month later, Mastercard announced that Trust Stamp’s biometric identity platform would be integrated into Wellness Pass as Trust Stamp’s system is capable of providing biometric identity in areas of the world lacking internet access or cellular connectivity and also does not require knowledge of an individual’s legal name or identity to function. The Wellness Program involving GAVI, Mastercard, and Trust Stamp will soon be launched in West Africa and will be coupled with a Covid-19 vaccination program once a vaccine becomes available.
The push to implement biometrics as part of national ID registration systems has been ongoing for many years on the continent and has become a highly politicized issue in several African countries. Opposition to similar projects in Africa often revolves around the costs surrounding them, such as the biometric voter management system that the Electoral Commission of Ghana has been trying to implement ahead of their 2020 general election in December. Bright Simons, honorary VP of the IMANI policy think tank, has questioned the “budgetary allocation” for the new system, claiming that the “unnecessary registration of 17 million people all over again” represents millions of dollars “being blown for reasons that nobody can explain in this country.”
Masking ulterior motives
Trust Stamp’s biometric identity system, largely funded by Mastercard’s massive investment in the company in February, utilizes a technology it calls Evergreen Hash that creates an AI-generated “3D mask” based on a single photo of a person’s face, palm or fingerprint. Once this “mask” is created, much of the original data is discarded and encryption keys are created in place of a person’s name or other more traditional identifiers.
“Only a small percentage of the data that originally existed is in the hash,” Trust Stamp CEO Gareth Genner has stated. “What you have is something safer for storing because it can’t be used to directly identify you. No one would recognize you in this huge jumble of numbers.” The result, according to Genner, is an “irreversible non-personally identifiable information” system that “protects privacy, reduces potential for misuse and allows effective inclusion when there is no other form of legal record.”
Genner also explained in a recent press release that the unique “hash” is capable of “evolving” as a new hash with updated health information is created every time a child or individual gets a vaccine. Trust Stamp’s AI algorithms can accurately determine if different hashes belong to the same individual, meaning that “the hash evolves over time just as you evolve,” said Genner.
It is unclear how much the Wellness Pass initiative is motivated by public health concerns as opposed to free market considerations. Indeed, the GAVI alliance, largely funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, as well as allied governments and the vaccine industry, is principally concerned with improving “the health of markets for vaccines and other immunization products,” rather than the health of individuals, according to its own website. Similarly, Mastercard’s GAVI partnership is directly linked to its “World Beyond Cash” effort, which mainly bolsters its business model that has long depended on a reduction in the use of physical cash.
Dual use tyranny
Trust Stamp also shares this market-focused vision for its digital identity system as the company has stated that it is looking for new commercialization options for its Evergreen Hash technology, specifically with prison systems. Talks with private and public prison systems have revealed an interest in their utilization of Trust Stamp’s technology to provide identification for individuals on parole “without making them pay for pricey ankle bracelets that monitor their every move,” as Trust Stamp’s platform would ostensibly provide that same function but in a “touchless” and less expensive manner.
Trust Stamp’s interest in providing its technology to both COVID-19 response and to law enforcement is part of a growing trend where numerous companies providing digital solutions to COVID-19 also offer the same solutions to prison systems and law enforcement for the purposes of surveillance and “predictive policing.”
For instance, contact tracing software originally introduced as part of the COVID-19 response has since been used by police departments across the U.S. to track protesters during the country’s recent bouts of protests and civil unrest. Similarly, a controversial Israeli tech firm currently being used in Rhode Island offers AI-powered predictive analytic to identify likely future COVID-19 hotspots and individuals likely to contract COVID-19 in the future, while also offering governments the ability to predict future locations of and participants in riots and civil unrest.
What is perhaps most alarming about this new “Wellness Pass” initiative, is that it links these “dual use” digital solutions to cashless payment solutions that could soon become mandated as anything over than touchless, cashless, methods of payment have been treated as potential modes for contagion by GAVI-aligned groups like the World Health Organization, among others, since the pandemic was first declared earlier this year.
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Raul Diego is a MintPress News Staff Writer, independent photojournalist, researcher, writer and documentary filmmaker.
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Iranian President Hassan Rouhani negotiated the original Iran nuclear deal in 2015, but is due to leave office in August. On Saturday, Iran’s lead envoy in Vienna, Abbas Araghchi, said a new deal was unlikely before presidential elections in his country this Friday. World powers are trying to revive the 2015 agreement that the US abandoned three years ago. It restricted Tehran’s nuclear program in return for sanctions relief and the Vienna talks are focused on how Washington can reverse Trump-era sanctions and return to the accord so that both sides can resume full compliance with its terms.
As the world waits eagerly to see a new agreement possibly signed soon, Steven Sahiounie of MidEastDiscourse interviewed Seyed Hamed Nematollahi, an independent journalist and political analyst based in Tehran. He has studied International Journalism and has been working for different media and think tanks since 1997. He been interviewed many times about political developments, especially in Iran, on different media such as TV5Monde, France24, ABC News, AlEtijah English, Globo Brazil, FranceInter, and RTS.
Steven Sahiounie (SS): Iran is set for a new presidential election, in your opinion will there be change in the foreign policy of Iran?
Seyad Hamed Nematollahi (SHN): Analyzing topics related to Iran without a good and clear understanding of the power structure of the Islamic Republic is impossible. According to Article 110 of the constitution determining the overall politics of the Islamic Republic system of Iran after consultation with the Expediency Council is one of the authorities and responsibilities of the leader. Because of this responsibility and some duties of the Supreme Council of National Security (Article 176), the ministers of Defense, Foreign Affairs and Interior are selected by the president with consultation with the Leader.
Therefore, we won’t see radical changes with a new president and only the techniques will be changed.
SS: The nuclear deal between Tehran and the west is very close to an end. Will the new Iranian leadership proceed with the deal?
SHN: The strategy toward the JCPOA is subject to a consensus across the Iranian political system that Iran has given enough concessions, and it’s time for the European signatories to stand up to the U.S. and take us back to the deal and to its commitments. The United States has quit the agreement so they should take the first step and till now they have shown no determination towards removing its sanctions and returning to compliance with the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, so I don’t predict any agreement in the current situation.
SS: The tension between Iran and the Israeli occupation is at the highest level. Do you think that this tension will take the Middle East to war?
SHN: The tension between the Israeli occupation and Iran has always been high. Sometimes these tensions have been directly influenced by the domestic situation of the occupied territories. Nowadays Netanyahu is trying absolutely anything to avoid giving up power and conceding defeat to the new coalition partners and the recent 11 days’ war can be understood in the same context. He is also trying to provoke retaliation by Iran with clandestine attacks but I believe Iran has no intention of taking that bait, for now. and nothing will happen.
SS: If the nuclear deal succeeds, in your opinion, will that have a positive effect on the Middle East hot-spots such as: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Yemen?
SHN: According to Article 154 of the constitution “while it completely abstains from any kind of intervention in the internal affairs of other nations, it supports the struggles of the oppressed for their rights against the oppressors anywhere in the world.” So, this support -that is not limited to the Middle East and the Axis of Resistance- it’s for oppressed in “anywhere in the world’. During the latest years that Iran was under “Crippling Sanctions”, not only different forms of support has not stopped, but it has intensified.
I believe that the narrative promoted by mainstream media that the JCPOA will result rise of tensions in that hotspots, is false and an international agreement will help in its own to make the region safer. Also Biden’s foreign policy approach is on less presence in the region and the change of tone of Mohammad Bin Salman and the ongoing negotiations between Saudi Arabia and Iran is a sign of this change.
SS: If the nuclear deal is completed, what does this mean for Iranian business in general?
SHN: The JCPOA -in the current format- can’t resolve the problem of the Iranian economy in its own because USA has enforced their nuclear sanctions with others such as secondary ones that they won’t revise. Speaking in the United States’ Council of Foreign Relations on April 2016, Central Bank of Iran (CBI) Governor Valiollah Seif said, “Let me also give you a snapshot of what has happened over the last three months — the date of implementation of the JCPOA: almost nothing.” He reiterated the same words in another interview with Bloomberg.
Nothing has changed from then, so I don’t expect any big changes.
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The Western desire to keep open the Bab al-Hawa corridor for aid into the extremist-controlled Idlib region of Syria is a ploy to continue destabilizing the Assad government, by propping up a murderous al-Qaeda offshoot.
Among the matters under discussion by US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva on Wednesday was Washington’s call to keep open the last United Nations aid crossing into Syria, in an opposition-held northwest part of the country at Bab al-Hawa on the Turkish border. It is set to be closed on July 10 under the terms of a UN Security Council Resolution.
MP Sarah Champion, chairwoman of the House of Commons International Development Committee, is urging British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab to tow the US line in a similar manner.
Presenting the aid entry point as the last bastion of humanitarian rescue efforts in the war-ravaged country, Biden said in a follow-up press conference to the summit that the effort to keep aid flowing in the northwest is supposedly part of “the urgent need to preserve and reopen the humanitarian corridors in Syria.”
But Biden’s loose nomenclature is misleading, because the aid corridor in question is one that pipes in foreign aid money from abroad without passing it under the scrutiny of Bashar Assad’s government in Damascus, which as the territorially sovereign government of Syria has the right to coordinate all foreign aid inflows.
President Putin has underscored this point, as Assad has regained control over much of Syria formerly overrun by factious jihadists, helping shut down similar UN aid crossings into those areas as Damascus broadened its own reach in distributing aid. Shortly before his summit with Biden, the Russian leader said that “[Humanitarian] assistance should be given through the central government.”
In addition, the recipient of the foreign aid at issue is the breakaway region of Idlib, under the control of a terrorist faction lacking international recognition, which has stoned women to death and slaughtered religious minorities as part of its modus operandi.
What sounds at the outset like an issue of genuine humanitarian concern, then, is on closer inspection an iteration of a common Western regime-change ploy, to keep breakaway regions as vassals under the pretext of international assistance disbursed by Western entities.
Maintaining a foreign aid crossing into northwest Syria unregulated by Damascus would allow the band of butchers in Idlib to continue to influence that funding or even benefit directly from it, under the leadership of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the head of Al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch.
This same Jolani, a terrorist theocrat, is the focus of a slick Western PR campaign that has kicked into high gear alongside the Western diplomatic offensive to keep Idlib tied to foreign NGOs – both with the aim of presenting Jolani as a viable Western “asset” merely because he coalesces a contingent of anti-Assad militants.
This rebranding effort is meant to distract attention from years-long US and British support that has funded the rise of Jolani and other extremists wreaking havoc on Syrian civilians, all in the name of anti-Assad opposition.
Since 2013, the CIA has been funneling large tranches of covert money to a group of Syrian oppositional elements dominated by Islamist extremist groups. Jolani was a member of that group who ascended in prominence, having crossed into Syria in 2012 as a member of Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and helping establish Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State.
A feud with him led Jolani to set up Jabhat al-Nusra, the official Syrian offshoot of Al-Qaeda. With CIA backing, Nusra took control of Idlib Province and instituted a bloody regime of theocratic oppression. Encouraged by its foreign supporters to distance itself from Al-Qaeda while continuing its brutal methods, Nusra changed its name to Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and then to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), by which it is currently known.
In reply to deliberately friendly overtures from HTS claiming to be a purely anti-Assad organization rather than a terrorist one, James Jeffrey, President Donald Trump’s Special Representative for Syrian Engagement, said, “I couldn’t agree more… Keep me informed as often as possible,” while reporting back to then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to a recent interview Jeffrey gave with PBS Frontline’s Martin Smith.
The Al-Qaeda run cabal in Idlib ramped up its charm offensive in 2020, rebranding itself as the “Syrian Salvation Government” and creating an office of media relations, helping Western journalists access the region and, via government-endorsed guides, showing them exactly what HTS wanted them to see.
During one such staged on-location interview in March 2021, also with Martin Smith of PBS, Jolani told Smith that Idlib “is not a staging ground for executing foreign jihad,” blithely ignoring the ongoing jihadist extremism carried out against Syrian citizens in the region, by his own government.
As ‘refugees’ from formerly extremist enclaves in Syria fled into Idlib after Assad’s forces brought those regions back under national control, Western pundits and politicians deliberately conflated the supposedly humanitarian needs of this population with real support for Syrian sovereignty.
In fact, though, the Idlib regime’s extremist enforcement of narrow religious doctrines repeatedly plays out in routine, prejudicial persecution of fellow Syrians, while essentially holding the burgeoning population of refugees as leverage to extract aid money from Western nations. They, in turn, are more focused on humanitarian plight than the brutal regime directing the inflows of aid.
In this dangerous nexus, US aid money earmarked for Idlib has been siphoned off by the ruling terrorists. In a report released in 2018, the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) revealed that USAID funds were implicated in “numerous instances of possible or confirmed diversions to armed groups in Idlib Governorate in northwestern Syria, including Ha’yat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.” NGO contractors willfully used their USAID disbursements to assist HTS, and in some instances HTS had already infiltrated the NGOs themselves.
Although USAID’s own investigation into this behavior led to a crackdown on such funding and the Trump administration’s official refusal to send aid to HTS-controlled Syrian areas in 2018, aid to Idlib is still a politicized weapon used by the West against the Assad regime. The Brussels-headquartered International Crisis Group, funded by the EU and other Western governments, ran a highly sympathetic interview with Jolani in 2020, quoting him as saying, “we pledge non-interference” in the work of NGOs delivering aid to Idlib.
Ken Roth, executive director of regime-change promoting Human Rights Watch (HRW), emphatically endorsed this interview at the time, while Gerry Simpson, an HRW associate director, claimed recently that shutting down the Bab al-Hawa corridor would “unleash a humanitarian calamity.”
These are partisan statements that take the words of a murderer at face value, even though his actions have repeatedly contradicted any promises of respect for all Syrians’ civil liberties. Falsely portraying Jolani’s Idlib as a bastion of workable democracy and sending aid to territory under its control automatically burnishes the image of the HTS elite, by implying they are victims rather than dangerous usurpers. Attention instead ought to be given to the fact that with Assad having regained control of much of Syria, his government is now far-better placed than foreign NGOs to coordinate the delivery of aid to all Syrian regions and has repeatedly expressed its willingness to do so.
Indications have already emerged that World Food Organization trucks have been used to smuggle terrorists and weapons into Syria in the past, and with Western furor over the potential closing of a UN aid corridor into Idlib rising while their rebranding of HTS kicks into full pitch, it would seem probable that the Bab al-Hawa aid corridor is the only avenue the regime-change activists have left in funding the illegitimate, extremist HTS regime.
If these activists were not engaged in propping up HTS under cover of an ostensibly humanitarian guise, they would have no problem with the corridor’s shutdown and would simply coordinate their aid through Damascus.
As Special Representative Jeffrey said in his PBS interview, “we were perfectly willing to go on in a questionably sustainable attrition situation” by opening indirect channels to HTS in Idlib “to keep the other side from winning in Syria.”
That “other side” is represented by President Assad, who has already won another presidential election as the sovereign ruler of Syria. Disturbingly, as Jeffrey has served in key diplomatic posts under George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, his warped anti-Assad views on Syria appear to reflect bipartisan continuity proceeding apace under Biden, Obama’s former vice president.
Propping up HTS and its murderous Idlib tyranny as a jingoistic cat’s paw against the Damascus government and its Russian, Chinese, and Iranian allies – whether through diplomacy, aid, publicity, or weapons – only delegitimizes the terrorists and their Western apologists even further.
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Kevin Karp, commentator, screenwriter, and former political adviser in the House of Commons and the European Parliament. As an EU adviser based in Brussels and Strasbourg, he specialized in international trade, European populism, and Brexit. Find his website at moon-vine-media.com.
“Essentially what we’re looking at is a broader perspective of how the United States de facto supported Nazi Germany with a view to destroying the Soviet Union, as well as weakening the British Empire and competing empires including of course France, Belgium, Holland, etc. and again those countries virtually are no longer colonial powers.” – Professor Michel Chossudovsky (from this week’s interview).
America was born out of a revolt against British imperial rule.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the British Empire was “the hated enemy”. In 1812, the young republic declared war on Great Britain and tried unsuccessfully, to conquer the Canadian colonies.
Within less than a half century of its birth, the United States of America under President James Monroe, established a policy that came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, which asserted that the USA would oppose any further colonization in the Americas (Western Hemisphere) by European powers. By establishing a sphere of influence outside its borders, the new republic was arguably taking its first steps in the direction of becoming an imperial power. [1]
Subsequent decades saw the U.S. continue to grow in geographic size, economic power and geopolitical influence. By the mid-twentieth century, the U.S. had become a significant military and economic player, and after World War II, the U.S. was to overtake all the European powers as the dominant force on the world stage.
A popular conception is that the United States is a democratic country devoted to the principles of the Founding Fathers and tasked with the responsibility of bringing freedom and democracy to the world. A less naive viewpoint might hold that governments corrupted by greed and the influence of big money have redirected the country’s foreign policy away from these high ideals toward whatever might benefit entrenched wealthy interests.
The notion that America’s military expansion might be guided by imperial rivalries with European powers is not immediately evident. Certainly, while menacing gestures and indignant statements toward nations like China or Russia or the so-called rogue or failed states like North Korea and Iraq may be common-place, U.S. leadership over the last century has typically exhibited a congenial attitude toward its counterparts in Europe.
In a recent paper by Professor Michel Chossudovsky (presented at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN)) focussing on documentary record of both world wars, the interwar period, the Cold War and the post Cold War period, America has continued to adopt an adversarial attitude toward Great Britain.
In fact, the paper, published in Spanish as La globalizacion de la guerra: Cronología de la “Guerra Larga” de EE.UU. contra la Humanidad, exposes, among other aspects, U.S. support for Nazi Germany, a 1920-39 approved plan to invade Canada, and plans to wage a nuclear war against 66 Soviet cities in the immediate wake of World War II at a time when the two countries were allies.
In a feature length interview, Professor Chossudovsky elaborates on his thesis, placing world events spanning the last century, including the recent Brexit drama in the United Kingdom, in that context.
Professor Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, and Editor of Global Research. He has served as economic adviser to governments of developing countries and has acted as a consultant for several international organizations. His books include The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003), America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005), and The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity (2015). In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit of the Republic of Serbia for his writings on NATO’s war of aggression against Yugoslavia.
Transcript- Interview with Professor Michel Chossudovsky, Dec. 19, 2019
The transcript has been edited by Prof Chossudovsky. Text boxes, maps added.
Part One
Global Research: You presented your paper in Nicaragua at the beginning of December 2019. Could you briefly introduce that paper to us?
Michel Chossudovsky: Well, the focus essentially was on the globalization of war and the chronology of U.S. hegemony.
The (“accepted scholarly”) history of the last hundred years is misleading because it presents Britain and the United States as allies, but in fact, they were never allies. They were competing Empires.
This confrontation between the United States and Britain has existed right from the onset of the founding of the United States in 1776. It became increasingly pervasive in the wake of the Civil War, 1865.
There were US military scenarios and war plans directed against the British Empire. These were not limited to the Western Hemisphere.
In essence, the objective of the United States was to weaken the British Empire and acquire a dominant position Worldwide.
There’s a lot of history, and I want to point to some important landmarks.
The Berlin Conference of 1884 – 1885, which was essentially a French and British initiative, the United States was excluded. They were there as observers, but they were never offered any role to play in “the carving up of Africa”, so that in effect, the European powers had already decided on the carving up of Africa without the United States.
1914 Map of Africa
Then you have the Spanish-American war of 1898, and then the First World War (1914-1918), and what we can say is that the United States consolidated its hegemony in relation to the British Empire specifically in Latin America and the Caribbean but also in Asia.
And although the Monroe Doctrine was not “officially” directed against the British Empire, it was nonetheless intent upon consolidating US hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.
GR: Professor Chossudovsky, could you remind us briefly what exactly is the Monroe Doctrine and when it came about?
MC: Well, the Monroe Doctrine was initiated in the early 19th century, and it went through several phases. But ultimately, the concept was that European powers should not intervene in the Western hemisphere. It was directed largely against Spain and France but also Britain. And as we know France was also involved in Mexico at one point in its history (1862)
In other words, the Monroe doctrine laid the groundwork for hemispheric consolidation by the United States.
Now, what’s very important, particularly for Canadians, – because we have a particular way of understanding our history from 1867 onwards – is the fact that the United States had a plan to annex Canada, that was formulated in 1866.
M.C: (Cont) Of course then we had Confederation (1867). But that war plan against Canada wasn’t dropped: After World War I, the United States formulated a plan to invade the British Empire (including Canada). It was called ‘War Plan Red.’
Now, the details of this plan to invade the British Empire might seem absurd. They were supposed to be allies.
What happened was that there were plans to invade Canada, there were war games right at the US-Canadian border – and there were plans to even use chemical weapons against Canadians.
Map: Invasion plan directed against Canada and British possessions in Caribbean
The bombing campaign underlying these War plans was formulated in the 1920s and 1930s. It consisted in a plan to bomb four major Canadian cities, namely Vancouver Montreal, Halifax, and Quebec City. This infamous project had been entrusted to none other than General Douglas MacArthur. Well he wasn’t General at the time. He became General during World War II.
But nonetheless, War Plan Red pointed to the fact that there was a certain continuity, and there were plans to invade Canada.
The United States never really dropped its intent to wage war on the British Empire. And in 1939, when World War II broke out, the United States remained neutral. It did not side with the Allies until much later. In early September 1939, the United States declared its neutrality. It did not take any action to prevent the invasion of France by Nazi Germany, nor the bombing raids directed against the U.K.
World War II commenced with the invasion of Poland and the Baltic States, which was followed by war on the Western Front, including the invasion and occupation of France, Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as the bombings of the U.K.
The war on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union started in June 1941.
Text Box. The Invasion of Canada
A detailed plan to invade Canada, entitled “Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan — Red” was approved by the US War Department under the presidency of Herbert Hoover in 1930. It was updated in 1934 and 1935 during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was “put on hold” in 1939 following the outbreak of the Second World War.
Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley was largely instrumental in the formulation and approval of Plan Red by the US administration.
In its day, War Plan RED was not meant to be funny. The 1928 draft stated that “it should be made quite clear to Canada that in a war she would suffer grievously”. The 1930 draft stated that “large parts of CRIMSON territory will become theaters of military operations with consequent suffering to the population and widespread destruction and devastation of the country…”
In October 1934, the Secretary of War and Secretary of Navy approved an amendment authorizing the strategic bombing of Halifax, Montreal and Quebec City by “immediate air operations on as large a scale as practicable.” A second amendment, also approved at the Cabinet level, directed the U.S. Army, in capital letters, “TO MAKE ALL NECESSARY PREPARATIONS FOR THE USE OF CHEMICAL WARFARE FROM THE OUTBREAK OF WAR. THE USE OF CHEMICAL WARFARE, INCLUDING THE USE OF TOXIC AGENTS, FROM THE INCEPTION OF HOSTILITIES, IS AUTHORIZED…”
The use of poison gas was conceived as an humanitarian action that would cause Canada to quickly surrender and thus save American lives. (Commander Carpender, A. S., & Colonel Krueger, W. (1934), memo to the Joint Board, Oct. 17, 1934, available in U.S. National Archive in documents appended to War Plan RED.)
In March 1935, General Douglas MacArthur proposed an amendment making Vancouver a priority target comparable to Halifax and Montreal. This was approved in May 1935, and in October 1935, his son Douglas MacArthur Jr. began his espionage career as vice-consul in Vancouver. In August 1935, the U.S.A. held its then largest ever peace time military maneuvers, with more than 50,000 troops practicing a motorized invasion of Canada, duly reported in the New York Times by its star military reporter, Hanson Baldwin. Floyd Rudmin, Plan Red, Counterpunch, 2006 (emphasis added)
US Support of Nazi Germany
M.C: Now, the United States, in the course of the 1930s, but even extending further into World War II, was collaborating quite actively with Nazi Germany in the areas of finance, technology but also in the areas of military production, and this included the participation of Ford, Rockefeller, and also the Bush family.
The granddad of President Bush Junior was Prescott Bush. In other words the granddad of George W Bush was the director of the Union Banking Corporation, Brown Brothers Harriman, which in turn were partners with Thyssen Stahl, a major German conglomerate involved in the weapons industry of the Third Reich. And this has been reasonably well documented.
The United States continued to collaborate with Nazi Germany after September 1939. And after December 1941, namely Pearl Harbor, the US joined the allies, declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy. And there was a formal shift with regard to Nazi Germany. The Roosevelt administration adopted “Trading With The Enemy” legislation, In other words Washington took an official stance in support of its allies against Nazi Germany. But unofficially they continued collaborating with Nazi Germany.
Text box. The Bush Family and Nazi Germany, “Sleeping with the Enemy”
Prescott Bush was a partner of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co and director of Union Banking Corporation which had close relations with German corporate interests including Thyssen Steel, a major company involved in the Third Reich’s weapons industry.
“…[N]ew documents, declassified [in 2003], show that even after America had entered the war [December 8, 1941] and when there was already significant information about the Nazis’ plans and policies, he [Prescott Bush] worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler’s rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty” (The Guardian, September 25, 2004)
In August 1934, American “Standard oil” in Germany acquired 730,000 acres of land and built large oil refineries that supplied the Nazis with oil. At the same time, Germany secretly took delivery of the most modern equipment for aircraft factories from the United States, which would begin the production of German planes.
Germany received a large number of military patents from American firms Pratt and Whitney”, “Douglas”, “Curtis Wright”, and American technology was building the “Junkers-87”. In 1941, when the Second world war was raging, American investments in the economy of Germany amounted to $475 million. “Standard oil” invested – 120 million, “General motors” – $35 million, ITT — $30 million, and “Ford” — $17.5 million. (emphasis added)
Standard Oil Was Selling Oil to the Third Reich
M.C: Invariably neglected by historian and journalists, there’s a something which is absolutely crucial to an understanding of WWII: Germany did not have any petrol, fuel – it had very limited supplies of petrol.
This is documented in the book by Jacques Pauwels, a prominent Canadian historian. Pauwels analyses the relationship between Standard Oil, which was owned by the Rockefeller family and the Nazi regime.
