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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union, and the ACLU of Massachusetts today filed a petition for a writ of certiorari, asking the Supreme Court to hear a challenge to the Department of Homeland Security’s policy and practice of warrantless and suspicionless searches of travelers’ electronic devices at U.S. airports and other ports of entry.

The lawsuit, Merchant v. Mayorkas, was filed in September 2017 on behalf of several travelers whose cell phones, laptops, and other electronic devices were searched without warrants at the U.S. border. In November 2019, a federal district court in Boston ruled that border agencies’ policies on electronic device searches violate the Fourth Amendment, and required border officers to have reasonable suspicion of digital contraband before they can search a traveler’s device. A three-judge panel at the First Circuit reversed this decision in February 2021.

“Border officers every day make an end-run around the Constitution by searching travelers’ electronic devices without a warrant or any suspicion of wrongdoing,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Sophia Cope. “The U.S. government has granted itself unfettered authority to rummage through our digital lives just because we travel internationally. This egregious violation of privacy happens with no justification under constitutional law and no demonstrable benefit. The Supreme Court must put a stop to it.”

“This case raises pressing questions about the Fourth Amendment’s protections in the digital age,” said Esha Bhandari, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “When border officers search our phones and laptops, they can access massive amounts of sensitive personal information, such as private photographs, health information, and communications with partners, family, and friends—including discussions between lawyers and their clients, and between journalists and their sources. We are asking the Supreme Court to ensure that we don’t lose our privacy rights when we travel.”

Every year, a growing number of international travelers are subject to warrantless and suspicionless searches of their personal electronic devices at the U.S. border. These searches are often conducted for reasons that have nothing to do with stopping the importation of contraband or determining a traveler’s admissibility. Border officers claim the authority to search devices for a host of reasons, including enforcement of tax, financial, consumer protection, and environmental laws—all without suspicion of wrongdoing. Border officers also search travelers’ devices if they are interested in information about someone other than the traveler—like a business partner, family member, or a journalist’s source.

The petitioners in this case—all U.S. citizens—include a military veteran, journalists, an artist, a NASA engineer, and a business owner. Several are Muslims and people of color, and none were accused of any wrongdoing in connection with their device searches.

“It’s been frustrating to be subjected to this power-grab by the government,” said Diane Zorri, a college professor, former U.S. Air Force captain, and a plaintiff in the case. “My devices are mine, and the government should need a good reason before rifling through my phone and my computer. I’m proud to be part of this case to help protect travelers’ rights.”

The certiorari petition asks the Supreme Court to overturn the First Circuit’s decision and hold that the Fourth Amendment requires border officers to obtain a warrant based on probable before searching electronic devices, or at the least have reasonable suspicion that the device contains digital contraband.

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‘Every Time the US “Saves” a Country, It Converts It Either into a Madhouse or a Cemetery’.

By Prof. Vijay Prashad, April 26 2021

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Of relevance to the debate on vaccines, this incisive and carefully researched article was first published by Global Research on May 28. 2020

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I am not a scientist. I am not a doctor. I am not a biotech engineer. I am not an attorney. However, I read, listen, appreciate and try to understand those who are.

I was an investment banker until politics made it impossible to continue to practice my art. I was trained as a portfolio strategist—so I map my world by watching the financial flows and allocation of resources. I was also trained as a conspiracy generator and foot soldier—conspiracies being the fundamental organizing principle of how things get done in our world. It was not until I left the establishment that I learned that those not in the club had been trained to disparage and avoid conspiracies—a clever trick that sabotages their efforts to gather power.

My response to living at war with agencies of the U.S. government for a time was to answer the questions of people who were sufficiently courageous and curious to solicit my opinion. Over many years, that response transformed into two businesses. One was The Solari Report, which continues to grow as a global intelligence network – we seek to help each other understand what is happening, to navigate and contribute to positive outcomes. The other was serving as an investment advisor to individuals and families through Solari Investment Advisory Services. After ten years, I converted that business to doing an ESG screen. What those who use it want—that is not otherwise readily available in the retail market—is a screen that reflects knowledge of financial and political corruption. Tracking the metastasizing corruption, it’s an art, not a science.

When you help a family with their finances, it is imperative to understand all their risk issues. Their financial success depends on successful mitigation of all risk – whether financial or non-financial – they encounter in their daily lives. All non-financial risks impact the allocation of family resources – attention, time, assets and money.

Many of my clients and their children had been devastated and drained by health care failures and corruption–and the most common catalyst for this devastation was vaccine death and injury. After their lengthy and horrendous experiences with the health care establishment, they would invariably ask, “If the corruption is this bad in medicine, food and health, what is going on in the financial world?” Chilled by the thought, they would search out a financial professional who was schooled in U.S. government and financial corruption. And they would find me.

The result of this flow of bright, educated people blessed with the resources to pay for my time was that, for ten years, I got quite an education about the disabilities and death inflicted on our children by what I now call “the great poisoning.” As a result, I had the opportunity to repeatedly price out the human damage to all concerned–not just the affected children but their parents, siblings and future generations—mapping the financial costs of vaccine injury again and again and again.

These cases were not as unusual as you might expect. Currently 54% of American children have one or more chronic diseases. Doctors that I trust assure me the number is much higher as many children and their families can not afford the care and testing necessary to properly diagnose what ails them.

One of the mothers featured in VAXXED—a must-watch documentary for any awake citizen, as is its sequel VAXXED II:

The People’s Truth—estimated that a heavily autistic child would cost present value $5MM to raise and care for over a lifetime. When my clients who were grandparents insisted that they would not interfere with their children’s vaccine choices because it was “none of their business,” I would say, “Really? Who has the $5MM? You or your kids?

When your kids need the $5MM to raise their vaccine-injured child, are you going to refuse them? You are the banker, and it is your money that is at risk here, so it is your business. Do you want to spend that $5MM on growing a strong family through the generations or on managing a disabled child who did not have to be disabled?” Often, that $5MM in expenditures also translates into divorce, depression and lost opportunities for siblings.

My clients helped me find the best resources—books, documentaries, articles—on vaccines. You will find many of them linked or reviewed at The Solari Report, including in our Library.

Of all the questions that I had, the one that I spent the most time researching and thinking about was why. Why was the medical establishment intentionally poisoning generations of children? Many of the writers who researched and wrote about vaccine injury and death assumed it was a mistake—resulting from the orthodoxy of a medical establishment that could not face or deal with its mistakes and liabilities. That never made sense to me. Writings by Forrest Maready, Jon Rappoport, Dr. Suzanne Humphries and Arthur Firstenberg have helped me understand the role of vaccines in the con man trick of saving money for insurance companies and the legally liable.

Here is one example of how the trick may play out. A toxin creates a disease. The toxin might be pesticides or industrial pollution or wireless technology radiation. The toxin damages millions of people and their communities. Companies or their insurance provider may be liable for civil or criminal violations. A virus is blamed. A “cure” is found in a “vaccine.” The pesticide or other toxic exposure is halted just as the vaccine is introduced, and presto, the sickness goes away. The vaccine is declared a success, and the inventor is declared a hero. A potential financial catastrophe has been converted to a profit, including for investors and pension funds. As a portfolio strategist, I admit it has been a brilliant trick and likely has protected the insurance industry from the bankrupting losses it would experience if it had to fairly compensate the people and families destroyed.

Thanks to the work of Robert Kennedy and Mary Holland of Childrens Health Defense, I now understand the enormous profits generated by so-called “vaccines” subsequent to the passage of The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 and the creation of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program – a federal no-fault mechanism for compensating vaccine-related injuries or death by establishing a claim procedure involving the United States Court of Federal Claims and special masters.

Call a drug or biotech cocktail a “vaccine” and pharmecutical and biotech companies are free from any liabilities – the taxpayer pays. Unfortunately, this system has become an open invitation to make billions from “injectibles” particularly where government regulations and laws can be used to create a market through mandates. Unfortunately, various schemes have developed for government agencies and legislators as well as corporate media to participate in the billions of profits – resulting in significant conflicts of interest.

The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act became law in 2005, adding to corporate freedoms from liability. The Act

“is a controversial tort liability shield intended to protect vaccine manufacturers from financial risk in the event of a declared public health emergency. The act specifically affords to drug makers immunity from potential financial liability for clinical trials of avian influenza vaccine at the discretion of the Executive branch of government. PREPA strengthens and consolidates the oversight of litigation against pharmaceutical companies under the purview of the secretary of Health and Human Services (~ Wikipedia.)”

Over time, this has evolved to the engineering of epidemics—the medical version of false flags. In theory, these can be “psyops” or events engineered with chemical warfare, biowarfare, or wireless technology. If this sounds bizarre, dive into all the writings of the “Targeted Individuals.”

I learned about this first-hand when I was litigating with the Department of Justice and was experiencing significant physical harassment. I tried to hire several security firms; they would check my references and then decline the work, saying it was too dangerous. The last one took pity and warned me not to worry about electronic weaponry, letting me know that my main problem would be low-grade biowarfare. This biowarfare expert predicted that the opposing team would drill holes in the wall of my house and inject the “invisible enemy.” Sure enough, that is exactly what happened. I sold my house and left town. That journey began a long process of learning how poisoning and nonlethal weapons are used—whether to move people out of rent-controlled apartments, sicken the elderly to move them to more expensive government subsidized housing, gangstalk political or business targets, or weaken or kill litigants—and the list goes on. Poisoning turned out to be a much more common tactic in the game of political and economic warfare in America than I had previously understood.

After I finished my litigation, I spent several years detoxing from heavy metal toxicity – including of lead, arsenic, and aluminum. As I drove around America, I realized it was not just me. Americans increasingly looked like a people struggling with high loads of heavy metals toxicity. In the process of significantly decreasing my unusually high levels of heavy metals, I learned what a difference the toxic load had made to my outlook, my energy, and my ability to handle complex information.

This brings me to the question of what exactly a vaccine is and what exactly is in the concoctions being injected into people today as well as the witches brews currently under development.

In 2017, Italian researchers reviewed the ingredients of 44 types of so-called “vaccines.” They discovered heavy metal debris and biological contamination in every human vaccine they tested. The researchers stated,

“The quantity of foreign bodies detected and, in some cases, their unusual chemical compositions baffled us.” They then drew the obvious conclusion, namely, that because the micro- and nanocontaminants were “neither biocompatible nor biodegradable,” they were “biopersistent” and could cause inflammatory effects right away—or later (see this)

Aborted fetal tissue, animal tissue, aluminum, mercury, genetically altered materials—and what else?

Whatever the ingredients of vaccines have been to date, nothing is more bizarre than the proposals of what might be included in them in the future.

Strategies—already well-funded and well on the way—include brain-machine interface nanotechnology, digital identity tracking devices, and technology with an expiration date that can be managed and turned off remotely. One report indicated that the Danish government and US Navy had been paying one tech company in Denmark to make an injectible chip that would be compatible with one of the leading cryptocurrencies.

I was recently reading Mary Holland’s excellent 2012 review of U.S. vaccine court decisions (”Compulsory vaccination, the Constitution, and the hepatitis B mandate for infants and young children,” Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics) and I froze and thought, “Why are we calling the injectibles that Bill Gates and his colleagues are promoting ‘vaccines’? Are they really vaccines?”

Most people are familiar with how Bill Gates made and kept his fortune. He acquired an operating system that was loaded into your computer. It was widely rumored that the U.S. intelligence agencies had a back door. The simultaneous and sudden explosion of computer viruses then made it necessary to regularly update your operating system, allowing Gates and his associates to regularly add whatever they wanted into your software. One of my more knowledgeable software developers once said to me in the 1990s—when Microsoft really took off—”Microsoft makes really sh***y software.” But of course, the software was not really their business. Their business was accessing and aggregating all of your data. Surveillance capitalism was underway.

The Department of Justice launched an antitrust case against Microsoft in 1998, just as the $21 trillion started to disappear from the U.S. government—no doubt with the help of specially designed software and IT systems. During the settlement negotiations that permitted Gates to keep his fortune, he started the Gates Foundation and his new philanthropy career. I laughed the other day when my tweet of one of Robert Kennedy Jr.’s articles from Children’s Health Defense—describing the gruesome technology Gates is hoping to roll out through “injectibles” –inspired a response: “Well, I guess he is finally fulfilling his side of his antitrust settlement.”

If you look at what is being created and proposed in the way of injectibles, it looks to me like these technological developments are organized around several potential goals.

The first and most important goal is the replacement of the existing U.S. dollar currency system used by the general population with a digital transaction system that can be combined with digital identification and tracking. The goal is to end currencies as we know them and replace them with an embedded credit card system that can be integrated with various forms of control, potentially including mind control.

“De-dollarization” is threating the dollar global reserve system. The M1 and M2 money supply have increased in the double digits over the last year as a result of a new round of quantitative easing by the Fed.

The reason we have not entered into hyper-inflation is because of the dramatic drop in money velocity occasioned by converting Covid-19 into an engineered shut down of significant economic activity and the banruptcy of millions of small and medium sized businesses. The managers of the dollar system are under urgent pressure to use new technology to centralize economic flows and preserve their control of the financial system.

Just as Gates installed an operating system in our computers, now the vision is to install an operating system in our bodies and use “viruses” to mandate an initial installation followed by regular updates.

Now I appreciate why Gates and his colleagues want to call these technologies “vaccines.” If they can persuade the body politic that injectible credit cards or injectible surveillance trackers or injectable brain-macine interface nanotechnologies are “vaccines,” then they can enjoy the protection of a century or more of legal decisions and laws that support their efforts to mandate what they want to do.

As well, they can insist that U.S. taxpayers fund—through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program–the damages for which they would otherwise be liable as a result of their experiments – and violations of the Nuremberg Code and numerous civil and criminal laws – on the general population. The scheme is quite clever. Get the general population to go along with defining their new injectible high-tech concoctions as “vaccines” and they can slip them right into the vaccine pipeline. No need to worry about the disease and death that results from something this unnatural delivered quickly. The notion of an emergency along with contact tracing and freedom from liability can protect you from the millions of likely deaths from such human experimentation. Ideally, you can blame the deaths on a virus.

A colleague once told me how Websters Dictionary came about. Webster said that the way the evildoers would change the Constitution was not by amending it but by changing the definitions—a legal sneak attack.

I believe that Gates and the pharma and biotech industries are literally reaching to create a global control grid by installing digital interface components and hooking us up to Microsoft’s new $10 billion JEDI cloud at the Department of Defense as well as Amazon’s multi-billion cloud contract for the CIA that is shared with all US intelligence agencies.

Why do you think President Trump has the military organizing to stockpile syringes for vaccines? It is likely because the military is installing the roaming operating system for integration into their cloud. Remember—the winner in the AI superpower race is the AI system with access to the most data. Accessing your body and my body on a 24/7 basis generates a lot of data. If the Chinese do it, the Americans will want to do it too. The role out of human “operating systems” may be one of the reasons why the competition of Huawei and 5G telecommunications has become so fractious. As Frank Clegg, former President of Microsoft Canada has warned us, 5G was developed by the Israelis for crowd control.

In the face of global “de-dollarization,” this is how the dollar syndicate can assert the central control it needs to maintain and extend its global reserve currency financial power. This includes protecting its leadership from the civil and criminal liabiility related to explosive levels of financial and health care fraud in recent decades.

Which brings me back to you and me. Why are we calling these formulations “vaccines”?

If I understand the history of case law, vaccines, in legal terms, are medicine. Intentional heavy metal poisoning is not medicine. Injectible surveillance components are not medicine. Injectible credit cards are not medicine. Injectible brain-machine interface is not a medicine. Immunity for insurance companies is not the creation of human immunity.

We need to stop allowing these concoctions to be referred to by a word that the courts and the general population define and treat as medicine and protect from legal and financial liability.

The perpetrators of this fraud are trying a very neat trick–one that will help them go much faster and cancel out a lot of risk at our death, disease and expense. I understand why they are doing it.

What I don’t understand is why we are helping them. Why are we acquiescing in calling these bizarre and deeply dangerous concoctions “vaccines”? Whatever they are, they are not medicine.

So, what shall our naming convention be? What name shall we give to the relevant poisons, neurological damaging metals and digital shackles?

Whatever we call them, I know one thing. THEY ARE NOT MEDICINE, WHICH MEANS THEY SURE ARE NOT VACCINES.

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First published on April 21, 2020.

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Three-quarters of a century ago, on 21 April 1945 the Soviet Army had encircled Berlin and was unleashing its final attack upon Nazi Germany.

With the Germans having killed more than 10 million Soviet troops since their June 1941 invasion, the last remnants of the Wehrmacht and SS were still vastly outnumbered in their defence of Berlin. Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin, on the cusp of celebrating his most important triumph, amassed around 2.5 million Red Army soldiers for this assault on the German capital, supported by over 6,000 tanks and 7,500 aircraft. (1)

For the Battle of Berlin, Stalin’s old nemesis Adolf Hitler managed to gather almost a million troops, but a proportion of them had seen too many winters, or too few. The cream of German armies had either been wiped out by the Soviets over preceding month and years, or were in captivity. By 16 April 1945, the Red Army began their assault towards Berlin, with a massive artillery bombardment on the German defences along the Oder-Neisse river line.

Raising a Flag over the Reichstag, a photograph taken during the Battle of Berlin on 2 May 1945 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The previous day – 15 April 1945 – Hitler, dressed in full military attire, emerged in the morning from the cramped, overcharged atmosphere of the Führerbunker. Stepping outside into the fresh spring air, he looked about at his surroundings. Everything was still and quiet, the sky clear. Hitler walked the short distance from the Führerbunker to the Reich Chancellory, and he was joined by Hans Baur, his personal pilot since early 1932. During the 1920s, Baur was one of Germany’s most renowned commercial pilots, earning a variety of awards and recognition from the Weimar government.

Writing in his memoirs originally published in 1956, Baur recalled how,

“Hitler had personally taken charge of the defence of the Reich Chancellory, and on 15 April [1945] – it was a beautiful sunny day – he appeared in the garden to give various instructions… A thousand men of his Leibstandarte under the command of General Mohnke were there to defend Hitler’s last stronghold to the end”. (2)

With the Soviets closing in, Hitler rejected the pleas of underlings urging him to flee southwards towards Bavaria. Captain and crew would go down with the ship together. Apart from the Leibstandarte, very few remained in this area during the final days. Even SS commando Otto Skorzeny, the saviour of Benito Mussolini 18 months before and one of Hitler’s favourite soldiers, had since left.

Hitler saw Skorzeny for the last time in the Reich Chancellory in late March 1945, when the Nazi leader awarded him the prestigious Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross. Skorzeny got out of Berlin while he could. On 12 April 1945 he was present in Linz, the Austrian town where Hitler spent most of his youth and had planned to remodel. By 15 April Skorzeny moved on and “was drawing up plans for a full-scale guerrilla war should conventional methods fail to halt the Allies”, according to Skorzeny’s recent biographer, English historian Stuart Smith. (3)

That same day, standing outside the Führerbunker on 15 April 1945, Hitler inspected the defences of the Reich Chancellory perimeter. He then made his way into the Reich Chancellory itself, one of the very few large buildings standing in Berlin.

Suddenly appearing in the Reich Chancellory was Magda Goebbels, wife of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Shocked to see her at this late date Hitler said,

“For heaven’s sake Frau Goebbels, what are you doing here in Berlin? You should have gone away long ago. Baur here will fly you to the Berghof whilst there’s still time. You will be safe there with your children”. (4)

Magda Goebbels protested and Hitler’s orders were refused, for once. Instead she saw fit to remain in Berlin to die – before killing herself, she would allow her six children to be poisoned with cyanide as they slept in their beds, drugged with morphine.

Hitler had not foreseen the catastrophe that was engulfing his empire. Only two and a half years before, he was convinced that the Russians were finished. It appeared that way to many at the time. During the summer and early autumn of 1942, this was the period of the great German advance into far-eastern Ukraine, southern Russia and the Caucasus: principally towards the Russian cities of Stalingrad and Astrakhan, along with another drive further south to capture Baku, the capital of energy rich Azerbaijan, or so it was hoped. As Hitler knew, Baku was dripping in oil. This city provided 80% of the oil consumed by the Soviet war machine (5). Taking Baku would constitute a hammer blow to the Soviets.

Reminiscing on developments, the Nazi war minister Albert Speer acknowledged that by August 1942 “there actually no longer seemed to be any resistance to Hitler left in Europe” (6). It should be recognised that, from the summer of 1942, this German advance hundreds of miles into the western and southern Soviet Union was one of the most incredible feats in military history. During Napoleon’s invasion of Russia 130 years before, he was simply unable to progress as far as this, failing to survive the winter even.

Nevertheless the Wehrmacht could not replenish the casualties they suffered from June 1941. In the first six months of their invasion of the USSR, the Germans lost more than 900,000 men, along with being shorn of 6,000 aircraft and over 3,200 panzers and other armoured vehicles. Most German troops partaking in the 1942 offensive, had been involved from the start of Operation Barbarossa the year before.

Jacques R. Pauwels, the veteran Belgian-born historian, wrote that German forces “available for a push toward the oil fields of the Caucasus were therefore extremely limited. Under those circumstances, it is quite remarkable that in 1942 the Germans managed to make it as far as they did”. (7)

The Soviet Union, with almost twice the population of Nazi-occupied Europe, was able to replace much of their losses relating to manpower. The Soviets could also count on their greater industrial strength, and the bigger quantities of raw materials at their disposal.

It can be recalled that large-scale German victories were achieved in the early summer of 1942 – before Hitler’s offensive eastwards, Case Blue, had gained a head of steam in the high summer. Beginning on 12 May 1942, a huge clash unfolded in eastern Ukraine, known as the Second Battle of Kharkov. This city, Kharkov, was the Soviet Union’s third largest metropolis.

At the commencement of fighting in Kharkov, which the Soviets initiated, the Germans and their Axis partners were outnumbered on the ground by more than two to one. However, during the next fortnight, the Wehrmacht inflicted over 200,000 fatalities on the Soviets, along with the capturing of up to 240,000 Red Army soldiers. By comparison, the Axis powers lost less than 30,000 men in the Second Battle of Kharkov, and the city was taken by German-led forces on 28 May 1942.

Five weeks later, on 4 July 1942, the Crimea was in German hands, after they finally eliminated (with Romanian help) Soviet resistance at Sevastopol – the Crimea’s biggest city. Hitler was increasingly impatient for Sevastopol to be taken, and he had said as early as 21 August 1941 that, “the Crimean peninsula has colossal importance for protection of oil supplies from Romania” (8). Soviet bloodletting was again terrible. Since late October 1941 they had suffered over 300,000 casualties during the Battle of Sevastopol. Also on 4 July 1942, Soviet forces retreated from the cities of Kursk and Belgorod further north.

Meanwhile, the fine weather seemed as if it would last forever. On 5 July 1942, German soldiers from the 4th Panzer Army marching under a blazing sun saw water shimmering on the horizon. It was what they hoped to see. They had reached the Don River, just 200 miles west of Stalingrad (9). Ten days after, on 15 July, Soviet forces fled the towns of Boguchar and Millerovo, less than 200 miles from Stalingrad. The way appeared open to advance upon the city.

The following day, 16 July 1942, Hitler relocated hundreds of miles eastwards, settling into new surroundings near the town of Vinnitsa, in central Ukraine. His complex at Rastenburg, East Prussia, was positioned too westward and no longer deemed suitable. Hitler’s headquarters beside Vinnitsa again had the word “wolf” inserted into it, and was called Führerhauptquartier (FHQ) Werwolf. The title was apt here.

Hitler’s chief pilot, Baur, remembered how,

“It sticks in my mind in particular as the place where I first saw wolves outside a zoo. We were taxiing towards the start with Hitler on board, when I spotted a couple of wolves at the edge of the airfield. They didn’t seem much disturbed at our approach, and we got quite close to them before they finally looked at us, and then loped off into the forest. My mechanic had drawn Hitler’s attention to them, and we all saw them very clearly”. (10)

As July 1942 moved on the successes continued, one after another. The German 1st Panzer Army took the city of Voroshilovgrad, in far eastern Ukraine, on 18 July 1942 – followed by the capture of Krasnodon, two days later, another city in the Ukraine’s extreme eastern reaches. Virtually all of the Ukraine was now under Nazi rule.

On July 22nd, the German 6th Army reached the great bend in the Don River, as they approached ever closer to Stalingrad. Rostov-on-Don, a sizable Russian city 250 miles from Stalingrad, fell just hours afterwards to the 1st Panzer Army on July 23rd. The taking of Rostov was a significant victory, as the Wehrmacht was previously driven from this city by the Soviets in early December 1941. Older Rostov inhabitants were familiar with the sight of German troops. Rostov had also fallen to the German Army a quarter of a century before, under the leadership of Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg.

Image below: A Soviet KV-1 heavy tank destroyed near Voronezh (1942) (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The day after Rostov’s capitulation, 24 July 1942, another major German success was secured with the conclusion of the Battle of Voronezh, near the Don River. The Soviets lost over 550,000 men during the Battle of Voronezh, while the Wehrmacht and their Hungarian allies had less than 100,000 casualties (11). This battle, lasting for almost four weeks, is little known. Yet Soviet losses during it were comfortably higher than German casualties during all of the fighting at Stalingrad. The Red Army could just about afford to sustain such disasters, while the Germans clearly could not. That same date, July 24th, the city of Novocherkassk was taken by the Wehrmacht in Rostov oblast.

There is little doubt that, overall, German troops were of much superior quality to Red Army soldiers, time and again inflicting a far higher casualty rate on the Soviets. The problem was that, in the end, there were simply not enough German soldiers in existence while, as mentioned, the Soviets could call on a vast reserve of fresh troops to fill in their horrendous casualty list.

Yet the German advance continued relentlessly. German Army Group A marched towards the Caucasus on 25 July 1942, and further victories were clocked up. On July 27th, Bataysk, a city in Rostov oblast was taken. The following day Stalin issued Order No. 227 demanding of his soldiers “Not a step back!” Unfortunately for Stalin, this unrealistic order would be disregarded and had a largely detrimental effect upon morale. There were to be lots of steps back in the days ahead.

From July 30th, the Battle of Rzhev was beginning around 150 miles west of Moscow. Over coming weeks the Soviets would suffer in excess of 300,000 casualties there, about five times as much as the Germans.

On 2 August 1942, a long column of German motorised infantry from the 4th Panzer Army stormed the town of Kotelnikovo, 110 miles south-west of Stalingrad (12). Two days later, the 4th Panzer Army crossed the Askay River in its drive on Stalingrad. A few hours after, the city of Voroshilovsk fell on August 5th. Its airport would be used by the Luftwaffe to execute bombing raids on Soviet oil routes. On August 6th, the southern Russian towns of Tikhoretsk and Armavir, 80 miles apart, were taken within hours of each other in the separate advance towards the Caucasus.

On 9 August 1942, special forces led by Waffen-SS officer Adrian von Fölkersam captured the city of Maikop without a fight, at the base of the Caucasus Mountains. In fear of a major German assault, Soviet forces were fleeing in disarray from Maikop, ignoring Stalin’s order. Quickly following von Fölkersam’s units in the rear, the 1st Panzer Army then occupied Maikop, but found the surrounding area had endured scorched earth tactics. It would prove difficult to exploit Maikop’s famous oil reserves. On reaching Maikop the 1st Panzer Army, commanded by Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist, had advanced more than 300 miles in less than two weeks.

On 10 August 1942, the German 6th Army crossed the lower Don River. German officers, pausing for breath under the sun and looking into their binoculars, could clearly see the outer suburbs of Stalingrad before them. Having been shorn of much of their armour the month before, Hitler now expected the 6th Army to take the whole of Stalingrad by October 1942. This industrial city stretched for 25 miles along the western bank of the Volga River. (13)

Southwards, the march to the Caucasus was indeed advancing as planned. On August 15th, the German 23rd Panzer Division captured the town of Georgiyevsk, deep into south-western Russia (14). They were positioned 1,500 miles from Berlin, and within striking range of the frontiers of Georgia.

At this time, in the middle of August 1942, Speer travelled to see an elated Hitler at the FHQ Vinnitsa Werwolf, and he noticed that “The entire headquarters was in splendid humour”. Speer joined the dictator outside the latter’s modest bungalow, and they sat down on a bench under trees to discuss the next steps.

Hitler explained how they would now “advance south of the Caucasus and then help the rebels in Iran and Iraq against the English. Another thrust will be directed along the Caspian Sea towards Afghanistan and India”. Addressing Speer and several industrialists the next day, Hitler expected that “by the end of 1943 we will pitch our tents in Tehran, in Baghdad, and on the Persian Gulf. Then the oil wells will at last be dry as far as the English are concerned”. (15)

Within a few months, these dreams of conquest would be shattered. Spread out across endless expanses of the western and south-western Soviet Union by the autumn of 1942, the Germans and their Axis allies were under growing strain.

Pauwels, the experienced world war historian, wrote of the Germans that “when their offensive inevitably petered out, in September of that year [1942], their weakly held lines were stretched along many hundreds of kilometres, presenting a perfect target for a Soviet counterattack. This is the context in which an entire German army was bottled up, and ultimately destroyed, in Stalingrad”. (16)

As further noted by Pauwels, the real turning point of the war in Europe did not occur at Stalingrad, but in fact took place a year before in late 1941, when the Germans failed to capture Moscow. By 1942, the Wehrmacht was irreversibly weakened, their aura of invincibility gone, in spite of all of the above victories.

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

1 Warfare History Network, “Doomed: How the Battle of Berlin Ended Nazi Germany for Good”, The National Interest, 7 April 2020, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/doomed-how-battle-berlin-ended-nazi-germany-good-141872

2 Hans Baur, I Was Hitler’s Pilot (Frontline Books, 30 Sep. 2019), p. 174

3 Stuart Smith, Otto Skorzeny: The Devil’s Disciple (Osprey Publishing, 20 Sep. 2018), p. 227

4 Baur, I Was Hitler’s Pilot, p. 175

5 Georg Woodman, 2033-The Century After: How the World Would Look/Be If Nazi Germany & Empire Japan Had Won World War II (Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Agency, LLC (October 18, 2017), p. 128

6 Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries, (Fontana, London, 1977) p. 58

7 Jacques R. Pauwels, “75 Years Ago, the Battle of Stalingrad”, Global Research, 5 February 2018, https://www.globalresearch.ca/75-years-ago-the-battle-of-stalingrad/5628316

8 C. Peter Chen, “Battle of Sevastopol”, World War II Database, January 2008, https://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=214

9 Donald A. Bertke, Gordon Smith, Don Kindell, World War II Sea War, Vol 6: The Allies Halt the Axis Advance (Bertke Publications; null edition May 31, 2014), p. 337

10 Baur, I Was Hitler’s Pilot, pp. 134-135

11 David Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad, Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality, 18 November 2012, https://www.bradford-delong.com/2012/11/liveblogging-world-war-ii-november-18-1942.html

12 Jochen Hellbeck, Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich (Public Affairs, 11 Oct. 2010)

13 Hellbeck, Stalingrad

14 Robert Forczyk, The Caucasus 1942-43: Kleist’s Race for Oil (Osprey Publishing, 19 May 2015)

15 Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries, pp. 58-60

16 Pauwels, “75 Years Ago, The Battle of Stalingrad”, Global Research, https://www.globalresearch.ca/75-years-ago-the-battle-of-stalingrad/5628316

Featured image: The Brandenburg Gate amid the ruins of Berlin, June 1945 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

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***

After twenty years, the United States government – and the forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) – will depart from Afghanistan. They said that they came to do two things: to destroy al-Qaeda, which had launched an attack on the United States on 11 September 2001, and to destroy the Taliban, which had given al-Qaeda a base. After great loss of life and the further destruction of Afghan society, the US departs – as it did from Vietnam in 1975 – in defeat: al-Qaeda [covertly supported by the US] has regrouped in different parts of the world, and the Taliban is set to return to the capital, Kabul.

The speaker of Afghanistan’s parliament, Mir Rahman Rahmani, warns that the country is poised to enter a new period of civil war, a repeat of the terrible civil war that ran from 1992 to 2001. The United Nations calculates that in the first quarter of 2021, civilian casualties rose by 29% compared to last year, while the number of women casualties increased by 37%. It is unclear if there will be further talks between the Taliban, the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani, the Turks, the Qataris, the United States, and the United Nations. Afghanistan sits on the brink of further violence, whose impact can so aptly be described by the words of the poet Zarlasht Hafeez:

The sorrow and grief, these black evenings,
Eyes full of tears and times full of sadness,
These burnt hearts, the killing of youths,
These unfulfilled expectations and unmet hopes of brides

‘Saving’ Afghan women, advancing the cause of human rights: these words have lost meaning after two decades. As Eduardo Galeano put it, ‘Every time the US “saves” a country, it converts it either into a madhouse or a cemetery’.

Alicia Leal (Cuba), Un soldado de América, 1997.

The US government calculates that this war, which would enter its twentieth year, is the longest US war in the modern period (the US engagement in Vietnam lasted for fourteen years, from 1961 to 1975).

But this war in Afghanistan is not the longest war prosecuted by the United States government. There are two US wars that continue: a war against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or DPRK (since August 1950) and against Cuba (since September 1959).

Neither of these conflicts have ended, with the US continuing to execute hybrid wars against both the DPRK and Cuba. A hybrid war does not necessarily require the full arsenal of a military to come into force; it is a war fought through the control of information and financial flows as well as the use of economic sanctions and illicit means such as sabotage. There is no question that the longest and unfinished US wars have been against Korea and Cuba.

Sixty years ago, on 17 April 1961, the CIA’s Brigade 2506 landed at Cuba’s Playa Girón (‘Bay of Pigs’). The Cuban people resisted this invasion as they would six decades of hybrid war against their sovereign revolutionary processes. Cuba has never threatened the United States; it never has violated the UN Charter of 1945. The United States, on the other hand, has routinely threatened the Cuban people. In October 1962, when the Soviets sent a missile cover to protect Cuba, General Maxwell Taylor, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, planned for a full-scale invasion. In this now-declassified memorandum, Taylor pointed out that such a military venture might result in 18,500 casualties on the US side because of the determination of the Cubans to protect their land and their political project. The plot was to reinstate the old Cuban oligarchy that had sought refuge in Miami and turn Cuba back into a gangster’s paradise.

After the Cuban government sent troops to assist the national liberation project in Angola in November 1975, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told his team on 24 March 1976, ‘if we decide to use military power, it must succeed. There should be no halfway measures – we would get no award for using military power in moderation. If we decide on a blockade, it must be ruthless, rapid, and efficient’. The US planned to mine Havana’s harbour and bomb Cuba’s cities. ‘I think we are going to have to smash Castro’, Kissinger told US President Gerald Ford. Ford replied, ‘I agree’. Such is the attitude of the US government, from 1961 to the present.

Carlos Garaicoa (Cuba), Puzzle la Malenka, 2009.

Before he left office in January 2021, US President Donald Trump placed Cuba on the US government’s ‘state sponsors of terrorism’ list. Seventy-five US lawmakers asked his successor, President Joe Biden, to reverse this decision. On 16 April, Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki told the briefing room that ‘A Cuba policy shift or additional steps is currently not among the President’s top foreign policy priorities’. Biden, in other words, has decided to passively continue Trump’s policy, dictated to him by the likes of Republican Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott from Florida and Senator Ted Cruz from Texas (as well as Democratic Senator Robert Menendez from New Jersey). Biden has opted to persist in this cruel six-decade long policy to suffocate the Cuban people.

Just after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the US government made it clear that it would not tolerate a sovereign Cuba only 145 kilometres from Florida’s coast. Cuba’s commitment to people over profit is a standing rebuke of the hypocrisies of the United States rulers. This has been clarified once more during this pandemic, during which the infection and death rates per million are strikingly higher in the US than in Cuba (recent figures indicate the US has recorded 1,724 deaths per million, whereas Cuba stands at 47 deaths per million). While the US locked itself into vaccine nationalism, Cuba’s Henry Reeve Brigade of doctors continued with their work amongst the world’s poorest people (for this, of course, they deserve the Nobel Prize for Peace).

Unable to successfully invade Cuba, the US has persisted with a tight blockade of the island. After the fall of the USSR, which had provided Cuba with ways to circumvent the blockade, the US attempted to tighten its grip on the island. US lawmakers then attacked Cuba’s economy through the Cuban Democracy Act (1992) and the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act (1996) – both laws with names that demean the words in them. From 1992 onwards, the UN General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly for the United States to end this blockade. A group of UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteurs wrote a statement calling on the US to withdraw these measures, which have only made Cuba’s attempt to fight the pandemic harder.

The Cuban government reported that between April 2019 and March 2020, Cuba lost $5 billion in potential trade due to the blockade; over the past almost six decades, it has lost the equivalent of $144 billion. Now the US government has deepened the sanctions against shipping companies that bring oil to the island. The head of US Southern Command, Admiral Craig Faller, described Cuba’s medical internationalism as a ‘regional corrosive influence’. There is cruelty in Washington.

Far from the bitterness of the US government, the Cuban communists held their eighth Party Congress, where the discussion was on how to improve the state enterprises and how to innovate to meet the aspirations of the Cuban people. Deputy Prime Minister Inés María Chapman said that the party members must be active in their communities to build and defend socialism. Rafael Santiesteban Pozo, president of the National Association of Small Farmers, said that working people must produce more with what resources are available. Minister of Economy and Planning Alejandro Gil pointed to the need for greater efficiency in the state enterprise system, the expansion of self-employment, and the expansion of cooperatives.

These are serious people who recognise the problems but are not overwhelmed by them; they are part of a project that has fought to defend its sovereignty against enormous odds since 1959. Defeat is not in their vocabulary. Their agenda is hopeful, unlike the bilious agenda that comes from the US government and the Miami-based Cuban oligarchy.

At this Congress, Raúl Castro stepped down from his post. Castro, one of the original Cuban revolutionaries, had been imprisoned for his role in the Moncada uprising of 1953. Upon his release, he went to Mexico with his brother Fidel and then returned on the Granma to lead the rebellion against the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. After the victory of the Revolution, Castro served in the government and as a leader in the Communist Party, guiding it alongside Fidel and others through the difficult Special Period (1991-2000) and then continuing to lead it after Fidel’s death in 2016. His quiet role in defending and elaborating the Cuban Revolution has been immense.

José Rodríguez Fuster (Cuba), Granma, 2013.

After the Playa Girón attack by the CIA, the Spanish poet Jaime Gil de Biedma wrote a poem about Cuba called ‘During the Invasion’ (collected in Moralidades, 1966). The Venezuelan poet Diego Sequera translated this poem for us as we celebrate the 60^th anniversary of the defeat of the US on those beaches:

The morning newspaper is open on
the tablecloth. The sun glows in the glasses.
Lunch at the small restaurant,
a working day.

Most of us remain silent. Someone speaks with an elusive voice;
these are conversations with special sorrow
about the things that always happen and
that never end, or that end in disgrace.

I think that at this time of day, the sun rises in Ciénaga;
nothing is yet decided, combat doesn’t stop,
and I look in the news for some hope
that doesn’t come from Miami.

Oh, Cuba in the distant dawn of the tropics,
when the sun is simmering, and the air is clear:
may your land sow tanks and your broken sky
be grey from the wings of airplanes.

With you are the people of sugar cane,
the man of the streetcar, those from the restaurants,
the thousands of us that today search in the world
for a bit of hope that doesn’t come from Miami.

Hope comes from the warm sun of Cuba.

Warmly,

Vijay Prashad

This article was first published by the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

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Featured image: Mohsen Taasha Wahidi (Afghanistan), Rebirth of the Red, 2017.

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Tens of thousands of people have sued Monsanto owner Bayer AG alleging their non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and other cancers were caused by glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide.

Three cases brought by Lee Johnson, Edwin Hardeman, and Alva and Alberta Pilliod went to trial.

And in each case, the courts found the Roundup caused the cancers, that Monsanto hid the risks, and that compensatory and punitive damages were justified.

Bayer wants to resolve the thousands of remaining cancer claims with an $8 billion to $9 billion compensation fund. Those cases are being negotiated by Monsanto lawyers and the lawyers representing the cancer victims.

But last year, in a surprise to the Monsanto plaintiffs lawyers, a separate settlement was put forward to handle everyone else who might bring a case against Monsanto in the future – including people who have yet to get sick or contact a lawyer.

A handful of class action lawyers, led by Elizabeth Cabraser and Sam Issacharoff, proposed a settlement that would put a four year hold on any Roundup litigation against Bayer, prohibit punitive damage claims against Bayer, and set up a secret science panel.

That proposal was rejected by a federal judge sitting in San Francisco – U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria.

Now, the settlement lawyers have come back with a revised $2 billion proposal.

A May 12 public hearing is scheduled before Judge Chhabria.

More than 300 lawyers have challenged the settlement.

One of those lawyers is Gerson Smoger (image on the right) of Dallas, Texas. (Smoger filed a 57 page brief in opposition to the settlement on March 31, 2021.)

“I’m challenging this because it’s an abomination to the tort system,” Smoger told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “Monsanto continues making this material without any restrictions. Roundup will stay on the market. People’s future lifetime exposure to Roundup is included in the settlement, even though they haven’t been exposed yet for a product that is going to continue to go on the market.”

“There is a four year stay on all litigation. And the stay is not just against people with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. That stay includes all contract claims against Monsanto. Nothing can be brought for four years. At the end of four years, every single person in the United States who has been exposed to Roundup can never sue Monsanto for punitive damages or medical monitoring.”

What does the settlement offer deliver to people who are exposed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma?

“If you have non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma during the period of the active settlement, then there are provisions for amounts of money you can apply for within a settlement grid. Theoretically you can go up to $200,000. But I don’t believe you can go above $65,000. The best you can probably do is between $25,000 and $65,000 for your injury of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which probably costs you between $100,000 and $200,000 to treat, none of which you are entitled to get reimbursed for.”

Compare that to the tens of millions awarded to the three cases that went to trial.

“They were each in the tens of millions or more in punitive damages. And for those people, if they were covered under this proposed settlement, they would get somewhere between $10,000 and $25,000.”

I thought the top number was $200,000.

“It is. But if under the proposed settlement, you go through rungs on a ladder. And if you miss any of those rungs on a ladder, you are stuck at a lower level. Three of the cases that went to trial – Hardeman and the Pilliods – would have been stuck at the second level because of how old they were. Mr. Johnson didn’t have a long enough exposure to get up to the third level, so he would be stuck at the second level. The second level is between $10,000 and $25,000.”

This wasn’t the first such proposed settlement.

A previous settlement was rejected by Judge Chhabria. How is that settlement different from this?

“That settlement had a private secret science panel that would make a determination binding on the class. The panel would be put together by the proponents of the settlement and Monsanto and they had people operating in secret. And they would conclude what the literature said.”

The previous settlement had the science panel. Does this settlement have it also?

“It has it well dressed. The dressing is better, the result is a little different. They have a science panel whose conclusions will be determined the same way. At the end of the day, if the science panel decides no causation, as it likely would, the juries will be told that is a stipulated fact for any opt-out. And the judge is not allowed to tell the jury that they could look elsewhere. The judge has to be silent on it. And that judge is told that an independent science panel as a stipulated fact has made a determination.”

Why did the judge reject the first agreement?

“One was that the science panel took away from the province of the jury to decide. The other was the difficulty of giving notice to such a large amorphous group of exposed people, the vast majority of them being future claimants.”

“I argued this issue of not binding future claimants in the Agent Orange case before the U.S. Supreme Court. You should not be able to have a large class that is not identified and take away their rights in the future when they will not have the information necessary to make an informed choice as to whether they want to be part of the settlement or not.”

“And that’s what this settlement does. If you don’t have non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, you are not going to pay attention to this case. You are not going to think about the fact that ten years ago you spent five years working every summer with Roundup. You are going to think about it when you are diagnosed and find out that there are things you can’t do, that you can’t have punitive damages in your case. But you are not going to find that out when you are not injured and can’t imagine that you are going to get non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”

What is the purported reason put forward by the proponents of the settlement for the four year stay on litigation?

“The best they say is that it is essential to Monsanto. They don’t give a reason that it would help the class. One of the difficulties is that a number of people who get non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma during the course of the four years will die before the four years are over.”

And that’s because non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma kills something like 20 percent in the first year?

“Exactly. Lee Johnson got a priority under California law to have his case tried faster, while he was still alive. People are going to get sick and die and not be able to get near a courtroom.”

What’s the purported reason for a ban on punitive damages?

“That is given up to get the settlement. They say they have sufficiently paid in compensatory damages. But compensatory damages are for compensation. They are for the injury. They are not designed for punishment in any fashion. In fact, any compensatory settlement says that they are not settling for punitive damages. But that is what they are saying – we have paid enough in compensatory damages and therefore we shouldn’t be punished.”

How were these lawyers chosen to do this?

“This settlement is patched on to the MDL by law firms that have no part whatsoever in the organization of this case. Did these lawyers say – there is a hole in the negotiations of this case, we’ll negotiate it, we will wrap this up? Or did Monsanto come to them and say – we need somebody to wrap this up? It’s rather significant that the actual lawyers that have been bringing this MDL litigation are not bringing this class action. It is not them. It is people that are well known for settling class actions.”

“Elizabeth Cabraser has a great deal of experience in large scale settlements. What she does not have any experience in is Roundup or this particular litigation. She is foreign to this litigation.”

Who is representing Monsanto in this case?

“Monsanto hasn’t filed any papers. They have a number of law firms. But they have not filed any papers yet in support of the class.”

Does there need to be some kind of settlement for people who have not yet spoken with a lawyer?

“No. There does not need to be a settlement. These injuries are substantial.”

You would ban glyphosate?

“The elimination of the product is the way to go. Under our laws, it would be difficult to ban. But you would structure it out of business. Because the way our laws work, you have to phase it out. Yes, it needs to be banned.”

Did the plaintiffs lawyers know that this settlement was being negotiated? Or was it a surprise?

“The first one last summer was a surprise. Clearly there was a belief that there was going to be a plan B. But the settlement negotiations have not involved the people most intimately a part of the litigation. They didn’t bring this to the table. There is that $8 billion to $9 billion attempt at a settlement. And then Monsanto is on this separate track with other lawyers to get this global resolution that they didn’t try to get with the people involved in the litigation.”

Why would these class action attorneys tie the hands of victims? No punitives. No lawsuits for four years. Limited amounts of recoveries even if they entered the settlement agreement?

“It’s hard for me to say. And this has occurred over the years for both Elizabeth and Sam. I believe the importance of the tort system is in vindicating individual rights. Individuals have a right to decide their own fate and bring their own lawsuits. We should always weigh in favor of individual decisions to be represented in that fashion. Elizabeth and Sam believe efficiencies of resolutions are more important than individual needs. That’s the best I can say.”

Have you spoken with any of the settlement lawyers about this case?

“The answer is no. But I know the settlement lawyers. There are others that would give less beneficent reasons as to why this settlement is taking place. But I have considered the three people who are proposing this to be friends for a very long time. And I’d rather think that we just view the world differently.”

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Ever since reports have surfaced in recent days that people who have chosen NOT to receive the experimental COVID-19 shots but have been exposed to those who have received them, and have suffered what appear to be infections coming from these fully “vaccinated” people, affecting mainly women who have reported menstruation difficulties, heavy bleeding, miscarriages, and reduction of breast milk, I have been watching my newsfeed to see if any of the dissenting doctors and scientists we feature regularly here at Health Impact News would address these issues.

Fortunately, a team of 5 doctors in the U.S., all of whom we have featured in the past here at Health Impact News and are highly qualified to address this topic, just held a round-table discussion a couple of days ago to address these issues.

The issues they discuss affect ALL of us in the U.S. (and around the world) right now, and it is imperative that you take 79 minutes of your time to watch this video.

