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The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) Solidarity Network, made up of allied organizations and individuals, demands the North Atlantic Treaty Organization end its imperialist endeavor in Afghanistan and calls on the United States to abide by the 2020 U.S.-Taliban agreement by exiting Afghanistan by May 1.
The BAP Solidarity Network encourages anti-imperialist, anti-war people and organizations to sign a petition to demand the Biden administration exit Afghanistan. It also has developed a template to help the U.S. public write letters to the editors of news organizations to demand an end to the U.S. intervention.
The BAP Solidarity Network has uncovered through its research that although 2,500 U.S. troops occupy Afghanistan, 11,000 NATO troops representing 36 countries are in the war-riddled country. At a December 16, 2020 meeting, NATO allies agreed to a $1.94 billion 2021 military budget and a $312.5 million 2021 civil budget—all for its Afghanistan operations.
Tod Wolters, commander of the U.S. European Command—one of 11 global command structures the United States uses to dominate every inch of the world—also is NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe. He said, “Everything we do is about generating peace. We compete to win… and if deterrence fails, we’re prepared to respond to aggression, primarily through NATO.” That indicates NATO does not merely advise or train Afghan troops.
Today, the U.S. European Command and NATO, along with the Afghan Forces they finance, are shifting their objectives from the so-called anti-terrorist campaign to “peace building in Afghanistan.”
“The BAP Solidarity Network understands this is only a cover for the real objectives, namely fighting the New Cold War against Russia, China and other countries not aligned with the U.S.-European imperialist consensus,” says Zach Kerner, member of the BAP Solidarity Network.
While increasingly under threat of a global war, the people of Afghanistan continue suffering the immediate brunt of imperialist and capitalist interests in the region. To date, the U.S. empire and its European allies are complicit in the deaths of over 100,000 Afghan adults and children, leaving thousands more injured or permanently disabled. Two decades of dropping 50,000 bombs on a country the size of Texas has left Afghanistan with catastrophic levels of poverty, an economy in shambles, and health care workers struggling with the added burden of the pandemic. Nearly 3 million Afghans refugees have fled their country to escape the violence, making Afghanistan one of the world’s biggest sources of refugees, and over 2 million Afghans have been internally displaced. Two decades of war has cost the U.S. public more than $1 trillion.
Within days of taking office, the Biden administration signaled it would not abide by the U.S.-Taliban agreement, citing the importance of supporting a “stable, sovereign, democratic, and secure future for Afghanistan.”
“This is the same language we hear whenever the United States and NATO conspire to destabilize foreign countries hostile to U.S. and European capital,” says Danny Haiphong, co-coordinator of the BAP Solidarity Network. “But we condemn the threat of the New Cold War and the continued war and occupation of Afghanistan, as we condemn the use of state violence and militarism against poor and working-class people of all nations. That is why we demand the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO forces as well as the financing of the war machine in Afghanistan and the region.”
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Featured image: Then-Vice President Joe Biden during a tour of the largest military training facility in Afghanistan in 2011. (Photo by Chief Petty Officer Brian Brannon/public domain)
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The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier and its Carrier Strike Group have entered the Mediterranean Sea.
This makes it, currently, the closest aircraft carrier to the Middle East. It has been quite a while since the US hasn’t had one of its super warships deployed in or near the Persian Gulf.
Starting in the spring of 2019, the U.S. Navy has been publicly ordered to keep a near-constant presence in the region, as if this were something new.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced that a global posture review is taking place, and it would be reconsidered whether a carrier was even needed in the region. Still, the Mediterranean Sea is quite nearby, and the removal of the Carrier Strike Group (CSG) from the Persian Gulf was a political move.
It’s Lloyd Austin’s dream to have a CSG in every hotspot in the world, but resources don’t allow for that.
Still, the US has the amphibious warship USS Makin Island (LHD-8) in the Persian Gulf with a detachment of F-35B fighter jets, so it still has a hefty presence. Further, it is without a doubt possible for the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and its CSG to operate without issue in the Middle East, be it Syria, Iraq or elsewhere, from its current place of deployment.
In Syria itself, as the primary US competitor, alongside Iran, Russian forces are preparing to set up a permanent military base near the city of Palmyra in the Badia Desert. This is not yet confirmed, but according to satellite photos it has a helipad as a runway.
This base is likely planned to support the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) further in their push against both ISIS and Turkish proxies.
On March 9th, the SAA carried out heavy shelling on the positions of Turkish proxies in the village of Jabal Al-Zawiya, in southern Idlib.
Separately, Pro-Turkey opposition factions reportedly thwarted an attempt by the SAA to advance on the Qalaat front in the northern countryside of Latakia. Attacks are frequently repelled in Twitter posts, but nowhere else, demonstrating that the propaganda wing of the Turkish proxies is quite active.
In the days leading up to this, the SAA has been preparing for a large push in the province of Aleppo.
This is likely an attempt to form a uniform front, which can exert equal pressure along the frontline and thin the enemy’s forces to provide opportunity for a breach.
Turkey and its proxies are sure to offer heavy resistance to any advance by the SAA, but so far it appears that this may not be enough.
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Using what have already become clichéd industry buzzwords like “transparency,” “trust,” and even “privacy,” IBM’s Digital Health Pass marketing describes the mass tracking app as a “smart way to return to society” that allows people to “return to the activities and things they love.”
IBM is partnering with Covid-19 mRNA vaccine maker Moderna to track vaccine administration in real time through its various blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, and hybrid cloud services. According to a company press release, the collaboration will “focus on exploring the utility of IBM capabilities in the U.S.,” such as a recently unveiled pilot program for a Covid-19 Digital Health Pass in the State of New York, which effectively deputizes private businesses to enforce government-imposed Covid-19 regulations.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomoannounced the initiative, billed as the “Excelsior Pass,” during his 2021 State of the State Address in January and the program’s initial phase was tested at the Barclays Center during an NBA game, followed by another test at Madison Square Garden for an NHL game on March 2.
According to the state’s official website, the trial runs were designed to maximize “return on investment and saving development time” before submitting the “wallet app” to the Google and Apple app stores.
“The Excelsior Pass will play a critical role in getting information to venues and sites in a secure and streamlined way,” said Cuomo, who in February rolled out the state’s reopening guidelines for sports and entertainment venues, which would pave the way “to fast-track the reopening of these businesses and getting us one step closer to reaching a new normal(emphasis added).”
A promotional image showing the Excelsior Pass
Built on IBM’s Digital Health Pass technology, the QR code-based health data tracking app is only one of multiple blockchain ledger applications the company will leverage as part of its partnership with Moderna. Others include their Blockchain Transparent Supply and Food Trust services, which use the open-source Hyperledger technology to share supply-chain and food sourcing “credibility” data respectively with enterprise customers.
ANNOUNCING: IBM Digital Health Pass will integrate with @salesforce Work. com to help businesses, schools and governments verify vaccine and health status in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
IBM’s Blockchain World Wire cross-border payment processing service rounds out the blockchain ecosystem that will serve to “enhance” supply chain visibility and “real-time” vaccine management and administration.
Transparent coercion
Using what have already become clichéd industry buzzwords like “transparency,” “trust,” and even “privacy,” IBM’s Digital Health Pass marketing literature describes the mass tracking app as a “smart way to return to society” that allows people to “return to the activities and things they love.”
Still in the “voluntary” stages of use, according to IBM’s Steve LaFleche, the Digital Health Pass and similar mobile health verification apps, like CommonPass, cease to be so once government guidelines and regulations force the private sector to enforce their implementation, as in the case of New York’s reopening rules for stadiums, theaters and other venues.
In addition to the already widely-enforced capacity limits, social distancing and mandated facial coverings, Cuomo’s guidelines for venue operation now include the requirement that “all staff and spectators receive a negative COVID-19 PCR test within 72 hours of the event,” as well as the collection of contact information of everyone in attendance in order to “inform contact tracing efforts.”
IBM’s partnership with Moderna allows many of these requirements to be carried out unobtrusively and with minimal fuss for the general population, who are by now used to interfacing with the world on their smartphones. As LaFleche writes, the app “can interoperate easily with other solutions so that people won’t have to rely on multiple apps when going about their daily lives.”
Tethered to the blockchain
The development of these health-tracking, blockchain-based technologies as part of a broader redesign of supply chain and capital organization structures — often referred to as the “new normal” or the “Great Reset — has been in the works since at least 2016. It began with the “Use of Blockchain in Health IT and Health-related Research Challenge,” co-hosted by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where IBM submitted its white paper, “Blockchain: The Chain of Trust and its Potential to Transform Healthcare – Our Point of View.”
Since April 2020, these efforts have sped up considerably through initiatives like the COVID-19 High Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium, a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) “spearheaded” by IBM and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which brought Big Tech players like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft together with academic institutions and federal agencies to apply an “unprecedented scale of computing power to support COVID-19 research.”
The PPP applied its “unprecedented” computing power to controversial research topics like the supposed genetic predisposition among African Americans to Covid-19 infection and other areas of focus, such as potential treatments and “medicinal plants,” which can now all be integrated as part of IBM’s blockchain-based applications across the entire economic spectrum.
As covered by MintPress in a recent three-part series by this author, the intersection between blockchain technology and health data is at the center of a global campaign to recreate capitalism as a data-driven economic model based on a so-called “impact investment” paradigm, which purports to solve the world’s health, social and environmental problems through market-based solutions.
“Hacking the software of life”
The collection of our genomic data lies at the core of the fraudulent concept of creating financial incentives around human misery. DNA is the single point of data convergence across humanity that allows for these new “moral” economic models to generate enough volume to replicate present-day economies of scale and design financial instruments to exploit human beings at a cellular level.
Moderna’s former Chief Medical Officer, Tal Zacks, is well aware of the opportunities. On February 25, Moderna announced their CMO’s intention to step down in September as he looks forward to the “next leg of his career.” Zacks will leave a wealthy man, after regularly selling Moderna stock over the course of 2020, making him approximately $1 million a week, according to SEC filings.
In 2017, Zacks delivered a TED Talk in which he plainly states what many of the mRNA vaccine detractors have been warning about. Namely, that these novel vaccination technologies are, in fact, mechanisms designed to manipulate the human genetic code.
Zacks mirrors much of what his colleague and fellow vaccine credential promoter, Dr. Brad Perkins, said in a similar presentation that same year, in which he expounded on the massive potential for profits of these kinds of technologies — and the collection of genomic data, in particular — across the healthcare and insurance industries.
“I’m here today to tell you,” Zacks informed the spectators, “that we’re actually hacking the software of life.” Aiming at a more general audience, Zacks wasn’t as forward as Perkins in his description of the implications, limiting himself to emotional appeals through anecdotal accounts of former patients who might have been saved had they lived through the “phenomenal digital and scientific revolution” of mRNA “information therapy” solutions from which he has profited so handsomely.
Conveniently, IBM’s strong presence in the law enforcement space, as one of the largest providers of digital profiling technologies and AI policing systems in the world, may also help with any obstacles Moderna may face among vaccine-hesitant populations — such as the 3,000 Romanians who took to the streets of Bucharest to protest mass vaccinations, or the refusal of entire communities in Mexico to have their personal sovereignty violated by the world’s newest crop of snake oil salesmen.
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Raul Diego is a MintPress News Staff Writer, independent photojournalist, researcher, writer and documentary filmmaker.
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Airlines in the US are already in the process of leveraging apps and smartphones to allow travelers to offer proof that they have been vaccinated, or recently tested negative for COVID-19, and they’re not alone: Across Europe, a growing number of airlines and countries are adopting, or leaning toward adopting, so-called “vaccine passports”.
France24 reports Wednesday that countries increasingly see these vaccine passports as the best chance to bolster hard-hit tourism industries in places like Spain and Greece. However, since vaccines are still relatively hard to come by in Europe (supplies in the developing world are also scarce) there are concerns that vaccine passports won’t work – while also raising thorny privacy issues.
Most programmes under development are geared towards facilitating travel and come in the form of smartphone apps with varying criteria for a clean bill of health.
Vaccine passports, for example, are a popular way to approach proof of immunity with jab rollouts underway across the globe.
While UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently told Britons that they won’t need a vaccine passport to visit the local pub, his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron is considering creating a digital vaccine passport without which French citizens might be barred from visiting restaurants and other public places.
French President Emmanuel Macron recently suggested yet another, more localised form of Covid-free permission slip: the so-called “health pass.”
This certification would only be valid within France’s borders but would allow a fully vaccinated person to, for example, eat in restaurants and attend certain events.
Fortunately, vaccine passports aren’t the only option available to airlines hoping to fight the spread of COVID.
There are also apps that accept positive antibody tests as proof of immunity for those who have had the virus and recovered.
But the World Health Organization has warned that there is no evidence to show that recovered Covid sufferers with antibodies are protected from a second infection.
Even as pressure to implement passports grows, the report notes that vaccine passports do raise some thorny legal issues, while also potentially exacerbating economic inequality as the poor are effectively barred from traveling, while their movements in public are limited.
Making health passports stricter or requiring them for travel could invite legal challenges.
A major worry is that banning unvaccinated people from travelling would exacerbate inequality since access to jabs is far from universal.
There are also concerns over how applications would access users’ personal data.
In France, there is already an official database of citizens who have been vaccinated against Covid-19, approved by the country’s privacy watchdog.
However, the body has warned it will re-examine the issue should the database be put to use in the context of a health passport.
Earlier this week China launched a digital “health certificate” for its 1.3 billion citizens which will record their vaccination status and COVID test status.
In tourism-dependent Greece and Cyprus, vaccination passports are being launched specifically for travel to and from Israel, which has fully vaccinated 44% of its population, and, being situated on the east coast of the Mediterranean, is also located nearby. Denmark and Sweden are also looking to launch health passports soon, while the EU is promising to propose a “green pass” to ease movement within the bloc.
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Lebanon’s political, economic and COVID crises are ballooning while politicians continue to bicker over the formation of a government capable of implementing reforms that could deliver $21 billion in financial aid to rescue the country from collapse.
Caretaker Prime Minister HassanDiab, who resigned last August, has threatened to suspend work to exert pressure on recalcitrant politicians to form the long overdue government. Hizbollah has warned of a social explosion if a new government is not in place soon. Maronite Christian Patriarch Beshara Al Rahi has castigated politicians for the “intentional delay” in establishing a government and said popular protests are justified.
Army chief Joseph Aoun has urged the politicians to resolve Lebanon’s economic crisis quickly while pointing out that his officers and men suffer privation along with the general population. Addressing the political class, he asked, “Where are we headed? What do you intend to do?”
He had no reply from politicians who mismanaged Lebanon’s affairs for decades and have done nothing to tackle its current political, economic, social and COVID crises.
The explosion is already taking place. Lebanese have adopted a new strategy to vent their fury over economic melt-down. Instead of mounting mass protests in central squares in cities and towns, Lebanese are disrupting the movement of people and goods by blocking highways and main roads across the country. The blocking protests have been triggered by the fall in the value of the Lebanese Lira to more than 10,000 to the dollar, driving up the prices of both imported and locally produced essential supplies. While the Lira has hovered around the 8,000 mark for some months, the long-term official rate has been 1,500 to the dollar. To make matters worse salaries have fallen by more than 80 per cent and inflation is running at between 300 and 400 per cent.
The economic and social crises will become more acute if the central bank enacts progressive reductions in subsidies on essential foodstuffs, electricity and fuel. The World Food Programme has warned that this would have “major inflationary repercussions” and impose “an unbearable strain on households” which are already struggling to put food on the table.
If subsidies are ended, the price of bread would triple and the cost fuel would rise 4.5 times. Although financial assistance would be provided to 83 per cent of the population, most Lebanese do not trust the government to deliver monthly payments of $50 for adults and $25 for children. While the World Bank is set to provide $246 million for those suffering extreme proverty, money has a tendency to go astray before reaching the people for whom it is destined.
After Lebanon’s downward economic slide began in mid-2019, Lebanese took to urban streets and squares to call for an end to corruption and mismanagement and the ouster of the sectarian power-sharing regime imposed by France before independence. Tens of thousands joined these largely peaceful protests but the politicians, determined to preserve their paternalist powers and pelf, did not budge: Not even after the horrific explosion in Beirut port that killed more than 200 people and devastated four neighbouring districts.
Appointed last October to form a cabinet of nonpartisan technocrats to deal with the economic crisis and enact reforms, prime minister Saad Hariri awaits presidential approval of his 18 ministers. President Michel Aoun argues Hariri has no authority to dictate who is in his cabinet and insists on key ministries for the Aounist Free Patriotic Movement. Other political factions, naturally, put forward their demands.
Instead of capitulating, Hariri went, as they say in Australia, “walk-about”. He travelled around the region and elsewhere but his absence changed nothing.
COVID vaccinations, which should be dispensed impartially, have even been mismanaged and become politicised. The World Bank provided bankrupt Lebanon with COVID vaccines valued at $34 million to inoculate two million of the six million residents of the country — Lebanese, Palestinians, Syrians and others. The Bank also called for the elderly and health care workers to be first in line for shots which were to be administered at designated locations. Naturally, deputies jumped the queue and the Health Ministry inoculated them in parliament itself, infuriating World Bank officials who threatened to halt to halt funding of the rollout. Lebanon registers 3,000-4,000 cases daily and total infections have reached 400,000 and deaths 5,000. While Lebanon’s self-inflicted travails are largely ignored by the world, Pope Francis, as he wrapped up his historic visit to war-devastated Iraq, promised his next trip will be to Lebanon.
It is significant that the two countries are governed by sectarian regimes imposed by Western occupying powers. France sought to ensure domination of Lebanon by Christians favourable to Paris but two civil wars and constant instability have demonstrated the Lebanese model is a dangerous failure. Nevertheless, in Iraq the US installed a “democratic” Shia fundamentalist government which, ironically, favours Tehran over Washington. In both countries, corruption is rampant and misrule has brought about the collapse of the state. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that, both Lebanese and Iraqis have been rising against sectarian governments since October 2019.
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A 39-year-old woman from Ogden, Utah, died Feb. 5, four days after receiving a second dose of Moderna’s COVID vaccine, according to CBS affiliate KUTV.
Kassidi Kurill died of organ failure after her liver, heart and kidneys shut down. She had no known medical issues or pre-existing conditions, family members said.
The medical examiner could not say whether the autopsy would be automatically forwarded to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Dr. Erik Christensen, Utah’s chief medical examiner, said proving vaccine injury as a cause of death almost never happens.
“Did the vaccine cause this? I think that would be very hard to demonstrate in autopsy,” Christensen told KUTV.
Christensen could think of only one instance where a vaccine as the official cause of death would be seen on an autopsy report. That would be in the case of immediate anaphylaxis where someone received a vaccine and died almost instantaneously.
“Short of that, it would be difficult for us to definitively say this is the vaccine,” Christensen said. “A more likely result would be a lack of answers or an incomplete autopsy.”
An autopsy can provide answers to a family when no disease or red flags are found, or rule out other competing causes of death, Christensen explained. The lack of answers may help a family “understand if the vaccine was a possible cause.”
Christensen said vaccine deaths are possible and do happen.
“Just about every vaccine or anything you do [to] treat someone, when you inject something has a potential for a negative outcome. I’m sure VAERS can verify other vaccines have led to death.”
After her first shot, Kurill, a surgical tech for local plastic surgeons, experienced a sore arm but no other side effects. The day of her second shot she had gone shopping and was fine until she started feeling “not so great that evening,” said her sister Kristin.
According to Kurill’s father, she “got sick right away” after receiving the second shot. She had soreness at the injection site, started to get sick and complained “she was drinking fluids but couldn’t pee.”
Kurill went to the emergency room and was later transported to Intermountain Medical Center for a liver transplant. Both parents were willing to donate portions of their liver to save their daughter, but Kurill died within 30 hours of arriving at the ER.
Kurill’s obituary states that she died from “apparent complications due to the second COVID-19 vaccination.”
Although the CDC says on its website that CDC and FDA physicians review each reported death as soon as notified, it does not appear that autopsies were ordered in any of the other reported Utah cases, according to KUTV.
Last month The Defender reported on a 58-year-old woman who died hours after getting her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. State and federal officials said they were investigating her death but had not performed an autopsy.
On Feb. 5, officials said that they did not know the cause of Keyes’ death or any underlying conditions that could have contributed to her death, but there was “no evidence it was tied to the vaccine,” reported NBC News.
According to The Virginian Pilot, a public records request related to Keyes’ death revealed concerning emails. State Health Commissioner Norman Oliver told public information officers in a Feb. 5 email that if reporters asked whether an autopsy was done on Keyes, they should say “a full autopsy was not needed in order to ascertain whether the death was related to the vaccination.”
The public records request also revealed that officials inside and outside the health department were “concerned the death of Keyes, who is Black, could worsen vaccine hesitancy among minorities,” reported The Virginian Pilot.
When the health department spokespeople crafted a statement following Keyes’ death, they included Gov. Ralph Northam’s press secretary and another Northam staffer in the editing process. The wording regarding timing of the death after the vaccine went from saying there may appear to be a relationship, “But that is not necessarily the case,” to the timing “is not evidence of it being related,” highlighting their focus on deterring speculation, according to The Virginian Pilot.
The family was forced to get their own private autopsy. Keyes’ daughter said that even before state officials had her mother’s postmortem preliminary test results, the medical examiner’s office told her they would not perform an autopsy. They told her “nothing could be gleaned from an autopsy that would relate the vaccine to her death.”
State officials didn’t answer how medical examiners could thoroughly rule out other potential causes of death triggered by or linked to the shot without an internal examination of the body.
The CDC says no deaths have been attributed to COVID-19 vaccines. However, according to the latest data available from VAERS — which includes reports submitted between Dec. 14, 2020, and Feb. 26, 2021, a total of 1,265 deaths following COVID vaccines have been reported to the system.
Dr. Sheffield with Intermountain explained the difference in numbers of deaths reported and the CDC’s statement of “no vaccine deaths,” saying it comes down to what can and can’t be proven.
“You have to look at what it (the numbers) are saying,” Sheffield told KUTV. “Is it saying the vaccine caused the deaths, or there were deaths in people who received the vaccine? And those are two very different things.”
As The Defender reported last month, the CDC is investigating the death of a 36-year-old doctor in Tennessee who died Feb. 8, about one month after receiving the second dose of a COVID vaccine.
News reports at the time didn’t identify which brand of vaccine the doctor received, though at the time, only the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines were approved for emergency use in the U.S. Dr. Barton Williams’ death was attributed to multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-A) caused by asymptomatic COVID, though he never tested positive for the virus.
In January, The Defender reported on the death of baseball legend Hank Aaron from an “undisclosed” cause 18 days after receiving his first dose of the Moderna vaccine. The New York Times implied that Aaron’s death was unrelated to the vaccine, however no autopsy was conducted.
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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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“Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.” – Edward W. Said. (Los Angeles Times, July 20, 2003)”
“Geographically, the Horn of Africa is normally understood to comprise Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia. As foreign military forces operate in ways that link deployments on land, in the air and at sea, for the purposes of this paper the Horn of Africa region is defined as a security space comprised of the four core countries plus Kenya, the Seychelles, South Sudan and Sudan, as well as key adjacent maritime areas—the southern Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait” 1
Introduction: Historical Background
The Horn of Africa is a complex site of geopolitical and geostrategic importance, inextricably linked to key aspects of its history and geography. The uptick in engagement by external actors, and their attendant interests, alliances and agendas, underscore the pivotal role of geopolitics in shaping the security and economic trajectory of the region. The proximity of the Horn of Africa to the oil-rich countries of the Persian Gulf, and the vital commercial lanes that transit the Bab al-Mandab and the Gulf of Aden, reinforce the region as a crucial maritime chokepoint and port of call in an increasingly connected global order. 1)
France had African colonies since the European Colonial powers Berlin Conference in 1884, which they divided and took positions of Africa among themselves.
The French presence in Africa dates to the 17th century, but the main period of colonial expansion came in the 19th century with the invasion of Ottoman Algiers in 1830, conquests in West and Equatorial Africa during the so-called scramble for Africa and the establishment of protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco and much of Equatorial and Central Africa.
French colonialism always were interested in Egypt even before Napoleon’s war Egypt in 1789. They also were interested in the countries along the red sea and the Bab el Mandep strait which allows the passage of goods safely through the narrow strait.
And thus, Djibouti (The French Territories of Afar & Isse) came to play when France took possession of Djibouti (called French Somali-land) in 1884. As the Territory of the Afars and the Issas, it remained part of the French republic until independence in 1977,
France is interested in the following :
1) The Safety and continuity of passage of goods and peoples through Bab el Mandep straits and the Red Sea.
2) French power projection in the Horn of Africa region and the littoral states of Red Sea i.e. Egypt, Saudia, and Yemen.
3) The Protection and Preservation of Christian Ethiopia with in the Muslim HOA region.
4) French economic, political and soft-power projections in the HOA and Red Sea litterol nations.
5) French imperial occupation, exploitation under the coattails of AFRICOM/EU/NATO empire of Africa and the littoral states of Egypt, Eritrea, Saudia, Sudan, Yemen and Djibouti which plays a major role as a Hub of western military bases, currently housing US/French/Italian/Chinese/ and Japanese military bases in such small country.
French Neocolonialism in Africa
To protect and influence its interests in post-Independence Africa, France, opted to institutionalize its relationships with its former colonies by singing comprehensive bilateral economic, political, military and cultural accords that binds effectively french control, domination, and presence of the former colonies.
Besides Djibouti, the French controls military bases in Reunion, Seychelles and Kerguelen Islands in the Indian Ocean which connects to the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea via Bab El Mandep straits which is strategically important for economic, military and Geo-strategic purposes.
Thus, France uses and employs its political, economic, military and its United Nations Security Council (UNSC) membership. And as an ally of the US, through NATO and AFRICOM, it projects its powers in the region.
Although the French Colonial Empire is long gone, Paris is still attempting to maintain its global influence through its former colonies, not only in the Red Sea and HOA region, but also in Central and Northern Africa, Another point to note is that the French energy company Total is one of the most important partners for Gas and Oil explorations, operations, sells and marketing in Ethiopia and Kenya – 1950 and 1955 respectively.
The French Oil conglomerate Total holds a 45% interest in three offshore exploration licenses in the Lamu Basin (Near the disputed Somali Maritime border) namely L11a, L11B and L12. 3)
Conclusions
Historically it is evident, that the French seeks to use its former African colonies in the indian ocean Basin and The Red Sea littoral countries for its Geostrategic interests in the region and its competition with Turkey, China and Russia.
There is a Turkish-French Competition in Africa since 2000. Turkey and France are acting as rivals in Africa by creating cooperation with the East, HOA and West African countries. France has joined strategic marriage of convenience with Anti-Turkish Arab countries of Egypt, Saudi, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates may work against Turkey to create their influential zone.
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This article was already published on Academia.edu.
Prof. Dr. Bischara Ali EGAL is Executive Director and Chief Researcher at The Horn of Africa Center for Strategic and International studies (Horncsis.org) https://horncsis.org, Mogadishu, SOMALIA (HOA)
Notes
1) Faith Mabera (2020) The Horn of Africa-Persian Gulf nexus: inter-regional dynamics and the reshaping of regional order in geopolitical flux. INSTITUTE FOR GLOBAL DIALOGUE Issue 136 /April 2020
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It’s Lianghui (“Two Sessions”) time – the annual ritual of the Beijing leadership. The stars of the show are the top political advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference; and the traditional delivery of a work report by the Prime Minister to the top legislature, the National People’s Congress (NPC).
The review of the draft outline of China’s 14th Five-Year Plan will proceed all the way to March 15. But in the current juncture, this is not only about 2025 (remember Made in China 2025, which remains in effect). The planning goes long-range towards targets in the Vision 2035 project (achieving “basic socialist modernization”) and even beyond to 2049, the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.
Premier Li Keqiang, delivering the government work report for 2021, stressed that the target for GDP growth is “above 6%” (the IMF had previously projected 8.1%). That includes the creation of at least 11 million new urban jobs.
On foreign policy, Li could not draw a sharper contrast with the Hegemon: “China will pursue an independent foreign policy of peace” and will “promote the building of a new type of international relations”.
That’s code for Beijing eventually working with Washington on specific dossiers, but most of all focusing on strengthening trade/investment/finance relations with the EU, ASEAN, Japan and the Global South.
The outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) for the Chinese economy had already been designed last October, at the CCP plenum. The NPC will now approve it. The key focus is the “dual circulation” policy, whose best definition, translated from Mandarin, is “double development dynamics”.
That means a concerted drive to consolidate and expand the domestic market while continuing to push foreign trade/investment – as in the myriad Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects. Conceptually, this amounts to a quite sophisticated, very Daoist, yin and yang balancing.
In early 2021, President Xi Jinping, while extolling Chinese “conviction and resilience, as well as our determination and confidence”, was keen to stress the nation faces “unprecedented challenges and opportunities”. He told the Politburo “favorable social conditions” must be created by all means available all the way to 2025, 2035 and 2049.
Which brings us to this new stage of Chinese development.
The key target to watch is “common prosperity” (or, better yet, “shared prosperity”), to be implemented alongside technological innovations, respect for the environment, and fully addressing the “rural question”.
Xi has been adamant: there’s too much inequality in China – regional, urban-rural, income disparities.
It’s as if in a cool reading of the dialectical drive of historical materialism in China, we would arrive at the following model. Thesis: imperial dynasties. Antithesis: Mao Zedong. Synthesis: Deng Xiaoping, followed by a few derivations (especially Jiang Zemin) all the way to the real synthesis: Xi.
On the Chinese “threat”
Li stressed China’s success in containing Covid-19 domestically; the nation spent at least $62 billion on it. This should be read as a subtle message, addressed especially to the Global South, about the efficacy of China’s governance system to design and execute not only complex development plans but also cope with serious emergencies.
What’s ultimately at stake in this competition between wobbly Western (neo)liberal democracies and “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (copyright Deng Xiaoping) is the capacity to manage and improve people’s lives. Chinese scholars are very proud of their national development plan ethos, defined as SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound).
A very good example is how China, in less than two decades, managed to extricate 800 million people out of poverty: an absolute first in History.
All of the above is rarely evoked as Atlanticist circles drown in virtually 24/7 China demonization hysteria. Wang Huiyao, the director of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, at least had the merit to bring into the discussion Sinologist Kerry Brown of King’s College, London.
Drawing from comparisons between Leibniz – close to Jesuit scholars, interested in Confucianism – and Montesquieu – who only saw a despotic, autocratic, imperial system – Brown re-examines 250 years of entrenched Western positions on China and remarks how is “more difficult than ever” to engage in a reasonable debate.
He identifies three major problems.
1. Throughout modern history, there’s no Western appreciation of China as a strong and powerful nation, and its restored historical importance. Western mindsets are not ready to deal with it.
2. The modern West never really thought of China as a global power; at best as a land power. China was never seen as a naval power, or capable of exercising power way beyond its borders.
3. Propelled by the iron certainty over its values – enter the very much debased concept of “true democracy” – the Atlanticist West has no idea what to make of Chinese values. Ultimately the West is not interested in understanding China. Confirmation bias reigns; the result is China as a “threat to the West”.
Brown points to the key predicament afflicting any scholar or analyst trying to explain China: how to convey China’s extremely complex worldview, how to capture the China story in a few words. Soundbites do not apply.
Examples: explaining how a whopping 1.3 billion people in China have some sort of health security, and how 1 billion enjoy some kind of social security. Or explaining the intricate details of China’s ethnic policies.
Premier Li, delivering his report, vowed to “forge a strong sense of community among the Chinese people and encourage all of China’s ethnic groups to work in concert for common prosperity and development”. He did not specifically mention Xinjiang or Tibet. It’s an uphill task to explain the trials and tribulations of integrating ethnic minorities into a national project amid non-stop hysteria on Xinjiang, Taiwan, South China Sea and Hong Kong.
Come and join the party
Whatever the Atlanticist West’s whims, what matters for the Chinese masses is how the new Five-Year Plan will deliver, practically, what Xi has previously described as “high-quality” economic reform.
Things look good for powerhouses Shanghai and Guangdong – they were already aiming at 6% growth. Hubei – where Covid-19 cases first appeared – is actually targeting 10%.
Based on frenetic social media activity, public opinion confidence in the Beijing leadership remains solid, considering a series of factors. China won the “health war” against Covid-19 in record time; economic growth is back; absolute poverty has been eradicated, according to the original timetable; the civilization-state is firmly established as a “moderately prosperous society” 100 years after the founding of the Communist Party.
Since the start of the millennium, China’s GDP grew no less than 11-fold. Over the past 10 years, GDP more than doubled, from $6 trillion to $15 trillion. No less than 99 million rural people, 832 counties and 128,000 rural villages were the last ones to be extricated from absolute poverty.
This complex hybrid economy is now even engaged in setting up an elaborate, “sweet” trap for Western firms. Sanctions? Don’t be fools; come here and enjoy doing business in a market of at least 700 million consumers.
As I’ve noted last year, the systemic process in play is like a sophisticated mix of internationalist Marxism with Confucianism (privileging harmony, abhorring conflict): the framework for “community with a shared future for mankind”. One country – actually a civilization-state, focused on its renewed historical mission as re-emerging superpower. Two sessions. And so many targets – and all of them achievable.
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Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.
All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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After Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau and new US Secretary of State Antony Blinken held their first bilateral meeting Global Affairs’ release mentioned China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and… Haiti. The first four nations are all in the crosshairs of Washington and Ottawa. But Haiti’s de facto president is in the opposite position. Jovenel Moïse would fall quickly if the US and Canada withdrew their support.
What does it mean that a supposedly ‘unimportant’, impoverished, nation is the only non-enemy government mentioned by those in charge of US and Canadian diplomacy? Is it a recognition that their Haitian puppet might fall or is it a backhanded compliment to the anti-dictatorship movement? Or maybe it reflects the US and Canada’s commitment to credible elections?
On Sunday thousands marched against the dictatorship in Port-au-Prince. A week earlier 100,000 marched in the capital and thousands more protested in a half-dozen other cities. On February 14 nearly 100,000 also marched in Port-au-Prince.
Since Jovenel Moïse extended his mandate extra-constitutionally on February 7 there has been a wave of criticism against US and Canadian policy in Haiti. The country’s heterogenous opposition have vociferously condemned the foreign powers. In the US there have been a number of rallies and online actions. A number of Democratic party senators and congresspeople have also called on the Biden administration to stop propping up Moïse. In Canada three current MPs and three former MPs, as well as Noam Chomsky, David Suzuki, Naomi Klein and 500 others, signed a letter criticizing Ottawa’s “support for a repressive, corrupt Haitian president devoid of constitutional legitimacy.” A coalition of 30 Haitian Canadian groups, as well as the Canadian Labour Congress and Council of Global Unions, have also expressed opposition to Canadian and US policy in Haiti.
Blinken and Garneau are undoubtedly feeling some pressure. At the same time, however, the situation on the ground is fluid and if they want Moïse to remain it is imperative to express their diplomatic backing.
The post Blinken/Garneau meeting release noted that the two discussed a desire “to ensure the upcoming electoral process in Haiti is credible, inclusive and transparent.” But Haiti’s opposition has already rejected elections under Moïse, which few will consider “credible”. In the summer Moïse pushed out the entire electoral council and appointed a new one in contravention of the constitution.
The Canada-US position ensures the opposite of their stated aim. By supporting Moïse as he extends his mandate, rewrites the constitution, criminalizes protests, sets up a new intelligence agency, instigates a gang alliance to terrorize the slums, etc. they are guaranteeing that forthcoming elections won’t be credible. But concern for credibility has not been a defining feature of Ottawa and Washington’s response to Haitian elections over the past 20 years.
After Fanmi Lavalas won more than 70% of 7,000 mayoral, senatorial, etc. positions in 2000 the US and Canada undermined what OAS observers initially called “a great success”, probably Haiti’s most credible ever election. Realizing there was little chance Fanmi Lavalas would be defeated at the ballot box in the foreseeable future, they suddenly claimed the previously employed method to determine whether a runoff was to be held in a handful of Senate seats made the election “deeply flawed”. A few years later they overthrew all the elected officials.
After a two-year coup government repressed pro-democracy forces, the US and Canada financed elections that blocked the most popular political party from participating. On simple procedural grounds the election was also dubious. During the election in 2000 there were more than 10,000 registration centres and some 11,000 polling stations across the country. In 2006 the coup government reduced that number to 500 registration centres and a little more than 800 polling stations, even though they had some $50 million to run the election (mostly from the US, Canada and France). In the poorest neighborhoods, where opposition to the coup was strongest, registration centres were few and far between.
At the last minute former president René Préval entered the race. The coup government sought to block Préval from winning in the first round and the head of the International Mission for Monitoring Haitian Elections, chief electoral officer of Elections Canada Jean-Pierre Kingsley,ardently supported the effort. After an explosion of protest following the discovery of thousands of ballots burned in a dump, the US, French and Canadian ambassadors — who initially insisted the electoral council continue counting votes to force a second round — reluctantly agreed to negotiate with their counterparts from Brazil and Chile, as well as the UN and others to grant Préval a first-round victory. But they used the negotiation to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Préval’s mandate, even though he likely won 60% of the vote.
Not viewing Préval as sufficiently compliant, the US and Canada pushed for presidential elections months after the devastating 2010 earthquake and amidst a deadly cholera outbreak. Following the first round of voting, Canadian and US officials forced the candidate whom Haiti’s electoral council had in second place, Jude Celestin, out of the runoff. According to the official results, Mirlande Manigatreceived 31% of the vote, Celestin 22% and Michel Martelly 21%. With no statistical rationale they removed votes from Celestin, who was allied with Préval, until Martelly was in second place.
Through Martelly’s term he failed to hold legislative elections and ruled by decree. That didn’t stop the US and Canada from supporting the corrupt and thuggish former Ton Ton Macoute. After repeatedly postponing elections Martelly held a poll marred by fraud in 2015. A subsequent audit found that 92% of polling place tally sheets had significant irregularities and 900,000 of the 1.5 million votes cast for president were from accredited poll observers who could vote at any voting station. Despite mass protests against Martelly’s handpicked successor Moïse first round lead, the US and Canada pushed to move forward with the second round of the election as if the first round of voting was legitimate. Riots ultimately forced the cancellation of the second round. In a subsequent redo Moïse ‘won’ an election with few participating.
While the US and Canada claim to support democracy and fair elections in Haiti, history proves otherwise. In reality neither government seems to care about the wishes of ordinary Haitians.