Standard Oil was the largest oil producer Worldwide. It controlled the oil industry, and Nazi Germany was dependent on oil.
And that oil was sold to Nazi Germany directly up until Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and subsequently it was sold via third countries indirectly, to bypass the “Trading With The Enemy Act” which was passed in the US Senate.
Well, in fact it was a previous legislation [1917] but nonetheless, it’s worth noting that the Bush family’s assets were confiscated under the “Trading with Enemy” legislation.
M.C.: (Cont) But as far as Standard Oil was concerned, they continued selling oil to Nazi Germany up until 1944-1945.
And the Roosevelt administration turned a blind eye.
And the main reason for this was that without the oil supplies from Standard Oil, Nazi Germany could not under any circumstances have waged war on the Soviet Union, and in fact, even the Western Front would have been compromised.
So that the sale of US oil by Standard Oil to the Third Reich was crucial. The US was sleeping with the enemy. Unofficially the US was a de facto “ally” of Nazi Germany. There were no sanctions imposed on the Third Reich: After Pearl Harbor (December 1941) US oil was sold to the enemy through third countries, and then there was a large component of Standard Oil’s shipments which was sold out of Venezuela.
Operation Barbarossa was launched in June 1941 by Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. It resulted in 26 million deaths.
It was understood that the Third Reich would be getting oil from the United States.
The Nazis were staunch military planners, and prior to launching Operation Barbarossa they ensured that they would have regular supplies of oil provided by Standard Oil.
Without US oil, they could not under any circumstances have waged war on the Soviet Union.
Text Box. The Unspoken Question. Where did Germany get its oil from?
Prior the December 1941, Texas oil was shipped on a regular basis to Nazi Germany.
While Germany was able to transform coal into fuel, this synthetic production was insufficient. Moreover, Romania’s Ploesti oil resources (under Nazi control until 1944) were minimal. Nazi Germany largely depended on oil shipments from US Standard Oil.
The Attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) occurred barely six months after the launching of Operation Barbarossa (July 1941). The United States enters World War II, declaring war on Japan and the axis countries.
Trading with the Enemy legislation (1917) officially implemented following America’s entry into World War II did not prevent Standard Oil of New Jersey from selling oil to Nazi Germany. This despite the Senate 1942 investigation of US Standard Oil.
While direct US oil shipments were curtailed, Standard Oil would sell US oil through third countries. US oil was shipped to occupied France through Switzerland, and from France it was shipped to Germany:
“… for the duration of the Second World War, Standard Oil, under deals Teagle had overseen, continued to supply Nazi Germany with oil. The shipments went through Spain, Vichy France’s colonies in the West Indies, and Switzerland.”
It should be noted that a large share of Nazi Germany’s oil requirements was met by shipments out of Venezuela which at the time was a de facto US colony.
Venezuela’s US sponsored (War-time) president GeneralIsaías Medina Angarita (May 1941 – October 1945) was there to protect US oil interests as well as “trade with the enemy” from the onset of America’s entry into World War II in December 1941:
John D. Rockefeller Jr. owned a controlling interest in the Standard Oil corporation, but the next largest stockholder was the German chemical company I. G. Farben, through which the firm sold $20 million worth of gasoline and lubricants to the Nazis. And the Venezuelan branch of that company sent 13,000 tons of crude oil to Germany each month, which the Third Reich’s robust chemical industry immediately converted into gasoline.
While Medina Angarita’s government pressured by Washington in the immediate wake of Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) remained officially neutral (de facto aligned with the US, while breaking its relations with Nazi Germany), oil shipments out of Venezuela to Germany were not discontinued. In a rather unusual twist (bordering on ridicule) Venezuela declared war on Germany in February 1945, when the war was almost over.
Without those oil shipments instrumented by Standard Oil and the Rockefellers, Nazi Germany would not have been able to implement its military agenda. Without fuel, the Third Reich’s eastern front under Operation Barbarossa would most probably not have taken place, saving millions of lives. The Western front including the military occupation of France, Belgium and The Netherlands would no doubt also have been affected.
M.C: The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration could have adopted severe sanctions against Standard Oil with a view to enforcing a blockade against Nazi Germany.
The US was not committed to peace: Washington’s unspoken objective was not only to destroy the Soviet Union, it also consisted in undermining Britain’s role as an imperial power.
Let us be under no illusions. Without the oil shipments instrumented by US Standard Oil and its subsidiaries, Nazi Germany’s imperial design could not have been undertaken.
It should be noted that the role of the US in supplying Nazi Germany with oil is casually ignored. Today’s Western “consensus” which was upheld by the European Parliament is to blame Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union for WWII.
GR: Professor Chossudovsky, you said quite a bit there. Could you maybe just share with our listeners some of the key source documents that you used for your research that informed your analysis?
MC: Well, you know, from a historical standpoint, this US-Third Reich “alliance” was not clear in my mind, it was blurred. Moreover, with some exceptions it was not the object of (mainstream) scholarly research.
What I did was to indulge in what might be called common sense analysis. In this regard, I think that Jacques Pauwels book on World War II, is absolutely fundamental.
Common sense analysis tells us the following: you cannot wage a large scale military campaign without fuel.
Without the steady supply of fuel to Nazi Germany from Standard oil, the history of WWII would have been totally different. Operation Barbarossa would most probably not have occurred.
But then, there’s another element which I mentioned earlier with regard to the British Empire. War Plan Red against the British Empire was put on hold in 1939. But it was never abandoned.
From 1939 onwards, from a geopolitical standpoint, America’s unspoken hegemonic objective was to weaken all competing imperial powers including the British empire.
In other words, weaken Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium and Holland as well as Japan. All these countries had colonial possessions. And in the wake of World War II, Europe had been destroyed and the US economy was booming.
In the course of the post-war era, these colonial possessions (e.g. Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia) were taken over, integrated into America’s sphere of influence.
The two historic objectives of the United States in World War II were
1) to undermine the British Empire and competing imperial powers,
2) destroy the Soviet Union,
Secret Plan to Wage Nuclear War on the Soviet Union Formulated during WWII
There was a secret plan first formulated in 1942 confirmed by declassified September 15, 1945 documents, that the United States was intent upon waging a nuclear war against the Soviet Union.
Two atomic bombs were dropped respectively on Hiroshima and Nagasaki under President Truman (6 and 9 August 1945), and we know that in the first few minutes of that bombing of Hiroshima, a hundred thousand people were killed, and the same thing occurred with regard to Nagasaki.
These cities were totally destroyed, leading also to extensive nuclear radiation.
But what most people don’t know, is that on the 15th of September 1945, declassified documents from the U.S. war department pointed unequivocally to a detailed US plan to bomb 66 cities of the Soviet Union – with over 200 atomic bombs.
Some historians might have concluded: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dress rehearsals for this devastating project directed against 66 Soviet cities. Now, I think this is significant because this project was formulated when the Soviet Union and the United States were allies theoretically against Nazi Germany.
But in fact 20th Century history, I think, has to be looked at very carefully.
US oil for Nazi Germany’s motorized convoys of tanks and armored cars, its Luftwaffe planes was part of America’s plan to destroy the Soviet Union. It resulted in the loss of 26 million lives.
Now, that project did not take place because the Soviet Union had information on this plan first formulated in 1942 and they were in the process of developing their own weapons system.
But what I’m saying is that the arms race did not start with the Cold War. The arms race started with the Manhattan Project (launched in 1939) which consisted in building nuclear weapons capabilities in the United States. And Canada, incidentally, was a partner in that project. And so was Britain.
Essentially what we’re looking at is a broader perspective of how the United States de facto supported Nazi Germany with a view to
a) destroying the Soviet Union,
b) weakening the British Empire and competing empires including of course France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, etc and so on, (Those countries virtually are no longer colonial powers).
Intermission
Part Two
GR: Another aspect of U.S. hegemony, as you put it, is also the economic dimension. We spoke with Michael Hudson a few months back and, you know, he mentioned the use of the U.S. dollar in maintaining their control and financing their war agenda.
So, could you speak to the point of the use of the U.S. dollar, and the way that’s been used to maintain America’s hegemonic role – the way they’ve been able to use the creation of these institutions like the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and just the U.S. dollar as the currency – the world’s petro-currency?
US Dollar Hegemony
MC: Well, you know, this goes back to the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, where there was a decision which was virtually imposed in the post-war era, to establish the U.S. dollar as the international currency. And linked up to gold and then subsequently the gold standard was dropped.
This dollarization of the post World War II economy went through several stages. It eventually led to the World Bank and the IMF playing a pro-active role in countries which were former colonies of the Western European powers: Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and of course Latin America – in other words, these were so-called ‘developing countries.’
But again it’s the Washington Consensus, it’s the World Bank, the IMF which became instruments leading to the consolidation of U.S. hegemony, namely U.S. dollar hegemony.
And definitely that is really, in a sense, an outcome of World War II where all the competing imperial powers are ultimately destroyed. Well, they’re no longer competing powers and I’m talking about Italy, France, Britain, Belgium, Holland, and of course Germany.
That whole structure has been ultimately flattened, and many of the so-called developing countries – territories of these former colonial powers– are now within the U.S. sphere of influence.
And the dollar is their proxy currency.
So, it’s a structure of domination and hegemony using currency markets, economic policy conditionalities, control of wages, control of prices, and so on.
And then it’s also the whole process of relocation of industrial activity to cheap labour economies. And many of those cheap labour economies are the former colonies of the Western Powers.
GR: Now, there’s the fall of the Berlin Wall, and so the Soviet Union is no more.
And then we have entered into a new phase, but the United States and its NATO allies continue to advance towards the border of Russia.
we’re at the point where US-NATO is threatening Russia,
Moreover, since 2001 the US is waging a ‘Global War on Terrorism’. It’s the post 9/11 period.
So, does this signify an important course change, and how does that relate to this ongoing effort to supplant the British Empire?
MC: Well, I mean, in the wake of World War II NATO is established in 1949.
It’s the seventieth anniversary of NATO so to speak. And it’s the shift into the Cold War. Now NATO was actually established (April 1949) barely a few months before the founding of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) on October 1st 1949. And consistently of course, NATO has been targeting the Soviet Union on behalf of the Pentagon.
The United States has been the main power in sustaining the Cold War up until its “official end” in 1989.
But in effect, the Cold War is not over. While the Soviet Union no longer exists, US-NATO is now directing its threats against the Russian Federation (which is bona fide capitalist country).
Again, it’s part of a hegemonic project, not by the NATO member states but of the United States which controls NATO via the Pentagon.
And I think that the whole process of militarization after World War II with the establishment of the geographic command structures – the U.S. Central Command, U.S. Africa Command, U.S. Pacific Command, etc – hundreds of military bases around the world.
US Geographic Commands
And largely, well, they’re not only there threatening Russia, they’re threatening China.
And these bases are also there as a means to enforcing america’s sphere of influence, i.e. colonize regions which were formerly colonies of European countries.
In Southeast Asia, of course, what is very important are the strategic waterways.
Indonesia is a de-facto within the U.S. zone of influence and various other countries as well.
And so, it’s a process of global militarization in each of the major regions of the world.
This new hegemony in the wake of the Cold War is also characterized by various modes of interference in the affairs of sovereign states through military dictatorships in Latin America, regime change, engineered protest movements, sanctions, meddling in national elections, and so on.
It’s the whole gamut of military might which of course supports U.S. economic and financial interests in different parts of the world.
And it’s not strictly in the context of Eastern Europe. It’s also in Central Asia, it’s in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait,
And in the present structure we now have a situation where the Russian Federation and China are allies under the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which ultimately constitutes a powerful countervailing bloc in relation to U.S. hegemony, particularly in the Asian context.
GR: Most people understand there was a great deal of enmity between the United States and the British Empire in the late 18th century and early 19th century. But over the course of the last couple of centuries, one would think that, well, maybe they’ve changed their ways. I mean the United States is more of a partnership with the United Kingdom, as opposed to looking to supplant them as the dominant empire.
Could you maybe take on that idea, i.e. that there’s no interest in a partnership? Because there’s certainly been a lot of partnership in all of these military adventures we’ve seen since the second world war, but what indications are there that the objective of supplanting of the British Empire is still in effect?
MC: Well, you know, the world is characterized by what I would call cross-cutting coalitions. You can be friends in the area of diplomacy and politics, and then enemies in financial affairs. We can see the situation with regard to the relationship between, let’s say, the United States and Turkey, or Turkey and NATO. Turkey is an ally now of Russia, but it’s still part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
With regard to Britain and the United States – there are many cross-cutting relations. Britain is still Europe’s main financial market, and the City of London is considered one of the major financial centres in the world. And there are links between British and American firms. And there are links also with other European countries.
But, I think there’s something quite specific. Today, while the United Kingdon aligns itself with the United States, they are subordinate to the US.
And I don’t think British governments have any intention of restoring the British Empire, because, apart from the Commonwealth, it is more or less defunct – it doesn’t exist anymore.
But, on the other hand, it’s important to point out that in all recent wars, Britain has faithfully participated in an Anglo-American alliance, both with regard to Afghanistan, as well as, of course, with regard to Iraq during the Gulf War (1991) as well as in 2003. It was marked by The Bush-Tony Blair relationship.
In that regard, there is, of course, a very cohesive and corrupt alliance.
But when you look at the hegemonic objectives of the United States, you realize that what’s happening today in the United Kingdom is the appointment under PM Boris Johnson of a U.S. proxy regime.
GR: Could you explain that a little bit?
MC: It’s something which is not so straighforward to explain. I should mention there are other cases of proxy governments in Western Europe, particularly in France and Germany.
But what this means is that essentially the United States is intent upon taking over the European landscape.
And in one form or another it has done that since the end of World War II, simply by the fact that there are U.S. military bases in several European countries, and they have NATO and they control NATO.
But in the case of Britain, we must understand that the UK has never been part of the Eurozone. And there’s a reason for that, and it has to do with U.S.- U.K. relations in terms of financial institutions, markets, and so on.
But more recently, there have been UK-US negotiations pertaining to trade and investment, etc. the details of which haven’t really emerged. Negotiations between Boris Johnson and the Trump administration, let’s say, with regards to macro-economic policy, specifically the privatization of health services.
In other words, what the U.S. is pushing for is the neoliberal restructuring of Britain, extensive privatization, repeal of the welfare state, something which was built in the post World War II era, namely socio-democracy. And which has nothing to do with British colonialism.
It had to do with the fact that, at one point, the British people pushed towards the development of social programs, education and so on.
And I think that what is happening now is that we have a government which ultimately is not representative of the British people. It has become an instrument of dominant U.S. hegemonic interests, as well as a continuation of a fragile Anglo-American partnership dominated by Washington.
So that, I think that is the endgame. The destabilization of Britain as a nation state.
That destabilization is engineered by the Washington Consensus.
If we look at the evolution of the British Empire from Queen Victoria at the end of the nineteenth century to the present, US hegemony ultimately prevails, The endgame of Britain’s imperial ambitions is economic and political chaos under Brexit.
GR: Yeah…
MC: …It’s not that Brexit per se is the issue. It’s the fact that a proxy government has been installed. It’s a corrupt government. It’s manipulated by financial interests and it is ultimately leading Britain, the former British Empire into a total political impasse.
Intermission
Part Three
GR: Professor Chossudovsky, you brought up Brexit there just now, and I just want to get some clarification. Does Brexit ultimately serve U.S. goals or was it just a means by which a certain kind of proxy, as you say, would get elected?
MC: Well, I think the broader US objective is to create instability across the European landscape. It serves U.S. interests because it cuts Britain off from the European Union. But it also defines a whole series of trade agreements, and so on, which are to benefit the United States. (i.e. US financial interests).
The irony is that U.S. expansionism and hegemony feeds on creating and disrupting both national and local economies. The result is economic and social destabilization.
US sponsored neoliberal reforms destabilize the national economy and create social divisions. (For instance the divisions created in EU member states). the nation state becomes fragmented. (eg. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia are broken up). You create divisions within national societies.
At the same time, the War on Terrorism is used, of course, to weaken the fabric of Western European countries: it triggers the refugee crisis. The latter is marked by people fleeing the war theatres in Syria, or Iraq, or elsewhere. The refugee crisis is the direct result of U.S. military aggression, whether it’s direct military action or whether it is the result of US sponsored terrorist insurgencies.
The whole European landscape now is in crisis politically, socially. And this is also the consequence of U.S. led wars in the Middle East.
But it is also the result of neoliberal policies which are now much more generalized, and which are now being applied in many Western countries.
And inevitably, when you start adopting neoliberal policy in a country like the United Kingdom, you destroy the whole fabric of the welfare state. That’s ultimately the objective.
GR: Professor Chossudovsky we’re going to have to bring the interview to a close shortly, but I wanted to ask one more question about the fact that when these plans – this hegemonic agenda – originated in the 19th century, the U.S. was ascendant, and now it would seem that today and for a couple of decades now, the U.S. has been on the decline with China apparently – appearing to be on the rise and forming partnerships with Russia and other countries. So, how do you see this – I mean, is this agenda of imperial dominance going to fall apart, given the immense debts that the U.S. has racked up, and the inability to sell U.S. Treasury bonds as they have in the past. How do you see this proceeding? Is the U.S. hegemon going to succeed or is it destined to fail?
MC: Well, you know, it has a lot to do with the sources of money wealth. And it’s the growth of speculative activities, the hedge funds, the deregulation of banking during the Clinton administration and the fact that now you can make money without necessarily producing anything.
And you can speculate.
And the various corrupt forms of wealth creation within the financial system are ultimately to the detriment of the real economy.
Then, there’s the whole issue of delocation. And, in effect, what we’ve seen now in the United States is that certain industries are simply being wiped out – and it’s true also in Canada and Western Europe.
And they’ve been delocated to Southeast Asia or even to China for that matter, to cheap labour havens in Southeast Asia.
But at the same time the implementation of these austerity measures, coupled with very large military budgets is leading to the collapse of America’s economic infrastructure.
So the real economy is in crisis. In the core of the US Empire, there’s a large share of the U.S. population which don’t even meet minimum food requirements.
It’s a situation of impoverishment of the richest country on the planet.
And that has a lot to do with the way the US imperial apparatus functions. You delocate everything with a view to paying $150 a month to workers in Southeast Asia, which then leads to people loosing their jobs on assembly lines in North America and so on, And ultimately then this leads to unemployment and the collapse in purchasing power and the downfall of economic activity, not to mention rising food prices. But also concurrently the whole infrastructure of the U.S. economy is in crisis.
And I suspect that this is going to backlash because the Empire is no longer in a position to assert its hegemony in relation to real economic activity.
And the levels of consumer demand have collapsed because of the process of off-shoring of jobs, which create unemployment.
We might make a comparison with the Roman Empire. At one point, in the history of the Roman Empire, the use of slave labor contributed to destroying the independent small scale handicraft economy as well as farming. With the extension of the slave labor economy, the levels of consumer demand simply collapsed, and the whole productive and trading structure went into crisis.
Well, we’re living that, in a sense. We delocate industrial activity to an overseas cheap labour economy with exceedingly low wages (from $100 and $300 a month), and then we close down our factories here.
And then we cut all social expenditures with a view to funding the military industrial complex with large scale investments now of the order of $1.3 trillion for an absolutely useless nuclear weapons program: the only use for that program is to blow up the planet.
Meanwhile, the media tell us that that “nuclear weapons make the World safer”.
This hegemonic project seeks to minimize wages at a global level. In the central core of the US Empire: America, has a declining standard of living, it has high levels of illiteracy, it has poverty, racism alongside a thriving luxury good economy for a small sector of the population.
And those social conditions in the heart of the Empire are exacerbated by the thrust of America’s hegemonic objectives in different parts of the world including the ‘profit driven” global cheap labor economy.
The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.
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This article by Jean-Marie Chauvier was first published on June 22, 2016
***
On 22nd June, 2021 it will have been 80 years since the commencement of Operation Barbarossa, the Hitlerian invasion of the Soviet Union, the war of extermination, pillage and colonization which was to cost the lives of between 24 and 29 million human beings (according to recent estimates): Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians and other Soviet peoples who spearheaded the resistance – finally victorious – to Nazi Germany and its allies. It is sometimes forgotten that this aggression was led not only by Germans but by the armies, SS divisions and various other legions of most European countries, under fascist, right-wing authoritarian, or occupation regimes, which were to a greater or lesser extent collaborators.
The fact – explicit in the principal Nazi documents – is also neglected that Hitler’s “European project”, the destruction of the USSR and the colonization (economic integration) of a vast “Lebensraum” in the East was the major project of this war. Berlin’s Generalplan Ost provided for deportation beyond the Urals of thirty to fifty million Slavs, of whom a good number were to die – estimates were in the vicinity of thirty millions deaths. In the course of the first year of the invasion around twelve million Soviet prisoners of war were deliberately exterminated through starvation or shooting – a subject generally withheld from us – and 900,000 Jews, as implementation of the “final solution” got underway.
But the approach of the 75th anniversary is equally inspiring an indictment of the USSR and Russia. Make way for militant revisionism!
In the Baltic countries that are members of the European Union and NATO, and in Ukraine since the political overturn of February 2014, the accent is being placed on “Bolshevik barbarity” to which resistance was mounted by the local nationalisms allied with Germany. The death of millions of Soviet prisoners of war is imputed to Stalin “who had not signed the Geneva conventions” protecting prisoners. The war itself and its mass carnage are attributed to “the twin totalitarianisms” and certain historians and journalists (Russian oppositionists, Ukrainian nationalists) are putting into circulation the German theory according to which Hitler “was obliged” to attack the USSR given the imminence of a Soviet invasion of Europe.
The “revisionism” currently fashionable, including in Germany and Central Europe, focuses its attention on the acts of cruelty perpetrated by the Red Army and the anti-fascist resistance. In this new “inventory”, the work of often remarkable historians (notably in Germany) carries little weight with public opinion by comparison with the novels and fiction films, media “revelations” adapted to the political requirements and the new presumed expectation of the “the public”. Who would be so bold as to claim that “the past is unpredictable”?
Jean-Marie Chauvier is a researcher and specialist on Russia, Belarus and Ukraine
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Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.
***
First published on June 17, 2021
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Selected quotations from Transcript
Indian tribal girls were used as guinea pigs.
With 1.3 billion people, India is a good base for pharmaceutical companies to make a killing and also kill a lot of people in the process.
The manipulation of people by the media.
It is so terrifying what they are doing.
“We are taking things that are genetically modified organisms and injecting them into little kids arms…”, says Bill Gates
Over 490 000 children in India developed paralysis as a result of the Gates supported vaccine.
There was a parliamentary inquiry, and the Gates Foundation was excluded from India.
And Now they are back, doing their own tricks again.
**
Watch the video by clicking the image below. click right hand corner to go into full screen.
*
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A man claiming to be a friend with a British Airways pilot has stated that 3 pilots have just died within the past week shortly after receiving COVID-19 injections, and his recording has gone viral on social media.
Here is the recording (let us know if Twitter takes it down as we have a copy.)
…
This brought out the usual corporate media “fact-checkers” to try and debunk the man’s claims.
Reuters responded with a “fact-check,” but in their own investigation and report they confirmed that not only did these three die, but a fourth one as well.
They gave the usual corporate media response by quoting some health “authorities” who categorically stated that their deaths had “nothing to do” with the shots, while not denying that they died, nor giving any other explanation for their deaths.
Shared in the form of a voice recording on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, an unidentified male says he has spoken to a “friend who’s a BA pilot” and explains “things are getting crazy” after three fellow pilots passed away (here , here and here).
“They’ve had the third BA pilot die in the last seven days, yeah? Third pilot dead in the last week,” says the man heard in the recording. “The first two guys were in their forties and fifties; this guy, mid-thirties, perfectly fit, no underlying conditions. He gets his second jab and he’s dead within days, exactly the same with the first two.
“Because of this, BA are now in crisis talks with the government about whether to allow vaccinated pilots to fly. The issue with that of course is that about 80%, according to my friend in BA, 80-85% have been injected.”
The man then goes on to say only “10% of pilots will be able to fly,” branding it a “serious issue”.
Reuters presented the claims to British Airways, which said they were unfounded and that no such talks were underway with the government.
The spokesperson, however, confirmed the authenticity of the four condolence books, as four company pilots had recently passed away.
“Our thoughts are with their family and friends,” they said, adding that none of the deaths was linked to vaccines.
In a statement to Reuters, the UK’s Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) also denied any such crisis talks with Britain’s flagship air carrier.
“We have not been made aware of deaths of BA pilots after receiving the Covid-19 vaccine and have not had discussions with BA or other airlines, about preventing pilots from flying after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine,” said Dr. Sarah Branch, the director of vigilance and risk management of medicines for the MHRA. “There are currently no restrictions on aviation or other industries and activities post vaccination.” (Source -Emphasis added.)
Meanwhile, Sky News out of Australia is reporting that airline companies in Spain and Russia are warning COVID-19 “vaccinated” people not to travel because of the risk of blood clots.
An Exclusive Interview of Three Frontline Canadian Physicians “Freedom of expression is enshrined in our Constitution, and is imperative in a free and democratic society, as it underpins other human rights, such as the freedoms of thought, conscience, association and assembly.
Free expression is vital to robust and open debate in order to formulate sound and reasoned public policy. This video reveals the disturbing, and dangerous, trend of how peaceful voices of frontline physicians who dissent, and disagree, with state policy regarding COVID directives, are being silenced.
Dr. Gill, Dr. Phillips and Dr. Lamba have all come under attack for their expression that public health directives and mandates are grossly flawed and misguided, and for calling attention to the incredible harms of the governments’ forced lockdowns.
Their desire to speak about the research they know, and the harms they witness, is driven by their conscience.
Their only purpose in doing so is to live up to their oath to “first, do no harm”.
Please subscribe to this YouTube channel and https://www.carenotcuts.ca to stay informed. Exclusive Interview by the Constitutional Rights Centre of Canada and Whole Hearted Media. Original Premiere was February 21, 2021.
