Global Research

The CDC Mandate Masks Study: Is the CDC About to be Canceled by Google and Facebook for “COVID Heresy”?

By Simon Black, March 09 2021

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.

No COVID Vaccine? No Travel, Air Force Officials Say

By Pam Long, March 09 2021

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

We Should Have Known! “To Those Born Later”

By Bertolt Brecht and Dr. Rudolf Hänsel, March 08 2021

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.

Is the US Heading for Confrontation with China? The Pentagon’s Multibillion Dollar Indo-Pacific Military Deployment

By Stephen Lendman, March 09 2021

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?

The Battle for Lithium: The UK Supported the Coup in Bolivia to Gain Access to Its ‘White Gold’

By Matt Kennard, March 09 2021

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.

Biden Iran Envoy Boasted of Depriving Civilians of Food, Driving Up Iranian Inequality in “Art of Sanctions” Manual

By Max Blumenthal, March 09 2021

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 Federal Reserve is Enabling Biden and Congress’ Destructive Economic Agenda

By Rep. Ron Paul, March 09 2021

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.

India, Pakistan on the Road to Peace

By M. K. Bhadrakumar, March 09 2021

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.

Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman and the Perils of Racial Profiling

By Abayomi Azikiwe, March 09 2021

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.

Attacks on the Rights of Transgender People Are Rising; Fight Back

By Margaret Flowers, March 09 2021

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.

Joe Frazier vs. Muhammad Ali: 50 Years Ago, The Heavyweight “Fight of the Century”

By Adeyinka Makinde, March 09 2021

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.

Manlio Dinucci

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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]

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

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).

***

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.

I just read @RichardMNephew's "The Art of Sanctions."

Nephew, ex-Obama State Dept sanctions coordinator, clinically & chillingly details how pain is the essence of the US global sanctions regime.

Unfortunately, he hasn't been honest about the contents of his own book. Thread: pic.twitter.com/r5y9bc93eU

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) September 13, 2020

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.

My full story here: https://t.co/FWTYO7Ab4G pic.twitter.com/m5431czF8i

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 8, 2021

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

— Richard Nephew (@RichardMNephew) March 18, 2020

In an administration filled with fun-loving, ethnically diverse characters who moonlight as rock guitarists, decorate the walls of their homes with Haitian art, bob their heads to Tupac, and even enjoy an occasional toke, all while keeping the gears of a ferociously violent empire grinding along, the tattooed sanctions artist seems like a perfect fit.

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

— Omer Carmi (@CarmiOmer) March 2, 2021

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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.

All images in this article are from The Grayzone

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).

***

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.

All images in this article are from the author

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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: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

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.

The bills also run counter to standard medical practice. After more than 100 years of work to provide gender-affirming health care to transgender youth and adults, this area of medicine is well-documented and supported by major institutions such as the American Association of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the American Medical Association, the Endocrine Society and the American Psychological Association. At a time when the medical establishment is working to improve care for transgender people in all settings, these state bills would be a huge impediment to that progress.

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.

Featured image is from Penelope Barritt/Rex/Shutterstock.

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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).

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

“How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/how-wall-street-fleeces-america/

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/banker-occupation-waging-financial-war-on-humanity/

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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.

Click here to read the document

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.”

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab stated:

“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. 

Featured image is from People’s Dispatch

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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 jabs reported 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.

However the Government has since updated it’s advice within the document, for reasons unknown to the following –

4.6 Fertility, pregnancy and lactation

Pregnancy

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).

***

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.

Featured image is from Flickr

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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.

Rountree, who is not a doctor, may not be aware that the clinical trials were designed to measure symptom mitigation, and neither Pfizer-BioNTech’s nor Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine have demonstrated efficacy to prevent infection or transmission.

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.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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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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Featured image is from Indian Punchline

On International Women’s Day 2021: Palestinian Women on the Front Lines of the Liberation Struggle

By Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, March 08 2021

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.

From Afghanistan to Syria: Women’s Rights, War Propaganda and the CIA

By Julie Lévesque, March 08 2021

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.

Further Reflections on Women’s Suffrage and African American Emancipation

By Abayomi Azikiwe, March 08 2021

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.

Women’s Day 2021: Mainstream Media Islamophobia and Women’s Rights in Muslim Countries

By Prof. Henry Francis B. Espiritu, March 08 2021

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.

International Women’s Day: Lucy Parsons’ Fight Against America’s Robber Barons and the Ku Klux Klan

By William Loren Katz, March 08 2021

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.

Vaccine Diabolus and the Impending Wave of Rare Neurodegenerative Disorders

By Mike Whitney, March 08 2021

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.

Is China Planning on Blocking US Sanctions Imposed on Iran?

By Shahbazz Afzal, March 08 2021

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.

Video: It’s Here: First Court Case Against Mandatory Vaccination — Attorney Interview

By Ana Garner and Spiro Skouras, March 08 2021

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.

5 Ways They’re Trying to Trick You into Taking the COVID “Vaccine”

By Kit Knightly, March 08 2021

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.

Despite US Senate $1.9 Trillion “Stimulus Bill”, Main Street Depression Prevails, Guess Who Will the “Lion’s Share”.

By Stephen Lendman, March 08 2021

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.

India’s Farmers Resistance Movement. Repeal the Three Farm Laws

By National Alliance of People’s Movements, March 08 2021

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.

Nicaragua’s Indigenous People: Neocolonial Lies, Autonomous Reality

By Stephen Sefton, March 07 2021

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.

Sounds of Silence: Extinction Is Erasing the Earth’s Music

By Kathleen Dean Moore and Tara Lohan, March 08 2021

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%.

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).

(image) Bertolt Brecht with son Stefan

***

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

***

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

***

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.

***

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.

***

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

(2) Op. cit. Blurb on the back of the book

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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).

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

“How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/how-wall-street-fleeces-america/

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/banker-occupation-waging-financial-war-on-humanity/

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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.

Between Dec. 14, 2020, and Feb. 26, a total of 25,212 total adverse events were reported to VAERS, including 1,265 deaths and 4,424 serious injuries.

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.

This week’s VAERS data also included 1,414 reports of anaphylaxis, with 60% of cases attributed to the Pfizer-Bio-N-Tech vaccine and 40% to Moderna, and 298 reports of Bell’s Palsy.

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.

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

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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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***

By now, anybody speaking about vaccine equality and equity of access must surely be coming across as slightly deranged.  In the field of COVID-19, traditional proprietorial instincts remain.  Add to this the disparity in terms of manufacture, bureaucracy and the nasty flavour of politics, and we would all be entitled to long draughts of cynicism.

The COVAX (COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility) scheme, supposedly a levelling measure in ensuring global equitable and cheap access to vaccines, risks looking like a rhetorical bauble. 

Co-led by Gavi, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations (CEPI) and the World Health Organization (WHO), these collaborators seek to “accelerate the development and manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines, and to guarantee fair and equitable access for every country in the world.” 

The aim of the group is to supply 2 billion doses by the end of 2021.  Last month, the WTO reported that 130 countries, comprising 2.5 billion people, had yet to receive a single dose.

The project has hit a rather large snag.  Many countries are not willing to play along.  If they do, they are doing so in two-timing fashion.  WHO senior adviser, Bryce Aylward, is worried that “some countries are still pursuing deals that will compromise the COVAX supply.”  This lack of fidelity to the cause is also of concern to the WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.  “We can’t beat COVID without vaccine equity. Our world will not recover fast enough without vaccine equity, this is clear.”

A suggestion of dealing with the problems of accessing COVID-19 vaccines has been put forth by several states and international bodies.  Last Friday, the WHO called for an agreement dealing with the waiver of intellectual property rights to vaccines. “If not now, when?” asked Ghebreyesus.

In October 2020, India and South Africa submitted a proposal for waiving “certain provisions of the TRIPS [Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights] agreement for the prevention, containment and treatment of COVID-19.”  The waiver would be granted to WTO members so that they would not have to apply or enforce certain provisions under Part II of the TRIPS Agreement, namely section 1 (copyrights and related rights), 4 (industrial design), 5 (patents), and 7 (protection of undisclosed information).  The waiver would be in place for a duration agreed to by the General Council and till widespread global vaccination had taken place, with the majority of the world’s population rendered immune. 

A briefing document on the proposal, authored by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), merely confirms that the proposed waiver was specific, applicable only to COVID-19 and not “all TRIPS obligations, nor does it suggest a waiver beyond what is needed for COVID-19 prevention, containment and treatment.”  Were the waiver to be granted, patents would not be enforced or granted on “all COVID-19 drugs, vaccines, diagnostics, and other technologies, including masks and ventilators, for the duration of the pandemic.”  Collaboration in research and development (R&D), manufacturing, scaling up and supplying COVID-19 tools could also take place.

In discussions held by WTO members at the TRIPS Council over October 15-16 last year, the opponents nailed their colours to the mast.  Australia, Brazil, Canada, EU, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the United States were either formally opposed to the measure, or not in support of it. The COVID-19 vaccine world had been clearly demarcated: the wealthy and the rest.

The justifications from such states do not make for pretty reading.  All centre on one essential theme: the importance of maintaining an ironclad IP system in the name of innovative practice.  An EU spokesman suggested somewhat speciously that no evident nexus could be shown between access to vaccines and IP barriers. “There is no evidence that IP rights in any way hamper access to COVID-19 related medicines and technologies.” The UK government decided to upend the cart with its reasoning, underlining the importance of having strict IP rules if access to new products to battle the pandemic were to be made available. The chair of the WHO Solidarity Trial of COVID-19, John-Arne Røttingen insists that “IP is the least of the barriers” relative to necessary facilities for production, knowledge and infrastructure. 

South Africa sought to address such claims on October 16 at the TRIPS Council meeting and again at the Council Meeting on November 20.  Examples included the manufacturers of monoclonal antibody therapeutics, such as Regeneron and Eli Lilly, which had restricted their capacity via bilateral arrangements.  Specifically on vaccines, South Africa could point to the struggle between MSF and Pfizer being waged in India over the pneumococcal vaccine, protected by a patent effectively blocking the development of alternatives.

As if further proof was needed about efforts by pharmaceutical behemoths to freeze and halt both innovation and access in the field of vaccines with generous IP shields, one need look no further than the case of South Korea’s SK Bioscience. The company was embroiled in patent litigation with Pfizer in developing a pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PVC) by the name of Skypheumo.  SK Bioscience lost the suit, with the Supreme Court ruling that it could not sell Skypheumo until 2026, when Pfizer’s composition patent for Prevenar 13 expires.