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“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” ~ John F. Kennedy
“A poorly trained, apathetic, and gullible media is one of the greatest national security and public health threats to the United States of America, because in such a world not only does there cease to be a watchdog against government, industry, and general hucksterism, but the media itself becomes prone to manipulation, deception, coercion, and outright recruitment by precisely those it is supposed to be watching for the good of the people.” — Marco Caceres Di Iorio
“The media hacks who push the pro-vaccine propaganda and hide the truth are complicit in crimes against humanity…The entire vaccine machine is built on lies of omission and fraudulent science. billions of dollars are quietly paid out by NVICP (National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program) to vaccine-injured people, but the overwhelming majority of vaccine injuries are never reported. Of the thousands that are reported, only a tiny few are compensated. Therefore, the real amounts that should have been paid out to vaccine injured people is in the trillions.” — William Christenson
“Fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. The CDC’s entire vaccination propaganda campaign rests on their claim that side effects from vaccinations are exceedingly rare, but according to the blatantly pro-over-vaccination, Big Pharma-funded CDC, in 2016 alone, VAERS received 59,117 vaccine adverse event reports. Among those reports were 432 vaccine-related deaths, 1,091 permanent vaccine-related disabilities, 4,132 vaccine-related hospitalizations, and 10,274 vaccine-related emergency room visits. What if these numbers actually represent less than 1% of the total as this report asserts? You multiply those numbers by 100.” – William Christenson (2017)
“As of 1986, only 12.8% of American kids had chronic diseases. That number has grown to 54% among the vaccine generation (ie, Generation V, those children born after lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers were outlawed in 1986) in lockstep with the CDC’s and AAP’s expanding vaccine schedule.” — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
“Safety testing, which typically requires months and years for other medical products, often lasts only a few days with vaccines – not nearly long enough to spot cancers or chronic conditions like autoimmune diseases (e.g. juvenile diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis), allergic illnesses (e.g. food allergies, allergic rhinitis, eczema, asthma), or neurological and neurodevelopmental injuries (e.g. ADD, ADHD, narcolepsy, epilepsy, seizure disorders, and autism). Vaccine manufacturer’s vaccine inserts that accompany every vial of mandated vaccines include warnings about these and over 400 other injuries including many serious immune, neurological, and chronic illnesses for which FDA suspects that vaccines may be the cause.” – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
“The children who comprise this vaccine-injured generation are now aging out of schools that needed to build quiet rooms and autism wings, install wobble chairs, hire security guards and hike special ed spending to 25% to accommodate them. They are landing on the social safety net which they threaten to sink. As Democratic lawmakers all around the nation vote to mandate more vaccines and call for the censorship of experts (including parents of vaccine-injured or killed children) that are expressing concerns about vaccine safety, Democratic Presidential candidates argue about how to fix America’s dysfunctional and unaffordable health care system without addressing the reality of the vaccine-related chronic disease and autoimmune disorder epidemic. The good news for Big Pharma, of course, is that many of these vaccine-injured children have lifelong dependencies on unaffordable blockbuster drugs like insulin, Adderall, anti-psychotic drugs, Epi-Pens, asthma inhalers, and diabetes, arthritis, and anti-seizure meds made by the same companies that made the vaccines.” – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
“An overwhelming majority of the FDA officials directly charged with licensing vaccines, and the CDC officials who effectively mandate them for children, have personal financial entanglements with vaccine manufacturers. These ‘public servants’ are often shareholders in, grant recipients from, and/or paid consultants to vaccine manufacturers, and, occasionally, even patent holders of the very vaccines they vote to approve. Those conflicts of interest motivate them to recommend ever more vaccines with minimal support from evidence-based science” – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
“The FDA receives 45% of its annual budget from the pharmaceutical industry. The World Health Organization (WHO) gets roughly half its budget from private sources, including Pharma and its allied foundations. And the CDC, frankly, is a vaccine company; it owns 56 vaccine patents and buys and distributes $4.6 billion in vaccines annually through the Vaccines for Children program, which is over 40% of its total budget.” — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
“The HHS (US Health and Human Services partners with vaccine makers to develop, approve, recommend, and pass mandates for new products and then shares profits from vaccine sales. HHS employees can personally collect up to $150,000 annually in royalties for products they work on. For example, key HHS officials collect money on every sale of Merck’s controversial HPV vaccine Gardasil, which also yields tens of millions annually for the agency in patent royalties.” — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
“In 1986, Congress—awash in Pharma money (the pharmaceutical industry is number one for both political campaign contributions and lobbying spending on legislators over the past 20 years) enacted a law granting vaccine makers blanket immunity from liability for injuries caused by vaccines. The subsequent gold rush by pharmaceutical companies boosted the number of recommended inoculations from twelve shots of five vaccines in 1986 to 54 shots of 13 vaccines today. A billion-dollar sideline grew into the $50 billion vaccine industry behemoth.” — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
“Since vaccines are liability-free – and effectively compulsory to a captive market of 76 million children – there is meager market incentive for companies to make them safe. The public must rely on the moral scruples of Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi, and Pfizer. But these companies have a long history of operating recklessly and dishonestly, even with (the many drug) products for which they can be sued for injuries. The four companies that make virtually all of the recommended vaccines are all convicted felons. Collectively they have paid over $35 billion since 2009 for defrauding regulators, lying to and bribing government officials and physicians, falsifying science, and leaving a trail of (incurable chronic illnesses) injuries and deaths from products they knew to be dangerous and still sold under pretense of safety and efficacy.” – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
“I ate breakfast last week with the president of a network news division at CBS) and he told me that during non-election years, 70% of the advertising revenues for his news division come from pharmaceutical ads. And if you go on TV any night and watch the network news, you’ll see they become just a vehicle for selling pharmaceuticals. He also told me that he would fire a host who brought onto his station a guest who lost him a pharmaceutical account.” — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – See more here.
“The public in both poor and rich countries has a right to scientifically-based evidence that international vaccine programs are as safe as possible and that they have been thoroughly safety-tested. The best metrics for measuring safety are studies comparing health outcomes of vaccinated versus unvaccinated cohorts. Yet, both the CDC and the WHO have aggressively discouraged the pursuit of such studies. – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
“I knew that MMR (GlaxoSmithKline’s Measles/Mumps/Rubella vaccine) was a mistake from the start. Within 10 seconds I could see that it was a bad idea. All the vaccinations prior to MMR could occur in nature; they had never been combined before. Normally, viruses can’t infect at the same time, so if you put more than one virus into a body at once you are making a grave error. Surely the point of vaccination is to make it safer for children, but with MMR a child could be overwhelmed, and might not recover. The deaths and severe reactions to MMR are just the tip of the iceberg.“ – Dr Peter Mansfield – British general practitioner whose practice was dedicated to reducing his patient’s reliance on doctors by giving them the confidence and information to help themselves
“Even higher levels of aluminium have been found in the brains of individuals, diagnosed with an early-onset form of sporadic (usually late onset) Alzheimer’s disease, who have experienced an unusually high exposure to aluminium through the environment (e.g. Camelford) or through their workplace. This means that Alzheimer’s disease has a much earlier age of onset, for example, fifties or early sixties, in individuals who have been exposed to unusually high levels of aluminium in their everyday lives.” – Christopher Exley, PhD
“No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable…for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death.” – President Ronald Reagan, as he signed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986, absolving drug companies from all medico-legal liability when children die or are disabled from vaccine injuries, thus reversing many of the intentions of original legislative action.
“…the NIH (National Institutes of Health) is incapable of conducting conflict-free research…it is clear that the system managing our vaccine program is corrupt beyond repair and needs a complete overhaul.” – Lori Mellwain, National Autism Association board chair
Safety Recommendation for Parents Who Choose or are Mandated to Vaccinate Their Children, Based on Guidelines of the Autism Research Institute:
Never vaccinate a sick child, even if just a runny nose from a viral infection, as all viruses are immunosuppressive, rendering the child more vulnerable to adverse vaccine reactions.
Never allow more than two vaccines per visit; avoid all combination vaccines.
Administer vitamin C before and after each vaccination, ideally in doses of 500 mgs every four hours during waking hours. Also give vitamin A in standard doses.
All forms of sugar should be avoided for several days before and after vaccines, as sugar has been shown to diminish the protective activities of the immune system by depressing white blood cells’ ability to destroy bacteria.
The following 7 quotes are from Dr. Richard Moskowitz’s brilliantly articulated article, “The Case Against Immunizations”:
“It is dangerously misleading, and indeed the exact opposite of the truth, to claim that a vaccine renders us ‘immune’ to or protects us against an acute disease, if in fact it only drives the disease deeper into the interior and causes us to harbor it chronically instead, with the result that our responses to it become progressively weaker but show less and less of a tendency to heal or resolve themselves spontaneously. What I propose, then, is to investigate as thoroughly and objectively as I can how the vaccines actually work inside the human body, and to begin by simply paying attention to the implications of what we already know. Consider the process of falling ill with and recovering from a typical acute disease, such as the measles, in contrast with what we can observe following (the intramuscular) administration of the measles vaccine.”
“…Once inhaled by a susceptible individual, the [measles] virus undergoes a prolonged period of silent multiplication, first in the tonsils, adenoids, and accessory lymphoid aggregations of the nasopharynx; later in the regional lymph nodes of the head and neck; and eventually, several days later, it passes into the blood and enters the spleen, the liver, the thymus, and the bone marrow, the ‘visceral’ organs of the immune system. Throughout this ‘incubation’ period, which lasts from 10 to 14 days, the patient typically feels quite well, and experiences few or no symptoms of any kind.”
“By the time that the first symptoms of measles appear, circulating antibodies are already detectable in the blood, and the height of the symptomatology coincides with the peak of the antibody response. In other words, the ‘illness’ that we call the measles is simply the definitive effort of the immune system to clear this virus from the blood. Notice also that this expulsion is accomplished by sneezing and coughing, i. e., via the same route through which it entered in the first place. It is abundantly clear from the above that the process of mounting and recovering from an acute illness like the measles involves a general mobilization of the immune system as a whole, including inflammation of the previously sensitized tissues at the portal(s) of entry, activation of leukocytes, macrophages, and the serum complement system, and a host of other mechanisms, of which the production of circulating antibodies is only one, and by no means the most important.”
“Such splendid outpourings indeed represent the decisive experiences in the normal physiological maturation of the immune system in the life of a healthy child. For recovery from the measles not only protects children from being susceptible to it again, no matter how many more times they may be exposed to it, but also prepares them to respond promptly and effectively to any other infections they may encounter in the future. The ability to mount a vigorous acute response to infection must therefore be reckoned among the most fundamental requirements of health and well-being that we all share.”
“By contrast, the live but artificially attenuated measles-virus vaccine is injected directly into the blood, by-passing the normal port of entry, and sets up at most a brief inflammatory reaction at the injection site, or perhaps in the regional lymph nodes, with no local sensitization at the normal portal of entry, no ‘incubation period,’ no generalized inflammatory response, and no generalized outpouring. By ‘tricking’ the body in this fashion, we have accomplished precisely what the entire immune system seems to have evolved to prevent: we have placed the virus directly into the blood and given it free and immediate access to the major immune organs and tissues, without any obvious mechanism or route for getting rid of it.”
“The result is the production of circulating antibodies against the virus, which can in fact be measured in the blood; but this antibody response occurs as an isolated technical feat, without any overt illness to recover from, or any noticeable improvement in the general health of the recipient. Indeed, I submit that exactly the opposite is true, that the price we have to pay for these antibodies is the persistence of viral elements in the blood for long periods of time, perhaps permanently, which in turn carries with it a systematic weakening of our capacity to mount an acute response, not only to the measles, but to other infections as well.”
“Far from producing a genuine immunity, then, my suspicion and my fear is that vaccines act by interfering with and even suppressing the immune response as a whole, in much the same way that radiation, chemotherapy, corticosteroids, and other anti-inflammatory drugs do. Artificial ‘immunization’ focuses on antibody production, a single aspect of the immune process, disarticulates it, and allows it to stand for the whole, in much the same way as chemical suppression of an elevated blood pressure is accepted as a valid substitute for genuine healing or cure of the patient whose blood pressure has risen. It is the frosting on the cake, without the cake. The worst part of this counterfeiting is that it becomes more difficult, if not impossible, for vaccinated children to mount a normally acute and vigorous response to infection, by substituting for it a much weaker, essentially chronic response, with little or no tendency to heal itself spontaneously.” – Dr Richard Moskowitz – from “The Case Against Immunizations”
“The number of ‘cases’ in turn is dependent on the numbers of ‘positive’ PCR tests. You may have seen the term ‘casedemic’ being used to describe the situation, and while that term can also be misused, it legitimately calls attention to the problem of using PCR tests for diagnostic purposes and justifying policies based on ‘cases’…While PCR tests can be useful to confirm a diagnosis of COVID-19, they should never be used by themselves as a diagnostic tool. Yet, in ‘case’ counts, that is precisely what’s been done: people who do not have the disease and are not contagious are being counted as COVID-19 ‘cases’, and these numbers in turn are being cited to justify continued lockdown measures.” – Jeremy R. Hammond, Independent Journalist and Author – www.jeremyrhammond.com
“Covid-19 ‘cases’ are a practically meaningless metric, especially in light of how their numbers are determined by counting ’positive’ results from RT-PCR tests that do not distinguish between viable virus and non-infectious viral RNA. Even the lockdown-loving New York Times has admitted that 90% of so-called ‘cases’ in the US have been individuals who were probably not contagious.” — Jeremy R. Hammond
“Just as there are professional propagandists masquerading as ‘journalists’, so are there propagandists dutifully masquerading in their role as ‘scientists’ to deceive the public in order to manufacture consent for harmful authoritarian policies.” – Jeremy R. Hammond
“…if a person gets a “positive” PCR test result at a cycle threshold of 35 or higher (as applied in most US labs and many European labs), the chance that the person is infectious is less than 3%. The chance that the person received a “false positive” result is 97% or higher.” – Swiss Policy Research
“There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask…While masks may block some droplets, they do not provide the level of protection people think they do. Wearing a mask may also have unintended consequences: People who wear masks tend to touch their face more often to adjust them, which can spread germs from their hands.” — Dr. Anthony Fauci (60 Minutes interview – March 8, 2020)
“Aluminum adjuvants (which are present in many vaccines) cause behavioral abnormalities, abnormal weight gain, learning and memory impairment, motor neuron death/apoptosis, neuromuscular strength deficits, chronic microglial activation/brain inflammation and large increases in brain and spinal cord aluminum content. These adverse effects occur at dosages less than or approximately equal to dosages received by infants according to the CDC vaccine schedule.” – Informed Consent Action Network
“The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.” – Arnold Seymour Relman, MD (1923-2014), Harvard Professor of Medicine and former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine
(The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) derives a majority of its outside contributions – estimated at more than $25 million per year – from pharmaceutical companies that make vaccines. The pediatricians that the AAP represents derive the majority of their annual revenues from the administration of vaccines to their pediatric patients.) — J.B. Handley
“The majority of studies that authorities point to as proof that vaccines do not cause autism have been published in a journal called Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. As we know, the AAP is a trade union for pediatricians.” – J.B. Handley
“You’d be amazed at the number of physicians who don’t know what’s in a vaccine. They’ll say, well, there’s the bacteria, the virus you want to vaccinate against, and then there’s a little immune stimulant in there to help stimulate the immunity so they react against those viral antigens. They don’t know about these other chemicals in there like aluminum, mercury, formaldehyde, special proteins, special lipids that are known to be brain toxic, that are known to induce autoimmunity in the brain. They’re not aware of that. They don’t know that MSG is in a lot of vaccines―monosodium glutamate, a brain excitotoxin. They’re not aware of what’s in the vaccine they’re giving! —Russell Blaylock, MD
“Most physicians haven’t got a clue about vaccines. Physicians are undeservedly endowed with a mantle of authority and therefore most of their patients think vaccines are simple, safe and effective. And therefore, there is nothing much to know about vaccines except that they somehow illicit an immune response and magical antibodies will protect the inoculated patient for life. Total ignorance. But that’s what ‘The Snake’ tells physicians starting in medical school; and, since medical school (and nursing school) professors are also undeservedly endowed with a mantle of authority, both of whose healthcare professional groups believed it from the start. Until they get bit.” – Anonymous Anti-Over-Vaccination activist parent
“The true mortality rate of Corona virus is less than one in 100,000, or ≤ 0.001%, which is even 10 times less than the whistleblowers explain why they died. Therefore, it was not the Corona/COVID-19 virus that killed them. Professor Püschel concludes strongly that we have absolutely no reason to fear that the virus will kill us. The average age of the Corona/COVID-19 dead that Professor Püschel did autopsies on was 80 years old, and they all had one or more severe diseases that could explain why they died. Therefore, it was not the Corona/COVID-19 virus that killed them. Prof Püschel concludes strongly, that we have absolutely no reason to fear that the virus will kill us.” — Søren Ventegodt, MD, Copenhagen, Denmark
“The pharmaceutical industry obviously benefits from the panic over the COVID-19 pandemic. Could it be that the pharmaceutical companies have influenced how the mortality is measured and how the statistics are interpreted? Could commercial interests from the pharmaceutical companies producing vaccines for the world influence the way the World Health Organization (WHO) operates, the information it provided, the advice and guidance it offers to the world? Yes, it is possible, and it could explain how this whole Corona alarm and panic started. The stronger the interest, the less you can trust the data. If there is money involved, you need to be especially skeptical.
“A medical statistic made by a provider or manufacturer of a drug or a vaccine is normally flawed and manipulated to such an extent that you cannot believe in the statistics. To answer this question about how big the influence of the pharma industry might be we need a deep exploration of the WHO, its peoples, the communication between internal organizations in the WHO, and with the industry and people related to the pharmaceutical industry. We need total transparency and full access to all communication in and with the WHO. The lack of openness has earlier made it difficult to investigate the WHO’s Processes.” — see this
“Do you remember the “Swine Flu Scandal” of 2009 and the World Health Organization’s (and the CDC’s) panicky pandemic prognosis at that time? The definition of ‘pandemic’ was changed by WHO 12 years ago to ‘just a worldwide disease’. Many serious illnesses and many deaths were not required anymore, to announce a pandemic. Due to this change the WHO was able to declare the swine flu pandemic in 2009, with the result that (fast-tracked, poorly tested, and therefore dangerous) vaccines were produced and sold worldwide, on the basis of contracts that have been kept secret until today. During the swine flu in 2009, Drosten was one of those who stirred up panic in the population; repeating over and over again that the swine flu would claim many hundreds of thousands, even millions of deaths, all over the world. Thanks to Germany’s Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, this hoax was brought to an end before it would lead to even more serious consequences.” — Dr Reiner Fuellmich
“Also remember that the WHO has lied before, in 2009, when they said the swine flu was dangerous and millions would die, and based on this, most governments bought many vaccines. It turned out that the swine flu was just the normal flu, and what is even more worrying, the vaccines the governments had bought had to be destroyed because of negative side effects. Many children became handicapped because of the swine flu vaccines. There is a conflict of interests in WHO (and the world’s CDCs) because they are sponsored by pharmaceutical industries. The swine flu scandal is documented.” — Dr Reiner Fuellmich
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Dr Gary G. Kohls is a retired American family physician who practiced holistic (non-drug) mental health care during the last decade of his professional career. His patients came to see him asking for help in getting off the psychotropic drugs to which they were addicted and which they knew had sickened them and disabled their brains and bodies. He was successful in helping significant numbers of his patients get off or cut down on their cocktails of drugs using a time-consuming program that was based on psychoeducational psychotherapy, brain nutrient therapy and a program of gradual, closely monitored drug withdrawal.
He warns against the abrupt discontinuation of any psychiatric drug – legal or illicit – because of the common, often serious withdrawal symptoms that can occur in patients who have been taking such drugs. It is important to be treated by an aware, informed physician who is familiar with treating drug withdrawal syndromes and brain nutritional needs.
Dr Kohls lives in Duluth, MN, USA and writes a weekly column for the Duluth Reader, the area’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, Big Pharma’s psychiatric drugging and over-vaccination regimens, and other movements that threaten the environment, prosperity, democracy, civility and the health and longevity of the planet and the populace.
Many of Dr Kohls’ columns have been archived at a number of websites around the world, including these five:
All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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Deborah Bunka knows she’s in Hardin County, Iowa, when the smell of manure starts to filter in through her car’s air conditioning.
As the membership director for Iowa Farmers Union, Bunka has spent a lot of time talking to farmers in counties like Hardin, where pigs outnumber people about 37 to 1. And she’s seen firsthand the effects of living in close proximity to so many animals.
“There are parts of this state where you can’t open your windows,” Bunka said.
In Iowa and across the Midwest, the source of the smell can be hard to pinpoint, and that’s by design. The federal government doesn’t keep tabs on livestock operations nationwide, a matter of concern for environmentalists, activists and community members alike.
Iowa is the country’s top pork producer, with around 24 million hogs at any given time, according to industry data. Most of that production comes from concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, large scale livestock operations that raise thousands of animals in enclosed barns.
CAFOs have been a point of contention between the livestock industry and environmental activists since they began to proliferate in the 1990s, overtaking small, pasture-feeding operations as the dominant form of animal agriculture in the US. As the number of livestock producers has declined, the number of animals — hogs, cattle and poultry — has skyrocketed over the past several decades, in part due to rapid consolidation in the industry.
One large CAFO can easily produce more than one million tons of manure per year — more than the yearly waste of a large city. That manure not only causes the smell that Bunka described, but also contributes to water and air pollution when improperly managed.
The animal waste — usually stored in a lagoon or large tank before being spread as fertilizer in crop fields — contains nitrogen, phosphorus and sometimes growth hormones, antibiotics or pathogens such as E. coli. Rainwater can cause lagoons to spill over or wash the manure out of fields and into waterways.
But the full extent of the damage is hard to estimate because the federal government doesn’t keep track of where CAFOs are located. Instead, it’s up to states, researchers and activists to build their own databases.
This work is complicated by the fact that each state has different rules for issuing CAFO permits, on top of those mandated by the federal government.
Generally, any animal feeding operations (AFOs) that discharge waste into federal waterways must apply for a permit from the Environmental Protection Agency or from the state agency designated by the EPA. When a government agency issues such a permit, the applicant’s information is added to a database. The collected information includes the facility type and location, the owner’s name and contact information, the number of animals at the AFO, and the facility’s manure disposal plan.
These databases are useful because they allow agencies to quickly locate the source of a pollution event, schedule facility inspections and track CAFO hotspots. They’re also considered public records, obtainable via a Freedom of Information Act request, which allows journalists, researchers, environmental groups and neighbors to access the same information.
The federal government doesn’t require permits for facilities that claim they pose no risk to water quality, however, meaning thousands of CAFOs aren’t included in these databases. When the EPA tried to expand its reach to cover unpermitted facilities, judges ruled the agency cannot require all CAFOs to apply for a permit, effectively barring the federal government from creating a complete register.
Even before lawsuits blocked the EPA from collecting more data on CAFOs, the agency wasn’t adequately studying the environmental impact of their waste, according to the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan organization that audits federal agencies.
The work of cataloguing these facilities and their environmental impact is left to states, academic researchers and activists, whose combined work has created a patchwork of maps and databases that shed light on the prevalence of CAFOs in the US.
“I think it’s one hundred percent the government’s responsibility to know where CAFOs are, to know the environmental and health impacts each one can have, and to make that available to the public and to people like myself to inform policy making and policy design,” said Lee Miller, lecturing fellow at Duke Law and food and agriculture policy expert.
The EPA doesn’t know where thousands of CAFOs are
The EPA’s authority to regulate CAFOs comes from two pieces of legislation, both passed in 1972: the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act.
While the Clean Air Act doesn’t specifically mention CAFOs, animal operations have to abide by the same emission limits as other industries.
In 2005, in an attempt to develop specific CAFO air emission requirements, the EPA struck a deal with CAFO operators, granting civil protections to the CAFOs that participated in an industry-funded emissions monitoring program.
The EPA was supposed to use the results of the study to determine the best way to measure CAFO air emissions and to enact emissions controls by 2010.
Eleven years later, the agency still hasn’t determined how to measure CAFO air emissions. In August 2020, the EPA released a draft model for estimating swine CAFO emissions and the agency’s website states that draft models for certain emissions from poultry and dairy operations will be released this year.
But what the limits will be, and when they will take effect, is still “TBD.” Until the rules are finalized, protections remain in place for CAFOs that took part in the original monitoring study 15 years ago.
And, without air quality regulations in place, the EPA cannot create a database of CAFOs using its authority under the Clean Air Act.
The agency has successfully documented certain CAFOs using clean water laws. In the 1970s, under authority granted by the Clean Water Act, the EPA began requiring CAFOs to obtain a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit if they planned on discharging waste into federally regulated waterways. It’s the only permit the federal government requires of CAFOs.
But as the number of unpermitted CAFOs dramatically increased in the decades after the acts passed, the EPA sought to bring more of the facilities under federal regulation.
In 2003, the EPA issued a rule that would require all CAFOs to apply for permits unless they could prove that there was no possibility of water contamination. But the regulation was essentially nullified in 2005, when a judge struck down the “duty to apply” part of the rule, stating that the EPA could not regulate CAFOs based solely on the presumption that the facility would pollute.
“In our experience, we can not trust a lot of these operators to self-report, even in the case of something extreme happening, like a manure spill,” Miller said.
Miller co-authored a report about the lack of public information about CAFOs and their effect on the environment for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit advocating for environmental protection and anti-climate change policies. Due to this court ruling, CAFOs often decide for themselves whether they need to apply for a NPDES permit, the NRDC report alleges.
And not knowing the exact location of thousands of animal feeding operations makes it harder for regulators to find the source of a manure spill or to know which areas are CAFO-dense and should be closely monitored for pollution, Miller said.
In 2013, after the livestock industry resisted EPA efforts to gather information on CAFOs nationwide, the agency instead requested CAFO databases from each state, creating an extensive federal CAFO database for the first time. The Natural Resources Defense Council then filed a Freedom of Information request for that database. The EPA complied, mailing the NRDC a disk with all of the information they’d gathered from 30 states, including the names and addresses of thousands of farmers.
Citing fears of surveillance or compromised biosecurity, the Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation sued the EPA, claiming that by releasing names and addresses, the EPA had endangered farmers and their livestock. The litigation lasted until 2016, when a judge ruled that the EPA had improperly released farmers’ information and blocked the agency from collecting and publicizing such data in the future. The NRDC returned the unredacted data.
“The pork industry has a long track record of working cooperatively with numerous stakeholders and has never hesitated to share information and data when it was warranted with appropriate government officials and legitimate researchers,” NPPC spokesperson Rachel Gantz wrote in an email to the Midwest Center. “NPPC will continue to vigorously defend the rights and privacy of its producers.”
Gantz declined when asked to provide specific examples of when the NPPC has provided industry data to government officials or researchers.
Iowa officials become “little detectives” in search for missing CAFOs
Much of the fight over CAFO management in the Midwest has played out in Iowa. Bunka got involved nearly 15 years ago with an environmental organization named Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement.
In 2007, the group filed a petition with the EPA, asking federal authorities to investigate the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and seeking stronger enforcement of environmental protection rules. The EPA ignored the petition, however, until Iowa CCI threatened to sue for inaction in 2011.
The threat kicked the EPA into gear, and District 7 of the agency conducted an investigation of the Iowa DNR in 2012.
Investigators found that the Iowa DNR didn’t issue NPDES permits when appropriate, didn’t conduct enough inspections of unpermitted facilities to determine if they needed a permit, failed to act on permit violations in nearly half of the reviewed cases, didn’t impose adequate penalties against rule breakers, and didn’t enforce federal rules governing where CAFOs could and could not be built.
From 2013 to 2018, the EPA and Iowa DNR worked together to address the issues pointed out in the report.
Iowa CCI got involved in the plan by petitioning the Iowa Environmental Protection Commission, a politically-appointed group that oversees the state DNR. For nine months, Bunka traveled across rural Iowa, visiting local events like farmers markets and fairs. She gathered signatures for a petition asking the commission to enact stricter regulations and permitting requirements for CAFOs.
Bunka collected more than 2,000 signatures. She brought the signed papers to the Iowa CCI offices, where staff made photocopies and taped all the papers together before bringing the long list of names to a meeting of the Iowa Environmental Protection Commission, a politically-appointed board that oversees environmental policies in the state.
In the meeting room, staff members wrapped the paper chain all the way around the commissioners, asking them to join the call for an audit of the Iowa DNR.
“There was a lot of gaveling, and then they kicked everyone out and ended the meeting,” Bunka said. The commission never enacted the policies sought by Iowa CCI.
But the work plan brought other reforms to the department, including a requirement to take an inventory of all animal feeding operations in the state.
Iowa DNR employees scoured satellite maps, cross-referencing them with their existing AFO database, and found more than 1,200 previously unidentified medium and large animal feeding operations.
“We’ve become little detectives,” Iowa DNR environmental engineer Cindy Garza said.
Garza considers Iowa’s online databases to be the best in the region, and she’s been involved since the data went online in 2009. The state’s online AFO database contains all of the facilities the department has contact with, she said. That includes medium and large AFOs, which are required by state law to file manure management plans; any facility that’s been cited for violating DNR regulations; the operations located in the department’s 5-year search; all NPDES permitted facilities; and those that register voluntarily with the department.
In all, the online database contains information on nearly 13,000 operations, not all of which are active. The Iowa DNR also maintains an interactive map of the facilities connected to the main AFO database.
While the EPA’s intervention shed light on the prevalence of unpermitted, under-the-radar CAFOs in Iowa, the same attention hasn’t necessarily been paid to other states’ permitting programs.
Detailed CAFO databases are harder to come by in other places. In North Dakota, for example, there is no online database or map of AFOs. Instead, anyone seeking information about the facilities must file a formal open records request. And before the state releases information about specific facilities, the Department of Environmental Quality has to mail out release forms to every operation included in the database notifying them of the request. (In 2019, a Midwest Center reporter fielded about 90 phone calls from AFO owners who’d been notified of the request and provided his phone number by the state.)
Researchers and activists create their own CAFO databases
Without a central database to reference in research, scientists and academics who study agriculture and the environment have found other ways to gather information about CAFOs.
In 2020, two Stanford researchers published a deep-learning artificial intelligence tool that could find CAFOs using Google Maps. The tool used the distinctive aerial appearance of CAFOs– rows of long, rectangular roofed barns, sometimes interspersed with manure lagoons — and scanned satellite images to find the operations. According to a report published in Nature Sustainability, the AI tool accurately detected more than 90 percent of concentrated poultry operations in one region of North Carolina — a state that doesn’t require permits for most poultry CAFOs.
The researchers published the AI tool online, and animal rights activists quickly put it to work building maps of CAFOs across the U.S. One activist group, Project Counterglow, published a crowdsourced map of the entire US using AI to pinpoint CAFOs and cross-reference the operations with existing databases.
The map is the first of its kind, pointing out thousands of CAFOs that aren’t present in government records.
But Project Counterglow doesn’t provide any information about its backers or funding. The website crowdsources information on individual facilities, asking followers to gather and publish evidence of animal cruelty or malpractice on the site. The map sparked concern among the livestock industry, prompting articles about protecting one’s operation from surveillance and fear of bioterrorism.
Project Counterglow did not respond to requests for comment.
Fighting a constant battle for data transparency and stronger CAFO regulation has caused burnout among environmental scientists and policymakers, said Austin Frerick, deputy director of the Thurman Arthur Project at Yale University, which conducts research on competition policy and antitrust enforcements.
“A lot of people who used to be in this space have left because they just got so heartbroken,” Frerick* said. “So a lot of institutional knowledge has been lost.”
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Featured image is from Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting
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An international NGO devoted to halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons recently released satellite imagery showing that Israel, for the first time in decades, was engaged in new construction at its Dimona nuclear site. The reactor there, which first became active in the mid-1960s, manufactures plutonium as fuel for Israel’s reputed stockpile of 80 nuclear warheads.
This excavation has piqued the curiosity of nuclear experts and intelligence agencies around the world. Since the Dimona reactor has long since passed its projected lifespan, some have speculated that Israel may be building a new plutonium reactor.
This seems unlikely, as this element is long lasting, and Israel has already produced enough for current or future needs. Some have speculated that the existing reactor is either substantially shut down or being decommissioned.
If Israel does not need a new reactor to replace the old one, then what else might it be building there? In a recent interview with the Associated Press, Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association, pointed to another critical element in nuclear warheads: tritium. It is a hydrogen isotope used to increase the yield of nuclear warheads. It also makes the explosive reaction more efficient, so less fuel (in Israel’s case, plutonium) is needed.
Tritium has allowed for advances in weapons design, including smaller devices whose explosive power is magnified. It is also used in neutron bombs, which are designed to kill humans while having a reduced blast area. Kimball told the AP that Israel “may want to produce more tritium, a relatively faster-decaying radioactive byproduct used to boost the explosive yield of some nuclear warheads”.
Tritium, like plutonium and other substances used to produce nuclear weapons, is manufactured in a nuclear reactor. It can be produced by irradiating lithium metal. The isotope is less stable than plutonium, meaning it requires replenishing more frequently for use in a nuclear arsenal.
If, as leading nuclear expert Avner Cohen has speculated, the old Dimona reactor is to be retired, Israel would need a new source for the production of tritium. Perhaps a reactor is being specifically built for that purpose.
Construction appears to have begun, according to an analysis of satellite photos, sometime in late 2018 or early 2019. This means that work has likely been underway for around two years. The current images mainly indicate excavation, but no buildings yet being constructed.
Why is the process moving so slowly? It could indicate indecision among policymakers about when and whether to shut down the old reactor, or budgetary constraints preventing a faster pace of construction.
The real nuclear danger
But why has the imagery become public only now, after two years of construction? Given the looming conflict between Israel and US President Joe Biden over the revival of the Iran nuclear negotiations, it’s possible that the US administration wants to remind the world where the real nuclear danger lies – and it’s not in Iran.
If the construction is related to the production of tritium, this would suggest that Israel is not building a new class of nuclear arms, such as the hypersonic weapons of which Russian President Vladimir Putin has boasted – at least not at Dimona. Rather, Israel is likely refining the potency of its existing arsenal.
Satellite images shows significant new construction at the Dimona site https://t.co/Mhyh801Uzp
The ultimate irony of the Dimona project is that no one questions Israel’s right to make nuclear weapons or to improve the lethality of its arsenal. Digging a hole the size of a soccer field to build God-knows-what? Go right ahead. Yet, should a single particle of uranium fall to the ground in a place where it should not be in Iran, the whole international community begins tut-tutting that Tehran is a few weeks from nuclear breakout and imminent catastrophe.
Why the double standard? Why does the world believe that Israel has the right to such an immense arsenal, and that it will maintain it responsibly, while Iran has no right to even a single weapon – and that should the latter create one, it would blow up the world? What has Israel ever done to deserve such credibility, and what has Iran ever done that is so much more heinous as to deserve this level of obloquy?
Keeping enemies in check
In a Facebook exchange with Cohen, he called Benjamin Netanyahu Israel’s most “nuclear-keen” prime minister since David Ben-Gurion, who founded the country’s nuclear programme. Netanyahu has taken far more interest in the nuclear project and made numerous speeches, both at Dimona and at Ben Gurion’s graveside nearby at Sde Boker, threatening Iran with nuclear destruction.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that Netanyahu is any more likely to use such weapons than previous prime ministers. It means that he sees a critical need for Israel to have credible nuclear deterrence to keep its enemies in check. This is a key element of Israel’s geopolitical strategy, a means of projecting power and guaranteeing the nation’s regional dominance.
It fends off threats by hostile forces in Iran, Syria and Iraq. In the past, former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered an attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor, and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmertordered an attack on a Syrian reactor being built in its eastern desert.
Netanyahu’s obsession with Iran’s nuclear programme might derive from his being loath to be the first Israeli leader to permit an Arab enemy to join the nuclear club.
Over the past decade, the US and Israel have played good cop-bad cop roles regarding the Iranian nuclear threat. US presidents have used a combination of covert sabotage and public diplomacy to advance a policy of restraining Iran, while Israel has, at times, advocated an outright military attack. Both collaborated on the covert Stuxnet malware that destroyed uranium centrifuges.
But the US has never been willing to join in an attack on Iran, despite Netanyahu’s lobbying. Will the Israeli leader show restraint, or will he test Biden’s resolve and Iran’s commitment to negotiations by continuing to assassinate nuclear scientists and otherwise undermine a political-diplomatic approach to resolving the crisis?
Biden has learned from the past experiences of former President Barack Obama not to trust Netanyahu. It is an unenviable position to have to distrust both one’s enemy (Iran) and one’s ally.
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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)
ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102 Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling) PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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A group of scientists and doctors has today issued an open letter calling on the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to answer urgent safety questions regarding COVID-19 vaccines, or withdraw the vaccines’ authorisation.
The letter describes serious potential consequences of COVID-19 vaccine technology, warning of possible autoimmune reactions, blood clotting abnormalities, stroke and internal bleeding, “including in the brain, spinal cord and heart”.
“Should all such evidence not be available”, the authors write, “we demand that approval for use of the gene-based vaccines be withdrawn until all the above issues have been properly addressed by the exercise of due diligence by the EMA.”
The letter is addressed to Emer Cooke, Executive Director of the EMA, and was sent on Monday 1 March 2021. The letter was copied to the President of the Council of Europe and the President of the European Commission.
It states:
“We are supportive in principle of the use of new medical interventions.” However, “there are serious concerns, including but not confined to those outlined above, that the approval of the COVID-19 vaccines by the EMA was premature and reckless, and that the administration of the vaccines constituted and still does constitute ‘human experimentation’, which was and still is in violation of the Nuremberg Code.”
Video statement by Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, Professor Emeritus of Medical Microbiology and Immunology and Former Chair, Institute of Medical Microbiology and Hygiene:
“No sooner did we deliver our letter than the Norwegian Medicines Agency warnedthat COVID-19 vaccines may be too risky for use in the frail elderly, the very group these vaccines are designed to protect. We would add that, by virtue of the mechanisms of action of the vaccines, to stimulate the production of spike protein, which has adverse pathophysiological properties, there may also be vulnerable people who are not old and already ill. New data shows that vaccine side effects are three times as commonin those who have previously been infected with coronavirus, for example. None of the vaccines have undergone clinical testing for more than a few months, which is simply too short for establishing safety and efficacy.
“Therefore, as a starting point, we believe it is important to enumerate and evaluate all deaths which have occurred within 28 days of vaccination, and to compare the clinical pictures with those who have not been vaccinated.
“More broadly, with respect to the development of COVID-19 vaccines, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has stated in their Resolution 2361, on 27th January 2021, that member states must ensure all COVID-19 vaccines are supported by high quality trials that are sound and conducted in an ethical manner. EMA officials, and other regulatory bodies in EU countries, are bound by these criteria. They should be made aware that they may be violating Resolution 2361 by applying medical products still in phase 3 studies.
“Under Resolution 2361, member states must also inform citizens that vaccination is NOT mandatory and ensure that no one is politically, socially, or otherwise pressured to become vaccinated. States are further required to ensure that no one is discriminated against for not receiving the vaccine.”
The letter comes as a petitionagainst UK Government plans for vaccine passports passed 270,000 signatures, more than double that required to compel consideration for debate by MPs. The petition will be debated in the UK Parliament on 15th March 2021.
Doctors and scientists can sign the open letter by sending their name, qualifications, areas of expertise and country of practice to: [email protected].
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Due to their remote location in the Northern Marshall Islands, the people of Bikini Atoll were spared the worst of the mid-Pacific fighting between the American and Japanese armies in the final years of World War II. Their millennia-old culture and sustainable way of life ended abruptly when, in early 1946, Commodore Ben Wyatt, a representative of the occupying United States Navy, informed King Juda and other Bikini residents that the US would begin to test nuclear weapons near their homes. Wyatt asked the Bikinians to move elsewhere, stating that the temporary move was for “the good of mankind and to end all wars.” Though Wyatt may have believed his words to be true, the show of might by the US that followed neither ended all conflict, nor was the exodus short-lived. Seventy-five years later, Bikinians have yet to return.
Nuclear testing in Bikini and other Marshall Islands, which lasted from 1946 to 1958, received international attention at the time. In those early Cold War days, America demonstrated its nuclear prowess through images of mushroom cloud blasts towering over the Pacific on the cover of Time magazine and other prominent publications. The word Bikini infiltrated popular culture via the name of a two-piece swimsuit (named by a French designer to be “explosive”) and SpongeBob’s home, without simultaneously suffusing our conscience with an awareness of the injustices and suffering those blasts caused the Marshallese people.
It is time, finally, to recognize and right the wrongs perpetrated by the US government in the Marshall Islands. The US forced a new and dangerous technology on the native lands and peoples, without fully comprehending the short- and long-term consequences. The Marshall Islands–and Bikini specifically–ended up the site of most of the tests of US hydrogen bombs, weapons up to a thousand times more powerful than atomic bombs used in attacks on Japan in 1945. Later, when the refugees were briefly returned to Bikini after testing ended, they were exposed to harmful radiation amounts with devastating health effects.
To be sure, the US government has taken steps to monitor and address the contamination that resulted from these nuclear detonations. However, the status quo—studies by the Energy Department for the sake of scientific publications and reports, while Bikinians continue to live on other islands—is not only inadequate, but morally repugnant. Bikini is a native land and water that, over thousands of years, was critical to the people’s sustenance and the bedrock of their culture. While some of those who survived the decades of relocations are still alive, their children and grandchildren, including the descendants of King Juda, have yet to resettle their ancestral home. Without an immediate US-government-funded plan to resettle the living refugees, the millennia-long culture and history tied to the atoll may be lost forever. Also, as one of the highest lying islands in the region, Bikini could be the solution to challenges the Marshallese face from global warming and corresponding rise of sea levels.
But it’s not as simple as saying: “Let’s move the Bikinians back.” A permanent return to the atoll by a multi-generational community would risk serious health effects unless sources of remaining radiological contamination in Bikini’s fruit, soil, and lagoon are addressed and removed, according to our research at Columbia University’s K=1 Project, Center for Nuclear Studies. We have found radioactive materials throughout Bikini Atoll, resulting in background gamma radiation above the limit agreed upon by the Republic of the Marshall Islands and US and levels of cesium-137 in various fruits that violate most relevant international and domestic safety standards. Even the waters surrounding Bikini, a formerly plentiful source of food, are riddled with radioisotopes from the detonations. The cleanup may require a novel scientific approach on par with that used after the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear accidents. That said, a modern nuclear testing cleanup protocol may prove useful in the event of future nuclear incidents in the United States or elsewhere.
The Biden administration has promised to lead in domestic and international spheres with morals and compassion. To do so, it must engage in a truthful, comprehensive accounting of past missteps in the Marshall Islands, regardless of whether the cost of reparations and resettlement exceeds its current pledgeof roughly $110 million to Bikini. Commodore Wyatt’s allegedly “temporary” displacement of Bikinians from their native land has lasted 75 years and counting. Will the Biden administration act with morals to clean remaining radioactive material from US detonations? Will it act with compassion to help Bikinians find their way home?