Independent MP Derek Sloan holds a news conference on Parliament Hill to raise concerns about the alleged censorship of doctors and scientists as well as medical information related to vaccines.
The Ontario MP has been critical of lockdowns that have been in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and also sponsored a petition questioning the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
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The NATO proclamation—promoted at its annual summit this week—that a cyber attack could trigger Article 5 of the NATO treaty heightens the risk of military confrontation with Russia or China.
Article 5 says that the NATO alliance regards an attack on one of its members as an attack on all of them. That is supposed to come into play only in case of an armed attack, since that is the only kind of attack under the UN Charter that warrants responsive use of force.
If one expands the concept of armed attack in violation of the UN Charter, one opens a broader path to the use of force. Thus, while the concept of self-defense is obviously necessary, where an actual armed attack occurs, the concept is dangerous if acts not amounting to armed attack can trigger it.
NATO’s history with invocation of Article 5 does not give much comfort. The only time that occurred was after the September 11, 2001, criminal attacks in the United States against the Pentagon and World Trade Towers. That invocation provided justification for military action in Afghanistan that was said to be aimed at Al-Qaeda but that morphed into a twenty-year fiasco that is now reaching its ignoble end. It is dangerous to leave the decision to start war to NATO.
Scene of destruction in Afghanistan following U.S. NATO bombing there. The war resulted from NATO’s invocation of Article 5 following the 9/11 attacks. [Source: revolutionaryfrontlines.wordpress.com]
The UN Charter is set up, in fact, to keep regional defense organizations from undertaking war without authorization from the UN Security Council. NATO decisions to start wars skirt that obligation.
The United States decreed a dangerous expansion of self-defense in 2002 when it said in the Defense Department’s annual strategic policy document that self-defense is warranted in response not only to an actual armed attack, but as well in response to an anticipated attack. That interpretation opened the path to the distortion of facts relating to Iraq that provided a rationale for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
NATO, moreover, was set up to stop what was said to be a risk of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. NATO has transformed itself into an organization with worldwide scope. So when President Biden says, as he just did, that Article 5 is a “sacrosanct” obligation, he is diverting attention from what Article 5 was created to prevent.
Cyber attacks of one kind or another occur frequently these days. While it is true—and this is the rationale for the NATO statement—that cyber attacks can be extremely damaging, their very frequency heightens the risk of calling cyber attacks the equivalent of an armed attack.
The nightmare scenario is that a cyber attack occurs, the origin is not obvious, but NATO says it was the work of Russia or China and proceeds with military action. There would be no oversight for that assessment.
Another nightmare is that Russia or China is accused of a space-based attack of unknown origin, or which derives from weapons testing.
The prohibition of use of force contained in the UN Charter in 1945 was an important achievement for the world community. The Charter allowed for self-defense but kept it within narrow bounds. The expansion of the parameters of Article 5 in the 21st century that is claimed to allow for defense force—in violation of the UN Charter—is a danger to world peace.
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John Quigley is Professor of International Law at Ohio State University.
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MinutesMinutes before liftoff, Elon Musk’s SpaceX ignored at least two warnings from the Federal Aviation Administration that launching its first high-altitude Starship prototype last December would violate the company’s launch license, confidential documents and letters obtained by The Verge show. And while SpaceX was under investigation, it told the FAA that the agency’s software was a “source of frustration” that has been “shown to be inaccurate at times or overly conservative,” according to the documents.
SpaceX’s violation of its launch license was “inconsistent with a strong safety culture,” the FAA’s space division chief Wayne Monteith said in a letter to SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell. “Although the report states that all SpaceX parties believed that such risk was sufficiently low to comply with regulatory criteria, SpaceX used analytical methods that appeared to be hastily developed to meet a launch window,” Monteith went on.
Launch violations are rare in the industry, even as private contractors have taken over work that once was the US government’s alone. SpaceX occupies a particularly dominant position, as it is now NASA’s only ride to the International Space Station and the Moon. The documents exclusively obtained by The Verge show how SpaceX prioritized speed over safety when launching on its own private rocket playground. Ultimately, the FAA didn’t sanction SpaceX, and less than two months later, SpaceX resumed flights in Boca Chica, Texas.
For Musk, SpaceX’s CEO who was on site for SN8’s launch day, the violation is one of the latest tussles with regulators overseeing his companies. After settling with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018 over an attempt to take Tesla private, Musk was told his tweets about the company needed a lawyer’s sign-off. Shortly after, he went on 60 Minutes to say no one was approving his tweets; the SEC brought him back to court, though Musk’s tweets have continued to raise eyebrows with no apparent consequences. In 2020, Musk’s Fremont Tesla factory violated local safety orders, defying the local government’s stay-at-home order to work through the pandemic. Musk taunted local officials, inviting them to come arrest him.
SpaceX emerged from the December launch violation relatively unscathed. The company has since won a $2.9 billion contract to put NASA astronauts on a Starship flight to the Moon in 2024 — the first and only such contract in a half-century.
Neither SpaceX nor Musk has publicly commented on the SN8 violation. SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for comment. The FAA confirmed the violation after a report by The Verge in January. But a confidential five-page report by SpaceX and letters between Shotwell and Monteith reveal what SpaceX employees knew before liftoff and detail how the company responded to its violation in the aftermath.
SpaceX first attempted to launch SN8 at SpaceX’s South Texas Starship campus on December 8th with FAA approval, but it scrubbed due to an engine issue. Launch day on December 9th, when weather conditions changed, was full of ad hoc meetings between company employees and FAA officials, who repeatedly rejected SpaceX’s weather and launch modeling data that purported to show SN8 was safe to fly, according to a five-page SpaceX report. It was unclear what role, if any, Musk himself played in the decision to launch SN8.
SpaceX’s SN8 Starship prototype successfully lifts off in violation of its launch license.GIF: SpaceX
The FAA’s models showed that if the rocket exploded, its shockwave could be strengthened by various weather conditions like wind speed and endanger nearby homes. As a new launch countdown clock was ticking, SpaceX asked the FAA to waive this safety threshold at 1:42PM, but the FAA rejected the request an hour later. SpaceX paused the countdown clock.
SpaceX’s director of launch operations, whose name wasn’t provided in the report, restarted the launch countdown clock shortly after. The report said the director had “the impression that” SpaceX’s data was sufficient. But that wasn’t the case. As the launch clock was counting down, SpaceX staff in the meeting made little progress — 15 minutes before liftoff, “the FAA informed SpaceX that the weather data provided was not sufficient.” The same safety risk remained, and SN8 wasn’t cleared for launch.
SpaceX employees left the FAA meeting for the company’s launch control room ahead of SN8’s launch. Minutes before liftoff, an FAA safety inspector speaking on an open phone line warned SpaceX’s staff in the launch control room that a launch would violate the company’s launch license. SpaceX staff ignored the warning because they “assumed that the inspector did not have the latest information,” the SpaceX report said.
SpaceX launched the rocket anyway. The steel-clad SN8 prototype flew more than six miles over the company’s private rocket facilities on the coast of Boca Chica, Texas, and blew to smithereens upon landing. No injuries or damage to any homes were reported.
SN8 perishes in an explosive “hard landing”
In one letter to Shotwell, Monteith cited SpaceX’s report and slammed the company for proceeding with the launch “based on ‘impressions’ and ‘assumptions,’ rather than procedural checks and positive affirmations.”
“These actions show a concerning lack of operational control and process discipline that is inconsistent with a strong safety culture,” he said.
SpaceX agreed to take over a dozen corrective measures but defended its own data and decision-making. The company criticized the FAA’s launch-weather modeling software. The software’s results, SpaceX said, can be intentionally interfered with to provide “better or worse results for an identical scenario.”
SpaceX has complained to the FAA in the past about the software, but “this feedback has not driven any action, contributing to the situation described above,” the report said. A “closer and more direct dialogue” with FAA officials would’ve smoothed the FAA discussions before SN8’s launch, SpaceX added.
SpaceX also proposed corrective measures: pausing the launch countdown clocks if an FAA inspector says there’s a violation and lowering the threshold for manually detonating an errant rocket midflight, before a more dangerous explosion occurs. The company also proposed to build at least four new launch and weather modeling tools with the FAA.
Monteith wasn’t happy with SpaceX’s response. He ordered SpaceX to reevaluate its safety procedures and launch day chain of command, and he urged it to go back and review the launch control room phone lines to spot any times SpaceX strayed from the license’s communication plan. He also required an FAA inspector to be physically present in Texas for every Starship prototype launch in the future. Flying inspectors from offices in Florida to rural Texas for each launch isn’t easy, so the FAA might base one in Houston for a shorter trip.
FAA investigators couldn’t determine whether the SN8 license violation was intentional, according to people involved in and briefed on the investigation, speaking on the condition of anonymity. That’s partially why the FAA review of the violation wasn’t a more in-depth investigation that could have resulted in fines or stronger consequences. FAA officials also believed grounding Starship and foisting a two-month investigation on a multibillion-dollar company focused heavily on speedy timelines would be a more effective penalty than imposing relatively trivial fines, the people said.
SN8 marked SpaceX’s first high-altitude launch outside of its other launch sites in Florida and California, where Air Force officials who monitor local weather conditions tell the company whether it’s safe to launch. Those government officials, formally called Range safety officials, don’t exist at SpaceX’s private rocket facilities in south Texas. SpaceX was primarily responsible for its own range safety during SN8’s launch, a responsibility in which it had very little experience. The company acknowledged in its report that the Starship site “was not mature enough” to function as a range.
SpaceX is moving ahead anyway. Since the launch violation, it’s launched four more rockets at the Starship site and even landed one successfully — all with FAA approval and a few changes to its operations. Unlike SN8, which launched on an automatic timer, other Starship launches now require a final “go” command from a human operator, Shotwell said in a letter to Monteith. And it is taking a stab at maturity, at least with its range safety tech.
At least one of the new launch-weather models SpaceX proposed, designed to bolster its range capabilities, has already taken shape. The company is building a database of wind patterns over Boca Chica to help inform its launch day weather modeling, using an experimental tool to gather wind speed data, according to a document the company filed with the Federal Communications Commission in April.
But new weather tools won’t change Musk’s Twitter presence, a concern for agency officials and lawmakers who worry the CEO’s candid tweets influence SpaceX employees and put unfair pressure on launch safety processes.
As the FAA’s review of SpaceX’s safety culture investigation was nearing completion in late January, holding up the company’s SN9 launch for a few days, Musk tweeted that the FAA’s “space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure” and that, under its rules, “humanity will never get to Mars.” An FAA spokesman replied, saying the agency “will not compromise its responsibility to protect public safety.”
The House transportation committee that oversees the FAA opened its own probe into SpaceX’s SN8 violation in February as well as “the FAA’s subsequent response, and the pressure exerted on the FAA during high profile launches,” chairs of the committee and its aviation subcommittee wrote to the agency’s administrator Steve Dickson. SpaceX’s recent launch activities raise serious questions about whether the FAA is under “potential undue influence” in making safety decisions, the letter said.
In March, after an onsite FAA inspector left town for the weekend following a week of anticipation for the company’s SN11 prototype launch, SpaceX emailed the inspector on Sunday to return for a Monday liftoff, according to a person familiar with the exchange. The inspector, taking the weekend off, missed the email at first but hopped on an early Monday morning flight back to Texas.
“FAA inspector unable to reach Starbase in time for launch today,” Musk wrote on Twitter, stirring up vitriol against the FAA in SpaceX’s fan base bubbles on Twitter and Reddit. The inspector landed in Texas, and SN11 launched the next day.
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Back in the George W. Bush years, I began thinking the US ruling class had entered a serious phase of rot. After a round of tax cuts skewed toward the very rich, Bush and his cronies launched a horribly destructive and expensive war on Iraq that greatly damaged the reputation and finances of the United States on its own imperial terms.
The president and his cronies seemed reckless, vain, and out of control. Bush adviser Karl Rove dismissed the critiques of “the reality-based community,” with its conclusions drawn from “the judicious study of discernible reality.” Instead, Rove asserted, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” One waited in vain for the grown-ups to appear on the scene and right the imperial ship, but, if they existed at all, they were too busy celebrating their tax cuts and pumping up the housing bubble to bother.
After that bubble burst, creating the financial crisis and the Great Recession, the smooth and cerebral Barack Obama seemed like a stabilizing force. That’s not what many of his more fervent supporters expected of his presidency; they were hoping for a more peaceful and egalitarian world, but they got neither. Facing the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, one like that depression driven in large part by Wall Street, Obama was not about to do anything on the scale of the New Deal. There was the early and underpowered stimulus package, but beyond that, there would be no major reregulation of finance and no programs of public investment, income security, or redistribution. Unlike the Franklin Roosevelt administration, or even John F. Kennedy’s, for that matter, there was little political ferment around the White House, even though the Democratic policy elites came out of the same Ivy League circles as their ancestors.Image on the right: President George W. Bush and Karl Rove on August 13, 2007. (Joyce N. Boghosian / Wikimedia Commons)
The disappointments of the Obama years prepared the way for Donald Trump. Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, many people (including sometimes me) thought the establishment would somehow keep Trump from winning. Hillary Clinton, the product of Wellesley College and Yale Law School, would stop the vulgarian who cheated his way into Wharton from entering the Oval Office. But her brand of status-quo politics failed to inspire.
Trump was not the bourgeoisie’s favorite candidate. He had support from provincial plutocrats but not from the executive suite at Goldman Sachs. When he took office and immediately began ransacking, one wondered if the deep state would rein him in. Maybe the CIA would even arrange a malfunction in Air Force One’s fuel line. But it was not to be. Tax cuts and deregulation made capital forget all their reservations about Trump, and the stock market made 128 fresh daily highs — on average, one every six days — between inauguration and the onset of the coronavirus crisis. It took his encouragement of an attack on the US Capitol for the big bourgeoisie to complain openly — 99 percent of the way through his time in office.
Fish rots from the head, they say, and it’s tempting to think the same about US society. We’ve always had a brutal ruling class — more brutal at certain times (the years of slavery and Jim Crow) than others (the New Deal). But despite the brutality, there was usually a great economic and cultural dynamism. That now seems long past, and I’m not just talking about the era of Trump and the coronavirus. Something has gone badly wrong at the top of this society, and all of us are suffering for it.
One doesn’t want to idealize the ruling classes of the past. For all of history, their wealth and status have depended on exploiting those below them — and they’ve never shied away from extreme measures if they feel that those things are threatened. But the present configuration of the American ruling class is having a hard time performing the tasks it’s supposed to in order to keep the capitalist machine running. It’s not investing, and it’s allowing the basic institutions of society — notably the state but also instruments of cultural reproduction like universities — to decay.
Capitalists have long been driven by shortsightedness and greed. But it feels like we’ve entered what Christian Parenti calls the necrotic phase of American capitalism.
Lest anyone misunderstand, this isn’t an argument for a better elite or a “true” meritocracy; it’s ultimately an argument for a different society, one not dependent on the rule of plutocrats and their hired hands.
A core concept of Marxism is class struggle, but the tradition exhibits a strange dearth of investigation of the ruling class. When I first started getting interested in elite studies, I asked the Marxist political scientist Bertell Ollman whose writing he liked on the issue. He thought a moment and said, “Marxists don’t write about the ruling class.” When I asked why not, he said, “They think it’s obvious.”
You could say the ruling class is the capitalist class, of course, but what does that mean? CEOs of Fortune 500 companies? Their shareholders, to whom they allegedly answer? What about the owner of a chain of franchised auto parts stores in the Midwest? The owner may be able to get his congressperson on the phone — a senator might be harder — to get a tax break slipped unobtrusively into a larger bill, but what influence does he have over larger state policy? Are car dealers part of the ruling class? If so, what about new versus used? And what about someone like Henry Kissinger, a man who started as a clever functionary and ended up shaping US foreign policy in much of the 1970s, and who still has an influence over how diplomats and politicians think? How about less grand politicians and high government officials? Are they employees of the ruling class or its partners — or shapers, even? It’s not at all obvious.
Before proceeding, I should say I’m not taking seriously the idea that there is no ruling class — that there are voters in a democracy who may be divided into interest groups but none are dominant. Yes, the constrained democracy we live under is a lot better than a dictatorship would be; elections do act as a limit on elite power. But that’s a long way from the popular self-government socialists dream of. Nor am I taking seriously conceptions of a ruling class that center on PC-obsessed, organic-food-eating urban elites. That set has some influence, especially among the liberal wing of the consciousness industry, but it doesn’t shape the political economy.Image below: Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1976. (Library of Congress)
I’d say the ruling class consists of a politically engaged capitalist class, operating through lobbying groups, financial support for politicians, think tanks, and publicity, that meshes with a senior political class that directs the machinery of the state. (You could say something similar about regional, state, and local capitalists and the relevant machinery.) But we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of the political branch of the ruling class in shaping the thinking of the capitalists, who are too busy making money to think much on their own or even organize in their collective interest.
One way to approach the question of a ruling class is through Italian elite theory, namely the work of Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels. In his four-volume warhorse The Mind and Society, Pareto laid out a clear vision of society:
“Ignoring exceptions, which are few in number and of short duration, one finds everywhere a governing class of relatively few individuals that keeps itself in power partly by force and partly by the consent of the subject class, which is much more populous.
To preserve its power, that governing class must be “adept in the shrewd use of chicanery, fraud, corruption.”
Individual governing elites do not last: “History is a graveyard of aristocracies,” Pareto declared. Contributing to their passing is a loss in vigor, an effect of the decadence of the well-established and the failure to invigorate the stock by recruiting from below. For Pareto, a healthy governing class is able to absorb the leaders of the “governed” and thereby neutralize them. “Left without leadership, without talent, disorganized, the subject class is almost always powerless to set up any lasting régime.” (Karl Marx said something similar: “The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the foremost minds of a ruled class, the more stable and dangerous becomes its rule.”) But if the governing class is overcome by “humanitarian sentiments” and is unable to absorb the natural leaders of the oppressed, it could be overthrown, especially if “the subject class contains a number of individuals disposed to use force.”
Image on the right: Gaetano Mosca (Wikimedia Commons)
Mosca wrote at some length about strata below the ruling elite. The one just below it, which plays the officer corps to the enlisted personnel of the masses, is crucial to the health of the system and functions as the backbone of political stability. Should it erode, morally or intellectually, then society will unravel. It can tolerate foolishness at the top if the stratum just one level below is in good order — one thinks of Trump and the grown-up problem.
Mosca saw clearly the profound relation of the family to political and economic power, something modern conservatives understand (and people who wonder about the coexistence of “family values” and neoliberal politics don’t). Upper-class parents do their best to prepare their children for rule, and there’s always a heavy dose of inheritance in social power. In an exuberant moment, Mosca wrote:
In order to abolish privileges of birth entirely, it would be necessary to go one step farther, to abolish the family, recognize a vagrant Venus and drop humanity to the level of the lowest animalism. In the Republic Plato proposed abolishing the family as an almost necessary consequence of the abolition of private property.
Further down, Mosca lamented the state of the European middle classes in the 1930s. He warned, “If the economic decline of [the middle] class should continue for a whole generation, an intellectual decline in all our countries would inevitably follow.” They are “great repositories of independent opinion and disinterested public spirit,” without which:
we would have either a plutocratic dictatorship, or else a bureaucratico-
military dictatorship, or else a demagogic dictatorship by a few experts in mob leadership, who would know the arts of wheedling the masses and of satisfying their envies and their predatory instincts in every possible way, to the certain damage of the general interest.
He didn’t define the “general interest,” a concept often confused with what’s good for the upper orders, but the erosion of the US middle ranks over the last few decades has had a trajectory not unlike what Mosca worried about.
Of the Italian trio, Michels is the most interesting, not least because so much of his attention is paid to the Left formations to which he once belonged. His most famous contribution is known as the “iron law of oligarchy,” a belief that organizations will always evolve into hierarchies, even parties ostensibly trying to overthrow the hierarchies of bourgeois society. Marx was right about class struggle as the motor of history, Michels conceded, but every new class coming to power will itself evolve a new hierarchy. Even syndicalists, argued Michels, who criticize the oligarchic tendencies in socialist parties and favor instead direct strike action by organized workers, need leaders. “Syndicalism is even more than socialism a fighting party. It loves the great battlefield. Can we be surprised that the syndicalists need leaders yet more than do the socialists?”
Within socialist parties and organization, Michels pointed to the prominence of traitors to the bourgeoisie. Most of the prominent nineteenth-century socialist writers, Marx and Engels most famously, were bourgeois intellectuals; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a rare exception. So, too, the revolutionary leaders of the twentieth century: Vladimir Lenin came out of a middle-class family and was educated as a lawyer; Leon Trotsky was born to a rich farming family and educated in cosmopolitan Odessa; Che Guevara was another child of the middle class who was surrounded by books and political conversation as he grew up. No doubt the descendants of the old syndicalists would argue that these relatively elite origins contributed to the ossification of the Russian and Cuban revolutions — but one could cite Michels’s retort about the necessity of leaders to the syndicalists in response to that critique. Growing up bourgeois confers some advantages — time to study, as well as exposure to the nature of power — often denied to people further down the social hierarchy. Instead of lambasting their “privilege,” it might be better to welcome these class traitors.This doesn’t mean one should be complacent about them, or about the concept of leadership in general. Many on the Left have resisted applying Michels’s iron law to our parties and occasionally our governments, but it would be better to acknowledge the power of the tendency and figure out the best way to keep those leaders accountable through what Michels called “a serene and frank examination of the oligarchical dangers of democracy.” It’s better to be open about the reality of hierarchies than to pretend they don’t exist; even professedly leaderless organizations are subject to domination by the charismatic.
The Italians focus primarily on politics and the state as the sites of rule, without much interest in their relations with capitalists. For an American, that seems like a serious deficit. But in some senses, the focus on politics is clarifying. That’s where class conflicts are often crystallized, sharpened to a point — more so than in the workplace, which can appear to be the site of interaction among individuals rather than classes. As the Marxist political theorist Nicos Poulantzas put it, through relations with the state, the complex and diffuse relation between classes “assumes the relatively simple form of relations between the dominant and the dominated, governors and governed.”
We once had a coherent ruling class, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), who more or less owned and ran the United States from its founding through the 1970s. Based largely in the Northeast, with offshoots in the Upper Midwest, WASPs went to the same elite schools and colleges, belonged to the same clubs, married out of the same pool, and vacationed in the same favorite rural retreats. There were Southern WASPs, descendants of the slave-owning gentry, but they never had the social weight of their northern relatives — though they did rule their region and enjoy an outsize role in Congress for decades.
Visiting crew team at the Groton School on the Nashua River. (National Archives at College Park)
At the rank-and-file level, men worked in genteel law firms and brokerages or as executives in old-line manufacturing firms, and women did volunteer work for museums and charities and maintained the social relations that kept the group functioning together as a class. At the high end, WASPs played a role in government far out of proportion to their numbers, most notably in foreign policy. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), target of innumerable conspiracy theories generated from left and right for its prominent role in shaping imperial policy, traces its origins to the end of World War I, when a delegation of British and American diplomats and scholars decided to preserve the transatlantic comity of the war years and form a council whose purpose was, in the words of Peter Gosse’s official history, “to convene dinner meetings, to make contact with distinguished foreign visitors under conditions congenial to future commerce.” The CFR didn’t begin to influence policy until the 1930s, when its fellows and members helped plot the takeover of the British Empire, a concern of the Franklin Roosevelt administration.
That special identification with England has been foundational to WASP identity from the first. But it took waves of fresh immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, people with strange customs and sometimes dangerous politics, for the formation to come to energized self-consciousness as a class, beginning in the 1880s. That decade brought the obsession with finding one’s old-stock roots, the first country clubs, the founding of the Social Register, and, quite importantly, the opening of the Groton School by Endicott Peabody, which shaped generations of the wellborn as well as the children of arrivistes who wanted to learn the ways of the wellborn. Peabody’s vision was one of “Muscular Christianity,” popular among elites of the time, who were worried about a loss of manliness in an increasingly urban society — austere, disciplined, athletic. FDR said that the influence of Peabody and his wife meant more to him than “any other people next to my father and mother.”
Coming out of World War II, elite WASPs like Averell Harriman (son of a robber baron) and Dean Acheson (son of the Episcopal bishop of Connecticut, who learned how to row crew from Harriman at Groton), supplemented by recruits like George Kennan (son of a Milwaukee lawyer) and John McCloy (a poor kid from Philly who learned the ways of the elite at an early age and got certified with a Harvard Law degree), shaped what would become the US empire. Their skill can’t be denied; that empire has had a long and successful run, though it now looks to be coming unglued. (The competitive pressures of having the USSR as rival, and having socialism as a plausible alternative to capitalism in the twentieth century, did bring out some of the talent in the upper crust.)
McCloy, despite being a recruit, earned the title of “chairman of the American establishment” for having run postwar Germany and becoming a name partner of the law firm that represented the Rockefellers, Chase, and Big Oil (from which he took a break to run the young World Bank, which he kept safe for Wall Street). At one point, he was simultaneously chair of Chase, the Ford Foundation, and the Council on Foreign Relations and partner at the elite law firm Milbank, Tweed, where he basically ran US Middle Eastern policy.
Cast into political exile in the Eisenhower years, the WASPs returned with the status-anxious John F. Kennedy, desperate for the approval of a stratum suspicious of Irish Catholics. Kennedy, who was denounced by WASP columnist Lucius Beebe as “a rich mick from the Boston lace curtain district,” went to Choate and Harvard to learn the manner of the upper orders. As president, he brought back the older patrician crew and added the notorious McGeorge Bundy, another Groton product, who would be one of the most enthusiastic promoters of the Vietnam War, a disaster that pretty much ended that caste’s dominance of foreign policy.
Image below: John F. Kennedy at Harvard University, circa 1939.
Fresh from helping wreck Southeast Asia, Bundy went on to run the Ford Foundation, where, among other things, he applied counterinsurgency techniques developed in Vietnam to the urban crisis of the 1970s. Bundy’s strategy, as Karen Ferguson recounts in Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism, was to split off the “natural” leadership of the black community and incorporate it into the ruling class, then encourage the separate development of black schools and cultural institutions on an apartheid model, because the broad population just wasn’t advanced enough to join white society. The Italian elite theorists would have been proud of him.