Given that WTO decisions tend to be made through consensus, the waiver proposal has been stuck in diplomatic purgatory in the TRIPS Council.  Requests from Chile, Australia and Canada for evidence that the waiver would achieve increased capacity for vaccine manufacturing and assist ameliorate shortages have not helped.  Burcu Kilic, research director for access to medicines at Public Citizen sees the unfolding of a crude agenda.  “What [high-income countries] are hoping is that they can discuss and drag the issue out that things will be OK by the summer.”

The WTO General Council meeting held at the start of this month did not see a change of heart from high-income countries towards the South African-Indian proposal.  Neither the US nor EU wished to even discuss it.  What instead kept delegates busy was the proposal by WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to pursue a meek third way alternative.  That option would involve, according to Okonjo-Iweala, the licensing of manufacturing to countries ensuring “adequate supplies while still making sure that intellectual property issues are taken care off”. 

Ahead of officially commencing her duties as Director-General, she reiterated the idea that there was a way of increasing access “through facilitating technology transfer within the framework of multilateral rules” and for pharmaceutical giants to make licensing arrangements permitting other manufacturers to produce vaccines.  Music, no doubt, to representatives of Big Pharma.

To date, the doses-ordered per capita read as a comparison of states looks stark.  The US has 10.2 doses per person, the UK 7.6, the EU 6.5, and Australia 5.  David Legge and Sun Kim, both of the People’s Health Movement, note that the African Union (AU), in sharp contrast, has deals covering a mere 970 million doses for 1.34 billion people.  Vaccine coverage, at this point, looks meagre. 

Some 115 European Parliamentary members, on February 24, issued a declaration pleading for the European Commission, and the European Council to review their opposition to the TRIPS waiver proposal. Certain EU member states and the European Commission had spoken about COVID-19 medical products “as global goods” but there were no “actionable realities.”   A waiver, the members urged, would not only cast aside onerous legal barriers to production but enable “the sharing of know-how and technologies with GMP manufacturers from third countries”.  EU strategy had, however, been tribal, emphasising domestic production with the potential to exacerbate “a dangerous North-South divide when it comes to affordable COVID-19 diagnostics, personal protective equipment, treatment and vaccines.”

The vaccine fault lines suggest different timetables and differently filled pockets.  Regions of the world risk remaining unvaccinated, with infections and deaths set to continue.  Legge and Kim rightly see this as an abandonment by wealthier countries to chance, death and despair in favour of self-interest.  Should low- and middle-income countries have to wait another year or two in the face of wealthier states “commandeering the vaccines, there will be about 40-50 million more cases of infections and perhaps 2 to 3 million additional deaths.”  A good number on those charts of mortality will be health workers.

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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]

Featured image is from OffGuardian

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***

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top advisers successfully intervened in pushing state health officials scrub a public report showing that by July 2020, nearly 10,000 New York nursing home residents had died in the pandemic, according to a late-Thursday report in the Wall Street Journal.

At the urging of Cuomo advisers, the report excluded nursing home residents who later died in hospitals after becoming sick in long-term facilities, resulting in a “significant undercount of the death toll attributed to the state’s most vulnerable population,” according to the report.

“The Health Department resisted calls by state and federal lawmakers, media outlets and others to release the [full] data for another eight months,” according to the Journal.

State officials now say more than 15,000 residents of nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities were confirmed or presumed to have died from Covid-19 since March of last year—counting both those who died in long-term-care facilities and those who died later in hospitals. That figure is about 50% higher than earlier official death tolls. -WSJ

The published version of the data said just 6,432 nursing home residents had died, when in fact over 15,000 residents of nursing homes were either confirmed or presumed to have died of COVID-19 since last March. Notably, Cuomo’s administration issued a March 25 directive that no nursing home could refuse to readmit residents or admit new residents who had COVID-19.

In February, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn asked the Cuomo administration to produce information on nursing-home deaths from the July report, said people familiar with the matter.

This “incident” begs the question: what other things did “they” lie about in 2020, and why? https://t.co/yzXg1VqlsI

— Barbarian Capital (@BarbarianCap) March 5, 2021

When asked for comment, Cuomo’s office said on Thursday that they had concerns over the accuracy of out-of-facility deaths, which is why they advocated to exclude that data.

“The out-of-facility data was omitted after DOH could not confirm it had been adequately verified,” said Beth Garvey, special counsel and senior adviser to Cuomo – while “one official familiar with the back-and-forth between the Health Department and Mr. Cuomo’s advisers said state Health Commissioner Howard Zucker agreed the out-of-facility data shouldn’t be included in the report.”

“[The Department of Health] was comfortable with the final report and believes fully in its conclusion that the primary driver that introduced Covid into the nursing homes was brought in by staff,” said Health Department spokesman, Gary Holmes.

The Health Department updated the report on Feb. 11 to include out-of-facility deaths of nursing-home residents, saying its conclusions remained unchanged by the new data.

State lawmakers from both parties have said the out-of-facility death data was critical for them to evaluate nursing-home policies that could prevent future fatalities. They said the Cuomo administration’s decision to delay its release constitutes a coverup of data the governor knew would be damaging to his political stature. -WSJ

Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, infuriated state lawmakers during a Feb. 10 virtual meeting, when she admitted to sidelining a legislative request for the data due to fears that the Trump DOJ would use it to investigate. Of note, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division began requesting data on nursing home deaths from New York and other Democratic-leaning states in August.

According to the July report, nursing homes were already full of COVID patients when the March 25 policy was enacted, and was attributed to staff who brought it with them to work.

Cuomo, who is also embroiled in two sexual harassment allegations, has refused to step down following repeated calls from both sides of the aisle.

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***

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***

An earlier version of the measure was adopted by the House.

The revised bill heads back to the body for an early in the week vote, passage highly likely. 

It’ll then be sent to the White House for Biden to enact it into law in the next few days.

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.

Most Americans will get a one-time $1,400 stimulus check.

Individuals earning $80,000 or more and couples with incomes of $160,000 or more are excluded — based on pre-economic collapse 2019 income.

Unemployed individuals or others adversely affected by made-in-the-USA Depression conditions whose income was at or greater than the above thresholds in 2019 — no longer thereafter — are excluded from receiving a stimulus check when most needed.

It’s at a time when economist John Williams explained that “(s)evere systemic structural damage from (last year’s) shutdown will forestall meaningful rebound into 2022 and beyond.”

“Unemployment remains in deep non-recovery territory (at) 25.8%” — based on how calculated pre-1990.

Over the past year, CPI inflation is 9.1%. Reported numbers of the above data conceal reality.

Williams added that “systemic turmoil is just beginning, with both the Fed and US government still driving uncontrolled US dollar creation.

The $1.9 trillion stimulus plan will likely spike inflation higher.

Weekly unemployment insurance (UI) for unemployed US workers was reduced from $400 to $300 through September 6 in the Senate passed measure.

Most provisions are similar to a version passed earlier by majority House members.

Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) for self-employed individuals and contractors was renewed.

So was Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) that adds additional weeks of state benefits.

The child tax benefit was increased to $3,000 per child up to age-17, $3,600 for children under age-six through yearend.

Affordable Care Act premium subsidies for low and middle-income households, making up to 400% of the poverty level, were extended for two years.

The measure provides $170 billion for public schools, $46 billion for monitoring, diagnosing, and tracing seasonal flu outbreaks now called covid, $75 billion for testing and mass-jabbing with experimental, high-risk drugs — causing widespread numbers of adverse events and deaths when taken as directed.

States, local communities and US territories are to get $350 billion.

HHS gets $4.5 billion to help low-income households pay energy and water bills.

Much of what’s in the measure goes to special interests, much too little for the nation’s unemployed and low-income workers.

In the latest BLS reporting period, another 1.2 million jobless workers applied for unemployment insurance (UI) benefits.

It was the 50th straight week of about a million or more claims — reflecting the most dire ever Main Street economic conditions in US history while privileged interests never had things better.

The divergence between super-rich and struggling daily to survive households was never before as extreme as now.

On Friday, a deceptive BLS report showed 379,000 jobs created in February.

Well over 90% were in the hospitality sector, mostly waiters, bartenders, cooks and related jobs.

Education, construction and mining jobs declined. Black unemployment increased.

With Main Street Depression-level conditions little changed, there’s no just cause for optimism.

One of many examples of how privileged interests are benefitting while ordinary Americans are struggling to get by was reported by Wall Street on Parade (WSOP) on March 3, saying:

The Wall Street owned and controlled Fed handed a dozen or more of the largest US banks “a cumulative $9 trillion or more in repo loans” from mid-September 2019 “though at least September 30, 2020.”

So-called emergency repo loans (Wall Street handouts) “began began months before” covid outbreaks were first reported early last year.

According to WSOP, it’s highly likely that “a handful of the largest derivative-laden banks got the lion’s share of the bailouts.”

At the same time, ordinary Americans consistently get sold out, notably since last year with no end of draconian horrors in sight — the worst highly likely ahead.

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

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

“How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/how-wall-street-fleeces-america/

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/banker-occupation-waging-financial-war-on-humanity/

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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.

In 2015, following intense negotiations between China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, the US, Germany, the European Union and Iran, a milestone agreement was concluded – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – commonly known as the ‘Iran Nuclear Deal’.

The deal was completed during the Obama administration and endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2231.

The deal restricts Iran’s nuclear activities. It allows Iran to be subject to rigorous and continuous monitoring by the UN watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – allowing its inspectors to enter Iran to confirm full compliance with the nuclear-related provisions and requirements set in the deal. According to many reports the IAEA has devised the most intrusive international monitoring system specifically for Iran – and no other nation in history has ever been subject to such robust scrutiny.

In exchange for compliance, the other signatory nations to the ‘Iran Nuclear Deal’ are committed to lifting sanctions against Iran.

Despite Iran’s full compliance with the deal, as repeatedly confirmed by the IAEA, President Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the deal on May 8, 2018, and subsequently re-imposed the US primary and secondary sanctions on Iran. Other signatories made strong declarations they would remain committed to the agreement, which raised harsh criticism from the Trump administration. US allies, including Israel, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, welcomed the steps taken by the US to sabotage the deal.

In a National Security Presidential Memorandum, President Trump directed the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury to immediately take steps to reinstate US sanctions lifted or waived in connection with the ‘Iran Nuclear Deal’. The Trump administration would later implement further sanctions against Iran beyond the reinstated sanctions.