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Hart Rapaport is an undergraduate at Columbia University majoring in political science & statistics. He conducts research with Columbia’s K=1 Project, Center for Nuclear Studies.
Ivana Nikolić Hughes is a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry at Columbia University and the Director of Frontiers of Science, the required course for Columbia College students. Ivana is also the Director of the K=1 Project, Center for Nuclear Studies in Arts and Sciences. The center is focused on educating students and the broader public on nuclear technology issues.
Featured image: A nuclear weapon test by the US military at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Credit: US Defense Department image via Wikimedia Commons, licensed with PD-USGov-Military.
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Should we thank Pope Francis’ invitation to the world to stare into the maw of the Iraqi landscape? Whatever image the holy man conjures with his blessings, it can hardly be more than a fleeting one.
What remains, what might endure, what might rise and be restored–is unspeakable for Americans. A blast of yellow dust obscures the present, replaced by a soft image of robed clerics wandering through ancient Mesopotamia.
Among old timers familiar with Middle East archeology, Iraq was simple– an exotic Mesopotamian desert. It yielded scientific discoveries and allowed the removal of unparalleled creations to distant museums; it inspired novels by Agatha Christie. Oil, a collateral benefit of intellectual explorations, emerged from Mesopotamia.
Today, that place has neither oil nor people…to speak of. It’s reverted to an unthreatening, legendary land: a page in American school texts, a museum lecture. Those lessons, stripped of inhabitants, are illustrated mythical beasts and ancient minarets, brick walls cemented with 4000-year-old bitumen mortar. If that ancient place produced the world’s earliest known written novel, the first inscribed legal code, those items don’t fit the allotted page entry.
In the imagination of Americans, the name Iraq is not really a country or a desert, not a democracy or a multi-ethnic nation, not a theater-of-war or a cemetery of past patriots.
The reference belongs to a fellow American, an undisputedly brave “thank-you-for-your-service” recipient. In his late 30s now, he’ll earn more accolades if victim of an IED –not clean sniper bullets, but something terroristic. If he’s diagnosed with PTSD, he’s secured employment upon retirement. Combat trauma excuses his rage, explains his domestic abuse, references his murder of fellow Americans– co-veterans, neighbors, family—and his drug addiction.
He becomes a pitiable, troubled film hero who displays immense willpower, despite his misdeeds. Or he emerges into a political candidate.
Iraq veteran is a badge of honor, a qualification, for wannabe U.S. politicians today (whatever their party affiliation). Presidential candidates Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Buttigieg boasted war experience. Across the country today, party committees scour towns and neighborhoods to identify such noble figures.
A nearby village hosts a brewery called “Do Good”. The manager explains “Do Good” honors his deceased friend; “He was a sniper in Iraq. Do Good is what he always advocated.”
This transformation from killer-sniper to symbol of democracy took hardly a decade, helped initially by best-selling soldier-authored poetry collections and memoirs, then by Hollywood. Any voter will recall films where American boys emerge valorous: defusing bombs, saving comrades, opening Christmas packages from home, craving fried chicken, caressing photos of newborn children.
To prepare for the glory and pain, the losses and merciless heat, the rigorous sniper training and persistent fear, Mesopotamia needed to be transformed from the benign to the menacing. Kept under the radar, far from American public view, Mesopotamian lads were mobilized against Iranians their own age, enemies along a shared frontier. No Shia or Sunni in Iraq then, only wrathful extremists who’d ousted Washington’s dictator in Tehran.
Never mind the name of a young, promising military officer who sent hardy farm boys into marshy borderlands for face-to-face combat. He gladly took on “religious fanatics”, having earlier served America with his quiet purge of Iraq’s communists.
After 1988 when the two neighbors ended their conflict, Iraq became “The Regime”. Occasionally a real person would emerge with a new memoir of torture under this regime’s “Republican Guard”. Even today, that demon remains more threatening than any Marine-managed torture prison or helicopter gunship firing at children.
“The Regime” became the terror behind the exodus of intellectuals that continues up to today. Uncounted. Highly reputed doctors, renowned engineers, language and history scholars slip away, welcomed by western hospitals and universities after each has somehow managed fees and endured low paid retraining to settle, hushed, in a Michigan or California suburb.
Who won that 1980s border war hardly matters. Kuwait emerged as the victor, defining a new Hitler for the U.S. imagination. How robustly the grimacing face of Saddam gripped the US imagination! Thirty allied nations rallied behind Washington’s call to liberate Kuwait. The global assault was spectacular and efficient—forget about sons and brothers lost on those borders. Forget about the following thirteen silent years while a relentless blockade took a toll greater than any battlefield. Without signs of blood and no American lost, only Iraqi children offered an occasional statistic of malnutrition, disease, or cancer deaths. The quietly murderous U.N. embargowas hardly eventful.
Good Iraq became Kurdistan; some oppressed Shiaa in a triangle of dusty desert pleaded for emancipation. (Nothing about women.) Mesopotamia, modern hospitals, bustling universities, family excursions to Europe and scientific conferences ceded to Saddam and his Republican Guards.
Finally, a motive was found for a full-scale invasion. Was it weapons of mass destruction? Something related to Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack? Or the singular Saddam demon? Minorities needing liberation, craving democracy?
A new generation of journalists headed eastward. Prize-winning books followed.
More medics and teachers disappeared. More young people forgot about education, Olympic training, sculpturing, or cultivating their Mesopotamian soil.
Pillaging and killing were massive, but no heart was won. Local newspapers and new television companies flourished and villagers brandished their purple thumbs. Prime-ministers changed seats while whoever was left became Shia-Sunni, Yazidi or Chaldean, Al-Qaeda-ISIS-Daesh.
Exhausted, the Mesopotamian dust settles over another layer of outstanding civilization.
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Many people in the United States are aware of the struggle for Civil Rights led by African Americans during the post-World War II period from the late 1940s right through the early 1970s.
Rosa L. Parks, of Alabama, gained international acclaim for her refusal to yield her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus on December 1, 1955.
Parks’ stance and the organizing work done by the Women’s Political Council led to the formation of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) which conducted a year-long bus boycott that forced the courts to end segregation practices in the city’s public transportation system. It was the actions organized by the African American community in Montgomery that catapulted a young 26-year-old minister, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., into national prominence.
After the developments in Montgomery, the broader movement to end Jim Crow and win universal suffrage gained momentum resulting in numerous court rulings, legislative initiatives and executive orders striking down the legalized “separate but equal” Supreme Court decision of 1896 in the Plessy v. Ferguson case.
Elizabeth Jennings Graham and the Campaign against Segregation in New York
Yet the antecedents for the Montgomery Bus Boycott can be traced back as far as July 1854, when African American teacher and musician, Elizabeth Jennings, attempted to board a horse-driven streetcar in New York City. Jennings, only 24 at the time, was told she could not ride on the car because she was Black.
Jennings immediately objected to the order made by the driver and demanded the right to ride to the First Colored American Congregational Church where she served as the organist. The white driver attempted to remove her physically as she continued to resist. Later a police officer was summoned and the two white men forcefully ejected Jennings from the streetcar.
Her own account which was published in at least two journals, the New York Daily Tribune and Frederick Douglass’s papers, Jennings emphasized:
“I…told him I was a respectable person, born and raised in New York, did not know where he was born, that I had never been insulted before while going to church and that he was a good for nothing impudent fellow for insulting decent persons while on their way to church.”
Jennings’ father, Thomas L. Jennings, was a Free African who had built a skills trade as a tailor. He had gained enormous stature in the New York Black community due to his successful efforts to purchase the freedom of Elizabeth’s mother, of the same name, from enslavement. Thomas L. Jennings supported his daughter Elizabeth in her effort to acquire justice.
At this time in New York City, the omnibuses and streetcars were owned by private corporations. Many of the companies would not allow African Americans to ride or if they did, maintained strict segregationist policies.
“The conductor undertook to get her off, first alleging the car was full, when that was shown to be false. He pretended the other passengers were displeased at her presence. But [when] she insisted on her rights, he took hold of her by force to expel her. She resisted. The conductor got her down on the platform, jammed her bonnet, soiled her dress and injured her person. Quite a crowd gathered. But she effectually resisted. Finally, after the car had gone on further, with the aid of a policeman they succeeded in removing her.”
The legal case would be decided in 1855 after 24-year-old Attorney Chester A. Arthur argued successfully before Brooklyn Circuit Court Judge William Rockwell who ruled in Jennings’ favor. Arthur would later become Vice-President in 1881 and succeeded James Garfield after his assassination the same year. Jennings was awarded monetary damages for the acts of discrimination and violence by the conductor and policeman.
Nonetheless, it would take another two decades of mass actions and legal work to end segregation completely within the New York transportation system. Rallies were held immediately at the First Colored American Congregational Church after the incident involving Jennings. Eventually in 1874, a Civil Rights Act was passed outlawing segregation in the state of New York.
“In 1860, Jennings married a man named Charles Graham. Their only son, Thomas J. Graham, fell ill and died in infancy in 1863. Charles passed away a few years later in 1867. Jennings continued to teach, first at the private African Free School and later in the public schools. She also founded the city’s first kindergarten for African American children, operating it from her home just south of Longacre Square (now Times Square). On June 5, 1901, Jennings passed away at age 74 and was buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery alongside Charles and Thomas.”
Legacy Continued for More Than a Century
By 1883, Ida B. Wells-Barnett (image on the right) had become a teacher and journalist in Memphis, Tennessee, a thriving southern municipality with a highly politicized African American population emerging in the aftermath of enslavement and the Civil War. In 1866, white racist mobs would attack the Black community in Memphis prompted by a conflict over the disarmament of Civil War-era militias staffed by African Americans.
Wells had graduated from Rust College in Mississippi where she was born in 1862 as an enslaved African during the Civil War. Her parents and grandparents died during the yellow fever epidemic of the late 1870s which struck Mississippi and southwest Tennessee.
The known introduction of Wells to political agitation occurred in 1883 when she was forcefully ejected from a non-smoking (women’s car) on the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad Company line. She filed a lawsuit against the company and won an initial judgement. The case was later overturned on appeal. However, Wells would go on to serve as a co-publisher of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight newspaper which was circulated in large areas throughout Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas. She became known nationally after her outspoken response to the lynching of three of her friends in Memphis during 1892. (See this)
Eventually, Wells’ newspaper offices were firebombed while she was out of the city on a speaking tour. Her business partner escaped barely with his life. Later Wells would lead an international campaign against lynching in the U.S.
She would relocate to Chicago and marry Ferdinand Barnett in 1895, an attorney and newspaper publisher as well. Wells became a co-founder of the African American women’s club movement which organized hundreds of thousands across the U.S. within cities and rural areas. Wells became an advocate of women’s suffrage and marched defiantly in the front rows of the 1913 national march in Washington, D.C. demanding the passage of a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right of women to vote, which was later ratified in 1920.
Wells-Barnett’s political origins are inextricably linked to the struggle for access to public transportation on a non-discriminatory basis. Her efforts would lay the groundwork for the emergence of the modern movements for Civil Rights, Black Power and Self-Determination in the U.S.
Lessons from Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin: The Struggle for Public Access Continues
Several months prior to the arrest of Rosa L. Parks in Montgomery, Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old African American youth, was arrested for refusing to yield her seat to a white woman. The act of defiance by Colvin illustrated clearly that the national mood among Black people was shifting during the mid-1950s.
Image below: Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin
Nevertheless, for various reasons Colvin’s case did not get the attention that Parks’ did in 1955-56, although she was a plaintiff in the landmark case of Browder v. Gayle, which ended segregation in public transportation in Montgomery. Colvin was an adolescent and an expectant mother. Many felt in Montgomery that the case could have been exploited by segregationists. Parks was a 42-year-old seamstress with a long history of political involvement dating back to the defense campaign of the Scottsboro Boys in the early 1930s in Alabama. The young men were falsely charged with rape of two white women on a freight train in 1931. Only a years-long campaign spared them from the electric chairs. (See this)
Later Parks was active around the effort to win justice for a 24-year-old African American woman, Recy Taylor, who was gang raped by six white hoodlums while walking home from church in Abbeville, Alabama in September 1944. Although the whites were never held accountable for their crimes, the incident further exposed the degree of impunity exercised by segregationists during the period. At the time of her arrest, Parks was the secretary of the Montgomery National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and also worked with E.D. Nixon, a leader within the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, an African American labor organization based in the railroad industry.
Although in the 21st century African Americans ostensibly have fundamental rights to public access and due process, the inequalities of national oppression persist. Municipalities and rural areas are facing even deeper cuts in public services amid the rising gap between the wealthy and the working class. These inequalities are more pronounced when race and nationality are taken into consideration.
Today the struggle for access must encompass the demands related to the need to increase funding for public transportation. Public transportation ranks among other major necessities which must be won by the people including the right to housing, water, utilities, education, environmental quality along with freedom from racist violence and state repression.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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Alena Douhan (image below), the UN special rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, published her preliminary report on February 12 on the impact of US and European sanctions on Venezuela.
The report laid bare how a years-long campaign of economic warfare has asphyxiated Venezuela’s economy, crushing the government’s ability to provide basic services both before and during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The [Venezuelan] government’s revenue was reported to shrink by 99%, with the country currently living on 1% of its pre-sanctions income,” Douhan found, impeding “the ability of Venezuela to respond to the Covid-19 emergency.”
Douhan thus urged
the governments of the United Kingdom, Portugal and the United States and corresponding banks to unfreeze assets of the Venezuela Central Bank to purchase medicine, vaccines, food, medical and other equipment.
The campaign to overthrow the Venezuelan government, Douhan added, “violates the principle of sovereign equality of states and constitutes an intervention in domestic affairs of Venezuela that also affects its regional relations.”
Douhan’s report follows a Center for Economy and Policy Research (CEPR) paper that estimated that sanctions were responsible for over 40,000 deaths in Venezuela in 2017–18 (FAIR.org, 6/14/19). Though sanctions were not the only factor driving economic hardship, CEPR found that they
exacerbated Venezuela’s economic crisis and made it nearly impossible to stabilize the economy, contributing further to excess deaths. All of these impacts disproportionately harmed the poorest and most vulnerable Venezuelans.
Like the CEPR study, Douhan’s report has been categorically ignored across establishment media.
By omitting the devastating impact of sanctions, corporate media attribute sole responsibility for economic and humanitarian conditions to the Venezuelan government, thereby using the misery provoked by sanctions to validate the infliction of even more misery.
Collective punishment
US and European officials have long admitted that the sanctions regime against Venezuela is collective punishment by design. Speaking to G20 foreign ministers in May 2018, then–British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson announced:
The feeling I get from talking to my counterparts is that they see no alternative to economic pressure—and it’s very sad, because obviously the downside of sanctions is that they can affect the population that you don’t want to suffer. But in the end things have got to get worse before they get better—and we may have to tighten the economic screw on Venezuela.
On March 22, 2019, a senior US government official bragged:
The effect of the sanctions [against Venezuela] is continuing and cumulative. It’s sort of like in Star Wars when Darth Vader constricts somebody’s throat, that’s what we are doing to the regime economically.
A year later, as the Covid-19 virus spread globally, US Attorney General William Barr gloatedthat the pandemic was
good timing, actually.… The [Trump] administration is taking a kind of “kick them while they’re down” approach, seemingly with the hope that by piling on sanctions and other actions, the administration can capitalize on the virus in Iran and Venezuela to spur greater public opposition to the incumbent governments and perhaps regime change.
“Although sanctions do not seem to be physical warfare weapons,” the Lancet (3/18/20) noted, “they are just as deadly, if not more so. Jeopardising the health of populations for political ends is not only illegal but also barbaric.”
Media silence
Many Western journalists, however, appear not to have seen these overt declarations of collective punishment against the Venezuelan population—a crime against humanity under Article 7 of the Statute of the International Criminal Court, according to former UN Expert Alfred de Zayas.
Loath to abandon belief in the fundamentally benign nature of Western foreign policy, corporate scribes have typically presented the devastating effects of sanctions as a mere accusation of Nicolás Maduro. “Maduro…said US sanctions were hurting his administration’s ability to buy medicines and foodstuffs” was the next-to-last paragraph of a Guardian piece (3/17/20) on Covid in Venezuela whose subhead read, “Continuing chaotic situation under Nicolás Maduro leaves hospitals and health services desperately unprepared.”
Often, they fail to mention sanctions at all. In June 2019, for instance, the Guardian’s Tom Phillips reported that “more than 4 million Venezuelans have now fled economic and humanitarian chaos,” citing would-be coup leader Juan Guaidó’s claim that the country’s economic collapse “was caused by the corruption of this regime,” without making any reference to Washington’s campaign of economic warfare.
Keeping with tradition, Douhan’s damning report has been met with stunning silence by establishment media outlets. Neither the Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post nor BBC reported on Douhan’s findings, leaving the task primarily to alternative media (Venezuelanalysis, 2/15/21; Canary, 2/13/21). (CNN—2/13/21—had an exceptional report focused on the UN report, which noted Douhan’s statement that sanctions “constitute violations of international law.”)
The issue is not that Western media are uninterested in Venezuela. In February 2019, the month after Juan Guaidó declared himself president, the Guardian published 67 separate articles about Venezuela, regularly citing the UN on Venezuela’s economic and humanitarian conditions—signaling Maduro’s sole responsibility for a crisis about which something must surely be done.
For example, the Guardian (2/27/19) reported in 2019, “The UN’s political and peace building chief, Rosemary DiCarlo, depicted a devastating collapse in Venezuela’s health system”—while making no reference to sanctions.
Similarly, the New York Times, whose editorial board had supported 10 out of 12 US-backed coups in Latin America since 1954, has regularly covered the deteriorating economic situation in Venezuela with—at best—only fleeting reference to US and European sanctions.
The New York Times (12/5/20), for instance, described how “Yajaira Paz, 35, has lost nearly everything” to the Venezuelan economic crisis: “her mother, dead from a heart problem she could not afford to treat; her brothers, to migration; her faith in democracy, to the nation’s crippled institutions” — omitting any mention of sanctions.
The Washington Post Magazine (3/3/21) ran a similarly emotive article, noting how “the pandemic wore away even more access to basic necessities in a country racked by deepening poverty and crisis,” blaming “the national mismanagement of resources” and, again, ignoring the existence of sanctions.
Corporate media thus consistently emphasizes the gravity of Venezuela’s humanitarian situation while overlooking crucial evidence on the catastrophic impact of sanctions, fortifying the very narratives deployed to justify the economic siege against Venezuela.
The collective silence over Douhan’s report is only the most recent case of propaganda by omission on Venezuela. By refusing to acknowledge Washington and London’s fundamental role in making Venezuela’s “economy scream,” corporate media play a key part in manufacturing consent for regime change.
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John McEvoy is an independent journalist whose work has featured in the International History Review, Declassified UK, the Canary, Tribune, Brasil Wire and others.
This article by Professor Michel Chossudovsky was granted the 2015 Project Censored Award.
Ranked No. 5 among the 25 most censored news stories.
Nuclear radiation resulting from the March 2011 Fukushima disaster –which threatens life on planet earth– is not front page news in comparison to the most insignificant issues of public concern, including the local level crime scene or the tabloid gossip reports on Hollywood celebrities.
The shaky political consensus both in Japan, the U.S. and Western Europe is that the crisis at Fukushima has been contained.
The truth is otherwise. Known and documented, the ongoing dumping of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean constitutes a potential trigger to a process of global radioactive contamination.
This water contains plutonium 239 and its release into the Ocean has both local as well as global repercussions. A microgram of plutonium if inhaled, according to Dr. Helen Caldicott, can cause death:
Certain isotopes of radioactive plutonium are known as some of the deadliest poisons on the face of the earth. A mere microgram (a speck of darkness on a pinhead) of Plutonium-239, if inhaled, can cause death, and if ingested, radioactive Plutonium can be harmful, causing leukemia and other bone cancers.
“In the days following the 2011 earthquake and nuclear plant explosions, seawater meant to cool the nuclear power plants instead carried radioactive elements back to the Pacific ocean. Radioactive Plutonium was one of the elements streamed back to sea.” (decodescience.com). (emphasis added)
It would appear that the radioactive water has already penetrated parts of the Japanese coastline:
Environmental testing of shoreline around the nuclear plant (as well fish, especially Tuna) showed negligible amounts of Plutonium in the seawater. The Plutonium, from what little is reported, sank into the sediments off the Japanese coast.” (Ibid)
A recent report suggests that the Japanese government is intent upon releasing the remaining radioactive water into the Ocean. The proposed “solution” becomes the cause of radioactive contamination of both the Japanese coastline as well as the Pacific Ocean, extending to the coastline of North America.
While the chairman of the Nuclear Radiation Authority recognizes that the water in the tanks is heavily “tainted”, a decision has nonetheless been taken to empty the tanks and dump the water into the Ocean:
The head of Japan’s nuclear watchdog said contaminated water stored at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant should be released into the ocean to ensure safe decommissioning of the reactors.
Shunichi Tanaka, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulation Authority, made the comment Dec. 12 after visiting the facility to observe progress in dismantling the six reactors. The site was severely damaged in the tsunami generated by the 2011 earthquake.
“I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of tanks (holding water tainted with radioactive substances),” Tanaka told reporters, indicating they pose a danger to decommissioning work. “We have to dispose of the water.”
With regard to expected protests by local fishermen over the discharge, Tanaka said, “We also have to obtain the consent of local residents in carrying out the work, so we can somehow mitigate (the increase in tainted water).”
Tanaka has said previously that to proceed with decommissioning, tainted water stored on the site would need to be released into the sea so long as it had been decontaminated to accepted safety standards.
“While (the idea) may upset people, we must do our utmost to satisfy residents of Fukushima,” Tanaka said, adding that the NRA would provide information to local residents based on continuing studies of radioactive elements in local waters.
The inspection tour was Tanaka’s second since he became NRA chief in September 2012. He last visited in April 2013.
During his visit, Tanaka observed work at a trench on the ocean side of the No. 2 reactor building, where highly contaminated water is being pumped out. He also inspected barriers set up around the storage tanks to prevent leaks of tainted water.
Tanaka praised the completion in November of work to remove all spent nuclear fuel from the No. 4 reactor building, as well as changes to work procedures that he said allows for the completion of the work at the No. 2 reactor trench. Hiromi Kumai , NRA Head Signals Massive Release of Tainted Water to Help Decommission Fukushima Site Asahi Shimbun December 13, 2014
The contradictory statements of the NRA chief avoid addressing the broader implications, by giving the impression that the issue is local and that local fishermen off the Fukushima coast will be consulted.
At Fukushima, reports confirm that alpha, beta, gamma particles and neutrons have been released:
“While non-ionizing radiation and x-rays are a result of electron transitions in atoms or molecules, there are three forms of ionizing radiation that are a result of activity within the nucleus of an atom. These forms of nuclear radiation are alpha particles (α-particles), beta particles (β-particles) and gamma rays (γ-rays).
Alpha particles are heavy positively charged particles made up of two protons and two neutrons. They are essentially a helium nucleus and are thus represented in a nuclear equation by either α or . See the Alpha Decay page for more information on alpha particles.
Beta particles come in two forms: and . particles are just electrons that have been ejected from the nucleus. This is a result of sub-nuclear reactions that result in a neutron decaying to a proton. The electron is needed to conserve charge and comes from the nucleus. It is not an orbital electron. particles are positrons ejected from the nucleus when a proton decays to a neutron. A positron is an anti-particle that is similar in nearly all respects to an electron, but has a positive charge. See the Beta Decay page for more information on beta particles.
Gamma rays are photons of high energy electromagnetic radiation (light). Gamma rays generally have the highest frequency and shortest wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum. There is some overlap in the frequencies of gamma rays and x-rays; however, x-rays are formed from electron transitions while gamma rays are formed from nuclear transitions. See the Gamma Rays for more” (SOURCE: Canadian Nuclear Association)
“A neutron is a particle that is found in the nucleus, or center, of atoms. It has a mass very close to protons, which also reside in the nucleus of atoms. Together, they make up almost all of the mass of individual atoms. Each has a mass of about 1 amu, which is roughly 1.6×10-27kg. Protons have a positive charge and neutrons have no charge, which is why they were more difficult to discover.” (SOURCE: Neutron Radiation)
“Many different radioactive isotopes are used in or are produced by nuclear reactors. The most important of these are described below:
1. Uranium 235 (U-235) is the active component of most nuclear reactor fuel.
2. Plutonium (Pu-239) is a key nuclear material used in modern nuclear weapons and is also present as a by-product in certain reprocessed fuels used in some nuclear reactors. Pu-239 is also produced in uranium reactors as a byproduct of fission of U-235.
3. Cesium (Cs-137 ) is a fission product of U-235. It emits beta and gamma radiation and can cause radiation sickness and death if exposures are high enough. …
4. Iodine 131 (I-131), also a fission product of U-235, emits beta and gamma radiation. After inhalation or ingestion, it is absorbed by and concentrated in the thyroid gland, where its beta radiation damages nearby thyroid tissue (SOURCE: Amesh A. Adalja, MD, Eric S. Toner, MD, Anita Cicero, JD, Joseph Fitzgerald, MS, MPH, and Thomas V. Inglesby MD, Radiation at Fukushima: Basic Issues and Concepts, March 31, 2011)
This article was first published on March 21, 2019
The eight year anniversary of the triple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility passed mostly without comment in mainstream media circles. In spite of ongoing radiological contamination that will continue to spread and threaten human health for lifetimes to come, other stories dominate the international news cycle. The climate change conundrum, serious though it may be, seemingly crowds out all other clear and present environmental hazards.
As part of efforts to normalize this historic event and cover it up in its magnitude, the Japanese government has invested considerable financial, public relations and other resources into what they are billing the ‘Recovery Olympics‘ set to take place in a year’s time in Tokyo.
But Helen Caldicott warns that the dangers associated with Fukushima have not gone away and remain a cause for concern.
Dr. Helen Caldicott has been an author, physician and one of the world’s leading anti-nuclear campaigners. She helped to reinvigorate the group of Physicians for Social Responsibility, acting as president from 1978 to 1983. Since its founding in 2001 she served as president of the US based Nuclear Policy Research Institute later called Beyond Nuclear which initiates symposia and educational projects aimed at informing the public about the dangers of nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and nuclear war. And she is the editor of the 2014 book, Crisis Without End: The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe.
On the week marking the eighth anniversary of the Fukushima meltdowns, the Global Research News Hour radio program, hosted by Michael Welch, reached out to Dr.Caldicott to get her expert opinion on the health dangers posed by the most serious nuclear disaster since, at least, the 1986 Chernobyl event.
Global Research: Now the Japanese government is preparing to welcome visitors to Japan for the 2020 Olympic Games, and coverage of the 8th anniversary of the Fukushima disaster is hardly, it seems to me, registered given the significant radiological and other dangers that you cited and your authors cited in your 2014 book, Crisis Without End. Now it’s been more than four years since that book came out. I was hoping you could update our listenership on what is currently being recognized as the main health threats in 2019, perhaps not registered in the book, that you’re currently looking at in relation to the Fukushima meltdown.
Helen Caldicott: Well it’s difficult because the Japanese government has authorized really only examination of thyroid cancer. Now thyroid cancer is caused by radioactive iodine and there were many, many cases of that after Chernobyl. And already, they’ve looked at children under the age of 18 in the Fukushima prefecture at the time of the accident, and … how many children… 100…no 201 by June 18 last year… 201 had developed thyroid cancer. Some cancers had metastasized. The incidence of thyroid cancer in that population normally is 1 per million. So obviously it’s an epidemic of thyroid cancer and it’s just starting now.
What people need to understand is the latent period of carcinogenesis, ie the time after exposure to radiation when cancers develop is any time from 3 years to 80 years. And so it’s a very, very long period. Thyroid cancers appear early. Leukemia appears about 5 to 10 years later. They’re not looking for leukemia. Solid cancers of every organ, or any organ as such appear about 15 years later and continue and in fact the Hibakusha from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki who are still alive are still developing cancers in higher than normal numbers.
The Japanese government has told doctors that they are not to talk to their patients about radiation and illnesses derived thereof, and in fact if the doctors do do that, they might lose their funding from the government. The IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency interestingly set up a hospital – a cancer hospital – in Fukushima along with the Fukushima University for people with cancer, which tells you everything.
So there’s a huge, huge cover up. I have been to Japan twice and particularly to Fukushima and spoken to people there and the parents are desperate to hear the truth even if it’s not good truth. And they thanked me for telling them the truth. So it’s an absolute medical catastrophe I would say, and a total cover up to protect the nuclear industry and all its ramifications.
GR: Now, are we talking about some of the, the contamination that happened 8 years ago or are we talking about ongoing emissions from, for example–
HC: Well there are ongoing emissions into the air consistently, number one. Number two, a huge amount of water is being stored –over a million gallons in tanks at the site. That water is being siphoned off from the reactor cores, the damaged melted cores. Water is pumped consistently every day, every hour, to keep the cores cool in case they have another melt. And that water, of course, is extremely contaminated.
Now they say they’ve filtered out the contaminants except for the tritium which is part of the water molecule, but they haven’t. There’s strontium, cesium, and many other elements in that water – it’s highly radioactive – and because there isn’t enough room to build more tanks, they’re talking about emptying all that water into the Pacific Ocean and the fishermen are very, very upset. The fish already being caught off Fukushima, some are obviously contaminated. But this will be a disaster.
Water comes down from the mountains behind the reactors, flows underneath the reactors into the sea and always has. And when the reactors were in good shape, the water was fine, didn’t get contaminated. But now the three molten cores in contact with that water flowing under the reactors and so the water flowing into the Pacific is very radioactive and that’s a separate thing from the million gallons or more in those tanks.
They put up a refrigerated wall of frozen dirt around the reactors to prevent that water from the mountains flowing underneath the reactors, which has cut down the amount of water flowing per day from 500 tons to about a hundred and fifty. But of course, if they lose electricity, that refrigeration system is going to fail, and it’s a transient thing anyway so it’s ridiculous. In terms… So over time the Pacific is going to become more and more radioactive.
They talk about decommissioning and removing those molten cores. When robots go in and try and have a look at them, their wiring just melts and disappears. They’re extraordinarily radioactive. No human can go near them because they would die within 48 hours from the radiation exposure. They will never, and I quote never, decommission those reactors. They will never be able to stop the water coming down from the mountains. And so, the truth be known, it’s an ongoing global radiological catastrophe which no one really is addressing in full.
GR: Do we have a better reading on, for example the thyroids, but also leukemia incubation—
HC: No they’re not looking–well, leukemia they’re not looking for leukemia…
GR: Just thyroid
HC: They’re not charting it. So the only cancer they’re looking at is thyroid cancer and that’s really high, and you know it’s at 201 have already been diagnosed and some have metastasized. And a very tight lid is being kept on any other sort of radiation related illnesses and leukemia and the like. All the other cancers and the like, and leukemia is so… It’s not just a catastrophe it’s a…
GR: …a cover up
HC: Yeah. I can’t really explain how I feel medically about it. It’s just hideous.
GR: Well I have a brother who’s a physician, who was pointing to well we should maybe, the World Health Organization is a fairly authoritative body of research for all of the indicators and epidemiological aspects of this, but you seem to suggest the World Health Organization may not be that reliable in light of the fact that they are partnered with the IAEA. Is that my understanding…?
HC: Correct. They signed a document, I think in ‘59, with the IAEA that they would not report any medical effects of radiological disasters and they’ve stuck to that. So they are in effect in this area part of the International Atomic Energy Agency whose mission is to promote nuclear power. So don’t even think about the WHO. it’s really obscene.
GR: So what would… the incentive would be simply that they got funding?
HC: I don’t know. I really don’t know but they sold themselves to the devil.
GR: That’s pretty incredible. So there’s also the issue of biomagnification in the oceans, where you have radioactive debris, hundreds of tons of this radioactive water getting into the oceans and biomagnifying up through the food chain, so these radioactive particles can get inside our bodies. Could you speak to what you anticipate to see, what you would anticipate, whether it’s recorded by World Health authorities or not, what we could expect to see in the years ahead in terms of the illnesses that manifest themselves?
HC: Well number one, Fukushima is a very agricultural prefecture. Beautiful, beautiful peaches, beautiful food, and lots of rice. And the radiation spread far and wide through the Fukushima prefecture, and indeed they have been plowing up millions and millions of tons of radioactive dirt and storing it in plastic bags all over the prefecture. The mountains are highly radioactive and every time it rains, down comes radiation with the water. So the radiation – the elements. And there are over 200 radioactive elements made in a nuclear reactor. Some have lives of seconds and some have lives of millions of years or lasts for millions of years will I say. So there are many many isotopes, long-lasting isotopes – cesium, strontium, tritium is another one – but many, many on the soil in Fukushima.
And what happens is – you talked about biomagnification – when the plants take up the water from the soil, they take up the cesium which is a potassium analog – it resembles potassium. Strontium 90 resembles calcium and the like. And these elements get magnified by orders of magnitude in the rice and in the plants. And so when you eat food that is grown in Fukushima, the chances are it’s going to be relatively radioactive.
They’ve been diluting radioactive rice with non-radioactive rice to make it seem a bit better. Now, into the ocean go these isotopes as well, and the algae bio-magnify them by – you know -ten to a hundred times or more. And then the crustaceans eat the algae, bio-magnify it more. The little fish eat the crustaceans, the big fish eat the little fish and the like. And tuna found in – off the coast of California some years ago contained isotopes from Fukushima. Also fish, being caught on the west coast of California contained some of these isotopes. So, it’s an ongoing bio-magnification catastrophe.
And the thing is that you can’t even taste, smell or see radioactive elements in your food. They’re invisible. And it takes a long time for cancers to occur. And you can’t identify a particular cancer caused by a particular substance or isotope. You can only identify that problem by doing epidemiological studies comparing irradiated people with non-irradiated people to see what the cancer levels are and that data comes from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and many, many, many other studies.
GR: Chernobyl as well, no?
HC: Oh, Chernobyl! Well, a wonderful book was produced by the, uh, Russians, and published by the New York Academy of Sciences, called Chernobyl with over 5000 on the ground studies of children and diseases in Belarus and the Ukraine, and all over Europe. And by now over a million people have already died from the Chernobyl disaster. And many diseases have been caused by that, including premature aging in children, microcephaly in babies, very small heads, diabetes, leukemia, I mean, I could go on and on.
Um, and those diseases which have been very well described in that wonderful book, um, which everyone should read, are not being addressed or identified or looked for in the Fukushima or Japanese population.
May I say that parts of Tokyo are extremely radioactive. People have been measuring the dirt from rooves of apartments, from the roadway, from vacuum cleaner dust. And some of these samples, they’re so radioactive that they would classify to be buried in radioactive waste facilities in America. So, that’s number one.
Number two, to have the Olympics in Fukushima just defies imagination. And uh, some of the areas where the athletes are going to be running, the dust and dirt there has been measured, and it’s highly radioactive. So, this is Abe, the Prime Minister of Japan, who set this up to – as a sort of way to obscure what Fukushima really means. And those young athletes, you know, who are – and young people are much more sensitive to radiation, developing cancers later than older people – it’s just a catastrophe waiting to happen.
GR: Dr. Caldicott…
HC:They’re calling it the radioactive Olympics!
GR: (Chuckle). Is there anything that people can do, you know, whether they live in Japan or, say, the west coast of North America to mitigate the effects that this disaster has had, and may still be having eight years later?
HC: Yes. Do not eat any Japanese food because you don’t know where it’s sourced. Do not eat fish from Japan, miso, rice, you name it. Do not eat Japanese food. Period. Um, fish caught off the west coast of Canada and America, well, they’re not testing the fish so I don’t know what you’d do. Um, I mean, most of it’s probably not radioactive but you don’t know because you can’t taste it.
Um they’ve closed down the air-borne radioactive measuring instruments off the west coast of America, uh, but that’s pretty bad, because there still could be another huge accident at those reactors.
For instance, if there’s another large earthquake, number one, all those tanks would be destroyed and the water would pour into the Pacific. Number two, there could be another meltdown, a release – huge release of radiation, um, from the damaged reactors. So, things are very tenuous, but they’re not just tenuous now. They’re going to be tenuous forever.
Corporate news sources are reporting that Austria has suspended their roll-out of the experimental AstraZeneca COVID vaccines after a 49-year-old nurse has died “as a result of severe coagulation disorders,” and a 35-year-old nurse developed a pulmonary embolism following the COVID injections.
Israel has rapidly deteriorated into a segregated culture that discriminates against people who have not received experimental COVID-19 vaccinations, say Israeli citizens who are reaching out for help on media platforms.
In the latest episode of “TRUTH” with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Kennedy sat down with the iconic Naomi Wolf for a spirited discussion on abuse of power, standing up to tyranny and preserving our Constitution.
Maybe you have noticed the rise in public incredulity toward the coronavirus narrative that you hear all day from the mainstream media. More doubts. More opposition. More protests. And far less trust. You are hardly alone.
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.
Over the last few weeks, investors’ sentiment about future inflation and future interest rates has changed. It seems that complacency about inflationary pressures in some parts of the economy is coming to an end.
Will Washington be permanently militarized in the wake of what happened? Will something similar be ordered for New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other major US cities — on the dubious pretext of protecting national security?
The battlefields are silent, but the suffering continues from US-EU sanctions which deprive citizens of some medical supplies, and building materials to repair their homes and businesses. The economy is in freefall, while COVID-19 has added to the hopelessness many feel.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken made statements saying that there is currently no American interest in carrying out operations and interventions that are too expensive. Meanwhile, the American escalation in northeastern Syria continues and creates uncertainty for the future.
Although Azerbaijan, with assistance from Syrian mercenaries and Turkish special forces, recaptured seven districts surrounding the former Soviet Union’s Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast from Armenian personnel, it appears that a new conflict is about to break out.
Ten Years Ago. This incisive and carefully researched article was first written by Stephen Lendman in April 2013
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In her book titled “No Immediate Danger: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth,” nuclear power/environmental health expert Rosalie Bertell (1929 – 2012) said:
“Should the public discover the true health cost(s) of nuclear pollution, a cry would rise from all parts of the world and people would refuse to cooperate passively with their own death.”
In her article titled “Radioactivity: No Immediate Danger,” she coined a new word. “Omnicide” describes the ultimate human rejection of life. It’s “difficult to comprehend,” but it’s happening, she said.
She called industrial radioactive pollution “cumulatively greater than Chernobyl. We are now in a no-win situation with radioactive materials, where (it’s) acceptable to have cancer deaths, deformed children and miscarriages.”
Industry propaganda falsely claims nuclear power is clean and green. The nuclear fuel cycle discharges significant amounts of greenhouse gases.
It’s also responsible for hundreds of thousands of curies of deadly radioactive gases and elements in the environment annually.
“Claiming nuclear production of energy is ‘clean,’ ” said Bertell, “is like dieting but stuffing yourself with food between meals.”
Separately, she said:
“There is no such thing as a radiation exposure that will not do damage. There is a hundred per cent possibility that there will be damage to cells. The next question is: which damage do you care about?”
All toxic hazards are serious, she explained. Nuclear radiation is worst of all. It threatens all human life. “Our present path is headed toward species death – whether fast with nuclear war or technological disaster, or slow, by poison.”
Global suicide is certain. Continued nuclear proliferation and Fukushima accelerated it.
March 11 marked its second anniversary. It’s perhaps the worst ever environmental disaster. Reliable experts call large parts of Japan unsafe. They’re too hazardous to live in.
According to Professor Hiroaki Koide, Tokyo’s as contaminated as Fukushima. Thousands of city residents protested. They oppose nuclear power. They want safe energy sources replacing it.
Radiation contamination is widespread. East Asia, North America, Europe and other areas are affected.
Hazardous air, water and land readings across many areas globally are many multiples too high. Future epidemic cancer levels are certain. It occurs when body cells divide and spread uncontrollably. If untreated, it metastasizes and kills.
Michel Chossudovsky calls Fukushima “a nuclear war without a war.” It’s an “unspoken crisis of worldwide nuclear contamination.”
Tens of thousands of children have confirmed thyroid abnormalities. They reflect the tip of the iceberg. Children are especially vulnerable. No radiation dose is safe.
Karl Grossman wants planet earth made a “nuclear free zone.” We barely made it through the last century without a “major nuclear weapons exchange,” he said.
Nuclear energy in all forms is unsafe. Safe, clean, renewable solar, wind, geothermal, and other energy sources are readily available.
Admiral Hyman Rickover (1900 – 1986) was the father of America’s nuclear navy. In January 1982, he told a congressional committee that until a few billion years ago, “it was impossible to have any life on earth.”