As the twentieth century rolled on, WASP predominance eroded in spheres other than foreign policy. The 1970s saw a mini genre of “decline of the WASP” books and articles crop up, as Jews, Eastern and Southern European ethnics, and even blacks and Latinos began to permeate cultural, political, and business elites. At the same time, the old-line manufacturing companies, headquartered not only in New York but also in outposts of the WASP archipelago like Pittsburgh and Cleveland, fell to Japanese competition and squeezed profits. Inflation and multiple generations of inheritance ate away at old WASP fortunes. And the deregulation of Wall Street that began in the mid-1970s turned the genteel world of white-shoe investment banking (and associated law firms) into a ruthlessly competitive one. Gone were the days when a well-bred young man could pop out of Yale and into a quiet job as a bond salesman.
To use the language of finance theory, the transaction replaced the relationship. All those old WASP ties of blood and club were replaced by principles of pure profit maximization. Firms that had dealt with the same investment bank for decades shopped around to find out who could give them the best deal. The stable world of the immediate postwar decades, in which the same companies dominated the Fortune 500 and trading on the New York Stock Exchange, was transformed by a massive wave of takeovers and business failures.This new competitive structure destroyed the WASP dominance at the same time that it created fresh fortunes: oil and natural resources in the South and the West, and takeover artists like Henry Kravis and Carl Icahn. At the center of the turbulence was the investment banking firm of Drexel Burnham Lambert, which, though it bore a pedigreed name — the firm’s founder, Anthony Drexel, was a partner of J. P. Morgan and a member of Philadelphia’s aristocracy — had turned into a machine for borrowing lots of money and powering a fresh generation of arrivistes. But with the aristocracy in decline, the new arrivals had little to be assimilated into, unlike in Peabody’s days. Instead, the 1980s brought us stylized remnants of the old order like The Official Preppy Handbook, a guide to dressing and acting like the aristocracy, and Anglophilic clothing designed by Ralph Lauren (born in the Bronx as Ralph Lifshitz).
Though always a major part of American life, money was about to take a starring role. It’s hard to believe now, but when Forbes compiled its first list of the 400 richest Americans in 1982, there were just over a dozen billionaires among them, and the minimum price of entry was $100 million, or $270 million in 2020 dollars. Oil and real estate tycoons were prominent among them. Now, tech and finance dominate the list, and the fortunes are far larger — the minimum price of entry in 2020 was $2.1 billion. The five richest 2020 members were worth $520 billion; in 1982, the top five were worth $11 billion, or $26 billion in current dollars. A 2015 study of the Forbes list over the years found a decreasing prominence of inherited wealth and a rise in self-made fortunes — though the new arrivals were more likely to depart the list than the pedigreed.
The economic and financial forces that helped destroy the WASPs and create a new capitalist class deserve close attention. Much of it revolved around the stock market, as the 1970s became the 1980s. The entire model of how to run large corporations was transformed.Stock markets are peculiar institutions. They’re touted in the media as economic thermometers, to a public that has little idea what they do. Few people have deep ownership interest in the markets; only about half of American households have retirement accounts, with an average holding of $65,000. The richest 1 percent own 55 percent of stocks; the next 9 percent own 39 percent, leaving all of 6 percent for the bottom 90 percent. The market’s behavior can seem bizarre to outsiders and connoisseurs alike, swinging from extremes of joy to despair. Its reaction to news can be perplexing, but it’s a realm where people are all trying “to beat the gun,” an American phrase that John Maynard Keynes adopted in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money to describe the logic of speculative markets.
As frivolous as the market can seem, there’s a serious business going on under all the froth. Much of the productive apparatus of the United States is owned by public corporations — that is, ones whose stock is widely held and traded on exchanges. Those shares represent ownership interests in those corporations. As detached as the stock market may appear from reality, it’s actually an institution central to class formation — the way an owning elite stakes its ownership claims on an economy’s means of production as a whole. That’s in contrast to the nineteenth century, when industrial firms were owned by individual capitalists or small partnerships. As those firms grew, they became too big to be run and funded by a small circle; their organizational form gave way to the professionally managed corporation owned by outside shareholders. That became the dominant form of economic activity in the early twentieth century.
But the owners — the shareholders — don’t know the first thing about how to run corporations, so they have to hire specialists to do the work for them. This presents what’s known in the trade as an agency problem: the owners are dependent on hired hands to run their companies for them, but how do they know the executives are running the firms in the shareholders’ interests and not their own? Yes, shareholders elect the board of directors, and boards hire and fire top management, but in practice, it’s not easy for disperse shareholders to supervise a board, and crafty CEOs can turn boards into rubber stamps. If the market were working in accordance with official theology, it would be disciplining actors into the proper profit-maximizing behavior, but clearly that’s not enough.
A classic work on the topic is Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means’s The Modern Corporation and Private Property, published at the depths of the Depression in 1932, when capitalism was in deep disrepute. Berle and Means, both advisers to FDR, saw the large, publicly owned corporation — ever since nicknamed the Berle-Means corporation, marked by what they call the “dissolution of the atom of property” — as a profound innovation. It was about to become, if it wasn’t already, “the dominant institution of the modern world.”
There were many perils in this new arrangement. As Berle and Means noted, “out of professional pride,” managers could choose to “maintain labor standards above those required by competitive conditions and business foresight or . . . improve quality above the point which, over a period, is likely to yield optimum returns to the stockholders.” This would benefit other stakeholders, as we call them today, namely workers and customers, but it would be in “opposition to the interests of ownership.”
But that was not without political promise. As good New Dealers, they thought this new capitalism could be managed responsibly after the reckless high jinks of the 1920s. Gone were the rabid profit maximizers of the robber baron era; why push to maximize profits when they’ll only be passed along to shareholders? With the profit maximizing incentive gone, under a regime of proper state regulation and enlightened management, the system was evolving into a “collective capitalism,” as Berle called it in the preface to the revised 1967 edition. Or, as the authors put it in the original text, the modern corporation is “approach[ing] toward communist modalities.” It would be more accurate to say that this view aimed to make socialism obsolete and irrelevant now that the days of Jay Gould and J. P. Morgan had given way to the man in the gray flannel suit.
As the legal historian Mark Roe argues, the Berle-Means corporation emerged out of a nineteenth-century populist distrust of concentrated financial power. Better dispersed ownership, the thinking went, than bank ownership. These trends were reinforced by the New Deal, which broke up banks, took them largely out of the stock ownership game, and made it harder for financial operators to interfere in corporate management.
There was a clear political intent here. As Roe notes, the New Deal leashing of finance moved issues of ownership and class division off the political agenda, issues that were hot in the 1930s. FDR was explicit about the need to break up “private socialism” — concentrated corporate and financial power — in order to prevent “government socialism.” For New Dealers — many of them renegade WASPs rebelling against their kind’s Republicanism — the point of regulation wasn’t to stifle capital, it was to legitimate it by making financial power seem transparent and disinterested.
For the first few postwar decades, the New Deal model was standard liberal doctrine. In The New Industrial State, John Kenneth Galbraith argued that rapacious profit maximization had been replaced by a secure mediocrity, and greedy capitalists by a “technostructure.” Top managers, who were well paid but on nothing like today’s scale, saw little point in risk-taking; they wanted sales growth and prestige, not the paychecks that would later populate the Forbes 400. Today’s paychecks are driven by stock prices; in the 1950s, top executives were paid mostly straight salaries. Shareholders had become vestigial; if they didn’t like the performance of firms they held stock in, they’d just sell the shares. No one ever troubled management.
The New York Stock Exchange and portraits of capitalists and financiers, 1903. (New York Public Library)
That comfortable world began falling apart in the 1970s, as profits stumbled, financial markets performed miserably, and inflation rose inexorably. As we’ll see later, the corporate class organized to address this politically, but there was also a fierce fight within the capitalist class as shareholders began demanding more.
Enabling that demand for more was the major shift in the ownership of stocks. In the early 1950s, households (mostly rich ones, of course) owned over 90 percent of stock; now it’s under 40 percent. Large institutional holders like pension funds and mutual funds owned about 2 percent of all stock in the 1950s; now it’s around 30 percent. While the household owners of the mid-twentieth century had common interests in rising share prices and stable, generous dividends, they had no means of organizing to influence the corporations they owned. Today’s institutional owners have plenty of means. The diffuse, passive shareholders of the past have given way to the professional money managers of recent decades.
Deteriorating economic and financial performance, combined with the change in ownership, provided rich material for the shareholder revolution. Beginning in the 1970s, financial theorists, notably Harvard’s Michael Jensen, began to query the Berle-Means corporation. In a 1976 paper, Jensen and coauthor William Meckling noted the oddity of the public corporate form: “How does it happen that millions of individuals are willing to turn over a significant fraction of their wealth to organizations run by managers who have so little interest in their welfare?” Having raised the question, they let the arrangement off the hook, essentially saying that it’s worked well so far. Jensen turned more aggressive in the 1980s, denouncing corporate managers as inefficient wastrels sorely in need of outside discipline. He particularly liked debt as a form of discipline; if a company had big debts to pay, it would concentrate managerial minds on maximizing profitability by cutting costs and closing or selling weaker divisions.
Theorists revived interest in a 1965 paper by law professor Henry Manne, who argued that efficiency — by which he meant profitability — would best be served by having corporations constantly up for auction to the highest bidder. What came to be known as the “liquid market for corporate control” would discipline managers, forcing them to concentrate on profits and stock prices at the expense of all those old New Deal considerations.
As theorists like Jensen did their work, financiers developed the practice: a debt-driven restructuring of corporate America. A wave of takeovers undertaken by investment boutiques like Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) and individual takeover artists like Icahn was launched at “underperforming” firms. While details vary, the model involved borrowing lots of money, taking over target firms against management’s wishes, and forcing a sale to the operator or some third party. Corporate indebtedness rose massively and fed the broad attack on labor that was underway in the 1980s; the quickest way to cut costs and raise your stock price was to do mass layoffs. The larger point of all these exercises was to center the stock price in managerial consciousness. That would solve the agency problem: make managers think like shareholders, relentlessly cutting costs and raising profits.
The takeover wave of the 1980s completely disrupted the corporate landscape, bringing down a lot of old names and, with them, an old corporate culture. The renegades were initially seen as disreputable and greedy, conducting an assault on old values — the “barbarians at the gate,” as Bryan Burrough and John Helyar called their book on the battle for RJR Nabisco. Texas oilman turned financial operator T. Boone Pickens framed his 1983 takeover attempt on Gulf as an attack on a pampered corporate elite. Pickens never took over Gulf; it ended up being bought by SOCAL (Standard Oil of California), but he made over $700 million by selling the stock he’d accumulated in the attempt. Another casualty of the deal was to diminish the old WASPy Pittsburgh corporate elite, of which Gulf was a pillar. And, as Fortune noted in an admiring 2019 obituary for Pickens, raids like his changed the way managers did business; the constant fear of a hostile takeover was “revolutionary, forever changing the way companies interacted with their shareholders.”
As often happens, the debt mania came to a bad end when too much money was borrowed to buy bad assets at excessive prices. The model collapsed in a wave of bankruptcies and a long recession in the early 1990s. But later in that decade, shareholders came up with a new ploy to press their interests: pension-fund activism, perversely led by public funds like the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS). (Curiously, KKR, one of the pioneers of the 1980s takeover movement, which had initially been seen as reckless and maybe scandalous, was legitimated on Wall Street when it won an investment from the Oregon state pension fund; the second K, Henry Kravis, still publicly thanks the fund for helping launch them. Everywhere you look, you can see that states shape markets.) CalPERS would draw up lists of underperforming companies and lobby management to tighten the ship — meaning cut costs and boost the stock price. When I interviewed the chief counsel of CalPERS in the mid-1990s, I asked him about the propriety of using funds held in workers’ names to pursue an anti-worker agenda; he said they just cared about maximizing returns.The result of all this was to turn the stock market into an ever-updating grade on corporate performance. To induce managers to think like shareholders, their compensation was increasingly linked to the stock price. The intra-capitalist family fight looked to have been resolved in favor of shareholders. Predictable mediocrity, the lodestar of the 1950s and 1960s, had given way to the cult of the profit-seeking CEO with a 25 percent return on equity.
The shareholder revolution of the 1980s was supposed to make the passive investor a thing of the past. No longer would management run companies as private fiefdoms with little outside supervision: they’d be disciplined by activist investors and real-time report cards provided by stock prices.That was the case for quite a while, but the intraclass peace treaty after the shareholder revolution has brought back several aspects of that old world. Two are especially important: the growth of index funds and the explosion in stock buybacks, through which corporations have shoveled trillions of dollars into their shareholders’ pockets.
Financial theory from the 1960s onward argued convincingly that it’s nearly impossible to beat the market. Sure, there are star investors like George Soros and Warren Buffett, but most people aren’t them. Instead of trying to beat the market, many investors decided to settle for matching it. Big money managers like Vanguard began offering mutual funds that replicated prominent stock market indexes, notably the S&P 500, by investing in the component stocks in proportion to their weights in the index. Because the management of an index fund is almost automatic, fees are very low compared to actively managed funds, which require the attention of highly paid specialists (who rarely deserve their compensation given how many of them lag the averages they’re supposed to beat).
Image on the right: BlackRock building in New York. (Wikimedia Commons)
Over the last decade, law professors Lucian Bebchuk and Scott Hirst report, 95 percent of all inflows into investment funds have gone to passively managed funds, like mutual funds. The lion’s share has gone into funds managed by the Big Three (BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street), and that proportion has been rising. In 1998, those three firms held about 5 percent of the total capitalization of the S&P 500, an index made up of the stocks of the largest blue chip corporations. That share is now 21 percent, and it’s almost certain to keep growing. Managers of index funds rarely challenge management — and why would CEOs listen to them if they couldn’t, by definition, sell their stock? And while managers of passive funds swear that they care deeply about their corporate governance responsibilities — high-mindedly called “stewardship” in the literature — they have little economic incentive to do much. Any improvement caused by an indexer’s stewardship would accrue to other indexers as well, which would violate all norms of capitalist rationality. And with fees as low as they are, there’s not much money around to pay the stewards. Those entrusted with that task have about half a day for every company they cover. Index fund managers sometimes say they engage in behind-the-scenes lobbying of corporate managers, but the Big Three had no engagement at all with more than 90 percent of the firms in their portfolios.
Of course, the kinds of supervision that authors like Bebchuk and Hirst long for, like dismantling defenses against hostile takeovers, aren’t good for the working class. But this does represent a significant departure from the early hopes of the shareholder revolutionaries. There are still activist hedge funds that take positions in companies they see as underperforming to provoke management changes or takeovers, but they’ve become a lot rarer than they were in the 1980s, when CEOs routinely felt like they were under siege.
If you can’t buy and sell stocks based on corporate performance, there’s less discipline coming from the stock price. A financial world in which index funds dominate is one where the stock market plays almost no role in how corporations are run. That prompts the question: Who needs outside stockholders?
In 2016, Inigo Fraser Jenkins, an analyst with the investment house Bernstein, declared indexing “worse than Marxism.” Central planning is bad enough, he argued, but a system in which capital allocation was purely formulaic looks backward rather than shaping the future, which will damage innovation. Soon after writing that, Fraser Jenkins was diagnosed with lymphoma, and when he returned from his brush with death, he wrote a near-four-thousand-word essay musing on whether what he does for a living is worth it. Both those positions are worth taking seriously. With stockholders tending in the direction of autopilot, are they irrelevant?
This new unity of purpose between managers and shareholders has produced some perverse results, notably an eagerness to shower the shareholders with corporate cash. In both academic and popular theory, the stock market is supposed to be a way to fund corporate investment; shareholders are providing capital to firms in need of it. In fact, the stock market does very little of that. According to statistics collected by finance professor Jay Ritter, US corporations raised just over $755 billion in initial public offerings (IPOs) — first sales of stock to the public by previously private corporations — between 1998 and 2020. That pales in comparison to the $8.5 trillion firms spent buying back their own stock over the same period, which is still only half their profits. Such stock buybacks — which were mostly illegal before 1982 — are intended to boost prices and make shareholders happy. But since CEOs and other top executives are now paid mainly in stock, buybacks make them happy, too. (Research by the Washington Post and the Securities and Exchange Commission has found that corporate executives often sell into a buyback program, profiting off the lift all the corporate purchases give to prices.) The Berle-Means corporation has been transformed into a machine for stuffing vast sums into the wallets of shareholders and CEOs.
A study by Germán Gutiérrez and Thomas Philippon shows that buybacks have depressed investment, and that firms with high share ownership by index funds and other broad mutual funds that hold stocks rather than trading them aggressively (which, it should be said, makes excellent financial sense) do more buybacks and stint more on investment. Another reason to ask why we need outside shareholders.
The capitalist class is showing faint signs of rethinking the shareholder-first orthodoxy. In August 2019, the Business Roundtable, big capital’s trade association, issued a statement signed by 181 CEOs declaring the business had social goals other than profit-making — responsibilities to “all stakeholders — customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders.” Commenting on the statement, JPMorgan Chase chair Jamie Dimon vowed “to push for an economy that serves all Americans,” a wish that is hard to square with his role in life. A subset of Wall Street money managers has been pushing for corporations to take environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors into account when investing. That sounds nice, but a primer on ESG filters published by CNBC reports that such exemplars as Microsoft, Lyft, and Honeywell (which, among other things, makes parts for military aircraft) pass the worthiness test.Just after Joe Biden’s inauguration, BlackRock boss Larry Fink announced that because “climate risk is investment risk,” he would be voting shares under that firm’s management against boards and CEOs that failed to show “significant progress on the management and reporting of climate-related risk, including their transition plans to a net zero economy.” In that statement, Fink also expressed concern for those capitalism has forgotten to treat well, though he was sparing in detail on how he’d change things. After that high-minded display, however, Fink is finding some of Biden’s early climate moves a bit extreme. There’s the bottom line to consider.
While much of this is risible, considering the sources and their material interests, the rhetorical shift is noteworthy. The corporate class is feeling unloved in ways it hasn’t since the 1970s.
At the same time the stock market was acquiring a larger role in our economic life, so was a countermovement toward privatization. The number of public corporations has fallen dramatically — though their share of the economy has, if anything, grown — through mergers as well as the growth of private equity (PE), a form of business that hearkens back to the nineteenth century, before the emergence of the Berle-Means corporation.Curiously, modern PE traces its roots to some of the prime agents of the shareholder revolution, buyout boutiques like KKR. Of course, the 1980s buyout firms weren’t the first to prowl the financial landscape, armed mostly with other people’s money and looking to do deals — you could see J. P. Morgan himself as such an operator — but they were obscure players in the early postwar decades. The 1982 buyout of Gibson Greetings, led by former Treasury secretary (and avid right-wing propagandist) William E. Simon, made him and his partners millions of dollars when the company went public sixteen months later. It’s often credited as the deal that got the 1980s buyout movement going, but it was KKR, founded in 1976 by three alumni of the late investment bank Bear Stearns (which blew up in the 2008 financial crisis), that really made the headlines. Among KKR’s triumphs of the 1980s were the buyouts of Safeway — which led to mass layoffs, union-busting, and worker suicides — and RJR Nabisco, the deal that inspired the 1989 best-seller Barbarians at the Gate.
With the end of the “roaring ’80s,” the markets and the economy entered a period of doldrums that they didn’t emerge from until the middle of the next decade. Buyout activity slowed markedly, as corporate America tried to digest all the debt contracted during the period of extreme exuberance. There was a surge with the dot-com mania of the late 1990s, a retreat when it collapsed, another surge in the mid-2000s, a bigger retreat when the whole world nearly fell apart in 2008 (a year when a private equity titan, Bain’s Mitt Romney, ran for president), and yet another surge over the last decade.
The core structure of private equity is fairly simple. A small management team raises a pool of money from rich individuals and institutions, then cruises for deals. The outside investors don’t have much say in how things are run; they have to trust that the management team knows what it’s doing. The typical target is an established firm that has seen better days. The PE shop buys the firm and works it over, cutting costs — most notoriously through layoffs but also by selling or closing the weaker operations. The purchase usually involves a major amount of borrowed money — money contributed by the outside investors is just a foundation, on top of which sits copious amounts of debt — which means a good deal of the target’s cash flow has to be devoted to paying off interest and principal. On top of that, the new PE owners often issue debt in the target’s name and pay themselves rich dividends with the proceeds. Returns for the PE firm’s principals can be very generous; outside investors, however, don’t necessarily do so well after the principals take their cut. The goal is usually to sell the firm to someone else several years down the line, either to another PE firm or to the public with a stock offering.
Private equity has become a major employer — not directly, since their staffs are relatively small, but through the companies they own. The Carlyle Group, KKR, and Blackstone together employ close to 2 million people. It’s odd to think about PE this way. As Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett put it a few years ago, because of “their ruthless focus on efficiency and profit,” these companies are “better known for cutting jobs” than creating them.
Private equity’s apologists say the model contributes to growth and employment, but lately, PE has been in the news for carnage in retail — chains like Toys “R” Us were killed in part by the enormous debt imposed by their PE owners — and for jacking up the price of health care, where the buyout artists have recently been working their magic. PE went from being little involved in health care twenty years ago to having a massive presence today. Hospitals, medical and dental practices, and ambulance operators were taken over and often “rolled up,” as they say in the business, into large, heavily indebted regional or national behemoths. With the unexpected costs of the COVID-19 crisis, the PE model “amplified . . . salary cuts, layoffs, and bankruptcies across the health care industry,” in the words of an article in, of all places, the Journal of the American College of Radiology. Faced with unexpected costs and little financial cushion, “the short-term focus of the PE model led to hard cost cutting rather than more in-depth planning for the future.” Salaries and staff were slashed amid a profound health emergency.
But what’s most striking about PE is how it’s reconfigured the capitalist class — away, to some degree, from the dispersed ownership of the public company and back to a narrower ownership group. Curiously, many of the PE firms have themselves gone public, including KKR and Blackstone. Blackstone’s IPO in 2007 was exquisitely timed, arriving as the first symptoms of the great financial crisis were revealing themselves; you’d suspect that the firm’s two leading figures, Stephen Schwarzman and Hamilton “Tony” James (a member of Henry and William’s family), surmised that things were about to go south and it’d be a good time to cash in on the exuberance of the investing public. Blackstone’s principals kept all the voting shares and the right to set their own pay. Other PE firms have engaged in similar maneuvers to maintain tight management control. Even going public hasn’t changed the industry’s predilection for calling the shots with little external supervision.
A less malignant subset of PE is venture capital (VC), which provides money to start-ups, many of them in tech. It’s not picking over “incumbent” old companies for unexploited values; it’s trying to create new value, some of it fanciful.
In a world made flush with free Federal Reserve money — trillions of it after the 2008 financial crisis, and a few more trillions amid the COVID-19 crisis — VCs have had cash to burn. The characteristic creature of the time has been the “unicorn,” if it achieved a billion-dollar valuation, and a “decacorn” if it managed ten times that. The exuberant funding of unprofitable firms was reminiscent of the late-1990s dot-com era, but unlike that time, the public didn’t participate through the stock market — it was funded by VCs using money from institutional investors and billionaires.In the historiography of Wall Street, VCs and other “insiders” were the smart money who began selling off their investments to the masses through IPOs when it looked like time to get out. That was the spirit of the late 1990s, captured by star analyst Henry Blodget’s characterization of a now-forgotten stock called 24/7 Media as a “piece of shit” even while his employer, Merrill Lynch, was urging clients to “accumulate.” Blodget, who was fined $4 million and banned for life from the securities business, went on to be a financial journalist.
This time, though, the VCs held back, waiting years to go public. Word was that they and their beneficiaries didn’t want all the scrutiny that came with an IPO — pesky shareholders wanting their say and their share. And when some of the big names finally made their debut, many initially fell on their faces. That didn’t stop the IPOs, however; from 2018 onward, we’ve seen some of the most vigorous activity in initial offerings, though nothing like the late 1990s. The public company is far from dead, but it’s not as alluring as it once was.
Recent decades have seen another throwback to nineteenth-century models: an increasing prominence for the owners of very profitable private firms. A study of US tax records, “Capitalists in the Twenty-
First Century,” by economist Matthew Smith and colleagues, finds that a large portion of the upper ranks — just over half of the proverbial 1 percent — is populated by the owners of closely held firms, rather than the public company CEOs who get so much of the press. Under American tax law, these are structured as pass-through entities, meaning their profits are untaxed at the firm level and distributed directly to their owners, either a single individual or a small partnership.
The form has grown sharply over the decades. Its share of total business income rose from 10 percent in the mid-1980s to 35 percent in recent years. Contributing to that growth are both a rise in value added per worker and an increasing share of that value taken by the owners.
Who are these owners? Most of them (85 percent) are “self-made,” at least in the sense that their parents were not in the 1 percent — though the remaining 15 percent whose parents were is fifteen times their share of the population. They’re unlikely to operate in capital-intensive industries, like manufacturing, which are more appropriate to conventional corporate forms. As the authors say:
Typical firms owned by the top 1–0.1% are single-establishment firms in professional services (e.g., consultants, lawyers, specialty tradespeople) or health services (e.g., physicians, dentists). A typical firm owned by the top 0.1% is a regional business with $20M in sales and 100 employees, such as an auto dealer, beverage distributor, or a large law firm.
These enterprises yield a nice living for their owners, especially at the highest end. Firms owned by the top 0.1 percent (those with annual incomes of $1.6 million or more) have an average of seventy-four employees who yield a profit of $14,000 each for the boss — more than $10 million in total. Few of these owners have more than one business, which makes for some precarity, and few businesses survive their owners. Even at the high end, this is not “Big Capital,” though it’s fat personal income. But they make up much of the top 0.1 percent — 84 percent of it in all. That’s thirteen times the number who make their big incomes as officers of public corporations; in the aggregate, privateers make eight times as much as their corporate comrades.