According to recent reports China has developed a potentially effective instrument, a ‘blocking statute’, which would allow China to do some trade with Iran and circumvent the US sanctions.

On January 9, 2021, China’s Ministry of Commerce – MOFCOM – issued its first order of the year, the ‘Rules on Counteracting Unjustified Extra-Territorial Application of Foreign Legislation and Other Measures’. These ‘rules’ are designed to counteract the impact of US secondary sanctions – and are similar to the EU’s Blocking Statute.

The EU’s Blocking Statute was first introduced in 1996 to counteract the US’s sanctions against Cuba, Iran and Libya at that time.

On 6 June 2018, the EU adopted a delegated act amending Regulation (EC) No 2271/96 of 22 November 1996 protecting against the effects of the extra-territorial application of legislation adopted by a third country, and actions based thereon or resulting therefrom (the Blocking Statute) in order to counteract the extra-territorial application of certain US sanctions in the EU.

However, the EU Blocking Statute has been considered a ‘toothless tool’, with limitations on the practical enforcement of it.

China has a different set of priorities with Iran, than the EU does with Iran.

The Chinese leadership has made clear Iran is a strategic partner as outlined in the 18-page document titled, ‘Iran-China Comprehensive Strategic Partnership’.

This concludes a long-term trade and military negotiations between China and Iran – and would see China invest $400 billion over the next 25 years in Iran. It would “vastly expand Chinese presence in banking, telecommunications, ports, railways and dozens of other projects” and allow China to receive Iranian oil at a reduced price in order to meet its growing energy needs. All of this will motivate China to ensure its own ‘blocking statute’ will be robust and achievable.

China needs Iran to advance its global ambitions – and ensuring the success of its ‘blocking statute’ will be a priority.

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Shahbazz Afzal is an independent writer and political activist.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

First published by Global Research on February 25, 2019

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.

As we pointed out in an earlier essay, the campaigns aimed at winning the right of women to exercise the franchise emerged directly from the demands for the outlawing of African enslavement.

William Lloyd Garrison as leader of the American Anti-slavery Society (AASS) provided an opportunity for both free African men and women to enhance their avenues of expression in work related to the achievement of ending involuntary servitude. The Philadelphia Female Anti-slavery Society (PFASS) and its national component of the Anti-slavery Convention of American Women during the 1830s attracted people of both African and European descent creating the conditions for the early calls for full equality eventually leading to the demands for universal suffrage.

None of these efforts would have been possible absent of the flight and rebellion taking place among the enslaved African people. By the early 19^th century concerns about the untenable nature of the Atlantic Slave Trade and its containment of the impacted populations created the material basis for the stiffening of repressive measures aimed at controlling the African people residing in the U.S.

Although there was a gradual reversal of the legalization of slavery and the limited enfranchisement of African people in the Northeastern states after the War of Independence from Britain, the rapid expansion of slave labor production occurred during the opening decades of the 19^th century after the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, prompting the large-scale European settlement of South. Rebellions and rumors of unrest in Richmond (VA) in 1800, Charleston (SC) 1822 and the South Hampton County (VA) uprising led by Nat Turner in 1831, fueled the notions of the potential for a collapse of the slave system through violent upheaval.

The Haitian Revolution from 1791 to 1804 and the founding of the Black Republic born in the military defeat of French empire on Hispaniola Island actually worsened the conditions for enslaved Africans on the plantations of the South during subsequent decades. By the 1830s and 1840s the demand for cotton continued to rise in order to supply the textile industries of the North and in England.

Seneca Falls, Women’s Suffrage and the Intervention of Frederick Douglass

Organizers of the Seneca Falls, New York July 19-20, 1848 convention through writings and speeches have placed this event as the genesis of women’s suffrage claims. However, these demands had been raised before in other fora including the Liberty Party platforms earlier in the same year (June 14-15) by presidential candidate Gerrit Smith and within the work of previously organized female societies opposed to slavery. Ernestine Rose delivered addresses as early as 1846 in support of abolition and universal suffrage. (See this and this)

Many of the concerns which were initially addressed at Seneca Falls were related to the right of property ownership, inheritance and marital status. Even leading women activists were unsure about the timeliness of demands for universal suffrage.

In fact it was Frederick Douglass (image on the right), the publisher of the North Star, a leading abolitionist, who spoke to the delegates on the second day of the Convention urging the gathering to pass a resolution calling for the right of women to vote. Douglass, said to have been the only Black person and one of very few men in attendance, rose militantly to pronounce:

“If there is any argument to be made, it must be made by opponents, not by the friends of woman suffrage. Let those who want argument examine the ground upon which they base their claim to the right to vote. They will find that there is not one reason, not one consideration, which they can urge in support of man’s claim to vote, which does not equally support the right of woman to vote.” (See this)

Yet Maria Stewart of Boston had written and spoken publically as early as 1831 on the need to end African enslavement as well as advocating equality for women. Stewart published in the Liberator newspaper initiated by Garrison, and beginning in 1832, delivered at least four lectures on the horrors of slavery along with the need for women’s emancipation. It is important to acknowledge that Stewart is often referred to as the first woman to speak in public settings where audiences were composed of diverse genders.

Speculation is that Stewart spoke within the same mode as other 19^th century African women preachers such as Jarena Lee (image on the left) and Julia Foote. Lee preached after much struggle and opposition in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) founded by Richard and Sara Allen in 1794 in Philadelphia. Foote was ordained as the first woman deacon in the African Methodist Zion Church (AMEZ) and would later become a well-known evangelist associated with the spiritualist tradition which reached fruition in the early 20^th century.

The Women History Blog notes that:

“Maria Stewart’s essays and speeches presented original ideas that were to become central to the struggles for African American freedom, human rights and women’s rights. In this she was a clear forerunner to Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and generations of the most influential African American activists and political thinkers. Many of her ideas were so far ahead of their time that they remain relevant more than 180 years later.” (See this)

Another notable personality of the era was born into slavery in the early 1820s in Dorchester County, Maryland. Harriet Tubman ran away from her master to become a leader in the Underground Railroad. She liberated many Africans from bondage and would later serve as a member of the Union Army in the Civil War where she provided intelligence on the locations of plantations.

Divisions Intensify After the Civil War

Tubman later worked with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony after the Civil War in efforts aimed at acquiring women’s suffrage. These efforts linking African emancipation and women’s rights would be strained over events surrounding the enactment of 14^th and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution.

A leading section of the women’s movement led by Stanton and Anthony opposed the passage and ratification of the 15^th Amendment which was purportedly drafted to guarantee the right to the franchise for African American males formerly enslaved in the Confederate states. This disagreement prompted the split within the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) founded in 1866 with the stated purpose of winning civil rights for African Americans and women of all races. The AERA would collapse by 1870 resulting in the advent of two rival women’s suffrage organizations.

Even Douglass’ alliance with Stanton and Anthony would be strained during this period as one historical source describes how:

“After only three years, the AERA dissolved over heated fights about whether to support the 15th Amendment, with which Black men won the right to vote (in the South, this victory would be short-lived). At a pivotal convention in May 1869, Douglass argued that the AERA should support the amendment while continuing to fight for women’s suffrage. Stanton not only disagreed, she gave an address filled with racist stereotypes about the male immigrants and male former slaves whom the amendment would enfranchise.” (See this)

This fragile victory gained through the passage of the 15^th Amendment would be liquidated through the withdrawal of federal troops from the former Confederate states, the passage of Jim Crow legislation by southern state governments instituting peonage for African American farmers and the widespread usage of racial terror by white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.  Lynch law became the order of the closing decades of the 19^th century.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, an educator, journalist and political organizer was driven out of Memphis after her militant opposition to the 1892 triple lynching of three African American men by leading white officials and businessmen in the city. Launching an international campaign against racist mob violence and state approved repression, Wells-Barnett would also become a leading force in the African American women’s club movement of 1890s and early 1900s.

After relocating in Chicago, Wells-Barnett was a key figure in the struggle for full political rights through the founding of the Alpha Suffrage Club in 1913. Despite here valiant efforts, members of the renewed white-dominated women’s movement sought to segregate her along with dozens of other African Americans at a demonstration for voting rights in Washington, D.C.

An account of this episode says:

“In March 1913, Wells-Barnett traveled to the first suffrage parade in Washington D.C., an event organized by the National American Woman Suffrage Association. On the day of the parade, Wells-Barnett and sixty other Black women arrived to march with the Illinois delegation, but were immediately advised, as women of color, to march in the back, so as to not to upset the Southern delegates. Wells-Barnett refused, arguing: ‘Either I go with you or not at all. I am not taking this stand because I personally wish for recognition. I am doing it for the future benefit of my whole race.’ She initially left the scene, therefore convincing the crowd that she was complying with the request. However, she quickly returned and marched alongside her own Illinois delegation, supported by her white co-suffragists Belle Squires and Virginia Brooks. This event received massive newspaper coverage and shed light on the reality for African-American participation in politics.” (See this)

Lessons for the 21^stCentury Struggles Related to Gender Equality and Anti-Racism

Over a century later these unresolved contradictions remain a serious impediment to inter-racial political unity aimed at the realization of full equality and self-determination for women and the oppressed nations in the U.S. Gaining the right to the franchise through the 15^th (1870) and 19^th Amendments (1920) was the result of decades of tireless work and sacrifice.

During the mid-20^th century, the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibiting discrimination based on race, religion, gender and national origins was the direct outgrowth of mass initiatives and legal challenges. The following year, the 1965 Voting Rights Act empowered the federal government once again to exercise its authority to guarantee universal suffrage. Moreover, the international pressures from the world socialist movement and the national liberation struggles were an important element in the transformation of the superstructure of U.S. political culture.

Nevertheless, the existence of these civil rights cannot be guaranteed under a capitalist system which is committed to the reversal of every gain won by popular movements. This historical reality requires the building of independent revolutionary organizations based within the working class and the masses of oppressed peoples.

The acquisition of sustainable guarantees for democratic rights and self-determination cannot be secured by the two existing ruling class oriented political parties. A party of the working class and nationally oppressed must come into existence which can speak in the name of those who have been the victims of the centuries-long class domination and economic exploitation.