“There was so much radiation on earth you couldn’t have any life, fish or anything.” Gradually the amount subsided. “Now, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible.”
“Every time you produce radiation, (a) horrible force” is unleashed. “In some cases (it’s) for billions of years, and I think the human race is going to wreck itself.”
“I am talking about humanity. The most important thing we could do is start having an international meeting where we first outlaw nuclear weapons to start off with. Then we outlaw nuclear reactors, too.”
“The lesson for history is when a war starts, every nation will ultimately use whatever weapons are available. That is the lesson learned time and again.” ”
“Therefore, we must expect, if another war, a serious war breaks out, we will use nuclear energy in some form. We will probably destroy ourselves.” Widespread contamination acts in slow motion.
Disturbing reports explain. In early April, around 120 tons of contaminated water leaked from Fukushima’s No. 1’s underground storage tank. It contained an estimated 710 billion becquerels of radioactivity.
Water around the affected tank is highly radioactive. It’s about 800 meters from the Pacific. Government and Tokyo Electric (Tepco) claimed it won’t likely reach it. Numerous previous reports suggest otherwise.
Tepco general manager Masayuki Ono said “(w)e cannot deny the fact that our faith in the underwater tanks is being lost.”
In November 2012, Nature.com headlined “Ocean still suffering from Fukushima fallout,” saying:
“Radioactivity is persisting in the ocean waters close to Japan’s ruined nuclear power plant at Fukushima Daiichi.”
New data show high contamination levels. “The Fukushima disaster caused by far the largest discharge of radioactivity into the ocean ever seen.”
Radiation levels aren’t dropping. “The implications are serious for the fishing industry.”
On December 26, CleanEnergy.org headlined “Japan Continues Struggle with Aftermath from the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster,” saying:
“….an estimated 160,000 (Japanese) citizens still have not returned home. Reports of illness in humans and livestock continue to underscore the far reaching and difficult to predict impacts that a nuclear accident can cause.”
In July 2012, 36% of Japanese children screened had abnormal thyroid growths. Months later an illness called the “Fukushima syndrome” was killing cattle throughout Fukushima Prefecture.
Mutations were found in butterflies and other insects. Their shorter life cycles allow genetic disruptions to show up sooner than in humans or other mammals.
On April 11, Bloomberg.com headlined “Tepco Faces Decision to Dump Radioactive Water in Pacific,” saying:
“Leaks were found in three of seven pits in the past week….” Options for moving contaminated water are limited.
“With Japan’s rainy season approaching, contaminated water levels are likely to increase…”
“Yesterday, Tepco reported another leak of radiated water, this time from a pipe.”
“Pacific bluefin tuna caught off San Diego in August 2011 was found to contain radioactive cesium 10 times higher than fish seized in previous years….” Perhaps its much higher now.
On April 15, Science Daily headlined “The Fukushima Dai-Ichi Power Plant Accident: Two Years On, the Fallout Continues,” saying:
“….(S)cientists are still trying to quantify the extent of the damage.” Most important is “determining just how much hazardous material escaped into the atmosphere….”
Japan Atomic Energy Agency researchers now say previously estimated “137C and 131l” release rates were too low.
On March 11, 2013, nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen said “(t)here’s definitely a large crack, perhaps five inches in diameter, in Fukushima reactor 2.”
Containment is sorely lacking. Pacific Ocean leakage continues.
On April 24, Natural News headlined “Massive, uncontained leak at Fukushima is pouring over 710 billion becquerels of radioactive materials into atmosphere,” saying:
It’s the largest ever plant leakage. Fukushima’s disaster never ends. It “keeps on giving.”
“(N)ew reports indicate that a wealth of new radioactive materials have been spewed into the atmosphere.”
It’s spreading globally. Nuclear radiation is forever. It doesn’t dissipate or disappear. No safe level exists. Every dose is an overdose. Bertell was right. “Omnicide” threatens everyone.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].
His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”
All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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A Dem Capitol Hill security report on the January 6 anti-Trump false flag for Biden/Harris to replace DJT ignored the diabolical plot — a US Reichstag fire.
Will Washington be permanently militarized in the wake of what happened?
Will something similar be ordered for New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other major US cities — on the dubious pretext of protecting national security?
Mandates in place since seasonal flu was renamed covid were unthinkable pre-2020 but happened largely with public compliance?
If ordered, will Americans accept militarized US cities that infringe on public assembly, free movement, and other constitutional rights?
Mass acceptance of social control last year showed that when manipulated by invented threats, most people will go along with what harms their health, well-being and fundamental rights.
The Democrats task force 1-6 recommended initiation of a permanent militarized police battalion staffed with rotating National Guard and Pentagon reserve forces — on the dubious pretext of protecting against violent outbreaks, the report saying:
“Our national capital is a prominent tourist destination, venue for many peaceful First Amendment activities, and a high-value target for foreign terrorists or domestic extremists (sic).”
“Yet it has no dedicated quick reaction force for response to crises.”
No January 6 “violent insurrection” occurred on Capitol Hill.
Hostile-to-Trump elements infiltrated largely nonviolent Trump protesters.
They got access to Capitol Hill after police and federal law enforcers opened barricades surrounding it, permitting their entry into the main building.
Inside, guards led them to designated areas. What happened was orchestrated by anti-Trump dark forces well in advance.
Instead of preventing what happened, Capitol Hill security facilitated it in what appears to have been the climax to a homeland color revolution to end Trump’s election challenge.
Recommendations by the Capitol Security Review task force — headed by retired General Russel Honore — called for the following:
Increasing numbers of city police from 1,800 to around 2,650.
Establishing a new intelligence unit on the pretext of improving civil defense.
Increased funding for militarized equipment, training, permanent retractable fencing around Capitol Hill, along with a “fully integrated system of obstacles, cameras, sensors and alarms.”
Enhanced screening to include “background checks for identification card holders.”
Expanding numbers of Dignitary Protection Service members.
Providing militarized police protection for congressional members.
Empowering the city’s police chief to request greater militarization of the capital to deal with perceived (or invented) emergencies.
Following staged January 6 events, over 25,000 National Guard troops were deployed to the nation’s capital.
Over 5,000 remain. The task force report also recommended that DHS develop an overall security plan for Washington and surrounding areas, adding:
“The collective planning effort would be key to developing a shared understanding for any response effort and better enable unity of effort.”
“This plan should be exercised quarterly through table-top exercises and reinforced in daily operations.”
Congress will likely pass legislation to incorporate task force recommendations, Biden to sign it into law.
Perhaps more repressive legislation will follow, similar to the aftermath of the 9/11 mother of all false flags to that time — police state America to be hardened more than already.
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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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Although Azerbaijan, with assistance from Syrian mercenaries and Turkish special forces, recaptured seven districts surrounding the former Soviet Union’s Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast from Armenian personnel, it appears that a new conflict is about to break out. After a humiliating loss due to Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s unpreparedness and/or disinterest in maintaining control over the seven districts, a direct land route was supposedly granted to Azerbaijan so it can access its Nakhchivan exclave via a corridor through Armenia’s Syunik province, which Azerbaijani’s call Zangezur. This was supposedly agreed upon with the signing of the November 10 trilateral (Armenia-Azerbaijan-Russia) ceasefire agreement.
Monte Melkonian, a Lieutenant Colonel from the first Nagorno-Karabakh War (1988-1994), said in the early 1990’s that if Armenians lost Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan, they would next lose Syunik Province, the thin strip of land separating Azerbaijan-proper from Nakhchivan. He stated that “If we lose [Karabakh], we turn the final page of our people’s history.” He believed that if Azerbaijani forces succeeded in deporting Armenians from Karabakh, they would then advance on Syunik and other regions of Armenia. If Azerbaijan were to capture Syunik province, this would not only connect Azerbaijan-proper to Nakhchivan, but it would also give Turkey direct access to the oil and gas rich Caspian Sea and onwards to Central Asia.
Azerbaijan defends its position to recapture Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has also maintained that his country is only interested in recapturing what it calls occupied territory.
However, Turkish and Azerbaijani nationalists have called for the occupation of Syunik province to end Nakhchivan’s detachment from Azerbaijan-proper. Many prominent Armenians warn that the long-term aim of Turkey and Azerbaijan is to create a smaller Armenian rump state based around today’s northern Armenia.It appears that Azerbaijan is preparing for a new military conflict to capture Syunik from Armenia.
Aliyev said during a speech at an economic conference last week that a “new transport corridor will pass through Zangezur, a historic territory of Azerbaijan, and will connect mainland Azerbaijan with its integral part, the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic, and Turkey.” Ignoring Aliyev’s fallacy that Syunik is historically Azerbaijani territory, Armenian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Anna Naghdalyan claimed that “with such a provocative statement, calling Zangezur a ‘historic Azerbaijani territory’ and making reference to an imaginary corridor, the President of Azerbaijan deliberately undermines the implementation of the November 9 and January 11 trilateral statements. Article 9 of the November 9 trilateral statement does not mention the establishment of a corridor.”
The Azerbaijani president on Tuesday said that “Armenia wants to obstruct the implementation of the Zangezur corridor, but they will not succeed. We will force them.” This is a clear indication that Azerbaijan is prepared to use force to open a transportation corridor through Armenian territory to connect Nakhchivan with Azerbaijan-proper. Aliyev’s statement comes as Azerbaijani media reported at the end of February that Azerbaijani Armed Forces will conduct a special operation in Karabakh. “We cannot tell you exactly which area this will happen, but there is an accumulation of military equipment on both sides,” the report said.
In another suggestion that Azerbaijan is preparing for a new military operation against Syunik province, a Turkish Boeing 737AEW&C early warning and control aircraft was circling near the border with Armenia. This is the same plane codenamed “CENAH01” which was used during the opening days of last year’s war. There are also reports that Azerbaijan is calling up reservists, while at the same time the Turkish and Azerbaijani military have conducted joint exercises near the Armenian border.
The suggestion that Azerbaijan is preparing for a new conflict comes at a time when it appears that Ukraine is preparing for a spring offensive against militias in Donbass. There is a possibility that Azerbaijan and Ukraine, both close allies of Turkey, could launch simultaneous operations to force Russia to make concessions on behalf of Donbass militias and Armenia. Turkey strongly emphasises that Crimea is Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory and that the Tartar minority are supposedly oppressed. In addition, Turkey provides drones to the Ukrainian military and also says it will not hesitate to act against Armenia if it does not succumb to its demands.
Despite Pashinyan’s attempts to pivot Armenia away from Russia and towards the liberal West, Moscow is now helping the Armenian military to reform and rearm. Armenian Defense Minister Vagharshak Harutyunyan said lately that “conducting military reform in Armenia isn’t just planned, but is already being carried out, and our Russian colleagues are directly involved in this process.” According to him, the main efforts will be directed to the development of control systems, intelligence, electronic warfare, air defense and unmanned aircraft, missile forces and artillery. In response, Aliyev said that Russia should not help Armenia modernize its army or provide new weapons.
More importantly, Armenia is a member-state of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). If Armenia is attacked by a non-member state, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Russia would be obligated to provide assistance.
Although it is inconceivable that Azerbaijan, even with Turkish support, would be willing to antagonize Russia into a military conflict, the question begs whether Moscow would be able to handle simultaneous conflicts in the Caucasus and Donbass if Azerbaijan and Ukraine are to launch simultaneous spring offensives, in addition to Russia’s commitments in Syria and indirectly in Libya. It is likely that Turkey would be urging Azerbaijan and Ukraine to make simultaneous actions to gain concessions from Russia, such as forcing Armenia to open a transportation corridor between Azerbaijan-proper and Nakhchevan.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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There is a “crack in the veneer that Israel can just oppress and destroy Palestinian lives forever” is how Lee Camp sums up after interviewing Sivan Tal in Moment of Clarity about the latter’s decision (along with his wife Dori) to refuse to allow his son to be conscripted in the Israeli military.
Unlike the situation in 2017 with their older daughter Hadas, when she herself publicly refused to enlist and spent 60 days in jail, Sivan and Dori Tal are taking a novel approach to the situation with their son Yair. They are saying that, even though their son is 18, they are still his guardians and are taking on the responsibility of refusing for him.
In this way, they are also challenging the implicit collusion of other Jewish Israeli parents with the crimes of the Zionist apartheid regime against Palestinians, even as they acknowledge the enormous social pressures “from all sides” that such a decision entails, not least for their young son.
It’s hard enough these days of the rise of the fascistic spirit for parents to instill humanistic values in their children. But for those living under a Zionist regime like Sivan and Dori, the battle for the soul of their children is one akin to what is described in The Turn of the Screw.
In a study titled ‘Social and Moral Disintegration of the Zionist Family’ in Journal of Applied Sciences, Adnan Al-Ahmad writes in the introduction:
The Zionist regime in occupied Palestine is a peculiar sort of regime, for it has no resemblance to any social or political in the world. It is a racial and capricious regime which is based on aggression, militarism, territorial expansion, imperialism, deception and hatred of justice and humanity[1]. A notorious entity like the Zionist regime characterized by all these negative features cannot exist and continue without bringing unlimited sufferings and despair to its own subjects, those of neighboring territories and to the totality of the human race.
Sivan and Dori Tal are outspoken about the harm done to their children through indoctrination by the Israeli military at a very early age at school, growing up with no understanding or awareness of the involvement of the Israeli military in horrific war crimes as it continues to maintain the colonization and occupation of Palestine.
One can imagine, therefore, the time and effort it took for them to counteract the intense pressures on their children from outside the home.
In the letter addressed to the conscientious objectors’ committee that they posted on Facebook, Sivan and Dori write:
We have raised him [their son Yair] with love, protected him, supported and educated him for 18 years to the universal values that we believe in. Serving in the IDF stands in stark contrast to these values. Yair is not the property of the state, and the state does not have a moral right to forcibly recruit him to an organization that consistently violates international human rights conventions. We believe that it is our moral duty to oppose his enlistment to the IDF. It is our responsibility as parents.
In answer to a question I asked him, Sivan Tal emphasized the following point:
The message we tried to convey in our letter is that our son’s willingness or unwillingness to enlist or not is not the issue; we take it out of the equation. Our message is that parents’ consent should be mandatory. The Israeli education system and the whole surrounding doesn’t make it a viable option for the young high school graduates to refuse (except for a handful of special ones). They are brainwashed and they are put under heavy pressure to go and we need to challenge the system, and we demand that parents have the right to object [on behalf of their children].
In his talk on Moment of Clarity, Sivan Tal says, “I am Jewish, I love the people, I want to make Israel better not stronger; it’s strong enough already!” He adds:
Israel is committing crimes against Judaism because it uses Judaism as an excuse for all the atrocities taking place in Israel, which is an apartheid state, but in many ways, it is much worse than … South Africa, where nobody questions the nativeness [of the Africans there] or their right to be in their homeland. It takes a very twisted mind to think about our immigration from Europe [to Palestine] as a return from 2000 years ago. [Palestinian Arabs] are native and [yet] we object to their right to live in their homeland… They deserve a better future just like us.
The Tal family on vacation [courtesy Sivan Tal]
At the end of the interview, Lee Camp says, “I knew I couldn’t put ‘Israel’ in the title of this video, because it might get banned or suppressed; maybe it’ll still get suppressed but maybe not at the level of having ‘Israel’ in the title. We’re just seeing it endlessly, that type of suppression, holding down those of us who are speaking against these injustices. And we’ve got to keep doing it; we’ve got to keep fighting back. As Sivan said, we should not let them change us at the end of the day. That should really be the goal.”
Yes, we’ve got to keep fighting back. The Tal family has a lot to teach other Israelis and the world.
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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: Lee Camp (left) and Sivan Tal — captured from Moment of Clarity
Comments Off on Refusing to be Conscripted in the Israeli Military: “We Claim Responsibility for the Political Decisions of Our Young Son, and Our Decision Is — NO!”
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In Washington, military plans for the Middle East are unclear. Biden’s aggressive speech has remained the same since his election campaign, with a strong inclination to guarantee American interests in that region. However, Secretary of State Antony Blinken made statements saying that there is currently no American interest in carrying out operations and interventions that are too expensive. Meanwhile, the American escalation in northeastern Syria continues and creates uncertainty for the future.
After the attack on the Ain al-Asad base in Iraq, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said: “If we assess a further response is warranted, we will take action again in a manner and time of our choosing”. The pronouncement is curious when we consider Blinken’s promises. Would responses be necessary for an attack that left virtually no victims? It is necessary to emphasize that the attack on the American base in Iraq did not happen by chance. Previously, on February 25, American forces bombed installations of an Iraqi Shiite militia in Syria. Still, several mutual attacks have been reported for a long time, and the March 3 attack was certainly the mildest and most harmless of all. However, the American rhetoric from now on will be that this attack “justifies” new measures – such “justification” is simply due to the exaggerated media attention given to the case.
According to most experts, an American response would certainly be carried out through a new attack on enemy bases installed in Syria. The attacks outside Syria are, most of the time, exceptional measures, since it is in Syria that strategic movements occur most frequently. But, until “the great response” is announced, the US has already carried out new attacks in Syria – and no media attention was paid to this in the West. The targets of the most recent attacks were the Kataib Hezbollah and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada militias. The number of victims of the retaliation is still uncertain.
Meanwhile, on the American domestic political scenario, there is a strong outcry for tougher and more effective measures against Washington’s enemies in the US. In particular, radical Democrats claim that the attack is clearly financed and led by Iran. The State Department, having to deal with strategic rather than ideological issues, avoid taking impetuous actions and this causes irritation among globalists. Globalists supported Biden on the basis of his promises to safeguard Western agendas across the planet – and they are really demanding this from the new government. For some representatives of the American elite, Biden has been ineffective so far.
In a recent NBC News article, Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, says:
“‘We’re not going to prejudge.’ State Department spokesperson Ned Price deployed this classic Washington euphemism last week to avoid responding to a question over how much culpability Iran and its Shiite militias bear for recent rocket attacks against a US military base in northern Iraq. (…) Why is the Biden administration not connecting the dots between the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies — and not doing more to publicly deter this behavior? Is it simply that the new administration is still finding its feet after just one month in office?”
This clash brings us back to the question that all the experts asked when Biden’s promises were made: does Washington really have the strength to recover its global hegemony? The ideologically elite with the mission of “bringing (the American way of) democracy” to all parts of the world cries out for endless wars, interventions, sanctions, blockades, and retaliation. Those who actually operate such measures call for calm and claim for an end to overly expensive operations that only cause stress to the troops and take the lives of Americans away. This clash will not end anytime soon. The ideological part of the government is committed to objectives that require measures that they cannot operate alone – and those able to operate such measures visibly want to avoid them because they know their real conditions and know that every care is necessary when it comes to military operations.
However, the military also wants to respond – its only difference for Democrats is that they recognize their real conditions for action. The American military presence in northeastern Syria is increasing day by day. On March 6, American aircraft landed at the Al-Shaddadah military base carrying about 20 boxes containing missiles. New soldiers also disembarked there. Visibly, violence will escalate in the region and there are no good expectations for the near future.
While Democrats are calling for action against Iran, the military is likely to be concerned with increasing violence in Syria as a proxy war against Tehran and Shi’ite militias. The ideological wing of the Biden government will have to conform to material reality and understand that the current circumstances do not allow for a general increase in the American power of aggression.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
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India knows that it’s being lied to by the US, “Israel”, and/or Saudi Arabia but is still going along with them anyhow because it naively expects to gain something in return.
The article quotes an unnamed senior official at India’s National Investigative Agency who blames the IRGC for the non-lethal blast that occurred in the country’s capital in late January. Instinctively sensing a false flag attack, I immediately shared my concerns about this previously unconfirmed narrative that was bandied about at the time by Indian and “Israeli” officials in an analysis that I wrote for Pakistan’s Express Tribune asking “Did Iran Really Carry Out An Attempted Anti-Israeli Terrorist Attack In India?”
Iran’s official response to these latest official Indian allegations was reported by Sputnik in its follow-up piece titled “‘Sinister Intentions of Enemies’: Iran Slams Report Claiming IRGC Behind Israel Embassy Blast”. That article quotes the statement released by the Iranian Embassy in India which suggests that “third parties who are angry and dissatisfied with the progress in the relations between the governments of Iran and India” were responsible for what happened. This conforms to my previous speculation that the incident was really a false flag attack that tried too hard to implicate Iran. The question naturally becomes one of who would have the interests and means to carry it out.
Pakistan can be safely excluded from the list of suspects because India would have already blamed it if there was even a shred of evidence that could be spun as implicating Islamabad’s involvement. The very fact that this didn’t happen speaks to the unquestionable absence of such evidence.
Instead, the unnamed Indian official is quoted by Sputnik as saying that the investigation initially “hinted to the role of Islamic State” but that New Delhi eventually decided that the IRGC was really the true culprit. India could have stuck to the ISIS theory in order to avoid further complicating its increasingly complex relations with Iran but ultimately decided to pin the blame on the Islamic Republic, which advanced American, “Israeli”, and Saudi strategic interests.
Those three are therefore the most likely suspects, whether individually, in tandem, or altogether. It can only be speculated how one, some, or all three of them conspired to carry out that attempted attack, but there aren’t any other parties with both the interests and means. Even so, one must ask themselves why India would allow itself to be so obviously manipulated in such a crude manner by going along with the manufactured narrative that Iran was allegedly responsible. New Delhi knows that its statement risks worsening ties with Tehran, but it went ahead with it anyhow. This curiously coincides with new regional strategic developments that might explain the political calculations behind India’s decision.
Uzbekistan, the most populous state in Central Asia and the one with the most promising real-sector (i.e. non-energy) economic prospects, recently opted to go with Pakistan’s N-CPEC+ for connecting to the Indian Ocean instead of the eastern branch of the Indo-Iranian North-South Transport Corridor (NSTC). I wrote about this in my recent analysis for the Express Tribune which informed everyone “Why This Summer’s Central Asia-South Asia Connectivity Conference Will Be Crucial”. I explained that the agreement late last year to pioneer a railway between Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan (tentatively described by me as the PAKAFUZ project after the first letters of each country’s name) makes the NSTC redundant, thereby basically dealing a deathblow to it.
With this observation in mind, India might have calculated that it had nothing more to lose by going with the flow and publicly blaming the IRGC for late January’s attempted terrorist attack in New Delhi. If anything, doing so might have been expected to improve India’s standing in the eyes of its new American, “Israeli”, and Saudi allies. Iran has no means to “punish” India for its provocative allegation since the South Asian state no longer purchases the Islamic Republic’s energy resources like before due to its fear of being targeted by the US’ so-called “secondary sanctions”, and the PAKAFUZ project pretty much put an end to the economic viability of the NSTC’s eastern branch.
These factors help explain why India publicly accused the IRGC of being responsible for that attempted terrorist attack. Even so, India is wrong to have blamed Iran because it knows better than to believe that the Islamic Republic was truly responsible. This experience shows just how much of its supposedly cherished strategic autonomy India has surrendered to its new American, “Israeli”, and Saudi allies in recent years that it now unashamedly blames Iran for supposedly committing out an act of terrorism on its soil despite there being no compelling evidence to prove this. India knows that it’s being lied to by the US, “Israel”, and/or Saudi Arabia but is still going along with them anyhow because it naively expects to gain something in return.
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This article was originally published on OneWorld.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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March 15 is the date which many use for the start of the Syrian “uprising” in 2011. For many years, the war in Syria was a steady feature of western media; however, in recent years the fighting has stopped, the Geneva peace process has not produced results, and some countries have begun sending Syrian refugees back home. The battlefields are silent, but the suffering continues from US-EU sanctions which deprive citizens of some medical supplies, and building materials to repair their homes and businesses. The economy is in freefall, while COVID-19 has added to the hopelessness many feel. The public still has not received their first vaccinations.
The opposing sides
Western media portrayed the Free Syrian Army (FSA) as freedom fighters for democracy. The atrocities of the FSA went unreported, while the US and their allies used the FSA as their foot-soldiers in the project of ‘regime change’.
Of the 23 million citizens in Syria, about eight million were minorities such as Christians, Druze, and Alawites, who were protected solely by the Syrian government. President Assad is the leader of the Ba’ath Party, the oldest party in Syria, and has a large support base among the Syrian people. Certainly, there is political opposition in Syria, but only a small minority of the opposition support armed revolution and destruction of the state. This is the reason the ‘revolution’ failed: it was not supported by the majority.
Aleppo was attacked by the FSA because it was supportive of the government. The FSA responded by a brutal crackdown on the unarmed citizenry while fighting the citizens who rebelled against their Radical Islamic ideology.
Western media would have you believe most of the deaths in Syria were caused by the Syrian government, but you won’t hear about the thousands of unarmed civilians killed, raped, maimed, and tortured by the FSA and their allies. Equally misreported is the number of Syrian Arab Army soldiers who have died, which is believed to be at least half of the deaths reported.
The FSA stole the wheat reserves in Aleppo and sold them to Turkish traders, ransacked the pharmaceuticals, and destroyed the schools, while they were brutalizing the Syrian people, their homes, and businesses.
The FSA implemented Sharia law, forcing citizens to abide by laws they had never before had to face in secular Syria.
The FSA produced a video widely seen of a 12-year-old child being forced by the FSA to cut off the head of a Syrian Arab Army officer.
When the FSA became defeated on the battlefields they sent out a call for help to their brothers-in-arms Al Qaeda, and the international terrorists began flooding into Syria from Turkey which was their safe-haven. Officially supplying Al Qaeda with cash and weapons was against US laws, so Washington simply outsourced the support to Saudi Arabia and Qatar who both supplied Jibhat al-Nusra, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria.
On December 31, 2012, the Huffington Post published, “The West should not be surprised if an Islamic state results from an FSA victory. If so, they will have been complicit in the outcome.”
The US-NATO ‘regime change’ plan for Syria was to culminate in an Islamic State, headed by the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been the political arm of the Syrian opposition supported by the US and EU in Istanbul. The US-engineered the Egyptian election which brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power, only to be driven from office by mass protests.
The group called ISIS capitalized on the chaos the US had created in Syria to proclaim a “caliphate” straddling Syria and Iraq that shocked the world. While the US and EU were supporting the FSA and their Al Qaeda allies, the US coalition forces were fighting to eradicate ISIS.
Terrorists were bussed in surrender deals into the northwestern province of Idlib, where around three million people now live in dire conditions under the occupation of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria.
Chemical claims
In 2012, US President Barack Obama drew a red line in the sand and said the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be met with US military intervention. The terrorist groups interpreted the red line as a green light for them.
In May 2013, Carla Del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney-general and prosecutor with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), said evidence points to the ‘rebels’ using sarin gas. She was a leading member of a UN commission of inquiry.
In August 2013, Obama was faced with a decision to attack Syria in a planned decimation of the government and infrastructure. However, he called it off.
In April 2014, Seymour M. Hersh published an investigation detailing the Obama administration’s illicit weapons highway into Syria operated by the CIA, which also exposed the UK defense lab report to Obama that the sarin gas used in Syria was not from Syrian government sources.
In April 2018 veteran Middle East war correspondent Robert Fisk went in search of the chemical claims made in Douma. Fisk had maintained an anti-Assad stance throughout the war, but he went to Douma with open eyes, looking for the truth. What he found there was the other side of the video shown around the world. After interviewing doctors, nurses and bystanders he found the gas video was patients overcome not by gas but by oxygen starvation in the tunnels and basements in which they lived, on a night of wind and heavy shelling that stirred up a dust storm.
The locals he talked to told of the Jaish al-Islam (Army of Islam) terrorists, supported by the King of Saudi Arabia, who occupied the homes, offices, and businesses and subjugated the residents.
The ‘White Helmets’ were responsible for the video, which took advantage of the situation and wrongly portrayed it as a gas attack. Water was doused on adults and children to provide evidence of a chemical attack.
Days after the Fisk report, Russian officials produced an 11-year-old boy, Hassan Diab, who was in the video at Douma. Western media discredited the Russian press conference as propaganda. The boy was accompanied by his father as he described being unaffected by chemicals, but having been forced to be drenched in water by the ‘White Helmets’.
Most of the Syrian people never left Syria. Had they been all convinced that the government was using chemical weapons, more would have fled. Of those who left for Germany in summer 2015 most were economic migrants looking for a safe place and income.
The foreign actors
The Syrian war was scripted in Washington, DC but the UK, France, and Germany all played their supporting roles. The leaders in 2011 of the US, UK, and France are all gone, and only Germany’s Angela Merkle remains.
Timber Sycamore was a classified weapons supply and training program run by the CIA, headquartered in southern Turkey. In August 2017, President Trump shut down the $1 Billion covert operations which trained, funded, and weaponized Radical Islamic terrorists to fight in Syria. This was done in coordination with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey.
The program lost political support in Congress because much of the weapons were handed over to Al Qaeda, who were allied with FSA. President Barack Obama had begun the program in 2013 to overthrow the government of President Bashar al-Assad but was defeated by defections from the FSA to Jibhat al-Nusra and ISIS.
Russian military entered Syria in late 2015. Moscow did not want to allow a Radical Islamic regime to take power in Syria, because that would threaten the national security of Russia. Moscow knew they could either fight and defeat the terrorists in Syria, or face them later on the streets of Moscow.
Turkey has about 15,000 troops deployed inside Syria and wields significant influence in Idlib, which is occupied by Hayat Tahir al-Sham, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria. Turkey is led by a Muslim Brotherhood party that opposes the secular government of Damascus. Additionally, Turkey invaded the northeast corner where separatist Kurds had established a quasi-state. Ankara views the Kurds as terrorists, loyal to the PKK, internationally recognized as a terrorist group, responsible for 30,000 deaths over three decades.
Iran provided support for the Syrian military, as well as humanitarian aid. They have also been part of the Russian and Turkish trio for peace talks and ceasefires.
The next step
The UN peace process is slowly producing a possible new constitution, and presidential elections may be scheduled this summer. Nothing is clear yet, and the political stalemate continues, while the economic situation deteriorates by the day.
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“Investing illusions can continue for a surprisingly long time. Wall Street loves the fees that deal making generates, and the press loves the stories that colorful promoters provide. At a point, the soaring price of a promoted stock can itself become the ‘proof’ that an illusion is reality. Eventually, of course, the party ends, and many business ’emperors’ are found to have no clothes.” Warren Buffett (1930- ), America investor, (in his annual letter of Saturday, Feb. 27, 2021).
“All crises have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.” John K. Galbraith (1908-2006), Canadian-born American economist, (in ‘A Short History of Financial Euphoria’, 1994).
“History shows that once an enormous debt has been incurred by a nation, there are only two ways to solve it: one is simply declare bankruptcy, the other is to inflate the currency and thus destroy the wealth of ordinary citizens.” Adam Smith (1723-1790), Scottish economist, father of modern economics, (in ‘The Wealth of Nations’, 1776).
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Over the last few weeks, investors’ sentiment about future inflation and future interest rates has changed. It seems that complacency about inflationary pressures in some parts of the economy is coming to an end.
Even during the economic slowdown brought about by the economic impact of the pandemic, some prices are clearly on the way up. Besides the exuberance in the financial sector where stock and bond prices are frothy, some important prices in the real economy are also strongly increasing.
Sustained price pressures in some important economic sectors
For example, oil prices have increased by more than 50 percent since last year. Construction material prices (lumber, copper, steel, etc.) have skyrocketed by as much as 73% in one year. Because of a strong demand and higher construction costs, real estate prices and rents are rising. For instance, the median home price in the U.S. increased 15% in 2020, while average house prices increased 23% in Canada, during the same period. Food prices have also increased 3.8% in the U.S. and 2.3% in Canada in 2020, and are likely to continue their trend upward in 2021. Even some of the extra liquidity injected into the system has found its way into the cryptocurrency craze, a phenomenon reminiscent of the Tulip mania in Holland in the 17th Century!
The only place where there seems to be little inflation is in the official measures of inflation. In the U.S., the all-items Consumer Price Index (CPI-U) rose only 1.4% in 2020. Even the Producer Price Index (PPI) is up only 1.76% from one year ago. [N.B.: In Canada, the figures are 0.7% (or 1.3% for the CPI excluding gasoline) and 1.4% for durable goods, in 2020].
Currently, the actual inflation rate could be severely underestimated by official figures
Three factors can explain the low inflation reported by official figures. First, one must realize that official inflation indexes are lagging indicators, because important shifts in consumer spending patterns are adjusted every two years. Therefore, during the 2020 pandemic, even though consumers did substantially alter their consumer spending, that shift has not yet been reflected in the official inflation measures.
Secondly, some important sectors (tourism, travel, hotels, restaurants, retail, art and culture, etc.) did experience substantial drops in demand, production and employment, and the prices of their services have declined, artificially pushing the official inflation indexes down. It can be expected that prices in those depressed sectors will bounce back, maybe with a vengeance, once the economic recovery takes hold.
Thirdly, the prices of oil and gasoline were very depressed during most of 2020, and they have since bounced back. Higher energy prices will most probably filter into future measures of inflation.
My tentative conclusion would be that official measures of inflation have seriously underreported the true inflation rate experienced by consumers during the 2020 pandemic.
Many investors have also reached that conclusion. They have realized that the easy-money monetary policies pursued by central banks to boost inflation toward the 2% threshold may have been pushed too far, and that interest rates have been kept ultra low for too long.
This does not mean that more fiscal stimulus is not needed to help workers who have lost their job because of the pandemic and may have trouble going back to their old line of employment.
The clash between central bankers and investors
That is why there has recently been a clash between central bankers and investors about where inflation and interest rates are going to be, once the pandemic is a thing of the past and the economic recovery is well on its way.
The clash pits central bankers, who have been gradually pushing interest rates to ultra low levels with easy-money policies over the last 10 years, and investors, who fear that the after-pandemic economic rebound could be stronger than expected and lead to a resurgence of inflation.
This was epitomized last Thursday March 4, when U.S. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell ruffled investors by declaring that he had no plan to raise interest rates, i.e. not until labor-market conditions are consistent with “maximum employment and inflation is sustainable at 2 percent”. The Governor of the Bank of Canada Mr. Tiff Macklem also seems to subscribe to Mr. Powell’s thesis.
What is the basis for such a clash of perceptions? Essentially, there is a disagreement about how much excess supply there really is in the economy and how robust the economic recovery will be after the pandemic has been vanquished.
On the one hand, central bankers would prefer to keep interest rates on the floor until the economy reaches its full employment level and a higher moderate rate of inflation is attained. On the other hand, investors remember that central banks are known to procrastinate and wait too long to tackle inflationary pressures, ending up overshooting their inflation targets. Indeed, if central bankers wait too long to address inflationary pressures, sooner or later they must step on the monetary brakes, and interest rates shoot up, causing market disruptions.
The pre-1980 period, when central banks waited too long before fighting the creeping inflation, is a good example. In 1980, they pushed interest rates way up, and this brought about the deep 1980-1982 economic recession. [N.B.: In the U.S., the Fed funds rate hit 21% in June 1981, while in Canada, the Bank of Canada interest rate peaked also at 21%, in August 1981.]
Many investors believe that economic conditions are currently reminiscent of what happens after a war, when governments have built up huge debts, and there is a strong pent up demand on the part of consumers who wish to resume spending. By the end of the pandemic, they are forecasting a stronger economic rebound than the one some central banks are expecting.
The Central bankers’ rationale to keep easy-money policies a bit longer
Central bankers presently have two fears, which may explain why they would prefer to keep interest rates ultra low for a few more years.
First, the Fed sees that there are still 10 million fewer jobs today, in the United States, than there were in March 2020. [A similar soft labor market prevails in Canada, as there were 858,000 fewer jobs in January 2021 than in February 2020.] Central bankers think that some structural damage has been done to their economies, especially in the service sector and among young workers, and that it will take time to bring back full employment.
Secondly, the high levels of debt worldwide preoccupy central bankers. Indeed, they see the global financial system becoming overloaded with debt, at all levels, governments, corporations and consumers. They fear that any rise in interest rates would increase the burden of debt service and reduce aggregate demand and, possibly, trigger a financial crisis and an economic recession.
Total global debt is historically very high
Global debt, private and public, is well on its way to reach the unsustainable threshold of 400 percent of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2021. When interest rates begin rising, this could cause havoc in many ways. Paradoxically, it was the artificially low interest rates of central banks that encouraged such over-indebtedness. And today, those same central banks find themselves trapped in their past policies, and they fear that if they reverted to normal interest rates, it could trigger a global debt crisis.
Indeed, in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008, central bankers were very innovative in finding new ways of accommodating politicians who wanted, all at the same time, large tax cuts, higher fiscal deficits, super low interest rates, and faster economic growth, without inflation. This was too good to last for very long.
Central banks in Europe, the U.S., and Japan began to load their balance sheets with government bonds and other financial assets, in the hope of controlling both nominal and real interest rates, and, in so doing, boost economic growth. For example, since March 2020, the NY Fed has been buying $120 billion in Treasury bonds in various maturities and mortgage-backed securities each month, in order to keep interest rates ultra low.
The U.S. Fed’s balance sheet of financial assets, which was less than $1 trillion in 2008, now stands at $7 trillion. The Bank of Canada’s balance sheet stood at C$51 billion in 2008 and now is at C$573 billion. – Central banks can do that (i.e. inject large quantities of new money into the economy), for a while, provided that deflationary pressures are such that inflation does not result. If interest rates start rising, the entire policy could begin unraveling.
Attempts to keep interest rates ultra low in such an environment could simply be impossible, without creating unsustainable financial bubbles.
What could happen if central bankers keep interest rates ultra low for too long?
If central bankers nevertheless attempt to keep nominal interest rates artificially low by increasing the money base and the money supply, it would be like adding fuel to the fire. This will create even more inflationary expectations.
Since the mission of central banks is to prevent excessive inflation from taking hold, while keeping employment high, they have to be careful and make sure that an easy-money policy does not generate strong inflationary expectations.
Already, the unorthodox and unprecedented monetary policy implemented during the last decade has created huge financial bubbles in real estate, in the bond market and in the stock market, with little positive influence on the overall real economy.
It’s possible that central banks have been pursuing short-run financial and economic gains at the cost of serious long-run financial and economic pain. Indeed, if they were to persist in creating bigger and bigger financial bubbles, sooner or later, the day of reckoning will take the form of financial crashes.
Will consumers’ extra savings lead to more spending after the pandemic?
It would seem logical to expect that consumers, both in the U.S. and in Canada, and elsewhere, are going to spend at least part of their extra savings, once the pandemic is conquered. Such a pent up demand is another factor that could boost the economy in the next few years.
This could create a period of economic and financial euphoria with booming markets, fueled by the central bankers’ wholesale printing of money, possibly leading into 2023-2024, (provided, of course, that there is no third wave of virus variants).
Extra high public debts will bring about slower economic growth in the future
Because of the economic impact of the pandemic, many governments around the globe are more indebted than ever, even more so than after World War II, with public debts in advanced economies being over 120 percent of GDP, and growing.
Such a high level of over-indebtedness is bound to be a drag on future economic growth. This is because high public debts tend to push long-term interest rates up, and higher borrowing costs discourage private capital investment and hurt productivity. Extraordinarily high public debts may force governments to raise taxes to meet their ballooning debt service requirements, and this could also be another drag on future economic growth.
Conclusion
Economic conditions in most advanced economies, especially in the U.S. and in Canada, but also in Europe, are at a crucial juncture. There is hope now that the pandemic’s economic drag is about to end, because of the widespread vaccination programs implemented in most countries.
However, is it possible that a fear on the part of investors that inflation could quickly rise during a strong economic recovery, might push long-term interest rates way up? Or will central bankers be able to stick to their policies of ultra low interest rates for another year or two? Both outcomes carry their own risks.
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Fukushima was an avoidable disaster, fuelled by Australian uranium and the hubris and profiteering of Japan’s nuclear industry in collusion with compromised regulators and captured bureaucracies.
The Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission ‒ established by the Japanese Parliament ‒ concluded in its 2012 report that the accident was “a profoundly man-made disaster that could and should have been foreseen and prevented” if not for “a multitude of errors and wilful negligence that left the Fukushima plant unprepared for the events of March 11”.
The accident was the result of “collusion between the government, the regulators and TEPCO”, the commission found.
Mining
But overseas suppliers who turned a blind eye to unacceptable nuclear risks in Japan have largely escaped scrutiny or blame. Australia’s uranium industry is a case in point.
Yuki Tanaka from the Hiroshima Peace Institute noted:
“Japan is not the sole nation responsible for the current nuclear disaster. From the manufacture of the reactors by GEto provision of uranium by Canada, Australia and others, many nations are implicated.”
There is no dispute that Australian uranium was used in the Fukushima reactors. The mining companies won’t acknowledge that fact — instead they hide behind claims of “commercial confidentiality” and “security”.