Not only do these highly qualified doctors discuss why they think this is happening, they also give practical advice at the end about what we can be doing right now to protect ourselves and stop this attack on the human race by the Globalists seeking to reduce the world’s population.

Every single one of these doctors believe that these shots are NOT vaccines, but bioweapons designed to kill human beings.

Whatever else you are doing when you come across this video, it is highly unlikely that anything else you do the rest of your day will be more important than watching this video so you can be informed of the evil effects of these injections that are being censored in the corporate media and Big Tech social media.

Then share this video with as many people as you can.

This is from our Bitchute channel, and it will also be available on our Rumble channel.

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A new study conducted by MIT scientists and released this week reveals that the six foot social distancing and limited occupancy guidelines made law in most of the civilized world have done little to slow the spread of COVID-19, and suggests the only way to reduce the spread of COVID-19 is to limit exposure to highly populated areas and areas where people are physically exerting themselves, such as gyms, or areas where people are singing or speaking, such as churches.

The study reveals that the social distancing guidelines employed throughout much of the world for over a year have done nothing to limit the spread of COVID-19, suggesting that the adaption of the guidelines did not stop the spread of the of the China-originated virus, and it can only be slowed with the employment of severe lockdowns. Paradoxically, states and cities that have engaged in severe lockdowns have seen the largest spikes of COVID-19.

“We argue there really isn’t much of a benefit to the 6-foot rule, especially when people are wearing masks,” MIT professor Martin Z. Bazant said, as reported by NBC. “It really has no physical basis because the air a person is breathing while wearing a mask tends to rise and comes down elsewhere in the room so you’re more exposed to the average background than you are to a person at a distance.”

In other words, widespread mask wearing may simply change the physical vectors of transmission within a given room rather than stop it, effectively making six foot distancing rules pointless.

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An exposé of the corruption of medicine by the pharmaceutical industry at every level, from exploiting the vulnerable destitute for drug testing, through manipulation of research data, to disease mongering and promoting drugs that do more harm than good.

Authors, Professor Jon Jureidini and Dr Leemon McHenry, made critical contributions to exposing the scientific misconduct in two infamous trials of antidepressants. Ghostwritten publications of these trials were highly influential in prescriptions of paroxetine (Paxil) and citalopram (Celexa) in paediatric and adolescent depression, yet both trials (Glaxo Smith Kline’s paroxetine study 329 and Forest Laboratories’ citalopram study CIT-MD-18) seriously misrepresented the efficacy and safety data.

The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the Crisis of Credibility in Clinical Research (Wakefield Press, 2020) provides a detailed account of these studies and argues that medicine desperately needs to re-evaluate its relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. Without a basis for independent evaluation of the results of randomised, placebo-controlled clinical trials, there can be no confidence in evidence-based medicine.

Science demands rigorous, critical examination and especially severe testing of hypotheses to function properly, but this is exactly what is lacking in academic medicine.

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It is established that public masking does not stop the spread of viruses, and that prolonged use is detrimental to health. The sudden mandating of masks in 2020 has been a program of mass behavior modification based on constant repetition of a lie. The mask is intended as the first of a one-two punch combination, the second — and the ultimate goal — is mandated vaccination. Requiring masks is a means of getting the public to warm to the idea of minding governmental orders.

Laughing at “face diapers” as trivial is a serious mistake. They are a psychological assault beyond adverse physical effects and are part of the isolating strategy that includes “social distancing” and home quarantine. The crucial importance of the mask in the larger scheme to vaccinate the whole of society is seen In the unyielding coercion by official public health authorities to keep people masked.

To acknowledge public masking as the fraud that it is would spell doom for the Gates Foundation/Gavi Vaccine Alliance/WHO project to vaccinate the world. That is why the pharmaceutical industry is doubling down on masking with all of its considerable power, which it exerts through the World Health Organization (WHO), state organizations such as the CDC, and the university-affiliated schools of public health that send forth the “public health experts” seen in mass media and in communities across the nation.

Public health is primarily about policy, policy is about politics, and politics is a specialty of Big Pharma. What has come to be known as “public health” has been captured absolutely by the pharmaceutical industry to become a mechanism for framing policies according to its interests. The uppermost interest now of the pharmaceutical-governmental complex is to vaccinate the world and to make regular vaccination a mandatory aspect of the ’new normality’ of a globalized society.

As billionaires have joined the pharmaceutical industry’s global vaccine initiative, it has formed an unrivaled financial power, magnified as it links to the World Economic Forum (WEF) with its goal of The Great Reset of the world economy.

This interview of bioethicist Leemon McHenry, author of “The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine”, is a revelation of the degree to which this collective power is so pervasive that it has been able to get its ghost-written articles into the most distinguished medical journals, thereby dragging down the reputations of the journals and trust in mainstream medicine itself.

Trace the backgrounds of public health experts displayed by mainstream media and placed in advisory positions in state governments, and you find virtually all derive from, or connect to, university-linked schools of public health that are awash in pharmaceutical money, e.g. Bloomberg School at Johns Hopkins, T. H. Chan School at Harvard, Rollins School at Emory, and the Milken Institute School at George Washington University. These high-profile “experts” hew to an official blueprint opposed by many medical voices from around the world that are being scrubbed from public awareness because of media ‘lying by omission’ or through active ‘deplatforming’.

Society has been coached to rely on the pronouncements of media-showcased experts for its views of world events.

If any one expert could be understood to personify medical opinion in the service of mass vaccination, it would, these days, be Dr. Leana Wen, a professor at the Milken Institute School. Young, articulate, smooth and telegenic, and with a power-packed bio — (“Young Global Leader” for the World Economic Forum, “Global Health Fellow” at the World Health Organization, one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People, member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), consultant for the China Medical Board, and much more) — she hammers mask and vaccine advocacy into the public mind.

You see her on CNN, then on PBS, then on MSNBC, and you see her columns in the Washington Post, that CIA molder of public opinion:

“As more states lift restrictions … there will be no carrot left to offer.” –Leana Wen, Washington Post

“[T]he vaccine is the ticket back to pre-pandemic life … we have a very narrow window to tie reopening policy to vaccination status [and] if everything is reopened, then what’s the carrot going to be? How are we going to incentivize people to actually get the vaccine? [O]therwise, people are going to go out and enjoy these freedoms anyway. –Leana Wen on CNN

“[A]fter vaccination … still keep on wearing a mask … We are now in this race of vaccines versus variants … We need to understand masks and vaccines as the ticket back to pre-pandemic normal … Then, [after vaccination] you can travel [and] see your family.” –Leana Wen on PBS News Hour

Wen reveals that lockdowns are related not to well being of the public but to manipulation of the public.

Take the jab, she says, and then you can have your freedoms back.

Her’s is a classic example of one of Singer’s listed techniques for controlling humans: “Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments, and experiences in order to promote … group-approved behaviors.” Lifting lockdowns is the “carrot” she refers to, dangled in front of a herd longing to be free, and she frets that the herd is wanting to “enjoy these freedoms anyway” without waiting for permission from the army of ‘public health experts’ she so perfectly exemplifies. Oh dear, she’s declaring, opening up society too soon negates the carrot that could be used to force public compliance.

And she talks of a “ticket back to pre-pandemic life”. Really? Take a look!

There is no ‘going back’ in The WEF’s Reset plan, and there is no way that Wen could be ignorant of that fact. Any figure claiming a path to pre-2020 normality at this late date should not be trusted further.

Reading the signs it’s obvious that what is planned (as she perhaps unwittingly reveals with “this race of vaccines versus variants”) is a future of new “variants” and “mutant strains” coming in wave after wave, to be attacked with ever more vaccines ’til the end of time — strategy for an unending river of riches for the industry now in firm control of ‘western medicine’. Anyone who hasn’t had at least a glimmer of suspicion about this global show by now is either hopelessly gullible or living in willful ignorance.

It’s disheartening to watch Wen, with her wealth of polished credentials and honors, articulating bilge. But then, she is representative of the uniform message coming from schools of public health. How has such a situation arisen?

During a discussion of journalistic self-censorship, Noam Chomsky said to his interviewer, “I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying, but what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting”.

Chomsky is referring to a winnowing process existing within establishment systems that identify early in careers those with certain desired traits and inclinations for advancement. So it is, apparently, in the industry-driven world of official public health policy, as its army of experts proclaim mask and vaccine orthodoxy.

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Bill Willers is Emeritus Professor of Biology at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

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In February the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, made it a priority to phone Rui Figueiredo, the Foreign Affairs and Defense Minister of Cape Verde. They spoke about commerce and “security.” ^[1]

Why is the tiny African nation of Cape Verde (population 550,000) a U.S. priority? It is because the U.S. is behind China in the latest “scramble for Africa.”

Source: operationworld.org

To rectify its position, vis-à-vis China, in Africa, U.S. President Joe Biden pledged to put values at the heart of his administration’s China policy. Since entering office, he has called on the world’s democracies to “gird for a new era of strategic competition with China.”^[2]

To cut through U.S. rhetoric and reveal the covert value system of the U.S. in Africa, the word “security” is instructive.

Antony Blinken’s concern for the “security” of Cape Verde automatically activates a destructive infrastructure that’s summed up in the Americanisms: “war on drugs,” “war on terror” and the “United States African Command” (AFRICOM). War and its latest accoutrements actually define U.S. values in Africa.

A Pentagon map, for example, shows a network of 29 bases stretching from one side of Africa to the other.

Map of U.S. bases in Africa. [Source: bing.com]

The U.S. at the same time has provided billions of dollars in security assistance to local partners, conducted persistent counterterrorism operations that include commando raids, combat by U.S. Special Operations forces in at least 13 African countries between 2013 and 2017, and a record number of U.S. airstrikes in Somalia (just over one attack per week in 2019).

The Chinese by contrast have focused on the development of large infrastructural projects across the continent, which have been financed in part as a form of payback for Chinese exploitation of Africa’s mineral wealth.

Cape Verde has few mineral resources, and China’s investments there are mainly designed to spread goodwill and convey a positive image on the African continent.^[3]

The centerpiece of China’s efforts in Cape Verde is the opening of a university in Praia—the capital city of the archipelago.

China’s government has just funded the building of a campus that includes 34 laboratories, five auditoriums, a convention center with capacity for 654 people, and dormitories with 382 beds, in addition to classrooms, computers and reading rooms, a library, cafeterias and sport facilities. It was built by China’s LongXin Construction Group.^[4]

In Cape Verde, China has also funded the expansion of the presidential and government palaces and a national stadium, which has been hailed by then-ambassador Su Jian as “the greatest construction after independence.”

The juxtaposition between China’s spectacular contributions to Cape Verdean society and U.S. militarism captures two contemporary approaches to Africa. In simple terms, one involves the barrel of a gun and the other involves a wheelbarrow.

One is marked by violence and racism and the other by a solidarity with roots in the Third World movement. One is imperialist and the other, to a certain degree, liberationist.

Kickstarting the Slave Trade

The tragic humiliation of Africa began in Cape Verde. In 1462, Portugal began the European colonization of tropical Africa on the island of Santiago—in a settlement then called Ribeira Grande.^[5]

In the process, the Portuguese kick-started the Atlantic slave trade that eventually spawned the USA. Or, as Walter Rodney put it in his seminal volume entitled How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Africa developed Europe at the same rate as Europe underdeveloped Africa.

Painting of the Portuguese slave trade in Cape Verde. [Source: cratediggs.blogspot.com]

Although not entirely analogous, China’s century of humiliation echoed what happened in Africa. The British colonization of a tropical island (Hong Kong) triggered fragmentation and the obnoxious opium trade—the trade which gave rise to powerful U.S. dynasties and U.S. institutions (Forbes, the Astors, the Delanos, U.S. Steel, Ford, General Motors, and the universities of Harvard, Yale and Princeton).^[6]

The humiliation of Africa and China at the hands of Europe and the U.S. cannot be brushed aside. When considering China’s current investment in Africa and Africa’s openness to this investment, it is imperative to include the long African and Chinese struggles against Western imperialism.

The founders of modern China and modern Cape Verde—Mao Zedong and Amilcar Cabral—were two of the greatest anti-imperialists of the 20^th century. And both nations still tap into the Third-World perspective to develop their people.

For example, China’s Belt and Road Initiative—of which Cape Verde is a strategic part—is boldly uniting the economies of Asia, Africa and Latin America. It is the materialization of the South-South alternative which first emerged in the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia.

Map of China’s one-belt-one-road initiative. [Source: allafrica.com]

The 20^th century struggle against Western imperialism was even more global than imperialism itself. To bring down the Portuguese empire, for instance, required not just pan-Africanism but universalism (the equality of all races and all nations). Amilcar Cabral identified this in his speeches and writing:

“One should not forget that the African revolution is in the service of the peace and progress of humanity as a whole. If the African peoples succeed in taking into their hands, exploit and develop rationally all the material and human resources of their countries, it will be a decisive contribution to world peace, to the total disappearance of imperialism …”

“One should not forget that whatever the particularities of the African case and the possible originality of African societies, the laws of their development are the same as those of all the other human societies.”^[7]

These were not abstract thoughts. Cabral, in the 1960s, explicitly connected the struggle for freedom in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau with universalistic societies throughout the world.

Cabral and other leaders of PAIGC [African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde] became regular guests at the Chinese embassy in Conakry [Guinea]. In 1960, the PAIGC received an invitation from the Chinese Committee for Afro-Asian Solidarity to visit China. A delegation from the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) was invited as well. During this visit, China agreed to use their military academies to train combatants from both the PAIGC and the MPLA.

As a result of Cabral’s leadership and diplomacy, China would emerge as one of Guinea-Bissau’s [and Cape Verde’s] first supporters in the early stage of its struggle for independence. China provided the PAIGC with a great diversity of support, from weaponry to assistance broadcasting radio messages denouncing the regular, horrific crimes of the Portuguese military in Guinea-Bissau. With support from China on one hand, and Portuguese brutality on the other, the anti-colonial struggle intensified between 1963 and 1974.^[8]

After the collapse of Portuguese imperialism in 1974, and the independence of Cape Verde in 1975, the relationships Cape Verde made during its struggle against Western racism continued. None was more important or more lasting than that with China.

Since its own birth in 1949, the People’s Republic of China has been supporting the construction of an Africa free from imperialism. This revolutionary narrative—in one way or the other—forms the backbone of China’s modern engagement with the continent.

Zhou Enlai, the first Premier of the People’s Republic of China, was a key signatory to the ten Bandung principles in 1955—which outlined Afro-Asian solidarity. These guiding points were based on the Charter of the United Nations and its idea of peaceful cooperation. But explicit, in the principles, was the belief “in the equality of all races and … the equality of all nations large and small.”^[9]

Zhou Enlai signs autograph for an admirer at the 1955 Bandung Conference. [Source: chinadaily.com]

The U.S. response to this egalitarian initiative within the Third World was an act of covert war: The CIA planted a bomb on the airplane it believed was transporting Zhou Enlai to Bandung. On April 11, 1955, 16 people died in the mid-air explosion between Hong Kong and Indonesia. The Chinese Premier, however, was on a different aircraft.^[10]

In the decades following the Bandung Conference, China outlined its position regarding Africa more clearly. Speaking in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1964, Zhou Enlai said:

“Although the Chinese people and the African peoples speak different languages and are thousands of miles apart, we have similarly experienced aggression and oppression by imperialism and colonialism, and we face the common fighting tasks of opposing imperialism and building up our respective countries. We understand each other best and we share each other’s feelings.” ^[11]

And, significantly, this message of solidarity and common struggle against Western racism continued after the death of Mao in 1976.

In 1996 the Chinese leader, Jiang Zemin, speaking to the Organization of African Unity (OAU), stated that the Chinese and African people “never have … had any conflicts between them.” Instead, “both [have] suffered enormously under colonialists and foreign aggression.” And as a result, they are “joining hands in building the solid foundation of Sino-African friendship and cooperation …” The developmental goal was to eliminate “the unjust and inequitable economic order left over from the past.” ^[12]

This decades-long anti-imperialist approach to Africa was then institutionalized in 2000 in the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). And it was clarified in the words of China’s leaders when they addressed the first Forum in Beijing. Premier Zhu Rongji spoke of the

“road towards friendship and cooperation [that] is covered with the footprints of Chinese and African leaders of several generations….”

Image on the right: Zhu Rongji [Source: britannica.com]

He spoke of this “joint struggle waged by the Chinese and African peoples shoulder by shoulder … [to create] a fair and rational new international political and economic order.” ^[13]

And President Jiang Zemin could not have been more explicit:

“[H]aving smashed the shackles of the colonial rule that lasted for several centuries, the African people won their national liberation and independence … and the Chinese people did away with imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic capitalism …

“We have come to the conclusion after a review of the history of the past one hundred years that the Chinese people and the African people both treasure independence … and … are both important forces for world peace and common development.”^[14]

This anti-colonial value system underlies China’s investment in Africa today. And it helps to explain not only the new Chinese-built university in Cape Verde but also the Chinese-built Poilão dam in Cape Verde—as well as the Chinese-built national stadium in Cape Verde. It explains why China is building a special economic zone in Cape Verde—on the island of São Vicente. And it explains why the U.S. government is today so anxious about Africa.^[15]

However, the fact is that China’s deep anti-imperialist narrative regarding Africa is only credible if there is an opposing deep imperialist narrative. It is only believable if Chinese construction in Africa is countered by imperialist destruction. It only holds water if the imperialist leopard—in Africa—has not changed its spots.

The evidence suggests that it has not. Portugal may have pulled back from Cape Verde and its other colonies, but the U.S. has rushed in to fill its imperialist boots.

In 1949, the U.S. aligned itself with Europe’s empires—U.S. President Joe Biden now calls these “the world’s democracies”—the British, French, Dutch, Belgian and Portuguese. At the time, Africa was still in the grip of these European racists. And one of the objectives of this new alignment—NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)—was to tighten that grip on Africa.

Cape Verde’s hero—Amilcar Cabral—was completely aware of the post-World War II restructuring of imperialism. In 1968, he noted:

“[T]he Portuguese government is able to count more than ever on the effective aid of the NATO allies …

“It is our duty to stress the international character of the Portuguese colonial war against Africa and the important and even decisive role played by the USA … If the Portuguese government is still holding out on the three fronts of the war which it is fighting in Africa, it is because it can count on the overt or covert support of the USA, freely use NATO weapons [and] buy B26 aircraft for the genocide of our people …” ^[16]

Since the assassination of Cabral in 1973, the U.S. and its NATO proxies may have lost their formal grip on Africa; but they continue to strangle Africa militarily. The most blatant example of this is NATO’s destruction of Libya in 2011.

Before the U.S. and its “democratic” partners bombed Libya, that country “had the highest Human Development Index, the lowest infant mortality and the highest life expectancy in all of Africa.”^[17] There was also—at the time of the bombardment—75 Chinese companies (36,000 employees) working inside Libya—constructing housing, railways, telecommunications and hydroelectric facilities. ^[18]

The end result of NATO’s unprovoked act of war against Libya (and Africa) was a catastrophic socio-economic reversal in the region, summarized in headlines such as “Slavery in Libya: Life inside a container”^[19] and “Slavery and Human Trafficking in Libya.”^[20]

When asked about the murder of the man (Muammar Gaddafi) who led Libya to the top of the African human development index, the then U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, succinctly expressed the barbaric values underpinning the U.S. approach to Africa: “We came, we saw, he died.” And then she laughed. ^[21]

War is the language of imperialism and, in Africa today, the U.S. speaks it fluently. Under the cover of “counterterrorism” and “counterinsurgency,” the U.S. and its NATO allies are inserting their forces throughout the continent.

On the one hand, there is the ongoing French Operation Barkhane (2014) that has spread thousands of NATO soldiers across West Africa.

And on the other hand, there is the United States African Command (AFRICOM—founded in 2007). The mission statement of AFRICOM is clear: It exists to “to advance U.S. national interests … and … support U.S. Government foreign policy … through military-to-military activities.” ^[22]

In 2019, just 12 years after its creation, AFRICOM had a “network” of 29 military bases spread across 15 African countries. ^[23]

Indeed, for U.S. leaders Africa is now “a petri dish and a proving ground for the development of a limited power-projection paradigm of drones, Special Operations forces, military advisers, local proxies, and clandestine intelligence missions.” ^[24]

This is alarming for Africa because it recalls the covert role of the U.S. military in post-World War Two Latin America. U.S. “military-to-military activities” in that part of the Third World resulted in neo-fascist dictatorships and “lost decades of development.”

Only a few decades after losing Africa, Western imperialism is back in Africa with a bang. And “Great Power Competition” is its excuse.

NATO’s purpose is to defend the economic order into which it was born. In 1949 the global economy revolved around the North Atlantic and its Bretton Woods system. To guarantee the flow of global wealth toward Western Europe and North America, NATO teamed up with institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).

However, it is this precise order—an order which props up the West at the expense of the Third World—which was challenged by the 1949 Chinese revolution and the decolonization of Africa in the 1960s and 1970s.

The exponential growth of the People’s Republic of China and the current export of that growth to Africa amount now to being a supercharged extension of that challenge.

The struggles for political freedom in Africa, therefore, have transformed into struggles for economic freedom—indeed for economic survival.

After NATO’s wars against African liberation there followed “NATO’s neoliberal attack” on Africa. NATO’s neocolonial debt traps and structural adjustment policies have plagued Africa since the 1980s. In fact, U.S. free-market fundamentalism sabotaged the freedom which Africa fought for.

The values underpinning this U.S. faith in the market—a propos Africa—were revealed in the infamous Summers memo of 1991. At the time Lawrence Summers was Chief Economist and Vice President at the World Bank. In his opinion,

the “under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low [sic] compared to Los Angeles.” ^[25]

In other words, this top U.S. economic strategist was advocating “the dumping of toxic waste in Africa.”^[26]

For many observers, though, it is even worse than that: The dictates of the U.S.-based World Bank and IMF created an “apocalyptic situation” in post-colonial Africa.

“The most basic index of well-being is life itself—how many years a human can expect to live. Yet while other regions’ life expectancy is steadily improving … Africa’s is now going backwards:

“Life expectancy declined in no fewer than 31 African countries between 1995 and 1998.”

The imperialist logic of neoliberalism in Africa is clear: “[It] is actually planned and reminiscent of the paleo-liberal strategy of the British state in the famines in Ireland and India and the Clearances of the Scottish Highlands in the 19th century.”

The objective conclusion can only be that U.S.-trained economists—the disciples of Milton Friedman inside the IMF and World Bank—since the liberation of Africa, “[have] knowingly … incorporated the death of millions as an element in their strategy … Theirs is clearly a strategy of ‘terror from above.’”’^[27]

As the 21^st century began, China entered into this “apocalyptic” U.S.-made situation. And as it did in the 1960s, it changed the orientation of Africa for the better. In contrast to Western “terror from above” (dictates and drones), China has been building up from below.

Since 2011, China has been the biggest player in Africa’s infrastructure boom, claiming a 40% share that continues to rise. Meanwhile, the shares of other players are falling precipitously: Europe declined from 44% to 34%, while the presence of U.S. contractors fell from 24% to just 6.7%. ^[28]

Today’s partnership between Cape Verde and China is the cutting edge of this “construction boom.” In the 1960s these two nations combined to defeat the politics of imperialism. Now they are combining to battle the economics of imperialism: “the unjust and inequitable economic order left over from the past.”

If there is “great power competition” in Africa today, the U.S. has already lost the moral high ground since it remains committed to the infrastructure of imperialism—a system which creates nothing but destabilization. For the U.S., therefore, Africa is first and foremost a “security issue”—a “heart of darkness.”

Africa, however, is not an ahistorical enigma or a prize to be won in a competition. It is a proud continent which broke free from imperialism around the same time as China broke free from imperialism. And at the 1955 Bandung Conference both Africa and China invested in freedom from empire and peaceful cooperation. No evidence to date suggests that China has disavowed the spirit of Bandung.

In stark contrast, the U.S.—around 1950—chose to partner with Western Europe (NATO) rather than with the world. It chose empire. It chose to violently oppose “Bandung.” It chose war, racism and the neoliberal apocalypse. If Africa must now choose between China and the U.S., the choice is obvious.

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Notes

1. Ken Moriyasu, Ryo Nakamura and Kaori Yoshida, “Great power competition: US boosts Africa diplomacy on land and sea,” February 25, 2021, www.asia.nikkei.com
2. Hal Brands and Zack Cooper, “U.S.-Chinese Rivalry Is a Battle Over Values,” March 16, 2021, www.foreignaffairs.com
3. Pedro Ramos, “Cape Verde: A Blueprint for China’s Positive Role in Africa,” The Diplomat, October 28, 2016.
4. Andreia Nogueira, “New multi-million dollar island campus a ‘significant’ expansion,” October 15, 2020, www.universityworldnews.com
5. Ribeira Grande is now called Cidade Velha.
6. Jarele E. Soyinka, “Opulence and Opium: The Legacy of Harvard’s Drug Syndicate,” March 30, 2017, www.thecrimson.com; Martha Bebinger, “How Profits From Opium Shaped 19th-Century Boston,” July 31, 2017, www.wbur.org
7. Amilcar Cabral, speech before the Third Conference of the African Peoples in Cairo, March 1961, Yves Benot, and Nzongola-Ntalaja. “Amilcar Cabral and the International Working Class Movement.” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 11, no. 2, 1984, pp. 81-96. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2633523. Accessed March 15, 2021.
8. Curry Malott, Amilcar Cabral: Liberator, theorist and educator, January 20, 2021, www.liberationschool.org
9. The Ten Principles of Bandung, www.china daily.com.cn, updated April 23, 2005.
10. N.D. Jayaprakash, “Why the CIA Tried to Kill Chou En Lai,” July 9, 2005, www.counterpunch.org
11. Zhou Enlai, formal address to a mass rally in Mogadishu, February 3, 1964, Strauss, Julia C. “The Past in the Present: Historical and Rhetorical Lineages in China’s Relations with Africa.” The China Quarterly, no. 199, 2009, pp. 777–795. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27756501. Accessed March 15, 2021.
12. Jiang Zemin, Towards a new historical milestone in Sino-African friendship, 1996, Strauss, Julia C. “The Past in the Present: Historical and Rhetorical Lineages in China’s Relations with Africa.” The China Quarterly, no. 199, 2009, pp. 777–795. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27756501. Accessed Mar 15, 2021.
13. Zhu Rongji, “Strengthen Solidarity, Enhance Cooperation and Pursue Common Development,” October 12, 2000, FOCAC Beijing Summit, www.china.org.cn
14. Jiang Zemin, “China and Africa-Usher in the New Century Together,” FOCAC Beijing Summit 2000, www.china.org.cn
15. Pedro Ramos, “Cape Verde: A Blueprint For China’s Positive Role in Africa,” October 28, 2016, www.thediplomat.com; Christopher Marc “Lilyblad, Cape Verde is Emerging as a Global Pivot Point,” October 20, 2020, www.foreignpolicy.com; Roncevert Ganan Almond, “Cabo Verde’s Gamble: Chinese Island-Building in the Atlantic,” April 25, 2017, www.thediplomat.com
16. Amilcar Cabral, The Development of the Struggle, Declaration made to the OSPAAAL General Secretariat December 1968, www.marxists.org
17. Garikai Chengu, “Libya: From Africa’s Wealthiest Democracy Under Gaddafi to Terrorist Haven After US Intervention,” October 20, 2015, www.counterpunch.org
18. ANSAmed, China in Libya – investments and neutrality, www.ansamed.info; Tania Branigan, “China looks to protect its assets in a post-Gaddafi Libya,” August 23, 2011, www.theguardian.com
19. Fatma Naib, “Slavery in Libya: Life Inside a Container,” January 26, 2018, www.aljazeera.com
20. Andrea Duleux, “Slavery and Human Trafficking in Libya,” February 14, 2020, www.borgenmagazine.com
21. Corbett Daly, “Clinton on Qaddafi: ‘We came, we saw, he died,’” October 20, 2011, www.cbsnews.com
22. What We Do, AFRICOM Mission Statement, www.africom.mil
23. Nick Turse, “Pentagon’s Own Map of U.S. Bases in Africa Contradicts Its Claim of ‘Light’ Footprint,” February 27, 2020, www.theintercept.com
24. Danny Sjursen, “The future of war, American-style,” February 3, 2021, www.salon.com
25. Basil Enwegbara, “Toxic Colonialism, Lawrence Summers And Let Africans Eat Pollution,” April 6, 2001, www.the tech.com 
26. Ibid.
27. George Caffentzis, “Neoliberalism in Africa, Apocalyptic Failures and Business as Usual Practices,” Fall 2002, ALTERNATIVES Turkish Journal of International Relations, www.dergipark.org.tr

28. Wade Shepard, “What China Is Really Up To In Africa,” October 3, 2019, www.forbes.com

Featured image: Chinese President Xi Jinping (right) meets with Cape Verde’s Prime Minister Ulisses Correia e Silva at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, Sept. 6, 2018. [Source: xinhuanet.com]

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

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Israeli lawyers and human rights activists Arie Suchovolsky and Ruth Machnes have filed a petition against Israel claiming that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Minister of Health Yuli Edelstein have violated Nuremberg codes against experimenting on humans by making deals with with Pfizer/Biontech to deliver Israel’s citizens as subjects for experimental genetic treatment by using draconian measures to force them to take Pfizer’s vaccine.

Click here to listen to the interview. This was removed by YouTube.

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“At some level of extreme wealth, money inevitably corrupts… it buys political power, it silences dissent, it serves primarily to perpetuate ever-greater wealth, often unrelated to any reciprocal social good.”(Farhad Manjoo(1))

Distorting Politics – Dark Money and Oligarchy 

In earlier posts I have discussed how powerful companies are able to manipulate politics. This also applies to excessively wealthy individuals. They lobby for policies that benefit themselves, even if they hurt society. They actively work to shrink the role of government in helping the poor, to decrease social security, to cut taxes for the rich, to cut regulation of big business, to allow the environment to be destroyed, and to privatise more and more. They do this by funding politicians who share these views.

They promote ideas that will make the rich richer and the poor poorer, even though they are unpopular with many people. This has decreased the willingness of our political leaders to deal with real problems.(2) Most wealthy people do not care about unemployment, food banks or homelessness. They are more interested in legalising ever more complex forms of tax manipulation.

They spend a great deal of what is known as ‘dark money’ under the radar to influence these politicians.(3) They do it very quietly, with no media discussion, no transparency and no accountability. The billionaire Koch brothers are notorious for operating businesses engaged in corporate wrongdoing. They increase their wealth by doing things that harm society, but they are also notorious for spending huge amounts to manipulate politics. One writer described the events of the last few decades as an:

“audacious project, decades in the making, to fundamentally change the relationship between the people and the government and to do so permanently in a manner that is designed to pin the proverbial pendulum to the right [in favour of the rich] so that it cannot swing back again.”(4)

Many commentators have pointed out that what we have now in Britain and the US is ‘government by the 1% for the 1%’,(5) or ‘by millionaires for billionaires’. This is known as oligarchy. The wealthy try to ensure that political power is aligned with their economic power. The whole system becomes self-reinforcing. We have a society geared ever more towards the needs of excessively wealthy people, and inequality keeps increasing. We no longer have a functioning democracy. 

The propaganda around immense wealth has been very effective:

“They have justified their wealth by describing themselves as wealth creators, brilliant innovators, or world-changers. They also claim that they are necessary to fill the gaps left by incompetent government. What is missing from this is a discussion about their role in destroying the ability of governments to do things.”(6) 

The evidence indicates that high taxes and high government expenditure are beneficial to societies, yet the rich continually lobby for lower taxes.(7) Tax rates have generally decreased for the richest people over the last few decades. At the same time there has been an increase in other taxes that affect the poor, such as Value Added Tax (VAT). Tax systems would almost certainly be much fairer if the wealthy weren’t so influential in influencing politicians.(8)

The same applies to choices about where governments spend their money. We have seen in earlier posts that governments pay large subsidies to big companies, but there are many other ways for governments to spend money that would be much more useful, such as a properly funded healthcare system, or better social services. Because the rich determine policy, the poor are squeezed in every direction: Lower pay, higher prices, and less support in times of need.

Occasionally we hear discussions about wealth taxes, land taxes or financial transactions taxes. The reason these are not part of policymaking discussions is that the rich successfully keep them out of serious consideration.

Excessive Wealth Undermines Democracy in Poor Countries  

The writer, Oscar Wilde, wrote of philanthropists (rich people who use their money for good causes) many years ago:

“They seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see in poverty, but their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it…the proper aim [should be] to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.”

The same is true today. People with excessive wealth create foundations which allow them to use their power and wealth to influence events overseas. Billionaires such as George Soros fund political groups, but their opinion of what an ideal society might look like might not be the same as that of the local population. They are therefore undermining democracy.(9) The influence of some excessively-wealthy individuals can be so great that it affects global political issues. A report in 2020 showed that 3 billionaires lobbied US President Trump to undermine an important negotiation with Iran.(10)

Other rich people use foundations to try to influence the policies of charitable and international organisations.(11) The most notorious example of this is Bill Gates, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates has been manipulating policy on health, farming and education, among other things. Strategies include placing people in international organisations, and gaining privileged access to policymakers.

Gates is influential at the World Health Organisation, and there is a revolving door between his foundation and the big pharmaceutical companies.(12) He provides medicines in poor countries by buying them from those companies, but he doesn’t challenge the patent system, which stops poor countries making their own medicines in the first place. His policy recommendations involve ideas like technology in schools, which increases Microsoft profits and enriches himself.

Foundations have been widely criticised for isolated and poorly coordinated solutions; for spreading corporate farming, and opening up African markets to US agriculture and biotechnology companies; for financial arrangements (known as public-private partnerships) that have already been disastrous in rich countries; and for possibly weakening public health systems in developing countries.(13) Many of these policies create downsides for local populations. The focus becomes whatever rich, white donors are interested in, instead of what might be the top priorities for people in recipient countries.

The people who set up these foundations made their wealth by exploiting the economic system to extract wealth from everyone else, and being among the greediest profiteers in history.(14) They are unlikely to be the right people to set up long-term policies for poor countries. Modern researchers have echoed Wilde’s sentiment:

“Appealing to the megarich to be more charitable is not a solution to global health problems. We need a system that does not create so many billionaires and, until we do that, this kind of philanthropy is either a distraction or potentially harmful to the need for systemic change.”(15) 

Controlling the News – Distorting How We Think About The World

In earlier posts we also saw that the mainstream media in Britain and the US have become a propaganda system controlled by excessively wealthy individuals, or governments. We also saw how the positive presentation of historical wealth by the media plays a propaganda role. Media output is distorted to serve the interests of their owners, which usually means the interests of rich people in general. Even mainstream commentators, such as Paul Krugman,(16) have commented on the extent to which the richest people get to define the agenda. The former US Secretary of Labour, Robert Reich, has said:

“They have employed one of the oldest methods used by the wealthy to maintain wealth and power – a belief system that portrays wealth and power in the hands of a few as natural and inevitable”(17)

All problems, and their possible solutions, are presented within a narrow framework, which fails to question the status quo, to challenge excess wealth, or to question how the economic and financial systems really work. The really important criticisms of the system are rarely discussed. It therefore becomes difficult to understand why many people are poor, or for members of the public to engage meaningfully in policy discussions. 

The media reinforces the idea that we should define success by how much money we have. Discussions about redefining success in other terms, such as happiness, culture, selflessness and helping others, rarely receive mainstream attention.

People Used To Talk About This 

The serious downsides of excessive wealth have been known for many years, and measures were put in place to decrease its effects at various times in the past. In the US from 1936-1980 the top tax rate never dropped below 70%.(18) In the UK, the top rate of tax peaked at 98%.(19) It is only in the last 40 years that these downsides have been ignored by most politicians and by most of the mainstream media. They unquestioningly assume that it’s ok to have extremely rich people and extreme inequality. 

What Can Be Done? Plutocracy Prevention Program 

Britain and the US could easily provide a high standard of living, and good quality of life, to all their citizens. Their failure to do so is a conscious choice by the rich and powerful, whose primary goal is manipulating the system to benefit themselves. Some people in the US are beginning to talk about this, with suggestions for income tax rates of up to 70%, and the introduction of taxes on existing wealth of 2-3%.(20) These would produce significant revenues for the government, but they are only a small fraction of what is required to eliminate vast concentrations of wealth.Taxing income at 70% still leaves some people with incomes of $250 billion / year. Wealth taxes of 2-3% would also leave the richest people becoming richer by billions of dollars / year.

These mainstream conversations are a sign of how the range of possibilities that are considered reasonable is limited to fit within the existing framework. The proposals don’t get to the source of the problem, which is that the entire economic system is rigged to make the rich richer. If we accept that excessive wealth is harmful to society then we need to transform the system so that the highest incomes drop to a small fraction of what they are now, and remove existing concentrations of wealth.

We would have to change many parts of the existing system. We would have to end all mechanisms that allow powerful people and companies to extract excess wealth from everyone else. The first step is to overcome decades of corporate propaganda, which brainwashes us into thinking that the existing system is reasonable. We have to begin a conversation where all options are discussed, with nothing ruled out because it is difficult. This would include challenging the right of people or organisations to own or control unlimited wealth.

For example, some people recommend an estate tax (inheritance tax in the UK) to reduce inheritances, but this still allows billions to be inherited. Instead, if we had a limit of say £100,000 (or dollars) as the maximum that anyone can inherit in their lifetime, it would transform the situation. Some people have even suggested ending inheritance altogether.(21) These ideas would require changes to many parts of the legal system, such as trusts, offshore accounts, and control of big companies, but should be discussed seriously.

A complementary approach is to reduce the role of wealth in leading a comfortable life. If the poorest people have excellent, free healthcare, an affordable home, and enough income to do what they consider important, then wealth becomes unnecessary. However, when billionaires manipulate politics, this approach is undermined. We therefore also need policies to reduce the power and political influence of those with excessive wealth, in order to allow for a much broader, wide-ranging discussion of possible options.

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Rod Driver is a part-time academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking modern-day US and British propaganda, and explaining war, terrorism, economics and poverty, without the nonsense in the mainstream media. This article was first posted at medium.com/elephantsintheroom

Notes 

1) Farhad Manjoo, ‘Abolish Billionaires’, New York Times, at https://medium.com/new-york-times-opinion/abolish-billionaires-c87593db0c22

2) Nancy Maclean, Democracy in Chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America, 2017

3) George Monbiot, ‘How US Billionaires are fuelling the hard-right cause in Britain’, The Guardian, 7 Dec 2018, at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/07/us-billionaires-hard-right-britain-spiked-magazine-charles-david-koch-foundation 

4) Nancy Maclean, ‘Capturing Democracy’, in EPI, ‘Taxing the (Very) Rich: Finding the Cure for Excessive Wealth Disorder’, Economic Policy Institute, 25 Jun 2019, at https://www.epi.org/event/taxing-the-very-rich-finding-the-cure-for-excessive-wealth-disorder/

5) Joseph Stiglitz, ‘Of the 1%, By the 1%, For the 1%’, Vanity Fair, 31 March 2011, at https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105 

6) Unknown speaker, taken from EPI, ‘Taxing the (Very) Rich: Finding the Cure for Excessive Wealth Disorder’, Economic Policy Institute, 25 Jun 2019, at https://www.epi.org/event/taxing-the-very-rich-finding-the-cure-for-excessive-wealth-disorder/

7) ‘The super-rich and Us, part 1’, at https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2eiirb

‘The super-rich and us Part 2’, at https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x67qpdu

8) EPI, ‘Taxing the (Very) Rich: Finding the Cure for Excessive Wealth Disorder’, Economic Policy Institute, 25 Jun 2019, at https://www.epi.org/event/taxing-the-very-rich-finding-the-cure-for-excessive-wealth-disorder/ 

9) Daniel Bessner, The George Soros Philosophy – and its fatal flaw, The Guardian, 6 July 2018, at https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/06/the-george-soros-philosophy-and-its-fatal-flaw 

10) Philip Weiss and James North, ‘Adelsons got a lot from Trump for $75 million – But media won’t tell you what’, 16 Oct 2020, at https://www.globalresearch.ca/adelsons-got-lot-trump-75-million-media-wont-tell-you-what/5727752

11 Chuck Collins ‘A cure for Excessive Wealth Disorder’, Commondreams, 3 April 2019 https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/04/03/cure-excessive-wealth-disorder 

12) Andrew Bowman, ‘The flip side to Bill Gates’ charity billions’, New Internationalist, 1 April 2012, at  https://newint.org/features/2012/04/01/bill-gates-charitable-giving-ethics

13) John Vidal, ‘Are Gates and Rockefeller Using Their Influence to Set Agenda in Poor States?’, The Guardian, 15 Jan 2016, at https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jan/15/bill-gates-rockefeller-influence-agenda-poor-nations-big-pharma-gm-hunger 

14) Aditya Chakrabortty, ‘Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas review – superb hate-reading’, The Guardian, 14 Feb 2019, at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/14/winners-take-all-by-anand-giridharadas-review 

15) David McCoy, cited in Andrew Bowman, ‘The flip side to Bill Gates’ charity billions’, New Internationalist, 1 April 2012, at  https://newint.org/features/2012/04/01/bill-gates-charitable-giving-ethics

16) Paul Krugman, ‘Taxing the very rich: finding the cure for excessive wealth disorder’, 25 Jun 2019, at https://www.epi.org/event/taxing-the-very-rich-finding-the-cure-for-excessive-wealth-disorder/ 

Paul Krugman, ‘Notes on Excessive Wealth Disorder’, New York Times, 22 June 2019, at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/opinion/notes-on-excessive-wealth-disorder.html 

17) Robert Reich, ‘To reverse inequality, we need to expose the myth of the ‘free market’, The Guardian, 9 Dec 2020, at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/09/inequality-free-market-myth-billionaires 

18) Henry Blodget, ‘The truth about taxes: Here’s how high today’s rates really are’, Busines Insider, 12 July 2011, at https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-tax-rates?r=US&IR=T 

19) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_United_Kingdom

20) EPI, ‘Taxing the (Very) Rich: Finding the Cure for Excessive Wealth Disorder’, Economic Policy Institute, 25 Jun 2019, at https://www.epi.org/event/taxing-the-very-rich-finding-the-cure-for-excessive-wealth-disorder/ 

21) James Butler, ‘Inherited wealth is an injustice’, The Guardian, 26 Mar 2014, at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/26/inherited-wealth-injustice-lets-end-it

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

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Twenty years ago, a group of neoconservative think tanks used their power to push for disastrous wars in the Middle East. Now, a new set of think tanks staffed with many of the same experts and funded by Taiwanese money is working hard to convince Americans that there is a new existential threat: China.

At MintPress, we have been at the forefront of exposing how Middle Eastern dictatorships and weapons contractors have been funneling money into think tanks and political action committees, keeping up a steady drumbeat for more war and conflict around the world. Yet one little-discussed nation that punches well above its weight in spending cash in Washington is Taiwan.

By studying Taiwan’s financial reports, MintPress has ascertained that the semi-autonomous island of 23 million people has, in recent years, given out millions of dollars to many of the largest and most influential think tanks in the United States. This has coincided with a strong upsurge in anti-China rhetoric in Washington, with report after report warning of China’s economic rise and demanding that the U.S. intervene more in China-Taiwan disputes.

These think tanks are filled with prominent figures from both parties and have the ears of the most powerful politicians in Washington. It is in their offices that specialists draw up papers and incubate ideas that become tomorrow’s policies. They also churn out experts who appear in agenda-setting media, helping to shape and control the public debate on political and economic issues.

Twenty years ago, a group of neoconservative think tanks like the Project for a New American Century, funded by foreign governments and weapons manufacturers, used their power to push for disastrous wars in the Middle East. Now, a new set of think tanks, staffed with many of those same experts who provided the intellectual basis for those invasions, is working hard to convince Americans that there is a new existential threat: China.

A fistful of dollars

In 2019, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States (TECRO) — for all intents and purposes, the Taiwanese embassy — donated between $250,000 and $499,999 to the Brookings Institute, commonly identified as the world’s most influential think tank. Taiwanese tech companies have also given large sums to the organization. In turn, Brookings Institute staff like Richard C. Bush (a former member of the National Intelligence Council and a U.S. national intelligence officer for East Asia) vociferously champion the cause of Taiwanese nationalists and routinely condemn Beijing’s attempts to bring the island more closely under control.

TECRO featured prominently among myriad defense interests on the donor rolls for both the Atlantic Council, left, and Brookings Institute

Last week, Brookings held an event called “Taiwan’s quest for security and the good life,” which began with the statement that “Taiwan is rightly praised for its democracy. Elections are free, fair, and competitive; civil and political rights are protected.” It went on to warn that the “most consequential” challenge to the island’s liberty and prosperity is “China’s ambition to end Taiwan’s separate existence.”

According to another organization’s latest financial disclosure, TECRO also gave a six-figure sum to the Atlantic Council, a think tank closely associated with NATO. It is unclear what the Atlantic Council did with that money, but what is certain is that they gave a senior fellowship to Chang-Ching Tu, an academic employed by the Taiwanese military to teach at the country’s National Defense University. In turn, Tu authored Atlantic Council reports describing his country as a “champion [of] global democracy,” and stating that “democracy, freedom and human rights are Taiwan’s core values.” A menacing China, however, is increasing its military threats, so Taiwan must “accelerate its deterrence forces and strengthen its self-defense capabilities.” Thus he advises that the U.S. must work far more closely with Taiwan’s military, conducting joint exercises and moving towards a more formal military alliance. In 2020, the U.S. sold $5.9 billion worth of arms to the island, making it the fifth-largest recipient of American weaponry last year.

Other Taiwan-employed academics have chided the West on the pages of the Council’s website for its insufficient zeal in “deter[ring] Chinese aggression” against the island. “A decision by the United States to back down” — wrote Philip Anstrén, a Swedish recipient of a fellowship from the Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs — “could damage the credibility of U.S. defense guarantees and signal that Washington’s will to defend its allies is weak.” Anstrén also insisted that “Europe’s future is on the line in the Taiwan Strait.” “Western democratic nations have moral obligations vis-à-vis Taiwan,” he added on his blog, “and Western democracies have a duty to ensure that [Taiwan] not only survives but also thrives.”

The reason this is important is that the Atlantic Council is an enormously influential think tank. Its board of directors is a who’s-who in foreign policy statecraft, featuring no fewer than seven former CIA directors. Also on the board are many of the architects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and James Baker. When organizations like this begin beating the war drums, everybody should take note.

Perhaps the most strongly anti-Beijing think tank in Washington is the conservative Hudson Institute, an organization frequented by many of the Republican Party’s most influential figures, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Vice-President Mike Pence and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton. The words “China” or “Chinese” appear 137 times in Hudson’s latest annual report, so focused on the Asian nation are they. Indeed, reading their output, it often appears they care about little else but ramping up tensions with Beijing, condemning it for its treatment of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Uyghur Muslims, and warning of the economic and military threat of a rising China.

An excerpt from a 2020 Hudson Institue report on existential threats to the United States

Over the years, Hudson’s efforts have been sustained by huge donations from TECRO. The Hudson Institute does not disclose the exact donations any sources give, but their annual reports show that TECRO has been on the highest tier of donors ($100,000+) every year since they began divulging their sponsors in 2015. In February, Hudson Senior Fellow Thomas J. Duesterberg wrote an op-ed for Forbes entitled “The Economic Case for Prioritizing a U.S.-Taiwan Free Trade Agreement,” in which he extolled Taiwan’s economy as modern and dynamic and portrayed securing closer economic ties with it as a no-brainer. Hudson employees have also traveled to Taiwan to meet and hold events with leading foreign ministry officials there.