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

All images in this article are from the author

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Some politicians can’t stop coming up with new ways of bossing people around and preventing the return of normal life, all in the name of countering coronavirus. A prime example of such coronavirus tyrants is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

This week, Cuomo, who has been imposing on people in New York for a year some of the harshest coronavirus-related restrictions in America, announced he is rolling out yet another rights abuse. Cuomo is requiring in a new “pilot program” that people obtain and present vaccination passports to gain entrance to certain places and take part in various activities that have been curtailed by government over the last year.

Cuomo calls the vaccination passports Excelsior Passes. No matter the name the state’s vaccination passports are marketed under, they are a mechanism for government tracking people’s movements, pressuring people into taking experimental coronavirus vaccines that carry risk of serious injury and death, and implementing a vaccinations-based caste system.

Elizabeth Elizalde writes at the New York Post that in the New York state pilot program people are being required to present their vaccination passports “in order to enter sports arenas, theaters and other businesses.” To receive a vaccination passport, Elizalde writes, a person must prove he has received one of the experimental coronavirus vaccines or that he has recently tested negative for coronavirus.

With time — after the experimental coronavirus vaccines have become more widely available — expect Cuomo to adjust the program so proof of injection with one of the not-really vaccines will be the only means to receive an Excelsior Pass and, thereby, the ability to take part legally in many activities.

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In this interview, which was initially banned by YouTube before it was even published (but now reversed), Spiro is joined by Attorney Ana Garner of New Mexico. 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.

Attorney Garner explains the significance of this case and what is at stake, as it is the first of its kind and may set a new standard for legal precedent regarding mandatory vaccination. Garner says she is prepared to take this case to the Supreme Court if necessary.

Spiro and Ana Garner also discuss another case of hers that is ongoing currently. A case that challenges not only the Governor of New Mexico, but the emergency itself.

You can see this important interview on the free speech platform BitChute … or watch it on YouTube if you must.

Click image to watch the BitChute video

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Korea’s new virus cases continued to stay around the 400-range on Friday, with the health authorities expressing concerns about possible resurgence amid the eased restrictions in the spring season.

The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KCDA) confirmed 398 new patients, including 381 local infections, down slightly from Thursday. The cumulative caseload rose to 91,638 as of midnight Thursday. Imported cases also decreased to 17 from 23.

The death toll stayed at a single-digit figure as the KCDA reported eight more fatalities, pushing the death toll to 1,627 with a fatality rate of 1.78 percent. An additional 398 patients fully recovered and returned to their everyday lives, increasing the total to 82,560. The country has tested 6,789,011 people since Jan. 3 last year.

With recent daily cases hovering around the 400-range, the nation is speeding up its vaccine rollout.

The health authorities have inoculated 225,853 people as of Friday – 221,944 with the AstraZeneca vaccine and 2,742 with Pfizer’s vaccine. Officials also confirmed a steep uptick in side effects after injection by confirming 849 new cases on Friday. The total adverse reaction cases tied to the vaccination have risen to 1,558.

While most of them showed mild symptoms, such as fever and muscle pain, authorities have confirmed 13 suspected anaphylaxis cases, one seizure, and six deaths. All of the severe adverse reactions were related to AstraZeneca’s vaccine.

Officials are investigating if the vaccine had any relations with severe side effects or deaths.

While the increase in side effects has increased concerns about the AstraZeneca vaccine among Koreans, especially older adults, more European countries have recently approved the AstraZeneca vaccine for senior citizens.

The German government approved AstraZeneca’s vaccination for people over 65 on Thursday, and the Swedish and Austrian health authorities have also expanded vaccination to people over 65. Hungary and Belgium also have decided to use AstraZeneca’s vaccine for citizens over 60 and 55, respectively.

The upward adjustment of inoculation age for AstraZeneca’s vaccine comes after Public Health England published a research result on Monday, which showed that the vaccine has a great preventive effect after three or four weeks of injection among the age group over 80 who received the first dose of the vaccine.

Various Korean medical associations also stressed that even people with underlying diseases, such as diabetes and respiratory diseases, need to receive the Covid-19 vaccine.

The Korean Diabetes Association has asked diabetes patients not to avoid vaccination opportunities and actively receive the jabs. “The way to prevent Covid-19 is to trust and participate in vaccinations administered under government approval,” it said.

The Korean Academy of Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases also stressed patients with underlying diseases should receive the vaccine. Various scientific clinical trials have proven the effectiveness of the Covid-19 vaccine, while its side effects are rare and mostly mild.

Cheong Wa Dae also announced that President Moon Jae-in plans to receive AstraZeneca’s vaccine this month to ease the public’s resistance to vaccination. A Cheong Wa Dae spokesperson said that they would determine the exact vaccination timing for President Moon after taking into account his schedule of the G7 Summit scheduled for June 11.

On Friday, the government unveiled its plan to introduce AstraZeneca’s vaccine for 1.05 million people from March to May.

“The government will introduce AstraZeneca’s vaccine for about 350,000 people this month and about 700,000 people from April to May,” Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said. “The KCDA should reschedule the vaccine schedule so that they can inoculate as many people as possible during the first half of the year.”

Meanwhile, the government unveiled a draft plan of its new four-tier social distancing scheme on Friday. The country has been using a five-tier social distancing system since November.

Excluding some entertainment facilities, such as clubs, the government will allow businesses, such as coffee shops, restaurants, and movie theaters, to operate their shops even during Level 4, the new distancing plan’s highest level.

The government has also changed the index for adjusting the distance stage from the weekly average daily confirmed cases to the weekly average daily number of patients per 100,000 people.

If the number is below 0.7, authorities will impose Level 1 distancing rules while setting Level 4 if the number is above three.

Therefore, if the government starts implementing the new measure, the country would be under a Level 2 scheme.

Regarding banning private gatherings, there is no restriction during Level 1.

However, the government will start banning private gatherings of more than eight people during the Level 2 scheme and require people to keep eight square meters apart.

During Level 3, the government will ban the private gathering of more than four people while advising citizens to stay home. Some businesses, such as karaoke, will have to close after 9 p.m.
In Level 4, health authorities will still allow private gatherings of less than four people. However, they will ban private gatherings of more than two people after 6 p.m.

Most businesses will also have to close down after 9 p.m, with some entertainment facilities, such as clubs, having to close down entirely.

While various authorities, such as the local and provincial government, and Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters, share the decision to implement Level 1 to 3 distancing scheme, only the headquarters can raise the distancing regime to Level 4.

The government plans to finalize the final draft within this month after coordinating opinions with related associations, ministries, and local governments for an additional one to two weeks.

However, they will implement the new distance system only when the Covid-19 epidemic stabilizes considerably throughout the country.

“The transition to the new system will ease quarantine measures, and there may be side effects if we start implementing the new scheme during a time when we do not know whether the Covid-19 epidemic will grow or slow down,” Ministry of Health and Welfare Spokesperson Son Young-rae said. “The government will start the new measures only if the nation reaches a Level 1 figure under the revised plan.”

Read this supplementary article by the author.

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Originally published on March 6, 2012

During the late-Nineteenth-Century struggles against America’s Robber Barons and the Ku Klux Klan, Lucy Gonzales Parsons was a brave fighter for human rights.

On March 7, 1942, fire engulfed the simple home of 89-year-old Lucy Gonzales Parsons on Chicago’s North Troy Street, and ended a life dedicated to liberating working women and men of the world from capitalism and racial oppression.

A dynamic, militant, self-educated public speaker and writer, she became the first American woman of color to carry her crusade for socialism across the country and overseas. In 1905, she was credited with the idea of striking workers sitting down at their work place rather than going outside, a concept that has resonated through time with the lunch counter sit-ins for civil rights and today’s Occupy movement.

Lucy Gonzales Parsons, a battler for labor and human rights.

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.

In Albert Parsons, a white man who’s Waco Spectator fought the Klan and demanded social and political equality for African-Americans, she found a handsome, committed soul mate. The white supremacy forces in Texas considered the couple dangerous and their marriage illegal, and soon drove them from the state.

Lucy and Albert reached Chicago, where they began a family and threw themselves into two new militant movements, one to build strong industrial unions and the other to agitate for socialism. Lucy concentrated on organizing working women and Albert became a famous radical organizer and speaker, one of the few important union leaders in Chicago who was not an immigrant.

In 1886, the couple and their two children stepped onto Michigan Avenue to lead 80,000 working people in the world’s first May Day parade and a demand for the eight-hour day. A new international holiday was born as more than 100,000 also marched in other U.S. cities.

By then, Chicago’s wealthy industrial and banking elite had targeted Albert and other radical figures for elimination — to decapitate the growing union movement. A protest rally called by Albert a few days after May Day became known as the Haymarket Riot when seven Chicago policemen died in a bomb blast. No evidence has ever been found pointing to those who made or detonated the bomb, but Parsons and seven immigrant union leaders were arrested.

As the corporate media whipped up patriotic and law-and-order fervor, a rigged legal system rushed the eight to convictions and death sentences. When Lucy led the campaign to win a new trial, one Chicago official called her “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.” When Albert and three other comrades were executed, and four others were sentenced to prison, the movement for industrial unions and the eight-hour day was beheaded.

Lucy, far from discouraged, accelerated her actions. Though she had lost Albert — and two years later lost her young daughter to illness — Lucy continued her crusade against capitalism and war, and to exonerate “the Haymarket Martyrs.” She led poor women into rich neighborhoods “to confront the rich on their doorsteps,” challenged politicians at public meetings, marched on picket lines, and continued to address and write political tracts for workers’ groups far beyond Chicago.

Though Lucy had justified direct action against those who used violence against workers, in 1905 she suggested a very different strategy. She was one of only two women delegates (the other was Mother Jones) among the 200 men at the founding convention of the militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the only woman to speak.

First she advocated a measure close to her heart when she called women “the slaves of slaves” and urged IWW delegates to fight for equality and assess underpaid women lower union fees. In a longer speech, she called for the use of nonviolence that would have broad meaning for the world’s protest movements.

She told delegates that workers shouldn’t “strike and go out and starve, but to strike and remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production.”

A year later Mahatma Gandhi, speaking to fellow Indians at the Johannesburg Empire Theater, advocated nonviolence to fight colonialism, but he was still 25 years away from leading fellow Indians in nonviolent marches against India’s British rulers.

Eventually Lucy Parsons’s principle traveled to the U.S. sit-down strikers of the 1930s, Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the antiwar movements that followed, and finally to today’s Arab Spring and the Occupy movements.