An interesting take on regional elites — those who live outside metropolitan centers and own businesses that might be small by globalists’ standards but are big in local terms — comes from the historian Patrick Wyman. Wyman wrote about what he called the “local gentry” in his hometown of Yakima, a city of 94,000 in Washington’s fruit and wine country, a long 140 miles from cosmopolitan Seattle. They own the region’s orchards and vineyards, and the businesses that serve those industries. Many are quite rich — not private equity rich, but enough to fund, in Wyman’s words, “hilltop mansions, a few high-end restaurants, and a staggering array of expensive vacation homes in Hawaii, Palm Springs, and the San Juan Islands.” You can say the same of hundreds of small cities around the country — Jeep dealers, McDonald’s franchisees, construction companies.
This formation looks a lot like a major base for the Republican Party: fervent enemies of taxes and regulations who may be too dispersed to cohere independently as a class but who can be nurtured by conservative politicians, donor networks, and think tanks. As of late October 2020, Yakima’s contributions to Donald Trump exceeded those to Biden by two or three times — a sharp contrast with Seattle, where, in some zip codes, Biden was ahead by as much as a 72:1 margin (and with five times as many dollars as Yakima). Upper-class Yakima is part of a formation that has been around for a long time; they were the financial base of right-wing politics back when Richard Hofstadter was writing about the paranoid style, but they’ve gotten a lot richer.
It’s not just geographical, it’s also a sectoral angle to the class base for right-wing politics. The MyPillow guy, Mike Lindell, was the most charmingly visible of Trump’s marginal business supporters, but there are also characters like Marty Davis, whom the Washington Post described as a “quartz-countertop mogul” based in suburban Minneapolis, at whose lakefront house Trump held an indoor fundraiser just before his COVID diagnosis. Minneapolis is far from a backwater, but Davis operates in an industry that would never qualify for inclusion in the commanding heights of capitalism. Still, the Davis family, which diversified into countertops after a successful run in the dairy business, was rich enough to have made a brief appearance on Forbes’s 2015 list of America’s richest families, with $1.7 billion in net worth.
All these developments do have some things in common: the share-price-motivated and buyback-driven public corporation, the extractive private-equity model, and the more exploitative closely held firm that dies with its founder all aim to take out as much money as possible, without much consideration for the future.
The two-party system has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past several decades. Once the party of New Dealers and Southern segregationists, the Democrats have evolved into a coalition of the softer side of the metropolitan establishment and a progressive wing the party leadership hates. And the GOP, once the party of the northeastern WASP elite, has evolved into a coalition of plutocrats and an enraged provincial petite bourgeoisie (often mistaken for the “white working class”).Both transformations can be read as driven partly by circumstances and partly by conscious effort applied to parties themselves. For example, the decline of manufacturing weakened the Democrats’ labor base as well as the economic base of the old WASPs in the Republican Party. Democrat support for civil rights drove Dixiecrats out, and Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy welcomed them into a Republican Party that had once been fairly progressive on civil rights.
But there were also vigorous internal restructuring programs that transformed the ideological coloration of the parties. In the 1980s, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), led by the likes of Bill Clinton, aimed to reinvent the Democratic Party for the neoliberal era by purging it of progressive forces left over from the 1960s and 1970s. The goal was to make it friendly to Wall Street and the Pentagon while dropping the civil rights and tree-hugger talk, and it was largely successful, as the party found popular support among professionals in the nicer suburbs.
Without downplaying the importance of the transformation of the Democrats — always a party of capital that had to pretend not to be one for electoral purposes — it must be said that the change in the GOP and the growth of the Right are a far more interesting story, because that’s where the organized energy among the bourgeoisie has been for decades.
Back in the 1950s, the Right was basically a movement of intellectuals funded by provincial petit bourgeois industrialists — the owners of machine tool makers in Milwaukee and the like. They saw Walter Reuther’s United Auto Workers (UAW) as socialism on the march, and Eisenhower as too accommodating of it. (Contempt for Eisenhower drove a lot of right-wing organizing in the 1950s.) The big bourgeoisie had made an unhappy peace with the New Deal. The corporate and Wall Street establishment, based in the Northeast, featuring marquee names like Rockefeller, du Pont, Pew, Mellon, and Whitney, and supplemented by small-town worthies from the Midwest, found political expression in Eisenhower’s party, a formation that survived into the early 1960s. They were temperamentally conservative in the sense of being cautious, but not ideologically driven.
For most of the twentieth century, there was a great deal of ideological diversity within the two major parties. Though more conservative than the Democrats on economic issues, the Republican Party had a liberal wing, just as the Dems had a conservative one. Though it’s hard to believe today, when the Republican Party routinely race-baits to win the votes of white bigots, the GOP of the 1950s and 1960s often had a stronger civil rights record than the Democrats, because they didn’t have a large Southern component. Into the 1960s, the Republicans were frequently stronger than Democrats on civil liberties, too. There had long been far-right tendencies in the Republican Party — most notoriously Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, who ended up disgraced after a wild run in the 1950s but whose obsessions, like hatred of upper-class Harvard-educated liberals, prefigured his modern descendants. But the party was dominated by northeastern WASPs. As Taft, a leader of the party’s conservative Midwestern wing, put it in 1952 after losing the presidential nomination to Eisenhower, “Every Republican candidate for President since 1936 has been nominated by the Chase National Bank.” Chase was a Rockefeller family enterprise, and it was certainly not socialist. But Eisenhower was not a reactionary. As he wrote to his brother:
Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things . . . [but] their number is negligible and they are stupid.
The business branch of that “splinter group” had a material problem with the Eisenhower-era settlement: General Motors may have preferred life without the UAW, but it could afford to pay union rates, especially in exchange for labor peace. Smaller fries couldn’t. They were caught in the petite bourgeoisie’s classic position, squeezed by big labor and big capital. Their freedom was under siege, and they reacted by funding a right-wing insurgency. The John Birch Society was founded in 1958 by the retired CEO of a Massachusetts-based candy company, Robert Welch, who’d made a fortune off lollipops and Junior Mints. Welch was rich, but he was no Rockefeller or Mellon.
Three years earlier, William F. Buckley, a few years out of Yale, founded National Review, with the mission of “stand[ing] athwart history, yelling Stop,” as he wrote in the magazine’s first issue in November 1955. As incredible as this may sound now, Buckley had trouble raising money for the magazine and needed help from his father, a small-time oil baron. As Buckley later put it, the capitalists didn’t seem all that interested in the project of saving capitalism.Eisenhower’s tepidity and compromises energized the Right, whose insurgency was almost Bolshevist in its ideological and organizational discipline. The Bolshevik tendencies were no accident. There were not only intellectuals like James Burnham, a Trotskyist turned cofounder of National Review, but important organizers like Clif White and the ex-Communist Marvin Liebman, who consciously emulated Red tactics in organizing their insurgency, from organizational and ideological discipline to how to dominate a meeting. That rigor and energy dismayed and disoriented the moderates, who preferred politeness and compromise above all things.
The Birchite and Buckleyite tendencies would eventually split, sort of — but before they did, they united in their affection for Arizona senator Barry Goldwater as their political avatar. Continuing the provincial petit bourgeois theme, Goldwater was the grandson of the founder of a five-outlet department store chain based in Phoenix — a flyspeck next to the likes of Macy’s. Goldwater — or, more accurately, Goldwater’s supporters — launched a bid for the 1960 Republican nomination that failed badly and had victor Richard Nixon betray the Right in several ways, but most visibly with his choice of the Massachusetts aristocrat Henry Cabot Lodge Jr as his vice presidential candidate.
Goldwater tried again in 1964, and though he would eventually be crushed in the general election by Lyndon Johnson, the convention that nominated the Arizonan was an important rite of passage for the conservatives. As journalist Murray Kempton put it, “This convention is historic because it is the emancipation of the serfs . . . The serfs have seized the estate of their masters.” New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, a leader of the moderate Republican faction whose name embodied the old elite’s domination of the party, was shockingly heckled, a sign of the WASPs’ impending decline. The party’s transition on race was made crudely clear by insults directed against black attendees — one of whom saw his jacket deliberately burned with a cigarette. Jackie Robinson, who was a delegate, said that the performance made him feel like “a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”
Movement conservatives were undeterred by Goldwater’s massive loss and continued with their plot to take over the Republican Party. A year later, Buckley ran for mayor of New York on the Conservative Party ticket, with the conscious aim of drawing enough votes away from the liberal Republican John Lindsay to elect the Democratic candidate, Abraham Beame, and thereby weaken the GOP’s left flank. (The contrast with left liberals, who condemn any third-party challenge that might lead their party to a loss, is a vivid symptom of their lack of conviction.) Buckley initially thought he’d harvest votes from the city’s WASP elite, but they were put off by his social conservatism. Instead, he tapped into the growing backlash of white ethnics — the people at the end of the subway lines, as future Nixon adviser Kevin Phillips, lead architect of his anti–civil rights Southern strategy, put it. Buckley ended up with 13 percent of the vote — not huge, but a nontrivial amount for a third-party candidate, and a sign of things to come.
Though much of that backlash was driven by race, there was also a class angle that most center-left analysts overlook. Lindsay was a social liberal and very attentive to the concerns of black New Yorkers, but on economic policy, he worked largely on behalf of the city’s powerful real estate industry, reflecting his patrician base. At the time, city policy was several years into accelerating the eviction of manufacturing and working-class housing from Manhattan and replacing it with offices and upscale residences. This was good for financiers, developers, and lawyers, but not for working-class whites — who expressed their resentment by lashing out at blacks and liberals rather than the less visible moneybags.
Nixon, elected in 1968, would work similar resentments on a national scale, developing a mass base for conservative politics. But he mostly governed to the left of his rhetoric. His time in office brought us food stamps, the Environmental Protection Agency, and a proposal for a guaranteed annual income. Those compromises with liberalism energized the Right the same way Eisenhower’s had two decades earlier. (In the brief period when I was a young conservative, I cast my first presidential vote against Nixon because he was too liberal.) But Nixon provided longer-term assistance to the cause of the Republican right with his Southern strategy — appealing to the resentments of white Southerners (and their fellow thinkers in the urban North) over the social gains of black Americans.
During Nixon’s final years as president, the Right began mobilizing in the extraparliamentary realm as well. Sidney Blumenthal’s 1986 book The Rise of the Counter-Establishmenttraces the ascent of the insurgent right’s policy infrastructure. The book is a reminder that while capitalists have a gut sense of their class interests, they can’t really think in detail about policy. For that, they fund think tanks.Blumenthal highlights a shift within the capitalist class that led to a change in the political complexion of its hired intellectuals. For decades, the corporate establishment funded the likes of the Council on Foreign Relations (which has, among others, a David Rockefeller room); the Brookings Institution, a hotbed of Democratic centrism; and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which is conservative but, as Rockefeller once said, not “far out.” According to Irving Shapiro, CEO of DuPont in the 1970s and one of the era’s business statesmen, AEI shaped capitalist thought in that decade.
A new cadre of rising Sun Belt entrepreneurs rejected this establishmentarian order, lusting for something more muscular. As Blumenthal points out, many of the nouveaux riches ran their own firms, unlike the old elite, who were the heads of public corporations. To the new class, that traditional order was stagnant. In 1973, beer mogul Joseph Coors founded the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, which took some time to get going but eventually became a powerhouse as the Reagan revolution set in.
President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan waving from the limousine during the Inaugural Parade on January 20, 1981, in Washington, DC. (White House Photographic Collection)
This new subclass brought a fresh worldview. As Blumenthal puts it, “The Sunbelt entrepreneurs possess neither authority endowed by inheritance nor authority stemming from bureaucratic function. For almost all Sunbelt entrepreneurs, social status is derived entirely from crisp new money.” Heritage, the intellectual avatar of this consciousness, spun forth multiple-volume briefings for the Reagan administration, much of which found its way into policy.
But the big capitalists weren’t screaming for Ronald Reagan. In Blumenthal’s telling, they had to be pulled in his direction, and the think tanks played an important role in that process. Walter Wriston, the influential chair of Citibank from 1967 to 1984, said that his East Coast business set underestimated Reagan’s skills. His crowd initially preferred a more orthodox candidate, like former Texas governor John Connally or George H. W. Bush, for the presidency in 1980. But they came around. David Rockefeller provided the ultimate blessing: “My enthusiasm has grown. I didn’t adequately recognize the strength of his leadership.” Rockefeller’s conversion came about despite the early conservative movement’s ire toward his family and institutions like the CFR that it endowed.
Blumenthal’s arrivistes held a mix of envy and contempt for the old establishment, resenting its prestige while lamenting its decadence. It’s curious how that view still pervades the American right, even though that old establishment is considerably reduced. Equally curious is how its institutions, the Ivy League universities, have become the boutique workshops for producing today’s meritocracy. While it’s tempting to point only at the Democratic side of that formation — the Clintons, Barack Obama — some of our leading right-populists have a similar institutional pedigree, a formation distinguished by its denunciation of elites. Josh Hawley went to Stanford and Yale Law; Mike Pompeo, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Ron DeSantis all went to Harvard Law. The former New Right, once the joint project of a rising subclass and movement conservatism, has aged into a game played by cynics.
Blumenthal’s account centers on movement conservatism, which the corporate establishment didn’t participate in. But it began mobilizing on its own, developing new institutions and reviving older ones to fight the inflation-prone, worker-friendly(ish) Keynesian order and impose what we would later call the neoliberal agenda.
As Benjamin Waterhouse emphasizes in Lobbying America, many of the businesspeople who pushed that neoliberal agenda in the 1970s were neither movement conservatives nor self-made entrepreneurs but career managers. They were often socially liberal. But they objected to the host of new demands coming from women and racial minorities, as well as to the explosive growth in regulation. This strained the accommodation with the New Deal and the Keynesian state beginning in the late 1960s, a discontent that intensified in the 1970s when inflation and fiscal recklessness seemed not like transient problems but the foundations of a new disorder. Deepening the hurt feelings of capitalists was perceived hostility to business in public opinion, popular culture, and, increasingly, among their employees.The major old-line business lobbies, the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce, had lost credibility and power in Washington because of their relentless anti-labor and anti–New Deal stances in the postwar decades, ceding ground to more accommodationist organizations.
It took some time for capital to mount its counterrevolution. Modern business political action committees (PACs) got their start in the early 1960s, but their ranks were thin and their legal status murky until the Federal Election Commission legalized them in 1975. The number of corporate PACs subsequently exploded.
You can’t tell the story of the new political consciousness of the 1970s business class without mentioning the Powell Memorandum, named after Lewis F. Powell, then a corporate lawyer and later a Supreme Court justice. Writing to the Chamber of Commerce in 1971, Powell worried about “the Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system,” but he worried even more about the spread of antibusiness attitudes in previously respectable realms like academia, the media, and churches, and among intellectuals, artists, and even politicians. He lamented the passivity of business in the face of these existential threats and urged a massive ideological mobilization by capital to make a fundamental case for its legitimacy.
While the influence of the Powell memo is sometimes exaggerated, it did embody the business wisdom of the time and help inspire a quadrupling of the Chamber’s membership during the 1970s. Shedding its musty reputation but not its conservative politics, it reinvented itself as a slick, modern organization — but one railing against occupational safety inspectors and environmental regulations. It argued that business had no social responsibility, a position once associated with marginal figures like Milton Friedman, who was himself on the verge of becoming not at all marginal. The renascent Chamber became an important part of the Right’s institutional structure.
But capital was organizing on other fronts as well. The Business Roundtable, made up of the CEOs of 150 large corporations, was founded at a private club in Manhattan in 1973 to fight the antibusiness drift of American politics. But the founding wasn’t on the executives’ initiative — they needed political actors to organize them, as they often do. When visiting Washington in 1971, John Harper, CEO of Alcoa, was urged by Treasury secretary John Connally and Federal Reserve chair Arthur Burns to form a “nonpartisan” lobbying group for big business as a whole — something that had never existed before. There were specific trade associations but nothing to represent the whole crew. Harper and several colleagues founded the Roundtable in 1973, an early sign that capital was becoming a class “for itself,” one capable of consciously organizing to pursue its own power and interests. It was, unlike the Heritage Foundation crowd, bipartisan, pragmatic, and (by its own imagining) nonideological.
The Roundtable came into being just as the Right was founding its flagship think tanks: Heritage was born in the same year, 1973, and the Cato Institute four years later. For that relatively brief moment — the late 1970s into the early 1980s — productive parallel agitation by the mainstream business lobby and the newly mobilized right would result in moments of political triumph like the appointment of Paul Volcker to the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve and the election of Ronald Reagan as president. Together, Volcker and Reagan would end the “inflationary spiral” of the 1960s and 1970s and break the economic and political power of organized labor.
That triumph, however, would lead to a dissolution of capital’s broad political unity. As Lee Drutman shows in The Business of America Is Lobbying, his history of the industry, after creating an infrastructure for politicking, the focus of business narrowed dramatically, to sectoral and even firm-specific issues. Its fragmentation was so complete that it was unable or unwilling to mobilize when a posse of hopped-up reactionary GOP backbenchers shut down the government and threatened default on Treasury bonds. In an interview, Drutman explained this silence as a symptom of capital’s narrowing field of vision:
It’s a business-wide issue, and they’re all looking out for their own narrow interests . . . Business rarely lobbies as a whole . . .Success has fractured them. When there was a lot at stake, it was easy to unify. They felt like they were up against Big Government and Big Labor. But once you don’t have a common enemy, the efforts become more diffuse . . . There’s not a sense of business organized as a responsible class.
Most of the organizational energy ever since has been on the Right. The most prominent figure in that agitation for decades has been Charles Koch, a rare case of a serious capitalist organizing independently on his class’s behalf. Along with his late brother David, Charles has led a small but very rich network of plutocrats who have pushed American politics to the right at every level of government over the last few years. The family’s money comes from control of a private company, Koch Enterprises, with $115 billion in annual revenues. Were it a public corporation, it would rank around seventeenth in the Fortune 500.
The Koch network organizes regular conferences for the like-minded, where they raise money and plot strategy, and their tentacles have spread into every state in the country. The circle — now with hundreds of major donors, distributing hundreds of millions of dollars every year — is thick with hedge fund managers and fossil fuel magnates, supplemented by a rank and file drawn from the pass-throughs in the top 0.1 percent. At the summit, financiers like Steven Cohen, Paul Singer, and Stephen Schwarzman — who mostly run their own investment funds rather than working for established banks — were drawn to the enterprise in the early Obama years, fearing he was a reincarnation of FDR about to crack down on their business models. (As it turned out, he never did much more than call them “fat cats” once, a remark many on Wall Street never forgave him for.) They were joined by carbon moguls who were afraid Obama was serious when he said, upon clinching the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” A big portion of the Koch network consists of financiers who own their own firms and not public corporations. They don’t like anyone telling them what to do — neither government nor outside shareholders.
Unlike many on the Left, Charles Koch has never seen a contradiction between electoral work and other organizing. His network showers cash on right-wing candidates up and down the ballot, but it also supports professors, think tanks, publications, and advocacy organizations — all as part of a coherent, long-term, and ideologically rigorous strategy. There’s nothing remotely like them in US politics.
That’s not to say there isn’t some big money on the liberal left — just not as much, and not as ideologically coherent. The closest liberals come is the Democracy Alliance (DA), which was founded in 2005 and gets money from George Soros and other, less famous monied liberals. But it distributed only about $500 million in the first decade of its existence — less than the Koch network spends on one election cycle. And unlike the Koch network, whose spending is tightly controlled by the leadership, DA members decide where to spend their money.
For Koch, following the model laid down by Friedrich Hayek and his comrades, political ideas have a production chain. The Mont Pelerin Society, the organization of neoliberal economists convened in a village by that name in Switzerland in 1947 on Hayek’s invitation, had a clear conception of how to spread its influence. Peak intellectuals, like Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and other luminaries of the movement, would develop ideas, which would spread down to think tanks, then to politicians and journalists, and finally to the public. (Friedman spanned several levels of the hierarchy at once, writing books and papers that were influential in the economics profession at the same time he lobbied politicians and wrote a column for Newsweek.) As Burton Yale Pines of the Heritage Foundation put it back in the 1980s, “Our targets are the policy-makers and the opinion-making elite. Not the public. The public gets it from them.”
One of the principal actors in the Koch family’s intellectual production and distribution network has been Richard Fink. Fink, then an NYU grad student in economics, dropped in on Charles one day in the late 1970s and asked for money to found a libertarian institute. Koch wrote him a check, which he used to set up the Center for the Study of Market Processes at Rutgers. He soon relocated it to George Mason University (GMU), where it became the Mercatus Center. In 1985, the Koch-funded Institute for Humane Studies moved from California to join Mercatus at GMU. This sequence of events transformed a formerly obscure state university in the DC suburbs into the Vatican of libertarian intellectual life. They’ve reproduced the model at universities around the country, financing institutes and endowing chairs with considerable influence over the direction of research. Unlike many leftists, Koch and co. take academia seriously.
In a 1996 article, Fink outlined his master strategy: an intellectual economy of producer goods and consumer goods, as in the real economy, reminiscent of the Mont Pelerin structure. The intellectuals, often university-based, are the makers of the producer goods (ideas), which are then transformed into intermediate goods by think tanks, and ultimately into products for mass application by activists. Or, as Koch himself put it, “libertarians need an integrated strategy, vertically and horizontally integrated, to bring about social change, from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action.” He’s done a lot to make it happen.Think tanks are the middlemen in the production and dissemination of ideas. One of the most important has been the Cato Institute, founded in 1977 with Koch money. The name came from Murray Rothbard, the libertarian economist, who emphasized there was nothing “conservative” about the institute’s mission: he dismissed conservatism as “a dying remnant of the ancien régime . . . ineluctably moribund, Fundamentalist, rural, small-town, white Anglo-Saxon America.” For Rothbard — like Koch and Cato — libertarianism is a revolutionary doctrine. Koch money also funded the Reason Foundation, best known for its eponymous magazine. Reason was founded by a Boston University student in 1968 and published out of his dorm room in its early days. A decade later, Charles Koch agreed to finance it if it remained “uncompromisingly radical.”
All these Koch-fueled entities — GMU, Cato, Reason — busily schooled Republican politicians and operatives throughout the 1980s and 1990s on the wisdom of privatization and austerity.
There are other right-wing mega-donors, though none with the broad scope and vision of Koch. Hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who was originally part of the Koch network and then went off on his own, was a major funder of the Trump campaign and the Breitbart News operation. Another striking pair of characters is Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein. Richard inherited a bunch of Schlitz beer money and then built a second fortune in the Uline packaging business. They support media, like the Federalist, and candidates that some on the Right find a little hot to handle, like Roy Moore, the Alabama judge with a taste for teenage girls. They’re also major supporters of the Club for Growth and Scott Walker, former governor of their home state, Wisconsin.
Right-wing funders, led by the Koch network, have created scores of policy outlets around the country. The State Policy Network (SPN) has sixty-six affiliates and over eighty associates populating every state but North Dakota. Founded in 1992 by the industrialist Thomas A. Roe, who had set up the first of these think tanks in South Carolina six years earlier on a suggestion from Ronald Reagan (politicians in the lead again!), the SPN flock develops policies, disseminates propaganda, and trains personnel to promote “economic liberty, rule of law, property rights, and limited government,” which, in practice, means gutting regulations, cutting taxes and services, privatizing public schools and pension systems, and destroying unions.
Closely associated with the SPN is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which shares funders and priorities but operates at the political ground level, writing bills and lobbying legislators. Since state and local governments often function in obscurity, with part-time legislators and thin staffs, having prewritten bills and trained politicians is a vital lubricant for the right-wing agenda. Aside from the usual right-wing funding sources, ALEC also draws from a wide variety of business interests, often by offering their assistance on a specific policy issue and then bringing the firms more permanently into the fold.
It’s an impressive network, running from the Oval Office all the way down to places like Schoharie County, New York, where a Mercer-funded think tank has been agitating. It’s been crucial to Republican control of statehouses across the country, influencing the shape of Congress because of their jurisdiction over districting and electoral law.
Despite this power, the Right has never achieved political hegemony, nor have its business patrons achieved economic hegemony. The Koch network is rich, but its wealth pales next to the Fortune 500’s cash flow. One way to make this point is to poke about their think tanks, where money is made into policy. There’s a decided lack of big names.
The board of the Cato Institute, despite its ties to the Koch world, is heavy with second-tier and third-tier capitalists — the chair of something called TAMKO Building Products, a Missouri-
based firm; a managing director with Susquehanna International Group, a money management firm based in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania; and the former owner of the Tennessee-based Young Radiator Company. Koch aside, it’s light on seriously elite connections.
As is the Heritage Foundation. Its president, Kay C. James, was previously a dean at Regent University, the school founded by televangelist Pat Robertson. Another link to the educational right is board member Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, a deeply conservative institution that takes no federal cash so Washington can’t tell it what to do. Other trustees include a corporate headhunter with two degrees from Baptist colleges; a real estate developer and chair of a food service company, both of which almost no one has heard of; the chair of a small maker of wearable biosensors; the head of a small private equity firm; another PE guy who advertises himself as “a life member of MENSA and the NRA”; and “one of America’s leading authorities on the development of human potential and personal effectiveness.” Its major funders contain few recognizable names outside standard right-wing circles (Bradley, Coors, Scaife, Walton). Its lower order of funders includes some big names — ExxonMobil, GE, Google, Visa — but they’re greatly outnumbered by much smaller ones.
Contrast this with the centrist Brookings Institution, whose board includes ambassadors from Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, TD Bank, Duke Energy, and Young & Rubicam. Its top funders include the Gates Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Comcast, Google, JPMorgan Chase, Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Time Warner, Toyota, AIG, and the governments of Japan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates — and even the libertarian would-be secessionist Peter Thiel, who, like any big investor, knows the importance of diversification. Or take the Clintonite Dems’ favorite think tank, the Center for American Progress, which has a “Business Alliance” — price of admission: $100,000 — that includes Comcast, Walmart, GM, GE, and Boeing.