The Hudson Institute also recently partnered with the more liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) to host an event with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, who took the opportunity to make a great number of inflammatory statements about the “ever more challenging threats to free and democratic societies” China poses; applaud the U.S.’ actions on Hong Kong; and talk about how Taiwan honors and celebrates those who died at the Tiananmen Square massacre. TECRO gave the CAP between $50,000 and $100,000 last year.

It is the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), however, that appears to receive the most Taiwanese money. According to its donor list, Taiwan gives as much money to it as the United States does — at least $500,000 last year alone. Yet all of the Taiwanese government money is put into CSIS’s regional studies (i.e., Asia) program. Like Hudson employees, the CSIS calls for a free trade agreement with Taiwan and has lavished praise on the nation for its approach to tackling disinformation, describing it as a “thriving democracy and a cultural powerhouse.” Although acknowledging that the reports were paid for by TECRO, CSIS insists that “all opinions expressed herein should be understood to be solely those of the authors and are not influenced in any way by any donation.” In December, the CSIS also held a debatesuggesting that “[w]ithin the next five years, China will use significant military force against a country on its periphery,” exploring what the U.S. response to such an action should be.

Like the Atlantic Council, the CSIS organization is stacked with senior officials from the national security state. Its president and CEO is former Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre, while Henry Kissinger — former secretary of state and the architect of the Vietnam War — also serves on its council.

The CSIS accepts money from the Global Taiwan Institute and the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy (TFD) as well. The former is a rather shadowy pro-Taiwanese group that appears not to disclose its funding sources. The latter is a government-funded organization headed by former Taiwanese President You Si-kun. Every year, the TFD publishes a human rights report on China, the latest of which claims that “the Chinese Communist Party knows no bounds when it comes to committing serious human rights violations” — accusing it of “taking the initiative” in “promoting a new Cold War over the issue of human rights” and trying to “replace the universal standing of human rights values around the world.” Ultimately, the report concludes, China “constitutes a major challenge to democracy and freedom in the world.”

Joseph Hwang of The War College in Taiwan speaks at a CSIS about how Taiwan acts a buffer to protect US data infrustructure from China

The TFD has also been a major funder of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a far-right pressure group that insists that Communism has killed over 100 million people worldwide. Last year, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation added all global COVID-19 fatalities to the list of Communist-caused deaths on the basis that the virus started in China. The Foundation also employs Adrian Zenz, a German evangelical theologian who is the unlikely source of many of the most controversial and contested claims about Chinese repression in Xinjiang province.

In the past 12 months, TECRO has also donated six-figure sums to many other prominent think tanks, including the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Center for a New American Security, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. MintPress reached out to a number of these think tanks for comment but has not received any response.

“It would be naive to believe that Taiwan’s funding of think tanks is not pushing them to take pro-Taiwan or anti-China positions,” Ben Freeman, the director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy, told MintPress, adding:

After all, why would Taiwan keep funding think tanks that are critical of Taiwan? There’s a Darwinian element to foreign funding of think tanks that pushes foreign government funding to think tanks that write what that foreign government wants them to write. Taiwan is no exception to this rule.”

TECRO is not just sponsoring American think tanks, however. It has also given funds to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a hawkish and controversial group described as “the think tank behind Australia’s changing view of China.” The country’s former ambassador in Beijing described ASPI as “the architect of the China threat theory in Australia” while Senator Kim Carr of Victoria denounced them as working hand-in-hand with Washington to push “a new Cold War with China.” ASPI was behind Twitter’s decision last year to purge more than 170,000 accounts sympathetic to Beijing from its platform.

“We must be ready to fight our corner as Taiwan tensions rise,” ASPI wrote in January, having previously castigated the West for being “no longer willing to defend Taiwan.”

ASPI — like Brookings, the Atlantic Council and others — are directly funded by weapons manufacturers, all of whom also have a direct interest in promoting more wars around the world. Thus, if the public is not careful, certain special interests might be helping move the United States towards yet another international conflict.

While the situation outlined above is concerning enough, the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative’s research has shown that around one-third of think tanks still do not provide any information whatsoever about their funding, and very few are completely open about their finances. Freeman maintains that, while there is nothing inherently wrong with foreign governments funding Western think tanks, the lack of transparency is seriously problematic, explaining:

This raises a lot of questions about the work they’re doing. Are their secret funders saying what the think tank can do in a pay-for-play scheme? Are the funders buying the think tanks silence on sensitive issues? Without knowing the think tank’s funders, policymakers and the public have no idea if the think tank’s work is objective research or simply the talking points of a foreign government.”

Freeman’s study of the Taiwanese lobby found that seven organizations registered as Taiwan’s foreign agents in the U.S. Those organizations, in turn, contacted 476 Members of Congress (including almost 90% of the House), as well as five congressional committees. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was their most frequent contact, the Californian being contacted 34 times by Taiwanese agents. Pelosi has been a great supporter of Taiwanese nationalists, successfully promoting pro-Taiwan legislation and proudly announcing that the U.S. “stands with Taiwan.”

Foreign agents working on behalf of Taiwan also made 143 political contributions to U.S. politicians, with former Alabama Senator Doug Jones the lead recipient (Pelosi was third).

Losing China, regaining Taiwan?

The reports listed above understand the dispute as purely a matter of Chinese belligerence against Taiwan and certainly do not consider U.S. military actions in the South China Sea as aggressive in themselves. That is because the world of think tanks and war planners sees the United States as owning the planet and having a remit to act anywhere on the globe at any time.

To this day, U.S. planners bemoan the “loss of China” in 1949 (a phrase that presupposes the United States owned the country). After a long and bloody Second World War, Communist resistance forces under Mao Tse-tung managed to both expel the Japanese occupation and overcome the U.S.-backed Kuomintang (nationalist) force led by Chang Kai-shek. The United States actually invaded China in 1945, with 50,000 troops working with the Kuomintang and even Japanese forces in an attempt to suppress the Communists. However, by 1949, Mao’s army was victorious; the United States evacuated and Chang Kai-shek retreated to Taiwan.

The Kuomintang ruled the island for 40 years as a one-party state and remains one of the two major political groups to this day. The war between the Communists and the Kuomintang never formally ended, and Taiwan has now lived through 70 years of estrangement from the mainland. Polls show a majority of Taiwanese now favor full independence, although a large majority still personally identify as Chinese.

While many Taiwanese welcome an increased U.S. presence in the region, Beijing certainly does not. In 2012, President Barack Obama announced the U.S.’ new “Pivot to Asia” strategy, moving forces from the Middle East towards China. Today, over 400 American military bases encircle it.

In recent months, the United States has also taken a number of provocative military actions on China’s doorstep. In July, it conducted naval exercises in the South China Sea, with warships and naval aircraft spotted just 41 nautical miles from the coastal megacity of Shanghai, intent on probing China’s coastal defenses. And in December, it flew nuclear bombers over Chinese vessels close to Hainan Island. Earlier this year, the head of Strategic Command made his intentions clear, stating that there was a “very real possibility” of war against China over a regional conflict like Taiwan. China, for its part, has also increased its forces in the region, carrying out military exercises and staking claims to a number of disputed islands.

A new Director of National Intelligence (DNI) report notes that China is the U.S.’ “unparalleled priority,” claiming that Beijing is making a “push for global power.” “We expect that friction will grow as Beijing steps up attempts to portray Taipei as internationally isolated and dependent on the mainland for economic prosperity, and as China continues to increase military activity around the island,” it concludes.

In an effort to stop this, Washington has recruited allies into the conflict. Australian media are reporting that their military is currently readying for war in an effort to force China to back down, while last week President Joe Biden met with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to shore up a united front against Beijing vis-a-vis Taiwan.

In February, the Atlantic Council penned an anonymous 26,000-word report advising Biden to draw a number of red lines around China, beyond which a response — presumably military — is necessary. These included any military action or even a cyber attack against Taiwan. Any backing down from this stance, the council states, would result in national “humiliation” for the United States.

Perhaps most notably, however, the report also envisages what a successful American China policy would look like by 2050:

[T]he United States and its major allies continue to dominate the regional and global balance of power across all the major indices of power;… [and head of state Xi Jinping] has been replaced by a more moderate party leadership; and … the Chinese people themselves have come to question and challenge the Communist Party’s century-long proposition that China’s ancient civilization is forever destined to an authoritarian future.”

In other words, that China has been broken and that some sort of regime change has occurred.

Throughout all this, the United States has been careful to stress that it still does not recognize Taiwan and that their relationship is entirely “unofficial,” despite claiming that its commitment to the island remains “rock solid.” Indeed, only 14 countries formally recognize Taiwan, the largest and most powerful of which is Paraguay.

Along with a military conflict brewing, Washington has also been prosecuting an information and trade war against China on the world stage. Attempts to block the rise of major Chinese companies like Huawei, TikTok and Xiaomi are examples of this. Others in Washington have advised the Pentagon to carry out an under-the-table culture war against Beijing. This would include commissioning “Taiwanese Tom Clancy” novels that would “weaponize” China’s one-child policy against it, bombarding citizens with stories about how their only children will die in a war over Taiwan.

Republicans and Democrats constantly accuse each other of being in President Xi’s pocket, attempting to outdo each other in their jingoistic fervor. Last year, Florida Senator Rick Scottwent so far as to announce that every Chinese national in the U.S. was a Communist spy and should be treated with extreme suspicion. As a result, the American public’s view of China has crashed to an all-time low. Only three years ago, the majority of Americans held a positive opinion of China. But today, that number is only 20%. Asian-Americans of all backgrounds have reported a rise in hate crimes against them.

Cash rules everything around me

How much of the United States’ aggressive stance towards China can be attributed to Taiwanese money influencing politics? It is difficult to say. Certainly, the United States has its own policy goals in East Asia outside of Taiwan. But Freeman believes that the answer is not zero. The Taiwan lobby “absolutely has an impact on U.S. foreign policy,” he said, adding:

At one level, it creates an echo-chamber in D.C. that makes it taboo to question U.S. military ties with Taiwan. While I, personally, think there are good strategic reasons for the U.S. to support this democratic ally — and it’s clearly in Taiwan’s interest to keep the U.S. fully entangled in their security — it’s troubling that the D.C. policy community can’t have an honest conversation about what U.S. interests are. But, Taiwan’s lobby in D.C. and their funding of think tanks both work to stifle this conversation and, frankly, they’ve been highly effective.”

Other national lobbies affect U.S. policy. The Cuban lobby helps ensure that the American stance towards its southern neighbor remains as antagonistic as possible. Meanwhile, the Israel lobby helps ensure continuing U.S. support for Israeli actions in the Middle East. Yet more ominously with Taiwan, its representatives are helping push the U.S. closer towards a confrontation with a nuclear power.

While Taiwanese money appears to have convinced many in Washington, it is doubtful that ordinary Americans will be willing to risk a war over an island barely larger than Hawaii, only 80 miles off the coast of mainland China.

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Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

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

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Summary

It’s easy to look at the individual things that are happening in our country as just that: individual things. However, that would also be quite naïve. In a recent push in our public schools to “achieve equity” and “dismantle racism” you see a lot of the same narratives, even in separate school districts across the country that seemingly have nothing to do with each other other than the fact that they’re schools.

This deep dive will explore changes being made to Virginia’s school curriculum that aims to rid its educational system of any advanced math courses for primary school students before grade 11. The reasoning behind this is to make education more equitable for all students, going on to say that students must “give up their privilege” to make it happen.

This language has been bought and paid for primarily by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (who else could be behind it at this point, really?). If you didn’t know already, Bill Gates was also the nearly-singular force behind the funding and political push to get our nation’s K-12 educational system onto Common Core. And now he’s behind the new ‘racial equity’ push set out to “challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.”

Why does this matter?

Bill Gates is the second largest funder of the United Nations. Second only to the United States (yes, the entire country) alone.

His vision for this earth aligns greatly with the “Sustainable Development” model and Agenda 2030 touted by the UN, which derives directly from Agenda 21. And no, Agenda 21 is not a “conspiracy theory.” It’s real, and anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is a liar and a snake.

By radically changing the way our children are educated, we also change the way they think.

The way they see themselves within this world, and the way they interact with those who see it differently. It would be genius if it weren’t evil.

At a glance, it seems that the people involved in the shift in our educational system have nothing to do with Gates. However, if you dive deep into the organizations and people pushing it, you’ll find ties and thought processes shared by the same small cluster of globalist organizations and their ultra-wealthy lackeys.

Namely: The United Nations, The World Economic Forum, and Bill Gates, along with a slew of nonprofits that surround and support them filled with globalist sycophants.

A few days ago I decided to plot out a rudimentary map of the web of connections to make sure I wasn’t just crazy.

I’m not. See below:

Click here to see larger image.

So, without further ado, this is the story of how the Globalist cabal took complete control of America’s educational system without anyone noticing it happened. You can click the sections below to skip around this deep dive, or read it all as a whole. Enjoy!

To Read complete article, click here

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During 2016  CIA director John Brennan and FBI director James Comey, together with the corrupt Democrat party, began orchestrating Russiagate in order to prevent Trump from reducing the risk of nuclear war and by normalizing relations with Russia.  President Trump tried to nip a New Cold War in the bud, but that was not in the interest of the power and profit of the military/security complex which desperately needs the “Russian threat” as its raison d’etre. 

Stephen Cohen, myself and a few others expressed concern that the tensions between the two  nuclear powers were being driven to more dangerous highs than ever existed during the 20th century Cold War.  Many websites joined in debunking the orchestrated Russiagate fabrication.

To discredit these voices, a new website, PropOrNot, suddenly appeared with a list of 200 “Russian agents/dupes.”  Those of us who had raised red flags about Russiagate and the worsening of tensions were on the list. The Washington Post gave the accusation credibility by reporting the PropOrNot accusation that those who dissented from a hostile policy toward Russia were “Putin agents.”

A number of the falsely accused websites were intimidated and abandoned the truth.  CounterPunch went even further. It dropped its best and most incisive writers—people such as Mike Whitney and Diana Johnstone.  CounterPunch, which  had once collected, published, and marketed a collection of my essays as a book, suddenly discovered that it preferred fiction over fact.  Other websites that had religiously reproduced all of my columns now became selective about which parts of the official narrative they would permit to be examined on their sites.  This was, perhaps, the beginning of the movement to de-platform all who challenge the narrative.

The threat to truth-tellers has now been elevated by election thief Joe Biden’s latest Executive Order declaring a “national emergency” to “deal with the Russian threat.” Pepe Escobar reports that Biden’s order opens every American to being accused of being a Russian agent engaged in undermining US security. “A sub-paragraph (C), detailing ‘actions or policies that undermine democratic processes or institutions in the United States or abroad,’ is vague enough to be used to eliminate any journalism that supports Russia’s positions in international affairs.”

“Supports Russia’s position” includes an objective description and non-partisan analysis of Russian policy. The crucial point is that, in effect, Biden’s executive order places everyone reporting objectively on Russia’s political positions as a potential threat to the United States. See this.  

If we are honest, we will acknowledge that we have undergone the complete collapse of the United States.  Truth is prohibited in the media, school systems, and universities if it conflicts with the elite agendas served by the official narratives. The First Amendment is dead and buried. Free speech is reserved for the official narratives, such as “systemic racism”  and “Russian threat.” Those who exercise their Constitutional right find themselves de-platformed or fired.  

To understand how the victory of propaganda over truth elevates the likelihood of nuclear Armageddon, consider the difference between the 20th century and 21st century cold wars.

In the original Cold War both Soviet and American leaders worked to defuse tensions.  Agreements were made on arms control and the anti-ballistic missile treaty. There were regular meetings or summits between American and Soviet leaders.  Diplomatic decorum was maintained.  There were agreements that permitted each side to inspect the other’s compliance.  

This process began with President John F. Kennedy and  Soviet First Secretary Nicolai S. Khrushchev.  It continued through President Reagan and, more or less, President George H. W. Bush.  It ended with the Clinton regime and has been downhill ever since. 

President Trump intended to reduce the dangerous tensions, but was not permitted.  Indeed, his intent was sufficient cause for the Establishment to drive him from office.  2020 was a coup, not an election.

In the 20th century Cold War Russian experts differed in their assessments of the threat, and their differences were publicly aired. Differing assessments were debated. Dissenters were not demonized as Russian agents.  Today American Russian experts find that being Russophobic is a career boost. In the 20th century the New York Times and Washington Post were aligned with peace efforts. Today they are part of the neoconservative warmongers’ propaganda ministry.

The alarming conclusion is that since the Clinton regime, the US government has worked consistently to worsen relations with Russia even to the extent of publicly demonizing the Russian president and strangling objective debate in the US.  This is the perfect foundation for war.

All the while insouciant Americans elected governments that successively raised the likelihood of nuclear annihiliation while shutting down dissident concerns.  As I reported on March 17, “In the United States Russian Studies has degenerated into propaganda.  Recently, two members of the Atlantic Council think tank, Emma Ashford and Matthew Burrows, suggested that American foreign policy could benefit from a less hostile approach to Russia. Instantly, 22 members of the think tank denounced the article by Ashford and Burrows.”

Today even in Republican and conservative circles to question Putin’s demonization raises disapproving eyebrows (the same for China and Iran).  The US Establishment has succeeded in labeling objective analysis as “pro-Russian” (or pro-Chinese or pro-Iranian). This means that an objective view of US/Russian relations is off-limits to US policymakers.  

The “Russian threat” is another hoax, one that will destroy the world.

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

Featured image is from The Intercept

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***

Now that Cuban president Raul Castro has resigned the presidency of Cuba, will the U.S. government lift its six-decades-long economic embargo against Cuba?

Don’t count it. Squeezing the life out of the Cuban people as a way to get regime change has become such a normalized way of life for the United States that it is unlikely that this cruel and brutal policy will be ended anytime soon.

Back in the day, the embargo was justified as part of the Cold War against “godless communism” and, specifically, the international communist conspiracy that was supposedly based in Moscow, Russia and that supposedly threatened to envelope the United States and the rest of the world. (Yes, that Russia, the one we are being called upon, once again, to treat as our official enemy.) The Pentagon and the CIA steadfastly maintained that the “national security” of the United States was gravely threatened by a communist outpost only 90 miles away from American shores.

But when the Cold War suddenly and unexpectedly came to an end in 1989, the embargo just kept going and going. And even though Fidel Castro has now passed, and his brother Raul is now out of the presidency, there is no push within the federal government to finally bring an end to this cruel and brutal program.

What’s up with that? The U.S. government doesn’t have an embargo against communist Vietnam, whose northern half killed some 58,000 American men. Why have an embargo against a country that has never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so?

I suspect that part of the reason is that the CIA has never been able to get over the humiliation of having been defeated when its ragtag army of Cuban exiles invaded Cuba in 1961 in a futile attempt to secure regime change on the island. In fact, my hunch is that the CIA and the Pentagon have never been able to get over the fact that their entire regime-change operations against Cuba, including sabotage, terrorism, and assassination, as well as the embargo, failed to oust the communist regime and replace it with a U.S.-installed regime, one that would, once again, do the bidding of the U.S. government.

In the ultimate analysis, it’s all about empire and control. During the Spanish-American War in 1898, the U.S. came to the defense of Cuba in its war for independence from the Spanish Empire. Once Spain was defeated, however, the U.S. government double-crossed the Cubans and refused to permit them their independence. Instead, the fledgling U.S. Empire simply replaced the Spanish Empire.

The U.S. Empire then proceeded to control Cuba for the next 60 years through a succession of pro-U.S. dictators who agreed to do the bidding of the U.S. government. They were what are sometimes referred to as “puppets”—dancing to the strings of U.S. control. That’s in fact how the U.S. government got its imperial outpost in Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay. The U.S. government’s puppet regime in Havana gave that portion of Cuba to the United States.

One of the U.S. puppets was Fulgencio Batista, a corrupt pro-U.S. tyrant who was ousted by the Cuban revolution in 1959. One of his programs was to have his government goons go out into the Cuban countryside and kidnap young girls — minors. They would then bring them back to Havana, where they would be handed over to the Mafia-controlled casinos, which were giving Batista a cut of the action. The girls would be handed over to the high-rollers in the casinos as sexual favors.

U.S. officials loved Batista and were hoping that he would remain in power. It was not to be. The person who instigated the revolution was a woman named Celia Sanchez, who had a young girlfriend who was kidnapped by Batista’s goons and then raped as a sexual favor in the Mafia’s casinos.

What the Pentagon and the CIA want today is to resume control over Cuba with another pro-U.S. dictator who will do their bidding, just like before the Cuban revolution. That’s what the embargo is all about. That’s why they continue to target the Cuban people with death and economic privation. They want to resume control over Cuba, and they want it bad.

There is something else to keep in mind about the U.S. government’s relationship with Cuba for the last 60 years: It has always been the U.S. government that has been the aggressor. It is the U.S. government that has targeted the Cuban people with death and economic privation with its embargo. It has been the U.S. government that has engaged in sabotage and terrorism against the Cuban people. It is the U.S. government that has repeatedly tried to murder Cuban officials, even in partnership with the Mafia, one of the biggest criminal organizations in the world.

Finally, I would be remiss if I failed to point out that the U.S. government’s embargo against Cuba has always been a direct attack on the natural, God-given rights of freedom of travel and economic liberty of the American people. After all, let’s not forget that Americans are the ones who are arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated for traveling to Cuba and spending money there without the official consent of their Washington overlords.

If the American people wished to begin restoring a sense of morality to the U.S. government and a small bit of economic freedom to their lives, a good place to begin would be by bringing about an end to the six-decades-old embargo against Cuba. It’s an evil and destructive Cold War dinosaur that deserves extinction.

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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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Of relevance to the current debate on Eugenics and Depopulation, this article was first published in December 2010 in the New Statesman.

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In the decades following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, a craze for eugenics spread not only through Britain but through America as well. Overbreeding by the poor and disabled threatened the quality of the human race, American campaigners warned. Drastic measures must be taken to avert a future catastrophe for humanity.

Amid popular fears about the decline of the national stock, one of the main drives behind the formation of American immigration policy at the end of the 19th century was the desire to exclude disabled people. The first major federal immigration law, the Act of 1882, prohibited entry to any ‘lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.’

As the eugenics movement gathered strength, the exclusion criteria were gradually tightened to make it easier for immigration officials to keep disabled people out of America. The 1907 law denied entry to anyone judged ‘mentally or physically defective, such mental or physical defects being of a nature which may affect the ability of such alien to earn a living.’ It added ‘imbeciles’ and ‘feeble-minded persons’ to the list of automatically excluded people and inspectors were directed to exclude people with ‘any mental abnormality whatever’. Regulations in 1917 included a long list of disabilities that could be cause for exclusion including arthritis, asthma, deafness, deformities, heart disease, poor eyesight, poor physical development and spinal curvature.

Detecting physical disabilities was a major aspect of the American immigration inspector’s work. The Commissioner General of Immigration reported in 1907: “The exclusion from this country of the morally, mentally and physically deficient is the principal object to be accomplished by the immigration laws.” Inspection regulations stated that each individual ‘should be seen first at rest and then in motion’ in order to detect ‘abnormalities of any description’. It was recommended that inspectors should watch immigrants as they carried their luggage upstairs to see if ‘the exertion would reveal deformities and defective posture’. As one inspector wrote: “It is no more difficult to detect poorly built, defective or broken down human beings than to recognise a cheap or defective automobile.” An abnormal appearance meant a chalked letter on the back – L for lameness, G for goitre, X for mental illness. Once chalked, a closer inspection was required, which meant that other problems were likely to be established.

Preventing disabled people immigrating to America was motivated by both economic and eugenic concerns. Officials wanted to keep out people considered likely to be unemployed and who might transmit their ‘undesirable qualities’ to their offspring. There was widespread support for this approach to immigration. In 1896, Francis Walker noted in the Atlantic Monthly that the necessity of ‘straining out’ immigrants who were ‘deaf, dumb, blind, idiotic, insane, pauper or criminal’ was ‘now conceded by men of all shades of opinion’ and indeed there was a widespread ‘resentment at the attempts of such persons to impose themselves upon us.’ William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, argued that immigration restrictions were “necessary to the preservation of our national characteristics and to our physical and mental health”. A New York Supreme Court judge feared that the new immigrants were “adding to that appalling number of our inhabitants who handicap us by reason of their mental and physical disabilities.”

Disabled people born in the USA were as despised as disabled immigrants. A leading American-based scientist, Alexis Carrel, who worked at the prestigious Rockefeller Institute in the early years of the 20th century, advocated correcting what he called “an error” in the US Constitution that granted equality to all people. In his best-selling book Man, the Unknown, he wrote: “The feeble-minded and the man of genius should not be equal before the law. The stupid, the unintelligent, those who are dispersed, incapable of attention, of effort, have no right to a higher education.” Arguing that the human race was being undermined by disabled people, he wanted to use medical advances to extend the lives of those he deemed worthy and condemn the rest to death or forced sterilisation. He later praised Hitler for the “energetic measures” he took to prevent the contamination of the human race.

Carrel was not a lone maverick in America. His views were shared by large sections of the American population. While some scientists distanced themselves from him, much of America idolised him and welcomed his ideas. His book sold more than two million copies and thousands of people in America would turn up to hear Carrel’s talks, sometimes filling venues to capacity. He was even awarded the Nobel Prize.

Soon the White House itself was intent on restricting the right of disabled people to reproduce. President Theodore Roosevelt could not have been more blunt: “I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilised and feeble-minded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them”. Theodore Roosevelt created an Heredity Commission to investigate America’s genetic heritage and to encourage “the increase of families of good blood and (discourage) the vicious elements in the cross-bred American civilisation”. Funding for the eugenics cause came from such distinguished sources as the Carnegie Institution and the WK Kellogg Foundation, and support also came from the influential leaders of the oil, steel and railroad industries.

In an effort to prevent unfit offspring from being born, sterilisation laws were introduced in many American states to stop certain categories of disabled people from having children. The first such law was passed in Indiana as early as 1907. This was 26 years before a similar law was introduced by the Nazis in Germany in 1933, The Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Disease. In their sterilisation propaganda, the Nazis were able to point to the precedent set by the United States.

From 1907 onwards, many American men, women and children who were “insane, idiotic, imbecile, feebleminded or epileptic” were forcibly sterilised, often without being informed of what was being done to them. The German geneticist Fritz Lenz commented in 1923 that “Germany had nothing to match the eugenics research institutions in England and the United States”. He went on to castigate the Germans for “their backwardness in the domain of sterilisation as compared to the United States, for Germany had no equivalent to the American laws prohibiting marriage… for people suffering from such conditions as epilepsy or mental retardation”.

A landmark Supreme Court case in 1927 upheld America’s sterilisation legislation on the grounds it was necessary “to prevent our being swamped with incompetence”. Judge Holmes, reflecting in his judgement that our “best” citizens may be called on to give up their lives in war, said of sterilising the feeble-minded or insane: “It would be strange if we could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices …It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind”.

By 1938, 33 American states permitted the forced sterilisation of women with learning disabilities and 29 American states had passed compulsory sterilisation laws covering people who were thought to have genetic conditions. Laws in America also restricted the right of certain disabled people to marry. More than 36,000 Americans underwent compulsory sterilisation before this legislation was eventually repealed in the 1940s.

America was not the only country in the Western world to introduce compulsory sterilisation of disabled people. Sweden sterilised 60,000 disabled women from 1935 until as late as 1976. Thousands of children labelled as having learning difficulties were sent off to live in “Institutes for Misled and Morally Neglected Children” where they were required to undergo “treatment”. When the extent of Sweden’s sterilisation programme came to light in the 1990s, some heartbreaking stories emerged. One woman was told that she would remain shut away in an institution for the rest of her life if she didn’t agree to be sterilised. She recalled crying as she was forced to sign away her rights to have a baby. Another man described how he and his teenage friends, terrified by the prospect of an operation, hatched a plan to run away. Other countries which passed similar sterilisation laws in the 1920s and 30s included Denmark, Norway and Finland. However, America led the way in promoting such a practice.

With such a prevailing culture, it is not surprising that some disabled Americans felt compelled to remain single voluntarily. According to a recent biography by Lyndall Gordon, the acclaimed American poet Emily Dickinson was epileptic. For this reason, Dickinson chose to spend the second half of her life as a recluse, refusing to leave her father’s house. In middle age, Dickinson had a passionate romance with a widower who wanted to marry her but she turned him down, regarding herself as unfit for marriage. People with epilepsy in America were warned against marrying for fear that sexual arousal might provoke seizures.

Following the first International Eugenics Conference in London in 1912, two more were held, in 1921 and 1932. Both were hosted by New York and both were dominated by America. At the 1921 conference, 41 out of the 53 scientific papers presented were written by Americans and the invitations were even sent out by the American State Department. At one stage, 375 courses covering eugenics were on offer at American universities including Harvard, Colombia and Cornell.

Not only did the American authorities take measures to stop disabled people immigrating, marrying or having children, but there are examples of American disabled people dying needlessly because society believed their lives were not worth living. In 1915 a leading Chicago surgeon Dr Harry Haiselden decided to allow a disabled new-born baby to die. This wasn’t the first time he had permitted a baby with an impairment to die, but no disciplinary action was taken against him. He was investigated three times by different legal authorities and each time they found in his favour. He was expelled from the Chicago Medical Society but only because he wrote newspaper articles about his work, not for his treatment of these children. Indeed, Haiselden received support from many prominent Americans and also won endorsements from some of America’s most well-regarded publications including the New York Timesand the New Republic.

In 1937, a Gallup poll in the USA found that 45 per cent of supported euthanasia for “defective infants”. A year later, in a speech at Harvard, WG Lennox argued that preserving disabled lives placed a strain on society and urged doctors to recognize “the privilege of death for the congenitally mindless and for the incurable sick”. An article published in the journal of the American Psychiatric Association in 1942 called for the killing of all “retarded” children over five years old.

After World War II, the Nuremburg court established by the Allies did not order reparations to be paid to the families of disabled people killed by the Nazis nor that those responsible be punished. German doctors accused of murdering disabled people defended themselves by claiming (with some justification) that they were only implementing ideas which had found support in other countries, including America.

What’s more, the Allied authorities were unable to classify the sterilisations of disabled people in Nazi Germany as war crimes because similar laws either did exist or had recently existed in America and other European countries. The new West German administration only provided compensation for people who had been sterilised against their will if they could prove they had been sterilised outside the provisions of the 1933 sterilisation law – in other words, if they could prove they were not genetically disabled. Following the defeat of the Nazis, compulsory sterilisation ended in Germany but it continued elsewhere in America and Europe. Only in the 1950s was the eugenic philosophy finally discredited in most countries.

There was no wholesale slaughter of disabled people in the UK and USA as there was in Nazi Germany. However, there are disturbing similarities in the history of these countries.

The widespread support given to eugenics in America and Britain shows that many people in these countries shared the values and ideology of the Nazis towards disability. Eugenicists in Britain and America like those in Nazi Germany believed it was socially desirable to prevent the creation of new human beings who might be physically or mentally disabled. Just as the Nazis set out to eliminate disabled people during the Holocaust, so the long-term aim of America’s sterilisation programme was to rid the country of people deemed to be “inadequate”. Although no formal mass sterilisation programme was implemented in the UK, an unknown number of forced or coerced sterilisations occurred in this country.

Forced sterilisation and mass killing are ethically different. But underlying both these measures was the presumption that there are people who are unworthy of life. The Nazis believed that disabled people’s lives had little value and wanted to relieve society of the burden of having to care for people they regarded as useless. We need to recognize that there was a time when such attitudes also received considerable support throughout America and Britain as well.

Social reformers in America and Britain wanted to create a perfect society, but the kind of society they envisaged contained an intolerant, illiberal, authoritarian dimension which allowed no place for disabled people. As Isaiah Berlin once put it, “Disregard for the preferences and interests of individuals alive today in order to pursue some distant social goal that their rulers have claimed is their duty to promote has been a common cause of misery for people throughout the ages.”

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Victoria Brignell works as a radio producer with the BBC. After reading classics at Downing College, Cambridge, she undertook journalism training at Cardiff University. She lives in West London and is 30 years old and is a tetraplegic wheelchair-user.

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We are witnessing the fourth Cross-Strait Crises. Chinese and American armed forces are undertaking dangerous, spectacular and threatening show of military might. 

What makes the present crisis different from the previous ones is the fact that it happened during and after the mutual cold-war declaration by Washington and Beijing in Anchorage, Alaska on March 18-19, 2021

The world is wondering how far this military show will go. Many are afraid of a shooting war involving China, Taiwan and the U.S.

 Indeed, many are even afraid of the possibility of the third world war which will kill us all.

However, I do not share such pessimistic views. My view is that the inter-China cold war is likely to remain cold, not hot, because none of the three actors involved in the conflict – two Chinas and the U.S.- will gain from the shooting war.

The Sino-American shooting war – if there will be one – will be ignited somewhere else.

My argument may be summarized as follows.

First, the U.S. does not want the inter-China hot war, because through its ambiguous Taiwan policy, it can continue to sell weapons to Taiwan and, at the same time, keep Taiwan as the primary outpost of its China containment policy.

Second, China is not eager to declare a hot war with Taiwan, because Taiwan has not provided the reasons for China’s Taiwan invasion.

There are five reasons for China’s Taiwan invasion including the declaration of Taiwan independence, internal turmoil, military alliance with another country, acquisition of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and negotiations under the violation of the 1992 Consensus for “one-China”. None of these conditions are present. Therefore, China has no reason to invade Taiwan.

Third, Taiwan does not want the hot war with China for the reason that it will be most likely defeated and the cost of such defeat will be too high in terms of economic development and the loss of its identity. In fact, if and when China wins, it is likely that the two Chinas will be united under the banner of PRC.

The U.S. does not want inter-China hot War

To understand Washington’s role in the inter-China conflict, it is important to understand its Taiwan policy.

Washington’s Taiwan policy is based on the three joint communiqués, the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 (TRA) and the Six Assurances imposed by Ronald Reagan in 1982. The followings are the contents of the three Communiqués, TRA and the Six Assurances.

The First China-U.S. Communiqué (28 February 1972)

• The U.S. Government acknowledges (not accept or recognize) that all Chinese in either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but One China
• Taiwan is a part of China
• The U.S. Government does not challenge this position
• . It reaffirms its interest in peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by Chinese themselves
• With this prospect in mind, it affirms its ultimate objective of the withdrawal of all the U.S. forces and military installations from Taiwan. 

The Second China-U.S. Communiqué (January 1, 1979)

• Neither should seek hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region or any other region of the world.
• Each is opposed to efforts by any other country or group of countries to establish such hegemony
• The government of the USA acknowledges the Chinese position that there is but one China and that Taiwan is part of China
• PRC is the sole legal government of China

Third China-U.S. Communiqué (August 17, 1982)

• The U.S. Government attaches great importance to its relation with China.
• It has no intention of infringing on Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity or interfering in China’s internal affairs or pursuing a policy of ‘two Chinas’ or ‘one China, one Taiwan.’
• The U.S. Government states that it does not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan
• Its arms sale to Taiwan will not exceed, either in qualitative or in quantitative terms the level of those supplied in recent years
• It intends to reduce gradually its sales of arms to Taiwan, leading over a period of time to a final solution.
• The U.S. Taiwan policy cannot be changed by the president and requires the consent of the Congress.

The Taiwan Relations Act (enacted by the U.S. Congress on April 10, 1979)

The principal contents of the Act is in Section 2 of the Act

• Taiwan is treated as a country, a nation or a state as sub sovereign nation
• Informal diplomatic relations are carried out by the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT)
• The U.S. Government normalizes its diplomatic relations with PRC (Beijing) under the condition that the future of Taiwan will be determined by peaceful means.
• Any efforts to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means including by boycotts, or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific are grave concern to the U.S.
• The Sino (Taiwan)-U.S. Mutual Defence Treaty is terminated.
• The U.S. Government does not intervene in case of invasion by People’s Republic of China (PRC)
• The U.S. Government provides arms of defensive character and maintains the capacity to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan
• The decision related to the quantity and the quality of defence articles and services is determined by the Congress and the president.

The Six Assurances 

The administration of Ronald Reagan unilaterally added in 1982 “Six Assurances” to the TRA and this has become the mains part of the U.S. Taiwan policy

• The U.S. Government has not agreed to set a date of the termination of its arms sale to Taiwan.
• The U.S. Government has not agreed to consult with PRC (China) or ROC (Taiwan) for arms sales to Taiwan.
• The U.S. Government does not perform the mediation role between ROC and PRC
• The U.S. Government has not agreed to revise the TRA
• The U.S. Government has not revised its position regarding the sovereignty of Taiwan
• The U.S. Government will not exercise pressure on Taiwan to enter into negotiation with PRC.

The positive aspect of Washington’s Taiwan policy is the termination of the bloody civil war between ROC and PRC which caused the two cross-strait crises (1954 and 1958); the civil war lasted until 1979.

But, the end of the inter-China civil war was also desirable for Washington as well, because Washington badly needed China to counter the aggressive assertiveness of the Soviet Union in Asia.

So, Washington and Beijing were strange bed fellows with different dreams. Another possible reason for the U.S. initiative to end the inter-China civil war was the fear of Beijing’s victory over Taipei, which means the loss of a lucrative American arms market and reliable outpost of China containment strategy.

On the other hand, Washington’s Taiwan policy is characterized by the amazing ambiguity of Washington’s perception of the cross-strait problems and tactics which was most likely designed to maximize the American interests at the expense of China’s interests.

What comes out of the three communiqués, the TRA and the six assurances may be summarized in terms of the issue of regional hegemony, the legal status of Taiwan and the American arms sales.

Regional hegemony

In the second communiqué of 1979, there are items preventing China from becoming a hegemonic power in the region. Neither the U.S. nor China should seek for hegemonic power in Asia. But the U.S was already the hegemonic power there.

Legal Status of Taiwan 

The second feature of Washington’s Taiwan policy is its contradictory and ambiguous position regarding the legal status of Taiwan.

In the joint communiqués, the U.S. acknowledges that China is one and Taiwan is a part of China and that Beijing is the sole legal government of China. But this should mean that since Taiwan is a part of China, Beijing should also govern Taiwan.

But, in the Taiwan Relations Act, Taiwan is given the status of a de facto sovereign country.

China can argue that Washington did no respect the contents of the joint communiqués. But Washington can say this: “We have never accepted one-China regime, we said we acknowledged the regime”. Here, we see the strategic political ambiguity of Washington.

In fact, in the TRA, it says that Taiwan is treated as a nation of sub sovereignty. The U.S. has established de facto diplomatic relations with Taiwan conducted through the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT).

Here, Washington’s position regarding the sovereignty of Taiwan is not clear. The hidden purpose of the U.S. could be to make the sovereignty issue ambiguous so that it can change its position in function of needs.

Washington’s Arms Sales to Taiwan 

Now, as for the issues of arms sales to Taiwan, the U. S. is even more ambiguous.

In the third communiqué, the U.S. says that it has no long-run plan of arms sales to Taiwan. But in the same communiqué, the U.S. says that it will reduce arms sales, which contradicts each other.

In the TRA, the Sino (ROC)-U.S. defence Treaty is terminated. Therefore, Washington should not intervene militarily if and when Taiwan is in armed conflict with Beijing. But, already, in media, the US intervention in case of PRC’s Taiwan invasion is openly discussed. One wonders what the reliability of the joint communiqués, the TRA and the Six Assurances is.

Now, in the Six Assurances, it is written that the U.S. has no date for the ending of its arms sales to Taiwan. The U.S. is not obliged to consult PRC or ROC for its arms sales to Taiwan. So, Washington has absolute freehand in handling the arms sales to Taiwan.

In short, the U.S. Taiwan policy is so confusing and so ambiguous that it has useful flexibility for the sales of arms to Taiwan. The following table shows the pattern of American arms sales to Taiwan.

Table: Washington’s arms sales to Taiwan by U.S. Presidents

The table above allows these observations.

• Washington’s arms sales to Taiwan has increased over the years, which is contrary to what the U.S. Government had promised.
• The Trump administration spent as much as US$ 4.45 billion per year which represents as much as 30% of Taiwan’s annual defence budget of $15 billion
• By and large, the Republican Party sells more than the Democrats.
• Washington sells more when the anti-Beijing liberal party of Taiwan, the Democratic and Progressive Parry (DPP) is in power, that is, under the DPP government of Chen Shui-bian (2000-2008) and under the DPP government of Tsai Ying-wen (2016-2021)

This has an important meaning. Remember that the DPP is the party which seeks independence of Taiwan. Hence, the data can be interpreted as Washington’s strategy of encouraging the independence movement leading to ROC-PRC tension and more U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.

Now, coming back to the question of whether the U.S. wishes hot war over the Taiwan Strait, the answer is that it will not want the hot war, because, the hot war means the unification of China and Taiwan will no longer be able to play the role of Washington’s primary China-containment outpost and its function of being the lucrative market of American military equipments. 

Neither PRC (People’s Republic of China) nor ROC (Republic of China-Taiwan) wants the hot War.

When we discuss Taiwan and China, it is important to remember that they were enemies. The army of the ROC was defeated in 1949 and Chiang Kai-sek fled to Taiwan and continued the Republic of China which was created in 1912 by Sun Yat-sen. The civil war between ROC and PRC continued until 1979.

Even though the civil war was terminated, the ROC and PRC relations have not been smooth partly because of the past history and partly because of different political and economic regimes. In other words, there are always the possibilities of hostility in the cross-strait relations.

However, they have established viable relations which have been beneficial to both through political and economic cooperation.

Political Cooperation 

The evolution of the Taiwanese political orientation may be measured in terms of the way in which its presidents consider the legal status of Taiwan vis-à-vis PRC.

The evolution of Taiwanese political leaders’ perceptions of Taipei-Beijing political relations is shown below. By and large, such relations have evolved by the following periods.

• The civil war period (1949-1979)
• The period of good relations (1979-1998)
• The period of hostility (1998-2008)
• The resumption of high level dialogue period (2008-2016)
• The frozen relation period (2016-2021)

The period of civil war (1949-1979) was characterized by two cross-strait crises and never ending armed conflict between two Chinas.

During the friendly relation period (1979-1998), Deng Xiaoping met frequently the head of the Nationalist Party, Kuomintang (KMT) in order to develop cooperative relations.

President Chiang Ching-kuo (1980-1988) of KMT, son of Chiang Kai-shek, declared the three NOs:

• No declaration of independence,
• No unification of Chinas and
• No use of force between the two Chinas.

On July 9, 1999, President Lee Teng-hui (1988-2000) of KMT defined the ROC-PRC relation as “country to country relations.” So, there is no need for the independence declaration.

However, Lee’s visit to the Cornel University Alumni in 1995 alarmed Beijing and it led to the 1996 show of military might of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of  PRC. This was, in fact, the third Taiwan Strait crisis.

During the period of hostility (1998-2008), President Chen Shui-bian (2000-2008) of the anti-PRC party, DPP, changed the name of “Chunghwa Post Co.” to “Taiwan Post Co.” He changed also the name of “China Petroleum Corporation” to “Taiwan Petroleum Corporation.”

But, under KMT president Ma Yong-Jeou (2008-2016), the old names came back. This episode shows how Taiwanese people are sensitive about the identity of Taiwan vis-à-vis China of main land.

In 2008, Ma Ying-Jeou of KMT (2008-2016) took over the power and the friendly relations across the Strait were resumed.

The year 2008 was marked by the efforts of PRCs president Hu Jintao to improve the bilateral relations across the Taiwan Strait. On March 26, 2008, he talked to President G.W. Bush, who endorsed the 1992 consensus on “One China”..

President Hu Jintao also met the Chairman of the KMT, Wu Po-hsing, who also accepted the 1992 Consensus.

As for President Ma, he defined the bilateral relations as “One Country on each side” or “two states in the same nation.”

In 2016, the power went back to DPP and Tsai Ying-wen became President. Tsai’s perception of Taiwan’s legal status was not more certain than those of other Taiwan presidents.

Her victory has put Beijing in even uncomfortable position. In 2016, Beijing cut all communications with ROC.

But, in the same year, some leaders in Taiwan being aware of the deteriorating cross-strait relations formed a Taiwanese delegation composed of eight magistrates and city mayors went to Beijing to improve the relations.

However, the cross-strait relations were not peaceful. In 2018, PLA conducted military exercises which surely alarmed Taiwan.

In 2019, Xi Jinping reaffirmed his position in favour of “one China, two systems.”

President Tsai Ying-wen refused Xi Jinping’s idea.

To the surprise of the world, in 2020 Tsai Ying-wen won the election again; the world was expecting that she would take more radical position regarding Taiwan’s independence.

True, her victory has encouraged the independence movement in Taiwan and pro-independence political parties and civic organizations asked for a referendum on independence.

However, Tsai maintained her position that since Taiwan is already independent country, there is no need for the declaration of independence.”

To sum up, none of the presidents of the major parties, the KMT and the DPP, opted for the declaration of Taiwan’s independence.

True, there are some pro-independence parties such as The Taiwan Independence Party, the Taiwan Solidarity and the Formosa Alliance, but they have no electoral support.

Thus, the danger of Taiwan’s declaration of independence seems nonexistent and therefore, Beijing has no reason to invade for now.

What has intrigued me is the Taiwanese people’s perceptions regarding Taiwan’s legal or political status. There are three public opinion polls which are meaningful.

In the poll of 2008 by the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) no less than76% of the respondents rejected the idea of “one China, two systems.”

In the 2017 poll by MAC, 85% of the respondents said that the future of Taiwan should be determined by the Taiwanese themselves.

In the 2019 poll by MAC, 75% of the respondents rejected the 1992 Consensus (There is only one China which should be governed by PRC).

In the 2020 poll by the Academia Sinica, one finds very interesting phenomena.

• 73% of the respondents identified themselves as Taiwanese.
• 27.5% of them identified themselves as Chinese-Taiwanese
• 2.4% of tem identified themselves as Chinese
• 52.3% of them would prefer the postponement of the question of Taiwan independence and keep the status quo
• 35.1% of them prefer immediate independence
• 5.5% of them would prefer immediate or eventual unification of China.

In the Poll of MAC, 90% of the respondents refused PLA’s military threats.

To sum up, the Taiwanese are eager to greater autonomy, even independence, but they seem to avoid military confrontation by postponing the solution of the independence issue. In short, Taiwan does not want a shooting war with China.

Economic Cooperation 

There is another reason why the ROC-PRC hot war will not take place. It is the cross-strait economic cooperation.

Taiwan has achieved a remarkable success in economic development. In the 19960s, the per capita GDP was as low as $60. Now, in 2020, its GDP (nominal) was $730 billion USD and the per capita GDP was $32,000. This is, in fact, the miraculous achievements of the Taiwanese people.

The information industries account for 35 % of the country’s industrial production. The semi-conductor producers such as Taiwan Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and the United Microelectronic Corporation (UMC) are world leaders. Taiwan is the 13th largest producer of steel; its steel products are exported to 130 countries. The most spectacular entrepreneurial performance has been shown by the SMEs accounting for 85% of industrial outputs.

Such achievement has been possible because of the courage, the innovative entrepreneurial spirit, the productivity and, especially the hard work of the Taiwanese. However, Washington’s economic aid, its imports of Taiwanese products and technology transfer have all contributed. In addition, we should not forget the cooperation between Mainland China and Taiwan which were enemies.

Under President Chiang Ching-kuo (1978-1988), two important semi-official organizations were was established: the Strait Exchange Foundation (SEF) under ROC’s Mainland Affairs Council and the Association of Relations across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) under PRCs Taiwanese Affairs Office.

These two organizations have been the center of bilateral political and economic cooperation. They have initiated the three links: postal services, transportation and trade.