Lucy was an unrelenting agitator, leading picket lines and speaking to workers’ audiences in the United States, and then before trade union meetings in England. In February 1941, poor and living on a pension for the blind, the Farm Equipment Workers Union asked Lucy Parsons to give an inspirational speech to its workers, and a few months later she rode as the guest of honor on its May Day parade float.

After the fire that took her life, federal and local lawmen arrived at the gutted Parsons home to make sure her legacy died with her. They poked through the wreckage, confiscated her vast library and personal writings, and never returned them.

Lucy Parsons’s determined effort to elevate and inspire the oppressed to take command remained alive among those who knew, heard, and loved her. But few today are aware of her insights, courage and tenacity. Despite her fertile mind, writing and oratorical skills, and striking beauty, Lucy Parsons has not found a place in school texts, social studies curricula, or Hollywood movies.

Yet she has earned a prominent place in the long fight for a better life for working people, for women, for people of color, for her country, and for her world.

 William Loren Katz adapted this essay from his updated and expanded edition of Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage [Atheneum, 2012]. Website: williamlkatz.com. This essay also appears at the Zinn Education Project:  http://zinnedproject.org/posts/16855

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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 vaccine rollout is in full flow now, the daily tickers have had “people vaccinated” added to their red counters, and the improbably large number grows more improbably large every day.

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.

1. Bribery

It’s being reported that everyone getting vaccinated is the only way to get “back to normal”.

Don’t you want to go to the pub again? Or the gym? Or see granny? Or hug people?

Well, just take the shot. Take the shot and all this lockdown and social distancing economic collapse and mounting poverty, it will all just go away.

It’s a common refrain, one which rather clashes with “new normal” we’ve been hearing about for a over year.

In fact, it looks like “back to normal” may come with a qualifying asterisk. For example embattled New York governor Andrew Cuomo has said vaccines will help the state “get back to normal*”…

…where “normal” involves an “Excelsior Pass”.

You don’t need me to explain the complexities of this technique. It’s simple coercion. “Do as we say, and you’ll get a treat.”

Important to remember: “Getting back to normal” is a lie. As much as people repeat the mantra in soundbites and social media posts, the “experts” are clearer – many have said we will NEVER be going back to normal, and others have said we need to maintain anti-Covid measures until at least 2022. The “vaccine” itself does not even claim to limit transmission, even those vaccinated are still being ordered to follow the restrictions.

2. Celebrity Endorsement

One of the oldest and most widely used marketing gimmicks. Partly because it works, but mostly because it’s cheap and easy: Simply find a bunch of tools and put them to work.

The NHS was not shy about this approach, claiming they were planning to enlist “sensible celebrities” who are “known and loved” to combat anti-vax sentiment.

For example, Patrick Stewart:

How do we say thank you to the health workers and scientists for their sacrifice and service? Receive the vaccine as soon as one can to lessen their load and keep wearing a mask to protect fellow citizens. In my 80th year, I am grateful and hopeful for better days ahead. pic.twitter.com/emGDlnYL2E

— Patrick Stewart (@SirPatStew) January 22, 2021

Or Elton John and Michael Caine:

Or even Her Majesty:

‘It was very quick. It didn’t hurt at all.’

The Queen shares her experience of getting the #COVIDVaccine with England’s NHS Vaccine Deployment Lead Dr @Emily_JR_Lawson, and encourages those who might be hesitant to get theirs when invited. 👑 @RoyalFamily pic.twitter.com/MsR7uqSmK2

— NHS England and NHS Improvement (@NHSEngland) February 25, 2021

Important to remember: Celebrities – especially actors and TV personalities – are simply paid to repeat lines. Even if their intentions are correct, there’s no reason to assume any of them have any understanding of what they’re talking about. And none of these people has anything to lose should you or a loved one suffer any harm from taking an untested vaccine.

3. Forced “Scarcity”

For weeks now we’ve been seeing headlines about “dwindling stock” of vaccines. How people in Europe are desperate for doses or some states are being prioritised over others. It goes on and on and on.

Everyone who has ever been inside a store knows this trick. “While stocks last”, “limited time offer”, or a thousand other variants designed to create the idea that if you don’t acquire product X right now, you will miss your chance.

A corollary of this is fake exclusivity, the way credit card companies tell absolutely everyone they call that they “qualified for our exclusive introductory rate”.

By creating the idea that the vaccine is hard to come by, they also create the idea that anyone who gets their hands on a dose is fortunate, or somehow a de facto member of some special club.

Important to remember: It’s all total nonsense. They are not in any danger of “running out” of vaccines. And even if they are, scarcity is a marketing ploy, not an argument.

4. Fake “Popularity”

You can’t underestimate the idea of peer pressure when it comes to marketing, one of the oldest tricks in the book is culturing popularity through the idea that popularity already exists. It’s why people buy likes and views on youtube and concerts have seat fillers.

And it’s why Matt Hancock was reported to have said this:

Incredible take up: Matt Hancock says 94% of Britons have taken a coronavirus vaccine or will do so when offered.

— Sebastian Payne (@SebastianEPayne) March 1, 2021

Is this true? No source is cited, so it’s hard to say. It could be entirely made up, a lot of statistics are. Even if the figure is technically real, it’s likely just from some opinion poll. And, as Yes Minister has taught us, polls are totally meaningless.

To quote (ironically enough) Peter Hitchens:

Opinion polls are a device for influencing public opinion, not a device for measuring it.”

The UK is reporting that 1/3rd of the population has already had at least one dose of vaccine, a number which seems very high (it equates to roughly 250,000 vaccinations per day since the first shot was given on December 8th), this follows early reports that vaccine uptake was “better than expected”.

Even if that’s the case – and the past year has proven there’s never any reason to trust government figures – Hancock’s “94%” seems very unlikely to have any bearing on reality, given the number of reports of low uptake – especially in poorer regions, amongst ethnic minorities, and NHS workers.

Important to remember: An opinion poll is no measure of reality, popularity is no measure of quality, and it is in the establishment’s interest to make all dissenters feel they are in a tiny minority.

5. “Resistance Is Useless”

This is an interesting one. There’s been a lot of talk about Vaccine Passports recently, and perhaps they will become a thing, but the vast majority of the public discourse is spreading the idea they are “inevitable”.

Now, the idea of inevitability is a powerful tool. You can encourage it as a way of preparing the ground for a policy role out, sure, but you can also use it to engender feelings of defeat in your opposition and thus gain their consent without force.

You can see this defeatist language taking hold in some hitherto staunch Covid sceptics.

Peter Hitchens recently announced he was being vaccinated, claiming he was defeated and vaccine passports were inevitable:

I get the strong sense that any sort of travel, and plenty of other things, will be impossible if I don’t have the necessary vaccine certificate.

Just today, Lord Sumption essentially caved on the same exact issue in the very similar language:

Lord Sumption Capitulating to Vaccine Passports. pic.twitter.com/oL4jkjYNFy

— WE GOT A PROBLEM (@problem_we) March 4, 2021

Desmond Swayne MP, another longtime Lockdown sceptic, also capitulated today:

I’ve just had my jab: make sure you can get yours, so that we can all get back to normal life pic.twitter.com/m0ChCRpkTX

— Desmond Swayne (@DesmondSwayne) March 4, 2021

“Get vaccinated now, because you’ll probably have to eventually” is the message, and it’s not hard to see the utility of it.

From a purely logistical point of view, making people think there are going to be vaccine passports is much, much easier (and cheaper) than actually introducing them.

As a follower said to us on twitter:

I believe it is the next level of the psyop- make people believe they are the minority when in fact the opposite is likely true but because the mind is beaten and manipulated more just ‘tag’ along for the ride

— S.G Truth (@patriotic1966) March 4, 2021

Will they eventually issue Vaccine Passports? Maybe.

Maybe all these tricks will fail and they’ll be forced to use less carrot and more stick. But it seems equally possible that – for now at least – they’re being dangled over people to encourage defeatism in those of us who are resisting, and thereby increase vaccine up take.

Important to remember: vaccine passports will only ever become “inevitable” once the vast majority of people have had the vaccine. If enough people refuse to take part, the program will never work.

So, there’s the breakdown of all the broad marketing categories being used to sell this vaccine. But what’s the final takeaway?

Honestly, not an un-positive one I would say. Because what all these strategies have in common is the increasingly hysterical air of desperation.

If vaccine take-up was really at 94%, there’d be no need to sell the vaccine so much. If they were really running out of vaccines, the papers wouldn’t be advertising it, they’d be telling people not to panic.

They’ve publicly turned several notable anti-lockdown voices for this campaign, these are key cards they have played all at once. That’s a desperate move.

In short, there’s good reason to think the resistance to the “new normal” is a lot more widespread than the establishment ever expected it to be.

You don’t put the Queen on a zoom call when you’re winning the argument.

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***

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%, writes acclaimed environmental philosopher and nature writer Kathleen Dean Moore in her new collection of essays, Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World. 

And with all that loss comes an unsettling silence.

“Unless the world acts to stop extinctions, I will write my last nature essay on a planet that is less than half as song-graced and life-drenched as the one where I began to write,” she explains in the book’s preface. “My grandchildren will tear out half the pages in their field guides. They won’t need them.”

Her book uses sound as a reference point to better understand what we stand to lose as extinction rates climb higher. But the essays are also a celebration of the natural world’s chorus and the joy of learning to hear what’s still there.

The essays are also being set to music in a series for Oregon State’s Spring Creek Project that will feature 20 4-minute-long concerts combining live musical performance with excerpts from Earth’s Wild Music.

“I’ve never been so excited about a project in my life,” Moore tells us. “It combines everything I care about with the cause that I believe in more than anything else.”

The Revelator spoke to Moore about the moral stakes of our environmental crisis, what it’s like to find a truly quiet place to listen, and what we lose as wild songs disappear.

You’ve been writing about nature for 50 years. During that time our environmental problems have become graver. Has this changed how you approach your work?

At first I was a celebrant. I believed Mary Oliver when she said, “My work is loving the world … which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.” And that went along fine for years and years, but then it became clear that what I was writing celebrations of were disappearing.

I was right in the midst of an essay on frog song, and bulldozers came and took away the marsh and put in a condominium. I was writing about a bald eagle nest, and the nest — and the tree it was in — burned to the ground in a forest fire. So it was starting to become clear to me that I was going to have to do more than celebrate. I was going to have to demonstrate. I was going to have to protect. I was going to have to defend the natural world.

Why did you decide to focus this collection on sound?