But their relatively inferior class status still hasn’t stopped the Right from winning lots of fights. As Blumenthal pointed out, the businessmen around Reagan were not heavyweights; they brought us Duracell batteries, the Diners Club credit card, and Lassie — two second-tier brands and a defunct fictional dog. Despite that light footprint, their intense organization and commitment have allowed the Right to punch way above its weight. These intrepid capitalists served as an avant-garde for their larger, more cautious comrades. It’s a messy business, cutting taxes and regulations.
Another dimension of the Right’s influence is what it does to the respectable left. As Thatcher adviser Sir Alan Walters told me at a conference twenty years ago, the Iron Lady’s most lasting achievement was her transformation of the Labour Party, which had ceased to stand for much. Something analogous happened with the post-Reagan Democratic Party, which has played an enormous supporting role in the organizational and ideological collapse of New Deal/Great Society liberalism. The party turned its attention away from the urban working class (which was savaged by deindustrialization) and toward professionals in the suburbs. But you would never characterize this formation as brimming over with political or intellectual passion of any sort.
Trump is thankfully a fading memory, but his relation to the right-wing counter-establishment is worth a closer look. Most weren’t all that interested in him; he certainly served part of their agenda, but the economic nationalism bothered these apostles of the free movement of goods, capital, and labor. An exception was Robert Mercer, the hedge fund billionaire famous for Cambridge Analytica (which turned out not to be some AI Svengali but rather a bit of a fraud), who threw Trump some money and brought Steve Bannon and David Bossie — the head of Citizens United, who mounted the famous legal case that opened politics to vast and secretive funding — into his orbit. Bannon and Bossie gave Trump, never much on political philosophy, some right-wing ideology (notably “America First nationalism”) and connections. The Koch set at first kept their distance from the new administration. But they did have an in through Marc Short, Mike Pence’s chief of staff, who headed a Koch front group called Freedom Partners from 2011 to 2015. Trump — or, given his ignorance of policy, more likely Pence — soon turned to the Koch network for advice on staffing his new administration.Image below: Donald Trump at his inauguruation on January 20, 2017. (Wikimedia Commons)
A well-organized force is ideally suited to fill a vacuum. The Koch touch was most visible in energy and environmental policy, but they had personnel placements elsewhere as well. Former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo was once known as “the congressman from Koch” when he represented the Wichita area in Congress from 2011 to 2016. Earlier, he had a business career in that city that was partly funded by Koch Industries.
The network’s influence extended to informal advisers as well. Trump took advice on energy from pals like fracking magnate Harold Hamm, whom Jane Mayer described as a “charter member of the Kochs’ donor circle.”
The Kochs won some victories in the Trump era: a generous loosening of energy and environmental regulation, friendly court appointments, and fat tax cuts. But they never did repeal Obamacare, and the tariffs and immigration restrictions were major losses. Trump’s rhetoric about immigration and Muslims were among the reasons Charles Koch refused to endorse him. Much of corporate America wasn’t happy with that part of Trump’s agenda either, but they were too happy with their tax cuts to do much about it until the Capitol riot.
But a new class fraction did find expression in, or at least had affinities with, the Trump administration. As I argued above, the business coalition that came together in the 1970s to lobby for deregulation and tax cuts largely dissolved as a united force when it got what it wanted. Rather than a broad agenda, the business lobby narrowed to focus on sectoral and individual corporate interests. The Chamber of Commerce, though purporting to speak for business in general, came to rent itself out to specific clients, often unsavory ones. Big capital is socially liberal — or it pretends to be. It has no interest in the Christian right’s moral agenda, nor is it nativist. Almost every Wall Street and Fortune 500 company has a diversity department, handling everything from anti-racist training sessions to the corporate float for the annual LGBT pride parade. Their worldview is little different from Hillary Clinton’s — but they’re not passionately engaged in politics. They write checks, but profits are high, and the tax rate they paid on those profits over the last few years was the lowest it’s been since the early 1930s.
They’re layabouts compared to the class fraction I’m describing, a gang made up of the owners of private companies as opposed to public ones, disproportionately in dirty industries. The financier wing comes largely out of “alternative investments,” hedge funds and private equity, not big Wall Street banks or Silicon Valley VC firms. Most alternative investment operations are run as partnerships with a small staff, often under the direction of a single figure. Collectively, they look like freebooters more than corporate personalities, and asset-strippers more than builders, be it natural assets in the case of the carbon moguls or corporate assets in the case of the PE titans. Trump himself ran a real estate firm with a small staff and no outside shareholders. Like a private equity guy, Trump loaded up his casinos with debt and pocketed much of the proceeds.
The prominence of private ownership is striking, and it’s politically reactionary. Lately, institutional investors have been lobbying for some action on climate — not profit-threatening action, of course, but something. Central bankers are starting to make similar noises; they’re increasingly worried that a financial system reliant on carbon assets (which could easily collapse in value when they’re recognized for the climate-killers they are) might run into serious trouble. Since they have no outside shareholders, the Kochs and Hamms of the world are spared having to listen to this chatter.
This alliance between the private corporate form and political reaction is a reminder of Marx’s observations on the topic. He described the emergence of the corporation, with its separation of ownership and management, as “the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself, and hence a self-abolishing contradiction.” Workers could hire managers as easily as shareholders, or maybe perform the task themselves. The stockholder-owned public corporation was a stepping-stone to a truly public entity. Short of that ambition, public firms are more transparent and subject to outside pressure than those controlled by a small, secretive circle of owners.
But, as we’ve seen, such owners have proven highly capable of organizing as a political force. Corporate America isn’t averse to working with Koch organizations. Exxon and Microsoft worked with the Koch-heavy Citizens for a Sound Economy to push very specific agendas. But these are usually temporary, targeted crusades; none have the durability and ubiquity that the Koch agenda itself has. And that agenda has a substantial toehold on state power.
Returning to the theories of Nicos Poulantzas, while there are often divisions within the capitalist class, its predominant bloc organizes a “general interest.” The contradictions remain, but the hegemonic fraction creates sufficient consensus to rule by universalizing its worldview as part of its dominance (or, as Marx put it in a classic formulation, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”). That kind of consensus seems to be missing in US politics in recent decades, a point that became very clear during the Trump era. The corporate and financial establishment, initially suspicious of rule by such a volatile incompetent, never tried to rein him in. He was never interested in a universalizing rhetoric, as Poulantzas’s hegemonic fraction is supposed to be. Instead, he stoked division almost every time he tweeted.
Within the GOP, the petit bourgeois mass base — the car dealers and accountants — is in conflict with its big business wing, and neither can gain political or ideological hegemony over the whole society. (That intraclass conflict became sharp and visible during Trump’s second impeachment hearing.) The Democrats, for that matter, look divided between the old centrist DLC faction — tied to parts of Wall Street and big capital, represented by Biden — and a younger, more leftish, and more energetic activist wing. It’s much easier to imagine (to take some names from the fuzzy past) Everett Dirksen and Lyndon Johnson coexisting in the same universe than to picture Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ro Khanna as colleagues in governance. Until the 1990s, the federal government never shut down for any length of time because of the inability to pass a proper budget; since 1995, the US government has shut down to a significant degree five times, for a cumulative total of eighty days, and political leaders openly suggested that a default on Treasury securities might be a salutary measure. There’s something fractured in a state that engages in periodic shutdowns.
Bourgeois pundits often lament “divided government” and the inability to compromise, which they attribute to partisanship or bad temperaments. A more fundamental reason may be that no fraction of capital, neither the older centrist kind nor the upstart right-leaning kind, is able to achieve hegemony. The Right has considerable strength at elite levels, but in the popular realm, it’s only the Electoral College, voter suppression, and aggressive gerrymandering that keeps it electorally competitive. Its position is greatly aided, however, by the deep weakness of more centrist forces, who lack serious intellectual or political energy. As the Right discredits itself with ludicrous attacks on the Capitol and farcical QAnon conspiracies, the center-left is feeble. The geriatric nature of the mainstream Democrat leadership is a sign of exhaustion. We’re a long way from when DLC-style politics, as terrible as they were, had at least the superficial appeal of novelty. Now we’ve got the No Malarkey Express parked in the Oval Office.
Elite division looks to be in stark contrast with the coherence and breadth of the WASPs, a relatively narrow, homogenous owning class bound by inherited wealth that married out of the same mating pool; went to the same schools; belonged to the same clubs; owned a lot of capital; ran the major industrial companies, law firms, and banks; ran major educational institutions like prep schools and universities; ran major cultural institutions like universities and museums, as well as the philanthropies that shaped social thought and cultural life; and defined the limits of liberal politics. WASPs also populated government, like C. Douglas Dillon in the Treasury or Dean Acheson at the State Department or Nelson Rockefeller as the governor of New York. We shouldn’t be nostalgic for them; they were often deeply racist and driven by notions of the “white man’s burden.” But they had a unity and authority that our current rabble of grifters and parvenus lacks.
That stratum’s leading analyst, the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell (himself a product of Philadelphia’s Main Line) thought a society like ours needed an authoritative elite of the sort his brethren once were. As he put it:
[U]nfortunately success is not synonymous with leadership, and affluence without authority breeds alienation . . . the inevitable alienation of the elite in a materialistic world where privilege is divorced from duty, authority is destroyed, and comfort becomes the only prize . . .
The essential problem of social order, in turn, depends not on the elimination but the legitimation of social power. For power which is not legitimized tends to be either coercive or manipulative. Freedom, on the other hand, depends not in doing what one wants but on wanting to do what one ought because of one’s faith in long-established authority.
For those of us who believe in democracy, this is an unacceptably hierarchical view of society. But in a society like ours, one deliberately structured to magnify elite authority and limit the power of the horde — if you don’t believe me, check out Federalist No. 10, in which James Madison makes it quite explicit his constitution was designed to do just that — the quality of governance depends profoundly on the nature of that elite. Our contemporary pack of plutocrats and scammers looks incapable of legitimation or coherent rule — and it appears to be nowhere near up to the challenge of climate change. Maybe Biden’s top economic adviser, Brian Deese, who came to the White House after handling ESG issues for BlackRock, will organize his class buddies into a significant force on addressing climate, but Larry Fink’s objections to Biden’s early executive orders suggest he’ll have quite a task on his hands. And that’s before the Koch network and the Freedom Caucus have gone to work.
Alas, it must be conceded that, until the bonds of that constitution are broken and something approaching a real democracy is instituted, Baltzell has a point about how the loss of ruling-class authority — a legitimation crisis — might lead to social tensions and disorder. With the center so weak, it does present an opportunity for the organized right to make gains — but it presents an opening for the Left, too.
Making revolution against the ruling class, however, is a hell of lot harder than making a revolution within it.
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Doug Henwood edits Left Business Observer and is the host of Behind the News. His latest book is My Turn.
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The first astronauts for China’s new space station have blasted off for the country’s longest crewed mission to date, a landmark step in establishing Beijing as a major space power.
The trio launched on Thursday on a Long March-2F rocket for the Tiangong station, where they will spend three months.
Liftoff took place at 9:22 am local time (0122 GMT) from the Jiuquan launch centre in northwest China’s Gobi desert.
Their Shenzhou-12 spacecraft will dock with the Tianhe main section of the space station, which was placed in orbit on April 29.
The module has separate living spaces for each of them, a treadmill for exercise, and a communication centre for emails and video calls with ground control.
It is China’s first crewed mission in nearly five years.
Matter of huge prestige in China
The launch represents a matter of huge prestige in China, as Beijing prepares to mark the 100th anniversary of the ruling Communist Party on July 1 with a massive propaganda campaign.
To prepare for the mission, the crew has undergone more than 6,000 hours of training, including hundreds of underwater somersaults in full space gear.
The mission’s commander is Nie Haisheng, a decorated air force pilot in the People’s Liberation Army who has already participated in two space missions.
The two other members are also members of the military.
Over the next year and a half, another 11 missions are planned to complete the construction of Tiangong in orbit.
The first crew will test and maintain the systems onboard, conduct spacewalks and undertake scientific experiments.
Ban on US astronauts on ISS
China’s space ambitions have been fuelled in part by a US ban on its astronauts on the International Space Station, a collaboration between the United States, Russia, Canada, Europe and Japan.
It is due for retirement after 2024, even though NASA said it could potentially remain functional beyond 2028.
The Chinese station reportedly is intended to be used for 15 years and may outlast the ISS, which is nearing the end of its functional lifespan.
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Residents of Sheikh Jarrah’s resistance to eviction by Israeli Jews evolved into a military confrontation so lopsided, the Israeli bombardments against Gaza so terrifying, it drew widespread condemnation (the US government excepted).
The Palestinian dead, injured and homeless are still being tabulated, while eviction processes of Sheikh Jarrah’s Arab inhabitants continue, even as we learn of similar forced displacement of Arabs in nearby Silwan.
Another Israeli scheme to dislodge Palestinians is home demolition—they number in the many thousands and continue (in Bustan, Silwan) even as I write. For a glimpse of these all-too-routine violations, I append my newly-digitized April 5, 1996 Christian Science Monitor article based on what I witnessed — I likened it to a lynching – when on assignment in the West Bank 25 years ago.
“It’s quite a spectacle, a Palestinian home being blown apart. Furniture, dishes and clothes, hastily removed, are deposited helter-skelter in the path or road.
Villagers stand by, silent and grim . Heavily armed soldiers are massed to prevent any disruption. Confused, awed children turn sullen.
Americans rarely see Israel’s demolition policy at work; but it’s a regular form of punishment. All Palestinians, from toddlers to the elderly, are familiar with it. Perhaps it’s happened to a neighbor. Perhaps they themselves were hauled out of their house in the early morning and told by a soft-spoken Israeli officer, with his troops surrounding the residence, that he has his orders. The entire town is aroused. Neighbors join in the frantic rush to save some household items; they know it’s useless to protest.
The silent frenzy of losing a home this way has no parallel. It’s not like a flood or a fire; it’s more like a lynching. There’s no one to call for help. Hundreds of soldiers surround the house and village to ensure no one interferes with the bulldozers and dynamite teams.
Legalized destruction
It’s all done legally too. That is to say, a paper, written in Hebrew, is presented to the householder spelling out the order to blow up or bulldoze his or her home, or to seal it. Often the order charges that the house lacks a building permit. Typically, a family has two hours’ notice.
In a village near Hebron in 1991, I saw the remains of a mosque that was flattened weeks before. The land had been cleared because of some building infraction, neighbors told me.
At other times, particularly during the intifadah (uprising), a family is informed that their son was caught (not convicted but simply picked up and charged) throwing a Molotov cocktail, or that he was captured in an attack on an Israeli.
In some cases, only the family orchard (their livelihood) is leveled. Again, the family is notified when the machines are already on the nearby road. Orchards have been destroyed based simply on a report that some Palestinian children were hiding from soldiers among the trees, or Jewish settlers claim that someone they were pursuing was heading in that direction.
During the first three years of the intifadah (1987-1991), when communal punishment was the norm for civil disobedience, the Palestinian Human Rights information Center recorded 1,726 demolitions or sealings of homes. On average, there are nine Palestinians living in a home; so those lost houses represent about 15,000 men, women and children, forcibly made homeless during that time. Often the dwelling is not even the family’s original home but a shelter inside a crowded refugee camp built with the help of United Nations funding.
Israel says it demolishes certain houses because they’re the homes of “suicide bombers”. The news media, which remains silent about these actions, are effectively sanctioning the policy. So conditioned is the public that whatever is done to an “Islamist terrorist” seems justified and is endorsed. Are we right to stand by silently and accept that?
Consider this: The demolitions are retaliatory actions that strike deep into the core of Palestinian identity. They are bound to have some traumatic effect on children. Such devastation may quell opposition temporarily, but the long-term effects may be very different. People may become more embittered and hostile towards Israeli authority. Blowing up the home of a family may in fact move the brothers and sisters of a dead man into closer identification with his actions.
Israel does not respond in this manner to all heinous acts. Look at the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by the Israeli law student. Look at Baruch Goldstein, the Hebron mass murderer. Their actions repelled most Israelis, yet their homes and families remained unharmed. No, these destructive acts are specifically designed for and executed against Palestinians.
Palestinians’ view
Palestinians see this type of punishment as another method Israel uses to “clear the land”, to deny their existence, to implement its “cleansing” policy. People deprived of a home may have one less link with the land. But such actions have other consequences. Children witness their homes, the places they were born, blown apart. They watch fathers and other male relatives helplessly held at gunpoint. They imbibe the horrified reaction of their mothers and grandmothers.
The house as the center
Because this form of punishment is so rare, few can imagine the impact of a house being blown up in front of its owners. We have to understand how central the house is to Palestinian life. Even today, most Palestinians are born at home. This is the place for daily prayer, for family meals, for weddings, for homecomings from jail, and for funerals. This is where everyone gathers to pass the evening. It is not a shelter; it is a community. It is the place for consolation and joy, the haven and the refuge.
Mother is the manager, so the home is unequivocally associated with her power and protective role. Harming the house is like violating the mother. Many children will feel they must avenge this injustice. Especially with the world community standing by seeming to sanction the destruction, family members may feel more responsibility to seek justice. Anyone who understands this would advise Israel to cease this practice for these reasons, if not for moral ones.”
Photos above and below–a sturdy old Jerusalem wall, replaced by a parking lot– was posted by Lisa S Majaj
Author’s note: Israel’s removal of Palestinians is interminable: sometimes it’s by shrewd legal maneuvers; sometimes it’s by harassment, sometimes it’s violent takeovers, and sometimes it’s brutal demolition. A protracted process, it’s so routine that it hardly garners outside attention. Besides residences, Palestinian orchards and nature preserves are savagely destroyed by Israeli forces. A recent egregious case was reported by my colleague Raouf Halaby in Counterpunch.
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Barbara Nimri Aziz.
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On June 13, 2021, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau put out a statement welcoming the new Israeli government and outlining Canada’s support for all things Israeli.
The full statement is available on the government website and contains many simplistic platitudes that conceal too many ugly realities. Without deconstructing all of it there are some salient points that do stand out.
The first is that “Canada and Israel are close friends bound together by shared democratic values”, in actuality a true statement, as neither country is truly democratic.
Both are colonial settler establishments.
Both are apartheid societies.
Both use militarized force to maintain control of indigenous populations.
Both are members/participants in the U.S. empire, although for Israel it is more of a manipulated convenience, and for Canada it is simple sycophancy and a pretence at global greatness.
Both attempt to overthrow other legally established governments, with Canada doing so more expansively around the empire (Venezuela, Haiti, Ukraine, Libya, Syria et al) while Israel stays with neighbouring states (sort of – to wit Iran).
Both kill Arabs: Israel quite directly with Naftali Bennett bragging about it, while Canada does it more discreetly through military trade with Saudi Arabia and support of the U.S. empire in general.
Neither country has a truly democratic electoral system, with the power residing in the corporations and political managers rather than the demos, the people.
Both take indigenous children from their families: Canada formerly through the churches and school system, now through the foster care system; Israel does it through militarized abductions, imprisonment, and torture (which is sort of like Canada’s church schools were like, with the verified dimension of murder).
Chances are I could go on, but the significant lack of truly “democratic” actions is obvious and common to both countries.
Trudeau goes on to say Canada has joined efforts in “combatting anti-semitism in all its forms”. Well and good but that includes support for the vaguely worded and poor exemplar of what antisemitism actually is within the IHRA definition (and it is not criticism of actions against international law and humanitarian law as practiced by Israel). Canada has a formal policy statement – though not a law – supporting the IHRA definition in the House of Commons. What Canada’s politicians ignore comes from recent polls showing that a large majority of Canadian citizens do not support Israeli actions and do not support the government’s positions on Israel/Palestine. Canada’s government also opposes the BDS movement, a peaceful resistance idea that acknowledges the apartheid nature of the state. Ironically, Canada is all for BDS when it comes to its U.S. partner’s great dislikes.
Next, “Canada remains steadfast in its commitment to a two-state solution, with Israelis and Palestinians living in peace, security, and dignity”. Sounds great, but it is an impossibility and Trudeau and his cohorts wilful ignorance on this topic simply demonstrates how little he cares for Palestine and peace, security, and dignity. The Oslo Accords, the Roadmap to Peace, the two state solution is dead.
Israel is quite happy to play along as it has given and will give them plenty of time to build and expand settlements that already prevent any contiguous viable Palestinian state. Trudeau is not alone in this as all political parties officially support the two state solution, although the NDP have shifted to a position of criticism of Israel’s most recent actions and attacks on Sheikh Jarrah, the al-Aqsa mosque, and Gaza.
With a final thank you to Netanyahu Trudeau ends with “Canada and Israel achieved a great deal together.” Wow, oh so true, this implicates Canada in Israel’s war crimes and humanitarian crimes, while providing the linguistic obfuscation to make it sound all so wonderful. Not such strange bedfellows.
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Image on the right: James A. Baker with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 in Moscow making a false promise. Gorbachev should have known from U.S. history never to trust an American leader. [Source: nsarchive.gwu.edu]
A Brussels Summit Communiqué claimed that NATO was the “most successful Alliance in history,” whose importance today resulted from “multiple threats” to Western democracies from “assertive and authoritarian powers,” notably China and Russia, whose “aggressive actions constitute a threat to Euro-Atlantic security.”
The Communiqué warned further about new “cyber, hybrid and other asymmetric threats, including disinformation campaigns, and by the malicious use of ever-more sophisticated emerging and disruptive technologies.”
This is seen as justification for a renewed commitment to the two percent GDP metric agreed upon in 2014 in which NATO member-states contribute two percent of their budget toward NATO—a total that will be increased after 2024.
Donald Trump had generated great publicity during his presidency demanding that NATO members adhere to the two percent provision, though Biden adopted the same position, bragging on Monday that ten countries had met the two percent goal [the number is actually twelve] and that the others were “on the way.”
Despite the pandemic, 2020 witnessed a 13.6% increase in worldwide military spending. NATO states spent $1.062 trillion on the military, approximately 56% of the global total.
Quique Sánchez, a Barcelonan peace activist noted at “Stop NATO 2021,” a webinar sponsored by the Left in the European Parliament, that if even a fraction of this military spending were cut, the entire world could be given COVID vaccines, and the public health crisis would recede.
Education and health care would also be adequately funded and proper action taken to combat climate change.
At an April 2019 anti-NATO protest in Washington, D.C., folk singers Ben Grosscup and Luci Murphy performed the song “NATO’s Got to Go,” which characterized NATO as a “political scheme to sell the whole world with the flu.”
The song went on: “From Kosovo to Afghanistan to African shores, the bureaucrats of NATO just keep making war.”
Ben Grosscup performing folk song “NATO’s Got to Go” at a Washington, D.C., anti-NATO rally in April 2019. Medea Benjamin, founder of the peace group CodePink, stands with sign “Say No to NATO.” [Source: worldbeyondwar.org]
Relatives and neighbors search for survivors in the rubble of the Gafez family home in Majer on August 9, 2011, one day after NATO strikes on this and another compound killed 34 people and wounded more than 30. [Source: hrw.org]
One priority of the Brussels NATO summit was to promote the new report, NATO 2030: United for a New Era, which aims to repurpose NATO as a bulwark against supposed Chinese and Russian aggression in the new Cold War.
Predictably, NATO 2030 uses hostile language demonizing China and Russia, with recommendations that will lead to growing confrontation.
Some of those recommendations are illegal—the report, for example, advocates sustaining the nuclear arms race, despite the UN having outlawed nuclear weapons.
Russia, however, was never an aggressor in the Euro-Atlantic region.
It responded in 2014 to a Western-backed coup in Ukraine by re-annexing Crimea—which historically belonged to Russia and which its population voted on—and by supporting a rebellion in Ukraine’s two eastern provinces, which the population there broadly supported.
NATO 2030 further condemns Russia for its allegedly “assertive behavior” in the Baltic states and Black Sea—when Russian military maneuvers have been largely developed in response to U.S.-NATO provocations.
The press release continued: “Taking off from Norway, two US Air Force B-1 bombers trained with fighter aircraft from Poland, Italy and Germany [flew] over the Baltic Sea and flew over the capitals of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In a separate event, two French Rafale fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Charles De Gaulle and two Spanish F-18 aircraft on NATO duty in Romania took part in drills involving NATO warships in the Black Sea.”
U.S. and Danish fighter jets flying over the Baltic Sea. [Source: usafe.af.mil]
If Russia had performed the same kind of exercises in the Gulf of Mexico, flown aircraft over Ottawa, and brought together allies in a hostile alliance, then Americans too would try to fortify the country’s defenses—or do something far more drastic if history is any guide.
But Russia is apparently not entitled to self-defense in the American-dominated world order, which NATO helps entrench.
Besides Russia, NATO 2030 notes with alarm the “growing power and assertiveness of China,” which has supposedly engaged in “intimidatory diplomacy well beyond the Indo-Pacific region” and “proved its willingness to use force against its neighbors.”
China, however, has won substantial support with its One Belt-One Road and other infrastructural development programs, and has not invaded anyone since the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979—while the U.S. has invaded dozens of countries in that time.
Although NATO 2030 repeatedly accuses Russia and China of promoting disinformation, it is NATO which is advancing disinformation along with biased analyses that are designed to secure yet higher levels of military spending.
The report’s concern for climate change and the environment also rings hollow; military aircraft are major sources of carbon emissions and military weapons a huge cause of pollution.
Not a Kumbaya Moment—The Biden-Putin Summit
On Wednesday, June 16th, Biden traveled to Geneva and met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in an 18th century villa in a much-awaited summit.
The tone of the meeting was cordial and Putin and Biden agreed to a) restore their countries’ two respective ambassadors; b) begin negotiations on nuclear talks to potentially replace the new START treaty limiting nuclear weapons after it expires in 2026; and c) cooperate in the realm of cyber security, Arctic exploration, and preventing terrorism in Afghanistan, and Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
The Biden-Putin meeting lacked the same circus environment as in 2018 when Donald Trump was accused in the media and by Democratic Party politicians of being a traitor for meeting with Putin and hatching certain agreements and plans.