But the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office acknowledged in October 2011 that:
“We can confirm that Australian obligated nuclear material was at the Fukushima Daiichi site and in each of the reactors — maybe five out of six, or it could have been all of them”.
BHP and Rio Tinto, two of the world’s largest mining companies, supplied Australian uranium to TEPCO and that uranium was used to fuel Fukushima.
Tsunamis
The mining companies have failed to take any responsibility for the catastrophic impacts on Japanese society that resulted from the use of their uranium in a poorly managed, poorly regulated industry.
Moreover, the mining companies can’t claim ignorance. The warning signs were clear. Australia’s uranium industry did nothing as TEPCO and other Japanese nuclear companies lurched from scandal to scandal and accident to accident.
The uranium industry did nothing in 2002 when it was revealed that TEPCO had systematically and routinely falsified safety data and breached safety regulations for 25 years or more.
The uranium industry did nothing in 2007 when over 300 incidents of ‘malpractice’ at Japan’s nuclear plants were revealed – 104 of them at nuclear power plants.
It did nothing even as the ability of Japan’s nuclear plants to withstand earthquakes and tsunamis came under growing criticism from industry insiders and independent experts.
Vicious cycle
And the uranium industry did nothing about the multiple conflicts of interest plaguing Japanese nuclear regulators.
Mirarr senior Traditional Owner Yvonne Margarula ‒ on whose land in the Northern Territory Rio Tinto’s Ranger mine operated ‒ said she was “deeply saddened” that uranium from Ranger was exported to Japanese nuclear companies including TEPCO.
No such humility from the uranium companies. They get tetchy at any suggestion of culpability, with the Australian Uranium Association describing it as “opportunism in the midst of human tragedy” and “utter nonsense”.
Yet, Australia could have played a role in breaking the vicious cycle of mismanagement in Japan’s nuclear industry by making uranium exports conditional on improved management of nuclear plants and tighter regulation.
Even a strong public statement of concern would have been heard by the Japanese utilities – unless it was understood to be rhetoric for public consumption – and it would have registered in the Japanese media.
Safety
But the uranium industry denied culpability and instead stuck its head in the sand. Since the industry is in denial about its role in fuelling the Fukushima disaster, there is no reason to believe that it will behave more responsibly in future.
Successive Australian governments did nothing about the unacceptable standards in Japan’s nuclear industry. Julia Gillard ‒ Australia’s Prime Minister at the time of the Fukushima disaster ‒ said the disaster “doesn’t have any impact on my thinking about uranium exports”.
Signification elements of Japan’s corrupt ‘nuclear village’ ‒ comprising industry, regulators, politicians and government agencies ‒ were back in control just a few years after the Fukushima disaster. Regulation remains problematic.
Add to that ageing reactors, and companies facing serious economic stress and intense competition, and there’s every reason for ongoing concern about nuclear safety in Japan.
Professor Yoshioka Hitoshi is a Kyushu University academic who served on the government’s 2011-12 Investigation Committee on the Accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Stations.
“Unfortunately, the new regulatory regime is … inadequate to ensure the safety of Japan’s nuclear power facilities. The first problem is that the new safety standards on which the screening and inspection of facilities are to be based are simply too lax.
“While it is true that the new rules are based on international standards, the international standards themselves are predicated on the status quo.
“They have been set so as to be attainable by most of the reactors already in operation. In essence, the NRA made sure that all Japan’s existing reactors would be able to meet the new standards with the help of affordable piecemeal modifications ‒ back-fitting, in other words.”
In the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon called for an independent cost-benefit inquiry into uranium trade. The Australian government failed to act.
Inadequate regulation was a root cause of the Fukushima disaster yet Australia has uranium supply agreements with numerous countries with demonstrably inadequate nuclear regulation, including China, India, Russia, the UnitedStates, Japan, South Korea, and Ukraine.
Overthrow
Likewise, Australian uranium companies and the government turn a blind eye to nuclear corruption scandals in countries with uranium supply agreements: South Korea, India, Russia and Ukraine among others.
In 2011 ‒ the same year as the Fukushima disaster ‒ the Australian government agreed to allow uranium exports to India.
This despite inadequate nuclear regulation in India, and despite India’s ongoing expansion of its nuclear weaponry and delivery capabilities.
A uranium supply agreement with the United Arab Emirates was concluded in 2013 despite the obvious risks of selling uranium into a politically and militarily volatile region where nuclear facilities have repeatedly been targeted by adversaries intent on stopping covert nuclear weapons programs. Australia was planning uranium sales to the Shah of Iran months before his overthrow in 1979.
Forced labour
A uranium supply agreement with Ukraine was concluded in 2016 despite a host of safety and security concerns, and the inability of the International Atomic Energy Agency to carry out safeguards inspections in regions annexed by Russia.
“Australia has no intention of selling uranium to a country which is so obviously in breach of international law as Russia currently is.”
Australia’s uranium supply agreement with China, concluded in 2006, has not been reviewed despite abundant evidence of inadequate nuclear safety standards, inadequate regulation, lack of transparency, repression of whistleblowers, world’s worst insurance and liability arrangements, security risks, and widespread corruption.
Civil society and NGO’s are campaigning to wind back Australia’s atomic exposures in the uranium trade with emphasis on uranium sales to China.
China’s human rights abuses and a range of strategic insecurity issues warrant a cessation of uranium sales. China’s ongoing human rights abuses in Tibet and mass detention and forced labour against Uyghurs in Xinjiang are severe breaches of international humanitarian law and UN Treaties.
A federal Parliamentary Inquiry in Australia is investigating forced labour in China and the options for Australia to respond. A case is before this inquiry to disqualify China from supply of Australian uranium sales – see submission 02 on human rights abuses and submission 02.1 on security risks.
Australia supplies uranium with scant regard for nuclear safety risks. Likewise, proliferation risks are given short shrift.
Australia has uranium export agreements with all of the ‘declared’ nuclear weapons states – the US, UK, China, France, Russia – although not one of them takes seriously its obligation under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to pursue disarmament in good faith.
Carte blanche
Australia claims to be working to discourage countries from producing fissile – explosive – material for nuclear bombs, but nonetheless exports uranium to countries blocking progress on the proposed Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty.
And Australia gives Japan open-ended permission to separate and stockpile plutonium although that stockpiling fans regional proliferation risks and tensions in North-East Asia.
Despite liberal export policies, Australian uranium sales are in long-term decline and now represent only 8.9 percent of world uranium usage.
With the Ranger mine shut down and no longer processing ore for uranium exports, there are only two operating uranium mines in Australia: BHP’s Olympic Dam copper-uranium mine and the smaller General Atomics’ Beverley Four Mile operation ‒ both in South Australia.
Uranium accounts for less than 0.3 percent of Australia’s export revenue and less than 0.1 percent of all jobs in Australia.
One wonders why an industry that delivers so little is given carte blanche by the government to do as it pleases.
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Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia.
David Noonan is an independent environment campaigner. For further information on BHP’s Olympic Dam mine click here.
Featured image: Senior Traditional Owner Yvonne Margarula was “deeply saddened” that uranium from Rio Tinto’s Ranger mine on Mirarr country in the Northern Territory was exported to Japanese nuclear companies including TEPCO. Photo by Dominic O’Brien via The Ecologist
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Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Meghan and Harry is a perfect case study of how an important political debate about the corrupting role of the monarchy on British life gets shunted aside yet again, not just by the endless Royal soap opera but by supposedly progressive identity politics.
As so often, a focus on identity risks not only blunting our capacity for critical thinking but can be all too readily weaponised: in this case, as the media’s main take-away from the Oprah interview illustrates, by providing an implicit defence of class privilege.
The racism directed at Markle – sorry, the Duchess of Sussex – and baby Archie is ugly, it goes without saying (but maybe more to the point, must be stated to avoid being accused of ignoring or trivialising racism).
The concern expressed by a senior royal during Markle’s pregnancy about Archie’s likely darker skin colour does indeed reveal how deeply ingrained racism is in the British establishment and how much it trickles down to the rest of British society, not least through the billionaire-owned media.
Princely ‘birthright’
But more significant is how the racism demonstrated towards Markle and Archie has played out in the media coverage of the interview and the resulting “national conversation” on social media – nowadays, the only real barometer we have for judging such conversations.
The problem is that, via Oprah, the Sussexes get to frame the significance of the House of Windsor’s racism: both in the threat that, when Charles ascends to the throne, grandson Archie will be deprived of his princely “birthright” because he is of mixed race; and in the fact that Harry and Meghan have been hounded from Palace life into celebrity-style exile in the US.
Let's be clear: only someone still deeply immersed in a lifetime of propaganda would be cheerleading one side or the other in this royal soap opera. It's an endless drama designed to obscure the fact that the system itself ensures privilege for some, exploitation for others https://t.co/TDq0yuAoym
In the process, an important, democratic conversation has yet again been supplanted about why Britain still maintains and reveres these expensive relics of a medieval system of unaccountable rule based on a superior (if no longer divine) blood line.
Instead, the conversation initiated by Oprah is a much more politically muddled one about whether it is right that a “commoner” woman of colour and her mixed-race son are obstructed from fully participating in this medieval system of privilege.
Image makeover
A real political debate about privilege – one that demands greater equality and an end to racist presumptions about blood lines – has been obscured and trivialised once again by a row of the kind preferred by the corporate media: whether most of the Royal Family are too racist to realise that a woman of colour like Meghan could help them with a twenty-first-century image makeover.
As a result, we are presented with a false binary choice. Either we cheer on the Royal Family and implicitly condone their racism; or we cheer on Meghan and implicitly support her battle to better veil the feudal ugliness of the British monarchy.
It ought to be possible to want Archie to live a life equal to “white” babies in the UK without also wanting him to live a life of pomp and circumstance, designed to ensure that other babies – white, black and brown – grow up to be denied the privileges he enjoys by virtue of royal birth.
This is your reminder that Versailles gets double the number of visitors compared to Buckingham Palace.
The way for the country to really get an economic boost from the royal family is therefore to chop all their heads off.
What the Oprah interview does – is designed to do – is derail the intersection of class and race in politically damaging ways.
A meaningful democratic struggle prioritises class unity as the battering ram against establishment power that long ago learnt to protect itself by dividing us through our competing identities. Class struggle does not ignore race; it embraces it and all other socially constructed identities used by power to rationalise oppression. Class subsumes them into a collective struggle strengthened by numbers.
Struggle based on identity, by contrast, is inherently divisive and politically enervating, as the Meghan Markle case illuminates. Her challenge to Royal “tradition” alienates those most invested in ideas of monarchy, “Britishness” or white identity. And it does so while offering no more than a sop to those invested in breaking glass ceilings, even of the kind that aren’t worth smashing in the first place.
Meghan’s fight for the first mixed-race British prince is no more politically progressive than the celebration by the media two years ago of the news that for the first time women were in charge of the military-industrial complex – the one that rains down death and destruction on “Third World” men, women and children.
"Women controlling the military-industrial complex is not feminism, it’s toxic masculinity. The fruit of a sick valuing system that is poisoning our environment and risking nuclear annihilation, writes Caitlin Johnstone." ~ via @consortiumnewshttps://t.co/GPqItPJClh
Strange as it is to recall now – in an age of social media, when anyone can comment on anything, and the “mainstream” media’s billionaire gatekeepers have supposedly been sidelined – ordinary Britons discussed abolishing the monarchy far more in the 1970s, when I was a child, than they do nowadays.
Getting rid of the Royal Family – like getting rid of nuclear weapons, another topic no one talks about seriously any more – was mainstream enough then that Royalists were often forced on to the defensive. As the mood soured among a vocal section of the population, the Queen’s defenders were forced hurriedly to switch from arguments rooted in deference and tradition to more utilitarian claims that the Royals offered “value for money”, supposedly boosting commerce and tourism.
Prince Charles’ engagement in 1981 to a beautiful, demure teenage “English rose”, Princess Diana, looked to many, even at the time, suspiciously like a move to reinvigorate a tired, increasingly unpopular brand.
The media spectacle of a fairytale romance and wedding, followed by years of controversy, disillusionment and betrayal, culminating in divorce and finally Diana’s death / murder, very effectively distracted the British public for the next 16 years from the question of what purpose a Royal Family served. It became only too clear what role they played: they kept us engrossed in a real-life, better-than-TV drama.
Champions of identity
Diana’s supposed struggle to grow from adolescence to womanhood in the glare of media intrusion and under the strictures of “The Firm” created the prototype for a new type of apolitical, Mills and Boon-style identity politics.
Following Diana’s escapades – from the secular saint who cleared landmines to the raunchy princess who had illicit sex with her riding instructor, an army major no less – was far more thrilling than the campaign to end the monarchy and the regressive landed class it still represents.
Diana’s life story helped pave the way to the reinvention of the left through the 1990s – under Tony Blair in the UK and Bill Clinton in the US – as champions of a new social issues-obsessed non-politics.
Both were ushered into power after reassuring the newly triumphant corporate elite that they would harness and divert popular energy away from dangerous struggles for political change towards safe struggles for superficial social change.
In the UK, that was achieved most obviously in Blair’s assiduous courtship of media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Importantly, Blair persuaded Murdoch that, as prime minister, he would not only preserve the economic legacy of the Thatcher years but head further down the path of deregulation.
Murdoch – himself no fan of a British monarchy that had always looked down on him as a vulgar Australian – also understood that the inevitable soap opera quality of exceptional individuals battling the UK’s rigid hierarchy of privilege, spurred on by Blair’s New Labour, would prove great for sales of his newspapers. Just as Oprah knows that the only tangible consequence of the Harry and Meghan interview is that it will rake in many more millions for her own media empire.
Sticking It to the Man
In the new era of identity-saturated non-politics, demands for equality mean removing obstacles so that more women, people of colour and the LGBT community can participate in institutions that represent power and privilege.
These battles are not about overthrowing those systems of privilege, as earlier identity-based struggles such as the Black Panthers’ were. Success serves simply to placate identity-focused groups by helping those of most “merit” elbow their way into the preserves of established power.
Those achievements started with the most visible, least significant areas of the economy, such as sport and celebrity, and led over time to greater access to the professions.
The current excitement among some on the left at Meghan’s “Sticking It to the Man” appears to derive from the disruptive threat she poses to the House of Windsor – not to its economic, social and political power, but to its status as the last hold-out against Blair’s identity-fuelled “revolution”.
The Queen has an opaque, little-discussed prior consent power over legislation she secretly abused to give herself a unique right, decades ago, to conceal from the public the scale of her vast private wealth.
Diana’s emancipation story helped distract us for nearly two decades from confronting central questions about the nature and role of the British establishment in preserving and veiling power.
Now Meghan Markle is expanding the identity story in a new direction, one that once again embraces the story of a young, “headstrong” woman scorned by the Royal Family for snubbing tradition. But this time there is an alluring contemporary twist to the narrative: the Family’s resistance to diversity and its refusal to own its racist past.
Unlike Diana who stood alone and seemingly fragile, Meghan and Harry offer a more relevant, modern picture of a confident, professional young couple standing and fighting together for what is fair, for what should be theirs by right.
This feels important, bold and empowering. But it is the precise opposite. It is more Mills and Boons, but this time with diversity thrown in to generate more appeal on one side and more hostility on the other.
Meghan’s story will continue to work its magic: fascinating, infuriating and pacifying us in equal measure as we focus on what is private, unknowable and can be endlessly contested rather than what is universal, visible and impossible to refute.
Meanwhile, the Royal Family, the perpetuation of privilege and the erosion of democracy will march on as before, in the same long and glorious British tradition.
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Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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As reported by New Delhi-based World Is One News (WION),1 Pfizer is demanding countries put up sovereign assets as collateral for expected vaccine injury lawsuits resulting from its COVID-19 inoculation. In other words, it wants governments to guarantee the company will be compensated for any expenses resulting from injury lawsuits against it.
WION reports that Argentina and Brazil have rejected Pfizer’s demands. Initially, the company demanded indemnification legislation to be enacted, such as that which it enjoys in the U.S. Argentina proposed legislation that would restrict Pfizer’s financial responsibility for injuries to those resulting from negligence or malice.
Pfizer rejected the proposal. It also rejected a rewritten proposal that included a clearer definition of negligence. Pfizer then demanded the Argentinian government put up sovereign assets — including its bank reserves, military bases and embassy buildings — as collateral. Argentina refused. A similar situation occurred in Brazil. Pfizer demanded Brazil:
“Waive sovereignty of its assets abroad in favor of Pfizer”
Not apply its domestic laws to the company
Not penalize Pfizer for vaccine delivery delays
Exempt Pfizer from all civil liability for side effects
Brazil rejected Pfizer’s demands, calling them “abusive.” As noted by WION, Pfizer developed its vaccine with the help of government funding, and now it — a private company — is demanding governments hand over sovereign assets to ensure the company won’t lose a dime if its product injures people, even if those injuries are the result of negligent company practices, fraud or malice.
Aside from Argentina and Brazil, nine other South American countries have reportedly negotiated deals with Pfizer. It’s unclear whether they actually ended up giving up national assets in return.2
Vaccine Maker Accused of Abusing Its Power
According to STAT News,3 “Legal experts have raised concerns that Pfizer’s demands amount to an abuse of power.” Lawrence Gostin, law professor at Georgetown University and director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law told STAT:4
“Pharmaceutical companies shouldn’t be using their power to limit lifesaving vaccines in low- and middle-income countries. [This] seems to be exactly what they’re doing … Some liability protection is warranted, but certainly not for fraud, gross negligence, mismanagement, failure to follow good manufacturing practices. Companies have no right to ask for indemnity for these things.”
Mark Eccleston-Turner, a lecturer in global health law at Keele University in England, added:5
“[Pfizer] is trying to eke out as much profit and minimize its risk at every juncture with this vaccine development then this vaccine rollout. Now, the vaccine development has been heavily subsidized already. So there’s very minimal risk for the manufacturer involved there.”
Don’t Expect Compensation if Injured by COVID-19 Vaccine
In the U.S., vaccine makers already enjoy full indemnity against injuries occurring from this or any other pandemic vaccine under the PREP Act. If you’re injured, you’d have to file a compensation claim with the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP),6 which is funded by U.S. taxpayers via Congressional appropriation to the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).
While similar to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP), which applies to nonpandemic vaccines, the CICP is even less generous when it comes to compensation. For example, while the NVICP pays some of the costs associated with any given claim, the CICP does not. This means you’ll also be responsible for attorney fees and expert witness fees.
A significant problem with the CICP is that it’s administered within the DHHS, which is also sponsoring the COVID-19 vaccination program. This conflict of interest makes the CICP less than likely to find fault with the vaccine.
Your only route of appeal is within the DHHS, where your case would simply be reviewed by another employee. The DHHS is also responsible for making the payment, so the DHHS effectively acts as judge, jury and defendant. As reported by Dr. Meryl Nass,7 the maximum payout you can receive — even in cases of permanent disability or death — is $250,000 per person; however, you’d have to exhaust your private insurance policy before the CICP gives you a dime.
CICP will only pay the difference between what your insurance covers and the total payout amount established for your case. For permanent disability, even $250,000 won’t go far. The CICP also has a one year statute of limitations, so you have to act quickly.
This too is a significant problem, as no one really knows what injuries might arise from the COVID-19 vaccine, or when, and this makes tying the injury to the vaccination a difficult prospect. Employers that mandate the COVID-19 vaccine will also be indemnified from liability for side effects. Instead, claims will be routed through worker’s compensation programs.
If the COVID-19 vaccines are as safe as the manufacturers claim, why do they insist on so much indemnification? Do they suspect or know something they’re refusing to admit publicly?
Side Effects Are Inevitable
Of course, those of us who have been looking at the science behind the mRNA technology used to create these novel “vaccines” have long since realized there are tremendous risks involved. For starters, mRNA vaccines are most accurately referred to as gene therapies, as this is what they are.
They effectively turn your cells into bioreactors that churn out viral proteins to incite an immune response, and there’s no off-switch.8 Based on historical and preliminary evidence, significant short- and long-term side effects are, quite frankly, inevitable.
For starters, your body sees the synthetic mRNA as “non-self,” which can cause autoantibodies to attack your own tissues. Judy Mikovits, Ph.D., explained this in her interview, featured in “How COVID-19 ‘Vaccines’ May Destroy the Lives of Millions.”
Free mRNA also drive inflammatory diseases, which is why making synthetic mRNA thermostable — i.e., slowing the breakdown of the RNA by encasing it in lipid nanoparticles — is likely to be problematic. The nanoparticles themselves also pose a risk. COVID-19 vaccines use PEGylated lipid nanoparticles, which is known to cause allergic reactions and anaphylaxis.9,10
What’s more, previous attempts to develop an mRNA-based drug using lipid nanoparticles failed and had to be abandoned because when the dose was too low, the drug had no effect, and when dosed too high, the drug became too toxic.11 An obvious question is: What has changed that now makes this technology safe enough for mass use?
As detailed in my interview with Mikovits, the synthetic RNA influences the gene syncytin, which can result in:
Brain inflammation
Dysregulated communication between the microglia in your brain, which are critical for clearing toxins and pathogens
Dysregulated immune system
Dysregulated endocannabinoid system (which calms inflammation)
Pathogenic Priming and Antibody-Dependent Enhancement
Another significant problem is that we don’t know whether antibody production is protective or pathogenic in coronavirus infections. If pathogenic, vaccinated individuals may be at increased risk of severe illness if they’re exposed to SARS-CoV-2 in the future. As reported in a December 11, 2020, Vaccine: X paper:12
“The first SARS-CoV-2 vaccine(s) will likely be licensed based on neutralizing antibodies in Phase 2 trials, but there are significant concerns about using antibody response in coronavirus infections as a sole metric of protective immunity.
Antibody response is often a poor marker of prior coronavirus infection, particularly in mild infections, and is shorter-lived than virus-reactive T-cells … Strong antibody response correlates with more severe clinical disease while T-cell response is correlated with less severe disease; and antibody-dependent enhancement of pathology and clinical severity has been described.
Indeed, it is unclear whether antibody production is protective or pathogenic in coronavirus infections. Early data with SARS-CoV-2 support these findings. Data from coronavirus infections in animals and humans emphasize the generation of a high-quality T cell response in protective immunity.”
A number of reports in the medical literature have indeed highlighted the risk of pathogenic priming and antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). As explained in “Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire? Due Diligence Warranted for ADE in COVID-19”:13
“ADE is an immunological phenomenon whereby a previous immune response to a virus can render an individual more susceptible to a subsequent analogous infection.
Rather than viral recognition and clearance, the prior development of virus-specific antibodies at a non-neutralizing level can facilitate viral uptake, enhancing replication; a possible immune evasion strategy avoiding intracellular innate immune sensors, or pattern recognition receptors …
ADE of SARS-CoV has also been described14 through a novel FcγRII-dependent and ACE2-independent cell entry mechanism. The authors state15 that this warrants concern in the safety evaluation of any candidate human vaccines against SARS-CoV.”
Similarly, “Pathogenic Priming Likely Contributes to Serious and Critical Illness and Mortality in COVID-19 Via Autoimmunity,” published in the Journal of Translational Autoimmunity, warns that:16
“Failure of SARS and MERS vaccines in animal trials involved pathogenesis consistent with an immunological priming that could involve autoimmunity in lung tissues due to previous exposure to the SARS and MERS spike protein. Exposure pathogenesis to SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19 likely will lead to similar outcomes.”
So, to be clear, what all of this means is that if you get vaccinated, you may actually be at increased risk for serious illness if/when you’re exposed to any number of mutated SARS-CoV-2 strains in the future.
This is why the recommendation to vaccinate individuals who have previously been infected with SARS-CoV-2, or who have an active SARS-CoV-2 infection, may actually be quite dangerous. Dr. Hooman Noorchashm recently sent a public letter17 to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner detailing these risks.
How mRNA Injections May Trigger Prion Disease
What’s more, in a paper18 titled, “COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease,” published in Microbiology & Infectious Diseases, Dr. Bart Classen warns there are also troubling evidences suggesting some of the mRNA shots may cause prion diseases such as Alzheimer’s and ALS. He writes:
“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 …
Analysis of the Pfizer vaccine against COVID-19 identified two potential risk factors for inducing prion disease is humans. The RNA sequence in the vaccine contains sequences believed to induce TDP-43 and FUS to aggregate in their prion based conformation leading to the development of common neurodegerative diseases.
In particular it has been shown that RNA sequences GGUA, UG rich sequences, UG tandem repeats, and G Quadruplex sequences, have increased affinity to bind TDP-43 and or FUS and may cause TDP-43 or FUS to take their pathologic configurations in the cytoplasm.
In the current analysis a total of sixteen UG tandem repeats were identified and additional UG rich sequences were identified. Two GGΨA sequences were found. G Quadruplex sequences are possibly present but sophisticated computer programs are needed to verify these.
The spike protein encoded by the vaccine binds angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), an enzyme which contains zinc molecules. The binding of spike protein to ACE2 has the potential to release the zinc molecule, an ion that causes TDP-43 to assume its pathologic prion transformation.”
mRNA Technology Has Potential to Cause Microvascular Injury
Additionally, Dr. J. Patrick Whelan, a pediatric rheumatologist specializing in multisystem inflammatory syndrome, submitted a public comment19 to the FDA back in December 2020, in which he expressed concern that mRNA vaccines have “the potential to cause microvascular injury to the brain, heart, liver and kidneys in ways that were not assessed in safety trials.”
He cited research showing that “the spike protein in brain endothelial cells is associated with formation of microthrombi (clots),” and that since no viral RNA has been found in brain endothelium, “viral proteins appear to cause tissue damage without actively replicating virus.”
“Is it possible the spike protein itself causes the tissue damage associated with Covid-19?”he asks. “In 13/13 brains from patients with fatal COVID-19, pseudovirions (spike, envelope, and membrane proteins) without viral RNA are present in the endothelia of cerebral microvessels …
It appears that the viral spike protein that is the target of the major SARS-CoV-2 vaccines is also one of the key agents causing the damage to distant organs that may include the brain, heart, lung, and kidney.
Before any of these vaccines are approved for widespread use in humans, it is important to assess in vaccinated subjects the effects of vaccination on the heart … Vaccinated patients could also be tested for distant tissue damage in deltoid area skin biopsies …”
Reports of Side Effects Are Rapidly Mounting
Around the world, reports are now pouring in of people dying shortly after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. In many cases, they die suddenly within hours of getting the shot. In others, death occurs within the span of a couple of weeks.
In the wake of 29 senior citizen deaths,20 Norway is reportedly considering excluding the very old and terminally ill from getting the AstraZeneca vaccine. According to the Norwegian Medicines Agency:21
“Most people have experienced the expected side effects of the vaccine, such as nausea and vomiting, fever, local reactions at the injection site, and worsening of their underlying condition.”
The Norwegian Institute of Public Health further noted that “for those with the most severe frailty, even relatively mild vaccine side effects can have serious consequences,” and that “For those who have a very short remaining life span anyway, the benefit of the vaccine may be marginal or irrelevant.”22
In Sweden, hospitals in Sörmland and Gävleborg suspended the AstraZeneca vaccine in mid-February 2021 after a full quarter of the vaccinated hospital staff reported side effects. To prevent staff shortages and conduct an investigation, the vaccination push was temporarily paused.23Examples of side effects reported after vaccination with Pfizer’s, Moderna’s and AstraZeneca’s vaccines from around the world include:
Persistent malaise24,25
Bell’s Palsy26,27,28
Extreme exhaustion29
Swollen, painful lymph nodes
Severe allergic, including anaphylactic reactions30,31,32
Thrombocytopenia (a rare, often lethal blood disorder)33,34
Multisystem inflammatory syndrome35
Miscarriages36,37
Chronic seizures and convulsions38,39
Severe headache/migraine that does not respond to medication
Paralysis40
Sleep disturbances
Psychological effects such as mood changes, anxiety, depression, brain fog, confusion, dissociation and temporary inability to form words
Cardiac problems, including myocardial and tachycardia disorders41
Blindness, impaired vision and eye disorders42,43
Stroke44,45
In the U.K., there were 49,472 reported side effects to the Pfizer vaccine and 21,032 reactions to the AstraZeneca vaccine as of January 24, 2021. As reported by Principia Scientific International,46“For both vaccines this equates to 1 in every 333 people suffering an adverse reaction. This rate could actually be higher as some cases may have not been reported …”
Greatest Risk of All: Sudden Death
Perhaps most concerning of all are rapidly mounting reports of sudden death,47,48,49,50,51,52 mostly in the elderly but also in much younger, healthy individuals. In the U.S., COVID-19 vaccines accounted for 70% of vaccine-related deaths between January 2020 and January 2021.
As of February 12, 2021, the number of side effects reported to VAERS totaled 15,923, including 929 deaths.53 Of the 799 deaths reported within the U.S., one-third occurred within 48 hours of vaccination and 21% of them were cardiac-related.
Pfizer’s vaccine was the most dangerous in terms of death, being responsible for 58% of deaths while Moderna’s vaccine accounted for 41% of deaths. Pfizer’s vaccine was also responsible for 75% of Bell’s Palsy cases, compared to Moderna’s at 25%.54
Curiously, based on the data submitted to the FDA, Moderna’s vaccine has a death rate 5.41 times higher than Pfizer’s, yet both are dramatically lower than the national average. As noted by The Defender, the dramatic discrepancy in death rates “deserves notice and requires explanation,” adding:55
“If Moderna’s on-vaccine death rate is so far below the national death rate and also simultaneously more than five times greater than Pfizer’s on-vaccine death rate, then Pfizer’s study sample appears even less representative of the entire population …
Moderna’s screening process and exclusion criteria in the trial led to evidence that the general population is dying at a rate 6.3 times greater than the death rate in the Moderna trial — which means the Moderna study, including its estimated efficacy rate and the vaccine’s alleged safety profile — cannot possibly be relevant to most of the U.S. population.
The super-healthy cohorts studied by Moderna are in no way representative of the U.S. population. Most deaths from COVID-19 involve pre-existing health conditions of the types excluded from both Pfizer and Moderna trials …
Those enrolling in the post-market surveillance studies deserve to know the abject absence of any relevant information on efficacy and risk for them. In their zeal to help humanity, or to help themselves, these people may very well be walking into a situation that will cause autoimmunity due to pathogenic priming, potentially leading to disease enhancement should they become infected following vaccination.”
Do a Risk-Benefit Analysis Before Making Up Your Mind
To avoid becoming a sad statistic, I urge you to review the science very carefully before making up your mind about this experimental gene therapy. Also remember that the lethality of COVID-19 is actually surprisingly low. It’s lower than the flu for those under the age of 60.56
If you’re under the age of 40, your risk of dying from COVID-19 is just 0.01%, meaning you have a 99.99% chance of surviving the infection. And you could improve that to 99.999% if you’re metabolically flexible, insulin sensitive, and vitamin D replete.
So, really, what are we protecting against with a COVID-19 vaccine? These mRNA vaccines aren’t even designed to prevent infection, only to reduce the severity of symptoms. Meanwhile, they could potentially make you sicker once you’re exposed to the virus, and/or cause persistent serious side effects such as those reviewed above.
While I won’t tell anyone what to do, I would urge you to take the time to review the science and weigh the potential risks and benefits based on your individual situation before you make a decision that you may regret for the rest of your life, which can actually be shortened with this vaccine. Undoubtedly, Pfizer and other vaccine makers suspect this as well, which is why Pfizer is bullying nations into covering for any and all of its mistakes.
The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) recently posted more than 50 video presentations from the pay-for-view Fifth International Public Conference on Vaccination held online October 16 to 18, 2020, and made them available to everyone for free.
The conference’s theme was “Protecting Health and Autonomy in the 21st Century” and it featured physicians, scientists and other health professionals, human rights activists, faith community leaders, constitutional and civil rights attorneys, authors and parents of vaccine injured children talking about vaccine science, policy, law and ethics and infectious diseases, including coronavirus and COVID-19 vaccines.
In December 2020, a U.K. company published false and misleading information about NVIC and its conference, which prompted NVIC to open up the whole conference for free viewing. The conference has everything you need to educate yourself and protect your personal freedoms and liberties with respect to your health.
Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity. I was a speaker at this empowering conference and urge you to watch these video presentations before they’re censored and taken away by the technocratic elite.
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The prism of power which holds together the American empire, that filters public perception, breeds manic worry amongst citizens about imagined enemies. To justify its existence, the military oligarchy that runs America needs enemies. Thus it views peace as an existential threat and invests serious resources into steering the thought and behaviour of the public to serve the murder machine. Although imperialism has targeted varied countries throughout its life, its strategy has remained constant, and forms a pattern of state behaviour that reveals the depravity of American motives in international relations.
The latest target to be confronted by a hostile US geostrategic agenda is China. In terms of its economy and political system, China is nonconformist in a global economy where western capital writes the rules. China represents the threat to US unilateral interventionism of a multipolar world, based on peaceful multilateral cooperation. China is the strongest strategic bulwark against the US agenda to privatise the public infrastructure of foreign nations whose resources the US desires, because western elites aspire to mastery of the globe.
Enmity towards China is supposed to blind captive citizens of capitalist states to the fact China’s system of power is more logical than bourgeois democracy, offering power to skilled public administrators rather than ambassadors of inherited wealth. China’s public administration ethic values and upholds organisational competencies, instead of uncritically obeying the profit motive. All in all, Chinese governance is more in harmony with the ideal of a state that is rationally planned than the chaos of cartel capitalism.
But China is not perfect. Unfortunately, it embraces techniques of surveillance capitalism etc to shut down critique of the state. China’s communications policy conforms to the trend of the state restricting the liberatory flow of ideas on the internet. The public is only as strong as the power of free intelligence within it, and China’s repression of electronic dissidence and whistleblowing on inevitable public corruption puts it in bad company.
Freedom of speech is only as strong as the power of critical inquiry, so we ought to be confident in challenging establishment narratives on China.
But we should avoid becoming patriots for China, lest we live in ignorance of the sublime truth of international human fraternity that transcends the state. All in all, China better represents the spirit of international consensus than America, and it could teach us how to develop capabilities in our public administration, were organised lies not blinding our minds.
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By any historical measure, it was a game-changer: the first meeting since the 7th century between a Roman Catholic Pope and a Shiite spiritual leader regarded as a “source of emulation.”
It will take a long time to assess the full implications of the immensely intriguing 50-minute face-to-face conversation, with interpreters only, between Pope Francis and Grand Ayatollah Sistani at his humble home in a Najaf alley near the dazzling Imam Ali shrine.
An avowedly imperfect parallel is that for the Shiite community of the faithful, Najaf is as pregnant with meaning as Jerusalem is for Christianity.
The official Vatican spin is that Pope Francis went on a carefully choreographed “pilgrimage” to Iraq under the sign of “brotherhood” – not only in terms of geopolitics but as a shield against religious sectarianism, be it Sunnis against Shiites or Muslims against Christians.
Francis went back to the main theme in an extremely frank exchange (in Italian) with the media on his plane back to Rome. Yet what’s most extraordinary is his candid assessment of Ayatollah Sistani.
The Pope stressed,
“Ayatollah Sistani has a saying, I hope to recall it properly: ‘Men are either brothers by religion or equal by creation.’” Francis sees the bridging of this duality also as a cultural journey.
He qualified the meeting with Sistani as delivering a “universal message,” and praised the Grand Ayatollah as “a sage” and “a man of God”: “Listening to him, one cannot but notice it. He’s a person who carries wisdom and also prudence. He told me that for over ten years he has not received ‘people who come to visit me but have other political aims.’”
The Pope added:
“He was very respectful, and I felt honored, even in the final salutations. He never stands up, but he did, to salute me, twice. A humble, and wise, man. It felt good to my soul, this meeting.”
A glimpse of the warmth was revealed in this image, absent from Western mainstream media – which, to a large extent, tried to gaslight, sabotage, ignore, black out or sectarianize the meeting, usually under barely disguised layers of “Shiite threat” propaganda.
They did that because, at the core, Francis and Sistani were delivering an anti-war, anti-genocide, anti-sectarian, and anti-occupation message, which cannot but incur the wrath of the usual suspects.
There were a few frantic attempts to portray the meeting as the Pope privileging quietist Najaf over militant Qom in the Shiite universe – or, in raw terms, Sistani over Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei. That’s nonsense. For context, see the contrast between Najaf and Qom in my Persian Miniatures e-book published by Asia Times.
The Pope has recently written to Ayatollah Shirazi in Iran. Tehran keeps an ambassador in the Vatican and has collaborated for years on scientific research protocols. This pilgrimage, though, was all about Iraq. Unlike those of the West, the media of the Axis of Resistance (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon) gave it wall-to-wall coverage.
That crucial fatwa
I have been privileged to track Ayatollah Sistani’s movements since the early 2000s, and have visited his office in Najaf several times.
In 2003, when the scarecrow du jour, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, literally blew up revered Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim in front of the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf, Sistani pleaded for no retaliation: The American occupation machine was too powerful and Sistani saw the divide-and-rule dangers of a sectarian Sunni-Shiite war.
Yet in 2004 he single-handedly stared down the mighty occupation apparatus and the dreadful Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) when they were contemplating a bloodbath to get rid of the incandescent cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, then holed up in Najaf.
In 2014, Sistani issued a fatwa conferring legitimacy upon the weaponizing of Iraqi civilians to fight ISIS/Daesh – especially as the takfiris were aiming to attack the quadruple, sacred Shi’ite sanctuaries in Iraq: Najaf, Karbala, Kazimiya and Samarra.
So it was Sistani who legitimized the birth of armed defensive groups which coalesced in the Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs), or Hashd a-Shaabi, later incorporated into the Iraqi Ministry of Defense.
The PMUs were – and remain – an umbrella group, with some closer to Tehran than others and working under the strategic supervision of Major General Qassem Soleimani until his assassination via an American drone strike at Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020.
Never promised you a rose garden
For all the warmth between them, the meeting between the Pope and Sistani may not have been the proverbial rose garden. My colleague Elijah Magnier, the foremost reporter on all things Axis of Resistance, confirmed some startling details with his sources in Najaf:
Sayyed Sistani refused to have his own photographer and did not want any Shiite cleric, nor the directors of his office, to be present at Al-Rasoul Street, where he received His Holiness the Pope…. The Vatican did not issue any statement or take any overt position to recognize and support the Shiites who were killed while resisting ISIS and defending the Christians of Mesopotamia. Thus, Sayyed Sistani did not consider it necessary to issue a “joint document” as the Pope desired and was aiming for, and as he had done in Abu Dhabi when meeting with the Sheikh of Al-Azhar.
Magnier correctly focuses on the subsequent communiqué issued by Sistani’s office – and especially on its roll call vote of No, No, No …. Every No indicts the hegemon.
Sistani denounces the “besieging of populations” – including sanctions; he denies that Iraqis want US troops to stay; when he denounces “violence,” he refers to American bombing.
Additionally, “No to injustice” is Sistani’s message not only to politicians in Baghdad – mired in corruption, not delivering basic services or job opportunities – but also to Washington’s “language of war” in the wider Middle East, from Syria and Iran to Palestine.
Rome sources confirmed there had been negotiations for months aiming at convincing Baghdad to normalize relations with Israel. A “message” was sent through the Vatican. Sistani replied sharply that normalization is impossible. The Vatican remains mum.
One reason to remain mum is that the statement from Sistani’s office makes it clear the Vatican is not doing enough to support Iraq. According to the Najaf source quoted by Magnier, between 2014 and 2017 “the Vatican was silent when the Shiites lost thousands of men defending the Christians (and other Iraqis) and did not receive any attention or even an overt statement of recognition from the Pope for all these years since.”
The statement from Sistani’s office explicitly refers to “displacement, wars, acts of violence, economic blockades, and the absence of social justice to which the Palestinian people are exposed, especially the Palestinian people in the occupied territories.”
Translation: Iraq supports the Palestinian cause.
A crown of thorns
The meeting of Catholicism and Shia Islam did revolve around a geopolitical crown of thorns. Take, for instance, the fact that spokespersons or underlings of a Catholic POTUS, as well as American mainstream media, demonize the enemy du jour as “Iran-backed militias,” “Shiite-backed militias” or “Shiite militias affiliated with Iran.”
This is nonsense. As I found when meeting some of them in Iraq in 2017, PMUs harbor brigades composed not only of Shiites but Iraqis of other religions. For instance, there’s the Council of Scholars of the Sacred Ribat of Muhammad; the Council for Combating Takfiri-Thinking of the Sunnah Fallujah and Anbar; and the Christian Chaldean Brigade led by Rayan al-Kildani, who met Pope Francis.
To be fair, Pope Francis in his pilgrimage did condemn those who instrumentalize religion to engineer wars – to the benefit of Israel, the Saudi oily hacienda, the empire, and all of the above. He prayed at a church destroyed by ISIS/Daesh.