I started thinking about how I could open people’s hearts without breaking them. How I could point to the onrushing extinctions and not force people to turn away in absolute grief. I decided that I was going to have to write in a way that was like a wave — I would lift people and smash them at the same time.

What is it that reaches people without breaking them? What is it that goes straight into people’s hearts? What do they love about the world and will call them to action?

I decided that of all the things I loved about the world, what I loved the most was the music. What I loved the most was the sound. I’ve been writing about this for quite some time, so I had a couple of essays already under my belt, and I couldn’t think of a more wonderful writing assignment for myself then to go outside and listen.

Nature may be getting quieter. But people are getting louder. How is our noise affecting wildlife?

We are deafening. Noise that we create is causing extraordinary harm to the creatures. Think about the pain caused to the whales from the exploratory thudding of those machines that go through the ocean and stamp to try to find oil.

Think about the meadowlarks that lived in the fracking fields and had to endure endless noise of drilling and trucks. And as a result, the songs of the meadowlarks are fractured and abbreviated. They haven’t been able to hear their parents well enough to imitate them.

Many of us may be out of practice at listening. In fact, a lot of folks walk around with earphones on so we can’t hear what’s around us. How do we get better at both listening to and understanding the sounds of nature?

Listening is an art that we should practice because it does two things. It makes us shut up and it makes us open up. We stop listening just to the songs of “me, me, me”. When we set aside our own stories, it opens us up so we can listen to the stories of other beings. It’s a skill of empathy, isn’t it? Listening to other people’s stories and other creatures’ sounds is a way of understanding the world from their point of view. It’s a moral training.

When it comes to understanding what we hear, Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring, and cared so much about bird song, took pains to tell us that it doesn’t matter if we know the names of what we see. That comes later. But the first thing that has to happen is love.

So I’m not so concerned about knowing which bird is calling. I’m surrounded by people who could do that in a majestic way. My husband can identify birds by their call. My neighbor can. I think it’s a beautiful skill that I don’t have.

But I do have the ability to catch a song. To hear it, which isn’t nothing. It can catch my attention and I can seek it out and I can listen to it. Knowing its name — maybe that’s not so important as knowing its tune.

How are people affected by this loss of nature’s song, and what’s the importance of preserving silent places where we can still experience what’s left?

We lose joy. Let’s face it — the sounds of the natural world are beautiful and they make us happy. I think we also lose a connection to the world around us.

In the book, I write about going with acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton to One Square Inch of Silence, a small spot in Olympic National Park [possibly the quietest place in the United States]. It was a wonderful experience. At the time, we were in pouring rain. Nature itself was cacophonous, but we didn’t hear a human sound for 20 minutes, which is the definition in Gordon’s mind of a quiet place.

Gordon now is recording in a jungle somewhere that can only be reached by canoeing down a wild river, because it’s one of the last places on Earth he can find that’s silent.

He’s famous for these recordings called the Dawn Chorus that captured the outpouring of bird song that’s triggered by morning light. But he couldn’t do that anymore, because that music box is broken. We’re in the process of wrecking what we should be treasuring.

It’s hard to find a balance between grief and celebration. But you know, people often ask me, “What can one person do?” And I say, “Stop being one person.”

You don’t have to do it all. Other people are working all around the world on the same causes you believe in. Find them, join up with them. You’ll find your place in the choir.  [Author and teacher] Joanna Macy says to choose what you love and devote yourself to it. That, she says, is enough.

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Tara Lohan is deputy editor of The Revelator and has worked for more than a decade as a digital editor and environmental journalist focused on the intersections of energy, water and climate. Her work has been published by The Nation, American Prospect, High Country News, Grist, Pacific Standard and others. She is the editor of two books on the global water crisis.

Featured image: A Marsh wren defending its territory in mid-song at Las Gallinas Wildlife Ponds, Marin County, CA. Photo: Doug Greenberg, (CC BY-NC 2.0)

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***

After confirming its jurisdiction on 5 February 2021, the ICC announced on 3 March the opening of a formal investigation into crimes committed in the Palestinian territories. This is a victory for international law, even if we are still a long way from a trial.

It all began in 2009, following the Israeli operation in Gaza dubbed “cast lead” (2008–2009). Palestine mounted a diplomatic offensive based on its claim to statehood and sent a declaration to the ICC accepting the court’s jurisdiction in order that it should investigate the crimes committed by the Israeli army.¹ What was at stake here was to determine whether or not Palestine is a State, since only States are entitled to become a party to the Rome Statute.²

2009-2014: Recognition of the Palestinian State

Seized of this matter, the ICC Prosecutor’s Office the issued a public call for contributions to help resolve this thorny problem of international law. Several dozen memoranda emanating from NGOs, universities or legal experts were submitted and published on the ICC’s website. In the meantime, Palestine had become a member of UNESCO(October 2011) and taken steps at the UN to become a Member State and then, faced with the US veto, to become an “observer State,” a request which was granted in November 2012 when Resolution 67/19 was passed by the General Assembly.

The Prosecutor’s Office did not issue a response until April 2012, three years after the Palestinian request had been submitted. Considering that the issue of Palestine’s status was uncertain, the prosecutor felt that it was not up to him to decide the matter and that only a clear-cut position taken by the Assembly of the States parties to the ICC or by the UNGeneral Assembly could provide a solution. It is surprising, to say the least, that such a disproportionate length of time should have been necessary to provide an answer to such a rudimentary question. The document is less than two pages long and is open to criticism on many counts, in particular the fact that Palestine’s admission to UNESCO is not even mentioned, whereas this in itself provided irrefutable proof that a majority of Member States recognized Palestinian statehood.

Season 2: after operation “Protective Edge” launched in Gaza by Israel forces during the summer of 2014, the Palestinian Minister of Justice tried to “reactivate” the 2009 declaration, basing the attempt on Palestine’s UN status as an Observer State, granted following the prosecutor’s decision in April 2012. This effort was also to remain fruitless. In a statement published on 2 September 2014, the new prosecutor Fatou Bensouda indicated that “the Office has examined the legal implications of this development (the upgrading of Palestine’s status at the UN, from observer entity to observer State) for its purposes and concluded that while this change did not retroactively validate the previously invalid 2009 declaration lodged without the necessary standing, Palestine could now join the Rome Statute”.

This position raised many legal problems. The prosecutor’s April 2012 decision did not “invalidate” the declaration; it seems merely to have “suspended’ it until such time as the status of Palestine should be clarified. Since the General Assembly’s vote had subsequently brought about this clarification, it cleared the way for a future accession of Palestine to the ICC since all the uncertainties concerning its status seem to have been dispelled.

2015–2019: The “Palestine Situation”

At this point, a third phase began, with Palestine’s formal accession to the Rome Statute in January 2015³, together with a declaration recognizing the ICC’s jurisdiction for crimes presumed to have been committed “on the Palestinian occupied territory, including East-Jerusalem, as of 14 June 2014.”⁴ Soon afterwards, the prosecutor opened a “preliminary examination” of the “situation in Palestine”⁵ to determine whether the conditions of jurisdiction for the Court are met and ascertain whether war crimes, crimes against humanity or acts of genocide have been committed there.

This preliminary phase of the proceedings, before any actual investigation was opened, lasted no less than five years, a delay which once again raised doubts as to the ICC’s genuine determination to proceed with the Palestinian case, in a context where many States allied with Israel, including some in Europe, have made no bones about their disapproval of the Palestinian efforts.

Finally, in December 2019, the Prosecutor’s Office announced that the preliminary examination had been completed and that it was prepared to open an investigation. It considered that Palestine had legitimately joined the ICC Statute and that the Court is competent to try crimes committed on its territory, including Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The prosecutor identified four broad categories of war crimes he intended to investigate:

• crimes committed by Hamas and other Palestinian groups in the context of the 2014 war in Gaza, consisting mainly of rocket fire aimed at Israeli civilian populations:
• crimes committed in the same context by the Israeli army, mainly consisting of the targeting and killing of Palestinian civilians and the destruction of civilian buildings.
• crimes committed by the Israeli army during the 2018 “March for Gaza” when Israeli soldiers opened fire, killing some 200 Palestinian civilians and wounding many others;
• finally, the crimes committed in the context of the colonisation policies, especially the implanting of an Israeli civilian population.

Reaffirming the 1967 Borders

However, a new turn of events occurred when the prosecutor insisted that a “pre-trial chamber” should define the extent of the Court’s territorial jurisdiction, considering the doubts that might persist on this issue, with an eye to strengthening any future investigation. This caused another delay of over a year before the Chamber’s verdict was handed down in February. However, this delay was useful, since the Pre-trial Chamber has confirmed the position taken by the prosecutor’s office: the Court is indeed competent to investigate all crimes committed on occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, since June 2014, thus clearing the way for a formal investigation.

The Chamber begins by establishing that Palestine must be seen as a “State Party to the ICC Rome Statute” following its recognition in 2012 as a “non-member observer State in the UN.” It can therefore trigger the jurisdiction of the ICC, in particular its territorial jurisdiction, and submit a complaint to the prosecutor’s office, which it did in 2018.

The second crucial point consists in determining the exact extent of the territories over which the court may exercise its criminal jurisdiction. In order to establish that the jurisdiction comprises all the occupied territories, the Chamber bases its findings mainly on the Palestinian people’s right of self-determination as set forth in the many resolutions of the UNGeneral Assembly. Especially resolution 67/19, which granted Palestine the status of Observer State, and which “reaffirms the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to independence in their State of Palestine on the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.”

And finally, the Chamber considers that the Oslo accords which exempt Israeli citizens from the criminal jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority have no effect on the determination of the Court’s territorial jurisdiction.

In spite of its assertion to the contrary, the points dealt with by the Chamber go beyond the strict framework of the procedure before the ICC and involve a larger legal and symbolic dimension. The judges based their decision on texts of absolutely general significance which may be regarded as establishing under international law the statute of the Palestinian State and the borders to which it is entitled. From this point of view, the difficulties associated with the practical observance of these findings have less to do with the law proper than with the lack of political willingness to comply with it, as is seen from the persistent refusal of most European countries to recognize the State of Palestine.

Investigating Under Pressure

Unsurprisingly, Israel has accused the ICC of “pure anti-Semitism,” and the USA has rejected the Chamber’s conclusion. They have been joined by other Western countries like Canada, Australia, Hungary and even Germany, which declared on Twitter that “the Court is not competent because of the non-existence of the Palestinian State according to the criteria of international law.”⁶

These reactions and the embarrassed silence of other Western diplomatic corps show that the future of these proceedings will probably not be exempt from outside pressures and that the task ahead for newly appointed prosecutor Karim Khan, who takes office in June, will be challenging.