The Taiwan’s Investment Guidelines and similar measures taken by ROC have led to mutual business investments. In fact, 40 % of Taiwan’s outbound FDI stock went to Mainland China. Chinese tourists contribute to more than 40% of ROCs tourist industry. The Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement of 2010 is another mechanism of the bilateral economic relations.

Above all, Taiwan depends heavily on China for trade. In 2020, the value of Taiwan’s total exports was $ 345 billion of which 29.7% went to China. In the same year, the value of Taiwan’s total imports was $ 286 billion of which 22% came from China.

It is true that the RCO-PRC relations are not peaceful. But these economic relations are beneficial enough to keep the status quo as long as possible.

The conclusion of my analysis is that none of the three actors involved in the cross-strait drama wants shooting war.

The U.S. does not want the hot war because it will mean the unification of China, the loss of Taiwan as the primary China-containment outpost and the loss of the lucrative arms market.

Taiwan does not want the shooting war, because it will mean the ruin of its economy, loss of its autonomy becoming one of the Chinese provinces.

China does not risk the hot war because Taiwan prefers the status quo; it has no intention of getting weapons of mass destruction; there is no internal turmoil; it does not seek military alliances.

However, even without the shooting war, as long as the Sino-U.S. cold war continues, the cross-strait tension will continue.

Washington will sell more military equipments and services and Taiwan will have to play the dangerous role of Washington’s the primary outpost of China containment strategy and that of main buyer of American military weapons.

I wish to add this. The bilateral conflict between two Chinas like all other major bilateral conflicts is an integral part of Washington’s strategy of global hegemony. One of the most productive components of the American global hegemony is the proxy war, that is, some member country of Washington’s alliances will fight for the U.S.

Japan might be asked to play this role, because Japan is the best qualified for such task; it is a world class military power and it has the ambition of dominating Asia again; to do so, Japan has to destroy China. I hope I am wrong in thinking such an awful thing.

Finally, I would like add this too. Taiwan is a country which has achieved an amazing economic miracle of which all Chinese should be proud. Taiwan has established viable democracy under very challenging conditions; this is a regime which will surely contribute to the further advancement of China’s socio-political system.

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Professor Joseph H. Chung is professor of economics and co-director of the East Asia Observatory (OAE)-the Study Center for Integration and Globalization (CEIM), Quebec University in Montreal (UQAM).

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

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Pfizer is the corporation that has profited most from Covid-19 vaccines to date. Pfizer uses its power to aggressively defend and extend its patents.

The total sales for the Pfizer vaccine will likely exceed $30 billion in 2021 alone. Pfizer shares its profits with its partner company – which means they are expecting at least $15 billion this year, bumping their total revenue next year to around $60 billion – one quarter of which will be accounted for by the vaccine.

According to one financial journalist “That would make it the second-highest revenue-generating drug anytime, anywhere”

Profiting from the pandemic

These sales will bring in a substantial profit for the company – particularly because the vaccine received nearly $6 billion from the American government’s contract for production and roll out costs. The German government supported the research, while official reports suggest Pfizer and its partner spent only around $1 billion in additional research costs last year.

Unlike other corporations Pfizer has explicitly said it will profit throughout the pandemic. It has sold very small quantities to the global distribution body Covax and African Union “at cost”, which it claims to be about $6.75 per dose. In fact, experts have suggested these types of vaccines could cost as little as 60 cents to $2 per dose to make. However, Pfizer is selling to most countries at $19.50 per dose, supposedly a special pandemic price, but clearly one which allows the corporation to make a large profit.

But a large profit isn’t enough for Pfizer, and it seems clear prices will rise steeply once they decide the pandemic is ‘over’. A senior executive has suggested $150-175 per dose would be more ‘normal’ pricing for a vaccine of this sort.

Pfizer claims these astronomical prices are needed to recoup R&D costs. But a glance at their accounts last year shows that the corporation returned a whopping $8.4 billion to shareholdersin dividends and reported a profit of $8.7bn.

Pfizer has sold its vaccines largely to rich countries. They’ve sold more than three times the amount to high income countries (1.6 billion) as they have to the rest of the world (560 million), while tiny quantities have been sold to low income countries. The international distribution network Covax has managed to secure a mere 40 million.

A vast lobbying effort

Pfizer’s former CEO was instrumental in developing the global patent agreement – known as TRIPS – and intellectual property is a bedrock of Pfizer’s profits. Pfizer’s CEO led the charge to bypass the WHO’s technology sharing programme CTAP, labelling it “nonsense”. This has helped render this important tool ineffective to date.

In its most recent annual report the corporation seems proud of its role in pushing for even stronger patent law stating “Our industry advocacy [lobbying] efforts focus on seeking a fair and transparent business environment for foreign manufacturers, underscoring the importance of strong intellectual property systems.” They say that “While the global intellectual property environment has generally improved following WTO-TRIPS and bilateral/multilateral trade agreements, our growth and ability to bring new product innovation to patients depends on further progress in intellectual property protection [emphasis added]”

This lobbing clout is important. Pfizer and its lobbying body PhRMA were the top spending lobbyists in the US healthcare sector in the last 2 decades. They use the power lobbying gives them to promote and extend their rights of secrecy (‘data exclusivity’) over medical development and their monopoly protection which allows them to charge astronomical prices. They support the US government including higher levels of monopoly protection in new trade deals.

It’s not just Covid-19

Last year, we looked at Pfizer’s troubling history of profiteering. In one example, Pfizer and its British distributor hugely hiked the prices of anti-epilepsy drug phenytoin which 48,000 NHS patients relied upon. NHS expenditure on the drug rose from £2 million a year to £50 million in a single year, with the cost of 100mg packs rising from £2.83 to £67.50. Overall, UK wholesalers and pharmacies faced price hikes of between 2,300% and 2,600%.

In 2009, Pfizer was forced to pay $2.3 billion in a set of complex suits which included the company’s illegal marketing of arthritis drug Bextra, as well as giving kickbacks to doctors. A whistleblower claimed that sales staff were incentivised to sell Bextra to doctors for medical conditions for which the drug wasn’t approved and at doses up to eight times those recommended. “At Pfizer I was expected to increase profits at all costs, even when sales meant endangering lives. I couldn’t do that,” he stated.

MSF ran a campaign against the price of Pfizer’s pneumonia vaccines, which it claimed were 68 times more expensive in 2015 than in 2001. While Pfizer did reduce prices for the lowest income countries, MSF said the cost to vaccinate remained “roughly US$9 for each child to be vaccinated in the poorest countries, and as much as $80 per child for middle-income countries”. It claimed Pfizer and GSK have earned over $50 billion for the drug, but “Today, 55 million children around the world still do not have access to the pneumonia vaccine, largely due to high prices.”

What we can do

Pfizer’s obsession with maximising its profits during the pandemic is in keeping with its troubling record. But there is no reason big pharma companies should remain in the driving seat.

Governments have the power to put global public health first.

We are campaigning for the suspension of patents on all Covid-19 vaccines to help scale up the global vaccine effort and give the world the best chance of getting this disease under control.

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Data released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the number of injuries and deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) following COVID vaccines showed a notable increase in reports of injuries and deaths compared with last week’s numbers.

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. Today’s data show that between Dec. 14, 2020 and April 16, a total of 86,080 total adverse events were reported to VAERS, including 3,186 deaths — an increase of 584 over the previous week — and 10,152 serious injuries, up 1,867 since last week.

Of the 3,186 deaths reported as of April 16, 26% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination, 17% occurred within 24 hours and 41% occurred in people who became ill within 48 hours of being vaccinated.

In the U.S., 202.3 million COVID vaccine doses had been administered as of April 16. This includes89 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine, 105 million doses of Pfizer and 8 million doses of the Johnson &Johnson (J&J) COVID vaccine.

This week’s VAERS data show:

• 20% of deaths were related to cardiac disorders.
• 54% of those who died were male, 44% were female and the remaining death reports did not include gender of the deceased.
• The average age of death was 75.9 and the youngest death reported was an 18-year-old. There are a few reported deaths in children under 18, including a 5-month old who died of a rare blood clot two days after the mother received her second dose of Pfizer vaccine and a 2-year-old, but these reports have not been confirmed.
• As of April 16, 462 pregnant women reported adverse events related to COVID vaccines, including 132 reports of miscarriage or premature birth.
• Of the 820 cases of Bell’s Palsy reported, 55% of cases were reported after Pfizer-BioNTechvaccinations, 41% following vaccination with the Moderna vaccine and 24 cases (6%) of Bell’s Palsy were reported in conjunction with J&J.
• There were 92 reports of Guillain-Barré Syndrome with 50% of cases attributed to Pfizer, 40% to Moderna and 13% to J&J.
• There were 24,841 reports of anaphylaxis with 43% of cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine, 47% to Moderna and 10% to J&J.

New reports of blood clots as CDC panel votes to resume J&J vaccine

Blood clotting disorders have been reported following vaccination with Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and J&J COVID vaccines. In the U.S., the J&J vaccine, marketed under the company’s Janssen subsidiary, was paused April 13 while U.S. health officials investigated reports of rare blood clots.

The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) Friday voted 10 – 4 to lift the pause and recommended continued use for persons 18 years of age and older. The panel did not recommend adding any extra warning about the risk of rare blood clotting disorders.

The ACIP said the link between blood clots and J&J’s COVID vaccine was “plausible,” but concluded the vaccine’s benefits still outweigh the risks. The recommendation by the ACIP has to be approved by the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) before becoming official government policy, USA TODAY reported.

The Daily News reported today the CDC is investigating the deaths of two more women from a rare blood clotting disorder possibly linked to the J&J vaccine. The CDC’s advisory panel found 15 women who were diagnosed with rare blood clots, including three deaths, seven who remain hospitalized and five recovering at home, according to a slide presentation shared at today’s committee meeting.

Only two of the women were older than 50, with the risk highest in women ages 30-39, according to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The findings appear to confirm the suspicion that younger women are more vulnerable to developing blood clots.

The Hill reported today the CDC is reviewing the death of an Oregon woman who died after receiving J&J’s vaccine. The woman, in her late 50s, was vaccinated before the state issued a pause. Two weeks after receiving the vaccine, she developed a rare but serious blood clot associated with very low platelets. The Oregon Health Authority said it was notified about the death on April 20, two days after the CDC was notified on April 18.

U.S. health authorities also are investigating the report of a Texas woman who was hospitalized after receiving J&J’s vaccine. The Department of State Health Services told The Hill in a statementthat the CDC notified state officials on Wednesday afternoon of a “possible case in Texas reported through VAERS. Symptoms reported “appear to be consistent with the six cases reported elsewhere last week,” the department said.

On April 21, The Defender reported that a Nevada teen underwent three brain surgeries to repair blood clots she developed about a week after receiving J&J’s COVID vaccine. Emma Burkey, 18, suffered seizures, was placed in an induced coma and on a respirator before undergoing surgeries for a massive brain injury.

Burkey was one of the initial six cases under review by the CDC. A CDC panel said Burkey and other women experienced headaches and back pain prior to the discovery of blood clots, and also disclosed she was given heparin, a blood thinner which typically is standard treatment for blood clots, but in cases like Burkey’s, can make the condition worse.

Children’s Health Defense queried the VAERS data for a series of adverse events associated with the formation of clotting disorders and other related conditions. VAERS yielded a total of 1,123 reports for all three vaccines from Dec. 14, 2020, through April 16.

Of the 1,123 cases reported, there were 512 reports attributed to Pfizer, 448 reports to Moderna and 160 reports to J&J — far more than the six J&J cases U.S. health officials were originally investigating.

As The Defender reported April 20, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) said Tuesday it found a “possible link” between the J&J COVID vaccine and blood clots, but concluded the vaccine’s benefits outweigh the risks.

EMA’s safety committee (PRAC) said a warning should be added to the product label, but the blood clot-related disorders should be listed as “very rare” side effects of the vaccine. J&J had delayed the vaccine’s rollout in the EU after U.S. health officials paused the vaccine.

Woman paralyzed after Pfizer vaccine

The Defender reported this week that a healthy 33-year-old woman in Pennsylvania experienced paralysis 12 hours after getting her first dose of the Pfizer COVID vaccine. Doctors at the Cleveland Clinic performed a series of tests, but said they didn’t know what caused the woman to develop paralysis.

Although the woman, who asked to remain anonymous, regained feeling and strength in her arms, as of April 21, she had no function from her lower chest down besides very slight movement in a few toes. The woman’s family confirmed with Channel 11 that her case was reported to Pfizer.

CDC ignores The Defender, no response after 46 days

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.”

The Defender reached out to the CDC on March 8 with a written list of questions about reported deaths and injuries related to COVID vaccines, the status of ongoing investigations reported in the media, if autopsies are being done, the standard for determining whether an injury is causally connected to a vaccine and education initiatives to encourage and facilitate proper and accurate reporting.

After repeated attempts to obtain a response, a representative from the CDC’s Vaccine Task Force contacted us March 29 and said she had never received our list of questions — even though employees we talked to several times said their press officers were working through the questions and confirmed the representative had received them. We provided multiple deadlines, none of which were met. The Defender also provided the list again and attempted to follow-up multiple times with no response.

After repeated calls to the CDC’s media department this week, we were told the COVID response unit would be informed we had still not received answers. The person we spoke with did not know why our inquiries were being ignored. We also asked why the CDC appeared to have the ability to respond to other news media outlets in a timely manner and questioned why the agency, funded by taxpayer dollars, appeared to be selectively responding to inquiries. No answer was provided.

We were told someone would get back to us. It has been 46 days since our original email was sent inquiring into VAERS data and reports.

New study shows Pfizer’s COVID vaccine may trigger herpes virus that causes shingles

The Defender also reported this week that Pfizer’s COVID vaccine may trigger a herpes virus that causes shingles. A recent study published in the journal Rheumatology found six women out of 491 patients developed a skin rash known as herpes zoster (HZ) infection — or shingles — within three to 14 days of receiving either the first or second dose of the Pfizer’s COVID vaccine. Five of them developed shingles infection after the first dose and one after the second.

Lead researcher Dr. Victoria Furer said five of the six patients were young, had mild cases of autoimmune disease and were taking little if any medications for it — which means they should not have been at increased risk for developing the infection, as HZ tends to develop more in people over the age of 50.

“We cannot say the vaccine is the cause at this point,” Furer said. “We can say it might be a trigger in some patients.” She said further research, including a larger epidemiological study, would be needed to prove cause and effect.

Third dose of COVID vaccines and annual boosters are on the way

The Defender reported this week, vaccine makers told investors and the media that COVID booster shots are in the works. But some independent scientists warn trying to outsmart the virus with booster shots designed to address the next variant could backfire, creating an endless wave of new variants, each more virulent and transmissible than the one before.

Dr. Ozlem Tureci, co-founder and CMO of BioNTech, which developed the vaccine with Pfizer, said she also expects people will need to get vaccinated against COVID annually, like the seasonal flu. That’s because, she said, scientists expect vaccine-induced immunity against the virus will decrease over time, CNBC reported.

Tureci’s comments came after Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in an interview that aired April 15 that people would likely need a booster shot, or third dose, of the COVID vaccine within 12 months of getting fully vaccinated with possible additional shots each year.

J&J vaccine manufacturer Emergent BioSolutions shuts down

The Defender reported this week a J&J COVID vaccine manufacturing plant, where an ingredient mix-up last month resulted in 15 million doses of J&J vaccine being discarded, may have contaminated additional doses. A report released Wednesday by the FDA also identified a series of other problems at the Baltimore facility owned by Emergent BioSolutions.

Emergent, which in June received $628 million in taxpayer funding through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to establish the primary U.S. manufacturing facility for J&J’s and AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccines, agreed this week to temporarily shut down operations.

A congressional investigation was launched Tuesday into the company’s federal vaccine contract and shareholders filed a class action lawsuit Monday for false and misleading statements that drove up stock prices and misleading statements regarding the company’s readiness to mass-produce COVID vaccines.

According to CNBC, an FDA inspection of the Baltimore plant in April 2020 revealed Emergent lacked necessary personnel to produce a COVID vaccine. Another inspection, in June 2020, determined Emergent’s plan for producing vaccines was inadequate due to poorly trained staff and quality control problems, raising questions as to why the company did not fix problems earlier and why federal officials who oversaw its contracts did not demand better performance.

Children’s Health Defense asks anyone who has experienced an adverse reaction, to any vaccine, to file a report following these three steps.

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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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The Montana state legislature overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan and unprecedented resolution Tuesday calling on the federal government to end endless wars. The resolution passed 95-3 in the House and 47-2 in the Senate.

House Joint Resolution 9, sponsored by Rep. Ron Marshall (R-Hamilton), is the first of its kind to be introduced by any state and is currently being used as a model for other states across the country.

The resolution specifically urges President Joe Biden and the United States Congress to “end the endless war in Afghanistan,” repeal the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, resist sending U.S. troops into combat without a declaration of war from Congress or specific authorization to do so, and to “execute a prudent foreign policy.”

Concerned Veterans for America, a veteran-run organization, endorsed the resolution and plans on utilizing it at the national level. The organization’s Deputy Director Russ Duerstine said in a statement that “the passing of the Endless War resolution is a firm statement—a strong message on behalf of Montanans that there is a better way than continuing to fight endless wars.”

According to USA Today, Montana has the third-highest percentage of veterans of all states in the United States. A recent YouGov and Concerned Veterans for America poll also determined that two-thirds of all US veterans support the complete withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Our troops have served valiantly in Afghanistan and elsewhere, but perpetual war and fruitless nation building is not in America’s best interests,” Duerstine added. “Worse, endless conflicts marginalize the service of those who have sacrificed for our freedom. We owe our military community better, and we thank Rep. Marshall and Sen. Bogner for leading on this measure and commend all those who showed their support for it.”

Some lawmakers have asked what the resolution will accomplish, referring to it as a “letter to Santa” since it isn’t legislation, but Concerned Veterans for America’s Montana Grassroots Engagement Director Chris Enget, a Purple Heart recipient who served in Afghanistan in 2012, said the resolution would put pressure on Montana’s congressional delegation to take action to end overseas conflicts.

Enget, who helped write the resolution, added that the organization is using it as a model in other states and will also pressure their congressional delegations by passing similar resolutions.

Concerned Veterans for America will also send the resolution to Washington D.C. and use their lobbyists to put pressure on Congress, according to Enget.

“We are going to use this to show America is fed up,” Enget said. “We’re not just going to let it sit there. We’re going to continue to bring it up and we’re going to continue to show that the state of Montana has made this very large statement that we can not keep participating in endless wars.”

The resolution passed a week after President Biden announced that the timeline for U.S. removal from Afghanistan would be delayed from May 1 to Sept. 11, 2021. Biden said, “I’m now the fourth United States President to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan: two Republicans, two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth.”

Concerned Veteran’s senior adviser Dan Caldwell said in a statement, “while we still believe a full withdrawal by the May 1st deadline in the Doha agreement best serves America’s interests, we are pleased to hear Biden is firmly committed to bringing our troops home within the next few months.”

The organization’s Montana chapter feels the same way.

“We’re going to support President Biden’s timeline, but we’re not going to let the pressure up,” Enget said. “We now have a concrete date from him that this is what he wants to do and we’re going to be supportive of the fact that he wants to fully withdraw troops, but he needs to keep that timeline then. We’re going to pressure his administration to keep that timeline.”

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Liam McCollum is an independent journalist and the host of The Liam McCollum Show, a libertarian-oriented podcast. He’s a Philosophy, Journalism, and Pre-Law student at the University of Montana.

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Amid renewed fear mongering about an “invasion” at the U.S.-Mexico border, this week’s 175^th anniversary of the 1846–1848 war the U.S. government instigated with Mexico is a reminder that throughout U.S. history, invasions have gone almost exclusively from north to south, not vice versa. A near-continuous series of invasions—military, political, and economic—moving from north to south has helped produce the poverty, violence, and insecurity driving people to migrate from south to north. The current humanitarian crisis at the border, with record numbers of unaccompanied minors desperately fleeing violence, insecurity and poverty, reveals the consequences of an interventionist policy that’s even older than the U.S.-Mexico war.

To be honest, interventionist is an all-too-common euphemism for imperialist invasions. The first invasion came in 1806 when U.S. military forces entered Mexican territory (then still controlled by Spain) and established a military base in today’s Colorado. In total, including the 1846–1848 war that resulted in the U.S. government seizing nearly half of Mexico, the U.S. military has invaded Mexico at least ten times.^[1] Across Latin America, U.S. forces have invaded southern neighbors more than 70 times, leaving occupying armies for months, years, and in some cases decades.^[2]

Today the U.S. State Department acknowledges that U.S. troops instigated the war with Mexico.^[3] In early 1846 President James Polk deployed forces into disputed territory along the Rio Grande River. “We have not one particle of right to be here,” U.S. Colonel Ethan Allen Hitchcock wrote from near the river. “It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses.”^[4] After fighting ensued, Polk used what he knew to be false claims that Mexico had “invaded our territory and shed American blood on American soil” to win a Congressional declaration of war.^[5]

Once the war started, many U.S. soldiers questioned the invasion of a neighbor posing no threat to the United States. Angry volunteer troops from Virginia, Mississippi, and North Carolina mutinied. Thousands of soldiers deserted. Several hundred Irish-American soldiers switched sides to fight for Catholic Mexico in the San Patricio Battalion. Casualty rates were unusually high for U.S. forces. They were higher still for Mexicans, including civilians subjected to U.S. bombardment and wartime atrocities. Commanding generals inflicted “extravagant violence” against Mexicans, following the pattern of scorched earth-style warfare employed against Native American civilians.^[6] “Murder, robbery, & rape on mothers and daughters, in the presence of the tied-up males of the families, have been common all along the Rio Grande,” reported U.S. General Winifred Scott in 1847.^[7] A young soldier at the time, future general and president Ulysses Grant said, “I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico.”^[8]

When U.S. and Mexican officials signed a treaty to end the war in 1848, the U.S. government took almost half of Mexico’s pre-war territory. This included around 525,000 square miles that today are the U.S. states of Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California, and parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. President James Polk had wanted even more territory: he had plans to invade the Yucatán Peninsula (and also hoped to buy Cuba from Spain).^[9] Some expansionist Democrats in Polk’s party pushed for annexing all of Mexico. They were among a group of southerners who dreamed of expanding the United States’ growing North American empire into the Caribbean, Central America, and Mexico based around enslaved labor and new slave-holding territories. Some led “filibustering” campaigns— private military invasions—in the 1850s into Mexico and Central America, although all failed.^[10]

From Mexico to Nicaragua to Panama and Beyond

The most infamous of the filibusters was William Walker. Walker led a private army, mostly composed of southerners, in an 1853 invasion of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. He declared himself president of what he called the Republic of Sonora. After Mexicans forced him to retreat to California, Walker led at least six separate campaigns into Nicaragua between 1855 and 1860. For a brief period, he declared himself president of Nicaragua, earned recognition from U.S. President Franklin Pierce, declared English the national language, legalized slavery, invaded Costa Rica, and announced his intention to take over all of Central America. Twice, the U.S. Navy captured him and returned him to the United States; in 1859, the administration of President James Buchanan ordered him released. Walker soon landed in Honduras during another attempt to take over Nicaragua. This time, Hondurans captured Walker, tried and executed him with a firing squad.^[11]

While U.S. government officials generally opposed private invasions like Walker’s, the U.S. military invaded parts of Latin America and the Caribbean throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. U.S. forces invaded Nicaragua in 1853, 1854, 1867, 1894, 1896, 1898, and 1899; Panama in 1856, 1860, 1865, 1873, 1885, and 1895; and Haiti in 1891 (with another invasion threatened in 1888).^[12] In 1903, U.S. officials and Navy warships helped Panamanian secessionists declare independence from Colombia to help advance plans to build a canal across the new country. Panama soon became a U.S. “colony in all but name.”^[13] The Panama Canal Zone was a U.S. colony, full stop, until its return in 1999. Between 1856 and the 1989 U.S. war in Panama, the U.S. military would invade Panama a total of 24 times.^[14] U.S. military bases in the Panama Canal Zone served as launch pads for yet more invasions elsewhere in Latin America.

New U.S. Colonies in Cuba and Puerto Rico

During the U.S. war with Spain of 1898, U.S. troops conquered Cuba and Puerto Rico, as well as the Philippines. U.S. officials turned Puerto Rico into a colony while officially granting Cuba its independence. In practice Cuba became a quasi-colony. To a greater extent than even the Panama Canal Zone, Guantánamo Bay became a U.S. colony, camouflaged by a U.S.-imposed “lease” that has no end date and that can only be terminated with the agreement of both governments. This arrangement amounts to an eviction-proof lease.

In 1901 U.S. officials also inserted an amendment into the new Cuban constitution allowing U.S. troops to invade at will. They soon did. An “Army of Cuban Pacification” occupied the island for almost three years in 1906-1909. U.S. forces occupied the country again in 1912 and for five years in 1917-1922.

Elsewhere in Latin America, the U.S. military occupied the Dominican Republic in 1903-1904 and 1914, and for nine years in 1915-1924. Neighboring Haiti suffered new occupations in 1914 and for nearly 20 years in 1915-1934. In Central America, Honduras experienced eight invasions and occupations in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1920, 1924, and 1925. The U.S. military occupied Nicaragua for two years in 1909-1910 and for around three decades in 1912-1933. U.S. troops invaded Guatemala in 1920. Naval vessels threatened the use of force in the waters of Costa Rica and Panama in 1921 and El Salvador in 1932.^[15] U.S. warships entered Latin American ports some 6,000 times between the mid-nineteenth century and 1930, in classic “gunboat diplomacy” style—in other words, political-economic bullying through displays of military force.^[16]

Covert Invasions

President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policy of the 1930s brought a brief pause in the invasions and occupations. After World War II, however, new, increasingly covert U.S. invasions largely replaced the overt wars and occupations. These invasions included CIA-backed coups in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Chile; weapons, training, and logistics support for right-wing forces in Central America’s horrific civil wars of the 1980s; Plan Colombia-style military deployments amid the “war on drugs”; and a growing number of U.S. military bases in the region. U.S. support for recent coups and coup attempts in Honduras, Bolivia, and Venezuela illustrates the persistence of such strategies.

U.S. military and CIA invasions into Latin America always have been matched by U.S. economic and corporate invasions, as Mexico demonstrates. Following the end of the war that began in April 1846, Mexico became as much of an economic dependency of the United States as it had been to its Spanish colonizer: mines were controlled by U.S. firms; railroads were designed to ship the wealth of the mines from south to north; the oil industry was dominated by Rockefeller, Mellon, and other oil giants; the peso was pegged to the dollar; Mexico was deeply indebted to U.S. banks.^[17] While Mexico has more power now relative to its northern neighbor than it did in the early twentieth century, the pattern of northern dominance largely has persisted.

Much of Central America and some other parts of Latin America have remained far more dominated by the United States than Mexico. There’s a reason that Honduras was the model for writer O. Henry when he coined the term “banana republic”: Honduras was under the near-complete control of U.S. banana companies and their political and military muscle, the U.S. government. Perhaps distracted by the clothing brand, many forget the original meaning of the term “banana republic”: a weak, impoverished, marginally independent country facing overwhelming foreign economic and political domination. In other words, a de facto colony—which is what Honduras and some other Latin American countries became in the twentieth century; in some cases they remain so today.

The U.S. government and U.S. corporations are not solely responsible for the violence, poverty, and insecurity that are at the root of today’s migration from Latin America to the United States. Other government and corporate actors within and beyond the region also bear responsibility. They include corrupt national leaders, European governments, and European, Canadian, and Asian corporations that have shaped Latin America through history.

One hundred and seventy five years after a U.S. president instigated a war with Mexico that resulted in the seizure of California and other lands that have been major sources of U.S. wealth, the current U.S. president and others in the United States should acknowledge the disproportionate role that U.S. leaders have played in invading and plundering to the south as well as the role these invasions and plunder have played in spurring mass migration northward.

Beyond recognizing U.S. culpability, President Biden has a historic opportunity to repair some of the damage our country has caused and stop causing more harm. This means abandoning the immoral and largely ineffective strategy of President Trump and his two presidential predecessors to outsource immigration control to the military and police forces of southern neighbors.^[18] It means admitting tens of thousands of Latin American asylum seekers per year as a start of paying off a long-owed “imperial debt.”^[19] If Biden is serious about addressing the “root causes” of migration, he and Vice President Kamala Harris must go beyond  pitifully small increases in humanitarian aid to Central America^[20] to end more than 200 years of military, political, and economic invasions that are at the root of those root causes.

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David Vine is Professor of political anthropology at American University in Washington, DC. This article is adapted from Professor Vine’s new book The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (University of California Press). David Vine is also the author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press, 2009) and Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 2015). See davidvine.net and basenation.us for more information.

Notes

[1] “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2020,” https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R42738.pdf.

[2]  “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2020,” https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R42738.pdf; The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State,

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520300873/the-united-states-of-war.

[3] “Milestones: 1830-1860,” http://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/TexasAnnexation.

[4] Fifty Years in Camp and Field: Diary of Major-General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, U.S.A., https://www.google.com/books/edition/Fifty_Years_in_Camp_and_Field/VhJ-4yKyrhoC?hl=en.

[5] A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/529359/a-nation-without-borders-by-steven-hahn/.

[6] “The Occupation of Mexico: May 1846-July 1848,” https://history.army.mil/html/books/073/73-3/index.html.

[7] “The April Invasion of Veracruz,” https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/21/opinion/krauze-the-april-invasion-of-veracruz.html.

[8] A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1946 U.S. Invasion of Mexico, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/200246/a-wicked-war-by-amy-s-greenberg/.

[9] What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, https://www.google.com/books/edition/What_Hath_God_Wrought/TTzRCwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0.

[10] E.g., Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from the Revolution to the Civil War, https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781566631365/Building-the-Continental-Empire-American-Expansion-from-the-Revolution-to-the-Civil-War; “From Old Empire to New,” https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/4453.htm.

[11] William Walker’s Wars: How One Man’s Private American Army Tried to Conquer Mexico, Nicaragua, and Honduras, https://www.chicagoreviewpress.com/william-walker-s-wars-products-9781613737293.php; Empire in Retreat: The Past, Present, and Future of the United States, https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300210002/empire-retreat; “William Walker: King of the 19th Century Filibusters,” https://www.historynet.com/william-walker-king-of-the-19th-century-filibusters.htm.

[12] Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from the Revolution to the Civil War, https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781566631365/Building-the-Continental-Empire-American-Expansion-from-the-Revolution-to-the-Civil-War; Historical Atlas of Central America, https://www.oupress.com/books/9780699/historical-atlas-of-central-america.

[13] America’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire, https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198296874.001.0001/acprof-9780198296874.

[14] Historical Atlas of Central America, https://www.oupress.com/books/9780699/historical-atlas-of-central-america; Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the U.S. in Panama, https://www.dukeupress.edu/emperors-in-the-jungle.

[15] Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the U.S. in Panama, https://www.dukeupress.edu/emperors-in-the-jungle; Historical Atlas of Central America, https://www.oupress.com/books/9780699/historical-atlas-of-central-america; The Martinez Era: Salvadoran-American Relations, 1931-1944, https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/3002/.

[16] Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780805083231.

[17] “From Old Empire to New,” https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/4453.htm.

[18] “Biden’s Plan for Central America Is a Smokescreen,” https://www.thenation.com/article/world/biden-central-america-immigration/.

[19] “Migrations as Reparations,” https://nacla.org/blog/2016/05/24/migration-reparations.

[20] “The Biden Plan to Build Security and Prosperity in Partnership with the People of Central America,” https://joebiden.com/centralamerica/.

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The campaign to oppose illegal Israeli military recruitment in Canada has received a significant boost. A parliamentary petition calling for an investigation into IDF recruitment has quickly surpassed the number of signatures required to be presented in the House of Commons.

Submitted by Rabbi David Mivasair and sponsored by NDP MP Matthew Green, the petition “calls upon the Minister of Justice to undertake a thorough investigation of those who have recruited or facilitated recruiting for the Israel Defense Forces, and if warranted lay charges against those involved in recruiting and encouraging recruiting for the IDF.” In 48 hours over 1,000 individuals have signed the petition, which is twice what’s required for it to be read in Parliament. The government then has to respond.

The petition is part of a multi-faceted campaign that began in the fall with a formal complaint and open letter signed by Noam Chomsky, Roger Waters, filmmaker Ken Loach, author Yann Martel, former MP Jim Manly, poet El Jones and more than 150 others. The letter called on the federal government to apply charges under the Foreign Enlistment Act against those recruiting Canadians for the Israeli military.

It is a crime to recruit anyone for a foreign military or to encourage any person to serve in a foreign military. The Foreign Enlistment Act states,

“Any person who, within Canada, recruits or otherwise induces any person or body of persons to enlist or to accept any commission or engagement in the armed forces of any foreign state or other armed forces operating in that state is guilty of an offence.”

On several occasions the Israeli consulate in Toronto has advertised that they have an IDF representative available for personal appointments for those wishing to join the IDF. In 2019 the consulate announced, “an IDF representative will conduct personal interviews at the Consulate on November 11-14. Young people who wish to enlist in the IDF or anyone who has not fulfilled their obligations according to the Israeli Defense Service Law are invited to meet with him.” Subsequently, United Jewish Appeal of Greater Toronto and Federation Combined Jewish Appeal Montréal publicized a webinar last June by Nefesh-B’Nefesh titled “Joining the IDF”, which claimed to offer participants “everything you need and want to know about joining the IDF.”

As part of drawing attention to the recruitment, Justice Minister David Lametti received a formal complaint and letters from nearly 1,500 individuals. Additionally, the chief of staff for the office of the RCMP Commissioner, Rob O’Reilly, received a packet of evidence and 900 emails regarding illegal Israeli military recruitment in Canada.

The campaign has been widely covered in left Canadian and pro-Palestinian media. “Why is the Israeli military still recruiting in Canada?” (Canadian Dimension), “Canadians should not be recruited to fight for the Israeli army” (Rabble), “Canadians recruited for Israeli war crimes” (Spring), “Toronto schools push students to join Israeli military” (Canada Files), “What Constitutes Recruiting” (Jewish Independent), “Civil society groups demand action on illegal Israeli military recruiting in Canada” (Rabble), “National Campaign Against IDF Recruiting Begins in Canada” (Washington Report on Middle East Affairs), “Justice minister asked to investigate alleged illegal recruiting in Canada by Israeli Military” (Canada Talks Israel Palestine), “Canadians call on justice department to investigate IDF recruitment in Toronto schools” (Mondoweiss), “Israel illegally recruits Canadian citizens to its army” (Electronic Intifada), “Open letter declares opposition to the Illegal Recruitment of Canadians by the IDF” (Canada Files), “Campaign to stop Israeli military recruitment in Canada gathers pace” (Middle Eastern Monitor) are some of the articles published on the campaign.

In Québec Le Devoir discussed the campaign on its front page and in a follow-up article while Journal de Montréal also ran a story on the challenge to Israeli military recruitment in Canada. But, in English Canada the dominant media has ignored the evidence presented to the justice minister and RCMP. A number of reporters expressed interest in the campaign but got cold feet or were stopped by their editors from covering the public letter and evidence compiled. In February Davide Mastracci wrote a powerful article about how “Media Is Ignoring Alleged Illegal Israeli Army Recruitment In Canada”.

The lack of corporate media attention partly reflects the silence of the anti-Palestinian lobby. Generally quick to denounce pro-Palestinian activists “toxic obsession with Israel”, the Israel lobby have failed to find fault with a campaign suggesting they are engaged in criminal activity. They understand that publicly denouncing the anti-recruitment campaign would draw attention to an issue difficult to defend. The potential illegality of the recruitment is embarrassing and promoting a foreign army rests uneasily with even right-wing nationalist thinking, which is generally sympathetic to an anti-Palestinian outlook. Prominent military historian Jack Granatstein, for instance, told an interviewer, “in my view no one who is a Canadian should be able to enlist in some other country’s military and keep his Canadian citizenship.”

At the same time, the Israel lobby doesn’t want to stop convincing young people to join the IDF. According to 2017 statistics from the IDF, 230 Canadians served in the Israeli military. In 2020, 9 per cent of “lone soldiers” in the Israeli military were from Canada according to the IDF. Canadians staff West Bank checkpoints and ships enforcing the blockade of Gaza.

About 3,500 “lone soldiers” serve in the IDF. This is significant but a relatively small proportion of the 150,000 enlisted in the Israeli military.

But “lone soldiers” are of value beyond their military capacities. Foreigners volunteering to fight for Israel are a powerful symbol to pressure/reassure Israelis weary of their country’s violent behavior.

“Lone soldiers” also intensify the Zionist ethos within much of Canada’s Jewish community. If a friend or family member is willing to give up two years of their life to ‘protect the Jewish people’, goes a certain Zionist logic, I should at least donate to an Israel focused group, lobby a politician, undermine a pro-Palestinian professor, etc.

The campaign to oppose Israeli military recruitment in Canada challenges this ideological climate. Bringing the issue into the House of Commons is an important step in disrupting a dynamic where a young Torontonian can be in charge of overseeing Palestinian misery. Please sign the parliamentary petition.

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The CDC announced this week that deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a U.S. Government funded database that tracks injuries and deaths caused by vaccines, following experimental COVID injections, have now reached 3,486 deaths since December of 2020, when the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID shots were given emergency use authorization (EUA) by the FDA.

To get a perspective on the magnitude of deaths following COVID shots that are being reported to the CDC, there were only 3,445 deaths reported to the CDC following all vaccines from 1/1/2005 through 11/30/2020, the 15-year period prior to the FDA issuing emergency use authorizations for experimental COVID injections in December of 2020.

Source.

3,186 of the reported 3,486 deaths following COVID injections were included in today’s data dump into VAERS, which also included 86,080 injuries with 1,217 permanent disabilities, 12,374 emergency room/doctor visits, 6,282 hospitalized, and 1,906 life threatening injuries.

Source.

Side by side comparison of 15 years of recorded vaccine injuries and deaths vs. 4 months of recorded COVID vaccine injuries and deaths. (Note: the CDC is reporting 3,486 deaths after COVID vaccines while only 3,186 are entered into VAERS so far.)

The breakdown of deaths per EUA injection is as follows.

• Pfizer/Biontech – 1,476 deaths (Source.)
• Moderna – 1,540 deaths (Source.)
• Janssen – 155 deaths (Source.)

According to the CDC’s COVID Vaccine Tracker, the latest statistics on how many doses of each COVID shot have been injected into the population is as follows.

• Pfizer/Biontech – 116,754,631 doses
• Moderna – 97,353,734 doses
• Janssen – 8,040,727 doses

The J&J Janssen shot has the highest percentage of recorded deaths, with Moderna second.

The Janssen shot is currently paused by the FDA due to reports of “rare” blood clots. According to the CDC, these reports only exist with 8 people, all women.

However, the specific cases of blood clots is very narrowly defined by the FDA and CDC, looking only for “cerebral venous sinus thrombosis combined with thrombocytopenia.” (Blood clots in the brain combined with low blood platelets.)

But many other kinds of blood clots following injections have also been reported, many of them fatal, besides just “cerebral venous sinus thrombosis.”

If we search for deaths due to any kind of “thrombosis,” the numbers go up. Here are the search results for “death” and all cases of “thrombosis” (blood clots.)

Source.

Source.

Source.

Clearly deaths associated with blood clots are being reported with all three EUA shots, but the percentage of shots administered along with deaths and blood clots is considerably higher with the J&J shot.

One other thing to note is the age range these deaths and blood clots are happening with each shot.

With the 27 deaths with blood clots among the Pfizer patients, only 1 occurred below the age of 65.

With the 19 deaths with blood clots among the Moderna patients, 5 occurred below the age of 65.

With the 13 deaths with blood clots among the J&J patients, 8 (62%) of them were among those aged below 65, including one between the ages of 17 and 44.

So the J&J shot is affecting young people, who have little to no risk of dying from COVID-19, far more than the other two shots.

And yet news reports today are stating that the CDC and FDA are getting ready to resume the J&J shots. (Source.)

COVID Shots: Mass Murder and Biological Weapons

The decision of whether or not to continue allowing emergency use authorization for the J&J shot, or either of the other two shots, is largely made by just a select few doctors and scientists, all employed by the U.S. Government and with strong ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

Other doctors and scientists who are not employed by a government or a pharmaceutical company that produces and sells vaccines, strongly disagree with the government health bureaucrats, and we have featured many of them here at Health Impact News.

One of the doctors who actually did get an interview in the corporate media is Dr. Hooman Noorchashm, a Harvard trained physician and scientist who was interviewed by Tucker Carlson on Fox News recently.

He stated that he does not know why the FDA and CDC focused on just this specific cluster of blood clots in the J&J experimental COVID shot, because the issue of dangerous blood clots concerns all three EUA COVID shots right now. He was glad the FDA took at least the one shot off the market (although it looks like it is coming back soon.)

The interview is still on YouTube for now. (Let us know if it disappears.)

Not only is there disagreement over whether or not these experimental injections are safe or effective, many are now claiming that these shots are purposely designed to infect and kill people as part of a global plan to reduce the world’s population.

The fact that very well-known scientists and doctors are saying this, such as Dr. Michael Yeadon, the former Vice President and Chief Scientist for Allergy and Respiratory at Pfizer, should be headline news, even if their views are not widely accepted by others.

But instead, they are attacked and censored from the corporate media which is mainly funded by Big Pharma and does not do investigative journalism at all when it comes to vaccines, but simply act as marketing agencies for Big Pharma.

J. Bart Classen, MD, an immunologist, just had a paper published in the journal Microbiology & Infectious Diseases, titled:

COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease

Excerpt:

There is an old saying in medicine that “the cure may be worse than the disease.” The phrase can be applied to vaccines. In  the current paper the concern is raised that the RNA based COVID vaccines have the potential to cause more disease than the epidemic of COVID-19.

This paper focuses on a novel potential adverse event mechanism causing prion disease which could be even more common and debilitating than the viral infection the vaccine is designed to prevent. While this paper focuses on one potential adverse event there are multiple other potential fatal adverse events as discussed below.

Over the last two decades there has been a concern among certain scientists that prions could be used as bioweapons. More  recently there has been a concern that ubiquitous intracellular molecules could be activated to cause prion disease including Alzheimer’s disease, ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases.

This concern originates due to potential for misuse of research data on the mechanisms by which certain RNA binding proteins like TDP-43, FUS and others can be activated to form disease causing prions.

The fact that this research, which could be used for bioweapons development, is funded by private organizations including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Ellison Medical Foundation [2] without national/international oversight is also a concern. (Full study.)

Reducing the world’s population can no longer be considered a conspiracy “theory,” as the Globalists themselves, such as Bill Gates, have publicly stated that we need to reduce the world’s population, usually in the name of climate change and “saving the earth.”

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, there are now more recorded deaths following the experimental COVID shots during the first four months in the market, then deaths recorded following all vaccines for the past 15 years!

And yet, the CDC’s official position is still:

A review of available clinical information including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records revealed no evidence that vaccination contributed to patient deaths. (Emphasis theirs. Source.)

For someone who objectively observes the data, which now includes statements submitted to the corporate media by the CDC explaining that thousands of people who are fully vaccinated are still coming down with COVID infections and dying, it obviously takes a LOT more faith to believe that these injections are for our benefit, than it does to believe these shots only benefit Big Pharma and can cause serious harm and injury, and should be avoided completely.

When more people among the public begin to realize that there are evil motives behind these experimental injections, will the politicians and drug company directors be held accountable for mass murder, as the German doctors were at the Nuremburg trials?

Most of those doctors were executed after being convicted at the trials, and if the same moral and legal principles still apply today, then shouldn’t the same thing happen?

For that to happen, however, Americans need to regain control of the judicial system, a topic of a future article that I hope to publish soon.

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A regional independent drug assessment center, the CTIAP (Centre territorial d’Information indépendante et d’Avis pharmaceutiques), which is linked to the Cholet public hospital in the west of France, recently published a report showing that the vaccines used against COVID were not only submitted to insufficient clinical testing, but that the quality of the active substances, their “excipients, some of which are new,” and the manufacturing processes are problematic. “These new excipients should be considered as new active substances,” the Cholet hospital team stated, in a study that according to them raises issues that have not been commented to date.

The team led by Dr. Catherine Frade, a pharmacist, worked on public data released by the EMA with relation to the Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) shots, and its first caveat was that all these products only have temporary marketing authorizations. They are all subject to further studies that reach as far as 2024 and even beyond, and these will be almost impossible to be completed because of the way the vaccines are now being distributed, said the CTIAP report.

These studies even include the stability and comparability of the vaccine batches put on the market and the quality and safety of excipients — substances formulated alongside the active ingredient of a medication to facilitate or enhance their absorption.

According to the CTIAP, all of the vaccines were put on the market and actively used on human beings before “proof of quality for the active substance and the finished product” was produced: all the manufacturing labs obtained future deadlines to submit their studies in this regard.

The authors of the report consider that the “variabilities, which impact the very core of the product, could even invalidate any clinical trials conducted” in the coming months and years.

They go so far as to state:

“Prudence would even dictate that, in all countries where these vaccines against COVID-19 have been marketed, all the batches thus ‘released’ should be withdrawn immediately; and that these MAs that have been granted should be suspended, or even canceled, as a matter of urgency until further notice.”

Here below is LifeSite’s full working translation of the CTIAP’s April 2 report:

Can we imagine launching a car manufacturing line and putting vehicles on the road, despite the uncertainties noted in the official documents published? These uncertainties are related to the quality of the parts making up the engine and the various other parts, including those related to safety, the manufacturing process, the reproducibility of the batches that are being marketed, etc.

In the field of medicines (including vaccines), the pharmaceutical act of “release” of the finished product (an authorized product intended for sale) constitutes the final stage of control that precedes the release of these products to the population. This key step of “release” is under the pharmaceutical responsibility of the manufacturers.

Following its previous analyses, the CTIAP of the Cholet Hospital Center has once again revealed to the public, and probably in an unprecedented and exclusive way, new vital information concerning the following four vaccines against COVID-19: the one from the BioNTech/Pfizer laboratory; the one from the Moderna laboratory; the one from the Astra Zeneca laboratory; the one from the Janssen laboratory.

This work was made possible thanks to the valuable contribution of Dr. Catherine Frade, pharmacist and former director of international regulatory affairs in the pharmaceutical industry. She graciously provided us with a documented, written alert.

In this document, she sheds light on data extracted, on March 22, 2021, from the MA (marketing authorization) itself; an MA qualified as “conditional.” She has extracted “source data that is difficult to identify by someone who does not work in the field.” This data is therefore public and verifiable. First of all, it should be noted that the author of this document no longer works in the pharmaceutical industry; she states: “First of all, I would like to make it clear that I have no conflict of interest with the pharmaceutical industry.” It is therefore with her agreement that CTIAP intends to make available to the public, health professionals, decision-makers … an analysis of some of these data that all should read carefully.

This reflection first presents what a “conditional” MA is (I). Then, it recalls that the studies for these vaccines are not complete, as they run from “2021 to at least 2024” (II). Then, it reveals, in an unprecedented and exclusive way, that the official documents, published by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), underline the insufficiency of the evidence concerning also the “quality” of the “active substance” and of the “excipients,” of the “manufacturing process,” of the “reproducibility of the batches” that are being commercialized, etc. (III). Finally, this analysis proposes a conclusion.

I — First of all, it is important to understand what a “conditional” MA is

An MA is to a drug what a car registration document is to a car. MA is granted when a drug has proven its quality, efficacy, and safety; with a positive benefit/risk ratio: that is, it presents more benefits than risks. Obtaining this MA is the essential condition for a pharmaceutical laboratory to sell any drug, including vaccines.