Failing to share a meal or take a walk with Putin, Biden refused to reconsider key U.S. policies that have resulted in the new Cold War. These include: a) the U.S. sanctions policy on Russia—which has harmed Russia and has been based on fraudulent pretexts; b) The U.S.’s pulling out of the Open Skies, Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) and Intermediate Nuclear Range Forces (INF) treaties; and c) NATO expansion.
Biden continued to antagonize Russia further by a) rebuking its human rights record and treatment of opposition leader Alexei Navalny; and b) affirming the United States’s “unwavering commitment to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.”
The latter statement insinuates that Russia violated Ukraine’s territorial integrity when in fact the U.S. was the one to violate it by providing $5 billion over a decade in support of color revolutions and regime-change efforts that culminated in the 2014 coup d’états against Russian-backed leader Viktor Yanukovych.
This coup triggered Ukraine’s civil war that drew in the Russians—in defense of two eastern provinces, Luhansk and Donetsk, whose people voted to secede after the post-coup Ukrainian government tried to impose the Ukrainian language on them.
Putin further defended his government’s treatment of Alexei Navalny, stating that Navalny wanted to be arrested because he decided to return to Russia when there was a warrant out for him.
In the latter case, rioters were [ie. Ashli Babbit] “shot on the spot, even if unarmed,” Putin said, marking the U.S. response as worse than anything Russia had done.
U.S. imperial drives have generally created a dangerous world environment—which Biden’s foreign policy has so far helped exacerbate. Russia and China’s alliance should prove more durable than the one established in the 1940s and 1950s—and more damaging to Washington’s global designs that appear more and more unsustainable.
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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: [email protected].
Featured image: NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg speaks with U.S. President Joe Biden during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of a NATO summit at NATO headquarters in Brussels, June 14, 2021. [Source: pri.org]
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This is important right to the end. Show this to anyone who has yet to get one or both mRNA shots.
“Good doctors are doing unthinkable things like injecting biologically active messenger RNA that produces this pathogenic spike protein into pregnant women. I think when these doctors wake up up from their trance, they’re going to be shocked to think what they’ve done to people,” he said, echoing what he, and Dr. Harvey Risch, professor at the Yale School of Public Health, told Fox News host Laura Ingraham during an interview last month.
“We are at over 5,000 deaths so far, as you know, and I think about 15,000 hospitalizations. In the EU it’s over 10,000 deaths. We are working with the Center for Medicaid (CMS) data, and we have a pretty good lead that the real number is tenfold.”
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Featured image is a screenshot from the video interview
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“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”— Friedrich Nietzsche
Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.
Think about it.
Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.
In almost every instance, the U.S. government (often spearheaded by the FBI) has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.
Which country has conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins? The U.S. government.
What country has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting? The U.S. government.
Are you getting the picture yet?
The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from terrorism.
The U.S. government is creating the terror. It is, in fact, the source of the terror.
Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.
So why is the government doing this? Money, power and total domination.
We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather, these are the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.
Case in point: the FBI.
The government’s henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused. Indeed, far from being tough on crime, FBI agents are also among the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers.
Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government, or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work.
For example, this is the agency that used an undercover agent/informant to seek out and groom an impressionable young man, cultivating his friendship, gaining his sympathy, stoking his outrage over the injustices perpetrated by the U.S. government, then enlisting his help to blow up the Herald Square subway station. Despite the fact that Shahawar Matin Siraj ultimately refused to plant a bomb at the train station, he was arrested for conspiring to do so at the urging of his FBI informant and used to bolster the government’s track record in foiling terrorist plots. Of course, no mention was made of the part the government played in fabricating the plot, recruiting a would-be bomber, and setting him up to take the fall.
This is the government’s answer to precrime: first, foster activism by stoking feelings of outrage and injustice by way of secret agents and informants; second, recruit activists to carry out a plot (secretly concocted by the government) to challenge what they see as government corruption; and finally, arrest those activists for conspiring against the government before they can actually commit a crime.
It’s a diabolical plot with far-reaching consequences for every segment of the population, no matter what one’s political leanings.
As Rozina Ali writes for The New York Times Magazine, “The government’s approach to counterterrorism erodes constitutional protections for everyone, by blurring the lines between speech and action and by broadening the scope of who is classified as a threat.”
This is not an agency that appears to understand, let alone respect, the limits of the Constitution.
Just recently, it was revealed that the FBI has been secretly carrying out an entrapment scheme in which it used a front company, ANOM, to sell purportedly hack-proof phones to organized crime syndicates and then used those phones to spy on them as they planned illegal drug shipments, plotted robberies and put out contracts for killings using those boobytrapped phones.
All told, the FBI intercepted 27 million messages over the course of 18 months.
What this means is that the FBI was also illegally spying on individuals using those encrypted phones who may not have been involved in any criminal activity whatsoever.
Even reading a newspaper article is now enough to get you flagged for surveillance by the FBI. The agency served a subpoena on USA Today / Gannett to provide the internet addresses and mobile phone information for everyone who read a news story online on a particular day and time about the deadly shooting of FBI agents.
This is the danger of allowing the government to carry out widespread surveillance, sting and entrapment operations using dubious tactics that sidestep the rule of law: “we the people” become suspects and potential criminals, while government agents, empowered to fight crime using all means at their disposal, become indistinguishable from the corrupt forces they seek to vanquish.
To go after terrorists, they become terrorists. To go after drug smugglers, they become drug smugglers. To go after thieves, they become thieves.
For instance, when the FBI raided a California business that was suspected of letting drug dealers anonymously stash guns, drugs and cash in its private vaults, agents seized the contents of all the safety deposit boxes and filed forfeiture motions to keep the contents, which include millions of dollars’ worth of valuables owned by individuals not accused of any crime whatsoever.
It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or if we’ve gone straight to an idiocracy.
This certainly isn’t a constitutional democracy, however.
Some days, it feels like the FBI is running its own crime syndicate complete with mob rule and mafia-style justice.
In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the FBI also gives certain informants permission to break the law, “including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts.
USA Today estimates that agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day (5600 crimes a year). Some of these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an entrapment scheme.
In a stunning development reported by TheWashington Post, a probe into misconduct by an FBI agent resulted in the release of at least a dozen convicted drug dealers from prison.
In addition to procedural misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, the FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, and harassment.
For example, the Associated Press lodged a complaint with the Dept. of Justice after learning that FBI agents created a fake AP news story and emailed it, along with a clickable link, to a bomb threat suspect in order to implant tracking technology onto his computer and identify his location. Lambasting the agency, AP attorney Karen Kaiser railed, “The FBI may have intended this false story as a trap for only one person. However, the individual could easily have reposted this story to social networks, distributing to thousands of people, under our name, what was essentially a piece of government disinformation.”
Then again, to those familiar with COINTELPRO, an FBI program created to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” groups and individuals the government considers politically objectionable, it should come as no surprise that the agency has mastered the art of government disinformation.
The FBI has been particularly criticized in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks for targeting vulnerable individuals and not only luring them into fake terror plots but actually equipping them with the organization, money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then jailing them for their so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the FBI characterizes as “forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.”
Another fallout from 9/11, National Security Letters, one of the many illicit powers authorized by the USA Patriot Act, allows the FBI to secretly demand that banks, phone companies, and other businesses provide them with customer information and not disclose the demands. An internal audit of the agency found that the FBI practice of issuing tens of thousands of NSLs every year for sensitive information such as phone and financial records, often in non-emergency cases, is riddled with widespread violations.
The FBI’s surveillance capabilities, on a par with the National Security Agency, boast a nasty collection of spy tools ranging from Stingray devices that can track the location of cell phones to Triggerfish devices which allow agents to eavesdrop on phone calls.
The FBI has also repeatedly sought to expand its invasive hacking powers to allow agents to hack into any computer, anywhere in the world.
Indeed, for years now, the U.S. government has been creating what one intelligence insider referred to as a cyber-army capable of offensive attacks. As Reuters reported back in 2013:
Even as the U.S. government confronts rival powers over widespread Internet espionage, it has become the biggest buyer in a burgeoning gray market where hackers and security firms sell tools for breaking into computers. The strategy is spurring concern in the technology industry and intelligence community that Washington is in effect encouraging hacking and failing to disclose to software companies and customers the vulnerabilities exploited by the purchased hacks. That’s because U.S. intelligence and military agencies aren’t buying the tools primarily to fend off attacks. Rather, they are using the tools to infiltrate computer networks overseas, leaving behind spy programs and cyber-weapons that can disrupt data or damage systems.
In fact, the NSA was responsible for the threat posed by the “WannaCry” or “Wanna Decryptor” malware worm which—as a result of hackers accessing the government’s arsenal—hijacked more than 57,000 computers and crippled health care, communications infrastructure, logistics, and government entities in more than 70 countries.
Mind you, the government was repeatedly warned about the dangers of using criminal tactics to wage its own cyberwars. It was warned about the consequences of blowback should its cyberweapons get into the wrong hands.
The government chose to ignore the warnings.
That’s exactly how the 9/11 attacks unfolded.
First, the government helped to create the menace that was al-Qaida and then, when bin Laden had left the nation reeling in shock (despite countless warnings that fell on tone-deaf ears), it demanded—and was given—immense new powers in the form of the USA Patriot Act in order to fight the very danger it had created.
This has become the shadow government’s modus operandi regardless of which party controls the White House: the government creates a menace—knowing full well the ramifications such a danger might pose to the public—then without ever owning up to the part it played in unleashing that particular menace on an unsuspecting populace, it demands additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threat.
Yet the powers-that-be don’t really want us to feel safe.
They want us cowering and afraid and willing to relinquish every last one of our freedoms in exchange for their phantom promises of security.
As a result, it’s the American people who pay the price for the government’s insatiable greed and quest for power.
We’re the ones to suffer the blowback.
Blowback is a term originating from within the American Intelligence community, denoting the unintended consequences, unwanted side-effects, or suffered repercussions of a covert operation that fall back on those responsible for the aforementioned operations.
Unfortunately, “we the people” are the ones who keep reaping what the government sows.
We’re the ones who suffer every time, directly and indirectly, from the blowback.
Suffice it to say that when and if a true history of the FBI is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America: how a nation that once abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable for its actions has steadily devolved into a police state where justice is one-sided, a corporate elite runs the show, representative government is a mockery, police are extensions of the military, surveillance is rampant, privacy is extinct, and the law is little more than a tool for the government to browbeat the people into compliance.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
We can persuade ourselves that life is still good, that America is still beautiful, and that “we the people” are still free. However, as science fiction writer Philip K. Dick warned, “Don’t believe what you see; it’s an enthralling—[and] destructive, evil snare. Under it is a totally different world, even placed differently along the linear axis.”
The powers-that-be are not acting in our best interests.
“We the people” are not free.
The government is not our friend.
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The idea of children, including preschoolers, walking around with bacteria traps on their breathing orifices all day so shocked the conscience that last summer, a bunch of internet parodies were produced illustrating such absurdity. Then, within weeks, most local governments mandated this cruel form of child abuse for an entire year without any study of the side effects. Now a group of parents from the Gainesville, Florida, area have shown that such masks are traps for harmful bacteria that potentially make children much sicker than from COVID — the virus for which the masks were required, but failed to mitigate.
In a press release obtained by TheBlaze and posted at RationalGround.com, six Alachua County, Florida, parents reported the findings of the lab cultures of their children’s masks worn in school. The parents sent the six masks to the University of Florida’s Mass Spectrometry Research and Education Center after they were worn for five to eight hours, most during in-person schooling by children ages 6 through 11. Although many students across the country likely wore dirty masks indefinitely for numerous days, the face masks studied in this analysis were new or freshly laundered before wearing. One of the masks submitted was from an adult who wore it at work as a cosmetologist.
The resulting report found that five masks were contaminated with bacteria, parasites, and fungi, including three with dangerous pathogenic and pneumonia-causing bacteria.
The lab used a method called proteomics to extract proteins from the masks and sequence them. The analysis detected the following 11 alarmingly dangerous pathogens on the masks:
Streptococcus pneumoniae (pneumonia)
Mycobacterium tuberculosis (tuberculosis)
Neisseria meningitidis (meningitis, sepsis)
Acanthamoeba polyphaga (keratitis and granulomatous amebic encephalitis)
Staphylococcus pyogenes serotype M3 (severe infections — high morbidity rates)
Staphylococcus aureus (meningitis, sepsis)
“Half of the masks were contaminated with one or more strains of pneumonia-causing bacteria,” according to the release. “One-third were contaminated with one or more strains of meningitis-causing bacteria. One-third were contaminated with dangerous, antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens. In addition, less dangerous pathogens were identified, including pathogens that can cause fever, ulcers, acne, yeast infections, strep throat, periodontal disease, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and more.”
For a control, the parents submitted a T-shirt worn by one of the children at school and unworn masks. No pathogens were found on the controls.
Obviously, the naysayers will immediately jump on this and criticize it as being a rudimentary study and small sample size. But that is the entire point. Of course, this issue needs further study. But why has this not been done over the course of the entire year by our government or any well-funded institution? How can we mandate such draconian policies without studying the side effects, including the spread of pathogens? Why is this left to helpless parents trying to raise awareness of these concerns?
It’s not like these concerns are novel. On March 8, 2020, Dr. Fauci told “60 Minutes” that masks can only block large droplets, they give a false sense of security, and they cause people to get more germs on their hands by fiddling with them. Several weeks later, Surgeon General Jerome Adams punctuated this point about the counterproductivity of wearing masks in public. Appearing on “Fox & Friends” on March 31, Adams said that based on a study that shows medical students who wear masks touch their faces 23 times more often, one has to assume that “wearing a mask improperly can actually increase your risk of getting disease.”
A 2014 study of hospital workers wearing surgical masks in a Bangkok hospital found their masks to be saturated with Staphylococcus aureus (found on some of the masks in the Alachua study) and the fungus Aspergillus. Another study of hospital workers in China from 2019 observed that after more than six hours of use, masks worn by medical personnel also contained viruses, including adenovirus, bocavirus, respiratory syncytial virus, and influenza viruses. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to hypothesize that a warm and humid microclimate cultivated by a mask is going to serve as an incubator for all sorts of pathogens. Not surprisingly, studies have shown that pathogen density on masks grows exponentially after two hours of use.
To this day, Fauci and CDC researchers have never answered how those concerns were no longer valid after their political U-turn on masks, given the terrible conditions with which we’ve witnessed the entire country wearing and reusing masks. The same reason why Fauci said last summer they never planned to embark on a randomized controlled trial of the efficacy of masks is likely why they never studied the side effects of masks either. They didn’t want to discover the truth that they themselves originally understood.
These findings are important for two reasons. First, there is a need to ensure that mask mandates are never implemented again. The Boston Globe is already advocating their use for the flu season. Second, as much as the mask mandate has ended for most consumers, workers in many professions are still required to wear them for hours on end without regard for the hazards they pose.
A Florida appeals court has already ruled that the mask mandate in Alachua County is presumptively unconstitutional because it violates bodily autonomy. The risk of masks cultivating and spreading other pathogens is just another reason why something this personal to the body must remain a personal choice.
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In a newly released book, members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior, a subcommittee that advises the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies in the U.K., admit government is using fear to control and manipulate the population
SPI-B, which advocated for the use of fear messaging, now says it was unethical, totalitarian and a regrettable mistake
Aside from the barrage of bad-news-only data — which was heavily manipulated in a variety of ways — fear and anxiety are also generated by keeping you confused
Giving out contradictory recommendations is being done on purpose, to keep you psychologically vulnerable. By layering confusion and uncertainty on top of fear, you can bring an individual to a state in which they can no longer think rationally. Once driven into an illogical state, you are easily manipulated
Government’s reliance on behavioral psychology didn’t just happen as a result of the pandemic. These tactics have been used for years, and are increasing
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Governments are using fear to control and manipulate their citizens. That has now been admitted by members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior (SPI-B), a subcommittee that advises the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) in the U.K. And they should know, because they advocated for it, and now say it was a regrettable mistake. As reported by The Telegraph, May 14, 2021:1
“Scientists on a committee that encouraged the use of fear to control people’s behavior during the COVID pandemic have admitted its work was ‘unethical’ and ‘totalitarian.’ Members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior (SPI-B) expressed regret about the tactics in a new book about the role of psychology in the Government’s COVID-19 response.
SPI-B warned in March last year that ministers needed to increase ‘the perceived level of personal threat’ from COVID-19 because ‘a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened.’
Gavin Morgan, a psychologist on the team, said: ‘Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government. By nature I am an optimistic person, but all this has given me a more pessimistic view of people.’”
Psychological Warfare Is Real
The Telegraph quotes several of the SPI-B members, all of whom are also quoted in the newly released book, “A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic,” written by Laura Dodsworth:2
“One SPI-B scientist told Ms Dodsworth: ‘In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian.
The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable. It’s been like a weird experiment. Ultimately, it backfired because people became too scared’ …
One warned that ‘people use the pandemic to grab power and drive through things that wouldn’t happen otherwise … We have to be very careful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in’ …
Another member of SPI-B said they were ‘stunned by the weaponization of behavioral psychology’ during the pandemic, and that ‘psychologists didn’t seem to notice when it stopped being altruistic and became manipulative. They have too much power and it intoxicates them.’
Steve Baker, the deputy chairman of the COVID Recovery Group of Tory MPs, said: ‘If it is true that the state took the decision to terrify the public to get compliance with rules, that raises extremely serious questions about the type of society we want to become. If we’re being really honest, do I fear that government policy today is playing into the roots of totalitarianism? Yes, of course it is.’”
The Manufacture of Fear
For nearly a year and a half, governments around the world, with few exceptions, have fed their citizens a steady diet of frightening news. For months on end, you couldn’t turn on the television without facing a tickertape detailing the number of hospitalizations and deaths.
Even when it became clear that people weren’t really dying in excessive numbers, the mainstream media fed us continuous updates on the growing number of “cases,” without ever putting such figures into context or explaining that the vast majority were false positives.
Information that would have balanced out the bad news — such as recovery rates and just how many so-called “cases” actually weren’t, because they never had a single symptom — were censored and suppressed.
They also refused to put any of the data into context, such as reviewing whether the death toll actually differed significantly from previous years. Instead, each new case was treated as an emergency and a sign of catastrophic doom.
Don’t Be Confused — Contradiction Is a Warfare Tactic
Aside from the barrage of bad-news-only data — which, by the way, was heavily manipulated in a variety of ways — fear and anxiety are also generated by keeping you confused. According to Dodsworth, giving out contradictory recommendations and vague instructions is being done intentionally, to keep you psychologically vulnerable.
“When you create a state of confusion, people become ever more reliant on the messaging. Instead of feeling confident about making decisions, they end up waiting for instructions from the Government,” she said in a May 20, 2021, interview on the Planet Normal podcast.3
An example provided by Dodsworth are the pandemic measures implemented over Christmas 2020:
“Family Christmases were on, then off, then back on, then off again. You have got someone tightening the screw, then loosening the screw, then tightening it again. It’s like a torture scenario.”
But that’s not all. As explained by psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin, by layering confusion and uncertainty on top of fear, you can bring an individual to a state in which they can no longer think rationally. Once driven into an illogical state, they are easily manipulated. I have no doubt driving people into a state where logic and reason no longer registers is the whole point behind much of the conflicting information we’re given.
The Fear Factory
In her book, Dodsworth details a number of branches of the British government that are using psychological warfare methods in their interaction with the public. In addition to the SPI-B, there’s the:4
• Behavioral Insights team, the so-called “nudge unit,” a semi-independent government body that applies “behavioral insights to inform policy, improve public services and deliver positive results for people and communities.”5 This team also advises foreign nations.
• Home Office’s Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU), which is part of the U.K.’s Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, advises front groups disguised as public “grassroots” organizations on how to “covertly engineer the thoughts of people.”
• Rapid Response Unit, launched in 2018, operates across the British Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister’s office (colloquially known as “Number 10” as in the physical address, 10 Downing Street in London) to “counter misinformation and disinformation.” They also work with the National Security Communications Team during crises to ensure “official information” gets maximum visibility.6
• Counter Disinformation Cell, which is part of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. Both monitor social media and combat “fake news” about science in general and COVID-19 in particular, with “fake news” being anything that contradicts the World Health Organization’s guidance.7
• Government Communications Headquarters (QCHQ), an intelligence and security organization that provides information to the U.K. government and the armed forces. According to Dodsworth, QCHQ personnel, and even members of the 77th Brigade, have been enlisted as so-called sockpuppets and trolls to combat anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown messaging on social media.
According to Dodsworth, there are many others. In her book, she claims at least 10 different government departments in the U.K. are working with “behavioral insights teams” to manipulate the public.
We’re Just Seeing It Now
Importantly, government’s reliance on behavioral psychology didn’t just happen as a result of the pandemic. These tactics have been used for years, for myriad PR purposes, and while the pandemic may be winding down, Dodsworth warns that more and more behavioral scientists are being hired:8
“It’s growing and growing. Right now, I feel we are in a maelstrom of nudge,” she says. “In the past, there have been calls to consult the public on the use of behavioral psychology, and those calls have come from the behavioral scientists themselves. And yet it hasn’t happened. We haven’t yet been consulted on the use of subconscious techniques which effectively strip away our choices …
I fervently hope this book [‘The State of Fear’] is actually going to inspire a much-needed conversation about the use of fear, not just in the epidemic, but the way we use behavioral psychology overall.
It’s not just a genie that has been let out the bottle. It’s like we’ve unleashed a Hydra and you can keep chopping its head off, but they keep employing more of these behavioral scientists throughout different government departments. It’s very much how the Government now does business. It’s the business of fear …
I think ultimately people don’t want to be manipulated. People don’t enjoy being hoodwinked and they don’t want to live in a state of fear. We maybe need to be a bit bolder about standing up more quickly when something is not right.”
Fear Is Contagious
Fear has long been the tool of tyrants. It’s profoundly effective, in part because it spreads from person to person, just like a virus. The contagion of fear is the topic of the Nova “Gross Science” video above, originally aired in mid-February 2017. Among animals, emotional distress responses are telegraphed through pheromones emitted through various bodily secretions such as sweat and saliva.
As explained in the video, when encountering what is perceived as a serious threat, animals with strong social structures, such as bees and ants, will release alarm pheromone. The scent attracts other members of the hive or colony to collectively address the threat.
Humans appear to have a very similar capability. When scared or stressed, humans produce chemosignals, and while you may not consciously recognize the smell of fear or stress, it can have a subconscious impact, making you feel afraid or stressed too.
Humans also tend to mimic the feelings of those around us, and this is yet another way through which an emotion can spread like wildfire through a community or an entire nation — for better or worse. Behavioral psychologists refer to this as “emotional contagion,” and it works both positive and negative emotions.
For example, if you’re greeted by a smile when meeting someone, you’re likely to smile back, mimicking their facial expression and behavior. If someone looks at you with an angry scowl, you’re likely to suddenly feel angry too, even if you weren’t before and have no subjective reason to — other than that someone looked at you the “wrong” way.
However, while both positive and negative emotions are contagious, certain emotions spread faster and easier than others. Research cited in the Nova report found that “high arousal” emotions such as awe (high-arousal positive emotion) and anger or anxiety (high-arousal negative emotion) are more “viral” than low-arousal emotions such as happiness or sadness.
The Nova report also points out that researchers have been mining Twitter and other social media data to better understand how emotions are spread, and the types of messages that spread the fastest. However, they ignored the primary culprits, Google and Facebook both of which steal your private data and use it to manipulate your behavior.
At the time, in 2017, they said this information was being harvested and used to develop ways to avoid public messaging that might incite mass panic. But the COVID-19 pandemic suggests the complete opposite. Clearly, behavioral experts have been busy developing ways to generate maximum fear, anxiety and panic.
How to Inoculate Yourself Against Negative Contagion
At the end of the report, Nova cites research detailing three effective ways to “immunize” yourself against negative emotional contagions.
Distract yourself from the source of the negative contagion — In the case of pandemic fearporn, that might entail not reading or listening to mainstream media news that for the past year have proven themselves incapable of levelheadedness.
Project your own positive emotions back at the source of the negative contagion — If talking to someone who is fearful, they might end up “catching” your optimism rather than the other way around.
Speak up — If someone is unwittingly spreading “negative vibes,” telling them so might help them realize what they’re doing. (This won’t work if the source is knowingly and purposely spreading fear or anxiety though.)
Pandemic of Panic
In a recent Tweet,9 Ivor Cummins, a biochemical engineer who researches the root causes of chronic disease, shared a short video detailing the root cause of the panic pandemic. Why has the whole world seemingly gone mad from fear?
As explained by Cummins, the outsized level of public fear is the result of a catastrophic feedback loop system where political and mainstream media drivers are pushing fear onto the public, and public fears are then feeding the media (fear sells) and pushing politicians to take action, which generates more fear messages. And so, round and round it goes.
However, at a certain point, this engine of fear starts losing steam. To keep the pandemic pandemonium going, academics bearing doomsday predictions were brought in to scare politicians and provide more fearporn fodder for the media.
Aiding the academic drivers are unelected, undemocratic organizations such as the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Big Pharma (just to name a few), all of which support these academic doomsday prophets from behind the scenes or openly promote them.
All of the organizations Cummins mentions are part of a technocratic, unelected elite that are making decisions for the entire world. If we were to somehow shut down this secondary engine that feeds into the first, the global insanity would probably start to abate.
The question is, can that be done? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has likened our current predicament to “an apocalyptical battle,”10 as we’re facing formidable undemocratic forces with seemingly unlimited financial resources, political influence and the ability to control the global landscape of communications.
We’re facing a globalist agenda that ultimately seeks to gain total control by stripping away human rights and the rights of countries, and they’re using “biosecurity” as justification for it all.
Exposing the Grand Plan
As explained by journalist James Corbett in his October 16, 2020, Corbett Report,11 the Great Reset is a new “social contract” that ties every person to it through an electronic ID linked to your bank account and health records, and a social credit ID that will end up dictating every facet of your life.