Significantly, Pope Francis handed a rosary to al-Kildani, the head of the Babylon militia of the PMUs. The Pope considers al-Kildani as nothing less than the savior of Christians in Iraq. And yet, al-Kildani is the only Christian on the planet featured on the US terrorist list.
It’s never enough to remember that the PMUs were the target of the recent Biden-Harris excellent bombing adventure on February 25/26: militants were actually bombed in Iraqi, not Syrian territory. The previous overall field commander of the PMUs was Abu al-Muhandis, who I met in Baghdad in late 2017. He was assassinated side by side with Soleimani.
Pope Francis was able to embark on his Iraqi pilgrimage only due to the Hashd al-Shaabi – who were absolutely key, front line actors saving Iraq from partition by takfiris and/or becoming a (fake) Caliphate.
Francis did retrace some of the Prophet’s steps in his Abrahamic pilgrimage, especially in Ur in Babylon; but echoes reach way farther, to al-Khalil (Hebron) in Palestine all the way to modern Syria and Jordan.
A mere pilgrimage won’t change harsh facts on the Mesopotamian ground: 36% unemployment (nearly 50% among the youth); 30% of the population living in poverty; an incoming NATO surge; the hegemon unable to let go because it needs this empire-of-bases hub between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean; widespread political corruption by an entrenched oligarchy.
Francis insisted this was only a “first step,” and it involves “risks.” The best one may hope for, as it stands, is that the Pope and his “humble and wise” interlocutor keep stressing that divide and rule, fanning the flames of religious, ethnic and communitarian strife, benefits only – who else? – the usual suspects.
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This article was originally published on Asia Times.
Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.
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Maybe you have noticed the rise in public incredulity toward the coronavirus narrative that you hear all day from the mainstream media. More doubts. More opposition. More protests. And far less trust. You are hardly alone. What began as a spark in the Spring of 2020 is now a raging fire. Try as they might to put it out, it is burning hotter and higher than ever before.
The data are already in and the lockdown elites are getting worried. Rightly so.
The great epidemiologist Donald Henderson in 2006 made two firm predictions of the consequences of lockdowns. First, he said, doing so would have no benefit in terms of disease mitigation. Indeed, lockdowns did not work.
Second, he said that doing so would result in discrediting public health and cause a “loss of public trust in government.” The loss in public trust – not just officials but also in media – is palpably obvious.
Turn your attention to a new round-up of surveys published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It specifically relates to vaccines but the results reflect a much broader loss of trust in general. Indeed, the surprising lack of public enthusiasm for the vaccines is but a symptom of a much larger problem.
However, despite scholarship emphasizing the role of trust in institutions to provide relevant information, polls suggest that sources of technical information about safety are not greatly trusted. Specifically, there is limited trust in the media or pharmaceutical companies to provide Covid-19 vaccine information: as few as 16% and 20% of respondents, respectively, say they have “a great deal/quite a bit” of trust in these organizations to provide such information. The public also has only moderate trust in information provided by the Food and Drug Administration.
The loss of trust was triggered by using an egregious and destruction means – lockdowns – in order somehow to achieve the unachievable; that is, the control of a widespread respiratory virus with severe outcomes for the elderly and sick but which is mostly mild for everyone else. It so happened that SARS-CoV-2 was not the universally deadly plague it was presumed to be one year ago, so these measures were wildly disproportionate.
Even if the pandemic had been as grim as the models predicted, there is no evidence in the historical record of lockdowns doing anything about a virus except to disrupt and destroy social and market functioning in a way that makes dealing with severe health outcomes even more difficult.
Consider one huge and unprecedented mitigation measure deployed last year: the stay-at-home order. Most states imposed them and enforced them with police power. It was not that different from near-universal house arrest – right here in the United States.
The claim was that this would slow or stop the spread or somehow cause the virus to be controlled, resulting in fewer severe disease outcomes. The propaganda became outrageous at points, with signs everywhere ordering people to “stay home and save lives,” as if leaving your house would result in lives lost.
People undertook enormous personal sacrifices to comply, at great personal expense. The economic costs were huge but so were the psychological and social costs. The result was an epidemic in loneliness and a rise in deaths of despair.
How did it work? A new study in Nature by four epidemiologists looked at the experience of 87 countries with a variety of policies, some loose and some extreme in strigency. They sought to correlate state-at-home orders with virus control. The results: they were unable to do so. The relationship does not exist, which is to say that it is consistent with randomness. The policy was worse than useless.
This study is the 31st that AIER has assembled using data nationally and internationally showing that lockdowns achieved nothing and cost everything. You are welcome to peruse the list and share it with your friends, who will be astonished (or maybe not) to discover that the public health edicts were unscientific and pointlessly brutal. All that sacrifice for nothing.
How many other things did public health authority get wrong? Thanks to a large email dump, from an account used by Anthony Fauci, we know that he was warned in early March 2020 that PCR testing was giving inaccurate results. As a result, almost all the data we thought we had now lives under a cloud. If testing is wrong, so too could be death data and so on. It’s a mess of confusion. The same email dump revealed that a US delegation went to China in mid-February to learn from the best in the politics and arts of locking down a society.
Incredibly, these policies were implemented at a time when American trust in government is at the lowest point it has been since 1972. Only 8% are willing to say that they trust government in domestic affairs a “great deal” whereas 20% say they trust government “not at all.” It will be fascinating to watch these polls move during this year, as more and more information comes out about what our governing elites did to the economy and our lives during the pandemic. It could be generations before trust returns to what it was before.
The last poll taken specifically about public health officials dates to September 2020, and it documented that trust in the CDC and Dr. Fauci were already evaporating. How does that compare with today? And what becomes of that trust over the next six months as more people discover just how terrible and thoroughly unscientific the policies were?
This collapsing trust is hitting about the time that the CDC has finally begun to put on its website some clarifying data. These charts for example make it clear that another public health measure from last year was wildly wrong: that getting the virus was very nearly a death sentence. We are at least getting some accurate data on the demographics of severe outcomes.
In truth, this was known since late March 2020. We reported on it on April 5. Even earlier, from March 8, we reported accurately on the nature of this virus, and fully expected that once the information was revealed, public fear would decline and the world would reopen. Instead, a combination of media and government messaging stoked that fear and fed more and longer lockdowns, disastrous policies that governors are racing to repeal even as the federal government warns against it.
The longer lockdown policies last – in practice especially but also when defended by public health authorities – the more that elites in government and media risk a devastating loss of credibility. The rebuilding of reputation might prove impossible for at least a generation or two.
There is a potential social cost to this loss in trust. Public health in the last century largely did good for humanity, with its emphasis on holistic perspectives on human well-being, the distribution of therapeutics and vaccines, the education on clean water and wise disease mitigation, its focus on rational science and calm over disease panic, and so much more. With lockdowns, and the tremendous public confusion sown by so many, this entire well-deserved reputation for science in the public interest is in tatters.
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Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and nine books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
Jeffrey is available for speaking and interviews via his email. Tw | FB | LinkedIn
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In the latest episode of “TRUTH” with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Kennedy sat down with the iconic Naomi Wolf for a spirited discussion on abuse of power, standing up to tyranny and preserving our Constitution. Wolf explained how tyrants always follow the same predictable route in their attempts to bring democracies to a close and how she believes our society has reached “Step 10” of her “Fascism in 10 Easy Steps.”
Highlights of their conversation include:
We’re reaching a point reminiscent of what led to the American Revolution: People were willing to die rather than give up their rights.
The Constitution wasn’t written for easy times but for emergencies such as the current COVID crisis.
Arbitrary restrictions are being put in place by those abusing emergency powers at local, state and federal levels.
In a free society, points are made and arguments won through free speech and open debate rather than censoring opinions that differ from ours.
Authoritarianism has no place in medicine although most liberals are accepting edicts promoted by Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates.
There’s no science to back up the widespread suspension of our Constitutional rights.
Non-partisan grassroots efforts are gaining momentum and can preserve our freedom and prevent totalitarian takeover.
All “Truth” episodes can be found on Children’s Health Defense’s social media and on Children’s Health Defense’s channel found on Peeps TV, a network on Roku. Roku is accessible from any Smart TV and can be purchased separately for older TVs.
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As new COVID cases tumble across North America, sleepy British Columbia has just reported a new outbreak of the virus at a nursing home in the province where both staff members and patients had already been vaccinated.
According to the CBC, a new outbreak of COVID-19 has been declared at the Cottonwoods Care Center, located in the Interior Health region. BC’s provincial health officer first acknowledged the outbreak yesterday.
During a live news conference about the outbreak, Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry emphasized being vaccinated doesn’t mean transmission will be stopped and that precautions must remain in place for seniors and care homes. Dr. Henry said two staff members and 10 residents have tested positive at the Cottonwoods facility, which is a long-term care home with 221 publicly-funded beds. Henry said that all staff and residents at the home were offered immunizations and that there was very high uptake of the vaccine. She said some of the cases were among people who had received two doses of the vaccine.
“You can have transmission even when people are fully vaccinated,” she said. “The illness seems to be milder and doesn’t transmit as much [and we] won’t see rapid explosive outbreaks.”
Despite the outbreak, Dr. Henry said the province will offer new guidance by the end of month that will allow for increased visitation at long-term care homes like this.
Increasingly, people around the world are questioning how and why outbreaks can still occur among populations with high vaccination rates. In Israel, where a spate of post-vaccination reactions and deaths were documented and reported as the tiny Mediterranean Country scrambled to be the world leader, the Jerusalem Post has just published an explainer piece entitled “Why would someone fully vaccinated still catch corona?”
In the article, the writer identifies four reasons why an individual might test positive and/or be severely sickened.
There are several reasons why one might develop COVID-19 after vaccination, according to Prof. Jonathan Gershoni of the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research at Tel Aviv University.
The first reason is that the clinical trials for Moderna and Pfizer indicate that the vaccine is 95% efficient in protecting against the disease meaning, according to Johns Hopkins University, that about one out of 20 vaccinated people may not be protected and could still get sick.
The efficacy of protection is calculated based on the number of people who were actually infected in the clinical trials, not on the total number of those that were vaccinated.
It should also be noted that 95% efficacy does not mean that 5% of the people in the Pfizer clinical trial caught coronavirus. According to an article published by Live Science, the percentage was much less – around 0.04%.
The second reason is variants.
The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were developed based on the original coronavirus strain as discovered and genetically sequenced in Wuhan, China. Since then, the virus has replicated and mutated into thousands of different variants, some of which might render the vaccine less effective.
“We know in Israel that now, the majority of infections are from the UK variant,” Gershoni said.
While these vaccines have already proven to be highly effective against the UK variant, they are not as effective against the South African strain, Gershoni said. Furthermore, he added, there could be other variants that are even more vaccine resistant.
The third reason is that immunity is “a numbers game,” the scientist explained.
The disease – or the vaccine – causes our bodies to develop antibodies against the virus. But if someone has an extremely high viral load and sheds that potent load, it is possible that this large amount of virus could break through the existing protection and infect the person. In this case though, it would likely only cause a mild disease.
The fourth and final reason, each person is unique and has her or his own molecular immunological makeup.
“We know some people have a tendency to be very robust and stand up to infections, and other people can be a bit more sensitive,” Gershoni said. “When talking in terms of vaccinating five million people in Israel, you are seeing the full spectrum of people with various levels of immune competence.”
But he cautioned that when we talk about “breakthrough infections,” sometimes people were infected before they got their second dose or even their first.
As more older Americans receive the vaccine (the US is now doling out more than 2MM doses per day of the three approved jabs from Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech and JNJ), it appears many are already booking trips to see family and friends, or take a brief vacation, after being essentially stuck in their own homes for a year. A recent BofA survey found that older Americans’ spending on airline tickets has surged 4x since June.
Although the CDC yesterday eased restrictions on certain domestic activities for people who have been “fully vaccinated”, any form of travel is still against the federal guidelines, especially if patients are deemed high risk. Still, as worries about the mutations intensify, what might this new trend portend?
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Did Joe Biden read the Democratic platform that he ran under? Elect us and we will “move away from military intervention” in the Middle East. Diplomacy will protect Syrians’ human needs and rights and “find a peaceful resolution for this horrific war.” All the “forever wars” will end.
Instead, Biden and the military men under his command did what the military is supposed to do: kill and destroy – or, as they prefer to put it, drop “precision-guided munitions” on “targets.” Among targets of the February 25th attack on Syria were at least 22 people.
Congressional reactions did not follow party lines. Several Democrats objected to the President’s violation of the constitutional war power of Congress. Some of their GOP colleagues praised the bombing, but Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) saw no right to attack a sovereign country. His father, ex-Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), called for Biden’s impeachment.
Few pay much attention to international laws against aggression, particularly three U.S. treaties prohibiting it. Forcible violation of the territorial rights of one state by another has been considered a war crime since the infamous trials following World War II.
But everything is good, from what administration spokesmen say. Don’t grieve for the 22. They were all “believed” to be members of “Iran-backed militias” accused of recent rocket attacks on US targets in Iraq. (Rest assured that no children, women, or non-militant men are ever harmed by our clever weapons, only “militants,” “insurgents,” and “terrorists.”)
The media reported that the raid was designed to “send a message” to Iran. Whatever that message said, it was expensive. You can send one far cheaper by e-mail, phone, fax, or airmail letter. You’d think the cost would concern the budget-minded congressional Republicans, if nothing else does.
As far as relations with Iran were concerned, the Dems’ platform pledged to call off the race to war; reject the goal of regime change in Tehran; emphasize “diplomacy, de-escalation, and regional dialogue”; and restore the nuclear agreement. If any of those things were in that message, you probably wouldn’t need to send it via bomb.
Our defense establishment tells us that the aggression was “defensive,” yet also “retaliatory”: We attacked Syria because our forces in Iraq had been attacked, though not by Syria. (Needless to say, our forces had a perfect right to be in Iraq. As California’s Senator S. I. Hayakawa once said about Panama, “We stole it fair and square.”)
What about the president’s decision to commit an act of war, when Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution reserves that power to Congress?
According to an aide of the National Security Council, “Biden acted under his constitutional authority to defend US and deter the risk of additional attacks.” (I’m quoting a Bloomberg story by eight writers. It said the aide “commented on condition of anonymity.” I would want to be anonymous too, if I had to dispense stuff like that.) Don’t bother searching through your Constitution for such authority; it’s not there.
Biden did not lose much time before tending to what the platform called “this horrific war.” The five weeks of abstention compare with 11 weeks into Trump’s term before he bombed Syria. Obama, before him, had waited five years before initiating his bombing of Syrians. Of course Trump and Obama did plenty of killing elsewhere throughout their terms. Biden is just getting started.
Biden (2021) Should Listen to Biden (1991)
Thirty years ago, President George H. W. Bush was massing US troops in the Saudi desert, preparing for war with Iraq over its seizure of Kuwait. Bush and his yes-men in the Defense and State Departments contended that the president, as commander-in-chief of the military, had the authority to start a war.
Joseph R. Biden Jr., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called a hearing on “The Constitutional Roles of the Congress and the President in Declaring and Waging War.” In an introductory speech, Senator Biden found the Bush view of the war power at odds with the Constitution. The Founders, he said, took great pains to ensure that the new government would differ from that of King George III. The chief difference was how the decision to go to war would be made.
“In England the king alone could decide to take a nation to war.” Here, the legislature would have that power. “The Constitution’s language says that the war power rests in the Congress…. The Constitution’s founders all understood this to be a key principle of our republic…. Yes, the president is the commander-in-chief….”
Senator Biden thereupon quoted Alexander Hamilton, who wrote about the (then) proposed Constitution in The Federalist, 69. “The president is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy… It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces as first general and admiral….” His authority would be much inferior to that of the British king, which “extends to the declaring of war and the raising and regulating of fleets and armies” – all of which would be the legislature’s functions under the Constitution.
“In short,” said the senator, “Congress decides whether to make war, and the president decides how to do so…. We have been told that the congressional debate on war could tie the president’s hands or limit his discretion….. Exactly right. Americans once lived under a system where one man had unfettered choice to decide by himself whether we could go to war or not go to war, and we launched a revolution to free ourselves from the tyranny of such a system.”
Senator Biden noted that President Bush was claiming that his impending war on Iraq would uphold the rule of law by undoing Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The former commented, “If the crisis is really about upholding the law of nations abroad, the President must start by upholding the law at home, and our law begins with the Constitution.”
Bush backed down and submitted to a congressional vote. It supported the war he wanted. Biden voted “nay.”
Gullible and Contradictory
Having opposed Bush Senior’s war on Iraq over the Kuwait seizure, Biden avidly supported the second war on Iraq, started by Bush’s son, George W. It was based on “weapons of mass destruction,” which Bush Jr. falsely claimed that Iraq possessed and would likely give to terrorists.
Biden fell for those lies and, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spoke in favor of a resolution (prepared in the White House) to let Bush decide whether war on Iraq would be warranted. The measure would be unconstitutional, for such a decision was up to Congress to make, not the president, as Biden himself had pointed out 11 years earlier.
Biden has shown similar gullibility in swallowing disputed allegations of Syrian use of poison gas and Russian “bounties” on lives of US servicemen in Afghanistan. Some US intelligence agents doubt that the bounty tale is true.
In foreign affairs, Biden is full of contradictions. Nine examples follow. JoeBiden –
Opposed one Bush attack on Iraq and supported another.
Ran for president on a promise of rejoining the nuclear agreement with Iran that Trump renounced, but hesitates to keep the promise, and now comes that “message.”
Condemns the bombing of Yemeni civilians and the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, yet – without congressional permission – commits the US to defend the Saudi monarchy that committed those crimes.
Talks of having the US, Europe, and Asia “work together to secure the peace,” while confronting China with US warships provocatively close to its coast.
Renews the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Russian Federation (New START) for five years, but heightens tensions by anti-Russian rhetoric and sanctions
Considers the climate crisis a top concern, yet the world’s single biggest producer of climate-changing gases is the US military, and war intensifies their production.
Resolves to work with allies on critical issues, but disregards his own country’s Congress.
Has repeatedly paid homage to “the rule of law,” contrary to his positions in favor of lawless actions in Syria, Iraq, and Yugoslavia (Bill Clinton’s 1999 war).
Conducts an act of war that is incompatible with the platform he ran under and his own comments about the war power, made to fellow senators 30 years ago.
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Paul W. Lovinger, of San Francisco, is a journalist, author, editor, and antiwar activist (see www.warandlaw.org).
All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”— George Washington
It’s a given that the government is corrupt, unaccountable, and has exceeded its authority.
So what can we do about it?
The first remedy involves speech (protest, assembly, speech, prayer, and publicity), and lots of it, in order to speak truth to power.
The First Amendment, which is the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights, affirms the right of “we the people” to pray freely about our grievances regarding the government. We can gather together peacefully to protest those grievances. We can publicize those grievances. And we can express our displeasure (peacefully) in word and deed.
Unfortunately, tyrants don’t like people who speak truth to power.
The American Police State has shown itself to be particularly intolerant of free speech activities that challenge its authority, stand up to its power grabs, and force it to operate according to the rules of the Constitution.
Cue the rise of protest laws, the police state’s go-to methods for muzzling discontent.
These protest laws, some of which appear to encourage violence against peaceful protesters by providing immunity to individuals who drive their car into protesters impeding traffic and use preemptive deadly force against protesters who might be involved in a riot, take intolerance for speech with which one might disagree to a whole new level.
Ever since the Capitol protests on Jan. 6, 2021, state legislatures have introduced a broad array of these laws aimed at criminalizing protest activities. Yet while the growing numbers of protest laws cropping up across the country are being marketed as necessary to protect private property, public roads or national security, they are a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a thinly disguised plot to discourage anyone from challenging government authority at the expense of our First Amendment rights.
It doesn’t matter what the source of that discontent might be (police brutality, election outcomes, COVID-19 mandates, the environment, etc.): protest laws, free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws, etc., aim to muzzle every last one of us.
However, as Human Rights Watch points out, these assaults on free speech are nothing new. “Various states have long-tried to curtail the right to protest. They do so by legislating wide definitions of what constitutes an ‘unlawful assembly’ or a ‘riot’ as well as increasing punishments. They also allow police to use catch-all public offenses, such as trespassing, obstructing traffic, or disrupting the peace, as a pretext for ordering dispersals, using force, and making arrests. Finally, they make it easier for corporations and others to bring lawsuits against protest organizers.”
Make no mistake: while many of these laws claim to be in the interest of “public safety and limiting economic damage,” these legislative attempts to redefine and criminalize speech are a backdoor attempt to rewrite the Constitution and render the First Amendment’s robust safeguards null and void.
No matter how you package these laws, no matter how well-meaning they may sound, no matter how much you may disagree with the protesters or sympathize with the objects of the protest, these proposed laws are aimed at one thing only: discouraging dissent.
In Alabama, lawmakers are pushing to allow individuals to use deadly force near a riot. Kentucky, Missouri and New Hampshire are also considering similar stand your ground laws to justify the use of lethal force in relation to riots.
In Arkansas, peaceful protesters who engage in civil disobedience by occupying any government property after being told to leave could face six months in jail and a $1000 fine.
Oregon lawmakers wanted to “require public community colleges and universities to expel any student convicted of participating in a violent riot.” In Illinois, students who twice infringe the rights of others to engage in expressive activities could be suspended for at least a year.
Responding to protests over the Keystone Pipeline, South Dakota enabled its governor and sheriffs to prohibit gatherings of 20 or more people on public land if the gathering might damage the land. At least 15 other states have also adopted or are considering legislation that would levy harsher penalties for environmental protests near oil and gas pipelines.
In Iowa, all it takes is for one person in a group of three of more people to use force or cause property damage, and the whole group can be punished with up to 5 years in prison and a $7,500 fine.
Obstruct access to critical infrastructure in Mississippi and you could be facing a $10,000 fine and a seven-year prison sentence.
A North Carolina law would have made it a crime to heckle state officials. Under this law, shouting at a former governor would constitute a crime.
In Connecticut, you could be sentenced to five years behind bars and a $5,000 fine for disrupting the state legislature by making noise or using disturbing language.
Indiana lawmakers wanted to authorize police to use “any means necessary” to breakup mass gatherings that block traffic. Lawmakers have since focused their efforts on expanding the definition of a “riot” and punishing anyone who wears a mask to a peaceful protest, even a medical mask, with 2.5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Georgia wants to ban all spontaneous, First Amendment-protected assemblies and deny anyone convicted of violating the ban from receiving state or local employment benefits.
Virginia wants to subject protesters who engage in an “unlawful assembly” after “having been lawfully warned to disperse” with up to a year of jail time and a fine of up to $2,500.
Missouri made it illegal for public employees to take part in strikes and picketing, only to have the law ruled unconstitutional in its entirety.
Oklahoma created a sliding scale for protesters whose actions impact or impede critical infrastructure (including a telephone pole). The penalties range from $1,000 and six months in a county jail to $100,000 and up to 10 years in prison. And if you’re part of an organization, that fine goes as high as $1,000,000.
Talk about intimidation tactics.
Ask yourself: if there are already laws on the books in all of the states that address criminal or illegal behavior such as blocking public roadways, trespassing on private property or vandalizing property—because such laws are already on the books—then why does the government need to pass laws criminalizing activities that are already outlawed?
What’s really going on here?
No matter what the politicians might say, the government doesn’t care about our rights, our welfare or our safety.
Every despotic measure used to control us and make us cower and comply with the government’s dictates has been packaged as being for our benefit, while in truth benefiting only those who stand to profit, financially or otherwise, from the government’s transformation of the citizenry into a criminal class.
In this way, the government conspires to corrode our core freedoms purportedly for our own good but really for its own benefit.
Remember, the USA Patriot Act didn’t make us safer. It simply turned American citizens into suspects and, in the process, gave rise to an entire industry—private and governmental—whose profit depends on its ability to undermine our Fourth Amendment rights.
In much the same way that the Patriot Act was used as a front to advance the surveillance state, allowing the government to establish a far-reaching domestic spying program that turned every American citizen into a criminal suspect, the government’s anti-extremism program criminalizes otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities such as peaceful protesting.
Clearly, freedom no longer means what it once did.
This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from soldiers invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ belief that this would be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”
Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.
Yet the unspoken freedom enshrined in the First Amendment is the right to think freely and openly debate issues without being muzzled or treated like a criminal.
In other words, if we no longer have the right to voice concerns about COVID-19 mandates, if we no longer have the right to tell a Census Worker to get off our property, if we no longer have the right to tell a police officer to get a search warrant before they dare to walk through our door, if we no longer have the right to stand in front of the Supreme Court wearing a protest sign or approach an elected representative to share our views, if we no longer have the right to protest unjust laws or government policies by voicing our opinions in public or on social media or before a legislative body—no matter how politically incorrect or socially unacceptable those views might be—then we do not have free speech.
What we have instead is regulated, controlled speech, and that’s what those who founded America called tyranny.
On paper, we may be technically free.
In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow.
As the great George Carlin rightly observed: “Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government … doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety… It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.”
In other words, we only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do—our very lives—depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle. And now the government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.
Remember: if the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.
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Israel has rapidly deteriorated into a segregated culture that discriminates against people who have not received experimental COVID-19 vaccinations, say Israeli citizens who are reaching out for help on media platforms.
“It’s very intense over here in Israel. I don’t know how much you see,” said Ilana Rachel Daniel in a video posted March 3rd on Bit Chute. “It’s terrible. It’s a very, very, very frightening situation.”
“They’re making this green passport where half the population cannot get into theaters or malls or all sorts of things unless you have taken the vaccination. They are creating a medical Apartheid,” Daniel said.
Part of a program dubbed Operation Back to Life , the “Green Pass” system restricts entry to registered gyms, theaters, hotels, restaurants, universities and secondary schools to holders of scannable vaccine passport only.
“This is the first step back to an almost normal life,” Israeli Health Minister Yuli Edelstein said at a briefing about the program which began rolling out last week.
The Israeli government announced a number of new rules on March 6 in a statement released jointly by the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Transportation. The government paper will be in effect until the next government review on March 20.
Students in Grades 7 to 10 were to be allowed to return to classes this week in jurisdictions where 70% of the population over age 50 had been vaccinated.
Universities and other educational institutions were to open for in-person classes as of Sunday to green pass holders only. Those who have not been vaccinated will be permitted to attend online classes only.
Restaurants are to allow vaccinated green pass holders the right to eat indoors, while non-vaccinated people are allowed to eat outside only.
Violators of the government order are to be fined 5000 New Israeli Shekels (NIS) which is about $1,500 USD.
Israeli students have been required to have COVID vaccine injections to allow them to sit their end of high school matriculation exams, according to a BBC report in January. Matriculation exam results can affect whether or not they go to university and their placement in the compulsory military service.
The passport is delivered by a government-run website which issues a green certificate featuring a high-security scannable QR code by text, email or regular mail delivery, according to a report in the Jerusalem Post.
People in Israel are expected to present their green passport for scanning along with personal identification before entering registered businesses.
The government statement issued Saturday said that the prohibition on the entry of Israelis by air to the country is cancelled (land crossings remain in place), allowing Israeli citizens and permanent residents to enter Israel.
“Those holding vaccination or recovery certificates will be able to exit Israel freely,” however, the statement adds.
Earlier in the month, Edelstein told the public that “vaccines won’t be mandatory, but anyone who forges a vaccine certificate will go to jail.”
The Israeli Health Minister has also said that soon employers will be required to have their staff vaccinated, or to undergo coronavirus testing every 48 hours.
Israel’s COVID-19 vaccination drive has been the fastest in the world where 10% of the population received experimental vaccines between December 19 and the end of 2020, and 50% of the country’s nine million residents had received at least one COVID vaccine shot by February 26, according to a statement by Health Minister Edelstein.
“I agreed with my friend, Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla, that we would bring shipment after shipment and complete the vaccination of the over-16 population in Israel during March,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted on January 10.
Pfizer’s Bourla canceled a scheduled trip to Israel because he has not received his second dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, the Jerusalem Postreported on Sunday. The CEO said he did not want to “cut in line” for his company’s injection and has delayed his visit to the country where he is looking at establishing a manufacturing site.
On February 24th the Israeli parliament passed a law allowing the government to share the names, addresses and phone numbers of people who had not received a COVID vaccine with other authorities in the ministries of education and welfare.
“They’re making people wear an ankle bracelet, a security bracelet when they come back from travelling,” said Daniel who is affiliated with the Rapeh party. “It’s absolutely insane.”
People are being offered electronic security ankle bracelets, similar to those worn by prisoners, to monitor their whereabouts after they travel outside of Israel instead of being forced to house in quarantine facilities, The Jerusalem Post reported February 25th.
“We call it a ‘freedom bracelet’ because we are not locking anybody up, but rather giving them the opportunity to go home,” Ordan Trabelsi, president and CEO of SuperCom, the company behind the surveillance system told the paper.
“They’re censoring us and attacking us and they won’t allow any media. Nothing. They took away the head of the party’s medical license,” said Ilana Rachel Daniel. Daniel is affiliated with the Israeli political party, Rapeh, which means “heal” in English.
The Rapeh Party was founded by medical doctor Aryeh Avni whose medical license was revoked by Israel’s Health Ministry on February 24th when a judge ruled he was “a ‘stumbling block,’ whose behavior poses a real danger to public safety and health.”
“They removed our platforms from Facebook and now they won’t let the media even write about us. So we want to ask all the international [inaudible] – anywhere we can get – to publicize what we are saying.”
“If I stop to think about it I will cry you know,” said Daniel, who can be heard breaking down in tears. “We just keep fighting you know, fighting as much as we can.
“We need everybody’s help because whatever happens here will happen everywhere,” she said. “So, we’re fighting for ourselves and we’re fighting for the whole world. We need to help…every hand on deck.” Daniel has since recorded an hour-long interview with British journalist James Delingpole.
In another video, posted on the Facebook page Radiant Israel on February 18, Israeli Gilad Rosinger described the green passport system as a “pre-holocaust agenda.”
“If you do not submit to this wicked, demonic, tyrannical agenda, if you choose to say, ‘you know what, I’m not ready to participate in this experimental program,’ then you are now considered a second class citizen in Israel,” Rosinger said.
“My grandfather was the only survivor out of his whole family of the Holocaust and this is exactly how it started. With discrimination, with essential and non-essential businesses, with people saying that Jews are second class citizens,” he said.
“Well, now it’s not about Jew, it’s not about Arab, it’s not about that. No, it’s about who will take the vaccination,” Rosinger said. “If you don’t do it, you’re wicked, you’re evil, you’re a second-class citizen.”
High level Israeli government officials are talking about sending police to the homes of unvaccinated people and demanding that their names be released, Rosinger said.
Despite its aggressive vaccination campaign, Israel enforced a strict third national lockdown on January 7, 2021 following a surge of new COVID cases. Israeli media reported that 4,500 people were diagnosed with COVID after receiving a first coronavirus vaccine, and that of those 375 were hospitalized.
Calling the new Israeli society a “Twilight zone” that is being “cheered on” by mainstream media, he added that many people are afraid to speak out.
“We need to sound the alarm,” said Rosinger. “Where are the international human rights courts on this? Where are the lawsuits? Where is the outrage? You don’t even have to believe in God to know that this is wrong.”
“Israel, unfortunately has been used as a prototype for the nations because if it succeeds here it’s coming to a town near you, it’s coming to a country near you. It’s coming to your town,” Rosinger said. “That’s why you have to care.”
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Corporate news sources are reporting that Austria has suspended their roll-out of the experimental AstraZeneca COVID vaccines after a 49-year-old nurse has died “as a result of severe coagulation disorders,” and a 35-year-old nurse developed a pulmonary embolism following the COVID injections.
A pulmonary embolism is an acute lung disease caused by a dislodged blood clot.
Both nurses reportedly worked at the Zwettl clinic in Lower Austria province.
The Austrian Federal Office for Safety in Health Care (BASG) said blood clotting was not among the known side effects of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
An AstraZeneca spokesman said: “There have been no confirmed serious adverse events associated with the vaccine.”
However, the statistics published by the UK Government’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency last week reported 244 deaths and 157,637 injuries following injections of the experimental AstraZeneca vaccine in the UK.
A recent CDC report in the U.S. found that 62% of nursing home workers are refusing the experimental Pfizer and Moderna COVID “vaccines.” (Source.)
Since long-term healthcare residents were targeted as among the first to receive the new experimental COVID vaccines in almost every country that has begun COVID injections, and where many deaths are being reported following the injections, it is easy to understand this “vaccine hesitancy” among healthcare workers who are observing these deaths and reactions firsthand.
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Looking at the county-by-county data, the CDC concludes that mask mandates were associated with an average 1.32% decrease in the growth rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths during the first 100 days after the mask policy was implemented.
The U.S. Air Force Air has created policies intended to restrict the movement of personnel based on their COVID-19 vaccination status — despite the fact that the vaccines are not mandatory, are still in phase 3 clinical trials and are still considered experimental, having been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration under Emergency Use Authorization
In his poem “An die Nachgeborenen” (To those born later), published in June 1939, Bertolt Brecht gave an honest, harrowing and admonishing account of his life in dark times.
China and Russia pose the main challenge to US hegemonic aims, especially united. Longstanding US policy seeks control over all world community nations, their resources and populations. Will US war on China by other means turn hot by accident or design?
After a coup in the South American country of Bolivia in November 2019, democratically elected president Evo Morales was forced to flee. Foreign Office documents obtained by Declassified show Britain saw the new military-backed regime, which killed 18 protesters, as an opportunity to open up Bolivia’s lithium deposits to UK firms.
Richard Nephew has taken personal credit for depriving Iranians of food and driving up their unemployment rates, celebrating the economic destruction he caused as “a tremendous success.” Under Biden, he will help direct policy on Iran.
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 2021 will be the second year in a row in which the federal debt exceeds Gross Domestic Product (GDP). CBO also projected that this year’s federal deficit will be 2.3 trillion dollars, which is 900 billion dollars less than last year. However, CBO’s projections do not include the 1.9 trillion dollars “stimulus” bill Congress is likely to pass.
Seizing the emergent opportunities could make all the difference. Both countries are endowed with abundant diplomatic talent to perceive this reality that is still below the radar. The imperatives of development are increasingly felt in both countries in their post-pandemic mindset, which is also leading to a new awakening that there is nothing like absolute security in the life of nations.
A recent incident involving Amanda Gorman, the United States youth poet laureate, who was hailed after her presentation at the inauguration of recently elected President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, revealed the continuing threat of racial profiling.
A growing and coordinated attack on the rights of transgender people is taking place through state legislation and sadly it is receiving support from people across the political spectrum.
Half a century has now passed since the third and last bout dubbed ‘The Fight of the Century’ during the 20th century. The first bout between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali was a unique clash of undefeated heavyweight champions.
L’Accordo Ue-Cina sugli investimenti, siglato il 30 dicembre dalla Commissione europea, potrebbe non essere ratificato dagli europarlamentari in base all’accusa che Pechino viola i diritti umani. È il paravento dietro cui si nasconde il vero motivo: la crescente pressione esercitata dagli Stati uniti sull’Europa per creare una coalizione contro la Cina. La strategia di Washington – da Obama a Trump e ora a Biden – è quella del «contenimento» della Cina, la cui crescita mette in discussione l’ordine economico mondiale dominato finora dagli Stati uniti e dalle maggiori potenze occidentali.
Sono le multinazionali e altre imprese statunitensi ed europee che hanno delocalizzato da decenni gran parte delle loro produzioni in Cina, realizzando enormi profitti. La Cina non è rimasta però semplicemente la «fabbrica del mondo» in cui si va a produrre perché la manodopera costa meno. Ha realizzato un proprio sviluppo produttivo e tecnologico e, su tale base, progetti come la Nuova Via della Seta. In fase avanzata di realizzazione, essa consiste in una rete viaria e ferroviaria tra la Cina e l’Europa attraverso l’Asia Centrale, il Medio Oriente e la Russia, abbinata a una via marittima attraverso l’Oceano Indiano, il Mar Rosso e il Mediterraneo. Per le infrastrutture viarie, ferroviarie e portuali in oltre 60 paesi sono previsti investimenti per oltre 1000 miliardi di dollari. In tale quadro, la Cina è divenuta il principale partner commerciale della Russia. Le relazioni economiche tra i due paesi si sono rafforzate, soprattutto dopo le sanzioni imposte da Stati uniti e Ue alla Russia, con un interscambio che ha superato i 100 miliardi di dollari annui ed è in crescita.
L’interscambio tra Stati uniti e Cina resta sei volte maggiore. Ma, dato che molti prodotti sul mercato statunitense sono fabbricati in Cina da multinazionali Usa o forniti da società cinesi, gli Stati uniti registrano nel commercio bilaterale un deficit di oltre 300 miliardi di dollari annui. Si è verificato inoltre un crollo degli investimenti cinesi negli Usa a scopi produttivi, calati del 90% in tre anni (da 46,5 a 4,8 miliardi di dollari), mentre quelli statunitensi in Cina sono rimasti a circa 13 miliardi. Allo stesso tempo la quota del debito statunitense di oltre 27.000 miliardi di dollari, posseduta dalla Cina, è diminuita dal 14% nel 2011 al 5% nel 2020. Ancora più grave per Washington è il fatto che la quota in dollari delle riserve valutarie cinesi è calata in quattro anni dal 79% al 59% e che la Cina cerca monete alternative al dollaro da usare nel commercio internazionale.
Non potendo arrestare tale processo che può mettere fine al predominio economico degli Stati uniti, Washington getta la spada sul piatto della bilancia. Il «contenimento» economico diventa «contenimento» militare. L’ammiraglio Phil Davidson, che è a capo del Comando Indo-Pacifico degli Stati uniti (la cui area di responsabilità copre la Cina e altri 35 paesi), ha richiesto al Congresso oltre 27 miliardi di dollari in cinque anni per costruire attorno alla Cina una cortina di basi missilistiche e sistemi satellitari, compresa una costellazione di radar su piattaforme spaziali. «Dobbiamo cominciare ad affrontare la Cina da una posizione di forza», ha dichiarato al Senato Antony Blinken, segretario di Stato dell’amministrazione Biden.
Alla Conferenza di Monaco sulla Sicurezza, il 19 febbraio, il segretario generale della Nato Stoltenberg ha ribadito: «Europa e Nord America devono difendere l’ordine internazionale, che Cina e Russia sfidano tentando di riscrivere le sue regole a beneficio dei propri interessi». Dopo aver accusato la Russia di «comportamento destabilizzante», ha dichiarato che «l’ascesa della Cina è una questione determinante per la comunità transatlantica». Ha quindi annunciato un prossimo «aggiornamento del concetto strategico della Nato» perché «abbiamo bisogno di rafforzarci militarmente» insieme a «stretti partner come Australia e Giappone». Chiamata alle armi dunque per gli alleati degli Usa, non solo contro la Russia in Europa ma contro la Cina in Asia. Col risultato che Russia e Cina rafforzano la loro alleanza anche sul piano militare.
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This is the sort of stuff barnacles clinging on the antiquated raft known as British Royalty were waiting for. One of the royal couples makes a dash for it, shirking and then shedding their subsidised duties. They get in touch with that great squeeze and fluff of publicity, Oprah Winfrey. Being interviewed by Winfrey is not going to get you kudos for aristocratic virtue but will appeal to a certain demographic. (New fashion design in the offing? Perfume line?)
The Prince Harry-Meghan Markle revelations were boring, uninspiring, tedious, self-promoting celluloid slush. For a moment, royalty gorgers and gloaters could forget the pandemic, the deaths of over 500,000 Americans, millions of job losses and incompetent governance. They could feast their eyes on a privileged couple being interviewed in the environs of Californian luxury talking about their terrible hardships.
Press outlets such as Associated Press were merely stating the obvious in claiming that the interview revealed a “picture of racism, insensitivity and deep-rooted dysfunction” in the royal family. On the racist charge, Meghan revealed that there had been “concerns and conversations” between Prince Harry and the family “about how dark” the skin of their offspring would be. Meghan was adamant that her treatment in the British media was different to that offered to other royals, particularly Prince William’s wife Catharine. It was one thing to be “rude”, another to be “racist”.
The discussion of racism was less bombshell than damp squib; Meghan had come into the House of Windsor. The records, satirised, anatomised, and scoured, suggest that if you want to join such a concern, you must expect a system that rejects evolution. But the couple, and certainly Meghan, might have believed that their marriage was somehow a change in the order of things, a sprinkling of diversity to the institutional monochrome.