Here, in the case of these vaccines against COVID-19, the four MAs issued are so-called “conditional” MAs. They are temporary. They are valid for no more than one year, because they were obtained on the basis of “incomplete data.” To obtain a standard 5-year MA, the laboratories concerned must provide dossiers completed with “studies in progress and studies planned for the coming years.” Throughout “this development,” close and coordinated monitoring between the manufacturing laboratories and the health authorities is organized through regular discussions. The “conditional” MA is “re-evaluated each year” according to the contribution and critical analysis of additional data provided and collected during a full year.

This “conditional” MA is a European MA. It was obtained through the centralized accelerated procedure. It allows simultaneous marketing in the following 30 countries (European Union and European Free Trade Association): Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden.

The studies concerning these four vaccines are therefore still in progress.

II — Secondly, the planned studies are still in progress and are spread over a period ranging from “2021 to at least 2024”

All of the studies submitted during the MA application are summarized in the EPAR (European Public Assessment Report). This report is published on the European Medicines Agency (EMA) website. The planned studies, not yet completed, are also included.

This schedule, which “extends from 2021 to at least 2024,” depending on which COVID-19 vaccine is involved, is defined in the “annexes” of the conditional marketing authorization and in the published EPARs.

As an example, the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine received this European conditional MA on December 21, 2020. And the deadline for filing “confirmation” of efficacy, safety, and tolerability of this vaccine is “December 2023.”

The Moderna vaccine was granted marketing authorization on January 6, 2021. The deadline for filing “confirmation” of efficacy, safety, and tolerability of the vaccine is “December 2022” at the earliest.

AstraZeneca’s vaccine was granted marketing authorization on January 29, 2021. The deadline for filing “confirmation” of efficacy, safety, and tolerability of the vaccine is “March 2024.”

The Janssen vaccine was granted conditional European marketing authorization on March 11, 2021. The deadline for submitting “confirmation” of the vaccine’s efficacy, safety and tolerance is “December 2023.”

However, to date — and this is undoubtedly where the unprecedented and exclusive revelation of this study lies — another deadline has been set for these four vaccines. This deadline no longer concerns only the ongoing clinical trials, but also the “proof of quality for the active substance and the finished product” itself: that is, the intrinsic quality (the heart) of the product sold and administered to millions of people.

III — Thirdly, and this seems to be unprecedented, the published official documents also underline the incompleteness of the evidence concerning the “quality” of the “active substance” and “excipients,” the “manufacturing process,” the ”reproducibility of the batches” marketed, etc.

The deadline for submitting additional evidence on the “quality” of the “active substance” and the “finished product” (i.e., the vaccine that is authorized and sold) is set for:

• “July 2021” for BioNTech/Pfizer;
• “June 2021” for Moderna;
• “June 2022” for Astra Zeneca;
• “August 2021” for Janssen.

Indeed, for these 4 vaccines, paragraph E, “Specific obligation regarding post-authorization measures for the conditional marketing authorization,” taken from Annex II of the MA, clearly states the following:

For the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine (pages 18-19)

By “March 2021,” the laboratory must provide “additional validation data” to “confirm the reproducibility of the finished product manufacturing process.”

By “July 2021,” the laboratory must provide missing information to:

• “complete the characterization of the active substance and the finished product;”
• “strengthen the control strategy, including the specifications of the active substance and the finished product” in order to “ensure the constant quality of the product;”
• “provide additional information regarding its synthesis process and control strategy” in order to “confirm the purity profile of the excipient ALC-0315” and “to ensure quality control and batch-to-batch reproducibility throughout the life cycle of the finished product;”
• and by “December 2023,” and “in order to confirm the efficacy and safety” of this vaccine, the company “shall submit the final clinical study report for the randomized, placebo-controlled, blind observer study (Study C4591001).

For the Moderna vaccine (page 15)

The laboratory should provide the missing information to:

• “complete the characterization of the manufacturing processes of the active substance and the finished product” (deadline “January 2021”);
• confirm the reproducibility of the manufacturing process of the active substance and the finished product (initial and final batch sizes) (deadline “April 2021”);
• “provide additional information on the stability of the active substance and the finished product and review the specifications of the active substance and the finished product after longer industrial practice” with the aim of “ensuring consistent product quality” (deadline “June 2021”);
• “submit the final study report for the randomized, placebo-controlled, blinded clinical trial for the mRNA-1273-P301 observer” to “confirm the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccine Moderna” (by December 2022).

For the Astra Zeneca vaccine (pages 14-15)

The laboratory must submit the missing information in order to:

• “provide additional validation and comparability data, and initiate further testing” with the aim of “confirming the reproducibility of the manufacturing processes of the active substance and the finished product” (by “December 2021”);
• “Provide the main analysis (based on the December 7 data cut-off (post database lock) and the final analysis of the combined pivotal studies” to “confirm the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca” (deadline “March 5, 2021” (for the main analysis) and “May 31, 2022” (for the combined analysis);
• “submit final reports of the randomized controlled clinical studies COV001, COV002, COV003 and COV005” to “confirm the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca” (due “May 31, 2022”);
• “provide additional data regarding the stability of the active substance and the finished product and revise the specifications of the finished product after extensive industrial practice” in order to “ensure consistent product quality” (deadline “June 2022”);
• “submit the synthesis and summaries of the primary analysis and the final clinical study report for study D8110C00001” to “confirm the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccine AstraZeneca in the elderly and in subjects with underlying disease” — due “April 30, 2021” (for the primary analysis) and “March 31, 2024” (for the final study report).

For the Janssen vaccine (page 18)

The laboratory should submit the missing information to:

• “provide additional comparability and validation data” to “confirm the reproducibility of the manufacturing process of the finished product” (deadline “August 15, 2021”);
• submit the final report of the VAC31518COV3001 randomized, placebo-controlled, single-blind clinical study to “confirm the efficacy and safety of the COVID-19 Ad26.COV2.S vaccine” by December 31, 2023.

These facts allow us to offer a conclusion.

Conclusion

For these reasons, which are not exhaustive, it has proved useful to look for and read the content of the paragraph E: “Specific obligation relating to post-authorization measures concerning the conditional marketing authorization,” extracted from Annex II of the MA, corresponding to each of these 4 vaccines against COVID-19.

The inadequacy of the evaluation does not only concern the clinical trials (studies conducted in humans (women and men)), but also the quality of the active substance, the excipients, some of which are new, the manufacturing process, and the batches released and administered to humans in several countries around the world.

Moreover, these new excipients must be considered as new active ingredients, and thus be the subject of a complete evaluation file similar to that required for a new active ingredient.

Changing the commercial name of one of these vaccines, as was recently announced for the AstraZeneca vaccine in particular, can only be considered as a cosmetic arrangement of the product’s image for marketing purposes (winning new public confidence, boosting sales). It would not answer the questions raised concerning the quality, efficacy and safety of the product. This is one of the usual techniques used to put make-up on (dissimulate) certain undesirable characteristics of the product concerned. It is a technique that has been used to present other drugs in the best possible light.

As already mentioned, in the field of medicines (including vaccines), the “release” of the finished product (intended for sale) is the final stage of control (of quality and therefore of safety) before making these products available to the population.

This key stage of “release” of batches is the pharmaceutical responsibility of the manufacturers. However, the responsibility of the users (institutions and health professionals in particular) may also be involved.

In our opinion, these clinical studies should never have begun before the intrinsic quality of the finished product and its manufacturing process had been fully mastered; before the formulas of these vaccines had been stabilized.

How can the results of these clinical trials, conducted on a global scale, be compared if the vaccine administered can vary from one manufacture to another, from one batch to another, from one region to another?

These variabilities, which impact the very core of the product, could even invalidate any clinical trials conducted.

Even in the case of a health emergency, it is therefore difficult for us to understand the basis for the MA (marketing authorization) that has been granted to these COVID-19 vaccines.

In addition to the uncertainties related to COVID-19, there are also the approximations related to the use, and the intrinsic quality, of these vaccines. Now two problems will have to be managed instead of one.

The maneuver seems subtle. The useful information is available in the official documents published in the framework of the MA; but this data is not made visible by the official discourse. It seems the latter has only tried to present these products as being effective and safe, without reservations; even though the formulas and manufacturing processes of these vaccines do not even seem to have been fully stabilized yet.

These new revelations, which are undoubtedly unprecedented and exclusive, further cast doubt on the validity of consent (a fundamental freedom) that is supposed to be free and informed, and which is said to have been given by the people who are now already vaccinated.

Every person has the right to clear, fair and appropriate information. This information is also perennial: if new data is revealed, those already vaccinated must be informed a posteriori (after the administration of this or that vaccine).

The “obligation” to vaccinate cannot therefore be sustained, even in a disguised form, notably through a “vaccine passport.”

This new analysis further confirms our previous reflections such as the one entitled “Could the Covid-19 vaccine (Tozinameran; COMIRNATY°) be qualified as ‘defective’ by a judge?” or those expressed in the two open letters that have already been sent to the Minister of Solidarity and Health and to the seven Orders of health professionals.

Vulnerability does not only arise from the age and state of health of individuals. Not being able to access independent information on medicines (including vaccines) is the first form of poverty and inequality.

Moreover, concerning the uncertainties on the effectiveness of these vaccines, the Council of State noted, on March 3, 2021, in particular the admission of the Ministry of Solidarity and Health itself, and the contradictions of the French “administration.” In this decision, and against the opinion of this Ministry, the Council of State had produced a decision that seemed to tend towards the recognition of this effectiveness. But, a few days later, in a new decision (n° 450413) issued on March 11, 2021, the Council of State changed its position and admitted “the uncertainty that remains regarding the real effectiveness of the vaccine in terms of the spread of the virus.” It should also be recalled that, on February 18, 2021, the Minister of Solidarity and Health also recognized, and that publicly, that no European country has been able to provide proof that these vaccines can prevent “severe” forms of COVID-19 (see press conference, starting at 34min 44s).

In its latest “Update on the surveillance of COVID-19 vaccines — Period from 12/03/2021 to 18/03/2021” published on March 26, 2021, and updated on March 29, 2021, the French National Agency for the Safety of Medicines (ANSM) reports, in particular, the number of deaths that have occurred in France after the administration of these vaccines. Deaths that are notified (reported) in pharmacovigilance (regardless of the certainty of the “causal link” between these vaccines and these deaths): “311 deaths” after administration of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine; “4 deaths” after administration of the Moderna vaccine; “20 deaths” after administration of the Astra Zeneca vaccine; (no data is available at this time regarding the latest vaccine (Janssen) to be licensed). In general, for all drugs, there is a high level of under-reporting in pharmacovigilance despite the mandatory nature of these reports.

Consequently, prudence would even dictate that, in all countries where these vaccines against COVID-19 have been marketed, all the batches thus “released” should be withdrawn immediately; and that these MAs that have been granted should be suspended, or even cancelled, as a matter of urgency until further notice. In any case, this is the sense of the recommendations that we could suggest to the ad hoc authorities, and in particular to the French authorities. And, at the very least, this information must be made known to everyone in a clear, fair, and appropriate manner.

All the more so since, in the case of serious adverse effects, including deaths, and in order to establish the said “causal link” with certainty, the victims and their families are often powerless when faced with the requirement of “probatio diabolica” [a legal requirement to achieve an impossible proof].

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America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) today announced the creation of its Legal Task Force, a combination of legal professionals committed to the cause of freedom. The best and brightest advocates for civil liberties have joined forces to develop a strategic response related to the legal and constitutional issues of lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine passports, medical discrimination, and more. We welcome Joey Gilbert, Esq, Leigh Dundas, Esq (CA), Thomas Renz, Esq, Ali Shultz, JD to the team. The nonprofit’s Legal Resources page provides everyday citizens with the tools they need to challenge unlawful masking edicts and equal-access discrimination through digital health credentials like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Excelsior Pass.

“The US Constitution isn’t optional, and our laws don’t fall by the wayside with every outbreak. America’s Frontline Doctors’ Legal Task Force is dedicated to taking power back from the unaccountable state public health bureaucrats and returning it to taxpaying citizens and business owners,” said AFLDS founder Simone Gold, JD. “Over the next several months, we will be launching a series of legal challenges to COVID-related restrictions in various states. This is the civil-rights issue of our time. AFLDS is proud to lead the fight once again for truth, freedom, and the American way of life.”

AFLDS supports business owners and concerned citizens pooling their legal resources together to resist major intrusions on their rights. To learn more about the organization’s policy recommendations, including legal remedies, visit their Issue Briefs page.

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On April 23rd, the US and NATO’s biggest concern in regard to Ukraine is dissolving.

The troops from the Russian Southern and Western military districts began returning to their permanent positions of deployment.

A day earlier, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu arrived in Crimea, where a large-scale exercise was taking place.

It involved more than 10 thousand servicemen; 1,200 units of weapons and military equipment of the Southern Military District, the Black Sea Fleet, the Caspian Flotilla and Airborne Forces.

Shoigu said that every aspect of the defense of the region had been tested, including coastal and air defense systems.

He claimed that the purposes of his sudden inspections were satisfactory, and the concentration of forces needed no longer remain.

In the EU, the deployment of Russian troops near the border with Ukraine was called “the most ambitious in history.”

According to the European Union’s foreign policy service, Russia has deployed 100,000 troops there.

The Russian Ministry of Defense explained the concentration of troops in the Southern Military District with exercises.

According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, the Ukrainian and Western media are blowing the issue of Russian military activity near the border with Ukraine out of proportion.

The United States also showed its unwillingness to start a large-scale war when it stopped the deployment of its warships to the Black Sea.

Former Russian President and Deputy Chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev said that the United States has chosen a dual approach to relations with Russia.

The new tactic of the Biden Administration is to signal the need for dialogue with one hand and increase pressure with the other.

Both Washington and Moscow showed that an open war is not in the interest of either party.

Kiev is, thus, left on its own, attempting to push its own aggressive course of action.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Ukraine didn’t want war, but it was ready for it.

He continuously uses militaristic rhetoric, saying that Kiev would stand until the last man in a war with Russia, and meanwhile, Zelensky is failing at his attempt at diplomacy.

He tried to play tough and invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to negotiations in Eastern Ukraine.

In response, Putin said that the Ukrainian leader should speak to the self-proclaimed republics in the region.

He was, however, always welcome to visit Moscow and talk with the Russian leader for whatever he wishes.

Ukrainian President Zelensky is now between a rock and a hard place.

Kiev has already had to pay for a new redeployment of its troops on the Eastern frontlines, while the country’s economy is battered.

Zelensky also may seek an escalation to get political mileage from the situation and to distract the population from numerous internal problems, including the disastrous spread of COVID-19.

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First published on May 22, 2014

“You’re trying to find the places where the money will have the most leverage, how you can save the most lives for the dollar, so to speak,” Pelley remarked. “Right. And transform the societies,” Gates replied.¹

In 2009 the self-designated “Good Club” – a gathering of the world’s wealthiest people whose collective net worth then totaled some $125 billion – met behind closed doors in New York City to discuss a coordinated response to threats posed by the global financial crisis. Led by Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and David Rockefeller, the group resolved to find new ways of addressing sources of discontent in the developing world, in particular “overpopulation” and infectious diseases.² The billionaires in attendance committed to massive spending in areas of interest to themselves, heedless of the priorities of national governments and existing aid organizations.³

Details of the secret summit were leaked to the press and hailed as a turning point for Big Philanthropy. Traditional bureaucratic foundations like Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie were said to be giving way to “philanthrocapitalism,” a muscular new approach to charity in which the presumed entrepreneurial skills of billionaires would be applied directly to the world’s most pressing challenges:

Today’s philanthrocapitalists see a world full of big problems that they, and perhaps only they, can and must put right.  … Their philanthropy is “strategic,” “market conscious,” “impact oriented,” “knowledge based,” often “high engagement,” and always driven by the goal of maximizing the “leverage” of the donor’s money. … [P]hilanthrocapitalists are increasingly trying to find ways of harnessing the profit motive to achieve social good.⁴

Wielding “huge power that could reshape nations according to their will,”⁵ billionaire donors would now openly embrace not only the market-based theory, but also the practices and organizational norms, of corporate capitalism. Yet the overall thrust of their charitable interventions would remain consistent with longstanding traditions of Big Philanthropy, as discussed below:

The World’s Largest Private Foundation

“A new form of multilateral organization”

The most prominent of the philanthrocapitalists is Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft Corp. and as of this writing the richest man in the world. (Despite the carefully cultivated impression that Gates is “giving away” his fortune to charity, his estimated net worth has increased every year since 2009 and now amounts to $72 billion. ⁶) Gates owes his fortune not to making technological contributions but to acquiring and enforcing a fabulously lucrative monopoly in computer operating systems:

Microsoft’s greatest strength has always been its monopoly position in the PC chain. Its exclusionary licensing agreement with PC manufacturers mandated a payment for an MS-DOS license whether or not a Microsoft operating system was used. … By the time the company settled with the Justice Department in 1994 over this illegal arrangement, Microsoft had garnered a dominant market share of all operating systems sold.⁷

Microsoft employs the standard repertoire of business strategies in defense of its monopoly power – preferential pricing, lawsuits, acquisitions of competitors, lobbying for patent protection – but relies ultimately, like other US-based monopolies, on the dominant position of the US worldwide. As former US Secretary of Defense William Cohen observed in 1999, “the prosperity that companies like Microsoft now enjoy could not occur without having the strong military that we have.”⁸

Gates remains chairman of Microsoft but now devotes the bulk of his time to running The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the largest private foundation in the world and easily the most powerful.  With an endowment of $38 billion, BMGF dwarfs once-dominant players such as Ford ($10 billion), Rockefeller ($3 billion), and Carnegie ($2.7 billion).⁹ These elite charitable funds are attractive to the super-rich not only as alternative channels of influencing policy, but also as a legal means of tax avoidance. Under US law, investments in charitable foundations are tax-free; moreover, investors are not required to sell their stock positions and may continue to vote their shares without restriction.¹⁰ By sheltering foundations, the US Treasury effectively co-finances the activities of BMGF and its investors, supplying a substantial part of the “leverage” lauded above.

Even in a field dominated by the world’s richest, the Gates Foundation has acquired a reputation for exceptional high-handedness. It is “driven by the interests and passions of the Gates family,” evasive about its financials, and accountable to no one except its founder, who “shapes and approves foundation strategies, advocates for the foundation’s issues, and sets the organization’s overall direction.”¹¹

Gates’ approach to charity is presumably rooted in his attitude toward democracy:

The closer you get to [Government] and see how the sausage is made, the more you go, oh my God! These guys don’t even actually know the budget. … The idea that all these people are going to vote and have an opinion about subjects that are increasingly complex – where what seems, you might think … the easy answer [is] not the real answer. It’s a very interesting problem. Do democracies faced with these current problems do these things well?¹²

The Gates charitable empire is vast and growing. Within the US, BMGF focuses primarily on “education reform,” providing support for efforts to privatize public schools and subordinate teachers’ unions. Its much larger international divisions target the developing world and are geared toward infectious diseases, agricultural policy, reproductive health, and population control. In 2009 alone, BMGF spent more than $1.8 billion on global health projects.¹³

The Gates Foundation exercises power not only via its own spending, but more broadly through an elaborate network of “partner organizations” including non-profits, government agencies, and private corporations. As the third largest donor to the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO), it is a dominant player in the formation of global health policy.¹⁴ It orchestrates vast elaborate public-private partnerships – charitable salmagundis that tend to blur distinctions between states, which are at least theoretically accountable to citizens, and profit-seeking businesses that are accountable only to their shareholders. For example, a 2012 initiative aimed at combatting neglected tropical diseases listed among its affiliates USAID, the World Bank, the governments of Brazil, Bangladesh, UAE et al., and a consortium of 13 drug firms comprising the most notorious powers in Big Pharma, including Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, and Pfizer.¹⁵

BMGF is the prime mover behind prominent “multi-stakeholder initiatives” such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the GAVI Alliance (a “public-private partnership” between the World Health Organization and the vaccine industry).  Such arrangements allow BMGF to leverage its stake in allied enterprises, much as private businesses enhance power and profits through strategic investment schemes. The Foundation also intervenes directly in the agendas and activities of national governments, ranging from its financing of the development of municipal infrastructure in Uganda,¹⁶ to its recently announced collaboration with the Indian Ministry of Science to “Reinvent the Toilet.”¹⁷ At the same time the Foundation supports NGOs that lobby governments to increase spending on the initiatives it sponsors.¹⁸

The Gates operation resembles nothing so much as a massive, vertically integrated multinational corporation (MNC), controlling every step in a supply chain that reaches from its Seattle-based boardroom, through various stages of procurement, production, and distribution, to millions of nameless, impoverished “end-users” in the villages of Africa and South Asia.

Emulating his own strategies for cornering the software market, Gates has created a virtual monopoly in the field of public health. In the words of one NGO official, “[y]ou can’t cough, scratch your head or sneeze in health without coming to the Gates Foundation.”¹⁹ The Foundation’s global influence is now so great that former CEO Jeff Raikes was obliged to declare: “We are not replacing the UN. But some people would say we’re a new form of multilateral organization.”²⁰

Notes:

1. “The Gates Foundation: Giving Away a Fortune,” CBS 60 Minutes, Sept. 30, 2010, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-gates-foundation-giving-away-a-fortune/3/. (back)

2. Paul Harris, “They’re Called The Good Club – And They Want to Save the World,” Guardian, May 30, 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/may/31/new-york-billionaire-philanthropists. (back)

3. Andrew Clark, “US Billionaires Club Together,” Guardian, Aug. 4, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/aug/04/us-billionaires-half-fortune-gates. (back)

4. Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, Philanthrocapitalism: How Giving Can Save the World (2008), pp. 3, 6. (back)

5. Harris, op cit. (back)

6. “Bill Gates,” Forbes.com, Sept. 2013, http://www.forbes.com/profile/bill-gates/. (back)

7. Barry Ritholtz, “What’s Behind Microsoft’s Fall from Dominance,” Washington Post, Sept. 26, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/whats-behind-microsofts-fall-from-dominance/2013/09/05/b0e5e91e-157b-11e3-804b-d3a1a3a18f2c_story_1.html. (back)

8. Quoted in Michael Perelman, “The Political Economy of Intellectual Property,” Monthly Review, vol. 54, no. 8, January, 2003, http://monthlyreview.org/2003/01/01/the-political-economy-of-intellectual-property. (back)

9. The Foundation Center, Top Funders, http://foundationcenter.org/findfunders/topfunders/top100assets.html. (back)

10. Sheldon Drobny, “The Gates and Buffett Foundation Shell Game,” CommonDreams.org, April 26, 2006, http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0823-26.htm. (back)

11. BMGF website, http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-Information/Leadership/Management-Committee. (back)

12. Richard Waters, “An exclusive interview with Bill Gates,” Financial Times, Nov. 1, 2013,  http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/dacd1f84-41bf-11e3-b064-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2q0sgejl. (back)

13. Noel Salazar, “Top 10 philanthropic foundations: A primer,” Devex, Aug. 1, 2011, https://www.devex.com/en/news/top-10-philanthropic-foundations-what-you-need-to/75508. (back)

14. Global Health Watch, Global Health Watch 2: An Alternative World Health Report, 2008, p. 250, http://www.ghwatch.org/sites/www.ghwatch.org/files/ghw2.pdf. In a 2008 memo leaked to the press, Arata Kochi, chief of the malaria program at the World Health Organization, charged that “the growing dominance of malaria research by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation risks stifling a diversity of views among scientists and wiping out the health agency’s policy-making function.” Donald G. McNeil Jr., “WHO official complains about Gates Foundation’s dominance in malaria fight,” NY Times, Nov. 7, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/world/americas/17iht-gates.4.10120087.html. (back)

15. “Private and Public Partners Unite to Combat 10 Neglected Tropical Diseases by 2020,” BMGF press release, Jan. 2012, http://www.gatesfoundation.org/media-center/press-releases/2012/01/private-and-public-partners-unite-to-combat-10-neglected-tropical-diseases-by-2020. (back)

16. Grant to Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development; Government of Uganda, July, 2012, http://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/Quick-Links/Grants-Database/Grants/2012/07/OPP1053920 . (back)

17. “The Next Grand Challenge in India: Reinvent the Toilet,” BMGF press release, Oct. 2013,  http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media-Center/Press-Releases/2013/10/The-Next-Grand-Challenge-in-India. The Foundation also feels free to “sit down with the Pakistan government” to demand security measures in support of its operations. See Neil Tweedie, “Bill Gates Interview: I Have No Use for Money. This is God’s Work,” The Telegraph, Jan. 18, 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/bill-gates/9812672/Bill-Gates-interview-I-have-no-use-for-money.-This-is-Gods-work.html. (back)

18. Global Health Watch, op. cit., p. 251. (back)

19. Ibid. (back)

20. Gabrielle Pickard, “Will Gates Foundation Replace the UN?” UN Post, 2010, http://www.unpost.org/will-gates-foundation-replace-the-un/#ixzz2pjv08DJr. (back)

Jacob Levich, [email protected], has written on imperialist military strategy for Aspects No. 42. He lives in New York City and tweets as @cordeliers. (back)

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On April 13, 2021, President Joe Biden announced that the United States would pull all remaining 2,500 troops out of Afghanistan by 9/11/21.  The announcement comes after 20 years of combat operations.  

Afghanistan is the longest war in U.S. history.  It cost over $1 trillion that included $978 billion for Overseas Contingency Operations spent directly on the war.  In addition, the base budget for the Department of Defense increased from $343 billion in 2001 to $633 billion in 2020.  To this cost must be added an increase of $175 billion over a twenty-year period for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

It does not end there.  It is estimated that the costs of U.S. wars in the Middle East added $453 billion in interest payments to the national debt, outlays that are expected to mushroom to an astonishing $7.9 trillion over the next forty years.

The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University estimates that 157,000 people died in Afghanistan because of the war between 2001 and 2019. A gross underestimate.

These included 2,298 U.S. military personnel, 6 U.S. Department of Defense employees, 3,814 U.S. contractors, 64,124 Afghan government military and national police forces, 43,074 Afghan civilians, 42,100 opposition fighters, 67 journalists and media workers, and 424 humanitarian workers.

The history and significance of this war bears scrutiny at a time of unprecedented tensions in the American empire.

The bombing, invasion and occupation of Afghanistan saw the first shots fired in George W. Bush’s ‘war on terror’, a deceitful strategy that provided a pretext for U.S. global interventionism after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was soon followed by the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the greatest strategic military blunder in U.S. history.  Both wars were based on lies.

In Afghanistan, the pretext was the capture of Osama bin Laden and destruction of Al Qaeda, accused of perpetrating 9/11.  In Iraq, the pretense was Saddam Hussein’s possession of “weapons of mass destruction” and ties to Al Qaeda.

The allegations were false.  No forensic evidence linked Bin Laden to 9/11.  Saddam’s biological and chemical weapons, supplied to him during the Iraq/Iran war by the United States, were degraded by 10 years of UN sanctions and inspections.

Further, Saddam had no ties to Al Qaeda. He was a secular Arab leader who detested Islamic fundamentalists such as Bin Laden.  Al Qaeda had no presence in Iraq until the U.S. invasion gave birth to ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq’ which later evolved into the ‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’, better known as ISIS.

Seven Muslim countries were bombed during a ‘war of terror’ that saw the United States conduct counter-terrorism operations in 80 countries.

The ‘war on terror’ witnessed countless U.S. violations of international law including crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity,  warrantless surveillance, extraordinary renditions, preventive detention, torture, and drone assassination.

The U.S. war in Afghanistan began 42 years ago with covert intervention under the Carter administration.  Secret involvement began when Jimmy Carter followed the advice of his National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski by allowing the CIA to arm Islamists to fight the secular government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan to induce a Soviet intervention in the country.

Brzezinski, it should be noted, was a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, illustrating his globalist orientation.  He authored a book in 1997 titled, The Grand Chessboard, that documents the geostrategic necessity of U.S. domination of the Eurasian landmass.

The Soviet intervention occurred on December 24, 1979.   Soviet troops immediately stabilized the Afghan government against the Islamic insurgency.  The United States promptly labeled the intervention as an “invasion.”

Public pronouncements by U.S. government officials portrayed the Islamic resistance as being organized as a response to the entry of Soviet troops into Afghanistan.  In a subsequent interview granted to a French journalist in 1998, Brzezinski admitted to springing a “bear trap” by deploying the Islamic mercenary army six months prior to the intervention hoping to precipitate an “invasion” that would give the Soviet Union its own “Vietnam.”

The “Soviet invasion” of Afghanistan was used by Jimmy Carter to announce the ‘Carter Doctrine’ during his State of the Union Address on January 23, 1980.  This doctrine stated that any attempt by an “outside force” to “gain control of the Persian Gulf region” would be interpreted as an assault on “vital interests of the United States” and would provoke a military response.

The doctrine served as a blueprint for massive U.S. military and naval intervention in the Middle East that witnessed the installation of permanent military and naval bases, positioning of rapid strike forces, deployment of naval fleets to patrol the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea, plans to use tactical nuclear weapons launched from U.S. warships in the Indian Ocean, and massive weapons sales to reactionary governments in the region.

Ronald Reagan and CIA director William Casey dramatically increased aid to the Islamic mujahideen in Afghanistan as part of a global counter-revolutionary offensive against the “Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union and “international terrorism” sponsored by the “Red Menace.”  CIA and Pentagon “black budgets” mushroomed under Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush from $9 billion to $36 billion per year to finance covert war.

Reagan’s imperious Secretary of State George Shultz continually bludgeoned the Soviet Union for alleged violations of human rights, support for socialist governments in Cuba and Nicaragua, provision of aid to insurgency in El Salvador and support for the African National Congress in South Africa and the Palestine Liberation Organization and Fatah in Palestine.

The blatant hypocrisy of Shultz’s claims was glaringly clear given U.S support for dictatorships in the Philippines and Indonesia, apartheid states in South Africa and Israel, contra war in Nicaragua, death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala, military dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, and terror campaigns in Afghanistan, Angola and Mozambique to counter Soviet support for liberation struggles across the globe.

The ideological heart of Reagan’s anti-communist offensive was use of the ‘terrorism’ label to invert reality by criminalizing liberation struggle and sanctioning ‘counter-terrorist’ repression.

Afghanistan was one part of a global ‘war of terror’ unleashed by the United States against the USSR.

The Afghan intervention was extremely costly to the Soviet Union.   The Islamic insurgency was armed and financed by the United States and Saudi Arabia.  Insurgents were trained in Pakistan.   They were provided with advanced weapons, including stinger missiles capable of destroying Soviet jets and helicopters.  Opium addiction demoralized Soviet troops, many of whom were skinned alive when captured by Reagan’s “freedom fighters.”  Rampant drug addiction and criminal gangs eventually spread to the USSR.

It is estimated that approximately 1 million Afghan civilians were killed in the nine-year conflict along with 90,000 Islamic insurgents, 18,000 Afghan troops, and 14,500 Soviet soldiers.  In fact, the U.S. proxy war in Afghanistan contributed to the overthrow of the USSR in 1991, American triumphalism, and creation of a unipolar world.

The defeat of the Soviet Union provoked publication of the neoconservative policy document titled “Defense Planning Guidance,” written by Under Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz in 1992.

Known as the ‘Wolfowitz Doctrine’, the policy paper stated that the goal of the United States was to prevent the rise of another super-power that could challenge U.S. global hegemony.  It articulated the doctrine of unilateral and preemptive war that would eventually become known as the “Bush Doctrine” when neoconservatives seized power in 2000 after spending a decade developing their hegemonic agenda in the Project for a New American Century and other right-wing think tanks during the 1990s.

The Wolfowitz doctrine officially became the Bush doctrine with the publication of the National Security Strategy of the United States in 2002.

George W. Bush executed the Wolfowitz doctrine of preemptive war in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.  The catalyst was 9/11, America’s “New Pearl Harbor,” an event predicted in 2000 by neoconservatives in a PNAC document titled, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.”  Thoughtful individuals should study the evidence surrounding the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to determine whether the neocons led by Bush, Richard Cheney, and their minions were simply clairvoyant or criminally complicit.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to the demise of secular-nationalist movements, particularly in the Middle East, which paved the way for the emergence of the Islamic resistance to imperialism and the settler state of Israel.

For example, isolation of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the wake of Iraq’s defeat in the 1991 Gulf War led to Yasser Arafat’s capitulation to Israel at Oslo.  In exchange for policing several cantons in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Authority collaborated with the Israelis provoking intensification of the armed resistance to occupation being waged by Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The irony is that British and U. S. imperialists along with their Zionist counterparts, had a long history of supporting Islamic fundamentalism as a counter-weight to secular nationalism as evidenced by their support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt against Nasser, Syria against Assad.

Without the defeat of the Soviet Union, the Gulf War of 1991, Afghan war of 2001, Iraq war of 2003, Libyan war of 2011, and Syrian covert war beginning in 2011 would never have occurred.

In each of these cases, the United States used a combination of overt military intervention and covert war to destabilized targeted governments illustrating the fact that the ‘war on terror’ was a fraud from the very beginning. The United States supported Islamic fundamentalist mercenaries, including Al Qaeda and Bin Laden in Afghanistan and used Al Qaeda and its stepchild, ISIS in Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

In Afghanistan, the defeat of the secular government in 1992 led to internecine warfare between competing war lords of the National Alliance and led to the rise of the Taliban.

Bill Clinton bombed Afghanistan in 1998 as a diversion from the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.

What Gore Vidal often referred to as the Cheney/Bush Oil Junta negotiated with the Taliban to construct a Caspian Sea oil pipeline through Afghanistan and proceeding to offer the leadership either a “carpet of gold” if they supported the project or a “carpet of bombs” if they refused.  The orientalist mind-set illustrated by that offer was brilliantly deconstructed by the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said fully two decades before the obscenity was uttered.

The Taliban refused.  The bombs dropped.

George W. Bush bombed and invaded the country in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 implementing plans drawn up prior to the terrorist attack.

Barack Obama continued the war by drawing down troops in Iraq and surging U.S. forces in Afghanistan.  Donald Trump escalated bombing attacks in Afghanistan and promised to remove troops by establishing May 1, 2021, as the withdrawal date.  He made the pledge at the end of his presidency.  Biden extended that date to September 11, 2021.

When the United States withdraws from Afghanistan, the corrupt puppet government installed by U.S. coalition forces will fall and the Taliban will regain control of the country.  The ugly Americans will have lost Afghanistan in the same way they lost Vietnam.

It is brutally ironic that although Brzezinski promised Carter to give the Soviet Union its own Vietnam by supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan, his policy ended up providing another Vietnam to the United States.

Predictably, humanitarian interventionists who supported the war in Afghanistan by claiming the United States was defending women’s rights against the Taliban are voicing opposition to Biden’s pull out.

In fact, Brzezinski’s covert war destabilized the country and led to the eventual fall of a secular government that defended women’s rights, ended the bride price, and promoted women’s literacy, advanced education, and employment.

The liberation of women was used by the CIA to recruit reactionary Islamic fundamentalists to fight Afghanistan’s socialist government and the godless, atheistic army of the Soviet Union.

The war in Afghanistan was a killing field much like Vietnam.  Thousands of women, children and peasants were among the victims.  So much for humanitarian intervention.

Afghanistan is known as the “graveyard of empires.”  Alexander the Great and the ancient Greek Macedonian empire, the British empire and the American empire were all compelled to leave this forsaken land proving once again the timeless axiom of philosopher George Santayana: “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”

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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  

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The Biden Administration has announced an Afghanistan US troop withdrawal date of September, 11, 2021, symbolically exactly two decades after the game-changing 911 attacks in New York and Washington. However the Pentagon and White House are saying nothing about one of the main reasons the powers that be who control Washington have remained in Afghanistan since the fake chase after a former CIA contract employee named Osama bin Laden.

What is clear is that the US Administration is not being straightforward with its plans for Afghanistan and the so-called pull-out. The previously agreed May 1 date versus September 11 is clearly not about making a more graceful exit after a two decade war that has cost US taxpayers more than $2 trillion. The argument by some US Democrats that a full pullout with endanger the rights of Afghan women with the brutal Taliban culture of misogyny is clearly not what US and NATO soldiers have been protecting with their presence. What then is at stake?

Private Mercenary Occupation

While the Pentagon has been sly about giving any direct answer, it seems that what the Team Biden neo-cons are planning is a “privatized” US military presence. According to a report by Jeremy Kuzmarov, “over 18,000 Pentagon contractors remain in Afghanistan, while official troops number 2,500. Joe Biden will withdraw this smaller group of soldiers while leaving behind US Special Forces, mercenaries, and intelligence operatives — privatizing and down-scaling the war, but not ending it.” Already there are seven private military contractors in Afghanistan for every single US soldier.

Use of private military contractors allows the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies to avoid serious Congressional oversight. Typically they are special forces veterans who earn vastly more as private security contractors or mercenaries. Their work is simply classified so there is almost no accountability. The New York Times reports, citing current and former US officials, that Washington “will most likely rely on a shadowy combination of clandestine Special Operations forces, Pentagon contractors and covert intelligence operatives” to conduct operations inside Afghanistan.

The current Afghan government led by Ashraf Ghani, like that of Hamid Karzai is a creation of the United States. Ghani will remain Washington’s proxy in Kabul. His military is funded by the United States at a cost of around $4 billion per year. For what?

What is missing from the public discussion of Afghan troop presence is the 800 pound gorilla in the room: drugs, specifically heroin.

The 800 Pound Gorilla

Some of these private soldiers of fortune are not doing nice things. DynCorp is one of the largest contractors there. As of 2019 DynCorp had gotten over $7 billion in government contracts to train the Afghan army and manage military bases in Afghanistan. One of the publicized tasks of DynCorp and other US mercenary personnel in Afghanistan has been to “oversee” destruction of Afghan poppy fields that supply an estimated 93% of world heroin. Yet the clear evidence is that that opium and its global distribution has been a major province of the CIA along with the US military who guarantee secure air transport via airbases in Kyrgyzstan as well as Afghanistan into the western heroin markets. DynCorp has little to show for that drug eradication, or were they doing something else?

CIA, Mujahideen and Afghan Opium

When the US first occupied Afghanistan, claiming retribution for the Taliban role in aiding Osama bin Laden in the 911 US attacks, a severe anti-opium policy of Taliban had reduced harvests to almost zero. By October, 2001, just before the US invasion, the UN acknowledged that the Taliban reduced opium production in Afghanistan from 3300 tons in 2000 to 185 tons in 2001. According to Canadian economist and historian Michel Chossudovsky, “immediately following the October 2001 invasion, opium markets were restored. Opium prices spiraled. By early 2002, the domestic price of opium in Afghanistan (in dollars/kg) was almost 10 times higher than in 2000.” The Anglo-American invasion of Afghanistan successfully restored the drug trade. The Guardian reported that, “In 2007 Afghanistan had more land growing drugs than Colombia, Bolivia and Peru combined.” That was six years into the US military occupation.

Source: UN

Within several years of US occupation under Karzai, opium crops were at all-time record levels. One of the largest Afghan opium warlords then was the brother of Karzai. In 2009 the New York Times, citing unnamed US officials, wrote that,

“Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years…”

In 2011 Ahmed Karzai was gunned down, mob-style, at his home in Helmland by one of his bodyguards. Helmland is the largest opium province in Afghanistan. If Helmland were a country it would be the largest opium producer worldwide. Was it accident that the CIA paid money to Karzai for at least eight years or did The Company have a stake in the business of Karzai?

While Washington and the CIA have denied supporting the huge Afghan opium trade, the CIA history since the Vietnam War with drug warlords suggests otherwise. As Alfred W. McCoy documented during the Vietnam War era in his ground-breaking book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, the CIA was deeply involved with Hmong tribesmen in Laos who were involved in opium trade. They claimed it was necessary to twin their support. Later it was found the CIA Air America was involved in secretly shipping opium from the Golden Triangle.

During the 1980’s US-financed Mujahideen war against the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan, the CIA allegedly turned a blind eye as Osama bin Laden and thousands of “Afghan Arabs” he recruited. Afghan warlords such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar were enriching themselves along with the Pakistani ISI intelligence with vast drug trade profits. To imagine that the CIA, and private mercenary armies such as DynCorp closely tied to the agency, are today involved in the world’s largest opium and heroin source requires no great leap of faith.

In 2018 Alfred McCoy made a damning indictment of the US war in Afghanistan. He asked,

“How could the world’s sole superpower have battled continuously for more than 16 years – deploying more than 100,000 troops at the conflict’s peak, sacrificing the lives of nearly 2,300 soldiers, spending more than $1trillion on its military operations, lavishing a record $100bn more on ‘nation-building’, helping fund and train an army of 350,000 Afghan allies – and still not be able to pacify one of the world’s most impoverished nations?”

His reply was that the US presence was not about nation-building or democracy. It was about heroin: 

“Throughout its three decades in Afghanistan, Washington’s military operations have succeeded only when they fit reasonably comfortably into central Asia’s illicit traffic in opium,” he charged. “Its opium production surged from around 180 tons in 2001 to more than 3,000 tons a year after the invasion, and to more than 8,000 by 2007.

By 2017 the opium production reached a record 9,000 tons. After more than 16 years of US military occupation. Somewhere here is a very dirty and criminal story and the CIA as well as related private military contractors such as DynCorp appear to be in the middle of it.

This is maybe the real reason Washington refuses to honestly leave Afghanistan. As Pepe Escobar points out, contrary to the narrative in Western media that the Taliban control the Afghan opium trade,

“this is not an Afghan Taliban operation. The key questions — never asked by Atlanticist circles — are who buys the opium harvests; refines them into heroin; controls the export routes; and then sell them for humongous profit…”

He points to NATO, noting that Russian citizens are “collateral damage” of the Afghan heroin ratline as much as Americans. “The Russian Foreign Ministry is tracking how tons of chemicals are being illegally imported into Afghanistan from, among others, ‘Italy, France and the Netherlands’, and how the US and NATO are doing absolutely nothing to contain the heroin ratline.”

The US operations in Afghanistan, the world’s largest opium producer, is far from ending. It is merely changing form.

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

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

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Imagine a nuclear blast, as depicted by Stephen Fry, in his recent video, describing Washington’s US$ 1.2 trillion plan of annihilation. With a technologically advanced nuclear war, atomic weapons, the kind available today certainly in the US, Russia, Israel and several European countries, a nuclear war could devastate, if not extinct humanity. Ninety percent of the world population could be wiped out and with it, all basic infrastructure, all major cities; and sunlight would be blocked out for maybe decades. (See video below)

Even in a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, the two smallest nuclear powers, within weeks the nuclear smoke would spread around the earth. In an altitude of 30 km it never rains, so the nuclear dust cloud might linger for years, blocking the sun, destroying crops and bringing about deadly famine.

Those surviving the nuclear blasts might die, if not from famine, from all sorts of cancers and other nuclear radiation-related diseases. It might bring about the end of humanity as we know it. Watch the video below for devastating details.

Possibly the sole survivors and the likely carrier of the human genome into a new nascent human history – maybe to eventually become another civilization – would be the untouched indigenous people, those that have been able to preserve their livelihood in the deepest jungles of the Amazon and what’s not yet destroyed in the Indonesian and African rain forests, and some other most remote corners of the world.

That is a possible scenario. And that has probably happened several times before in Mother Earth’s history. Of course, unlikley with nuclear bombs. Other human atrocities and intercultural feuds, even natural phenomena or a combination of both, could have been the cause for extinction.

Today, some researchers, scientists and investigators may warn about the dangers of extinction, but the grand comfortable public doesn’t want to know about such risks. So, where we are at this critical and high-risk point in history, is perfectly alright.

The human species is where it deserves to be, namely asleep, in a very dangerous, evil dreamworld. Seduced by daily comfort and by daily lies from our authorities (sic-sic), we prefer not to wake up and continue living in a phantasy world. In short, western society has become so complacent that it prefers lies to the truth.

William Casey, CIA Director under President Ronald Reagan, once said, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” – He was so right.

It’s about time, that Mother Earth goes into a self-cleansing process. She deserves it.

Is a global war what we want? A nuclear devastation? I don’t believe so.

Is that what the global elite wants – those who pretend calling the shots on the world’s present and future? – I don’t think so.

They, the “Global Cabal”, know that they would be wiped out too. There is no selection process with a gigantic all around the globe nuclear blast – or blasts. And there is nowhere to escape. They could hide for a while in their high luxury bunkers – those they have already prepared for “just in case scenarios” – but not for long. And what a pleasure would it be living underground, in darkness, far from the real sun… well, for them, who thrive on darkness, it might be a pleasing experience, who knows.

Few nuclear blasts a thousand times stronger than the ones that wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki, could end it all. That’s also where racial, color or regional discrimination would end. A couple of thousands of years of White Supremacy would come to a full stop.

That’s not what this global elite wants, those, who live only material and compassionless lives.

The nuclear arsenal has by now become highly sophisticated, with targeted nuclear destruction – “nuclear light”, being an ever-growing option. If applied, the Dark Cabal doesn’t know whether retaliation would also come in the form of nuclear “light”, or rather turn into a nuclear holocaust.

An atomic devastation would be one WWIII scenario. Some “experts” say we are 100 seconds from Armageddon. But, how do they know? How does anyone know? What are their criteria – fearmongering or an attempt at awakening? How does a self-styled “expert” know? It’s certainly not science – assessing the onset of Armageddon, the demise of our existence as we know it? Its either arrogance or taking people for more stupid than they are – deviating from the real issues, for example, of tyranny, enslavement, AI-control, possibly forced euthanasia — and much worse. Which leads to another WWIII scenario…

Another WWIII scenario may be the one we are living in right now, but hardly anybody seems to notice. The one waged by an multi-billion dollar powerhouse.

The kind of WW-scenario foreseen decades ago, and well described to the public at large in the so-called 2010 Rockefeller Report, and on 18 October 2019 by Event 201, a computer simulation of an invisible enemy – viruses and fear. In fact, what was simulated was SARS-CoV-2, precisely what we are living today. But we chose not to look when it was presented to us.

The simulation was causing collateral damage of an almost total annihilation of the globe’s economy – bankrupt enterprises, job losses, abject poverty, famine and death. This is precisely what reality is demonstrating today: a colossal socio-economic catastrophe of proportions never known before. It has already brought millions of deaths and we have hardly seen the tip of the iceberg yet.

Such artificially imposed Plandemics will help kill humanity. Yes, plural, because if we, The People, don’t bring this diabolical plan to a shrieking halt, there will be more pandemics, until the other goal of the Globalist Cabal has been reached — “Depopulation”, grabbing of Mother Earth’s remaining resources, as well as full control over a singular global monetary system.

Control as concluded by the WEF’s “Global Reset”, in – “You own nothing and will be happy” – and let me add – “happy – as long as you behave, as we want you to behave.” If not, it may be possible, at this point this is pure speculation, to turn on AI and euthanize the disobedient citizen, or what will have become by then, the “transhuman”.

For these high-tech operations they need 5G and soon 6G. The former is already functioning in many countries, and many urban areas, in Europe and the US. Soon they will get even more powerful electromagnetic (EM) waves and fields to manipulate high-speed vaccine-implanted nano-chips.
There are currently close to a thousand so-called Starlink satellites in orbit. The long-term goal is 30,000-plus. They are transmitting high-power AI-generated data to millions of antennas around the globe, and from there the information links up with magnetic fields, including MFs that are planned to be created in humans. With 5G and EM field humans would be transformed into “transhumans” (Klaus Schwab in “The Global Reset” and “The 4^th Industrial Revolution).

This human catastrophe, crimes against humanity, we are facing today have  been planned for many decades – right in front of our eyes.