Indeed, the formal investigation which was opened by the Office of the Prosecutor on 3 March will be long and fraught with difficulties, and it is far from easy to predict how it will end. Normally, it should make it possible to determine precisely what crimes were committed and who were the culprits, all of which would be predicated on a detailed factual review and the presentation of concrete evidence. This task will no doubt be easier with regard to Palestinian suspects since Palestine, as a state party to the Statute, has an obligation to cooperate. On the other hand, Israel has no such obligation and will do all it can to obstruct the work of the investigators. The prosecutor will also have to determine whether other crimes or characterisations need to be taken into consideration. The document submitted to the Pre-trial Chamber refers only to war crimes, whereas the occupation and colonisation policies, as a whole, systemic and discriminatory as they are, could also be qualified as crimes against humanity, most especially as the crime of apartheid, a term employed in two recent reports by Israeli NGOs (Yesh Din, B’tselem).

International Law on the Move

Another tricky issue will be the ICC’s interpretation of the principle of “complementarity” which holds that it must refrain from looking into a case which is already under investigation or the object of prosecution in the country concerned. Israel is in the habit of opening investigations of “incidents” involving its armed forces, generally dismissing the case a few weeks later. Thus, a considerable amount of work awaits the Prosecutor’s Office, verifying the “credibility” of such proceedings carried out in Israel.

But the most serious accusations brought against Israeli decision-makers concern specific combat techniques or colonisation policies which constitute the implementation of unabashedly proclaimed official doctrines and as such are never subject to investigation of any kind. For these crimes, it should be a simple matter to demonstrate the absence of any internal criminal procedures and the principle of complementarity easy to dismiss. Proof of this type of crime should be easy to provide as well, since it will be based on documents and public decisions in the framework of well-established state policies and duly authenticated chains of responsibility.

There is still a long way to go before the opening of individual cases based on precise accusations with the possible issuance of arrest warrants, let alone the organisation of trial proceedings knowing that these can only be held in the presence of the accused. Nonetheless, the decision handed down by the Pre-Trial Chamber already constitutes a huge legal victory, both as a step towards establishing accountability for crimes committed under Israeli occupation and more generally for taking international law into account in resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict. Shedding light on the international crimes committed systematically by Israeli authorities might also help to increase the pressure on Western States in view of a reconsideration of their special relations with Israel, along the lines of the evolution which finally materialised with regards to South Africa in the nineteen-eighties.

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Francois Dubuisson is a Professor of international law at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB).

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***

Adm. Philip Davidson, the head of US Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), is defending a $27 billion wishlist his command submitted to Congress to confront China in the region.

Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute on Thursday, Davidson recognized that the plan, known as the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI), is “not without controversy” but argued it was worth the massive price tag. He compared it to the European Defense Initiative (EDI) that the PDI was based on.

“It’s been fascinating to me, the relative ease at which the conversation happens year to year when it comes to the EDI when compared to PDI,” Davidson said. He is requesting about $27 billion in spending between 2022 and 2027, with $4.6 billion of that for the 2022 fiscal year alone.

One of the top priorities of the plan is a $1.6 billion missile defense system for the US military base in Guam. The Guam defense system requires a $200 million radar system in Pulau and $2.3 billion of space-based radars.

Perhaps the most provocative proposal of the PDI is a $3.3 billion request to place a long-range missile system throughout the First Island Chain, which stretches from south of Japan, through Taiwan, the Philippines, and down to Malaysia.

According to a copy of the PDI review by Nikkei Asia, the plan calls for “the fielding of an Integrated Joint Force with precision-strike networks west of the International Date Line along the First Island Chain, integrated air missile defense in the second island chain, and a distributed force posture that provides the ability to preserve stability, and if needed, dispense and sustain combat operations for extended periods.”

With the Biden administration making China a top foreign policy priority and Congress keen to confront Beijing, Davidson has a good chance of getting his funds. A group of House Republicans sent a letter to President Biden on Thursday urging him to increase military spending to combat China.

The Republicans called on Biden to increase military spending by 3 percent to five percent over inflation to compete with the Chinese military. The letter was signed by top House Armed Services Committee members. The effort was led by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL).

Biden’s Pentagon is currently conducting a review of its China policy which is being led by Ely Ratner, a China hawk who was appointed to advise Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on Asian matters.

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

Featured image is from Jared Rodriguez / Truthout

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***

The conversation held by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken with opponent Juan Guaidó is evidence that Joe Biden’s government will continue to use the former Venezuelan parliament member to appropriate all the resources Venezuela holds abroad, according to international analyst Laila Tajeldine, Sputnik reported.

Blinken held a telephone conversation with Guaidó on March 2 and reiterated that the U.S. government continues to support all kinds of pressure on President Nicolás Maduro, with allies such as the European Union, the Lima Group, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the International Contact Group.

“The United States is completely following Citgo (a subsidiary of Petroleos de Venezuela), which is still in a legal process, and the figure of Guaidó allows it to retain Venezuelan assets abroad; until that is not done, the United States is going to continue using the figure of Guaidó to steal all the resources, and once the objectives are fulfilled it will discard it,” Tajeldine said.

Pair this with Blinken's explicit admission of support for "Interim President Juan Guaido" (https://t.co/1B9dwoeZEK ) and it's clear the attempted coup in Venezuela is only beginning. Reluctant continuation of Trump policy? Doubtful. Imperialists stick together: blue and red. https://t.co/4UmP0LxhyG

— drew (@undercover_drew) March 4, 2021

According to the lawyer, Venezuela is not surprised by this stance of the new U.S. administration since Blinken had vowed publicly before assuming his current position a continuation of the Trump policies (2017-2021).

Early in the year, President Maduro had indicated hope in a change in relations with the United States “on the basis of mutual respect, dialogue, communication and understanding” after Biden’s arrival to power.

However, the analyst emphasizes the existence of a right-wing sector in the U.S. opposed to any change in the current status of confrontation because it bets on the destabilization of Venezuela to get hold of its resources.

“The U.S. economic lobby opts rather for the destabilization or destruction of the institutions and the State in Venezuela, and that lobby is the one that is saying that it is more convenient a destroyed Venezuela, a failed State in which they can arrive through intervention and steal all the resources,” he argued.

In his dialogue with Guaidó, Blinken also highlighted the “importance of a return to democracy in Venezuela through free and fair elections.”

In that sense, the international analyst pointed out that the call for elections is the United States’ strategy to justify its actions against Venezuela.

“Calling for free and fair elections is part of a repetitive discourse, worn out, and that evidently exposes that the only thing they want is to have more time to finish stealing Venezuela’s assets,” she commented.

The Venezuelan government has reiterated that the United States stole more than 30 billion dollars with the imposition of coercive measures, which prevents it from any type of financing.

The executive has requested the lifting of the economic sanctions to face the COVID-19 pandemic and to be able to purchase vaccines, supplies, and medicines freely.

#FromTheSouth News Bits | Venezuela has detained two citizens linked to operation “Red October,” led by former opposition lawmaker Juan Guaido, which included destabilization acts in Apure, Tachira and Maracaibo, according to the announcement made by lawmaker Freddy Bernal. pic.twitter.com/QT1oT3iyJq

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) January 26, 2021

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***

The Jerusalem International Airport, the oldest airport in Palestine, formerly known as Qalandia Airport, lies on a road connecting the cities of Ramallah and Jerusalem, near the town of Qalandia in the northern West Bank. It was built in 1920 during the British mandate on a land of 650 dunams (160 acres) initially. More than 50 years later, this very airport has turned into an abandoned site devoid of any luggage, planes or flight attendants. The cracks inside the concrete floor of the airport are now covered with dry and green grass.

Israel seized the airport after it occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967, and it annexed it in 1981 based on the so-called Jerusalem Law. Israeli airlines used it for commercial and domestic flights to and from Jerusalem until they closed it in 2000. Its name was changed to the Atarot Airport, of which only the runway, the control tower and the arrival and departure hall remain.

Khalil Tufakji, head of the map department at Jerusalem’s Arab Studies Society, told Al-Monitor,

“The largest Israeli settlement project that has been underway for several years now in Jerusalem seeks to seize and confiscate 1,300 dunams [321 acres] of the Jerusalem International Airport and the lands surrounding it. It aims at implementing Israel’s Greater Jerusalem project to expand the existing Israeli settlements and expel Palestinians to increase the number of Jews and settlers in the city of Jerusalem.”

He said,

“Since 1994, the Israeli authorities have set up the Greater Jerusalem project, which includes, according to Israeli plans, the settlements of Ma’ale Adumim, Givat Ze’ev and Gush Etzion. They have also controlled all roads leading thereto in order to cut off Palestinian neighborhoods from the Jerusalem municipality, such as Shuafat, Kafr Aqab and Anata, among others.”

Tufakji noted,

“The Israeli seizure of the Jerusalem International Airport primarily aims at killing the Palestinians’ dream of their capital — Jerusalem — given that the airport is located on lands belonging to the Palestinian capital. It also aims at tilting the demographic balance [in Jerusalem] toward the Israelis at the expense of the Palestinians. The Israeli control of the airport also aims at connecting the Israeli settlements that lie outside the boundaries of the Jerusalem municipality to the ones within it.”

He added,

“East Jerusalem includes 14 Israeli settlements that are home to 220,000 Israeli settlers. Those settlements account for ​​87% of the area of Jerusalem, leaving only 9,300 dunams [2,298 acres] for the Palestinians, estimated at only 13% of the area of ​​Jerusalem. Through the so-called Jerusalem 5800 project for the year 2050, the [Israeli] occupation is looking to link the Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem with the settlements in the west by a network of railways and bridges and establish an international airport in Wadi Musa.”

Of note, the separation barrier in the West Bank is 712 kilometers (442 miles) long, which is double the length of the so-called Green Line that extends over 320 kilometers (199 miles). Meanwhile, in the vicinity of Jerusalem, the barrier extends over about 202 kilometers (125 miles), according to data from Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.

Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Center for Social and Economic Rights, told Al-Monitor,

“The Israeli authorities took control of the Jerusalem International Airport after occupying the West Bank in 1967, and they subsequently used it to operate domestic flights from and to Jerusalem, Eilat and Tel Aviv. Israel closed it completely with the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising in 2000.”