This was itself almost amusing in its derangement, given Harry’s own past of race-related behaviour. When training at the Sandhurst military academy, the prince was recorded calling a soldier “our little Paki friend”. Another video revealed the royal saying the following to a combat helicopter pilot before training: “Fuck me, you look like a rag-head.” To comedian Stephen K. Amos, Harry remarked that he did not “sound like a black chap.” Then there was that rather infamous case of donning Nazi uniform at a fancy dress party. “Harry the Nazi,” roared The Sun at the time. The fruit never falls far from the tree.
In this, Harry shares much with his grandfather, Prince Philip. For years, anybody interested in the royals would be waiting for the dotty utterances of a man whose mouth really ought to have been taped. The Duke of Edinburgh, currently recovering from heart surgery, is Britain’s national treasure of petrified prejudice, incapable of changing and always ready with an incautious remark. Perhaps it was he who ventured the colour question. To dampen such speculation, which evidently had the opposite effect, Winfrey revealed that Harry confirmed “it was not his grandmother nor his grandfather [who] were a part of those conversations.”
The bleeding obvious category was also filled by observations aimed to inspire audience sympathy and garner click bait. Harry claimed to be trapped but initially suffered from false consciousness. “I was trapped but I didn’t know I was trapped.” His father and brother were similarly trapped. “They don’t get to leave.” Evidently, the prince lacks understanding on the difference between roles and people.
The issue of mental health was also given a generous airing to add to victim standard bearing. Meghan revealed she had suicidal thoughts. “And that was a very clear, and real, and frightening, constant thought.” The palace’s human resources insufficient support. In this, the Duchess of Sussex ticked another self-promoting box: as aspiring mental health advocate. This conversion certainly worked for Serena Williams, who wrote of those “mental health consequences of systematic oppression and victimization” and how they were “devastating, isolating and all too often lethal.” Billie Jean King also joined the party. “Her honesty will hopefully lead to more acceptance and more help for those who need it.”
Even the White House was bewitched. “For anyone to come forward and speak about their own struggles and mental health and tell their own personal story, that takes courage,” babbled the barely credible press White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.
What Meghan and Harry have done is publicise the tedious and the personal as a platform. Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked, sees a cultural coup at work, an enterprise on the couple’s part “to seize the throne of the victim industry and consolidate their cultural power in the post-traditional world.” At the very least, they have become publicity harlots, modern royals with a link to their own celebrity creating machine. They feed that machine even as they complain before an audience of 17.1 million viewers about breaches of their privacy.
In the aftermath of the showing, the couple’s efforts yielded much nauseating fruit. The whole exercise shows that Meghan is merely continuing the shallowness of showbiz by other means. Harry has become a tag along, an essentially useless royal who had already expressed dissatisfaction with the institution before meeting his wife. The lack of utility for the royals was already in evidence before the couple decided to step back from their duties. Leave that orbit, and you are merely a spec in search of vacuity masquerading as relevance.
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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 and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
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Richard Nephew has taken personal credit for depriving Iranians of food and driving up their unemployment rates, celebrating the economic destruction he caused as “a tremendous success.” Under Biden, he will help direct policy on Iran.
The Joseph Biden administration has named Richard Nephew as its deputy Iran envoy. As the former principal deputy coordinator of sanctions policy for Barack Obama’s State Department, Nephew took personal credit for depriving Iranians of food, sabotaging their automobile industry, and driving up unemployment rates.
Nephew has described the destruction of Iran’s economy as “a tremendous success,” and lamented during a visit to Russia that food was still plentiful in the country’s capital despite mounting US sanctions.
Nephew’s appointment to a senior diplomatic post suggests that rather than immediately returning to the JCPOA nuclear deal, the Biden administration will finesse sanctions illegally imposed by Trump to pressure Iran into an onerous, reworked agreement that Tehran is unlikely to join.
After coordinating Obama’s sanctions regime against Iran, Nephew left the administration for a position at the energy industry-funded Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. There, he published a book outlining in blunt terms how he honed the craft of economic warfare and applied it against Iran.
Entitled “The Art of Sanctions: A View From The Field,” the book’s cover image features two Caucasian hands drawing a rope for a noose, presumably to strangle some insufficiently pliant Global South government. Its contents read like a list of criminal confessions, detailing in chillingly clinical terms how the sanctions Nephew conceived from inside an air-conditioned office in Washington immiserated average Iranians.
With his candor, Nephew has shattered the official US rhetoric about “targeted sanctions” that exclusively punish “bad actors” and their business cronies while leaving civilian populations unharmed.
The application of pain to a country’s civilian population is central to Nephew’s sanctions strategy. As he explains in “The Art of Sanctions,” for the unilateral coercive measures to succeed, they must impose significant pain to a state’s most vulnerable sectors, shatter the state’s political and social resolve, and ultimately force the state to cry uncle in the face of Washington’s demands.
An excerpt from Richard Nephew’s book The Art of Sanctions
Nephew detailed how, as JCPOA negotiations got underway in January 2012, he led a process to reduce Iran’s oil revenue and starve its economy.
After the Obama administration successfully pushed for a wholesale reduction in oil exports and other unilateral coercive measures, Iran’s economy went from a period of growth to a sudden and staggering contraction, while the value of its currency tumbled.
Nephew pronounced the economic assault he engineered to be “a tremendous success.”
An excerpt from Richard Nephew’s book The Art of Sanctions
Nephew also patted himself on the the back for tripling the price of chicken “during important Iranian holiday periods,” thereby “contribut[ing] to more popular frustration in one bank shot than years of financial restrictions.”
Next, he boasted of more sanctions targeting civilians to prevent Iranians from obtaining the assistance they needed to repair their cars. “Iran’s manufacturing jobs and export revenue were the targets of this sanction,” Nephew wrote.
There were some goods that Nephew wanted Iran to import, however. In hopes of fomenting social unrest, he said Washington “expanded the ability of US and foreign companies to sell Iranians technology used for personal communications” so they could “learn more about the dire straits of their country’s economy…”
During a December 6, 2017 panel discussion about his book at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, Nephew detailed with a chilling smile how he not only sabotaged Iran’s automotive industry, but targeted “things like unemployment, to try to drive that up and make things a little more sticky.”
While discussing his book, "The Art of Sanctions," @richardmnephew boasted with a wide grin that the economic warfare tactics he devised drove up unemployment rates in Iran.
Nephew was just appointed as Biden's deputy Iran envoy.
In response to online criticism, Nephew has claimed that “the main target” of the sanctions regime he designed was “the oligarchs.” But his book on “The Art of Sanctions” tells another story.
Nephew fondly recalls how he structured sanctions to sabotage Iranian economic reforms that would have improved the purchasing power of average people. The Obama administration destroyed the economic prospects of Iran’s working-class majority while ensuring that “only the wealthy or those in positions of power could take advantage of Iran’s continued connectedness,” he wrote. As “stories began to emerge from Iran of intensified income inequality and inflation,” Nephew pronounced another success.
As he made clear, the rising inequality “was a choice” that Washington “made on the basis of helping to drive up the pressure on the Iranian economy from internal sources.” Nephew went on to claim credit for October 2012 protests brought on by the devaluation of Iran’s currency.
In a fairly stunning admission, Nephew admits at one point that despite providing Iran with supposed humanitarian exceptions on US sanctions, the economic war he helped design caused a catastrophic shortage of medicine and medical devices, largely because average Iranians could not afford them.
Despite acknowledging the heavy toll of human suffering brought on by the sanctions he personally conceived, suggesting they could have prompted high numbers of excess deaths, Nephew appears to be devoid of contrition.
During a December 2016 trip to Moscow, he complained that despite the sanctions imposed on Russia by the US, food was still widely available at local restaurants – “hardly a level of pain” that was necessary to bring the Kremlin to heel.
He called to “develop a strategy to carefully, methodically, and efficiently increase pain on those areas [of the Russian economy] that are vulnerabilities and avoid those that are not.”
So who is Richard Nephew? Does he lurk in the shadow world of intelligence intrigues and spook wars, keeping a low profile while he waits to strike the enemy? Or is he a fire-breathing hardliner bellowing threats against America’s adversaries from Beltway think tank panels? The reality is much more banal.
When he is not snatching chicken from Iranian kids during their winter holiday, Nephew is spending quality time with his own, amusing them with his tattered dad rock t-shirts and flashing arms adorned with tribal tattoos.
Boom!
Immediate reaction Wife: “Oh lord.” Son: “you look like a pirate!” Daughter 1: “how old is that shirt?” Told answer. “Oh that makes sense.” Daughter 2: softly, “oh my god.” pic.twitter.com/TyhdHEr0tK
Meanwhile, in Iran, where a leading daily recently portrayed Nephew as Keanu Reeves in the horror film The Devil’s Advocate, his elevation to a senior diplomatic role is viewed as a sign of more pain to come.
Vatan-e Emrooz highlights Richard Nephew’s appointment as deputy special envoy for Iran. The outlet highlights the fact that he was one of the designers of the Iran sanctions regime pic.twitter.com/vZHJlJIqU4
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The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
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A recent incident involving Amanda Gorman, the United States youth poet laureate, who was hailed after her presentation at the inauguration of recently elected President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, revealed the continuing threat of racial profiling.
Gorman, a best-selling and award-winning author of books for adults and children, was walking near her home in Los Angeles, California, when she noticed being trailed by a security guard.
The author was later told that she “looked suspicious”, implicating her as a potential suspect in committing a criminal offense. Such attitudes by police, vigilantes and corporate security agents have often been the precipitating factor in unjust arrests, physical assaults and even shooting deaths.
In response to the experience, the 23-year-old woman said that this was the plight of Black girls in the present period inside a racist country. The episode received national and international press coverage due to the heightened sensitivity and intolerance towards institutional racism and police misconduct.
A post on twitter by Gorman said of the situation that:
“A security guard tailed me on my walk home tonight. He demanded if I lived there because ‘you look suspicious.’ I showed my keys & buzzed myself into my building. He left, no apology. This is the reality of Black girls: One day you’re called an icon, the next day, a threat.”
This tweet from the youth poet laureate illustrates the hypocrisy of the U.S. society in regard to race relations. As a Harvard graduate and renown author, she can be praised for her accomplishments professionally within official circles and the corporate media. Nonetheless, as an African American, the social atmosphere within the U.S. makes her a threat to the stability of the government and economic structures.
Gorman went on to say in a following tweet in response to the provocation:
“In a sense, he was right. I AM A THREAT: a threat to injustice, to inequality, to ignorance. Anyone who speaks the truth and walks with hope is an obvious and fatal danger to the powers that be.”
The statements via Twitter were immediately met with condemnations of the security personnel and accolades of emotional support. Many people within the African American communities across the country and other peoples of color could readily identify with the widely known phenomenon of racial profiling by law-enforcement, private security officers and racist whites in general.
Hundreds of high-profile cases have been given publicity over the last year since the brutal racist executions of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and many others. Demonstrations and rebellions throughout the U.S. heightened the consciousness of the oppressed and working people as a whole in regard to the impact of state-approved targeting and violence. Calls for the defunding and dismantling of police agencies in major municipalities has prompted debate over the role of law-enforcement historically and on a contemporary level.
The youth poet laureate welcomed the groundswell of support through social media, saying:
“I am so thankful for the outpouring of support since the incident last night. It won’t change the truth of what happened, and continues to happen to Black Americans, but it reassures me of what I already know: There is always far more good in this world than bad.”
Gorman has overcome many obstacles in her journey towards academic, intellectual and literary success at such a young age. Born in Los Angeles on March 7, 1998, the product of a single mother who was an educator, he poet laureate worked on an auditory and speech impediment to become an acclaimed writer and public lecturer.
Her life ambitions and goals are related to deep interests in oppressive systems, feminism, race relations, social marginalization and the African Diaspora. A good deal of Gorman’s focus is on mentoring other young women in their desires to realize their full academic, artistic and professional potentials.
Not an Isolated Incident: A History of Racial Profiling and Struggle
Many other African Americans have undergone similar acts of racism as experienced by Gorman. One important figure of the 20th century, Mahalia Jackson (1911-1971), superseded many societal and economic hurdles to win international praise as a gospel singer and social activist.
Jackson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1911 under the draconian post-slavery structures euphemistically known as Jim Crow. Racial segregation was the law of the land in New Orleans during the early 20th century. Although exhibiting talent as a singer of spiritual music, after moving from Louisiana to Chicago, Jackson had to work for several years as a domestic to earn a living.
In 1947, she released a million-selling recording, Move On Up a Little Higher, gaining her fame and stature within the music industry. Despite her success, Jackson was a victim of racist violence in Chicago beginning in 1950.
According to an account of her early success as a public figure:
“Intense racism plagued her, though she had become an international star. When she moved into a white neighborhood in Chicago, someone shot through a window in her home. This struck no fear in her heart but only made her pursue social justice with more vigor. The New York Times reported that she once said, ‘I have hopes that my singing will break down some of the hate and fear that divide the white and black people in this country.’” (See this)
Jackson went on to provide food and other support to poor people in Chicago. She became a committed activist within the Civil Rights Movement befriending Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) during the 1950s and 1960s. She performed at the historic March on Washington in August 1963 and helped shape the groundbreaking address delivered by Dr. King on that fateful day.
This is just one example of the contradictions existing within U.S. society for artists and public intellectuals. The character of institutional racism is very much an oppressive force hampering the full freedom and right to self-determination among African Americans.
Racism in the U.S. Must be Completely Eradicated
Of course, these are not issues of individual prejudice amongst misguided and uninformed persons, racial profiling and its concomitant dangers, are deeply embedded within the U.S. capitalist and imperialist system. The domestic nature of institutional racism is reflected in the foreign policy imperatives of the ruling class and its military-industrial-complex.
However, Amanda Gorman has already identified her life’s mission related to ending oppression, racism and gender discrimination for African Americans and other people of African descent throughout the globe. Her objective is to become a major contributor in the struggle for human rights.
The fact that Gorman spoke out forcefully after the racial profiling incident is a strong indication of her courage and fortitude. She has also weighed in on the controversy now surrounding revelations of prejudice and racism inside the British royal family as represented by the treatment of Megan Markle, the wife of Prince Harry.
In the widely viewed interview with media personality Oprah Winfrey which aired initially on March 7, both Harry and Megan said they feared for their safety and suffered mental anguish as a direct result of racism within the British monarchy.
Newsweek magazine emphasized in a March 8 article that:
“Amanda Gorman has said the British royal family had missed out on its ‘greatest opportunity for change, regeneration and reconciliation in a new era’ by mistreating Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.”
Both Britain and the U.S. were instrumental in the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, and modern-day imperialism. Domestic institutional racism remains prevalent in U.S. and British society.
Therefore, notwithstanding the personal educational and professional achievements of African American women they continue face the pervasiveness of racial profiling and violence. Only a successful struggle to eliminate oppression and exploitation will lay the groundwork for the total eradication of color prejudice and racial discrimination.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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Chaos is brewing in the Aleppo countryside, as the Syrian Arab Army reportedly prepares for a decisive push on the Turkish-occupied areas.
All eyes are set on the town of Al-Bab and the surrounding area.
On March 7th, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) shelled the outskirts of the Turkish-occupied town of al-Bab. According to sources from the “moderate opposition”, at least ten mortar rounds fired by the SAA landed in the towns of Bratah and al-Dana near al-Bab.
There was one reported casualty, and one injury. The previous day saw shelling from the SAA on the same location, without any casualties and damage being reported.
These developments followed the incident on March 5 when, the Syrian military used ballistic missiles and rockets to pound Turkish-affiliated smugglers in the areas of al-Himran and Tarhin. According to reports, over 40 criminals were injured and more than 200 oil trucks and storage facilities were destroyed.
More than three years ago, the Turkish Armed Forces wrestled the city of al-Bab away from ISIS. Since then, the SAA has been waiting for an opportunity to liberate it from the successive occupations.
Nearby, in the northeastern part of Aleppo city itself, there appears to be a Turkish-funded insurgency rising.
On March 4th, saboteurs burned a minivan of the al-Quds Brigade in the district of Hannano. The al-Quds Brigade, made mostly of Palestinians, is one of the largest pro-government factions in Aleppo. The group Youth of Aleppo al-Shahba Regiment for Special Missions claimed responsibility for the attack. Their allegiance is formally unknown, but it is obvious.
It comes down to speculation, but pro-Turkish groups could have carried out the sabotage, in order to spread chaos and impede the SAA’s attack on the Turkish-occupied cities in the countryside.
Nearby, in Greater Idlib, the soon-to-be-rebranded Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) terrorists are attempting to merge with the Turkish-backed National Front for Liberation (NFL).
This proposed military council is clearly meant to provide a legitimate cover for the rebranded terrorist activities of HTS and other al-Qaeda factions in Greater Idlib.
Sure enough, on March 6th, an infamous propagandist of HTS, Tahir al-Omar, confirmed that work was ongoing to establish a “Defense Ministry” in Greater Idlib. HTS, in the past, has attacked the NFL occasionally, despite the fact they’ve been allied. For the purposes of the “moderate opposition” and the rebranding of terrorists, those issues have been left in the past.
Greater Idlib is still the greatest source of the terrorist threat, and no amount of rebranding of terrorists can change that.
A sense of urgency should be growing with in HTS and the Turkish-proxies in Greater Idlib, as their turn is likely coming shortly after any operation to recapture the Turkish-occupied towns in the Aleppo countryside.
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The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.
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A growing and coordinated attack on the rights of transgender people is taking place through state legislation and sadly it is receiving support from people across the political spectrum. The attack is successful because its proponents are using myths about transgender people to cloak their efforts under a veneer of feminism and concerns about children’s health. In reality, this attack is anti-feminist and threatens the well-being and lives of not only the transgender community, particularly the youth, which is one of the most vulnerable communities in our society, but also of all of us.
It is necessary to understand where this attack is coming from and the facts that dispel these myths so we can all take action to protect the rights of transgender people. The media is largely silent about what is happening. We need to raise awareness and halt these bills. Solidarity is critical to stop the assault and protect us from being divided against each other at a time when we need to struggle together for our People(s)-Centered Human Rights.
This week, I interviewed Chase Strangio, a lawyer with the ACLU who is a national leader in the fight for the rights of transgender people, on Clearing the FOG (available Monday night). We discussed the state bills, the impact they will have if they are made into law and how to stop them.
A coordinated attack on transgender rights in the states
The number of states that have introduced bills restricting the rights of transgender people has increased from 20 states in 2020 to 26 states so far in 2021. The bills range from those that prevent transgender people from participating in sports, using gender-appropriate facilities or obtaining identification documents to ones that make providing health care to transgender youth a felony and allow religious discrimination. You will find a list of the states, the bills and their current status here.
One bill that is imminent in Alabama would make it a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison and up to a $15,000 fine for health professionals who provide hormone therapy, hormone blockers or surgery to transgender youth. The bill also requires school staff to inform parents if a student has the “perception that his or her gender is inconsistent with his or her sex.” A version of the bill recently passed in both the Alabama House and the Senate. Sixteen other states have introduced similar legislation.
Both of these measures put transgender youth at a serious risk of lifetime harm or suicide if they are not able to receive appropriate medical therapy during puberty or are outed to parents who may not support them. A study from 2018 finds that suicide, the second leading cause of death in teenagers, and self-harm rates are higher in transgender adolescents than cisgender teens. In the Minnesota study of teens aged 11 to 19, nearly a third of transgender girls and more than half of transgender boys had attempted suicide, two-thirds had suicidal thoughts and more than half had injured themselves. The National Center for Transgender Equality finds that of the 1.6 million homeless youth in the United States, 20 to 40% of them are transgender youth while transgender people are less than 1% of the overall population. They face family rejection, denial of access to spaces in homeless shelters that are consistent with their gender and discrimination when they seek to rent or buy a home.
Another major set of bills currently present in 26 states would prohibit transgender students from participating in school sports on the same teams as their cisgender peers. As the ACLU writes, these bills are less about sports and more about “erasing and excluding trans people from participation in all aspects of public life.” The fight to exclude trans people from restrooms that are consistent with their gender failed, so this is the new tool to attack their rights.
Transgender girls and boys and women and men already compete in sports all over the world and their participation is supported by major institutions such as the Women’s Sports Foundation, the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education and the National Women’s Law Center. Nearly two dozen organizations signed onto a letter supporting the full inclusion of transgender people in athletics. Depriving transgender youth of the right to participate in sports harms their physical, social and emotional well-being. Transgender youth already face obstacles to being accepted in society and not being allowed into sports worsens that while preventing them from crucial areas of their development such as being part of a team and discovering their physical capabilities.
Creating barriers to participation in sports harms everyone, but especially women who as a group already face discrimination over their gender and attempts to control their bodies. In order to exclude transgender people from sports, all participants will be required to ‘prove’ their gender. As the National Women’s Law Center states,
“The law allows anyone, for any reason, to question whether a student athlete is a woman or girl, and then the student has to ‘verify’ her gender by undergoing invasive testing.” They add that by “allowing coaches, administrators, and other athletes to become the arbiters of who ‘looks like’ a girl or a woman,” the laws “will rely on and perpetuate racist and sexist stereotypes.”
Chase Strangio and Gabriel Arkles dispel four of the common myths about transgender athletes. They point out that the effort to exclude transgender women from sports is being done in a way that “reinforces stereotypes that women are weak and in need of protection. Politicians have used the ‘protection’ trope time and time again, including in 2016 when they tried banning trans people from public restrooms by creating the debunked ‘bathroom predator’ myth.” These myths are being spread widely, so it is critical that we understand the facts so we can stop them.
The groups behind the attacks on the rights of transgender people
There are a host of right-wing and conservative groups behind the attacks on transgender people. The major players involved in the state legislative efforts are the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Heritage Foundation and ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council). The Alliance Defending Freedom is a conservative Christian group formed in 1994 that does legal advocacy against women’s right to an abortion and for discrimination against lesbian, gay and transgender people. It is a well-funded ($35 million budget) and powerful group that trains “future legislators, judges, prosecutors, attorneys general, and other government lawyers.” It is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its support for the criminalization of same sex marriage, sterilization of transgender people and bigoted beliefs.
One way that conservative groups have gained credibility with liberals is by portraying their work as in the interest of women’s rights. They project a zero sum view that somehow advocacy for the rights of transgender women takes away from the long struggle for ciswomen’s rights, as if transgender women and men have not struggled for recognition and for their rights for a long time too. They falsely argue that transgender women spent part of their life as ‘privileged’ males and so they either cannot understand what women have experienced or they are bringing patriarchal views into women’s spaces. This view conflicts with the reality that transgender women experience greater discrimination and violence than cisgender women. They are hardly a privileged group. Similarly, they falsely portray transgender men as ‘victims of patriarchy.’
This bigotry has entered some radical feminist spaces that actively exclude transgender woman and portray them as threats to their safety. Left Voice provides a history of the rise of what is called “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists” or TERFs,” their violence against transgender women and their alliances with the alt-right. Katelyn Burns explains who some of these groups are and their attempts to dominate political space in the United Kingdom. Fortunately there is not much support for them in the United States, but it does exist.
Trans-exclusionary groups use fear as a weapon against transgender women by portraying them as threats to the physical safety of cisgender girls and women without solid evidence to back this claim. The National Resource Center on Domestic Violence finds that around half of transgender and nonbinary people have been sexually assaulted and more than half have experienced domestic partner violence. This is far less than the 18% of cisgender women who are victims of sexual violence. This use of a concocted threat of violence to discriminate against transgender women is similar to that used to justify repression against Muslims, immigrants and Black people.
Building an inclusive society
The increasing attacks on the rights of transgender people in the United States needs to be a concern to all of us. We cannot create an inclusive society that supports the healthy development and rights of all people if we remain silent as the most vulnerable among us are targeted with damaging and deadly discrimination. We cannot teach our children tolerance if they see their friends being prohibited from basic childhood activities such as participation in sports. We cannot deny people the right to determine who they are and to live in ways that support them. Transgender people are our neighbors, our friends and our family members.
Chase Strangio describes five specific ways we can take action to end discrimination against transgender people and to affirm them as members of our communities. There is something for everyone to do no matter where you are. We can all strive to point out and correct bigotry where we see it, work to educate people around us and donate to groups doing this work that are led by transgender people. If you live in a state where these bills are introduced, contact your state lawmaker and let them know of your opposition to them. You can also join local groups to advocate for the rights of transgender people.
Let’s stop the attack on transgender people in the United States before it is allowed to escalate further.
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Margaret Flowers is director of Popular Resistance where this article was originally published. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 2021 will be the second year in a row in which the federal debt exceeds Gross Domestic Product (GDP). CBO also projected that this year’s federal deficit will be 2.3 trillion dollars, which is 900 billion dollars less than last year. However, CBO’s projections do not include the 1.9 trillion dollars “stimulus” bill Congress is likely to pass.
The CBO’s report was largely ignored by Congress and the media. One reason the report did not get the attention it deserves is Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s continued commitment to making sure Fed policies enable Congress to spend as much as Congress deems necessary to address the economic fallout from the coronavirus panic.
As financial analyst Peter Schiff points out, the Fed’s commitment to ensuring the government can run up massive debt means the Fed will not allow interest rates to increase to anywhere near what they would be in a free market. This is because increasing interest rates would cause the federal government’s debt payments to rise to unsustainable levels. Yet, the Fed cannot admit it is going to keep rates near, or even below, zero indefinitely without unsettling the markets. So, the Fed continues to promise interest rate hikes in the future and the markets pretend to believe the Fed. When (or if) the lockdowns end, the Fed will find a new crisis justifying “temporarily” keeping interest rates low.
The Federal Reserve has not just endorsed massive federal spending, Fed Chairman Powell has also endorsed masks, vaccines, and social distancing to defeat the coronavirus and restore the economy. It is disappointing, but not surprising, to see the Fed go full Fauci.
The overreaction to coronavirus is a cause of the explosion in federal spending and debt we have witnessed over the last year. However, federal spending already greatly increased from January 2017 until the lockdowns. This spending growth occurred under a Republican president, a Republican Senate, and, from 2017 to 2019, a Republican House. One bright spot in Democratic control of the presidency and both houses of Congress is more Republicans will fight excessive spending and claim to be “deficit hawks.”
Republican hypocrisy in claiming to care about spending and debt only when a Democrat sits in the Oval Office is one reason why Democrats can so easily disregard debt. Another reason is the left’s embrace of Modern Monetary Theory. Modern Monetary Theory is the latest version of the fairy tale that politicians need not worry about debt and deficits as long as the central bank can monetize the federal debt.
Unless the government changes course, America will experience a crisis greater than the Great Depression. The crisis will include a final rejection of the dollar’s world reserve currency status. There will also be much increased price inflation. At that point Congress will have no choice but to limit spending, although it will try to hide cuts in popular entitlement programs by “adjusting” government measures of inflation. Congress could then blame the Fed for the reduction in value of government benefits.
Those who know the truth have two responsibilities. First, ensure they and their families are protected when the crash comes. Second, redouble efforts to spread the ideas of liberty and grow the liberty movement so politicians are pressured to cut spending and debt and to end the Fed.
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China and Russia pose the main challenge to US hegemonic aims, especially united.
Longstanding US policy seeks control over all world community nations, their resources and populations.
Will US war on China by other means turn hot by accident or design?
On Sunday, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi repeated what he and other Beijing officials stressed many times before.
China seeks cooperative relations with the US.
Washington’s rage to dominance prevents it, prioritizing containment of China along with seeking to undermine and isolate the country politically, economically, technologically and militarily.
US Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) head Admiral Philip Davidson urged Congress to appropriate over $27 billion for new regional military construction, missiles, air defense installations, radar systems, staging areas, intelligence-sharing centers, supply depots and testing ranges to confront China.
The US Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI) is all about increasing its military presence in a part of the world not its own to confront China.
Like US hostility toward Russia, Iran, and other nations free from its control, false accusation against Beijing are made with disturbing regularity.
Defense News.com hyped a nonexistent China threat, saying it “boost(ed) (its) defense budget again (that now) exceed(s) $208 billion” — citing a figure released by the country’s finance military.
The amount pales in comparison to countless trillions of US dollars poured down a black hole of waste, fraud, and abuse for militarism, belligerence, and maintenance of the Pentagon’s worldwide empire of bases.
In stark contrast to the US, China’s military spending is for defense, not forever wars.
Threatened by US rage to dominate the country, including by surrounding it with heavily armed Pentagon bases, China must react defensively.
Preparing for possible US aggression is the most effective deterrent against it.
Despite no threat of an attack by China against the US in the Indo/Pacific or anywhere else, Davidson considers Guam-based 360-degree Aegis Ashore missile defense his top priority, along with high-frequency radar in Palau.
He also wants space-based radar systems built and “specialized manned aircraft (for) multi-source intelligence” gathering.
He asked for “highly survivable, precision-strike networks (with) increased quantities of ground-based weapons.”
“These networks must be operationally decentralized and geographically distributed along the western Pacific archipelagos using service agnostic infrastructure,” he said, adding:
“We must convince Beijing that the costs to achieve its objectives by military force are simply too high.”
Unlike US-dominated NATO and Israel, China pursues its geopolitical aims cooperatively with other nations.
Brute force is how the US and its imperial partners operate.
China is the top US target for transformation into a pro-Western vassal state.
According to military analyst Song Zhongping, the “People’s Liberation Army is developing new types of weapons, including hypersonic weapons, to counter the offensive and defensive military strategy by the US.”
If trillions of dollars spent by the US for war on humanity at home and abroad were used to serve its people over exploiting them and others in targeted countries, peace and stability would end forever US wars on invented enemies.
The world and nation would be safer and more fit to live in.
Things are the other way around and getting steadily worse because of US rage to rule the world unchallenged.
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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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After a coup in the South American country of Bolivia in November 2019, democratically elected president Evo Morales was forced to flee. Foreign Office documents obtained by Declassified show Britain saw the new military-backed regime, which killed 18 protesters, as an opportunity to open up Bolivia’s lithium deposits to UK firms.
On 10 November 2019, after the head of the army called for his resignation, Bolivia’s socialist president, Evo Morales, stepped down. It followed weeks of protests after the release of a report by the Organisation of American States (OAS) alleging irregularities in the election Morales had won the previous month.
Persecution from the new regime forced Morales to flee the country and an “interim president”, Jeanine Áñez, was installed. Widely condemned as a coup, resulting protests were met with lethal force.
Days after taking power, on 14 November 2019, the Áñez regime forced through Decree 4078 which gave immunity to the military for any actions taken in “the defence of society and maintenance of public order”.
The following day, on 15 November, Bolivian military forces shot and killed eight protesters in the city of Sacaba. On 21 November, regime forces killed another 10 protesters in the neighbourhood of Senkata just outside the capital La Paz.
Despite the deadly violence, which was condemned by human rights groups, the British embassy in La Paz moved quickly to support Bolivia’s new regime, Declassified can reveal from documents we have obtained.
We have seen a project list for a Foreign Office programme in Bolivia called “Frontline Diplomatic Enabling Activity”, which the UK government describes as a “small pot of money that [embassies] receive and have authority over to spend on projects supporting [embassy] activity”.
The deposits
Bolivia has the world’s second-largest reserves of lithium, a metal that is used to make batteries and which has become increasingly important due to the burgeoning electric car industry.
The UK government has stated that lithium battery technology is a priority for its “industrial strategy”. In June 2019, it announced it was investing £23-million in “electric car battery development”.
The government has further noted: “It’s estimated that South America holds 54% of the world’s lithium resources, which are increasingly in demand to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles and energy diversification programmes.”
It added:
“The UK aims to have a thriving, sustainable battery industry, which would translate to a £2.7 billion opportunity … and our bilateral partnerships are essential to ensure this.”
In February 2019, Evo Morales’ government had chosen a Chinese consortium to be its strategic partner on a new $2.3-billion lithium project which would focus on production from the Coipasa and Pastos Grandes salars (salt flats under which the lithium is deposited).
But after the coup, the regime’s new minister for mining cast doubt on whether the deal would be honoured by the new government.
These particular salt flats were of interest to the UK embassy.
One project it co-funded from 2019-20 sought to “optimise Bolivia’s lithium exploration and production (in the Coipasa and Pastos Grandes salars) using British technology”.
After the coup, this project was quickly moved forward.
The abstract for the project was authorised by its main funder – the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) – on 25 November 2019, two weeks after the coup and days after the Senkata massacre.
The project gained full approval for funding of $100,000 weeks later, in mid-December 2019.
The IADB told Declassified: “The implementation of [grant] activities are conducted in close coordination with designated government authorities and their technical teams.” At that point its “close coordination” would have been with the Áñez regime.
Satellite Applications Catapult
The British embassy in La Paz provided £5,000 towards this lithium project in 2019-20, but the Foreign Office refused to tell Declassified if these funds were disbursed after the coup in November 2019.
The goal was to “design and implement a satellite data-based application that can optimise exploration and exploitation of large/best lithium sources in the Coipasa and Pastos Grandes salars in Bolivia”, the documents outlined.
The Foreign Office noted that the project was to be implemented by Satellite Applications Catapult, an Oxford-based organisation “helping organisations harness the power of satellite-based services”.
The company receives about a third of its funding from the UK government but it did not respond to Declassified’s questions about the Bolivia project.
However, we found that on 19 December 2019 – two days after the IABD gave final approval to the project – the UK Foreign Office transferred £33,220 to Satellite Applications Catapult, in a payment listed as “programme spend”.
The department refused to tell Declassified if this funding was for the lithium exploitation project in Bolivia. The IADB told us: “Coordination with the British Embassy has been particularly cooperative in search for synergies”.
A picture of the Coipasa salt flats in Bolivia, photographed by an Expedition 33 crew member on the International Space Station. (Photo: Nasa)
International seminar
Then, in March 2020, four months after the coup, the British embassy in La Paz partnered with the regime’s Ministry of Mining to organise an “international seminar” for more than 300 officials from the global extractives sector.
A British company, Watchman, was brought in by the UK embassy to give the keynote presentation and outline the “creative solutions” it had enacted in Africa to bring local communities onside with mining projects.
The Foreign Office documents note:
“Watchman UK and other consultancies are now in line to offer services in this important field to a number of Bolivia mining companies who wish to achieve win-win solutions to their controversies with indigenous inhabitants and towns located in the area of influence of their activities”.
Watchman is a risk management company set up in 2016 by Christopher Goodwin-Hudson, a nine-year veteran of the British Army who was later executive director of global security for the investment bank Goldman Sachs.
The company supports corporate clients “across the extractive, agribusiness and capital project sectors” who are having trouble operating because of local resistance. Watchman’s website carries the logo of the UK Foreign Office.
The firm’s associate director, Gabriel Carter, has held a number of senior roles in the private security industry and in 2012 founded an Afghanistan-focused security company that “supported numerous British and US development projects”.
Carter, also a veteran of risk management at Goldman Sachs, is a member of the Special Forces Club, an exclusive and secretive private members’ club for senior intelligence and special forces veterans in Knightsbridge, London.
Watchman did not respond to Declassified’s questions about the event and the UK Foreign Office refused to answer questions related to it.
UK Foreign Office documents from 2015-20 documenting a range of programmes run by the British embassy in Bolivia.
A long courtship
The quick moves of the British embassy on the lithium project followed years of trying to court Bolivia’s socialist government over the country’s reserves of the metal, the new documents show.
Morales had moved Bolivia away from the country’s traditional reliance on Western corporations since taking power in 2006. His government was widely praised for reducing poverty and increasing investment in schools, hospitals and infrastructure.
The Foreign Office notes that its “first engagement with the Bolivian Lithium Company”, known by its Spanish acronym YLB, was in 2017-18 when it paid £31,500 to organise a scientific UK mission. It focused on training the YLB on new technologies to explore and produce lithium in a “sustainable” way.
The documents note this project “allowed British organisations … to carry over projects on lithium in Bolivia with [Inter-American Development Bank] and [UK government] funding in the following years”.
The UK government noted:
“Relationship with the Bolivian Lithium Company might also prove relevant as Bolivia becomes a supplier of lithium (a critical material) to the UK”, and referenced its “effort to connect Bolivia, Chile and Argentina (ie the Lithium Triangle) with the London Metal Exchange”.
The following year’s programme notes that “stronger links” developed between the YLB and the British embassy in Bolivia.
The documents also outline how in April 2019, the British embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, hosted a “high-level technical meeting” with the mining and lithium authorities of Argentina, Chile and Bolivia, as well as senior representatives of the London Metal Exchange.
Those three countries together share ownership of the “lithium triangle”, the region of the Andes rich in lithium reserves. At the time Argentina and Chile had right-wing governments friendly with the UK.
Also in attendance was Bolivia’s vice-minister of lithium and the chief executive of YLB. “The project from the British Embassy in Bolivia … consisted in securing and facilitating the presence of the Bolivian authorities in the meeting”, the Foreign Office documents note.
It added that, after the meeting, the Bolivian government was now “aware of the relevance of the London Metal Exchange” and particularly “its interest to establish a lithium standard” which was to be based upon the lithium triangle production. Such standards serve “to promote understanding and communication between metal producers and users”.
The following sections in this passage are redacted under two exemptions related to “international relations” and “commercial interests”. These are the only redactions made on the programme documentation for the five years of operations seen by Declassified.
The London Metal Exchange, the world centre for industrial metals trading. (Photo: UK government)
Darktrace
There is further evidence Britain was always priming the country for a change in government. In the year before the coup, the British embassy was promoting the UK cyber sector, bringing a company to Bolivia founded by the UK intelligence community, and with close links to America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
In 2009, Morales had expelled a US diplomat who he claimed was a CIA asset heading an operation to infiltrate Bolivia’s state-owned oil company.
Eight months before the coup, the UK embassy spent more than £4,500 organising a “major event” in Laz Paz on cybersecurity for financial institutions, attended by 150 executives and senior officials from the Bolivian financial sector, according to the Foreign Office documents.
Delivered in coordination with the Bolivian Stock Exchange, Bolivian banks were said to “now be acquiring specialised services to protect their systems from cybercrime”. Further, the bankers were now aware that fighting cybercrime had to be “based upon adequate and state-of-the-art technology”.
Presentations were delivered by British company Darktrace, a cybersecurity firm set up by Britain’s domestic security service, MI5, and its signals intelligence agency, GCHQ. The company was incorporatedthe day after the first of whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s exposures was published in The Guardian.
Since its founding, Darktrace has hired personnel from the US intelligence community, including directlyfrom the CIA and the National Security Agency, where Snowden used to work.
Recruits from the CIA
Alan Wade, who sits on Darktrace’s advisory council, is a 35-year veteran of the CIA and its former chief information officer.
Darktrace also recruited Marcus Fowler, a former US Marine and 15-year veteran of the CIA, as its “director of strategic threat”. At the CIA, Fowler worked on “developing global cyber operations and technical strategies” and “conducted nearly weekly briefings for senior US officials”, he says.
In July 2013, Evo Morales’ presidential plane was grounded in Austria after US intelligence agencies suspected it had Snowden on board.
Morales blamed the US and other international actors for the November 2019 coup. “It was a national and international coup d’état,” he said soon after. “Industrialised countries don’t want competition.” He added: “I’m absolutely convinced it’s a coup against lithium.”
The WikiLeaks diplomatic cables show that the US embassy in La Paz worked closely with the political opposition in Bolivia to remove the Morales government after it took power in 2006.
Morales expelled the US Drug Enforcement Agency in 2008 and the US Agency for International Development in 2013, accusing them of “conspiring” against his government.
For the March 2019 event, the UK embassy also brought an expert from the London-based think tank Chatham House, whose co-president is Eliza Manningham-Buller, a former director-general of MI5.
Its funders include the US State Department, UK Foreign Office, the British Army, and the oil companies BP and Chevron.
After the event, Britain’s Foreign Office noted that “several companies in the field [are] now being hired and consulted”. It is not known if Darktrace was one of them.
The embassy kept up the engagement soon after. “New dialogue with the Bolivian government on cyber”, notes the Foreign Office in its 2019-2020 programme. It is unclear if this referred to the coup regime.
‘Important input’
The day after the Bolivian election on 20 October 2019, the Washington-based Organisation of American States – the grouping of countries in North and South America – released a report on the vote which Morales had marginally won. It cited “an inexplicable change” that “drastically modifies the fate of the election”.
It also raised doubts about the fairness of the vote and fuelled a chain of events that led to the November coup.
However, a subsequent study by independent researchers using data obtained by The New York Times from the Bolivian electoral authorities found that the OAS statistical analysis was flawed.
Its conclusion that Morales’ share of the vote jumped inexplicably in the final ballots relied on incorrect data and inappropriate statistical techniques, the researchers found.
Declassified can now reveal that the British embassy provided data for the OAS’s discredited report.
The British embassy spent £8,000 putting together an alliance of civil society organisations which “coordinated an operation for citizens’ observation of the elections in 2019”.
This alliance carried out a survey on voting intentions before the elections, which “was an important input for the OAS mission report, which identified irregularities in the process”, the Foreign Office notes.