We were told openly what THEY are planning to execute, for example, the Rockefeller Report, Event 201, the Great Reset, numerous small and targeted pandemics – SARS (2002-2004), MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) in 2012; H1N1, also called Swine Flu (2009-2010), and more.

They were like trial runs for something much bigger to come, namely a well-planned pandemic, which is really no pandemic, that was to embrace the entire humanity, in all 193 UN member countries – all at once.

From one day to the next the entire world went into lockdown, when WHO on 11 March 2020 declared a worldwide pandemic, when worldwide there were only 9,344 registered covid deaths, more than 90% of them people above the age of 80 with co-morbidities. People who could have died from the common flue, renamed “covid”. Clearly, no case for declaring a pandemic. Every annual seasonal flu in the past decades has killed far more people than SARS-CoV-2, alias, Covid-19.

Imagine, the entire world has been coopted, coerced, blackmailed or threatened into this plan. Not only all UN member countries, but the political body of the UN system, as well as many sub-organizations, including WHO, UNICEF (yes, THE very UN children’s protection agency), the World Trade Organization, UNCTAD, UNDP – not to forget the Bretton Woods Organizations, World Bank and IMF – and, of course, the key players of the World Economic Forum (WEF), are part of this concerted effort to destroy civilization, as we know it.

Other than the destruction of the global economy, there is a eugenist agenda behind this “covid oppression”.

Is  depopulation being planned?

So as to keep the people under control, this is carried out with tremendous and constant fear campaigns, repeated lockdowns, mask wearing, social distancing, severely limiting human gatherings – and so on.

These are well-known measures to denigrate human dignity and self-esteem. Fear is also reducing the immune system as well as the power and will to resist.

Almost every one of the 193 UN member countries had immediately declared a health emergency, akin to an Emergency Law, sort of a Health Martial Law, eliminating most civil and human rights. All these “health protection measures” are well-planned, under the moto, “divide to conquer”. Because humanity in solidarity is the biggest force there is in our close vicinity, other than that of Mother Earth’s.

We might ask ourselves: Is this plandemic a means of targeting so-called unnecessary people, the uneducated, old, infirm and weak for starters as formulated by the protagonists of Eugenics going back to the early 20th Century?

As the eugenics movement gathered strength, the exclusion criteria were gradually tightened to make it easier for U.S. immigration officials to keep disabled people out of America. The 1907 law denied entry to anyone judged ‘mentally or physically defective, such mental or physical defects …  It added ‘imbeciles’ and ‘feeble-minded persons’ to the list of automatically excluded people and inspectors were directed to exclude people with ‘any mental abnormality whatever’

They absorb unnecessarily too many resources and produce nothing, at least nothing from which the Global Cabal could benefit.

A plandemic costs less than a nuclear holocaust. There is no destruction of infrastructure and cities. It increases available land. The newly liberated land and properties go to the elite and possibly to the elite’s new “environmentally safe” agriculture, as propagated by philanthropic farmer Bill Gates, currently the single largest agricultural land owner in the United States.

He promotes vegetable-based meat to save the world from CO2 – and, of course, from global warming.

This goes even a step further than the New Green Deal, supported by the new left; a lie that catapults neoliberal capitalism into yet a new dimension. A lie they trust can easily sell as the truth in a world that has been indoctrinated for decades with the fake coming of man-made “climate change” – alias, “global warming”.

It is a seductive approach to a ‘new’ world order for all those who repeat in unison and in lockstep all the slogans of the fake environmentalists.

The New or One World Order requires a vastly reduced world population.

The bio-war based WWIII we are currently living, will not kill us all at once.

It will mentally prepare us for a better world.

That’s what diabolical plans always do. And as we submit to wearing masks and double masks, plus plastic shields (the latest ludicrous orders under punishment in some countries), to social distancing, to repeated lockdowns as new waves and new variants are invented, we are gradually taking speed running into our own graves.

We are giving more, and ever more of our freedom and human rights away, and move ever more into the grip of “Dirty Rich Elite”, whose objective is to get us all vaccinated, come hell or high water. We seem to be still unable to see the real agenda – nothing to do with protecting our health – to the contrary, it’s a eugenist plan.

Be aware – we are almost there. Dr. Mike Yeadon, former VP of Pfizer and Chief of Science at Pfizer warns of mRNA-type inoculations – which by the CDC’s own declaration are not vaccines but gene-therapies, very dangerous gene-therapies that might alter the human DNA.

These non-vaccines, of which two shots are usually required, are reported of having caused blood clotting, strokes, anaphylaxis, miscarriages, Bell’s Palsy, and a host of other neurologic and auto-immune disorders. And these are just the short-term risks. The long-term dangers – 3 to 5 years down the road – could potentially, according to Dr. Yeadon, result in more deaths and injuries. See here and here.

It is hard to believe that your own government betrays you, and that to a greater or lesser extent all 193 UN member governments participate in bringing about worldwide destruction, a massive bio-WWIII scenario.

Ten years from now, when the non-vaxx jab has transformed most of the remaining humanity into transhumans, when some of the resistant survivors ask you, why didn’t you do something about it, you knew something was not right, and your answer is, “I didn’t know”. Then, it will be too late.

This gigantic monstrous plan has been under preparation for at least 50 years, probably much longer.

Henry Kissinger, who became National Security Advisor in 1969 under President Nixon, played a key role in determining US foreign policy. In 1973 he became Secretary of State and in 1974, Kissinger directed the

National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests (NSSM200).

The classified study was adopted as official US policy by US President Gerald Ford in November 1975. It was declassified in the early 1990s. The study falsely claimed that population growth in the so-called Lesser Developed Countries (LDCs) was a grave threat to U.S. national security. It talked about food control genocide. “The Food Issue’ is not conjecture. Our food supply has been turned into a weapon against us all.”

The NSSM 200 outlined a covert plan to reduce population growth in those countries through birth control, and also, implicitly, war and famine. Brent Scowcroft, who had by then replaced Kissinger as national security adviser was put in charge of implementing the plan.

CIA Director George H. W. Bush was ordered to assist Scowcroft, as were the secretaries of state, treasury, defense, and agriculture. – This shows the importance of depopulation to several US Administrations, already from the 1970s onward. The NSSM 200 is operational as of this day.

Famine is only one weapon to decimate world population, especially of the Global South, which today still harbors at least two thirds of the world’s natural resources the Global North covets for its exuberant and wasteful life style.

Other means are constant wars, for example the “eternal war on terror”, that deliberately began with the insider 9/11 attacks. Over the past 20 years it has justified any atrocious killing by war or conflict by the US military or by NATO and murdered combined an estimated between 15 and 20 million people.

The US and her allies are guilty of massive war crimes. What can you expect from a nation that drugs its soldiers before combat so they may carry out the most heinous killings without any remorse? The atrocious slaughters come back later to haunt the soldiers once they are home, in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

They are often unable to reintegrate into society. According to the Washington Post, close to 20% of returning veterans report PTSD. The real figure must be much higher, many are committing suicide.

Covid has engendered a fear campaign, facilitating dictatorial and unconstitutional freedom-robbing measures, having destroyed the world economy, created uncountable bankruptcies, unemployment, famine – and finally death (incidence on mortality and morbidity).

Hundreds of thousands are expected to die, not from covid, but from the “collateral disaster” caused by the unjustified tyrannical covid-measures. See here.

Political leaders who do not obey the global elite’s imposed narrative, are heavily reprimanded and / or killed. There is a long history going back to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961.

While at this stage we have no proof, the recent deaths of the presidents of Tanzania and Burundi, raise important question marks. President of Tanzania, John Magufuli, refused to vaccinate his compatriots, saying there are natural remedies to cure the disease. He suddenly died on 17, March 2021, from a supposed heart attack. The President of Burundi, Mr. Nkurunziza, also died unexpectedly on 8 June 2020, also allegedly from heart failure. He was a so-called covid-denier and threw the WHO out of Burundi.

The importance of the relentless vaxx-vaxx-vaxx campaign couldn’t be a more glaring example of an agenda other than health protection behind the fraudulent covid-face. The European Union has just ordered 1.8 billion doses of mRNA-type vaccines. That’s about 4 doses for every one of the 450 million EU citizens. Why? How many more “waves” and “new “strands”, or covid “variants” are planned over the next 3 to 4 years?

And why are none of these vaccines from Russia or China? The two countries that produce vaccines which are based on the traditional vaccination-method, injecting a weak or dead virus that will produce antibodies when it comes in contact with the real virus. This method has for-decades been applied as a proven preventive medication.

We should ask ourselves: Does the western selection of experimental gene-therapy inoculations point to a health protection agenda? Or is it something else?

All in all – there is no time to lose.

We must resist.

We must say NO – in solidarity – worldwide.

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

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

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Israel had a near-miss of potentially catastrophic proportions on Thursday. As it has done hundreds of times in the past decade, the Israeli air force attacked Iranian bases inside Syria. In response, Syrian forces fired anti-aircraft missiles of a rather primitive Soviet model, one of which overflew its target and landed some 30 kilometres from Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor. Israel said recently that it was bolstering its defences around Dimona for just such an eventuality.

Although an Iranian general taunted Israel, implying that Iran had some responsibility for the attack, that doesn’t appear to be the case. But the missile landing inside Israel does show that if Iran wanted to attack Dimona, it has the capacity. And despite Israel’s best efforts, an Iranian missile could hit its target.

With that, one of the worst nuclear disasters in the region’s history could unfold, including a Chernobyl-type radioactive leak that could endanger not only all of Israel, but also many of its neighbours.

A US general has assured a Senate committee that the Syrians weren’t intending to attack Israel. Rather, a misguided missile meant to target an Israeli warplane overshot its target. He blamed it on “incompetence”, as if that was supposed to be somehow reassuring; rather, it only reinforces how easy it is even for a mistake to cause a nuclear disaster.

Campaign of terror

Certainly, if either Israel or Iran wanted to bomb each other’s nuclear facilities, they could do so successfully. An Israeli attack would probably cause less catastrophic damage, but only because Iran’s nuclear programme is not nearly as developed as Israel’s. An Iranian direct hit on Dimona would cause incalculable damage due to the plutonium reactor at the facility.

Nor does this happen in a vacuum: Israel has maintained a decade-long campaign of terror attacks on Iranian military bases and nuclear scientists. Most recently, it bombed the Natanz nuclear facility, destroying the power generation source and damaging older-generation centrifuges. It also attacked an Iranian Revolutionary Guard spy ship off the Yemeni coast this month.

Iran has responded in its own limited way, restrained by its need to maintain good relations with nuclear-deal signatories.

For Israel, the attacks are a low-risk proposition. It defies US opposition (if there is any) with a wink and a nod, and the attacks look good on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s résumé. To weather his corruption trial and retain public support, he needs external enemies (and internal enemies, but that’s a different story). Iran provides these in spades.

Eliminating Israeli leverage

The US could exert control over this scenario by eliminating Israeli leverage. If it agreed to lift sanctions in exchange for Iran’s return to low levels of uranium enrichment, as designated in the nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration, Israel’s rejectionist approach would become moot. The problem is that US President Joe Biden is running scared from Republican opposition to any nuclear deal with Iran. Besides, he has designated the Middle East a low priority for his administration.

There is some faint hope in the US announcement that it is ready to lift a partial set of sanctions. However, the list on offer is quite limited, and will certainly not satisfy the Iranians. Such half-measures present an example of the limitations of the Biden approach. He should instead make a full-throated commitment to end this dithering once and for all.

Israel is mounting a full-court press this coming week as it sends its Mossad and military intelligence chiefs, along with its army chief of staff, to Washington in an attempt to influence nuclear negotiations as they enter what may be a final stage. According to Haaretz, army chief of staff Aviv Kochavi “will also raise other issues, including Iran’s military expansion in Syria and the instability of Lebanon. Israel is concerned about the possibility that Hezbollah will try to … [foment] conflict with Israel.”

The hypocrisy of Israel’s refusal to acknowledge its own massive military interventions in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and even Iraq, while decrying Iran’s involvement in Syria, is almost breathtaking.

There is next to no chance that any of this will enter into the considerations of negotiators in Vienna. Unlike Israel, they are interested in doing a nuclear deal, not engaging in wishful thinking.

Combustible Middle East mix

Returning to the Biden administration’s global goals, the Middle East doesn’t care about presidential priorities. It contains a combustible mix of corrupt elites and overbearing dictators who do not shirk from causing mayhem in their domains. And one of them, perhaps a desperate Israeli prime minister or an ageing ayatollah eager to preserve his honour and legacy, could inadvertently (or intentionally) set the entire region aflame.

If Biden doesn’t act quickly and decisively, there is a sizeable risk that another missile from one country or the other will hit a target and cause devastation. That would mark a point of no return, like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, which led to World War One. The difference is that in 1914, armies fought with guns, bayonets and artillery. Today, they will fight with F-35s, ballistic missiles and possibly nuclear weapons.

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Richard Silverstein writes the Tikun Olam blog, devoted to exposing the excesses of the Israeli national security state. His work has appeared in Haaretz, the Forward, the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times. He contributed to the essay collection devoted to the 2006 Lebanon war, A Time to Speak Out (Verso) and has another essay in the collection, Israel and Palestine: Alternate Perspectives on Statehood (Rowman & Littlefield).

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People in Europe have been protesting against stringent government measures pertaining to COVID-19.

On the 24th of April, people flocked to Hyde Park, London, in an anti-lockdown and pro-freedom protest.

Watch the video below.

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Featured image is a screenshot from the video

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Introductory Note by Catherine Austin Fitts

The Doctors for Covid Ethics has served the members of the European Parliament with Notices of Liability advising them that they may be held personally liable for harm and death caused by implementation of a Digital Green Certificate (Vaccine Passport), to be voted upon in the European Parliament on April 28, 2021.

If you are a citizen of the European Union, please take time between now and April 28, 2021 to make your voice heard with them!

If you are a citizen of a country outside the European Union, please be inspired by the courage and hard work of the Doctors for Covid Ethics. Please take time now to work with your governments and the banks and companies in which you and your pensions own shares or which you frequent as a depositor or a customer to prevent the adoption of this effort to end health and personal human freedom.

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NOTICE OF LIABILITY (“NOL”)

[NAME]

April 20, 2021

This Notice of Liability has been SERVED to you personally.

You may be held personally liable for harm and death caused by implementation of the proposal identified as REGULATION OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL on a framework for the issuance, verification and acceptance of interoperable certificates on vaccination, testing and recovery to facilitate free movement during the COVID-19 pandemic (Digital Green Certificate), Brussels, 17.3.2021 COM(2021) 130 final 2021/0068 (COD), which is designed to coerce widespread acceptance of experimental vaccination. If you take further action supporting such implementation, and if you take no steps to mitigate your past actions supporting such implementation, you may be held personally liable for resulting harm and death.

Attached as appendices and as integral parts of this Notice of Liability are the documents:

Urgent Open Letter from Doctors and Scientists to the European Medicines Agency Regarding COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Concerns;

Reply from the European Medicines Agency to Doctors for Covid Ethics;

Doctors and Scientists Accuse Medical Regulator of Downplaying COVID-19 Vaccine Dangers;

Rebuttal Letter to European Medicines Agency from Doctors for Covid Ethics;

Doctors for Covid Ethics Signatories.

Furthermore, you may be held personally responsible for supporting CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY, defined as acts that are purposely committed as part of a widespread or systematic policy, directed against civilians, committed in furtherance of state policy.

Please respond to this NOTICE OF LIABILITY within 14 days from the DATE OF SERVICE to:

DOCTORS FOR COVID ETHICS

[email protected]

EU Parliment Members served (xlsx file)

1. Letter from Doctors for Covid Ethics to EMA – February 28, 2021
2. Reply from EMA to Doctors for Covid Ethics- March 23, 2021
3. Rebuttal letter from Doctors for Covid Ethics- April 1, 2021
4. Press Release EMA Rebuttal Letter- April 1, 2021
5. Doctors for Covid Ethics Signatories

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The United States is back. Back in the Paris Agreement, and back to faithfully promoting the interests of destructive industries and their allies at the global level under the guise of environmentalism. On Earth Day—a day that has been increasingly co-opted by corporations—President Biden is hosting a “Leaders’ Summit on the Climate.” But who are these “leaders?” 

The Biden Administration’s dubious definition is clear from the fact that a key initiative to be announced at the summit is a bilateral agreement between Biden and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. The deal would include significant financial support for Brazil’s “efforts” to reduce illegal deforestation.

If there were ever a prize for the most environmentally destructive president in history, Bolsonaro would stand a good chance to win. In just two years, he has succeeded in increasing deforestation rates in Brazil by 47 percent, triggering the destruction of 11,088 square kilometers of forests in his country in 2020 alone, primarily by allowing and even incentivizing his friends and allies in the industrial livestock sector and other industries to clear as much forest as they want.

Of course, it is basically up to Bolsonaro and his administration to decide what deforestation is legal or illegal—no matter the fact that Heads of State agreed in 2015 in the Sustainable Development Goals that all deforestation should be halted, and thus declared illegal, by 2020.

It is no wonder Brazilian Indigenous peoples, civil society organizations, feminist groups, and social movements are cynical about the proposed deal between the United States and Brazil. In a widely supported letter published on April 6, they denounced the proposed agreement, claiming it is unacceptable to give financial support to a “leader” who is not only destroying his own country, but has also been recommended by Indigenous peoples in Brazil to be prosecuted before the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Bolsonaro is not the only industry ally the United States is touting as an “environmental leader.” The Biden Administration has shown its commitment to protecting business as usual in climate policy by actively promoting carbon offset mechanisms that would allow some of the dirtiest industries in the country to buy cheap carbon offsets for their emissions under the euphemistic term “nature-based solutions.”

Such “solutions” often boil down to monoculture tree plantations, which have been embraced by companies like Shell and Texaco as a way to profit from pulp or bioenergy sales while pretending to “plant trees” for clients who want to greenwash their petroleum emissions.

These carbon offset mechanisms would allow some of the dirtiest industries to make money selling offset credits based on the use of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, and weed killers that avoid tilling (euphemistically called soil carbon sequestration or even “regenerative agriculture”) or, for example, the use of biogas produced by intensive livestock farming.

The emissions caused by the production of soy feedstock for the intensive livestock industry, a key cause of deforestation in countries like Brazil, are conveniently forgotten in these scenarios. Also forgotten are the devastating impacts on women, Indigenous peoples, and others who’ve borne the brunt of industrial farming, which is associated with massive health impacts due to agrochemicals, land grabbing, and rural depopulation.

Another “leader” who will undoubtedly show up at the U.S. Leaders’ Summit is Bill Gates, a passionate promoter of GMOs and other techno-fixes to address the impacts of  agro-industry on the climate. Through a series of strategic investments in different U.N. institutions, the former Microsoft CEO and his foundation have positioned themselves as the main benefactor and influencer of a wide variety of interlinked global processes.

The U.N. Food Systems Summit is probably the most controversial of these processes. The idea for the summit came from the business-dominated World Economic Forum. And its pro-business agenda was given a human face with the appointment of Agnes Kalibata, the president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, as special envoy of the conference.

The alliance is an initiative backed by the Gates Foundation to promote GMOs and other techno-fixes for agricultural challenges in Africa. Gates himself has invested heavily in companies like Monsanto/Bayer that stand to profit from such “nature-based solutions.”

With the U.N. Food Systems Summit planned for September 2021, the conditions are right for a corporate-driven agenda to push business-friendly “nature-based solutions” onto the “leaders” gathered at these summits. The winners in this scheme would be destroyers like Bolsonaro and Gates, who seek profit at the expense of some of the most precious forests on the planet.

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Ahead of European Green Certificate (vaccine passport) vote in the European Parliament on April 28, the experts warn that cardinal symptoms of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) dominate the list of adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccines

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Emer Cooke, Executive Director, European Medicines Agency, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 20 April 2021

BY EMAIL ONLY

Dear Sirs/Mesdames,

FOR THE URGENT PERSONAL ATTENTION OF EMER COOKE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE EUROPEAN MEDICINES AGENCY

The European Medicines Agency and those persons who work for that regulatory body, of which body you are Executive Director, were put on notice by Doctors for Covid Ethics on 1 April 2021.

We note your iterations to the press since that date.

Our concerns re the gene-based vaccines are not confined to that of Astra-Zeneca, rather to all the COVID-19 gene-based vaccines, namely those of Astra-Zeneca, Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson.

1a. Our most serious concern re ALL the gene-based vaccines is that you convey the impression that cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) is a very rare adverse event. In fact the opposite is probably true. The cardinal symptoms of CVST dominate the list of adverse reactions:

• piercing headache
• nausea and vomiting
• impaired consciousness
• impaired speech
• impaired vision
• impaired hearing
• paralysis of varying degrees in various locations
• loss of motor control (including such severe loss that victims mimic the symptoms of Huntington’s Chorea).

It is imperative that proper medical attention is given to every individual who presents with any of the above symptoms.

It is the indirigible duty of the European Medicines Agency to disseminate the above information to medical doctors and responsible authorities.

1b. A further serious concern is that peripheral “clot” formation is not alluded to by you at all.

It is evident that “clot” formation in the deep veins of the legs and arms can lead to life-threatening pulmonary embolism.

1c. Further, thrombus formation in the small vessels of the lungs can lead to a clinical picture resembling atypical pneumonia.

1d. In addition, it is vitally important to understand that any one of 1a. 1b. 1c. or any combination of these can lead via consumption of coagulation factors to the clinical picture of disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) which is actually characterised by massive bleeding events into the skin and into other organs of the body.

It is imperative that all the above diagnoses are actively searched for and that all cases displaying symptoms consistent with any of these diagnoses are recorded properly as adverse vaccine-related events.

1e. Furthermore, long term adverse effects, in particular the danger of immune dependant enhancement of disease and adverse effects of subsequent vaccinations are impossible to predict.

The European Medicines Agency, as the regulator re vaccines for almost 450 million people across 27 European Union member states, must inform the public and the relevant authorities of this profoundly important issue.

2. We believe that the number of deaths due to the gene-based vaccines to which you have publicly admitted is but a small percentage of the actual number of deaths due to the gene-based vaccines.

3. With regard to 2. we suspect that death certificates are being falsified, whether wittingly or unwittingly, particularly when

4. post-mortems are not being performed and

5. when the “laws” surrounding cremation (which constitutes destruction of evidence in the present context of the commission of great crimes) have been dangerously relaxed (3. 4. and 5. as per the Coronavirus Act 2020 and equivalent legislation worldwide) and

6. particularly in view of the deafening silence re 3. 4. and 5. from coroners and pathologists worldwide.

You will understand that this potentially lethal cocktail is of the highest importance, particularly in view of the numerous serious coercive measures being employed on psychologically traumatised populations worldwide to take gene-based vaccines which are not safe, which are not effective and which are not needed.

We have previously made you aware of multiple gross violations of the Nuremberg Code re human medical experimentation.

With this background, we ask that you disclose all data which you hold and/or could obtain on:

1) the effects of the gene-based vaccines on fertility in women of child bearing age, and in men

2) the number of cremations performed since and including 8 December 2020 and the number of burials since and including 8 December 2020 of those recorded as having died from COVID-19 on their death certificates, not necessarily in the European Union

3) the medical justification for the interval between the two Pfizer injections being increased at short notice from 3 weeks to 12 weeks, despite protests from Pfizer that they only possessed data for a three week interval

4) the medical justification for “mixing and matching” of different gene-based vaccines and

5) the medical justification for depriving recipients of the gene-based vaccines, in at least one European Union member state, of knowledge of which gene-based vaccine they have received.

We look forward to hearing from you.

We reserve the right to publish this email communication at any time.

This email is copied to the lawyer Reiner Fuellmich and other lawyers, to Charles Michel, President of the Council of Europe, to Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, and to five members of your staff.

Yours faithfully,

Doctors for Covid Ethics

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The very word is chilling, but has become normalised political currency in Denmark.  Since 2010, the Danish government has resorted to generating “ghetto lists” marking out areas as socially problematic for the state.  In 2018, the country’s parliament passed “ghetto” laws to further regulate the lives of individuals inhabiting various city areas focusing on their racial and ethnic origins.  The legislation constitutes the spear tip of the “One Denmark without Parallel Societies – No Ghettos in 2030” initiative; its target: “non-Western” residents who overbalance the social ledger by concentrating in various city environs. 

The “ghetto package”, comprising over 20 different statutes, grants the government power to designate various neighbourhoods as “ghettos” or “tough ghettos”.  That nasty formulation is intended to have consequences for urban planning, taking into account the percentage of immigrants and descendants present in that area of “non-Western background”.  One Danish media outlet, assiduously avoiding the creepier elements of the policy, saw it as the “greatest social experiment of the century.”

Bureaucrats consider the following: the number of residents (greater than 1,000); a cap of 50% of “non-Westerners”; and whether the neighbourhood meets any two of four criteria, namely employment, education, income and criminality.  Doing so enables the authorities to evict residents, demolish buildings and alter the character of the neighbourhood, a form of cleansing that has shuddering historical resonances.  Central to this is an effort to reduce the stock of “common family housing” – 40% in tough ghettos by 2030 – supposedly available to all based on principles of affordability, democracy and egalitarianism.

The problematic designation of people of “non-Western background” is also a bit of brutal public policy.  It is a discriminatory measure that has concerned the UN Committee on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights (CESCR) and the Council of Europe’s Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (ACFC).  In its concluding observations on the sixth periodic report of Denmark from 2019, the CESCR urged the country’s adoption of “a rights-based approach to its efforts to address residential segregation and enhance social cohesion.”  This would involve the scrapping of such terms as “ghetto” and “non-Western” and the repeal of provisions with direct or indirect discriminatory effects “on refugees, migrants and residents of the ‘ghettos’.”

The use of “descendants” also suggests the importance of bloodline that would have seemed entirely logical to the Nazi drafters of the Nuremberg Laws.  The German laws, announced in 1935, made no reference to the criteria of religion in defining a “Jew”, merely the importance of having three or four Jewish grandparents.  Doing so roped those whose grandparents had converted to Christianity and the secular. First came the sentiments; then came the laws.

This irredeemable state of affairs has solid, disturbing implications, though both the CESCR and ACFC tend to be almost mild mannered in pointing it out: You did not belong and you cannot belong.  It is less an integrating measure than an excluding one.  Denmark’s “Ghetto Package”, as the ACFC puts it, “sends a message that may have a counter-effect on their feeling of belonging and forming an integral part of Danish society.”  It also urged that Denmark “reconsider the concepts of ‘immigrants and descendants of immigrants of Western origin’ and ‘immigrants and descendants of immigrants of non-Western origin’.”

For its part, the Ministry of Interior and Housing finds the package all above board, a mere matter of statistical bookkeeping.  Using “non-Western” as a marker adopted to distinguish the EU states, the UK, Andorra, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland, the Vatican State, Canada, United States, Australia and New Zealand.  “All other countries,” the Ministry curtly observed in a statement, “are non-Western countries.”

Last year, Mjølnerparken, a housing project in Copenhagen’s Nørrebro area, became the subject of intense interest in the application of the Ghetto laws.  With 98 percent of the 2,500 residents being immigrants or the children of immigrants, a good number hailing from the Middle East and Africa, the “tough ghetto” designation was a formality.  Apartment sales were promised, effectively threatening the eviction of the tenants. 

These actions were proposed despite ongoing legal proceedings against the Ministry of Interior and Housing by affected residents.  Declaratory relief is being sought, with the applicants arguing that the measures breach the rights to equality, respect for home, property and the freedom to choose their own residence.

Three rapporteurs from the United Nations also warned that the sale should not go ahead as litigation was taking place.  “It does not matter whether they own or rent all residents should have a degree of security of tenure, which guarantees legal protection against forced eviction, harassment and other threats.”

Such policies tend to consume the reason for their implementation.  Disadvantage and stigmatisation are enforced, not lessened.  Former lawmaker Özlem Cekic suggests as much.  “It is not only created to hit the Muslim groups and immigrant groups but the working class as well.  A lot of people in the ‘ghettoes’, they don’t have economic stability.”

The Ministry has reacted to the protests with proposals that ostensibly reform the legal package.  The word “ghetto”, for instance, will be removed and the share of people of non-Western background in social housing will be reduced to 30% within 10 years.  Those moved out of the areas will be relocated to other parts of the country.  According to Nanna Margrethe Kusaa of the Danish Institute for Human Rights, “the ethnicity criteria has a more sharpened focus on it than before.”  Officials have merely refined the prejudice in one of Europe’s most troubling instances of ethnic engineering.  To this, Cekic has an ominous warning: “How can you expect [immigrants] to be loyal to a country that doesn’t accept them as they are?”

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Email: [email protected]

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U.S. contractors are staring down a tight deadline—with very little direction—to move out of Afghanistan by President Joe Biden’s planned troop withdrawal of Sept. 11.

“The timetable to do this properly is already too tight,” said David Berteau, president of the Professional Services Council representing 400 government contractors, many working in Afghanistan. “We don’t have years, we have only months.”

The Defense Department has 16,832 workers employed by contractors in Afghanistan, of whom 6,147 are U.S. citizens. That’s more than double the remaining 2,500 U.S. troops. Contractors support the military with everything from lodging, laundry, and food to transportation, equipment maintenance, and fuel. Since 2002, the Pentagon has spent $107.9 billion on contracted services in Afghanistan, a Bloomberg Government analysis shows.

“We need a much clearer idea of what the endgame looks like,” Berteau said. “None of that has been revealed to us or our member companies and that is what we’re calling for.”

The contractors’ alarm signals how complicated and fraught with risk the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan will be after almost two decades of combat against an entrenched network of armed forces, and with thousands of contractors supporting U.S. military operations.

Biden set the pullout deadline for the 20-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

Largest Vendors

The largest vendors with Pentagon contracts in Afghanistan are Fluor Corp. with $3.1 billion spent between 2016 and January 2021, and Amentum Parent Holdings LLC, with $1.7 billion during the same period.

Contract data is available only through the first half of January 2021. Both Fluor and Amentum’s largest contract is known as a logistics civil augmentation program. In short, it’s an indefinite delivery and quantity contract given in multiple awards.

Amentum, for example, works on air traffic control, airfield upkeep, unmanned aircraft operations, and maintenance. It also helped with training the Afghans’ national police and army, contract data show.

Amentum doesn’t have a comment for this article, a company spokeswoman said. Fluor officials didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Pentagon also has spent $1.2 billion for helicopter transport during the same 2016 to January 2021 period, primarily with two companies: Columbia Helicopters, at $966 million, and Construction Helicopters Inc. at $229 million. The Pentagon spent $935 million over four years on contracts with PAE Inc. to include training and mentoring, and for the Afghanistan technical equipment maintenance program.

Meanwhile, one vendor—Secure Movement Logistics Services—received $680 million for petroleum, oil, and lubricant product support. The complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan makes it likely that fuel services will no longer be needed in the country.

‘Devastating’ Removal

“Most of the contractors are going to leave, and certainly the U.S. contractors are going to leave,” Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the head of Central Command, told the House Armed Services Committee on April 20. He offered no details and later in the week, at a Pentagon press briefing, he said, “the U.S. contractors will come out as we come out. That is part of the planned withdrawal we have in place right now.”

The preliminary plan is for at least some contractors to leave during the military withdrawal from Afghanistan, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said this month after Biden’s announcement. The Pentagon has yet to provide details on how many contractors will be extracted. Kirby indicated plans are in flux and could change.

U.S. contractors leaving Afghanistan could be more “devastating” to the Afghan security forces than the U.S. troop pullout, John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said last month.

The departure of contractors was largely ignored as the focus shifted to when Biden would withdraw the military, Sopko told a forum organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Afghan government relies on contractors to train in using, and maintain, U.S.-supplied equipment such as Lockheed Martin Corp.’s UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters and C-130 transport aircraft, he said.

The Pentagon is looking at alternatives to help the Afghans in the maintenance effort from a distance, McKenzie said.

“We may be able to work some remote, televised way to do that,” he said at the Pentagon on Thursday. “We’re going to try all kinds of innovative ways. The one thing I can tell you is we are not going to be there on the ground with them.”

Future ‘Boondoggle’

The U.S. decision to send Blackhawks to Afghanistan that the local security forces can’t operate or maintain is ripe for fraud and abuse, said Jason Dempsey, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

“I see it as a total boondoggle,” Dempsey said in an interview. To support the Afghan air force, the U.S. would have to keep sending in contractors, he said, and “contracts are going to be ridiculous” going forward.

“We are going to put in a bunch of contractors, they are going to get hundreds of millions of dollars to maintain this fleet, and the fleet is not going to be used,” he said.

Without contractors, none of these aircraft can remain effective for combat for more than a few months, Sopko warned. Dyncorp International, now a part of Amentum, in December won a task order valued at up to $554 million for support of aircraft. The company said in a statement it would hire 250 people to start work in Afghanistan and Huntsville, Ala., where the program is managed.

‘Easy Part’

U.S. forces coming out of Afghanistan “is kind of the easy part,” said Elaine McCusker, a former acting Pentagon comptroller during President Donald Trump’s administration.

“The key thing is always, what does that detailed planning order look like, and what is the end state?” McCusker, now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said in an interview.

“Moving the forces out is not as big of a deal; it’s the equipment and then the reset that has to take place. Are you bringing that equipment out of the Middle East, are you just bringing it out of Afghanistan? Where is it going? How much is coming back to the U.S.?” McCusker said. “Those are some of the considerations that are going to play into what the final plan looks like.”

Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s acquisition officials are working on a strategy for any modifications for contracts that support U.S. forces. “But let’s face it, they also support coalition forces,” McCusker said. “It’s not just us that we want to look at what is provided through those contracts.”

The situation “cries out” both for individual review of the specific contracts, and a national review of contracts that would make sense to continue in order to support the Afghan government, and those that the Afghanis can maintain, Berteau, from the Professional Services Council, said.

“This is the kind of effort that if you started today, you’d be at a hard run to be finished by Sept. 11,” he said. “And you don’t even see a sign that it is underway today.”

First published in December 2020

“There is absolutely no need for vaccines to extinguish the pandemic… You do not vaccinate people who aren’t at risk from a disease. You also don’t set about planning to vaccinate millions of fit and healthy people with a vaccine that hasn’t been extensively tested on human subjects.” Dr. Mike Yeadon PhD, Pfizer’s former Vice President and Chief Scientist for Allergy & Respiratory Disease

“What we know about coronavirus from 30 years of experience is that a coronavirus vaccine has a unique peculiarity, which is any attempt at making the vaccine has resulted in the creation of a class of antibodies that actually make vaccinated people sicker when they ultimately suffer exposure to the wild virus.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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Here’s what I think is currently going on in our country and across much of the western world. A public health crisis– that was manufactured and gamed-out before the initial outbreak in Wuhan, China –has been used to short-circuit long-held civil liberties, strengthen the authority of political leaders, collapse the economy, dramatically remake basic social relations, and impose absolute control over work, school, gatherings and recreational activities. Public policy is now set by unelected technocrats who operate behind the cover of lofty-sounding organizations that are entirely controlled by the world’s biggest corporations and richest oligarchs. President Dwight Eisenhower anticipated this troubling scenario 70 years ago when he said:

“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Bingo. This is the state of affairs in America today. All real power has been conceded to a globalist oligarchy that operates behind the curtain of corrupt government officials and public health experts. This begs the question of whether the hoopla surrounding the Coronavirus emerged as a spontaneous and appropriate reaction to a lethal and fast-spreading pandemic or whether the hysteria has been greatly exaggerated (Infection Fatality Rate is 0.26% or 1 in 400) to implement a transformational political-social agenda that will not only eradicate democracy and basic human rights, but also pave the way for dangerous vaccines that will dramatically curtail population growth, which is an objective that is widely shared among wealthy elites.

Would it surprise you to know that vaccines have been used in Africa, the Philippines, Nicaragua and Mexico to terminate fertility? Would it shock you to know that “do-goodie” mandarins –who want to save the world from overpopulation and global warming– have used toxic vaccines on unsuspecting young women who didn’t realize that they were being used as lab rats in a malignant eugenics experiment? This is from an article at Global Research:

“According to LifeSiteNews, a Catholic publication, the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association is charging UNICEF and WHO with sterilizing millions of girls and women under cover of an anti-tetanus vaccination program sponsored by the Kenyan government…

… all six samples tested positive for the HCG antigen. The HCG antigen is used in anti-fertility vaccines, but was found present in tetanus vaccines targeted to young girls and women of childbearing age. Dr. Ngare, spokesman for the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association, stated in a bulletin released November 4:

“This proved right our worst fears; that this WHO campaign is not about eradicating neonatal tetanus but a well-coordinated forceful population control mass sterilization exercise using a proven fertility regulating vaccine. This evidence was presented to the Ministry of Health before the third round of immunization but was ignored.” (“Mass Sterilization”: Kenyan Doctors Find Anti-fertility Agent in UN Tetanus Vaccine?“, Global Research)

It all sounds rather suspicious, doesn’t it, especially since there was no tetanus crisis in Kenya to begin with. Kenya was merely the testing ground for vaccines aimed at achieving more diabolical goals. For example, why would a tetanus campaign only target women between the ages of 14 to 49 years old? Why did the campaign exclude young girls, boys and men who were equally susceptible to tetanus?

Why?

You know why. It’s because the real objective had nothing to do with tetanus. Tetanus was merely the pretext that was used to conceal the activities of globalist elites working the kinks out of their depopulation strategy. Take a look at this press statement By the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops on the National Tetanus Vaccination Campaign:

“We are not convinced that the government has taken adequate responsibility to ensure that Tetanus Toxoid vaccine (TT) laced with Beta human chorionic gonadotropin (b-HCG) sub unit is not being used by the sponsoring development partners. This has previously been used by the same partners in Philippines, Nicaragua and Mexico to vaccinate women against future pregnancy. Beta HCG sub unit is a hormone necessary for pregnancy.

When injected as a vaccine to a non-pregnant woman, this Beta HCG sub unit combined with tetanus toxoid develops antibodies against tetanus and HCG so that if a woman’s egg becomes fertilized, her own natural HCG will be destroyed rendering her permanently infertile. In this situation tetanus vaccination has been used as a birth control method.” (“Mass Sterilization”: Kenyan Doctors Find Anti-fertility Agent in UN Tetanus Vaccine?)

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that they might have conducted these depopulation programs in Africa, but they’d never do anything like that in the United States where our ever-vigilant media would expose what they were up to. Right?

Unfortunately, the media is owned lock, stock and barrel by the same people who create crises to advance their own self-serving agenda. Covid-19 is probably no different in that regard. The fact that the infection is modestly lethal actually helps to achieve the broader goal of reshaping society, restructuring the economy, abandoning representative government, and reducing the population to more sustainable levels. These are the real objectives of this politically-driven farce. Check out this article in Bloomberg (2019) which helps to shed light on today’s Covid developments. The article is aptly titled “Earth Needs Fewer People, Scientists Say”:

“Forty years ago, scientists from 50 nations converged on Geneva to discuss what was then called the “CO2-climate problem.”…Now, four decades later, a larger group of scientists is sounding another, much more urgent alarm. More than 11,000 experts from around the world are calling for a critical addition to the main strategy of dumping fossil fuels for renewable energy: there needs to be far fewer humans on the planet…

“We declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency,” the scientists wrote in a stark warning published Tuesday…

When absorbed in sequence, the charts lay out a devastating trend for planetary health. From meat consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and ice loss to sea-level rise and extreme weather events, they lay out a grim portrait of 40 years of squandered opportunities. The scientists make specific calls for policymakers to quickly implement systemic change to energy, food, and economic policies. But But they go one step further, into the politically fraught territory of population control. It “must be stabilized—and, ideally, gradually reduced—within a framework that ensures social integrity,” they write. (“”Earth Needs Fewer People, Scientists Say”, Bloomberg)

Forbes published a similar article titled “Over 11,000 Scientists Declare Climate Emergency”. Here’s a short clip:

“Beyond simply sounding the alarm louder than in the past, the letter also offers immediate steps to be taken in six key areas to slow climate change and its impacts…. The steps represent a fairly drastic re-ordering of global society and its underpinning systems, starting with the phasing out of fossil fuels, replacing large-scale land clearing with reforestation efforts, stabilizing global populationand greatly reducing the amount of meat and animal products we consume….” (“Over 11,000 Scientists Declare Climate Emergency“, Forbes)

Finally, there’s this statement published in the journal BioScience by dozens of scientists and endorsed by further 11,000 from 153 nations. The scientists say the urgent changes needed include ending population growth, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, halting forest destruction and slashing meat eating:

“Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is.” On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.

Still increasing by roughly 80 million people per year, or more than 200,000 per day (figure 1a–b), the world population must be stabilized—and, ideally, gradually reduced—within a framework that ensures social integrity. There are proven and effective policies that strengthen human rights while lowering fertility rates and lessening the impacts of population growth on GHG emissions and biodiversity loss. These policies make family-planning services available to all people, remove barriers to their access and achieve full gender equity….” (“World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency”, Oxford Academic)

(Notice how population control is a recurrent theme, a theme that coincides with the “zero emissions” agenda of elites and self-anointed “philanthropists.”)

The fact is, there is a growing consensus among corporate leaders and other elites that we are facing a “climate emergency” that will require immediate and draconian changes to our political, social and economic structures. Is it too far-fetched to think that Covid-19 was conjured up in order implement those changes without revealing the real reason? After all, the public is pretty evenly-split on climate change which means that the opposition would likely be organized, well-funded and ferocious. No doubt, that is something the oligarchs wanted to avoid altogether. A greatly-exaggerated global pandemic was the much better choice. With the media already in tow, and enough sell-out public health experts and Democrat governors to do the heavy-lifting, the prospects for success must have looked quite promising. 8 months into the current operation, the checkered flag is now within sight.. State governors remain unopposed in their usurping of special “crisis powers”, Fauci and his ilk are still widely revered, masks are everywhere, rolling lockdowns and ever-tightening restrictions continue to be the order-of-the-day, and we are just weeks away from the icing on the cake, the thinning of the herd with a “nanoparticle-based vaccine containing a synthetic chemical called polyethylene glycol or PEG”. In other words, the stealth sterilization exercises that were conducted in Africa were merely a dress-rehearsal for the main event, the summary injection of billions of people worldwide in an effort to significantly reduce global population. Are we there yet?

Not yet, but soon.

The teams of psychologists who worked with governments (to sell the Covid terror) and who figured out that mundane reality must be turned on its head– through social distancing, masks, shelter-in-place orders, the closing of schools, businesses, public gatherings, and religious services– in order (to create a disorienting and terrifying environment) to usher in a new authoritarian system in which personal freedom extends no further than selecting one’s online purchases from either Costco or Amazon. These psychologists deserve much of the credit for the transformation of the western world into a lockdown police state ruled by scheming miscreants who will now decide our future for us.

THE VACCINE– The Culmination of 8 months of Relentless Disinformation and Hysteria

While it’s clear that the progress on the vaccines was deliberately delayed until after the presidential elections, (in order to hurt Trump’s prospects for reelection.) very few realize the reason vaccines are being so quickly deployed. Simply put, the epidemic is rapidly winding down forcing the vaccine manufacturers to seek hasty approval so distribution can begin. This is a matter of great urgency which means the FDA will undoubtedly cave in to political pressure and approve prospective vaccines way before trials prove them to be safe. On Wednesday:

“the United Kingdom became the first country Wednesday to formally approve the Pfizer and BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine...The first inoculations are set to be rolled out next week…The vaccine has been authorized far more quickly than any other in history, its lightning development outpacing the 15 to 20 years it usually takes to develop these types of medicines.” (“U.K. becomes first country to approve Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine”, NBC News)

Naturally, safety does not factor into the creation of a vaccine that normally requires 10 years to develop but is swiftly slapped together and brought to market in a mere 8 months. By definition, such a vaccine is not safe.

More from NBC: “In the U.S., both Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have submitted applications to the FDA for an emergency use authorization..BioNTech CEO Uğur Şahin told NBC News’ Richard Engel that he was “confident that an authorization in the U.S. could also happen within the next two weeks.”..

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization told Reuters that it had received data from the companies and was reviewing it for “possible listing for emergency use” — meaning it could be rolled out quicker in developing countries.” (NBC News)

Why are these turkeys being rushed to market?

As we noted earlier, vaccine distribution is being rushed due to the fact that the pandemic is winding down, in fact, for all practical purposes, it’s already over. In the US, the hospitalization and fatality data are being deliberately inflated to perpetuate the hysteria, (we’ll explain this later) while in the UK, the fatalities attributable to Covid (in the fake “Second Wave”) have never exceeded the 5-year average of “excess deaths”, which is the barometer for deciding whether there is an unusual spike in mortality or not. There isn’t. The Second Wave does not exist. It is pure fabrication. Check out this blurb from Dr. Mike Yeadon, Pfizer’s former Vice President and Chief Scientist for Allergy & Respiratory. Yeadon dismisses the “Second Wave” theory as unscientific nonsense. Here’s what he says:

“Viruses don’t do waves… I have repeatedly asked to see the trove of scientific papers used to predict a ‘second wave’ and to build a model to compute its likely size and timing. They have never been forthcoming. It’s almost as if there is no such foundational literature… There have been no examples of multiple waves since and the most recent novel coronavirus with any real spread (SARS) performed one wave each in each geographical region affected. Why a model with a ‘second wave’ in it was even built, I cannot guess. …

Despite the absence of any evidence for a ‘second wave’ – and the evidence of absence of waves for this class of respiratory virus – there was an across-the-board, multi-media platform campaign designed to plant the idea of a ‘second wave’ in the minds of everyone. This ran continually for many weeks. It was successful: a poll of GPs showed almost 86% of them stated that they expected a ‘second wave’ this winter.

As research for this piece, I sought the earliest mention of a ‘second wave’. Profs Heneghan and Jefferson, on Apr 30th, noted that we were being warned to expect a ‘second wave’ and that the PM had, on Apr 27th, warned of a ‘second wave’. The Professors cautioned anyone making confident predictions of a ‘second’ and ‘third wave’ that the historical record doesn’t provide support so to do.

I looked for mentions by the BBC of a ‘second wave’.. On Mar 3rd and 6th, there is mention of a single SARS-CoV-2 wave with most (95%) of the impact early on. What looks to be the final document, Mar 29th, still just refers to one wave. This is what history and immunology teaches….

Despite this bothersome oddity about a ‘second wave’ and almost as if there was a plan for one, the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) testing infrastructure in the UK began to be reshaped….the Portuguese high court determined two weeks ago that this PCR test is not a reliable way to determine the health status or infectiousness of citizens…. With the scientific validity of this test under severe challenges, I believe it must immediately be withdrawn from use.” (“The PCR False Positive Pseudo-Epidemic“, Lockdown Skeptics)

No second wave??

Nope, it’s 100% bunkum. But “there was a plan for one”, which is to say, there was a plan for amplifying the panic to achieve the objectives of elites. That’s clear.

Yeadon then explains how the PCR tests were removed from NHS (National Health Service) labs and delivered to privately-owned “mass testing centers” that replaced “highly qualified and experienced Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) registered biomedical scientists” with ” mainly by volunteer unregistered staff in unaccredited laboratories that have been established within a few weeks.” Naturally, this threw into question the overall reliability of their test results which, in turn, produced massive numbers of false positives that in no way reflected the diminishing impact of the virus.

As Yeadon’s states: such mass testing brings with it, when using PCR as the method, a severe risk of what we call a “PCR false positive pseudo-epidemic”. This could never happen if we were not using PCR mass testing. When a more reliable test was used in Liverpool (Lateral-flow test or LFT) showing that a smaller percentage of people were infected, the test was discarded in favor of the PCR test.