It’s about getting rid of capitalism and free enterprise, and replacing them with “sustainable development” and “stakeholder capitalism” — terms that belie their nefarious, antihumanity intents. As noted in the book, “Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order”:12
“… Sustainable Development is Technocracy … The Sustainable Development movement has taken careful steps to conceal its true identity, strategy and purpose, but once the veil is lifted, you will never see it any other way. Once its strategy is unmasked, everything else will start to make sense.”
In her blog post “The Great Reset for Dummies,” journalist Tessa Lena summarizes the purpose behind the call for a global “reset”:13
“The mathematical reason for the Great Reset is that thanks to technology, the planet has gotten small, and the infinite expansion economic model is bust — but obviously, the super wealthy want to continue staying super wealthy, and so they need a miracle, another bubble, plus a surgically precise system for managing what they perceive as ‘their limited resources.’
Thus, they desperately want a bubble providing new growth out of thin air — literally — while simultaneously they seek to tighten the peasants’ belts, an effort that starts with ‘behavioral modification,’ a.k.a. resetting the western peasants’ sense of entitlement to high life standards and liberties … The practical aim of the Great Reset is to fundamentally restructure the world’s economy and geopolitical relations based on two assumptions:
One, that every element of nature and every life form is a part of the global inventory (managed by the allegedly benevolent state, which, in turn, is owned by several suddenly benevolent wealthy people, via technology).
And two, that all inventory needs to be strictly accounted for: be registered in a central database, be readable by a scanner and easily ID’ed, and be managed by AI, using the latest ‘science.’
The goal is to count and then efficiently manage and control all resources, including people, on an unprecedented scale, with unprecedented digital … precision — all while the masters keep indulging, enjoying vast patches of conserved nature, free of unnecessary sovereign peasants and their unpredictability.”
These new global “assets” can also be turned into brand-new financial instruments that can then be traded. For example, Zero-Budget Natural Farming is now being introduced in India. This is a brand-new concept of farming in which farmers must trade the carbon rate in their soil on the global market if they want to make a living. They’ll get no money at all for the crops they actually grow.
The Pandemic Has Been a Psychological Operation
There’s not a single area of life that is left out of this Great Reset plan. The planned reform will affect everything from government, energy and finance to food, medicine, real estate, policing and even how we interact with our fellow human beings in general.
It goes without saying that to radically transform every last part of society has its challenges. No person in their right mind would agree to it if aware of the details of the whole plan. So, to roll this out, they had to use psychological manipulation, and fear is the most effective tool for inducing compliance there is.
The following graphic illustrates the central role of fearmongering for the successful rollout of the Great Reset.
Social Engineering Is Central to Technocratic Rule
Technocracy is inherently a technological society run through social engineering. Fear is but one manipulation tool. The focus on “science” is another. Anytime someone dissents, they’re simply accused of being “anti-science,” and any science that conflicts with the status quo is declared “debunked science.”
The only science that matters is whatever the technocrats deem to be true, no matter how much evidence there is against it. We’ve seen this first-hand during this pandemic, as Big Tech has censored and banned anything going against the opinions of the WHO, which is just another cog in the technocratic machine.
If we allow this censorship to continue, the end result will be nothing short of devastating. So, we simply must keep pushing for transparency, truth, medical freedom, personal liberty and the right to privacy.
Recognizing that the fear we feel has been carefully manufactured can help free us from its grip, and once we — en masse — no longer believe the lies being put before us, the engine driving the fear and panic will eventually run out of steam.
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“There are Three Kinds of Lies: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics” – Mark Twain
It has long been known that benign coronavirus species are capable of causing 15 – 30 % of common colds (usual symptoms: runny nose, cough, sore throat). This reality was recently mentioned by an internationally-famous virologist from Germany, in an interview where he also admitted that laboratory confirmation of COVID-19 is next to impossible given the high incidence of both false-positive “COVID-19” PCR swab tests and false positive “COVID-19” serum antibody tests.
Apparently, neither test seems to be able to distinguish between the benign coronaviruses that can cause common colds and the more serious coronavirus that actually causes COVID-19!
Dr Fauci’s ignorance of (or his ”conflict of interest-generated” failure to reveal) that fact justified his oft-repeated assertions in his endless media rounds and White House press conferences prior to the ill-fated economic shut-down:
“I think we should be overly aggressive (even if we) get criticized for over-reacting. I think Americans should be prepared … to hunker down.”
Anthony Fauci, as everybody should know, is the long-time director of the NIH’s NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases). He is, significantly, also a holder of many HIV vaccine patents and the holder of the patent for the Sanofi-Pasteur Corporation’s Dengue virus vaccine that recently killed 600 Philippine children.)
Another expert, Dr Christian Drosten, pictured on the right, is the Director of Berlin University’s Institute of Virology. He is known at “Germany’s real face of the coronavirus crisis”.
The quotes below came during an interview that Dr Drosten made last month, in which he revealed that the benign coronavirus that causes the common cold cannot be differentiated from the actual Covid-19 virus by the PCR test kits, over 200 of which are currently in development by profiteering medical device companies!
“Some virologists now assume that there are people who have become immune to COVID-19 unnoticed because they have had a relatively harmless corona cold in the past.”
“It is quite the case that we expect that there may be an unnoticed background immunity – due to cold coronaviruses, because they are related to the SARS CoV-2 virus in a certain way.”
“15 percent of common colds are caused by well-known coronaviruses. These are so similar to the current (COVID-19) virus that they can even cause false positive antibody tests.”
“It could be that certain people who had a cold virus a year or two ago are protected in an unprecedented way.”
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COVID-19’s Phony Death Numbers
Covid-19’s Phony Death Numbers are the justification for unprecedented lockdown measures, euthanasia of the elderly, social distancing, detrimental masking, possible mandatory vaccines of dubious effect, all of which are causing the destruction of life and livelihood. But, why do this? And whose interests are being served?
By F. William Engdahl
Not only are the coronavirus models being used by the World Health Organization (WHO) and most national health agencies based on highly dubious methodologies, and not only are the tests being used of wildly different quality-only indirectly confirming evidence of a possible COVID-19 infection-but now the actual designations of deaths related to COVID-19 are being revealed to be equally problematic for a variety of reasons. It gives alarming food for thought as to the wisdom of deliberately putting most of the world’s people–and with it the world economy–into Gulag-style lockdown on the argument that it is necessary to contain deaths and prevent overloading of hospital emergency services.
When we take a closer look at the definitions used in various countries for “death related to COVID-19” we get a far different picture of what is claimed to be the deadliest plague to threaten mankind since the 1918 “Spanish” Flu.
The USA and CDC Definitions
Right now the USA is said to be the nation with the largest number of COVID-19 deaths, as of this writing, with media reporting some 68,000 deaths. Here is where it gets very dodgy.
The US Government agency responsible for making the cause of death tally for the country, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is making huge changes in how they count so-called novel coronavirus deaths.
As of May 5, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) of the CDC in Atlanta, the central agency recording causes of death nationwide, reported 39,910 COVID-19 deaths. A footnote defines this as “Deaths with confirmed or presumed COVID-19”.
How a doctor makes the “presumed” judgment leaves huge latitude to the hospital and health professionals. Although the coronavirus tests are known to be subject to false results, CDC states that even where no tests have been made a doctor can “presume” COVID-19. Useful to note for perspective is the number of USA deaths recorded from all causes during the same period of February 1 through May 2, that was 751,953!
Now it gets even more murky. The CDC posted this notice: “As of April 14, 2020, CDC case counts and death counts will include both confirmed and probable cases and deaths.” From that time the number of so-called COVID-19 deaths in USA has exploded in an alarming manner – or so it would appear. On that day, April 14, New York City’s coronavirus death toll was revised with 3,700 fatalities added, with the provision thatthe count now included “people who had never tested positive for the virus but were presumed to have it.”
The CDC now defines “confirmed” as “confirmatory laboratory evidence for COVID-19,” which as we noted elsewhere included tests of dubious precision. Then they define “probable” as “with no confirmatory laboratory testing performed for COVID-19.” Just a guess of the doctor in charge.
Now leaving aside the major discrepancy between the CDC headline COVID-19 deaths as of May 5 of 68,279 and their detailed total of 39,910 deaths for the same period, we find another problem. Hospitals and doctors are being told to list COVID-19 as cause of death even if, say, a patient age 83 with pre-existing diabetes or cardiac issues or pneumonia dies with or without COVID-19 tests.
The CDC advises, “In cases where a definite diagnosis of COVID cannot be made but is “suspected” or “likely” (e.g. the circumstances are compelling with a reasonable degree of certainty) it is acceptable to report COVID-19 on a death certificate as ‘probable’ or ‘presumed.’”
This opens the door ridiculously wide for abuse of coronavirus death numbers in the United States.
A Big Money Incentive
A provision in the March 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, known as the CARES Act, gives a major incentive for hospitals in the US, most all of them private, for-profit businesses, to deem newly-admitted patients as “presumed COVID-19.” By this simple method the hospital then qualifies for a substantially larger payment from the government Medicare insurance, the national insurance for those over 65. The word “presumed” is not scientific, not at all precise but very tempting for hospitals concerned about their income in this crisis.
Dr Summer McGhee, Dean of the School of Health Sciences at the University of New Haven, notes that,
“The CARES Act authorized a temporary 20 percent increase in reimbursements from Medicare for COVID-19 patients…” He added that, as a result, “hospitals that get a lot of COVID-19 patients also get extra money from the government.”
Then, according to a Minnesota medical doctor, Scott Jensen, also a State Senator, if that COVID-19 designated patient is put on a ventilator, even if only presumed to have COVID-19, the hospital can get reimbursed three times the sum from the Medicare.
Dr Jensen told a national TV interviewer,
“Right now, Medicare is determining that if you have a COVID-19 admission to the hospital you get $13,000. If that COVID-19 patient goes on a ventilator you get $39,000, three times as much.”
Little wonder that state governors, such as Massachusetts’ Governor Charlie Baker, suddenly began back-dating causes of death (totals back to March 30, significantly inflating COVID death numbers, or that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo began demanding 30,000 ventilators and emergency equipment around the same early April time, equipment that was not needed.
In short, the COVID-19 death statistics in the USA are highly dubious for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the huge financial incentives to hospital administrators who had been told to cancel all other operations to make extra room for a “predicted” flood of coronavirus illnesses. That “rising” death toll said to be “COVID-19-or presumed to be-COVID-19” brings on the decisions to lock down the economy and in effect create an economic pandemic of unparalleled dimensions.
The lack of uniformly agreed tests and the inaccuracies of many tests used, as well as the extremely doubtful criteria for declaring a cause of death as being “from” COVID-19 suggests that it is well past time to re-examine the unprecedented lockdown measures, social distancing, masking, possible mandatory vaccines of unproven effect, all of which are producing personal, social and economic devastation.
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De-mystifying the Misleading COVID-19 Statistics
Understanding the Statistics: Provisional Death Counts and COVID-19
“There are Three Kinds of Lies: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics” – Mark Twain
Part Three: The CDC’s National Vital Statistics System is where the numbers come from
Provisional death counts deliver our most comprehensive picture of lives lost to COVID-19.
These estimates are based on death certificates, which are the most reliable source of data and contain information not available anywhere else, including comorbid conditions, race and ethnicity, and place of death.
How it Works
The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) uses incoming data from death certificates to produce provisional COVID-19 death counts. These include deaths occurring within the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
COVID-19 deaths are identified using a new ICD–10 code.
When COVID-19 is reported as a cause of death – or when it is listed as a “probable” or “presumed” cause— the death is coded as U07.1. This can include cases with or without laboratory confirmation.
Why These Numbers Are Different
Provisional death counts may not match counts from other sources, such as media reports or numbers from county health departments. Our counts often track 1–2 weeks behind other data for a number of reasons:
Death certificates take time to be completed. There are many steps involved in completing and submitting a death certificate. Waiting for test results can create additional delays. States report at different rates.
Currently, 63% of all U.S. deaths are reported within 10 days of the date of death, but there is significant variation among jurisdictions.
It takes extra time to code COVID-19 deaths. While 80% of deaths are electronically processed and coded by NCHS within minutes, most deaths from COVID-19 must be coded manually, which takes an average of 7 days. Other reporting systems use different definitions or methods for counting deaths.
Things to Know About the Data
Provisional counts are not final and are subject to change. Counts from previous weeks are continually revised as additional records are received and processed.
Provisional data are not yet complete.Counts will not include all deaths that occurred during a given time period, especially for more recent periods. However, we can estimate how complete our numbers are by looking at the average number of deaths reported in previous years.
Death counts should not be compared across jurisdictions. Some jurisdictions report deaths on a daily basis, while others report deaths weekly or monthly. In addition, vital record reporting may also be affected or delayed by COVID-19 related response activities.
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Dr Gary G. Kohls is a retired rural family physician from Duluth, Minnesota. For the past decade since his retirement, Dr Kohls has written a weekly column for the Reader Weekly, Duluth’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His column, titled Duty to Warn, has been re-published and archived at websites around the world.
Dr Kohls practiced holistic mental health care in Duluth for the last decade of his family practice career, primarily helping psychiatric patients who had become addicted to their cocktails of dangerous, addictive psychiatric drugs to safely go through the complex withdrawal process. His Duty to Warn columns often deal with various unappreciated health issues, including those caused by Big Pharma’s over-drugging, Big Vaccine’s over-vaccinating, Big Medicine’s over-prescribing, over-screening, over-diagnosing and over-treating agendas and Big Food’s malnourishing and sickness-promoting food industry.
Dr Kohl is a a frequent contributor to Global Research.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) summit in Brussels on Monday reminds us once again of what a hoax the United States had perpetrated on the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 by assuring him that the western alliance would expand “not one inch eastward” once Moscow allowed German Unification and disbanded the Warsaw Pact.
Briefing Book #613 dated December 12, 2017 at the US National Security Archive located at the George Washington University in Washington, DC says as follows:
“U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
“The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.
“The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.” read more
It is this cold-blooded treachery and back-stabbing by the Bill Clinton Administration that rankles most in the Russian mind today, as the NATO enters the Black Sea and slouches toward Russia’s western borders. read more…
Suffice to say, Washington’s post-Cold War diplomacy in Europe has met with astounding success. The heart of the matter is that today the US critically depends on NATO:
To exercise its global hegemony;
To provide a captive market for export of hundreds of billions of dollars worth American weaponry;
To pin down major European powers (especially Germany) to an alliance system that puts brakes on their strategic autonomy and pursuit of independent foreign policies;
To gain “strategic depth” to undertake military operations globally as part of an alliance system rather than blatantly as an interventionist power;
To justify the deployment of thousands of American forces and store nuclear missiles in Europe; and,
To cement the US’ dominance of the transatlantic system.
The NATO brings to mind the classic paradigm of someone all dressed up and nowhere to go. It has to constantly reinvent a reason for its existence. Russia has been providing that reason — although, Moscow has no intentions of capturing territories beyond its borders. Of course, there is no question of a war between the NATO and Russia, either, since the latter is a thermonuclear power that can destroy the US many times over.
The NATO summit’s final communique issued yesterday once again puts Russia on the alliance’s crosshairs. It develops the theme in six paragraphs that are based on a self-serving narrative (Para. 9 to 15). And the alliance’s entire build up for the foreseeable future devolves upon tackling this perceived “Russian threat.”
NATO’s new narrative
Meanwhile, the Brussels communique for the first time in the alliance’s history also brings in China’s rise as posing a potential challenge. The US has been pressing for this in the recent years and has succeeded in including some references to China in the communique. (Paras 56-57.) The communique makes the following points with regard to China:
“China’s stated ambitions and assertive behaviour present systemic challenges to the rules-based international order and to areas relevant to Alliance security”;
NATO is concerned over China’s “coercive policies”;
China is “rapidly expanding” its nuclear capabilities and is developing “a larger number of sophisticated delivery systems to establish a nuclear triad”;
China is “opaque in implementing its military modernisation and its publicly declared military-civil fusion strategy”;
China has military cooperation with Russia and has participated in in Russian exercises in the Euro-Atlantic area; and,
NATO is concerned with China’s “frequent lack of transparency and use of disinformation”; and, China is not upholding its international commitments and acting “responsibly in the international system, including in the space, cyber, and maritime domains, in keeping with its role as a major power.”
But, typically, the communique softens the blow by dissimulating a conciliatory attitude, saying NATO maintains “a constructive dialogue” and welcomes “opportunities to engage” with China in information exchange on respective policies and activities, to enhance awareness and discuss potential disagreements.
The communique urges China “to engage meaningfully in dialogue, confidence-building, and transparency measures regarding its nuclear capabilities and doctrine. Reciprocal transparency and understanding would benefit both NATO and China.”
Make no mistake, this is Washington’s hand writing the NATO communique. Hence this mixed message. The fact of the matter is that many European allies would feel uneasy. For, China poses no military threat to the western alliance. The Europeans visualise a challenge from China largely in the economic sphere — trade, investment, technology, setting up global standards and so on.
China appears to have anticipated the US’ shenanigans. China’s mission to the EU promptly reacted with facts and figures, pointing out that in 2021, Beijing’s military spending stood at $209 billion in comparison with the alliance’s $1.17 trillion, which is over half of the entire global military expenditure and 5.6 times that of China. The statement said, “We will unswervingly defend our sovereignty and development interests, and keep a close eye on NATO’s strategic adjustments and policies toward China.”
An editorial in the Global Times said, “This NATO summit can be seen as a key point in the US and Europe’s attitude toward China in the security arena. Washington has raised the curtain for a political mobilisation campaign to use the NATO bloc to carry out strategic competition with China.
“The US wants to create a narrative that equates its own hegemony to the collective strategic advantage of the West and form a consensus among 30 countries. As long as NATO countries are bound by a common hatred for China, the interest links between Western countries and China will lose its moral basis and the US could force small European countries to serve its China strategy, politically exploiting them for US interests.”
QUAD is a shaggy-dog story
Beijing’s diplomatic countermove will be to strengthen China-European Union cooperation. It works to China’s advantage that the US does not have the sort of clout to dictate policies to the EU as it has on the NATO platform. (German Chancellor Angela Merkel has already counselled caution about NATO closing the door on China.)
What is Washington’s strategy in creating a China vector for NATO, which was in the first instance formed for the security of the Euro-Atlantic space?
Here the parallels are striking with the mid-1990s when the US turned its back on the assurances given to Gorbachev and proceeded with the NATO expansion in anticipation of a Russian resurgence in a conceivable future.
The US anticipates that within the coming decade, China must be stopped from overtaking it as the number one global power. The US needs an alliance system to cope with China’s emergence. The QUAD is a shaggy-dog story, in reality.
Second, to assuage the Russian apprehensions regarding the NATO’s eastward expansion, Bill Clinton administration had offered to Boris Yeltsin that Moscow would be consulted on the NATO plans. Thus was born the NATO-Russia Council. But it was an empty gesture as the US anyway went ahead and did whatever it wanted with NATO expansion.
Similarly, the NATO claim that it has a “constructive dialogue” with China is sheer sophistry. The NATO will go through the charade of a dialogue for a while to calm Chinese nerves before taking the gloves off within 2-3 years at the most.
Third, NATO’s expansion in the 1990s was helpful for Washington to create a window to forge a unified strategic posturing with European allies vis-a-vis Russia. Similarly, the US has begun working hard for the past year or two to get the European allies on board its strategy toward China. The NATO becomes the hub where this work in progress is best handled.
Fourth, the NATO expansion in the 1990s inevitably complicated Russia’s aspirations to become part of a new common security space between Vancouver and Vladivostok. On the contrary, the US secured a say in Russia’s bilateral relations with the NATO countries.
Similar US strategy is at work here to complicate China’s relations with its European partners. Already, the US could block its major NATO allies from partnering with China in 5G technology. The US aims to vanquish China’s BRI projects in Europe on security grounds.
Equally, per NATO guidelines, China can be eventually denied access to western technologies altogether. The point is, while the 30 heads of state and government have expressed concern over China’s “coercive policies”, “opaque ways”, its “use of disinformation” and have upfront called on Beijing to “uphold its international commitments and to act responsibly in the international system.”
Whither ‘Asian Century’?
Finally, as in the case with Russia, the US is pushing China toward an infructuous arms race. Of course, this creates the rationale for increased defence spending by NATO countries, which would in turn promote exports of US military technology to Europe.
Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II are expected to sell in the hundreds, if not thousands, to the US’ allies through 2035. Already, the planned initial buyers include Japan (147 aircraft), South Korea (80) and Australia (upto 100).
The NATO is a lucrative hunting ground for the American arms industry. The bigger the NATO’s threat perceptions, the greater the scope for US exports of weaponry.
In the final analysis, NATO’s naming of China as a systemic challenge would have profound implications for international security. Prima facie, it will draw China and Russia even closer together.
As the US strategic containment of China intensifies, Beijing will come under pressure to boost its deterrence and rapidly increase the number of commissioned nuclear warheads and the DF-41s, the strategic missiles that are capable of long-range strikes and have high-survivability.
China will be on guard as regards its sovereignty and will prepare for an intense showdown. Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of Global Times, wrote recently, “In this scenario, a large number of Dongfeng-41, and JL-2 and JL-3 (both intercontinental-range submarine-launched ballistic missile) will form the pillar of our strategic will. The number of China’s nuclear warheads must reach the quantity that makes US elites shiver should they entertain the idea of engaging in a military confrontation with China.”
There is an African proverb, ‘When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.’ To be sure, the Asian region is becoming the theatre where the US-China tensions will play out. Inevitably, this would cast shadows on the region’s extraordinary prospects for growth and development. The prospects for the ‘Asian Century’ may diminish. And that can only work splendidly for the US, but Asian countries themselves will be the poorer for it.
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Featured image: Family Portrait of NATO Allies, Brussels, Belgium, June 14, 2021 (Source: Indian Punchline)
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Israel’s “change government”, which brought down 15-year Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, will struggle to be an instrument of change because its eight diverse components disagree on how to handle core issues. On Palestine, this government will almost certainly continue Netanyahu’s policies of colonisation and repression because any attempt to effect change on this existential issue would blow up the coalition. Its partners extend from parties representing the far right through centre right, the left and Israel’s Palestinian citizens.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennet — who heads an ultranationalist religious party with only six seats in the 120 member Knesset — is a hardliner on Israel’s colonial enterprise and rejects any Palestinian entity in the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
His unlikely partner for several years of the engineer of the disparate coalition, Yair Lapid. He is regarded as a centrist on Israel’s political spectrum which has shifted right-wards since the Likud took power in 1977. If the coalition survives until September 2023, alternate prime minister Lapid is slated to take over the top job. He will hardly seek to attempt any ”changes” that will prevent him from taking over.
The third prime mover of the coalition is Avigdor Lieberman, head of the secular right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu Party, who has been determined to bring down Netanyahu for several years. He has served in several Israeli governments as foreign and defence minister and is to assume the influential post of finance minister. He has expropriated the post of chairman of the Knesset finance committee for a member of his faction.
Two ministers were in Netanyahu’s most recent Cabinet. Blue and White Party leader Benny Gantz, retains the defence portfolio, and New Hope founder Gedeon Sa’ar, the justice ministry. Both are deputy prime ministers.
All five have served under Netanyahu and broken with him personally due to his authoritarianism, failure to honour commitments, and arrogance, rather than his policies.
Ministries assigned to the centre-right Labour Party and leftist Meretz cover areas where there can be moderate change on the domestic front while the Ra’am, the Israeli’s Palestinian fundamentalist partyhas not claimed a ministry but chairmanship of key Knesset committees.
Ra’am is the first Palestinian party to participate in an Israeli government although there have been Palestinian ministers belonging to other parties in government. Until now only Zionist Jewish parties have been at the heart of the ruling establishment. Ra’am’s head Mansour Abbas has secured promises of benefits for Israel’s 20 per cent neglected and marginalised Palestinian minority, including funding for municipalities, schools, and public services, increased policing to fight a spike in crime, and an end to Israeli bullying of bedouin.
While Abbas may have bought benefits for Palestinian Israelis, many if not most are uncertain about Ra’am putting in power a coalition, heavily weighted in favour of the right. During the Netanyahu years, they have forged increasingly close connections with Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, rejected being called “Arab {rather than Palestinian] Israelis” and reclaimed their Palestinian identity.
Furthermore, the “change government” will have to deliver some if not major change. World public opinion has been alienated by the Netanyahu era, moved away from regarding Israel as a special case entitled to impunity over its never-ending occupation, land grab, harsh treatment of Palestinians, and attempts to drag the US and the West into a war with Iran.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has launched investigations into alleged Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity. The UN Human Rights Council has set up a permanent commission to probe Israel’s May onslaught on Gaza and other actions against the Palestinians. Amnesty International has dared to apply the word “apartheid” to the system of governance Israel imposes on theWest Bank.
“The perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity have evaded justice for more than half a century. An ICC investigation marks a long-overdue step towards justice for victims, and is a chance to end the cycle of impunity that is at the heart of the human rights crisis in the [occupied territories],” said Saleh Higazi, Amnesty’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa.
Last month, Ireland’s parliament adopted a motion branding Israeli settlements and policies in the occupied West Bank “de facto annexation”. This amounts to the most forthright characterisation of the situation in the West Bank by any European Union legislature. Ireland is not alone.
Democratic Party members of the US Congress have castigated Israel and urged the US government to suspend $3.8 billion in military funding for Israel as well as millions proposed to resupply its “Iron Dome” system which has protected Israel from rockets from Gaza while Israeli warplanes bomb the unprotected coastal strip with a population of two million Palestinians.
Having ignored developments on the international scene for most of his latest 12-years in power Netanyahu continues to behave as usual — hectoring opponents and accusing “change” of betraying Israel and risking its security. He enjoys the support of his Likud Party, the largest in the Knesset, and the hard right nationalist and religious parties. However, a slender majority of Israelis are fed up with him. They have shifted to parties represented in the coalition — mainly because they are weary and wary of Netanyahu — and resent his drive to exploit Israeli divisions in order to evade prison for breach of trust, fraud and bribery in his ongoing trial in a Jerusalem court. Now that he is not prime minister he could be the second Israeli premier to do jail time — after fellow Likud leader Ehud Olmert.
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