The OAS failed to respond to Declassified’s questions about the UK embassy’s role in its discredited report and the Foreign Office refused to answer any questions about it.
The British embassy’s projects to prepare for the election went even further. In February 2019, it spent £9,981 to bring the Thomson Reuters Foundation to the country to train 30 Bolivian journalists on “verification techniques and pre-planning an election on coverage that is balanced, accurate and free of polarisation”.
The Foundation said that “ahead of the elections in Bolivia” it was teaching “practical skills and tools to recognise fake news and attempts to influence the electorate with false information”.
Declassified previously revealed how the British government is using journalism as an influencing tool in Latin America. Also recently revealed was that the British government secretly funded Reuters in the 1960s and 1970s at the behest of an anti-Soviet propaganda unit linked to British intelligence.
‘Marxist solidarity’
Days after the November coup in Bolivia, the UK Foreign Office released a statement saying:
“The United Kingdom congratulates Jeanine Áñez on taking on her new responsibilities as interim President of Bolivia.” It added: “We welcome Ms Áñez’ appointment and her declared intention to hold elections soon.”
“We hope that the current crisis in Bolivia can now be resolved swiftly, peacefully and in a democratic way. The Bolivian people deserve to have the opportunity to vote in free and fair elections.”
Then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn offered a completely different view, saying: “I condemn this coup against the Bolivian people and stand with them for democracy, social justice and independence.”
Raab proceeded to attack Corbyn, quote-tweeting him and stating:
“Unbelievable. The Organisation of American States refused to certify the Bolivian election because of systemic flaws. The people are protesting and striking on an unprecedented scale. But @jeremycorbyn puts Marxist solidarity ahead of democracy.”
But Raab and the Foreign Office made no further comments as the new regime’s forces carried out the Sacaba and Senkata massacres the following week.
In March 2020, four months after Morales was overthrown, the new regime was organising a series of new initiatives “with the UK as a strategic partner”, the documents note.
That same month, Britain’s ambassador during the coup, Jeff Glekin, offered a glimpse of the UK interests involved in backing the new regime.
Glekin spoke to the Bolivian media about British Week, which was bringing 12 British companies to the country for the first time.
“Many are looking for new markets in the world and Bolivia can be an opportunity to grow,” he said. “Due to the political changes in Bolivia, a more open environment for foreign investment is perceived and I believe that this will open new doors to companies that want to share their technology, their products and make alliances with different companies.”
Glekin, who remains in post, added:
“We are working with the Santa Cruz Mayor’s Office … and we invite Santa Cruz corporations to participate in the event.”
In the documents seen by Declassified, a disproportionately high number of UK embassy projects have focused on the eastern city of Santa Cruz, which was the centre of opposition to Evo Morales’ government.
Glekin continued:
“The previous government was not very in favour of foreign investment. So, with the changes that we are going to see, it will be easier to enter the market and do business. The companies to come are from different parts of Great Britain and from various sectors. They are modern firms that are doing innovative things and want to enter the market and share their services and products in Bolivia.”
Glekin added:
“The demand for lithium is growing and Bolivia must take advantage of that opportunity.”
When new elections took place in October 2020, Evo Morales’ Movimiento al Socialismo won 55% of the votes against six rivals on the ballot, easily avoiding the need for a runoff. The runner-up was former President Carlos Mesa with just under 29%.
A Foreign Office spokesperson told Declassified:
“Presidential elections held in Bolivia in October 2020 were free and fair. There was no coup. The UK has a strong and constructive relationship with current and former Bolivian administrations.”
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Matt Kennard is head of investigations at Declassified UK, an investigative journalism organisation that covers the UK’s role in the world.
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It saddens us to have to report that as a result of receiving a dose of either the Pfizer / BioNTech MRNA vaccine or the Oxford / Astrazeneca Viral Vector (still MRNA technology), a total of twenty women have now had to suffer the grief of having a miscarriage and losing their unborn child.
Adverse reactions to both jabsreported to the MHRA Yellow Card scheme up to the 21st February shows that the number has almost doubled in just seven days when compared with the previous weeks data, which included adverse reactions to both jabs. As of the 14th February 2021, a total of eleven women had lost their baby with three of those being due to the Oxford vaccine and eight of those being due to the Pfizer vaccine.
The MHRA Yellow Card data now shows that the Oxford jab has caused four women to sadly lose their unborn child, an increase of one on the previous weeks data.
However the Pfizer jab has now caused, as of the 21st February, a total of sixteen women to sadly lose their unborn child, a figure which has doubled from the eight seen in the previous week up to the 14th February.
As of the 14th February there had been 8.3 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine administered, with the Oxford jab lagging behind by 1.4 million at just 6.9 million doses administered. But fast forward to the 21st February, a further 1.1 million doses of the Pfizer jab were administered, and a further 1.5 million doses of the Oxford jab.
However the number of adverse reactions to the Oxford jab is nearly double than what has been reported for the Pfizer jab, with 157,637 adverse reactions to the Oxford Jab being reported, compared with 85,179 adverse reactions to the Pfizer jab being reported as of the 21st February 2021.
Whilst the Oxford vaccine outnumbers the Pfizer jab significantly in terms of adverse reactions, the data now clearly shows the Pfizer jab to be much more dangerous when it comes to being administered to pregnant women.
But why is this happening?
Well when the Pfizer jab was first approved for emergency use only in the United Kingdom, meaning the manufacturer is not liable for any harm or injury caused by their product, the Government’s advice was as follows –
‘Pregnancy
There are no or limited amount of data from the use of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2.
Animal reproductive toxicity studies have not been completed. COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine
BNT162b2 is not recommended during pregnancy‘
‘For women of childbearing age, pregnancy should be excluded before vaccination. In addition, women
of childbearing age should be advised to avoid pregnancy for at least 2 months after their second dose.
This was taken from a document released by the Government titled ‘REG 174 INFORMATION FOR UK HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONALS’, of which we reported to you back in December 2020.
There is limited experience with use of the COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 in pregnant women.
Animal studies do not indicate direct or indirect harmful effects with respect to pregnancy, embryo/foetal development, parturition or post-natal development. Administration of the COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 in pregnancy should only be considered when the potential benefits outweigh any potential risks for the mother and foetus.
So now we know why pregnant women have started to be inoculated with the experimental jabs, because the Government quietly changed its own advice based on zero evidence to support it. Even going as far as to remove the recommendation that women of child bearing age being told to avoid pregnancy for at least two months after their second dose.
Statistically these women stood no chance of suffering from serious illness due to the alleged SARS-CoV-2 virus and the alleged resulting disease Covid-19, now sadly they have to suffer the misery of losing their unborn children.
How many more women need to suffer a miscarriage to stop this madness?
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On Friday afternoon, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (still called the CDC, even though they added a ‘P’) released a heretical report about mask-wearing and COVID-19.
The report, authored by at least a dozen medical doctors, PhD researchers, and, bizarrely, a handful of attorneys, examined how mask mandates across the US affected COVID cases and death rates.
You’d think with all of the media propaganda about mask effectiveness… and all the virtue signaling, with politicians and reporters appearing on live TV wearing masks… that the data would prove incontrovertibly and overwhelmingly that masks have saved the world.
But that’s not what the report says.
According to the CDC’s analysis, between March 1 and December 31 last year, statewide mask mandates were in effect in 2,313 of the 3,142 counties in the United States.
And, looking at the county-by-county data, the CDC concludes that mask mandates were associated with an average 1.32% decrease in the growth rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths during the first 100 days after the mask policy was implemented.
Wait, what? Only 1.32%?
You read that correctly, they didn’t misplace the decimal: according to the federal government agency that is responsible for managing the COVID-1984 pandemic, the difference between mask mandates and no mask mandate is literally just a 1.32% difference.
And bear in mind, it’s entirely possible that the real figure is even lower than that, given all the questionable COVID statistics.
For example, the CDC reports that influenza cases in the United States have dropped to almost zero in the 2020-2021 flu season, down from 56 MILLION the previous year.
It’s amazing they expect anyone to take this data seriously.
Are we honestly supposed to believe that the flu has been eradicated? Or is it possible, that, maybe just maybe, at least some influenza cases have been misdiagnosed as COVID?
If that’s the case, then the real impact of masks on COVID growth rates is potentially much lower than 1.32%.
Even the CDC seems to understand this, because at the end of its report, they inspidly conclude by stating that mask mandates “have the potential to slow the spread of COVID-19. . .” [the bold is mine, obviously]
Really? “Potential”? That’s HERESY! And an obvious contradiction to WHO guidance. It makes we wonder whether Google and Facebook are gearing up to censor this report, given they have self-appointed themselves as the Ministry of Truth.
Frankly it’s pretty incredible that the data was too weak for the CDC to make a clear assertion about the benefits of mask mandates.
(though I did say there were a couple of lawyers who co-authored this paper… and using non-committal language like “potential” certainly sounds like typical weasel lawyer-speak.)
Now, please don’t misunderstand the point of this letter. I’m not here to bash masks or say that they don’t work, or go on some anti-mask rant.
The point is that I’m pro-data. And pro-reason.
Public health policies come with consequences. There are always costs, and there are (hopefully) benefits.
The CDC has just published an official analysis of the benefits, quantified at precisely 1.32%.
What are the costs of their decisions? Well there’s plenty of data about that too.
For example, a recent study published earlier this month in the premier scientific journal Nature shows that Americans who wear masks are more likely engage in riskier activities, like, you know, leaving the house.
The study conclude that mask mandates “lead to risk compensation behavior” and mask wearers “spend 11-24 fewer minutes at home on average and increase visits to some commercial locations– most notably restaurants, which are a high-risk location.”
Other consequences are more grim.
There have been several studies which chronicle the alarming rise in severe mental health issues, including a spike in youth suicide, as a result of various public health policies, including mask mandates and lockdowns.
For example, another study published in Nature from early January reported that, in late 2020, suicide rates among children in Japan jumped 49%.
And the US government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service (SAMHSA) reported an incredible 890% increase in call volume to its nationwide suicide hotline last April.
Then there are the economic consequences to consider: Do mask mandates boost the economy by giving people more confidence to go out and spend? Or do mask mandates compel more people to stay home to avoid the hassle, and hence reduce economic activity?
There’s still no conclusive analysis on the subject. But you’d think that policymakers would want to know.
You’d think that they would look at all the data, all the pro’s and con’s, economic consequences, public health consequences, etc., and make an informed, rational decision.
But that doesn’t seem to happen anymore.
There can be no rational discourse on the topic. You’re not allowed to ask any questions or express any intellectual dissent, otherwise you’ll be denounced as a conspiracy theorist.
You have one job: obey. It’s not even about ‘trusting the science’ anymore, as we’ve been told to do over and over again during the pandemic. Because now the science tells us that mask mandates “have the potential” to reduce Covid growth rates by just 1.32%.
Not that you’ll hear this in the media.
There actually was a bonanza of coverage over the weekend about the CDC’s new report. The Washington Post headline read “After state lift restrictions, CDC says mask mandates can reduce deaths”.
The New York Times reported that “Wearing masks, the [CDC] study reported, was linked to fewer infections with the coronavirus and Covid-19 deaths.”
NBC called the report “strong evidence that mask mandates can slow the spread of the coronavirus. . .”
But very little of the media coverage bothered to mention the real data, i.e. the marginal 1.32% reduction in growth rates.
Just like the CDC’s influenza data, it’s incredible that the media expects to be taken seriously, or that they pass themselves off as an objective, unbiased source of information.
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James (aka Simon Black) is an international investor, entrepreneur, and founder of Sovereign Man. His free daily e-letter Notes from the Field is about using the experiences from his life and travels to help you achieve more freedom, make more money, keep more of it, and protect it all from bankrupt governments.
All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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Half a century has now passed since the third and last bout dubbed ‘The Fight of the Century’ during the 20th century.
The first bout between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali was a unique clash of undefeated heavyweight champions. One of the most anticipated events in sporting history, it was promoted as reflecting the ongoing battle in America between the forces of conservatism and those of the counterculture, represented respectively by Frazier and Ali.
Only two other fights had carried a similar level of significance: Joe Louis’s return confrontation with the German Max Schmeling on the eve of World War Two, and the duel between Jack Johnson and James Jeffries in 1910. While Louis-Schmeling was touted as a contest between opposing ideological camps on the threshold of war, the encounter between Johnson and Jeffries was perceived and promoted as a clash between black and white, and nothing short of a battle for racial hegemony.
Held at Madison Square Garden, Ali-Frazier I was attended by an extraordinary array of people. New York’s nobility and the city’s underworld sat ringside with celebrities such as Frank Sinatra, who worked on assignment as the official photographer for Life, and Miles Davis. Burt Lancaster worked as a co-commentator.
But beyond the hyperbole and the mischaracterization of what both men represented (Frazier was not a man of the Establishment and Ali, then a member of the Black separatist Nation of Islam, was not an aficionado of the counterculture) was the display of skill and courage over 15 gruelling rounds. Ali, who had been stripped of his world title by a vengeful Establishment over his refusal to be drafted into the United States Army during the Vietnam War, and whose religious affiliations had engendered widespread public animus, fought Frazier having had only two bouts after an absence of three and a half years.
Although he caused Frazier a significant amount of physical damage, which necessitated Frazier’s stay in a hospital after the bout, Ali, himself was also significantly corroded by the contest, during which he was felled in the last round by a patented left-hook. Frazier won the bout in which both fighters shared equally, the then colossal sum of 5 million dollars.
And while the sport of boxing then as now is criticised for its raison d’etre for the purposeful infliction of violence and its tendency to criminally exploit fighters, nothing can take away from its capacity for spectacle, as well as its ability to function as a vehicle for expressions of ideological sentiment and sociological undercurrents.
Ali-Frazier I embodied this.
It is arguable that no two other athletes have commanded the world’s attention as they did in the build up to their fight.
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Adeyinka Makinde.
Adeyinka Makinde is the author of Dick Tiger: The Life and Times of a Boxing Immortal and Jersey Boy: The Life and Mob Slaying of Frankie DePaula. He is also a contributor to the Cambridge Companion to Boxing.
All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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The U.S. Air Force Air has created policies intended to restrict the movement of personnel based on their COVID-19 vaccination status — despite the fact that the vaccines are not mandatory, are still in phase 3 clinical trials and are still considered experimental, having been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration under Emergency Use Authorization (EAU).
The Air Force is actively coercing uptake of the vaccines in violation of medical ethics, federal law and, in the case of Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, Calif., in violation of California state law.
On Jan. 13, Lt. Col. Joseph Rountree, Commander 30th Healthcare Operations Squadron at Vandenberg Air Force Base created a policy to strong-arm uptake of an experimental drug for all personnel without regard for individual contraindications and without providing information on alternatives, as required by the Emergency Use Authorization.
In a memo obtained by The Defender, Rountree misinforms on the potential protective benefits of the vaccine and omits the risks of adverse reactions:
“While the vaccine is not currently mandated, vaccine research reports that it produces a highly effective immune response in those who receive it. The vaccine provides robust protection, and cannot be forgotten or removed like masks and sanitizers; therefore is more powerful than other precautions.”
In an unprecedented policy that undermines the right of refusal for an EUA drug, Rountree states that he will not approve travel outside the state of California for personnel who refuse the COVID-19 vaccine, thereby restricting the freedom of movement of healthy people:
“The travel waiver request form has been modified to include information about your COVID-19 vaccination status (see attached). I will place significant weight on your vaccination status when reviewing travel requests. Leisure travel outside of the state of California is very likely to be disapproved if you have not been vaccinated.”
Rountree also established a new form and counseling session with the chain of command for personnel to justify why they choose to exercise their rights to opt-out of what amounts to participating in a phase 3 clinical trial of an experimental drug, thus creating a culture of coercion in violation of medical ethics:
“BLUF, if people are not vaccinated I will likely NOT approve travel outside of CA. I will listen to exceptions on a case-by-case basis, so please encourage our people to set up a meeting (flight leadership, them, me and MSgt Hill) to discuss if there is a compelling reason they should stay unvaccinated but need to travel.”
COVID vaccine policy — unlawful coercion?
OnFeb. 21, Col. Anthony Mastalir, Commander of Vandenberg AFB in California issued Public Health Directive #8 applying to all personnel at Vandenberg and authorizing leave and pass privileges only to personnel who choose to take a COVID-19 vaccine:
“We continue to employ a rigorous medical and legal review process to ensure base policies remain relevant and lawful. Accordingly, some restrictions need not apply to those individuals who have chosen to receive the vaccine, Exceptions for fully vaccinated individuals identified in this directive have been found to be medically permissible, legally sufficient and consistent with the current directives of higher authorities. For the purposes of this directive, an individual is deemed fully vaccinated two weeks after completing an FDA-approved vaccine treatment (including vaccines authorized for emergency use). For the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine, this means two shots plus two weeks (2+2).
“The local area for Vandenberg AFB is defined as San Luis Obispo County and Santa Barbara County. However, effective immediately, fully vaccinated individuals are exempt from this local area definition and, therefore, may resume leave and pass processes consistent with unit policies and AFI 36-3003, Military Leave Program.”
Mastalir’s policy potentially violates federal law protections in 21 U.S. Code § 360bbb–3 authorization for medical products for use in emergencies. For an unapproved product the statute (section 564(e)(1)(A)(iii)) requires that individuals are informed “that they have the option to accept or refuse the EUA product and of any consequences of refusing administration of the product; and of any available alternatives to the product and of the risks and benefits of available alternatives.”
Mastalir’s policy also possibly violates California Health & Safety Code § 24172 which is the state’s experimental subject’s bill of rights, with a list of rights including: “Be given the opportunity to decide to consent or not to consent to a medical experiment without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, coercion, or undue influence on the subject’s decision.”
Clearly, Mastalir’s policy has overstepped into coercion, most likely due to the lack of an Institutional Review Board (IRB) to supervise investigational trials of drugs with human subjects, with contact information for the IRB given to participants. Lack of IRB oversight is a violation of federal law 21CFR 50.23.
Mastalir’s policy does not even acknowledge that taking the vaccine is voluntary participation in a phase 3 clinical trial of the COVID-19 vaccine.
COVID-19 vaccine trials didn’t prove prevention
The COVID-19 vaccines do not have data demonstrating efficacy in preventing infection or transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Both the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech clinical trials were designed to study symptom reduction.
Table 23 on page 37 of the Moderna clinical trial compares the symptom differences of fever, headache, fatigue, myalgia, arthralgia, nausea/vomiting and chills between the vaccine group and placebo group after each dose in the 18 – 64 age group with a significant greater symptom percentage in the vaccine group:
This Moderna data does not demonstrate a reduction of symptoms in the vaccine group compared to the placebo group. “Fully vaccinated” results in more COVID symptoms in 81.9% of subjects.
Table 19 on page 39 of the Pfizer-BioNTech clinical trial, compares the symptom differences of pain, fatigue, pyrexia, chills, myalgia, arthralgia, headache, diarrhea, and nausea between the vaccine group and placebo group after the second dose in the 16 years and older age group with a significant greater symptom percentage in the vaccine group.
If COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent infection, do not prevent transmission and do not decrease symptoms, then what is the justification for coercing service members to take this drug?
Our military personnel deserve evidence-based medicine that also honors medical ethics. Evidence and ethics are currently being ambushed by compliant commanders.
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Pam Long is graduate of USMA at West Point and is an Army Veteran of the Medical Service Corps.
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Opportunities missed and opportunities seized in the chronicle of international diplomacy in modern history provide two outstanding illustrative examples.
After centuries of enmity and the colossal destruction inflicted by two devastating world wars in the last century, France and Germany seize an opportunity to turn a new page in their relations, which eventually blossomed into the European Union and is today a major factor of peace and stability in Europe.
Equally, on the contrary, the catastrophic failure of the West to consolidate the peace dividends of the end of the Cold War by inviting Russia into a “common European home” (to borrow Mikhail Gorbachev’s memorable words) is threatening to possibly trigger a new cold war or even morph into hostilities.
Today, India and Pakistan are also poised on a threshold of similar Big History in the region. Seizing the emergent opportunities could make all the difference. Both countries are endowed with abundant diplomatic talent to perceive this reality that is still below the radar.
The imperatives of development are increasingly felt in both countries in their post-pandemic mindset, which is also leading to a new awakening that there is nothing like absolute security in the life of nations.
Without doubt, the US Special Representative on Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad’s call with External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar on Sunday can lead to a passage opening into a “rose-garden”.The timing of Khalilzad’s call needs to be understood properly. He is on a regional tour that has already taken him to Kabul and Doha and is arriving in Islamabad later today. In Kabul, he had met with President Ashraf Ghani and other Afghan statesmen and in Doha he confabulated with senior Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
Khalilzad has unveiled in Kabul a US plan about a “participatory government” to be formed in Afghanistan as an interim arrangement of six months for the drafting of a new constitution leading to a final settlement. In a swift follow-up, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has spoken with Ghani and since addressed a letter to him (and to Abdullah Abdullah).
Blinken’s letter is in public domain and in it the US proposes, amongst other things, to convene under the UN auspices a meeting of foreign ministers and envoys from Russia, China, Pakistan, Iran, India and the US to discuss a unified approach to supporting peace in Afghanistan.
The intention behind it is to legitimise the transfer of power to an interim government in Kabul on the lines of the 2001 Bonn conference that paved the way for the transition following the removal of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
The good part is that despite the testy equations currently among and betwixt the US, Russia and China and the US-Iranian atomic tango, there is a broad international recognition that the Taliban should form part of any inclusive government in Kabul in the prevailing conditions when they control half of Afghanistan.
As in 2001-2002, when the so-called Northern Alliance set-up that seized Kabul following the Taliban’s removal from power needed some robust persuasion to agree to give way peacefully to the interim government under Hamid Karzai, a similar piquant situation arises today with Ghani and his faction ensconced in power adamantly digging in and will need to be brought down to terra firma so that the pace process can be pushed through.
This is where the opportunity arises for India. Conceivably, there are only a handful of world capitals that wield the degree of influence over Ghani (and his close circle of security czars) as New Delhi does. Suffice to say, India finds in the same situation as 19 years ago when at Bonn, it was called upon by Washington to persuade the Northern Alliance to move over and accept Karzai’s interim leadership.
The Vajpayee government in 2001 was eager to be helpful in Bonn sensing how much it mattered to the George W Bush administration reeling under the trauma of the 9/11 attacks. But then, India wasn’t a mentor of the Northern Alliance government (led by Burhanuddin Rabbani) as it is today in providing rock solid support to Ghani. Besides, from the Indian perspective, Karzai and Taliban are like cheese and chalk.
Truly, India’s Afghan policy is at a cross-roads. The criticality of the opportunity to be seized in the upcoming Afghan transition cannot be understated. It is a historic opportunity not only to recalibrate India’s Afghan policies and bring them in sync with the zeitgeist (spirit of the times) but also to transform the climate of India-Pakistan relationship.
A constructive Indian role in the Afghan transition facilitating the formation of an interim government in Kabul that includes Taliban can be tuned into a profound confidence-building measure vis-a-vis Pakistan. Simply put, such an Indian role can complement the recent India-Pakistan ceasefire agreement and create underpinning to put a moratorium on cross-border activities altogether that has inflicted countless bleeding wounds on each other’s body polity through the past several years and brought no tangible benefits to either side.
The point is, if a beginning is to be made to cut the Gordian knot of India-Pakistan relations, the first move could be by removing the Afghan problem from their cauldron of contentious issues. Pakistan has vital security interests in having a friendly government in Kabul, which are no less compelling than, say, India’s concerns in having a friendly cooperative Nepal, which has an open border with our country.
Of course, such a first step to harmonise over Afghanistan cannot be a substitute for India-Pakistan bilateral dialogue, but it will help matters. It is no coincidence that Ambassador Riaz Mohammad Khan, a former foreign secretary of Pakistan, wrote an op-ed yesterday titled Kashmir talks: reality & myth, which concluded that “If ever diplomacy revives for a (Kashmir) peace plan, its contours will be no different than those outlined through the 2005-06 effort. Political realities and demography impose limits on what diplomacy can achieve.”
For the benefit of the uninitiated, Ambassador Riaz Khan is a highly respected figure who had played a key role at a somewhat similar defining moment in regional politics in negotiating the so-called Geneva accords that led to the withdrawal of Soviet troops in Afghanistan in 1989.
The prospects are brighter than ever that an orderly Afghan transition in the coming weeks or months is entirely conceivable. A constructive role by India in this process would not only safeguard its security interests but also could provide the opportunity to engage with the Taliban for crafting a forward-looking relationship based on mutual trust and mutual respect. Trust Pakistan not to meddle with such a positive scenario.
The road ahead will be long and winding and much resistance can be expected from the high-flying “hawks” in our skies. But that should not deter the policymakers from planning a road map with the “big picture” in mind. Logically, the time is approaching for India to give thought to resuscitating the SAARC at an early opportunity so that any India-Pakistan bilateral processes would also get synergy from regional cooperation.
The bottom line is that India needs to foster a sense of urgency, a new way of thinking that gives precedence to the resolution and not simply the management of conflict situations, to avoid disaster rather than merely dealing with its consequences, to be able to prioritise the national agenda of development that ought to have precedence over all other sideshows in our country’s current history.
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To our colleagues, to Palestinian students and those around the world, from the heart of the Zionist prisons. On the occasion of 8th of March, we long for freedom, justice and equality for all women of the world, including students, inside and outside the prison cells.
Western heads of state, UN officials, military spokespersons will invariably praise the humanitarian dimension of the October 2001 US-NATO led invasion of Afghanistan, which allegedly was to fight religious fundamentalists, help little girls go to school, liberate women subjected to the yoke of the Taliban.
A cursory re-examination of the early years of what became known as the women’s suffrage movement and abolitionism represented the embryonic phases of self-organization and mass struggle politics within United States society.
It is the media’s solemn duty in the name of fairness to exhaust all angles of representation in as far as Islamic diversity is concerned before the media ventures to ascribe undesirable judgments on Islam and Muslims.
Lucy Gonzales started life in Texas. She was of Mexican-American, African-American, and Native-American descent and born into slavery. The path she chose after emancipation led to conflict with the Ku Klux Klan, hard work, painful personal losses, and many nights in jail.
The problem with the mRNA Covid-19 vaccine, is not that it’s a vaccine. It’s that it’s not safe. That’s the issue: Safety. This view is shared by a great many professionals who believe that these potentially-toxic concoctions pose a significant threat to the health and well-being of anyone who chooses to get inoculated.
According to some reports China has developed a ‘blocking statute’ to subvert US sanctions imposed on Iran. This follows President Joe Biden’s stance, which amounts to enforcing the policies of the previous US President, Donald Trump, against Iran.
Garner represents her client Isaac Legaretta, an officer at the Doña Ana County Detention Center and a military veteran, who is suing the county over its new policy for first responders to receive the COVID-19 vaccinations or face termination.
The sale of the century is very much on. The powers that be want every single person to be vaccinated, and they’re pulling out all the stops to make sure it happens. Here are the five main ways the establishment is trying to manufacture your consent.
The Senate adopted the plan by a narrow 50 – 49 margin, GOP Senator Dan Sullivan away at a family funeral not voting. The $15 minimum wage and other provisions benefitting ordinary Americans were stripped from the measure. It’s heavy on benefitting special interests, what federal legislation nearly always prioritizes.
The movement continues to challenge the notorious ‘Three Farm Acts’ that would herald unprecedented levels of corporate control over agriculture, nullifying the mandi system, diminishing the significance of the Minimum Support Prices (MSP) and opening up the possibility of alienation of farmlands to big corporations.
The interviews confirm the success of Nicaragua’s indigenous and afro-descendant peoples in their historic struggle to reclaim their ancestral rights. The conversations also confirm that the indigenous peoples of Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast have achieved progressive restitution of their rights.
What does a biodiversity crisis sound like? You may need to strain your ears to hear it. In the past 50 years, America’s bird populations have fallen by a third, and worldwide the average mammal population has dropped 60%.
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(image) Bertolt Brecht with son Stefan
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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel first brings to our attention this poem by Bertolt Brecht which was written (while in exile) in Stockholm two months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War in early September 1939.
Dr Hänsel then proceeds to reflect on the ongoing Worldwide corona crisis which is affecting humanity in its entirety, the lives of Planet Earth’s 7.8 billion people with its diverse cultures, histories and social identities;
All of whom share common values with families, children and friends, living in diverse communities in the planet’s towns, villages and cities,
All of whom cherish humanity and the “value of life” including civil rights, social justice, the right to employment, education, health, culture, music, artistic creation,
Standing in solidarity in one another.
The global lockdown started on March 11, 2020. And simultaneously the lives of millions of people in all major regions of the World were in jeopardy.
The unspoken truth is that the novel coronavirus provided a pretext and a justification to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to precipitate the entire World into a spiral of mass unemployment, bankruptcy, extreme poverty and despair.
And in turn, analysis of what is happening (to our fellow citizens and our children) is the object of massive censorship.
“What are these times when a conversation about trees is almost a crime” says Bertolt Brecht
What is required is the development of a Worldwide grassroots network which confronts both the architects of this crisis as well as the governments involved in implementing the lockdown, the closure of economic activity and the derogation of fundamental human rights.
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, March 2021
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In his poem “An die Nachgeborenen” (To those born later), published in June 1939, Bertolt Brecht gave an honest, harrowing and admonishing account of his life in dark times:
“Really, I live in dark times! The guileless word is foolish. A smooth forehead Indicates insensitivity. The laughing man Has not yet received Only not yet received.
What are these times when A conversation about trees is almost a crime Because it includes a silence about so many misdeeds! He who walks quietly across the street Is probably no longer accessible to his friends Who are in need?”
Bertolt Brecht, June 1939
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Three generations later, we are again living in dark times. Those born after us are to become transhuman beings, disembodied human machines, servants and energy carriers for the small number of “chosen ones”.
We could have known, should have known!
This future, which is to be only theirs, they’ve been announcing it openly for a long time.
But we could not interpret the flaming writing on the wall, this portent, like Belshazzar.
Could not believe that the despots and Satan’s followers, consumed with power, would actually carry out their diabolical plans.
Our minds are not free, we have not thrown off fearfulness.
From childhood we believe in authorities, are in bondage to them, handing over power and not having the courage to use our common sense – we are only capable of obeying.
These unscrupulous despots fuel the fears of citizens of hunger and enslavement, of death and hell.
They also employ the services of corrupt philosophers, psychologists and natural scientists who sell their souls.
Their aim is to subjugate the people, to take away all their rights, to transform them into transhuman beings so that they will obey… and serve.
In this, the throne and the altar would be henchmen… who would understand each other, like two cutthroats.
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This was the opinion of Jean Meslier, the 17th century French philosopher, an atheist in a priest’s skirt (1)
In the preface to his famous “Memoir of Thoughts and Sentiments”, he wrote that he had recently encountered a man who “was not a student, but who evidently possessed sufficient common enough common sense to recognise and condemn the abominable abuses and condemn the abominable abuses,” for he had said that:
“all the great men of the earth should be killed should be strangled with the intestines of priests and hanged by the neck…”
Meslier adds:
“This way of speaking certainly seems harsh, rude and offensive, but it must be admitted that it is frank and open. frank, succinct and impressive.” (2)
Among the greats of the earth today are the Rockefellers and Rothschilds, the Brzezinskis, the Kissingers and their ilk, the Coudenhove-Kalergis and the other wise men.
When they created the New World Order – a One World Government, a One World Religion, and for us ordinary citizens, Dante’s hell. they were sure they were going to win.
And that is how it looks!
Many great women and men – also in modern times – tried, to draw our attention, to warn us:
Baron d’Holbach, for example. or Prince Peter Kropotkin, Michael Bakunin or Karl Marx, Count Tolstoy or Johannes Messner, Emma Goldmann or Bertha von Suttner, Siegmund Freud or Alfred Adler, Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, Rosalie Bertell or Maria Mies, Albert Schweitzer or Carl Friedrich, von Weizäcker, Hannah Arendt or Michel Chossudovsky.
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But we did not listen to them because we knew better.
Nor did we want to know because it disturbed our circles.
That is why today the urgent question is: What to do?
“What to do?”, said Zeus,
“the gods are drunk and making a mockery of Olympus.”
A friend meant well and gave me the advice:
Dare to be wise and surrender power to no one!
Live your life, but also be the guardian of your brothers and sisters!
Make public spirit the guiding idea!
Protect the youth, encourage and challenge them!
Give if you can and do not hate if you can!
Intervene as an intellectual and show a constructive and non-violent way out!
And non-violent way out!
Have compassion for all creatures, for only this makes you a real human being!
Really a human being!
Rudolf Hänsel, March 2021
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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel is a graduate psychologist and educationalist.
Notes
(1) Hagen, Friedrich (1977). An atheist in a priest’s skirt. Jean Meslier and the French freethinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries. A polemic by Friedrich Hagen. Leverkusen and Cologne, p. 42
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Time and again, both right wings of the US war party unjustifiably justify endless preemptive wars by manufacturing nonexistent threats to US national security.
The Biden regime’s so-called Interim National Security Strategic Guidance (INSSG) maintains the myth of barbarians at the gates.
It falsely claims that US and other democracies — in name only — are threatened, referring to the increasingly totalitarian West and apartheid Israel.
Remarks ghost-written for Biden drip with references to democratic values, fundamental freedoms, prosperity for all, peace and dignity — notions abhorred by US-led Western countries and Israel.
“(B)uild back better” is all about handing the nation’s wealth to privileged interests at the expense of exploiting most others.
It’s about spending unlimited trillions of dollars for militarism and warmaking.
It’s about handing trillions more to Wall Street and other corporate favorites.
It’s about going all-out to prevent peace and stability from ending forever wars.
It’s about subjugating world community nation-states and ordinary people at home and abroad.
It’s about enforcing new world order harshness by police state control.
It’s polar opposite virtually everything just societies hold dear.
There’s nothing remotely benign about hardline US domestic and geopolitical policies.
Media supported mass deception pretends otherwise.
INSSG pretends that the Biden regime like its predecessors aims “to keep Americans safe, prosperous, and free (sic).”
Totalitarian rule — enforced with police state harshness — pursues polar opposite aims.
“Anti-democratic forces” are headquartered in Washington with branch offices in Western European capitals and Tel Aviv.
Enemies mentioned are invented, not real, notably China and Russia, nations prioritizing peace, stability, cooperative relations with other nations, and adherence to international law — notions long ago abandoned by the US-dominated West.
Iran and North Korea are longstanding invented US enemies, nations at war with no others, threatening no one.
Nations reinvented as barbarians at the US gates wage peace, not war, cooperation with other states, not confrontation — in sharp contrast to how the US and its imperial partners operate, an unprecedented threat to humanity’s survival.
Names and faces change in Washington over time. Farcical elections assure continuity.
Imperial rage for dominance through the barrel of a gun remains hard-wired policy.
So does police state harshness to prevent governance of, by, and for everyone equitably from ever breaking out.
Before taking office, Biden assured US privileged interests that nothing will change on his watch.
Governance serving them exclusively at the expense of most others will continue like always before.
Endless wars and occupations will continue.
Public wealth will shift entirely to powerful interests, ordinary Americans impoverished, resistance crushed when surfacing.
The state of the nation and other Western societies will become more unsafe and unfit to live in than already.
The type world US ruling authorities have in mind for ordinary people everywhere is too unacceptable to tolerate.
Invented threats — including barbarians at the gates — aim to cow ordinary people into submission.
They’re manipulated to believe everything is all right so they’ll learn to love their Big Brother oppressor.
Mass resistance is essential to challenge the worst of all possible worlds US dark forces want imposed on humanity.
Otherwise we’re all doomed.
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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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According to data released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of injuries and deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) following COVID vaccines continues to climb.
In the U.S., 70.45 million COVID vaccine doses had been administered as of Feb. 26.
VAERS is the primary mechanism for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before confirmation can be made that the reported adverse event was caused by the vaccine.
According to the latest data, 1,136 of 1,265 reported deaths were in the U.S. Of the total, 31% of the deaths occurred within 48 hours of vaccination, and 47% of deaths occurred in people who became ill within 48 hours of being vaccinated. Twenty percent of deaths were related to cardiac disorder.
Fifty-three percent of those who died were male, 45% were female and the remaining death reports did not include gender of the deceased. The average age of those who died was 77.8 and the youngest death confirmed was a 23-year-old.
As of Feb. 26, 180 pregnant women had reported adverse reactions to COVID vaccines, including 56 reports of miscarriage or premature birth. None of the COVID vaccines approved for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) have been tested for safety or efficacy in pregnant women. Yet health officials are urging pregnant women to get the vaccine, and many are enthusiastically doing so. As The Defender reported:
“Even without data from Pfizer or Moderna sufficient to inform vaccine-associated risks in pregnancy, expectant doctors, nurses and others appear eager for the shots, perhaps influenced by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which states that ‘neither a conversation with a clinician nor even a pregnancy test are necessary prerequisites.”
The World Health Organization on Jan. 27 issued guidance advising against pregnant women getting Moderna’s COVID vaccine — only to reverse that guidance two days later, as The New York Times reported. Pfizer announced last month that it was beginning COVID vaccine trials for pregnant women, but they don’t expect the trials to wrap up until January 2023.
As of Feb. 26, only the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines had been approved for emergency use in the U.S., but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration this week gave Johnson & Johnson’s COVID vaccine approval for emergency use. The one-shot vaccine started rolling out this week.
On Mar. 3, The New York Times reported that some people are experiencing an “angry-looking skin condition” after their first dose of the COVID vaccine –– with arms turning red, sore, itchy and swollen a week or more after the shot. Doctors said they wanted to share the information to “help prevent the needless use of antibiotics and to ease patients’ worries and reassure them that they can safely get their second vaccine shot.”
Dr. Hooman Noorchashm, an accomplished surgeon and patient safety advocate, wrote a second letter to the FDA urging the agency to require pre-screening for SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins in order to reduce COVID vaccine injuries and deaths. Noorchasm argued that at least a fraction of the millions of already infected Americans — especially the elderly, frail and those with serious cardiovascular comorbidities — are at risk of being harmed by a dangerous exaggerated immune response triggered by the COVID vaccine, reported The Defender on March 3.
On March 1, The Defender also reported that 25% of residents in a German nursing home died after receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Reiner Fuellmich and Viviane Fischer, attorneys and founding members of the German Corona Investigative Committee, interviewed a caregiver in a Berlin nursing home who described what happened during and after the rollout of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine. According to the FDA, as part of a vaccine’s EUA, it is mandatory that pharmaceutical companies and vaccination providers report “all serious adverse events, cases of Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome and cases of COVID-19 that result in hospitalization or death to VAERS.”
In the UK, where only the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines are being distributed, injuries related to both vaccines are coming into the government reporting system there.
As The Defender reported this week, between Dec. 9, 2020 (when the first COVID vaccine was administered in the UK) and Feb. 14, 2021, 402 deaths following COVID vaccines were reported to YellowCard, the UK government’s system for reporting side effects to COVID-related medicines, vaccines, devices, and defective or falsified products. More reportes were associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine, not yet approved in the U.S., than with the Pfizer product. In a letter written to but not published by The BMJ, John Stone wrote:
“It is also remarkable how unfavorably the Oxford-AstraZeneca data compare with the Pfizer data. MHRA data show 26,823 reports related to Pfizer vaccines, including 77,207 reactions, and 31,427 reports related to Oxford-AstraZeneca, including 114,625 reactions.
“Thus the Pfizer reports run at ~3.2 per 1,000 while the Oxford-AstraZeneca reports run at ~4.6 per 1,000: which translates to 43% more reports associated with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine compared with Pfizer.
“However, the Pfizer reports have an average of 2.9 reactions per report compared with 3.6 for the Oxford-AstraZeneca (again Oxford 24% higher) — so the rate of reactions reported is actually 77% higher overall for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.”
According to “Electronic Support for Public Health–Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System,” a research project focused on improving the quality of physician adverse vaccine event detection and reporting to the national Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are ever reported.
“Low reporting rates preclude or slow the identification of “problem” drugs and vaccines that endanger public health,” according to researchers.
On March 3, KUTV reported that there was a lack of information on how and where to report vaccine side effects. “Nationally, there have been very few reports on possible side effects and where to report them. Here in Utah, guiding people to the right resources post vaccine has not been a priority,” The news outlet said.
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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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Dr. Helen Caldicott has been an author, physician and one of the world’s leading anti-nuclear campaigners. She helped to reinvigorate the group of Physicians for Social Responsibility, acting as president from 1978 to 1983. Since its founding in 2001 she served as president of the US based Nuclear Policy Research Institute later called Beyond Nuclear which initiates symposia and educational projects aimed at informing the public about the dangers of nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and nuclear war. And she is the editor of the 2014 book, 