“By September, the great bulk of PCR testing was being run by large, private labs, some of which are called Lighthouse Labs.” That is when the number of infections began to spike sharply which was completely inconsistent with the behavior of epidemics in the past.

Yeadon: “How we can square these claims of tens of thousands of daily “cases” and an unprecedented ‘second wave’ of deaths with the unfeasible quantity of testing using a technique considered by bench experts difficult to perform reliably even on a small scale?”

That’s easy. The whole charade was rigged to make PCR false positives look like a real epidemic. Keep in mind, this isn’t my unprofessional observation, but Pfizer’s former Vice President and Chief Scientist for Allergy & Respiratory.

And just look at the extent to which this farce was maintained. Here’s Yeadon explaining how definitions are stretched to the breaking point to exaggerate the number of Covid fatalities:

“A “case” is a positive PCR test. No symptoms are involved. A “COVID-19 admission” to a hospital is a person testing positive by PCR before, on entry or at any time during a hospital stay, no matter the reason for the admission or the symptoms the patient is presenting. A “COVID-19 death” is any death within 28 days of a positive PCR test.”

So, let’s say you have a massive heart attack and die, but a PCR test shows you have harmless RNA fragments in your bloodstream, then the death is labeled “Covid”. Got that? Yeadon summarizes this hanky-panky in one terse sentence:

“We have very strong evidence that the PCR mass testing as currently conducted is completely worthless.” (Yeadon and a panel of experts have since submitted a 10-point paper to the Eurosurveillance editorial board challenging the science upon which the PCR test is based “which has led to worldwide misdiagnosis of infections attributed to SARS-CoV-2 and associated with the disease COVID-19. We are confronted with stringent lockdowns which have destroyed many people’s lives and livelihoods, limited access to education and these imposed restrictions by governments around the world are a direct attack on people’s basic rights and their personal freedoms, resulting in collateral damage for entire economies on a global scale.”)

According to Yeadon and his team of independent researchers:

“The pandemic was over by June and herd immunity was the main force which turned the pandemic and pressed it into retreat. In the autumn, the claimed “cases” are an artefact of a deranged testing system…. While there is some COVID-19 along the lines of the “secondary ripple” …it has occurred primarily in regions, cities and districts that were less hard hit in the spring. Real COVID-19 is self-limiting and may already have peaked in some Northern towns. It will not return in force…

That’s it. All the rest is a PCR false positive pseudo-epidemic. The cure, of course, as it has been in the past when PCR has replaced the pandemic itself as the menace in the land, is to stop PCR mass testing.” (“The PCR False Positive Pseudo-Epidemic” Dr Mike Yeadon, Lockdown Skeptics)

Yeadon’s analysis is similar to that of Genevieve Briand, assistant program director of the Applied Economics master’s degree program at John Hopkins. Briand wanted to see the effect that Covid had on excess deaths using the CDC’s own data. What she found was extraordinary, but consistent with Yeadon’s analysis. Here’s a brief summary of what she discovered:

“From mid-March to mid-September, U.S. total deaths have reached 1.7 million, of which 200,000, or 12% of total deaths, are COVID-19-related….

After retrieving data on the CDC website, Briand compiled a graph representing percentages of total deaths per age category from early February to early September, which includes the period from before COVID-19 was detected in the U.S. to after infection rates soared.

Surprisingly, the deaths of older people stayed the same before and after COVID-19. Since COVID-19 mainly affects the elderly, experts expected an increase in the percentage of deaths in older age groups. However, this increase is not seen from the CDC data. In fact, the percentages of deaths among all age groups remain relatively the same.

“The reason we have a higher number of reported COVID-19 deaths among older individuals than younger individuals is simply because every day in the U.S. older individuals die in higher numbers than younger individuals,” Briand said.

Briand also noted that 50,000 to 70,000 deaths are seen both before and after COVID-19, indicating that this number of deaths was normal long before COVID-19 emerged. Therefore, according to Briand, not only has COVID-19 had no effect on the percentage of deaths of older people, but it has also not increased the total number of deaths.

These data analyses suggest that in contrast to most people’s assumptions, the number of deaths by COVID-19 is not alarming. In fact, it has relatively no effect on deaths in the United States.

…”All of this points to no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths. Total death numbers are not above normal death numbers. We found no evidence to the contrary,” Briand concluded.” (“A closer look at U.S. deaths due to COVID-19”, JB Wells News)

The research of both Yeadon and Brand help to show how fake testing results, manipulated mortality data, relentless deception and disorienting state mandates (masks, lockdown etc) have fueled public hysteria creating the compliant population our rulers seek. After 8 months of this psychic-drubbing, the elites are now ready to deliver the coup de grâce, a vaccine containing potentially-toxic substance that will change the course of history.

Do I exaggerate?

Perhaps, but there are plenty of reasons to be concerned. Keep in mind, the most enthusiastic proponents of these experimental vaccines (media) are the same people:

1. Who lied about Trump-Russia for 3 years nonstop.
2. Who aggressively censored any information on Hunter Biden’s massive influence peddling operation.
3. Who covered up any information related to last month’s stolen presidential election.

The media are the enemy of the people, and they have proved that many times over. But, how can we apply this rule to the roll-out of the new vaccines?

We can assume that the interests of the wealthy powerbrokers– who own the media and set their agenda– will take precedence over the people who are in line to be vaccinated. That’s all. Their interests will take priority over your safety. That’s the way it works.

So, one should be extremely wary of vaccines that are rushed to market in record time, just as they should be suspicious of the motives of people who see “skepticism” or “hesitancy” as a “national security threat”. These people are not to be trusted. It’s that simple.

Why, for example, would the British government enlist “military intelligence to seek out and stamp out what The Times calls “anti-vaccine militants” and related “propaganda content” in cyberspace”??

Why would the social media giants remove articles that are critical of the vaccines?

Why are all the media and public health experts pushing for mass vaccination?

Why?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it?

It’s because the wealthy powerbrokers that are orchestrating this operation, want to see We the People vaccinated en masse. That’s what this is all about.

So, the question is: Why? Why is it so important to them? Is it because they want to save lives?

No, that’s not it at all. There’s obviously something else going on that we don’t know about. Maybe it’s climate change, maybe it’s over-population, or maybe it’s a collective determination to transform society into a technocratic dystopia. (“The Great Reset”). We don’t really know, but one thing is certain, all this ballyhoo about Covid is a red herring. It simply diverts attention from the real agenda, which is why we should be cautious about the vaccines. Mass vaccination could, in fact, be the ultimate objective. Check out Yeadon’s take on vaccines in a recent edition of LifeSite News:

“There is absolutely no need for vaccines to extinguish the pandemic…. You do not vaccinate people who aren’t at risk from a disease. You also don’t set about planning to vaccinate millions of fit and healthy people with a vaccine that hasn’t been extensively tested on human subjects……

Since it is demonstrable that “around 30% of the population had prior immunity,” and if one includes some young children who are “resistant,” 40%, and while considering that the infection rate is “somewhere [in] the mid-20s to low-30s per cent,” this means that around 65 to 72% of the population currently has immunity to COVID-19.

And considering the reality of herd immunity, when susceptibility to a virus falls this low, at around 28 to 35%, “that population can no longer support an expanding outbreak of disease,” and thus the virus “wanes and disappears... The pandemic is effectively over and can easily be handled by a properly functioning NHS (National Health Service). Accordingly, the country should immediately be permitted to get back to normal life.” (“Former Pfizer VP: ‘No need for vaccines,’ ‘the pandemic is effectively over”, LifeSite News)

Is he right? Are the vaccines an unnecessary risk that serve no earthly purpose? Here’s more from Yeadon on the potential downside effects of the new mRNA-based vaccines which are “all the rage”.

“The formation of so-called “non-neutralizing antibodies” can lead to an exaggerated immune reaction, especially when the test person is confronted with the real, “wild” virus after vaccination.”

– The vaccinations are expected to produce antibodies against spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2. However, spike proteins also contain syncytin-homologous proteins, which are essential for the formation of the placenta in mammals such as humans. It must be ruled out that a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 could trigger an immune reaction against syncytin-1, as it may otherwise result in infertility of indefinite duration in vaccinated women.

– The mRNA vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech contain polyethylene glycol (PEG). 70% of people develop antibodies against this substance. This means that many people can develop allergic, potentially fatal reactions to the vaccination.

– The much too short duration of the study does not allow a realistic estimation of the late effects. As in the narcolepsy cases after the swine flu vaccination, millions of healthy people would be exposed to an unacceptable risk if an emergency approval were to be granted and the possibility of observing the late effects of the vaccination were to follow.” (“That Was Quick”, Lockdown Skeptics)

Let’s summarize:

1. The new messenger RNA vaccines could make recipients more susceptible to serious illness or death.
2. Spike proteins can “trigger an immune reaction” that will “result in infertility.” (Once again, Population control)
3. The new vaccines contain polyethylene glycol (PEG) which can be “potentially fatal.”
4. The trials were not long enough to determine whether the vaccines are safe or not. FDA approval does not mean “safe”. Quite the contrary. The FDA is “captured” in the same way the FAA is captured. (Think: Boeing 737 Max)

The new regime of Covid-19 vaccines is both unnecessary and risky. Readers should ignore the hype and do their own research. Take responsibility for your own health and welfare. Do not expect the media or public health officials to tell the truth. They won’t. They want to use you as a guinea pig in their deranged lab experiment. Do not cooperate, do not comply, do not acquiesce, do not give in.

No surrender.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Mike Whitney is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Shutterstock

This article first published by Global Research in November 2009 recalls the circumstances of the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, which turned out to be a WHO fraud on behalf of Big Pharma.

Sister Teresa Forcades i Vila has taken off her theologian’s hat and gone back to her doctor in public health role to address the influenza A (H1N1) pandemic in a new video  that calls for a calm approach to the disease and emphasizes the right of citizens to refuse to be vaccinated against it.

Sister  Teresa also has a new blog space on catalunyareligió.cat in which she is sharing her writings on the flu and other issues

Editor’s Note. Since publication by GR in March 2020. The video of the interview has been taken down.

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To View her 2009 Interview in which she reveals the Fraud of Big Pharma and the lies and fabrications of WHO Director General Margaret Chan

Transcript below

BELL TOLLING for the Swine Flu (ENGLISH subtitled) from ALISH on Vimeo.

 

What’s a nun doing talking on the Internet about the dangers of the Influenza A vaccine?

Our rule prescribes five hours of prayer and six of work. Ora et labora.

…

I devote part of the working hours to medical research. I’m a doctor of medicine and in 2006 I published the study Crimes and Abuses of the Pharmaceutical Industry.

When did you decide you had to speak out on influenza A?

In May this year I was asked to give a speech on the papillomavirus vaccine and I was very struck by the lack of scientific basis for the official recommendations. After a few days I spoke on TV-3 about this vaccine and since then I have been receiving requests to comment on the influenza A vaccine.

Doesn’t the World Health Organization deserve to be trusted?

I don’t understand the motives that have led WHO to act in the absurd way it is acting.

Absurd?

Yes. Last May, WHO changed the official definition of a pandemic — it changed from a logical definition (a pandemic is an infection of global proportions and with a high mortality) to an illogical definition (a pandemic is an infection of global proportions).

What are the consequences of this change?

Under the new definition of “pandemic”, the annual [seasonal] flu more than meets the requirements to be one. Are we going to declare a world health alert every fall? Besides absurdity from the scientific standpoint, this has serious financial and policy consequences.

You don’t trust the vaccine. Why?

Unlike the annual seasonal flu vaccine, the influenza vaccine contains such powerful adjuvant substances that they can get the normal immune response to multiply by a factor of 10. In addition, two doses are recommended, to be received after the injection for seasonal influenza, which also contains adjuvants, although less potent. Never before have these substances been injected three times in a row in the general population, starting with children, the chronically ill and pregnant women.

What effects can result?

The artificial stimulation of the immune system can cause autoimmune diseases.

The same prospect of two of the influenza vaccines that have already been approved in Europe (Pandemrix and Focetra) indicates that it is expected that for every million people vaccinated, 99 will experience an autoimmune disease known as Guillain-Barré progressive paralysis.

If that happens, the drug companies would receive demands…

But in the U.S. a decree has already been approved exempting politicians and drug companies from liability.

Are you suggesting that the drug companies have acted irresponsibly?

What they have done is work for their interests.

Can someone be obliged to get vaccinated?

In 2007, WHO adopted a regulation establishing an exception. In all cases except one, the WHO makes recommendations, and only in one case may it give orders that override the sovereignty of member countries.

In the case of a pandemic.

Exactly. In 2007, WHO adopted a regulation that in case of a pandemic, WHO can legally bind member countries to vaccinate all or part of their population. The governments of these countries would be obliged then to impose fines or other penalties for individuals who refuse to be vaccinated.

Do you believe in world conspiracies?

I think there are interests at stake are not the good of the population. How can we justify the money invested in the purchase of vaccines if influenza A is milder than the annual seasonal flu? Spending so much money on vaccines and other preventive measures without sufficient scientific basis is an outrage and we should ask for accountability.

What do your fellow nuns say about the video and your statements?

An almost 90 year old sister raised the objection that the subject of influenza A is very serious and that I couldn’t speak out against the vaccine without having well-founded arguments.

And?

After reading my report, she approached me after vespers and simply said to me: “Understood.”

Aren’t you afraid?

Sometimes.

Do you pray a lot?

As much as I can.

by Gaspar Hernández (translation by Rebel Girl). El Periódico de Catalunya. October 7, 2009

First published in May 2009

Author’s Note:

Twelve Years ago April 2009: the H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic.

Media disinformation, political lies, fabrications, 4.9 billion vaccine doses were contemplated by the WHO…

The data was manipulated. 

Western governments and the WHO were complicit in a multibillion dollar fraud. 

“On the basis of … expert assessments of the evidence, the scientific criteria for an influenza pandemic have been met. I have therefore decided to raise the level of influenza pandemic alert from Phase 5 to Phase 6. The world is now at the start of the 2009 influenza pandemic. … Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organization (WHO), Press Briefing  11 June 2009)

 ”As many as 2 billion people could become infected over the next two years — nearly one-third of the world population.” (World Health Organization as reported by the Western media, July 2009)

“Swine flu could strike up to 40 percent of Americans over the next two years and as many as several hundred thousand could die if a vaccine campaign and other measures aren’t successful.” (Official Statement of the US Administration, Associated Press, 24 July 2009).

“The U.S. expects to have 160 million doses of swine flu vaccine available sometime in October”, (Associated Press, 23 July 2009)

“Vaccine makers could produce 4.9 billion pandemic flu shots per year in the best-case scenario”,Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organization (WHO), quoted by Reuters, 21 July 2009)

Wealthier countries such as the U.S. and Britain will pay just under $10 per dose [of the H1N1 flu vaccine]. … Developing countries will pay a lower price.” [circa $400 billion for Big Pharma] (Business Week, July 2009)

The WHO casually acknowledged it made a mistake.

There was no pandemic affecting 2 billion people…  

Millions of doses of swine flu vaccine had been ordered by national governments from Big Pharma. Most of them were destroyed: a bonanza for Big Pharma.

This was my first report on the subject published in May 2009. Subsequent reports confirmed unequivocally that this was a fraud.  

The Western media which provided daily coverage of  the pandemic, remained mum on the issue of fraud and disinformation.  

Michel Chossudovsky, April 16, 2016, April 25, 2021

*       *       *

What is the flu? Influenza (the flu) is a serious contagious respiratory illness caused by influenza viruses. Millions of people in the United States get the flu each year. Most people are sick for about a week. Some people (especially young children, pregnant women, older people, and people with chronic health problems) can get very sick and may die from the flu. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

The World Health Organization (WHO) raised its pandemic alert level to Phase 5 on a 6 point scale.

The WHO’s Phase 5 alert means

“there is sustained human-to-human spread in at least two countries and that global outbreak of the disease is imminent… It also signals an increased effort to produce a vaccine… Human cases have been confirmed in Mexico, the United States, Canada, Britain, Israel, New Zealand and Spain.” (emphasis added)

According to reports, the WHO took this decision after  “a 23-month-old [child] died [from the swine flu] in Texas after travelling there from Mexico for medical treatment.”

The swine flu was, according to reports, confirmed in 11 states in the US. Health officials at the WHO in Geneva and Washington are quoted as saying that the “spread of the virus is unlikely to stop”.

The media has gone into full gear with little analysis and review of the evidence, focussing their attention on the more than 2400 cases of non-specific influenza in Mexico.

“the global outbreak is imminent…

all countries should activate preparedness plans”,

The worst health crisis facing the world in 90 years…”

On the day following the WHO’s Phase 5 Pandemic Alert, a scientist attached to the European Union’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention hinted, without evidence, that the epidemic could potentially affect 40% to 50% of the EU population “in a mild way”. (See europeanvoice.com, April 30, 2009).

Professor Neil Ferguson, a member of the World Health Organisation task force on swine flu, stated that

“40 per cent of people in the UK could be infected within the next six months if the country was hit by a pandemic.”

“We don’t really know what size epidemic we will get over the next couple of months… It is almost certain that, even if it does fade away in the next few weeks – which it might – we will get a seasonal epidemic in the autumn.”

“We might expect up to 30 to 40 per cent of the population to become ill in the next six months if this truly turns into a pandemic.  “We could get substantial numbers infected in the next few weeks but, if I was to be a betting man, I would say it would be slightly longer because we are moving into summer.” Prof. Ferguson said the 152 deaths in Mexico probably made up a relatively small proportion of the total number infected, which might run into tens or hundreds of thousands.” (Daily Express, May 1, 2009)

The media reports are twisted. Realities are turned up side down. Policy statements are not backed by medical and scientific evidence. Professor Ferguson’s statements are unfounded. He has not bothered to check the number of  “laboratory confirmed” swine flu cases in Mexico.

30 to 40 % of the British population?

Up to 50 % of the population of the European Union’s 500 million population?

On what basis are these statements being made?

On April 27, 2009 there was, according to reports, only one case of  swine flu in the entire European Union:

“Europe’s first confirmed case of swine flu has been diagnosed in Spain. The country’s health ministry confirmed the news on Monday morning, after tests on a man who had recently returned from a trip to Mexico.” (BBC, April 27, 2009)

Germany

 

Weakening the Social Protest Movement

Statements of this nature on the “inevitable spread” of the disease, create, quite deliberately, an atmosphere of fear, insecurity and panic. They also serve to distract people’s attention from a devastating global economic crisis which is leading the World into mass poverty and unemployment, not to mention the war in the Middle East and the broader issue of US-NATO war crimes.

The Real Global Crisis is marked by poverty, economic collapse, ethnic strife, death and destruction, the derogation of civil rights and  the demise of State social programs. The EU announcement of the swine flu pandemic inevitably serves to weaken the social protest movement which has spread across Europe.

In Mexico, the swine flu emergency measures which have “closed down” entire urban areas, are widely perceived as a pretext of the Felipe Calderon government to curb mounting social dissent against one of the most corrupt administrations in Mexican history.

In Mexico, the May 1st Parade, which was directed against the Calderon government, was cancelled.

The WHO’s Balance Sheet

The WHO advisory points to 148 laboratory confirmed cases Worldwide of the swine influenza, including 8 deaths, barely a pandemia:

“29 April 2009 — The situation continues to evolve rapidly. As of 18:00 GMT, 29 April 2009, nine countries have officially reported 148 cases of swine influenza A/H1N1 infection. The United States Government has reported 91 laboratory confirmed human cases, with one death. Mexico has reported 26 confirmed human cases of infection including seven deaths.

The following countries have reported laboratory confirmed cases with no deaths – Austria (1), Canada (13), Germany (3), Israel (2), New Zealand (3), Spain (4) and the United Kingdom (5).

Further information on the situation will be available on the WHO website on a regular basis.” (WHO.org)

In a 29 April statement, the WHO Director-General, Dr Margaret Chan confirmed that

“Based on assessment of all available information, and following several expert consultations, I have decided to raise the current level of influenza pandemic alert from phase 4 to phase 5.

Influenza pandemics must be taken seriously precisely because of their capacity to spread rapidly to every country in the world.

… WHO will be tracking the pandemic at the epidemiological, clinical, and virological levels.

… I have reached out to donor countries, to UNITAID, to the GAVI Alliance, the World Bank and others to mobilize resources.

Bonanza for the Pharmaceutical Conglomerates

Big Pharma has been identified by the WHO as the solution to the crisis:

“I [the WHO Director-General] have reached out to companies manufacturing antiviral drugs to assess capacity and all options for ramping up production. I have also reached out to influenza vaccine manufacturers that can contribute to the production of a pandemic vaccine.”

The swine flu pandemic constitutes a corporate bonanza for a handful of BioTech conglomerates. The European Union has already given the green light to work with Big Pharma to develop a vaccine against the swine flu.

Examination of the Evidence

The data used to justify a Worldwide level 5 alert is extremely scanty. The WHO not only asserts that a “global outbreak of the disease is imminent”, it also distorts Mexico’s mortality data pertaining to the swine flu pandemic. According to the WHO Director General Dr. Margaret Chan in her official April 29 statement: “So far, 176 people have been killed in Mexico”. From what? Where does she get these numbers? 159 died from influenza out of which only seven deaths corroborated by lab analysis, resulted from the H1N1 swine flu strain, according to the Mexican Ministry of Health. (For details, see below).

As documented by William Engdahl, the symptoms of swine flu are non specific, similar to those of flu in general. (See William Engdahl, Global Research, April 29, 2009).

Scientific opinion contradicts the WHO official statement:

“Scientists studying the virus are coming to the consensus that this hybrid strain of influenza — at least in its current form — isn’t shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics.

In fact, the current outbreak of the H1N1 virus, which emerged in San Diego and southern Mexico late last month, may not even do as much damage as the run-of-the-mill flu outbreaks that occur each winter without much fanfare.

Mounting preliminary evidence from genetics labs, epidemiology models and simple mathematics suggests that the worst-case scenarios are likely to be avoided in the current outbreak.” (Los Angeles Times, April 30, 2009)

Mexico

Influenza is a common disease. There are millions of cases of influenza across America, on an annual basis.

“According to the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the flu kills up to 2,500 Canadians and about 36,000 Americans annually. Worldwide, the number of deaths attributed to the flu each year is between 250,000 and 500,000″ (Thomas Walkom, The Toronto Star, May 1, 2009)

Most of the reported influenza cases in Mexico do not exhibit the A/H1N1 strain.

From the press reports, most of the Mexican cases of swine flu were “suspected”: they have not been confirmed by an advanced lab examination. The Mexican Minister of Health, José Ángel Córdova confirmed that there were

“2498 serious cases of atypical pneumonia associated with a flu condition” …[which] could be related to the A/H1N1 virus”.

Out of those 2498 cases of influenza, 159 died, of influenza or related ailments, but only seven of these deaths were related to the swine flu, according to the official statement of the Minister of Health.

The figures above are consistent with the overall pattern of influenza observed in Mexico in previous years. “In a normal year, between 6,500 and 7,500 Mexicans die from pneumonia-like diseases” (Ibid)

159 reported deaths  “have been blamed on the outbreak” but the lab reports suggest that the swine flu was the cause of death only in seven out of 159 cases.

For instance, in the Veracruz town of La Gloria where there was an outbreak of acute respiratory infections, out of 450 cases, 35 were tested for the swine flu virus and only one came back positive. (That is a ratio of 1/450)

The press reports are invariably biased. They will quote 152 or 159 deaths from the H1N1 virus, when in fact only seven of these deaths are associated with the A/H1N1 swine flue strain, according to the Minister of Health. The other deaths may be associated with cases of ordinary flu and/or related conditions, but it seems that the reports rarely make the distinction. Moreover, no details were given as to the lab results pertaining to these seven cases.

In the US only one lab in the entire country has the ability to confirm the identify of the virus, namely the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention located in Atlanta.  How many labs are there in Mexico which have the ability to confirm the identify of the virus?

According to reports, samples are being sent to Mexico’s National Institute of Epidemiological Diagnosis and Reference, which then forwards them to government labs in the US and Canada. What this suggests is that there is no lab based analysis which documents the relatively large number of suspected cases. According to the Minister’s statements, the laboratory analysis pertaining to the 159 deaths is being conducted in Mexican labs with the support of the Atlanta based CDCP and that the results are forthcoming.

The US

In the US there have been 109 reported cases of the virus (April 30, 2009), of which only five were hospitalized. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control confirmed that a 23 month child in Texas had died from the swine flu virus, following hospitalisation and clinical examination.

---

 

U.S. Human Cases of Swine Flu Infection
(As of April 30, 2009, 10:30 AM ET)

States

# of laboratory confirmed cases

Arizona 1 

California 14 

Indiana 1 

Kansas 2 

Massachusetts 2 

Michigan 1 

Nevada 1 

New York 50 

Ohio 1  

South Carolina 10 

Texas 26

Death 1

TOTAL COUNTS

109 cases 1 death

International Human Cases of Swine Flu Infection
See: World Health Organization

---

Media Disinformation

News reports point to “hundreds of New York schoolchildren reported to have fallen sick with “suspected swine flu“. There was, however, no evidence corroborated by lab examinations of the incidence of the swine flu H1N1 strain. In all likelihood, the children were suffering from the flu, which is part of a common occurrence during the month of April.  “All the cases were mild, no child was hospitalized, no child was seriously ill,” Dr. Frieden said. Health officials reached their preliminary conclusion after conducting viral tests on nose or throat swabs from the eight students, which allowed them to eliminate other strains of flu.”

Tests were conducted on school children in Queen’s, but the tests were inconclusive: among theses “hundreds of school children”, there were no reports of laboratory analysis leading to a positive identification of the influenza virus. In fact the reports are contradictory: according to the reports, the Atlanta based CDCP is the “only lab in the country that can positively confirm the new swine flu strain — which has been identified as H1N1.”  (NYT, April 25, 2009)

Influenza is a common disease. Unless there is a thorough lab examination, the identity if the virus cannot be established.

It is revealing that the Atlanta based CDCP is playing a key role in identifying the virus on behalf of several Latin American countries, including Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Costa Rica. On April 30th, the US government established a CDCP lab in Mexico. In other words, a US government agency is monopolising the conduct of laboratory testing, the data and analysis.

***

Michel Chossudovsky was granted a Project Censored (State University of Sonoma) for his writings on the H1N1` pandemic.

For long version of original Kevin Barry article, click this or this.

For over a century, various entities that are involved in the propaganda machinery that has been tasked by the powers-that-be to advance American patriotism and corporate profiteering have covered-up the truth about what actually started the epidemic of  what became known as the “Spanish Flu”, successfully obscuring what was actually a shameful experiment perpetrated by the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research – the uber-wealthy entity that started the American Medical Association and the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University

For over a century, Americans have been led to believe that what was the true epicenter of the pandemic – US Army military bases – was actually the result of a Rockefeller Instutute vaccine experiment gone awry. The culprit vaccine, nicely documented by author Kevin Barry was perpetrated upon hapless military recruits at a variety of bases in the US. Spain had nothing to do with the epidemic, except for actually allowing its journalists to write about it.

The experimental vaccine was devised when the only vaccine that had ever shown any promise in preventing disease was the smallpox vaccine (which, when evaluated in retrospect, didn’t actually deserve credit for the disappearance of smallpox, since only a small minority of world citizens every actually received the vaccine.)

The crude experimental vaccine was intended to theoretically prevent bacterial (not viral) meningitis in soldiers, which had been a problem in past wars. Barry nicely documents the story that has been left out of the history books, ignored by the Mainstream Media, deleted from the Pentagon archives, and misrepresented by the pharmaceutical and medical industries, the NIH, the CDC, the NIAID and every corporation that seeks to profit from vaccinating as many infants, children and adults that they can. And that includes, of course, the widely discredited Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that has spent hundreds of billions of dollars funding, founding and subsidizing corporations and other entities that promote universal vaccinations for whatever is proclaimed Big Pharma to be “vaccine-preventable disorders”)

A previous 4261 word Duty to Warn column can be accessed at various websites, including here.

Below are excerpts from the article that was written by author Kevin Barry, whose website is called First Freedoms.

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By Kevin Barry

“During the war years 1918-19, the US Army ballooned to 6,000,000 men, with 2,000,000 men being sent overseas.  The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research took advantage of this new pool of human guinea pigs to conduct vaccine experiments.”

“During WW1, the Rockefeller Institute also sent its experimental anti-meningococcal serum to England, France, Belgium, Italy and other countries, helping spread the epidemic worldwide.”

“The Rockefeller Institute and its experimental bacterial meningococcal vaccine, contrary to the accepted mythology may have killed 50-100 million people in 1918-1919.”

“The crude anti-bacterial vaccine used in the Fort Riley experiment on soldiers was made in horses.”

“According to a 2008 National Institute of Health paper, bacterial pneumonia was the killer in a minimum of 92.7% of the 1918-19 Pandemic autopsies reviewed.”

“Clean water, sanitation, flushing toilets, refrigerated foods and healthy diets have done and still do far more to protect humanity from infectious diseases than any vaccine program.”

“In 1918, the vaccine industry experimented on soldiers…with disastrous results—but in 2018, the vaccine industry experiments on infants every day. The vaccine schedule has never been tested as it is given.  The results of the experiment are in: 1 in 7 of America’s fully vaccinated children is in some form of special education and over 50% have some form of chronic illness.” The “Spanish Flu” killed an estimated 50-100 million people during a pandemic 1918-19.”

What if the story we have been told about this pandemic isn’t true? What if, instead, the killer infection was neither the flu nor Spanish in origin?

Newly analyzed documents reveal that the “Spanish Flu” may have been a military vaccine experiment gone awry.

Summary

The reason modern technology has not been able to pinpoint the killer influenza strain from this pandemic is because influenza was not the killer.

More soldiers died during WWI from disease than from bullets.

The pandemic was not flu. An estimated 95% (or higher) of the deaths were caused by bacterial pneumonia, not an influenza virus.

The pandemic was not Spanish. The first cases of bacterial pneumonia in 1918 trace back to military bases, the first one in Fort Riley, Kansas.

From January 21 – June 4, 1918, an experimental bacterial meningitis vaccine cultured in horses by the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York was injected into soldiers at Fort Riley.

During the remainder of 1918 as those soldiers – often living and traveling under poor sanitary conditions – were sent to Europe to fight, they spread bacteria at every stop between Kansas and the frontline trenches in France.

One study describes soldiers “with active infections (who) were aerosolizing the bacteria that colonized their noses and throats, while others—often, in the same “breathing spaces”—were profoundly susceptible to invasion of and rapid spread through their lungs by their own or others’ colonizing bacteria.” (1)

The “Spanish Flu” attacked healthy people in their prime.  Bacterial pneumonia attacks people in their prime. Flu attacks the young, old and immunocompromised.

When WW1 ended on November 11, 1918, soldiers returned to their home countries and colonial outposts, spreading the killer bacterial pneumonia worldwide.

During WW1, the Rockefeller Institute also sent its experimental anti-meningococcal serum to England, France, Belgium, Italy and other countries, helping spread the epidemic worldwide.

During the pandemic of 1918-19, the so-called “Spanish Flu” killed 50-100 million people, including many soldiers.

Many people do not realize that disease killed far more soldiers on all sides than machine guns or mustard gas or anything else typically associated with WWI.

I have a personal connection to the Spanish Flu.  Among those killed by disease in 1918-19 are members of both of my parents’ families.

On my father’s side, his grandmother Sadie Hoyt died from pneumonia in 1918. Sadie was a Chief Yeoman in the Navy.  Her death left my grandmother Rosemary and her sister Anita to be raised by their aunt. Sadie’s sister Marian also joined the Navy.  She died from “the influenza” in 1919.

On my mother’s side, two of her father’s sisters died in childhood. All of the family members who died lived in New York City.

I suspect many American families, and many families worldwide, were impacted in similar ways by the mysterious Spanish Flu.

In 1918, “influenza” or flu was a catchall term for disease of unknown origin.  It didn’t carry the specific meaning it does today.

It meant some mystery disease which dropped out of the sky.  In fact, influenza is from the Medieval Latin “influential” in an astrological sense, meaning a visitation under the influence of the stars.

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Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Dr Gary G. Kohls lives in the USA and writes a weekly column, entitled Duty to Warn, for the Duluth Reader, Duluth, Minnesota’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns deal with the dangers of American Friendly Fascism, corporatism, Oligarchy, militarism, racism, malnutrition, and Big Pharma’s over-drugging and over-vaccinating agendas as well as other movements that threaten the environment, democracy, civility, health and the sustainability and livability of the planet and the future of the children. Dr. Kohls is a frequent contributor to Global Research 

Many of Dr Kohls’ columns have been archived at a number of websites, including:

http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2; 

http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls;

http://freepress.org/geographic-scope/national;

https://www.lewrockwell.com/author/gary-g-kohls/?ptype=article; and

https://www.transcend.org/tms/author/?a=Gary%20G.%20Kohls,%20MD

First published on June 27, 2019

***

In a recent post, I mentioned the Congressional debate over authorizing and funding the use of “low-yield” or usable nukes, which has many worried that the threshold for the utilization of nuclear weapons would be significantly lowered. On June 11th, the Pentagon released its new policy doctrine on war fighting. As Antiwar.com noted, the U.S. has had a difficult time achieving anything resembling military victory in its numerous wars after 9/11 against much less technologically advanced adversaries, so now it appears that the Joint Chiefs of Staff are considering the use of nuclear weapons.

Experts and observers are worried that this is another attempt to get the idea of using nuclear weapons accepted in conflicts where nuclear weapons have not been used first by the opponent – indeed the opponent may not even possess them. According to The Guardian the doctrine was inspired by the theories of Cold War ideologist Herman Kahn, who is believed to have been the inspiration for the iconic Dr. Strangelove character:

The document, entitled Nuclear Operations, was published on 11 June 2019, and was the first such doctrine paper for 14 years. Arms control experts say it marks a shift in US military thinking towards the idea of fighting and winning a nuclear war – which they believe is a highly dangerous mindset.

“Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability,” the joint chiefs’ document says. “Specifically, the use of a nuclear weapon will fundamentally change the scope of a battle and create conditions that affect how commanders will prevail in conflict.”

At the start of a chapter on nuclear planning and targeting, the document quotes a cold war theorist, Herman Kahn, as saying: “My guess is that nuclear weapons will be used sometime in the next hundred years, but that their use is much more likely to be small and limited than widespread and unconstrained.”

Within a week, the document was removed from the Pentagon’s website, but not before it was downloaded and copied by Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), which has made the document available on its website (linked to above under “Nuclear Operations.”)

As Common Dreams added in its reporting on the Pentagon document, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute just released a report pointing out the dangers of the new arms race – estimated at a cost of trillions of dollars – between the world’s nuclear superpowers:

FAS’s publication of the Pentagon document comes just days after the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released a report (pdf) on the state of military armaments and weaponry across the world. SIPRI found that “despite an overall decrease in the number of nuclear warheads in 2018, all nuclear weapon-possessing states continue to modernize their nuclear arsenals,” making nuclear conflict more likely than the year before.

Earlier this week, a joint poll by YouGov and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists revealed that 1 in 3 Americans would support a preemptive nuclear strike on North Korea if the U.S. discovered that the country had developed a nuclear missile capable of reaching the continental U.S. One could view this as positive that 2/3’s of Americans would not support such an atrocity, but the fact that 1 out of every 3 of my fellow Americans – 1 out of 3 of my neighbors, fellow bus passengers or co-workers – would support it is chilling, especially when the polling found that a significant number would support such a strike even if it killed up to a million North Korean civilians. In reality, it would likely kill many more outside of North Korea if you factor in the effects of nuclear winter, which doesn’t require a lot of nukes to trigger.

The significance of this is brought home to me all the more since I’m at the point in my book where I’m researching the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in depth. During that time, average Americans had more of a consciousness of the dangers of nuclear weapons. The dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan was within most adults’ living memory and the fact that an arsenal of much more powerful atomic weapons was in the possession of the two superpower rivals was known and discussed in the news and stories about its dangers were regularly seen in popular culture (the novel and film On The Beach and episodes of The Twilight Zone, for example).

But we don’t seem to have that consciousness – and the fear and disgust that should go along with it – anymore. This, despite the fact that those dangers have not gone away. Both the U.S. and Russia still have over 1,700 nuclear weapons combined on hair trigger alert. With so much antipathy, rancor and distrust having been recklessly stoked by the political class and much of the media toward Russia over relatively minor (and/or false) issues in the big picture – yes, they are minor in the big picture of a nuclear holocaust – don’t give a lot of reason for optimism if a radar error, renegade launch or some escalation spins out of control.

We survived the Cuban Missile Crisis because Kennedy and Khrushchev both had the courage and were allowed the political maneuvering (whatever previous mistakes they both made that led to the confrontation) to hold back their respective hardliners who encouraged escalation. Eyewitness accounts also reveal that both Kennedy and Khrushchev felt visceral fear in the face of what they might unleash. But a remarkably large part of the reason we survived also had to do with dumb luck as historians (and two of the foremost experts on the Cuban Missile Crisis) James Blight and Janet Lang make clear in their 2018 book, Dark Beyond Darkness: The Cuban Missile Crisis as History, Warning and Catalyst.

Blight and Lang have calculated that if the crisis were run 100 times with the same conditions, 95 times it would end in nuclear war.

With the U.S. now having unilaterally abrogated 2 of the 3 nuclear arms control treaties governing the U.S. and Russia’s arsenals and chest-thumping its own nuclear posture, it is demanding that Russia destroy its 9M729 missile, which U.S./NATO claims is in violation of the INF Treaty. Needless to say, Russia is not going to do any such thing – especially after Washington has already withdrawn from said treaty and has placed Aegis nuclear installations in Eastern Europe that can be easily modified as offensive nuclear weapons. Russia is warning of the dangers of another potential crisis reminiscent of the standoff near the shores of Cuba in 1962 if the U.S. doesn’t dump the hubris that has consumed its political class since the 1990’s and has led to this moment.

That hubris is reflected in our actions against Iran, North Korea, and Russia – tearing up critical agreements, issuing dictums, offering nothing in return, and not getting a constructive resolution. Of course, a resolution wouldn’t be desired by the military-industrial-complex or the irrational ideologues who have influence in Washington. There do appear to be people willing to beg trouble on a nuclear war and simply don’t care about the consequences. People addicted to the greed and power associated with the pursuit of such things are like all addicts in that they don’t care about anything accept feeding their addiction. I can’t think of a better explanation for the pathology of these people.

I encourage everyone to read here what Cuban leader Fidel Castro was thinking during the Missile Crisis in 1962, a perspective that isn’t often given much attention – a dangerous omission. It might provide a window into what the leaders of Iran, North Korea and even Russia might be thinking after enduring constant threats and provocations by the most powerful country in the world that’s armed with a large nuclear arsenal.

The potential consequences of Washington’s inflammatory actions against other nations and its inability to engage in cognitive empathy are not benign.

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Natylie Baldwin is the author of The View from Moscow: Understanding Russia and U.S.-Russia Relations, forthcoming in Autumn of 2019.  She is also co-author of Ukraine: Zbig’s Grand Chessboard & How the West Was Checkmated, available from Tayen Lane Publishing. The book can be purchased in paperback here or electronically here.  Publisher’s page here.

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

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While Japan last month marked the 10th anniversary of the devastating 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami with solemn ceremonies, the government has also been stressing the successes of its recovery efforts in the country’s northeast.

In truth, however, the country is still coping with the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, which has already cost Japan trillions of yen and whose exclusion zone will require up to 40 more years to fully rehabilitate.

And with contaminated water continuing to build up at the ruined Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga says that the government must finally begin dumping it into the Pacific Ocean.

With nuclear waste and fuel rods still contaminating the area, over one million tons of radioactive waste water continue to seep from the facility, according to The Japan Times, forcing authorities into what Suga describes as the “unavoidable” position of having to dump the water.

Officials claim that the water would be purified to the maximum extent possible, but environmentalist groups like Greenpeace warn that the water contains hazardous material that could damage human DNA and the health of marine life.

#Fukushima water release could change human DNA, Greenpeace warns: a "major contributor to collective human radiation dose and has the potential to damage human DNA." https://t.co/S0864I4Vns

— Jasper Teulings (@Patagorda) October 27, 2020

Fishers also fear that consumers will refuse to buy fish caught in contaminated waters, worsening their plight amid a restriction of imports from Fukushima prefecture imposed by 15 countries and regions.

Regardless, authorities argue they must deal with the cards that have been dealt.

“What to do with the [treated] water is a task that the government can no longer put off without setting a policy,” Japanese trade minister Hiroshi Kajiyama said on Wednesday.

Suga is expected to formally decide on the course of action by next Tuesday. If he proceeds, authorities will dilute tritium to 2.5 percent of the maximum concentration allowed by the country before it is dumped.

But while Japanese officials say that the water will be safe, it remains an open question whether people will trust their word.

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Former Pfizer Vice President and Chief Science Officer Dr. Mike Yeadon today related to plans to expand Green Passport implementation with a public plea in which he told America’s Frontline Doctors: “This is Israel now, and the U.K. in just a few weeks.”

His message continues:

Those who think vaccine passports are good or at least ok, I’m addressing you.

If you were a vulnerable person and have been vaccinated, you’re protected. You don’t need to know others’ immune status. Note, even if they’ve been vaccinated, that doesn’t guarantee they can’t carry a single virus particle and donate it to you. So it doesn’t help you or make your safer to know everyone else has been vaccinated.

If you’ve declined vaccination, for example, because you’re not at risk from this virus, noting younger people are at MORE risk from influenza than from COVID-19, you also don’t need to know anyone else’s immune status.

Vaccination protects those who need it. Vaccine passports protect nobody.

But vaxpass is useful to our overlords. It’ll be the worlds first common format database, operable anywhere from Bolton to Bogota, containing your unique digital ID and an editable health status flag (initially about vaccination status).

Who controls that database and any algorithm governing what it permits and denies has absolutely totalitarian control over every aspect of your life.

Imagine a future in which a valid Vaxpass is required to enter a sport ground or museum. Invalid Vaxpass, no entry.

Now imagine the rules are hardened up (they will be). Now you can’t enter large shopping malls or hotels without a valid pass.

Further? Sure, why not. The algorithm is tweaked and now you cannot enter large supermarkets or any public transport.

A tyrannical step might be a Visa/MasterCard tweak that requires a valid Vaxpass BEFORE a terminal will open up for a purchase transaction.

Now you can’t even buy a bottle of water. Or fuel. Or anything.

Ping! Your Vaxpass orders you to report for your top up vaccine. If you don’t, your pass expires. Do you think you’ve got a choice?

Ping! You’re reminded to bring your grandson in, too, as his mother hasn’t. If you don’t, your pass becomes invalid, as does the baby’s mother’s pass. Still think you’ve got a choice?

The fact that I can easily come up with examples must tell you at least that the potential for utterly totalitarian control of the entire population forever lies like a worm at the centre of this beyond-Orwellian future.

It’s not speculative. We’re told this system is about to happen. You’ll be coerced to be vaccinated or you’ll rapidly be marginalised.

Once you’re vaccinated, the limited freedoms they allow you can be withdrawn at any moment.

Don’t kid yourselves that “no one would be this evil”. I refer you to numerous examples during the last century. There are plenty of evil people and the only difference here is SCALE and the irreversible nature of it.

Now you’ve seen what is so easy to do to take complete control of a whole society, you MUST object and find ways to prevent a vaccine passport system from coming into being. By any and all means necessary.

Finally, to those who say this is all a series of unfortunate and incompetent errors, please watch this documentary. Long before you get to the end, you’ll realise, as I did with mounting horror, that this is absolutely not incompetence. It’s rehearsed and exercises like this have been war gamed for years if not decades. It’ll perhaps change your thoughts as to the origins of this mess and crimes.

But please, one thing: do not say you weren’t warned.

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For Palestinians, it takes a lot of courage to say, “Let’s talk about what Zionism means to Palestinians… We are not allowed to question the concept of Jewish self-determination in historic Palestine,” as Dima Khalidi, founder and director of Palestine Legal expresses below in an excerpt from a webinar hosted by the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, USACBI, titled: “Weaponizing anti-Semitism: IHRA and Ending the Palestine Exception.” And once we say it, we are not allowed to boost it.

In the two-minute video clip excerpt I boosted, Khalidi is discussing how the IHRA definition entrenches Zionist ideology and answering a question about how that suppresses Palestinian speech (Palestine Legal protects the civil and constitutional rights of people in the U.S. who speak out for Palestinian freedom):

To shield Israel from criticism, to win the rhetorical battle as you say, Professor Falk, and yes, it is intended to legitimize Israel as a Jewish state. It is intended to make it beyond question that Israel is a Jewish state. We are not allowed to question the ideology of Zionism. That’s what the IHRA does. We are not allowed to question the concept of Jewish self-determination in Palestine, in historic Palestine, and this ideology is so entrenched already in the political discourse among the political elite, and I think one of the most important things that IHRA should do is give us the opportunity to say, wait a second, you know, this is really about Zionism. Let’s talk about Zionism. Let’s talk about the foundation of the state of Israel. Let’s talk about what that means for Palestinians and who Palestinians are and what we are. We are working towards our own freedom and self-determination and liberation. so I think that is really one of the main things behind this definition.”

I posted this clip on a Facebook Page I administer called One km to Palestine and boosted it to reach a wider audience with this important message. However, although the ad was reviewed and accepted by Facebook as a post addressing a “political or social issue” for which the Page has been cleared, I received a notification that the ad was shown to “fewer people than would typically see it,” because it contains “a low quality attribute.” That “attribute” turned out to be suppression by “people feedback”, as I learned from the following:

Misleading experiences: When people give us feedback about their experience with advertisers, such as being dissatisfied with advertising and websites that misrepresent products, expected shipping times, customer support experiences and more. Learn more, and, as a reminder, if we detect that an ad violates our Misleading Claims policy, we’ll reject it.

Similarly, a boost of a post about the Deir Yassin massacre is not doing well, and I expect to hear about its “low quality attribute” soon after it runs its course, just as a boost of a post about the 3D reconstruction of the Mughrabi Quarter in Jerusalem and digital mapping of the city with Maryvelma Smith O’Neil was also stopped in its tracks: “LEARN ABOUT THE NEIGHBORHOOD IN THE OLD CITY OF #JERUSALEM THAT ISRAEL DESTROYED HOURS AFTER THE JUNE 1967 WAR.”

The website I linked to in the Deir Yassin post was the Palestinian Alternative Path Conference (Masar Badil):

“Together against #Zionism and in support of the Palestinian people’s resistance until liberation and return.” — مؤتمر المَسار الفلسطيني البَديل

As a friend commented, this Facebook practice is “not surprising especially after #Facebook and Instagram appointed Emi Palmor to its Independent Oversight Board. Palmor is a former general director of the #Israeli Ministry of Justice’s Cyber Unit that was responsible for the removal of thousands of pieces of #Palestinian content from Facebook.”

It may not be surprising, but it is certainly galling.

I am a denizen of Facebook in that I spend an inordinate amount of time there. In addition to posting on my profile, I am a member of many Groups and I administer the Page referenced above, One km to Palestine, that has quite a few followers — certainly more than I have here on Medium.

Thoreau once wrote about how the creaking of the crickets reminded him that he was “a denizen of the earth.” He described it as “a sound from within, not without.”

What reminds me I am a denizen of Facebook is the sound from within, the creaking sound of Facebook notifications, which are, to keep borrowing from Thoreau, “at the very foundation of all sound” in Facebook.

Like many on Facebook, I don’t really understand the ebb and flow of that creaking. The whole concept of “algorithms” is a mystery to me. Zionist trolls used to be on the rampage, but Facebook has effectively closed the doors on them. One can “hide all” from troll or “block” troll and that’s the end of it.

When Facebook asked me mindlessly whether I was happy with the suppressed Dima Khalidi post boost I describe above, I “creaked” this response into the void:

“This Page is not a business and the ad was approved as addressing a political/social issue. I don’t understand why it is described as ‘using language that entices people inauthentically to engage with the ad.’ I looked at the examples in the Ads Help Center and they all apply to products not issues. This ad does not seek to deceive the reader in any way; it is an excerpt from a webinar by the Director of Palestine Legal that seeks to educate about an issue central to the Page description.”

The problem is that in the corner of Facebook that has to do with advocacy for Palestinian liberation or preaching the gospel of Zionism, the structure is such that each side is largely preaching to the choir. Furthermore, mechanisms on Facebook meant to chill the Palestinian voice are firmly in place. Boosts offer the chance of stepping outside a little bit.

When I say, “preaching the gospel of Zionism,” I am not using language as metaphor. Zionism as it has manifested in Palestine has now become akin to a religion, and speaking against it is considered by Facebook and much of the world as blasphemy, not to mention antisemitic.

The way, I see it, though, and as I recently posted in One km to Palestine, There is no excuse for Zionism:

One km to Palestine: Zero tolerance for Zionism

NO EXCUSE FOR ZIONISM

Our motto is: Zero Tolerance for Zionism!

The way I see it: Simply put, Zionism in Palestine=Jewish nationalism, Jewish self-determination, Jewish supremacy in Palestine.

If you are an anti Zionist and for one democratic state in Palestine, it follows you are against all that comes after the equal sign, including a bi-national state.

And YES we can, and we will #return.

What would happen now if I try to boost the above post in Facebook? Or a post of this very article for that matter? According to Facebook:

“Pages, ad accounts, and domains that consistently promote low quality ads are more likely to be considered low quality in our system, and as a result, all ads from those entities may be shown to fewer people than would typically see them for their budget.”

As it happens, Mondowiess has also published a story along similar lines:

Facebook censored Palestinians in Gaza from sharing our story with the world

BDS activists in Gaza tried to promote a video on Facebook that compares Israel and apartheid South Africa. The platform rejected the promotion and shadow banned the account. Unfortunately this is not an isolated case.

… Facebook and its platforms rejected a sponsored promotion request for the aforementioned materials after taking no less than 24 hours to consider the request, accepting it for a few hours then shutting it down entirely.

And that’s how the system works when Zionism is at issue. We need “people feedback” on all the ads Facebook publishes glorifying the apartheid Zionist regime in control of Palestine from the river to the sea.

Facebook has grudgingly accepted anti-Zionist speech as long as it portrayed Palestinians as victims, because such language is no threat, as the Zionist so-called narrative excusing the savagery is everywhere.

But with any hint of resistance language that empowers Palestinians and frames the “conflict” as a struggle for liberation and Palestinian self-determination in their own homeland, Facebook comes down on us like a sledgehammer.

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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.

She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Dima Khalidi, founder and director of Palestine Legal (still from “Weaponizing anti-Semitism: IHRA and Ending the Palestine Exception.”

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).

First published on April 6, 2021

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First published on December 14, 2020

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Gates and his minions insist the billionaire never said we’d need digital vaccine passports. But in a June 2020 TED Talk, Gates said exactly that. Someone edited out the statement, but CHD tracked down the original.

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Some chiseler altered Bill Gates’ June 2020 TED Talk to edit out his revealing prediction that we will all soon need digital vaccine passports (slide 1). But after considerable effort, we tracked down the original video (slide 2).

Gates’ minions on cable and network news, his public broadcasting, social media and fact-checker toadies all now insist that Gates never said such things. They say he never intended to track and trace us with subdermal chips or injected tattoos.

They dismiss such talk as “conspiracy theories.”

Well, here it is from the horse’s mouth.

In 2019, according to a not-yet-purged Scientific American article, Gates commissioned the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build an injectable quantum dot dye system to tattoo stored medical info beneath children’s skin. The tattoo was designed to be readable by an iPhone app.

Screenshot: Scientific America, December 18,2019

Gates’ company, Microsoft, has patented a sinister technology that uses implanted chips with sensors that will monitor body and brain activity. It promises to reward compliant humans with crypto currency payments when they perform assigned activities.

Gates also invested approximately $20 million in MicroCHIPS, a company that makes chip-based devices, including birth-control implant chips with wireless on/off switches for remote-controlled drug-delivery by medical authorities.

In July 2019, months before the COVID pandemic, Gates bought 3.7M shares of Serco, a military contractor with U.S. and UK government contracts to track and trace pandemic infections and vaccine compliance.

To facilitate our transition to his surveillance society, Gates invested $1 billion in EarthNow, which promises to blanket the globe in 5G video surveillance satellites. EarthNow will launch 500 satellites allowing governments and large enterprises to live-stream monitor almost every “corner” of the Earth, providing instantaneous video feedback with one-second delay.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also acquired 5.3 million shares of Crown Castle, which owns 5G spy antennas including more than 40,000 cell towers and 65,000 small cells.

Please make your own copy of these clips — as Gates’ power to disappear inconvenient facts is expanding every digital day.

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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s reputation as a resolute defender of the environment stems from a litany of successful legal actions. Mr. Kennedy was named one of Time magazine’s “Heroes for the Planet” for his success helping Riverkeeper lead the fight to restore the Hudson River.

First published on March 10, 2021

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For decades, according to a Guardian article, “consumers worldwide have named the $347 billion pharmaceutical behemoth Johnson and Johnson (J&J) as one of its most trusted brands.” From its humble beginnings in the 1880s, making cotton gauze dressings and eventually band aids, baby powder and shampoo, J&J  has expanded into one of the most powerful multinational pharmaceutical and medical device companies in the world.  In 1959, it entered the world of Big Pharma as a leading player after succeeding in getting Tylenol approved as an over-the-counter drug.  Shortly thereafter J&J commenced with a flurry of acquisitions to increase its product line, which included Neutrogena, Cordis, DePuy, Janssen Pharmaceutica and Centocor.  Today, in most American home medicine cabinets one will find a popular J&J product:  Listerine, Tylenol and Benadryl, Neutrogena skin cream, Rogaine, Neosporin antibacterial ointment, or Destin to treat diaper rashes.

Now, people are eager for J&J’s “one shot and you’re done” Covid-19 vaccine despite health officials’ fears it may be less effective than Moderna’s and Pfizer’s mRNA competitors. Nevertheless, vaccination centers and pharmacies are racing to get their hands on the new adenovirus-based vaccine.  And as we will further note below, this is from a company that has absolutely no past experience in vaccine development and manufacturing.

However, we need to seriously challenge J&J’s reputation. A 2019 report by the British intelligence firm Alva has noted that J&J’s reputation has sunk dramatically during the past years, from 9^th place among 58 major pharmaceutical firms to 57^th. Certainly, this is not a company with a clean ethical record.

A review of J&J’s rap sheet over the past three decades presents a dire and contrary image that should lead us to question the company’s claims about its Covid-19 vaccine given the lucrative market the pandemic has created for the most aggressive medical corporations.

Similar to its equally over-sized competitors Glaxo, Merck and Pfizer, J&J too has had to pay out billions of dollars over the decades for civil settlements and criminal activities.  As the pharmaceutical giant receives applause across the mainstream media for the release and FDA emergency approval for its Covid-19 vaccine, Brazil’s Public Prosecution Service started an investigation into J&J’s antitrust activities under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) for “possible improper payments in its medical device industry.” This was part of an FBI bribery scheme investigation that included Seimens, General Electric and Philips acting as a larger cartel to illegally payoff government officials in return for securing contracts with Brail’s national health programs.  The charges also include price gouging, inflating prices up to 800 percent the market price to cover bribes.

This is not the first time J&J has violated FCPA laws. In 2011, J&J was charged by the Department of Justice with conspiracy for paying off Greek doctors to advance its product sales.  The SEC also charged civil complaints. The company had to pay out a $70 million penalty for buying off officials in Greece, Poland and Romania. In 2010, an executive for J&J’s subsidiary DePuy was sentenced to a year in prison for corrupt payments to physicians within the Greek national healthcare system.

As one of the world’s leading medical device companies, J&J has had its share of recalls for faulty products including contact lenses and hip implants  In 2013, it paid nearly $2.5 billion to compensate 8,000 recipients for its flawed hip implants  Again in 2016, another $1 billion was awarded to plaintiffs injured from this device.

One particular dubious activity the company became involved with in 2008 was to launch a “phantom recall.”  When its Motrin IB caplets were discovered to not properly dissolve, it hired outside contractors to buy up store supplies in order to avoid making public declaration. No one would have known of this activity and it would have gotten past the eyes of FDA inspectors had the deception not been exposed during a Congressional investigation.

Other major J&J lawsuits and recalls for faulty products include:

• 1995 – $7.5 million fine for destroying documents to cover up an investigation into wrongful marketing of its Retin-A acne cream to remove wrinkles
• 1996 – An undisclosed settlement on false claims over condom protection claims to protect against HIV and other STDs.
• 2000 – J&J’s subsidiary LifeScan was found guilty for selling defective blood glucose monitors and failed to inform the FDA.  All total, $105 million was paid out.
• 2001 – Paid out $860 million in a class action lawsuit for misleading customers about prematurely discarding its 1-Day Acuvue soft contact lens.  J&J recommended they should only be worn once although it was discovered the lenses were no different than the regular Acuvue lens that would last for two weeks
• 2010 – $81 million settlement for misbranding its anti-epileptic drug Topamax to treat psychiatric disorders and hiring outside physicians to join its sales force to promote the drug for unapproved conditions.  The following year, J&J paid $85 million for similar charges against its heart drug Natrecor
• 2011 – Several of its baby products were discovered to contain carcinogenic ingredients
• 2013 – The US Justice Department charged the company $2.2 billion in criminal fines for marking its autism and anti-psychotic drug Risperdal for unapproved uses. Forty-five states had filed civil lawsuits against J&J in the scandal

Risperdal is  horrendous drug that contributes to rapid weight gain and a condition known as gynescomastia, irregular enlarged breasts in men. Semmelweis reports that J&J’s subsidiary Janssen also had an aggressive campaign to market its use in children with behavioral challenges.  Other serious adverse effects from Risperdal reported by the FDA include diabetes mellitus, hyperprolactinaemia, somnolence, depression, anxiety, psychotic behavior, suicide and death.

The company’s legal problems over Risperdal do not appear to have ended. In October 2019, a Philadelphia jury awarded a man $8 billion in punitive damages for failing to warn that the drug could cause young men to grow breasts. Other recent suits include litigation over its blood thinner Xarelto risks of internal bleeding, and a $775 million settlement to 25,000 plaintiffs.

• 2016 –  Two women were awarded $127 million in damages for the talc in its J&J Baby Powder causing ovarian cancer.  Later, over 1,000 similar cases came forward. During the trial it was discovered that J&J suspected a link between talcum and ovarian cancer back in the 1970s.  A Missouri verdict fined the company over $4 billion but it was later reduced to $2.1 billion.  A New York Times investigation into internal J&J memos uncovered evidence that the talcum powder may have contained asbestos. These cases continue. In July 2019, J&J made efforts to dismiss 14,000 lawsuits over the talcum-cancer risk.

Image source.

More recently, J&J has been in the spotlight for its role in contributing to the deadly opioid crisis.  The company holds the patent for a unique strain of opium poppy commonly named Norman. It is the leading provider of the opioid for Purdue Pharma’s painkiller OxyContin. An Oklahoma court ordered a $465 million fine. This opened the door for other states to follow suit.  To fully realize how insane the system is, the half a billion dollar civil fine was good news on Wall Street, which anticipated the verdict would be in the billions of dollars. Consequently, J&J’s stock rose 2 percent after the judge’s ruling.  And despite J&J being Purdue’s major supplier, and a major contributor in the US’s opioid epidemic, the latter was forced to file for bankruptcy due to mounting lawsuits for overdose deaths.

Finally, we might ask why a 140 year old company, with no history whatsoever in vaccine development, has now become among the heroes in the immunological war against Covid-19?  J&J is not a household name in the vaccine industry. It is utterly absent, let alone ranks among the world’s 20 major vaccine makers. Among the 53 vaccines for other infections approved and licensed by the CDC, not one is manufactured by the nation’s leader in mouthwash and baby powder.  It is therefore no surprise that the company had to partner with Merck to manufacture its Covid vaccine to meet demand. It has no history or expertise in this medical field.

However, the Covid pandemic is a cash cow for the drug industry’s taking. Bernstein market analyst Ronny Gal predicts Covid-19 vaccine sales will reach $40 billion this year.  A more realistic figure is likely higher since together Moderna and Pfizer project their revenues at $32 billion. Then there are the other major vaccines by AstraZeneca, J&J and Novavax entering the competition.  According to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s vaccine research tracker, over 200 vaccines against Covid-19 are in development worldwide. It is an enormous pumpkin pie and everyone in the medical universe wants a slice from it.  So why shouldn’t we expect a non-vaccine player such as J&J to be eager to leap into the frenzy?

Finally, there is a disturbing question that we have no certain answer for.  How is it that a drug and household health product company, with no prior history in vaccine development, can develop and rush to market its first vaccine against a viral strain that was only identified 14 months ago?  Developing a vaccine requires many years and necessitates the establishment of an R&D infrastructure vastly different than conventional drug development.  The other major companies developing Covid-19 vaccines have been in the business for decades. But not J&J. There is something more to this story that demands investigation.  And if the company’s long rap sheet offers any warning, it is that we must be wary of any claims J&J publicly states about the efficacy and safety of its products.  Especially when the pandemic promise to increase the profits of numerous shareholders.

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This article was originally published on The Gary Null Show.

Featured image is from Flickr

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For at least the last twenty years, the United States have constantly been waging wars in the Middle East. On October 7, 2001, George W. Bush began bombing Afghanistan under the pretext of hunting down Osama bin Laden, allegedly the perpetrator of the 911 terrorist attacks.

In 2003, Bush continued his war adventure in Iraq, to ​​the point that the state budget was in deficit and the United States was now heavily indebted. The sum of all outstanding debts by the United States federal government as of March 1, 2021, exceeds $ 28 trillion.

After carrying out an election campaign filled with antiwar narratives and denouncing Republican war policies, Barack Obama then rose to power. Although Obama withdrew most of his troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, the air war continued to expand, mainly using drones. Obama also added special operations forces around the world. In 2016, US specialty operators could be found in 138 countries, increasing by 130% over the Bush era. Obama also supported Saudi Arabia’s attack on Yemen. The Saudi Foreign Minister, Adel al-Jubeir, once said,

“We have British officials and American officials and officials from other countries in our command-and-control centre. They know what the target list is and they have a sense of what it is that we are doing and what we are not doing” (The Guardian,15/1/2916).

Obama’s support to overthrow the Assad government in Syria since 2011 resulted in a prolonged war to this day. The Syrian war represents the greatest hypocrisy of United States foreign policy. The jargon of democracy and anti-terrorism that the US always utters becomes nonsense when at the same time the US is actually providing weapons to Al Qaeda in Syria. As Rep. Tulsi Gabbard said,

“[the U.S. government] quietly supporting allies, partners, individuals and groups who are working directly with al-Qaida, ISIS, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and other terrorist groups by providing them with money, weapons and intelligence support in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government” (NPR, 10/12/2016).

In his eccentric cowboy style, the next president, Donald Trump, promised to “Make America Great Again.” But he ended up increasing his troops in the Middle East, reaching nearly 90,000 soldiers, and continuing his involvement in the Syrian war.

During Trump’s time, the Palestinian Authority has cut off communications with the United States government after Trump unilaterally declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel and moved the US embassy to the holy city. Trump also arbitrarily killed generals Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi Al Muhandis, two figures who played a significant role in the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

This assassination raises the question, doesn’t the US claim to be fighting ISIS, but why were two heroes who went straight to the field fighting their lives against ISIS to be killed? Trump’s action ended in an embarrassing incident, where the most extensive US military base in Iraq, Ain Al Assad, was bombarded by Iran precisely as a form of retaliation.

What about Joe Biden? In his 100 days of his reign, there are several steps by Biden that seem to promise hope. For example, the US has removed at least three Patriot anti-missile batteries from the Gulf region, including one from Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, and reducing its military facilities from the Middle East.

Biden has also stated that he is blocking arms exports to Saudi Arabia (which are used to attack Yemen) and offering Iran to resume nuclear talks. Biden has stated that 2500 military personnel will be withdrawn from Afghanistan from May 1, 2021. However, Biden’s plan needs to be scrutinized.

As Branco Marcetic wrote in Jacobin (16/4/2021),

“If an invading force pulled troops out of the United States but continued bombing and sending covert forces into it, ask yourself if you’d think the war had finished.” The New York Times reported that the Biden administration will likely reinstate the US army with spies, special forces, and private military contractors and the US will continue to use drones to eradicate “suspected terrorists”.

In Syria, the United States Army remains. Middle East Monitor wrote (20/3/2021) that about 90 percent of Syrian oil is under the control of US troops. The total losses suffered by Syria due to losing access to its oil resources reached 92 billion dollars.

In Palestine, the US foreign policy doctrine, namely to equate its national interest with Israel’s national interest, has remained in Biden’s hands. Biden has said he will not change Trump’s decision towards Jerusalem, even though this is a violation of international law, including UN Security Council Resolution 476/1980, which prohibits Israel from taking any legislative and administrative actions that change the character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem and this is also a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The position of the United States is undoubtedly very crucial in the political constellation in the Middle East. As Hinnebusch has written in his book, “International Politics of Middle East”, the Middle East countries are generally periphery countries, dependent on core countries (namely Western countries that dominate the Middle East, especially the United States). For this reason, Biden’s foreign policy in the Middle East will significantly affect security in the region.

As President of the United States, Biden should prioritize the interests of his people.

A poll conducted by the Charles Koch Institute in June 2020 showed that 70% of Americans want their soldiers to be sent home from the Middle East.

They want the “endless wars” launched by the United States government in the Middle East to be stopped immediately and that domestic interests be put forward. However, as long as Biden continues the policy of his predecessors, namely continuing various wars in the Middle East, both on the grounds of “fighting terrorism” and protecting Israel, it is unlikely that much change will occur in the region shortly.

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Dr. Dina Y. Sulaeman is Director of Indonesia Center for Middle East Studies.

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***

On April 20 a large explosion took place in central Israel, at the facility of Tomer, a government-owned defense contractor.

As per the contractor, there were neither damages nor casualties, and the massive mushroom cloud that was seen was a “controlled test.”

The company, Tomer, produces a variety of propulsion systems for various missiles used by Israel.

Videos of the blast were widely shared on social media, prompting speculation that it was the result of a malfunction or sabotage, especially in light of ongoing tension between Israel and Iran. And Tehran’s state media had reports focused on the facility, which led to speculation that it was some form retaliatory attack after the blast in the Natanz facility.

The contractor still maintained that it was all planned, but there were none of the customary warnings in advance of the explosion and no confirmation by either the Ministry of Defense or the company after the fact.

Hours later, after midnight on April 22^nd, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) warplanes launched missiles from the skies above the occupied Golan Heights. The targets were located near Damascus and remain unknown.

Syrian Air Defense systems intercepted most of the missiles, and then locked on to the IAF jets and attempted to down them.

This led to a Red Alert in southern Israel and to Syrian Air Defense hitting an open area near the nuclear center in Dimona.

Nearly an hour later, IAF fighter jets circled back and struck a Syrian Air Defense battery, destroying it. Four Syrian Arab Army soldiers were injured in the blast but no deaths were reported.

Separately, in northeastern Syria, a first-of-its-kind incident occurred – a US supply convoy was attacked en route to the Omar oil field on April 21.

The culprit is unknown. Some accused ISIS cells in southeastern Deir Ezzor of carrying out the attack. In neighboring Iraq, however, pro-Iranian forces have been carrying out similar attacks on US supply convoys for more than a year now.

Also, in northeast Syria, in the town of al-Qamishli, heavy clashes broke out between the pro-government Syrian National Defense Forces (NDF) and Asayish, the security wing of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

Asayish claimed that NDF forces attacked one of its checkpoints near the Tayy district in the city.

In the course of the clashes, which lasted until the morning of April 21, Asayish units captured a number of NDF posts. Four fighters of the pro-government force were injured.

The fighting subsided when Russian Military Police intervened. Currently, the two groups are negotiating to restore stability in the town.

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***

It’s the wrong time for US youths with higher education aspirations in mind. On increasing numbers of US campuses, it’s hazardous to their health and well-being to enroll at colleges and universities whose policies may irreversibly harm them near-or-longer-term.

After Rutgers in March required students to be jabbed with experimental, high-risk, unapproved, rushed to market, DNA altering Pfizer or Moderna mRNA technology that risks irreversible harm to health, a dozen or more US schools of higher education went the same way.

By mandating the above, they’re putting their student body in harm’s way — irresponsibly and recklessly endangering them.

Affected students should transfer to a school that respects their health, and legal right to decide all things related to their well-being.

Schools mandating covid jabs are in breach of federal law and the Nuremberg Code.

The former requires that individuals may “accept or refuse administration of” experimental, unapproved drugs.

According to the Nuremberg Code, voluntary consent is required on all things related to health.

By ignoring the above, US schools that require students to be involuntarily jabbed for covid are in flagrant breach of these standards and contemptuous of the health and rights of their student body.

They include Rutgers, Northeastern, Fort Lewis College, St, Edward’s, Roger Williams, Nova Southeastern, Brown, Cornell, Yale, Columbia, and Columbia College, Chicago.

My esteemed alma mater Harvard University strongly urges students to be jabbed for covid, short of mandating it so far, saying:

“We continue to strongly recommend that you seek vaccination opportunities from all sources available to you to prevent further delay,” falsely adding the following:

“The safety of (covid jabs) is a top government priority (sic).”

Fact: Polar opposite is true, what Harvard suppressed.

Fact: Government mandates and recommendations since last year are intended to inflict harm on individuals following them, not the other way around.

Fact: They’re all about instituting draconian control.

Fact: Experimental covid mRNA technology and vaccines are bioweapons to depopulate the US and other nations of individuals dark forces want eliminated.

Covid jabs “will help protect you from getting” the viral infection (sic).

Fact: Jabs increase the likelihood of being infected. Harvard falsely claimed otherwise.

“(Y)ou may experience some side effects after receiving the injection (sic).

“This is a normal sign that your body is building protection (sic).”

Fact: Toxic jabs risk serious harm to health and no protection.

Fact: The more jabs, the greater the risk.

Fact: Jabs risk contraction of any number of serious diseases short-term or later on.

Fact: For the elderly with weak immune systems, allergic individuals and others, they can kill.

“The cost of the vaccine is covered by the government.”

Fact: To encourage mass-jabbing, US dark forces are incentivizing uninformed Americans to self-inflict harm.

Covid jabs “are one of many important tools to help us stop this pandemic (sic).”

“Once you’ve received your jab, continue to wear your mask and socially distance in public places (sic).

Fact: No pandemic exists, just normal annual outbreaks of seasonal flu-renamed covid to scare us into self-inflicting harm by following draconian mandates and recommendations.

Fact: Masks don’t protect and risk serious harm to health when worn longterm.

Fact: Social distancing provides no protection. It undermines normal interactions — essential to every day life.

Fact: It’s unnecessary and destructive of interpersonal relations, while providing nothing beneficial.

Voice of America, part of the US worldwide propaganda system, falsely said the following:

“The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved use of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines (sic).”

False on two counts! These drugs are NOT vaccines.

They’re hazardous, experimental, unapproved DNA altering mRNA technology — given emergency use authorization when no emergency exists.

According to American College Health Association’s Covid Task Force co-chair Gerri Taylor:

“We would love for all our students to be vaccinated before they go home to either places in the US or places in other countries, because if they go there unvaccinated, they could actually carry the virus to their families and communities (sic).”

All of the above claims are part of the most widespread ever state-sponsored mass deception campaign to convince maximum numbers of unwitting people to follow a high-risk with no reward protocol.

Protecting and preserving health requires rejecting it.

Above all, it’s vital to health and well-being to refuse being jabbed with what’s unneeded and may cause irreversible harm if used as directed.

When I was on campus long ago — circa 1950s — nothing remotely like the above existed.

In college and graduate school, I recall no health-related mandates of any kind.

None should exist today beyond encouraging students not to self-inflict harm by following good health practices — not the other way around like what’s going on today.

A Final Comment

According to draconian Yale and Columbia diktats, students unwilling to be jabbed for covid will be barred from classrooms and prohibited from coming on campus — except for those with medical, religious or other exemptions.

Unacceptable policies instituted by the above colleges and universities  may likely be mandated at many others in the coming weeks and months.

Instead of protecting students, they’ll be harmed near-or-longer-term, proving what’s unthinkable.

In the US, higher education is becoming hazardous to students instead of protecting and preparing them for endeavors they seek to pursue.

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

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

“How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/how-wall-street-fleeces-america/

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/banker-occupation-waging-financial-war-on-humanity/

Featured image is from OffGuardian

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).

***

Despite hopes by some that with Joe Biden a new US foreign policy will follow – US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has reaffirmed Washington’s committment to seeking conflict in the South China Sea under the guise of “standing with Southeast Asian claimants.”

Secretary Blinken pledged to stand with Southeast Asian claimants in the face of PRC pressure,” it said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.

China claims almost all of the energy-rich South China Sea, which is also a major trade route. The Philippines, Brunei, Vietnam, Malaysia and Taiwan have overlapping claims.

The United States has accused China of taking advantage of the distraction of the coronavirus pandemic to advance its presence in the South China Sea.

The US announcement confirms that a confrontational posture toward China will continue regardless of who occupies the White House – as US tensions with China are rooted in unelected  Western special interests and their desire to remove China as a competitor and potential usurper in what US policy papers themselves call “US primacy in Asia.”

US Primacy in Asia

One such paper titled, “Revising US Grand Strategy Toward China,” published by the Council on Foreign Relations in 2015 not only spelled out the US desire to maintain that primacy in Asia vis-a-vis China, but also how it would use overlapping claims in the South China Sea as a pretext to justify a continued – or even expanded military presence in the region and as a common cause to pressure China’s neighbors into a united front against Beijing.

The paper would note specific US goals of militarizing Southeast Asia and integrating the region into a common US-led defense architecture against China.

It is a policy built upon the US “pivot to Asia” unveiled as early as 2011 and a policy that has been built upon in turn during the last four years under the Trump administration – demonstrating the continuity of agenda that permeates US foreign policy.

Turning Disputes into Conflict 

Maritime disputes are common throughout the world – even in the West.

Just at the end of last year, the Guardian in an article titled, “Four navy ships to help protect fishing waters in case of no-deal Brexit,” would report:

Four Royal Navy patrol ships will be ready from 1 January to help the UK protect its fishing waters in the event of a no-deal Brexit, in a deployment evoking memories of the “cod wars” in the 1970s.

The 80-metre-long armed vessels would have the power to halt, inspect and impound all EU fishing boats operating within the UK’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which can extend 200 miles from shore.

In terms of such disputes, the waters of the South China Sea are no exception.

Not only does China have overlapping claims with the nations mentioned in the Reuters article – each nation listed has overlapping claims with one another.

This results in sporadic disputes between all of these nations – occasionally resulting in the seizing of  vessels and the temporary detaining of boat crews.

However – these disputes are regularly settled through bilateral methods – including disputes between Southeast Asian nations and China itself.

A high-profile example of this unfolded in 2015 where a US-led legal case was brought to the Hague on behalf of the Philippines regarding Chinese claims over the South China Sea.

While the Hague ruled in the Philippines’ favor – Manila declined to use the ruling as leverage against Beijing or to seek Washington’s assistance – and instead pursued bilateral talks with Beijing directly on its own.

It is a case that demonstrates the desire by Washington to escalate what are ordinary maritime disputes, into a regional or even international crisis – not unlike the US’ strategy in the Middle East which it uses to justify its perpetual military occupation there.

More recently the issue of the South China Sea has come up at ASEAN Summits.

Al Jazeera in its article, “ASEAN summit: South China Sea, coronavirus pandemic cast a shadow,” would cite Malaysia’s take on the issue, noting:

“The South China Sea issue must be managed and resolved in a rational manner,” Malaysia’s Foreign Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told the meeting. “We must all refrain from undertaking activities that would complicate matters in the South China Sea. We have to look at all avenues, all approaches to ensure our region is not complicated further by other powers.”

While the US poses a champion for Southeast Asia – it is clear that its efforts are unwelcome and viewed instead as a source of instability – not a path toward resolution. It is almost certain that it is Washington the Malaysian foreign minister was referring to when he mentioned “other powers.”

Just as the US nominated itself as protector of European “energy security” in its bid to obstruct the Russian-German Nord Stream 2 pipeline – the US has inserted itself into relatively routine maritime disputes in the South China Sea – not to “stand with” the nations of the region, but to serve as an excuse to impose its “primacy” over them.

The nations of Southeast Asia count China among their largest trade partners, sources of tourism, and for several – a key military and infrastructure partner. The prospect of a regionally destabilizing conflict originating over long-standing disputes in the South China Sea benefits no one actually located in Asia – and only serves the interests of those beyond Asia seeking to divide and reassert their rule over it.

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Tony Cartalucci is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Featured image is from NEO

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).

***

Vaccine passports (or passes or certificates) are being rushed through around the world, including in places where most people have not even been able to get a vaccine yet. They are being touted as a way of jump-starting the global economy by providing a means for people to prove their vaccinated status, allowing them to travel, shop, go to the gym, attend sporting and cultural events and conduct other indoor activities. Countries like Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore have already introduced vaccine passports in the last couple of months.

Of course, the use of the word “passport” is deceptive. “Passport” implies a document endorsed by a state that establishes citizenship and guarantees diplomatic protection. A traditional passport does not require the bearer to participate in a vaccine program, although immunity certificates have existed for diseases such as Yellow Fever. Another difference is that a vaccine passport is likely to come in the form of a digital document. The potential scope of its application is also far broader than that of a normal passport. It could be required not only to establish identity and vaccine status at national borders but also to travel, access public buildings and basic services within one’s own country of residence.

In countries that already have an established national health service, such as the UK and Israel, the vaccine passport has been mandated at state level. In the US tech and health-care companies are firmly in the driving seat. At least 17 alternative programs are currently under development. As for the EU, it has proposed issuing “digital green certificates” that would allow EU residents to travel freely across the 27-nation bloc by the summer as long as they have been vaccinated, tested negative for COVID-19 or recovered from the disease. It’s worth noting that the EU has been studying the feasibility of creating a common EU vaccination card since early 2019.

International Initiatives

There are also initiatives taking place internationally such as the Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group, whose partners include WHO, UNICEF, ITU and the European Commission. The group “is focused on establishing key specifications, standards and a trust framework for a digital vaccination certificate to facilitate implementation of effective and interoperable digital solutions that support COVID-19 vaccine delivery and monitoring, with intended applicability to other vaccines.”

Another initiative is the CommonPass digital health app being developed by the Commons Project Foundation (CPJ), which was founded by the Rockefeller Foundation and is supported by the World Economic Forum. The CommonPass is both a framework and an app that “will allow individuals to access their lab results and vaccination records, and consent to have that information used to validate their COVID status without revealing any other underlying personal health information.”

Then there’s ID2020, a nongovernmental organization that advocates for digital IDs for the billion undocumented people worldwide and under-served groups like refugees. In 2019, ID2020 launched a new digital identity program in collaboration with the government of Bangladesh and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). It is now involved in the Good Health Pass Collaborative, “an open, inclusive, cross-sector initiative, bringing together leading companies and organizations from the technology, health, and travel sectors”.

Pause for Thought

Some of these initiatives are already being piloted by companies, including airlines, and local or regional authorities. All Nippons Airways has started a test of the CommonPass on its flights from Tokyo Haneda to New York. Last week New York unveiled its Excelsior pass, which is based on technology from IBM. Other states are likely to follow suit. France has also just completed a month-long trial of a health passport app for Air France passengers travelling to Martninique and Guadeloupe.

The speed at which these initiatives are being rushed out should give pause for thought. Just as with contact tracing apps, the rollout is haphazard and rife with conflicts of interest. The technology is unproven and the privacy issues are glaring. Below are seven reasons why I believe vaccine passports should worry us. Perhaps you can think of more.

1. We still don’t know how effective or safe the vaccines are. The ostensible goal behind the vaccine passport is to provide proof that a person has taken an officially approved vaccine and therefore poses less of a contagion risk. Yet we still don’t know just how effective or safe each vaccine is. Naturally, the efficacy levels of each vaccine vary. As WHO itself concedes, there is still uncertainty over whether inoculation actually prevents transmission of the virus.

We also have no idea how long the immunity — partial or otherwise — provided by each vaccine lasts. What’s more, some of the vaccines appear to have reduced efficacy against some variants, including the B.1.351 strain (originally identified in South Africa).

It’s not just the potential lack of efficacy that should have us worried. There are also big safety concerns. Numerous adverse reactions have already been reported around the world. In the case of the vaccines developed by AstraZenecaand Johnson & Johnson, concerns about blood clotting side effects have led some countries to restrict or even suspend their use.

In the US, the latest VAERs data released on April 12 showed over 46,000 reports of adverse events following COVID vaccines. Women have been disproportionately affected, accounting for 77% of cases. Many are experiencing abnormal menstruation, raising fears that the vaccines could even affect fertility.

2. Vaccine geopolitics. To all intents and purposes the West is already locked in a new cold war with China and Russia. Tensions are escalating on an almost daily basis. Against such a backdrop, it’s hardly beyond the realms of possibility that at some point down the line countries or companies in the West will refuse to recognise vaccines certificates that are based on Russian or Chinese vaccines, and vice versa. The justifications for doing so will grow as bad news continues to emerge about the efficacy and safety of vaccines.

Over the past weekend Western news sources reported that George Fu Gao, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Prevention and Control, had publicly acknowledged that Chinese-made vaccines currently offer low efficacy against the virus. “We will solve the issue that current vaccines do not have very high protection rates,” he said, adding that adjusting the dosage or sequential immunisation and mixing vaccines might boost efficacy.

Since then China has backtracked on the comments. But the episode nonetheless raises serious questions for those nations relying heavily on the Chinese jab, including many in Latin America. If Chinese vaccines are not as effective as originally thought, it’s perfectly feasible that some countries in the West will refuse to acknowledge vaccine passes sporting the name of a Chinese vaccine. As such, rather than freeing up global travel, vaccine passports could up erecting new barriers.

3. The potential for mission creep. To begin with, SMART Health Cards are likely to include a person’s complete name, gender, birth date, mobile phone number, and email address in addition to vaccination information. But although advertised as digital vaccination records, they are clearly intended to be used for much more. Public information on the protocol notes that SMART Health Cards are “building blocks that can be used across health care,” including managing a complete immunization record that goes far beyond COVID-19 vaccines, sharing data with public-health agencies, and communication with health-care providers.

The framework is unlikely to be limited to health-care information. The use of the term “digital wallet”, both by the Vaccine Collective Initiative and IBM, to refer to their different digital health passes suggests that economic activity could become an integral part of the frameworks’ functions. The developer of the Vaccine Collective Initiative’s SMART Health Cards framework at Microsoft Health, Josh C. Mandel, hinted in a recent YouTube presentation that SMART Health Cards could soon be used as IDs for commercial activity, such as renting a car.

That this is all happening as central banks around the world are busily laying the foundations for central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs as they’ve come to be known, raises the specter of digital vaccine passports being used as a vehicle for the creation of a purely digital currency system to replace physical coins and notes. That’s not to say this will happen but it is a possibility. If the vaccine passport does become a digital currency wallet and cash is eliminated, opting out will be much harder. And opting in will leave us subject to levels of surveillance and control that were heretofore unthinkable.

4. Creating a two-tier society/world. Since its very inception Covid-19 has been a pandemic of inequality. This is particularly true in Israel, which was already a two-tier society long before Covid came along. It recently became the first country to launch a nationwide vaccine passport scheme, the so-called Green Pass. But its intended target is Israelis, not Palestinians. According to The Guardian, just over 4% of the 5 million Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip have so far received vaccines. Active Covid cases are back near historic highs while in the rest of Israel they are at their lowest level since last June.

Vaccine passports could end up exacerbating social divisions wherever they are used. Those who have access to vaccines can return to some semblance of normal life while those who don’t find themselves left even further out in the cold. This will happen not just within countries but between countries. As the Israeli economy reopens, Palestinians face arguably even more restrictions on their movement and activities than before Covid. But it’s not just Palestinians who are finding themselves being treated as second class citizens; so too are Israelis who refuse to take the vaccine, on religious, ethical or health grounds. Without Green Passes, they are unable to enter certain places or participate in certain activities.

Over time, as life gets more difficult for these people, the pressure to get the jab will grow. At least that’s what vaccine passport proponents like Joan Costa-Font of the London School of Economics are hoping.

“Vaccine passports can be used as an incentive to change behavior. They not only provide some direct benefits, but they signal what society expects from individuals. They exemplify a social norm that individuals are expected to comply with.”

But coercing people to take the vaccine could have the opposite effect, warns an opinion piece in the BMJ:

All in all, there are reasons to conclude that vaccine passports for basic activities may actually undermine vaccine rollout by disincentivising the very populations who most need incentivising. Closer inspection of the Israeli “green pass” scheme serves to reinforce this message. The evidence for passes increasing vaccination uptake is weak, while suspicions of compulsion and reports of people barred from workplaces for not being vaccinated have “resulted in antagonism and increased distrust among individuals who were already concerned about infringement on citizens’ rights.”

5. Loss of bodily autonomy and integrity. Forcing an experimental vaccine upon someone who doesn’t want it clearly contravenes their right to bodily autonomy and integrity.  According to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, “everyone has the right to respect for his or her physical and mental integrity. In the fields of medicine and biology, the following must be respected in particular: the free and informed consent of the person concerned, according to the procedures laid down by law.”

If bodily autonomy and integrity are indeed fundamental human rights, then the issuance of COVID vaccine passports should hinge on the informed consent of the individual and not mandatory adoption, as has been proposed in France, or coercion (and yes, denying people access to basic services is a form of coercion). This is particularly true in the case of vaccines that are approved merely on an emergency use basis.

6. Most governments and tech giants have already shown they cannot be trusted with our most valuable data. Vaccine passports raise huge privacy concerns. Data-hungry companies like Microsoft, a member of the Vaccine Credential Initiative, will be given new opportunities to track our daily movements and activities and share that data with third parties. There are also major concerns about data security. If recent history has taught us anything, it is that no data — no matter how private or precious — is completely secure.

A vaccine certificate is likely to include our most precious data of all: our biometric data. And it is unlikely to be safe. As Peter Yapp, ex-deputy director of UK GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) recently warned, building yet another centralised database to store even more of our personal data would create even more opportunity for hackers and cyber criminal organizations to plunder our data:

“Centralised databases means you’re putting a lot of data in one place so it becomes an attractive target for hackers and the like so it’s like a honeypot – it attracts people in and they’re going to have a go because there is so much data… As a software engineer, I know all software has bugs. Bugs create security vulnerabilities, that’s why it’s a terrible idea to gather together so much data of such importance in one place. This is one more nail in the coffin in the idea of Covid certification.”

7. Whatever the politicians might say, a vaccine certificate will be permanent. When the vaccine certificate debate reached fever pitch in the UK last week the Conservative Party tried to assuage voter fears by insisting that the certificate would be temporary.

“It will be time limited and I think the duration of the scheme will be measured in months,” one unnamed insider said. “The party will not wear any longer.”

This is from the same government that publicly insisted for months that it was not even considering vaccine certificates while in private it was examining how they could be used. After going to all the trouble and expenditure to create a digital ID system whose applications and uses can be expanded at ease, there’s no way in the world that the UK government is going to just hand it all back a few months later. As history has taught us time and again, whenever governments reward themselves new temporary powers, they usually find it painfully hard to relinquish them. Such will no doubt be the case with the vaccine passport, pass, certificate or whatever they want to call it.

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“We’re here at this summit to discuss how each of us, each country, can set higher climate ambitions that will in turn, create good paying jobs, advance innovative technologies, and help vulnerable countries adapt to climate impacts. We have to move. We have to move quickly to meet these challenges.”

– U.S. President Joe Biden, opening of Virtual climate summit, April 22, 2021 [1]

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LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

On Thursday April 22, U.S. President Joe Biden hosted a virtual climate summit attended by 40 other world leaders. [2]

In his opening speech given from the East Room of the White House he earnestly indicated a pledge to rework the country into a new clean economy. He would be devoting efforts to electrifying the system, abandoning oil and gas wells and coal mines and giving workers jobs making electric vehicles, installing and maintaining hundreds of thousands of vehicle charging stations, and engineering and constructing green hydrogen and carbon capture plants. His goal was “to cut greenhouse gases in half, in half by the end of this decade.” [3]

Bold statements, at least judged in relation to his predecessors. [4] But will even that be enough? Reports in this regard are rather disturbing.

According to measurements from the National Snow and Ice Center, from 1978 to 2021, the amount of ice melting at the polar ice cap has melted at a rate of 2.6 per decade, or 39,700 square kilometers. Over the entire 43 year period, that equates to 1.67 million square kilometers – roughly, that’s a loss of sea ice equivalent to the size of the state of Alaska! [5]

In a Siberian-Arctic coast, in the region 150 kilometres north of the Laptev Sea, Russian and Swedish researchers from the ISSS-2000 expedition documented elevated levels of methane at sea level. Methane is a greenhouse gas 80 times greater than carbon dioxide, and there are immense beds of these in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.[6]

Meanwhile, according to a recent report by Ceballos, Ehrlich and Raven in Proceeding of National Academy Sciences, the sixth mass species extinction is accelerating. [7]

For all our annual commitments of fighting climate change, all signs seem to suggest that our species is verging even closer to our biological annihilation. After 50 years in the U.S. since Earth Day was entrenched as an annual ritual, how fundamentally will we have to change our approach in order not to fulfill Einstein’s definition of insanity? The Global Research News Hour hopes to find alternatives to the solutions on offer this past half century.

Our first guest, Cory Morningstar, addresses the question of the role played by the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, how it has increased its grip on those out to protect the Earth, and how the COVID-19 ‘pandemic’ has increased the trend toward environmental action as the Green Billionaires would like to see it.

Our second guest, Dr Andrew Glikson, introduces some of the developments in Climate Science leading us to a more daunting prospect toward climate hope.

Cory Morningstar is an independent investigative journalist, writer and environmental activist, focusing on global ecological collapse and political analysis of what she calls the non-profit industrial complex. She resides in Canada. Her writings can be found on Wrong Kind of Green, The Art of Annihilation, Political Context, Canadians for Action on Climate, Change and Countercurrents.

Dr Andrew Glikson studies Earth and Paleo-climate science, works at Australia National University (ANU) School of Anthropology and Archaeology, ANU Planetary Science Institute, and ANU Climate Change Institute, and is Honorary Associate Professor, Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence, University of Queensland. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 313)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

Other stations airing the show:

CIXX 106.9 FM, broadcasting from Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. It airs Sundays at 6am.

WZBC 90.3 FM in Newton Massachusetts is Boston College Radio and broadcasts to the greater Boston area. The Global Research News Hour airs during Truth and Justice Radio which starts Sunday at 6am.

Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in  Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 7pm.

CJMP 90.1 FM, Powell River Community Radio, airs the Global Research News Hour every Saturday at 8am. 

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Notes:

1. https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/joe-biden-kamala-harris-earth-day-speech-transcript-leaders-summit-on-climate-session-1
2. https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/22/politics/white-house-climate-summit/index.html
3. https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/joe-biden-kamala-harris-earth-day-speech-transcript-leaders-summit-on-climate-session-1
4. https://truthout.org/articles/biden-opens-climate-summit-with-pledge-to-cut-us-emissions-in-half-by-2030/
5. http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
6. https://www.pnas.org/content/118/10/e2019672118
7. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/24/13596

The Prospect of a Major False-Flag Operation in the Middle-East Grows by the Day: Remembering June 8th, 1967 the Day Israel Attacked the USS Liberty

By Timothy Alexander Guzman, April 23 2021

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

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Russian forces near Ukraine’s border have been engaging in regularly scheduled military exercises. They’re also protecting Russian territory from possible cross-border spillover of US-orchestrated Kiev aggression against Donbass. 

On April 22, Russia’s Defense Ministry announced the following:

Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu “decided to complete a sudden check of the combat readiness of the troops of the Southern and Western Military Districts, since all the goals set have been achieved,” saying:

“The troops demonstrated the ability to provide a reliable defense of the country.”

He ordered them returned to their “permanent deployment points to conduct a detailed analysis and to sum up the results of the sudden check.”

Separately, he said “military activity of the NATO bloc is significantly increasing in this region.”

“Reconnaissnce activities are intensifying. The intensity and scale of operational training activities are increasing.”

“We are closely monitoring the transfer of alliance troops to the area of the upcoming Defender Europe 2021 exercise.”

“Coordination centers have been established in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria to ensure the meeting of NATO troops and cargo.”

Russia is “ready for an immediate response in case of (an) unfavorable development in the areas of the Defender Europe exercise.”

During drills, Russian “servicemen showed a high level of professional training.”

“Formations and military units have fulfilled the standards for bringing to the highest level of combat readiness, moving over long distances, creating groupings of troops and forces, and successfully complete combat training missions by them,” Shoigu stressed.

Returning Russian forces to their bases will begin Friday — to be completed by end of April.

Released video footage showed Russian troops storming Crimean beaches as part of simulated war games, a statement saying:

Exercises “practice(d) tasks of landing troops and overcoming the anti-landing defenses of the conditional enemy.”

According to Russia’s Defense Ministry, drills involved over 60 warships and other vessels, more than 10,000 troops, about 200 warplanes and other aircraft, along with hundreds of military vehicles.

In response to Russia’s Defense Ministry announcement, Ukraine’s pro-Western puppet president Zelensky tweeted the following:

“The reduction of troops on our border proportionally reduces tension.”

“Ukraine is always vigilant (sic), yet welcomes any steps to decrease the military presence and deescalate the situation in Donbass (sic).”

“Ukraine seeks peace (sic)” while it shells Donbass daily.

“Grateful to international partners for their support.”

No threatened Russian invasion exists now, earlier, or looking ahead.

The US and its proxy Ukrainian fighters bear full responsibility for aggression on Donbass.

On Wednesday, the Donetsk People’s Republic News Agency reported that Ukrainian forces shell its territory daily.

Yesterday, “Ukrainian forces reportedly fired grenade launchers at the Shakhta Trudovskaya and Staromikhaiilovka settlements earlier in the day,” it said.

Separately on Thursday, DPR head Denis Pushilin said everything Russian is being “destroyed” in territory controlled by Kiev, adding:

After the Obama/Biden regime’s 2014 coup, “Donbass built the first defense line, but not only on the contact line.”

“Donbass protects its land, homes and families and the whole Russian world from Ukrainian aggression.”

“I want to firmly state that we’re resolved to protect the rights and interests of Russians living in the remaining part of Ukraine.”

On Wednesday, Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) head Leonid Pasechnik said the following:

“In response to Kiev’s criminal laws on the Russian language ban and internment of Russians, we are ready to give our legal support to those whose rights are infringed upon in Ukraine.”

“The LPR adopted the law on persons subjected to political persecution by Ukraine and runs state humanitarian programs which provide assistance.”

Daily shelling of Donbass by Ukrainian forces shows no signs of easing.

Orchestrated by US dark forces, Zelensky follows orders by Biden regime hardliners.

Escalating war by Ukraine on Donbass could happen any time along Russia’s borders if that’s what they have in mind.

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

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

“How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War”

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“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/banker-occupation-waging-financial-war-on-humanity/