He said,

“The airport was the lung through which the Palestinians would catch a breath and travel to the Arab world. Several planes took off from this airport to land in Lebanon, Jordan and some Gulf countries. But with the Israeli control over it, it turned it into a new settlement outpost that serves Israeli goals and plans aimed at controlling the West Bank as a whole, and not just Jerusalem.”

Hammouri noted,

“The new settlement project will witness the construction of 15,000 to 25,000 settlement units on the land of the airport, and these will be connected to the settlements of Maskiyot and Atrout through a tunnel to be built starting April. The tunnel dives deep below the Qalandia checkpoint, as it helps settlers avoid traffic jams when they move either from Ramallah, the Jordan Valley or the northern West Bank areas to Israel without the need to go through the checkpoint.”

He added,

“The Israeli authorities are working to encourage the immigration of Israelis to settlements near Jerusalem by establishing many infrastructure projects and huge commercial centers that would lure thousands of Israelis into living there. Consequently, the Zionist plans show that the Palestinian Authority’s bet on the Oslo Acoord was a failure, let alone the postponing of negotiations on several core issues, such as the Jerusalem issue, during the negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis.”

Nasser al-Hadmi, head of the Jerusalem Committee for Resisting Displacement, told Al-Monitor that the settlement projects the Israeli authorities are carrying out in the city of Jerusalem in particular and the West Bank in general go beyond the goal of garnering the support of a large segment of the Israeli community for the extreme right, which has been ruling Israel for several years.

He said that the majority of Israeli society has become extremist and does not believe in the principle of peace or in a two-state solution between the Israeli and Palestinian sides.

Hadmi noted,

“In 2021 the Israeli occupation intensified its attacks on the city of Jerusalem, as it demolished houses it claimed were illegal and prevented Jerusalemites from obtaining building permits.”

He said that the Israeli authorities grant only 4% of the population in Jerusalem permits for construction. Also, Israeli approvals usually require five to 10 years and cost $50,000 to $100,000 for one housing unit.

“Over the years, the Israeli authorities have issued several laws aimed at controlling and seizing the property of Jerusalemites, including the Custodian of Absentee Property Law, which aims at facilitating the Israeli control over the property of Jerusalemites who left Jerusalem in 1967 and never returned. This [law] allows the Israel Land Administration to control and transfer such properties to settlement associations that establish settlements and outposts thereon and hand them over to settlers,” Hadmi concluded.

*

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‘For whether or not the age of revolutions is over, the age of state-formation has only just begun.’ — T. J. Clark, Farwell to an Idea, 1999

We are approaching the first anniversary of the coronavirus crisis in the UK, and more and more people — on the Twitter account of the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, in the Facebook pages set up to share censored interviews with scientists, in the online platforms not yet shut down for discussing the evidence against lockdown, in the illegal meetings of friends in the homes of the people that host them, in the thousands of discussions and exchanges that happen at every act of resistance, every demonstration, every march — know that this crisis has been manufactured. We know now that Government strategies for responding to a viral epidemic that had been in place for years were abandoned in favour of the historically unprecedented policy of national lockdown.

We know that Government contracts for the campaign of propaganda worth £119 million were signed with PR firms 3 weeks before the first lockdown. We know that, in April 2020, the Cabinet Office approved over £216 million for advertising on what it called the ‘COVID-19 Campaign 20/21’.

We know that the criteria for attributing deaths to COVID-19 were changed back in March to exaggerate the official number of fatalities.

We know that 95 per cent of the deaths attributed to the disease are of people with pre-existing health conditions like cancer, dementia, heart disease or diabetes.

We know that 84 per cent are over 70 years of age, and that the average age of those whose deaths are attributed to COVID-19 is the average age of death in the UK.

We know that, a year into this so-called ‘pandemic’, just over 600 patients under the age of 60 without a pre-existing health condition have had their deaths in English hospitals attributed to COVID-19. We know that, in April last year, the World Health Organisation issued instructions to medical practitioners that, if COVID-19 is merely the ‘suspected’ or ‘probable’ or ‘assumed’ cause of death, it must always be recorded as the ‘underlying cause’ on death certificates, whether this is ‘considered medically correct or not.’

We know that the WHO’s recommendations on the use of face masks by the public changed in June following political lobbying by the governments of, among other countries, the UK, and that even then it was primarily to encourage compliance with other restrictions on our rights and freedoms.

We know that the first and only randomised control trial of the effectiveness of face masks in stopping coronavirus transmission, which was rejected by several leading medical journals, when finally published reported that the benefits were ‘not statistically significant’. We know that, for a long time, the UK Government deliberately exaggerated the number of so-called ‘COVID-19 deaths’ by including anyone who has tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, no matter how long afterwards they died and of what illness.

We know that, even now, anyone who tests positive within 28 days of their death is still recorded as a ‘COVID death’. We know that, according to the WHO, 30 per cent of infections, even in high GDP countries like the UK, are contracted in intensive care units, meaning anyone dying in a UK hospital has an equivalent chance of being designated a ‘COVID death’. We know that, even with the withdrawal of medical care for nearly 68 million people for the best part of a year, the age-adjusted mortality rate in 2020 was the highest in only 12 years, and that the population fatality rate from the coronavirus ‘epidemic’ is equivalent to a bad season of influenza.

We know that, as even these inaccurately identified deaths have fallen, the Government has turned to the promotion of RT-PCR tests for the virus that, according to its own advisors at SAGE, have a false-positive rate higher than the percentage of the UK population testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 with these tests.

We know that between 20 and 80 per cent of infections with SARS-CoV-2 are asymptomatic, and therefore calling them ‘cases’ is medically inaccurate. We know from a study of nearly 10 million residents in Wuhan, the epicentre of the infection in China, that asymptomatic transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is statistically non-existent. We have known for the past 55 years that at least four coronaviruses circulate freely in UK on a seasonal basis, providing prior immunity to SARS-CoV-2 in around 30 per cent of the population before it reached these shores. We know that any RT-PCR test reliant on encoding the spike protein unique to coronaviruses can incorrectly detect as SARS-CoV-2anyone having a common cold from other coronaviruses at the time of sampling or carrying traces of dead and therefore non-infectious virus. We know that, despite this, the governments of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are using these meaningless statistics to impose tiered lockdownsacross the UK, in further violation of our human rights and civil liberties. We know that this is being done under legislation that only authorises such actionswhen justified by medical evidence that has not been produced for Parliament but merely alluded to in press conferences.

We know that the predictions of escalating infections and increased numbers of deaths by senior medical figuresemployed by the Government have been shown time and again to be wildly inaccurate fabrications based on predictive models challenged by the most eminent scientists around the world. We know that, as of publication, 351 coronavirus-justified Statutory Instruments have been made into law without a draft being presented to Parliament in advance for debate, without medical or other proof being provided of their justification or proportionality, and without an assessment being made of their impact, and that every one of these pieces of legislation requiring it has been rubber stamped in retrospect by virtual sittings of that Parliament.

We know that £22 billion of public monies has been awarded in coronavirus-justified contracts without prior competitive tender to privately-owned companies with financial links to members of Parliament, the Government and their business colleagues. We know that more and more of the functions of the state are being outsourced to private companies unaccountable to the public that provides the money with which they are paid. We know that the coronavirus-justified restrictions imposed on the UK population since March 2020 have cost the country £280 billion, the equivalent of £4,112 for every man, woman and child in the UK.

We know that, in contrast, the wealth of the world’s 2,200-plus billionaires increased by 20 per cent and US$1.9 trillion in 2020, more than in any previous year in history. We know that, by the end of 2020, the number of people in low to middle-income countries facing acute food insecurity will double to 265 million as a result of coronavirus-justified restrictions. We know that, under the cloak of this crisis, the Government and its financial partners have massively expanded the surveillance, monitoring and control of UK citizens through regulations, programmes and technologies that are implementing the UK biosecurity state.

We know that, at the peak of deaths attributed to COVID-19 in April, more than 40 per cent of acute care bedsin NHS hospitals were unoccupied. We know there is strong evidence that, at a conservative estimate, at least half the 80,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in 2020 were caused by lockdown restrictions that denied UK citizens emergency, elective, social and community care in order to free up hospital beds for an epidemic that was never in danger of arriving. We know that the renewal of lockdown over the winter of 2020-2021 is killing thousands more. We know that this lockdown was decided back in July, before the manufactured rise in so-called ‘cases’ consequent upon a huge rise in RT-PCR tests producing an even greater rise in false positives. We know that over the next five years, hundreds of thousands more people in the UK will fall into poverty, unemployment, bankruptcy and despair that will shorten their lives by many tens of thousands of years because of restrictions justified by these manufactured figures.

We know that, although the GDP of the UK is rising slowly back to pre-crisis levels, the restrictions that continue to be imposed on the population are redistributing wealth from the public purse into the pockets of the rich and the powerful on a scale never before seen even in the UK.

We know that the mental health of millions of UK citizens is being deliberately and systematically attacked through Government-funded campaigns of terrorism, fearmongering and lies designed to reduce the population to compliance, obedience, resignation and despair. We know that self-harming and thoughts of suicide, particularly among British children, are increasing.

We know that the fines for the newly-created crimes of not wearing a mask, meeting friends or leaving our home without permission have been raised and will continue to be raised to levels sufficient to financially ruin anyone who disobeys Government regulations. We know that non-compliance with certain coronavirus-justified Regulations can now be punished with up to 10 years in prison.

We know that the Government has looked at the legal barriers to making vaccination compulsory for a disease with a fatality rate of 0.23 per cent across the population and 0.05 per cent for those under 70, and has not ruled out making taking such a vaccine a condition of access to public life. We know that UK police forces are being given more power with reduced accountability to enforce these regulations with increased brutality and greater impunity from prosecution.

We know that the legal profession, the media, the press, academia, the medical profession, the pharmaceutical industry, the financial and banking sector, the passenger transport industry, the civil service, the security services, the armed forces and every other public institution are collaborating in affecting the revolution of the UK into a biosecurity state.

We know that this state is being implemented through the private sector as much as through the public sector, with the information technology industry, the healthcare industry, the education industry, the tourism industry, the hospitality industry and the retail industry all being compelled by coronavirus-justified regulations to enforce compliance with the technologies and programmes of the biosecurity state as a condition of using their services.

We know that these technologies will not stop there, but under the guise of monitoring and protecting our biosecurity, not only from SARS-CoV-2 but from any other virus designated a threat to public health in the future, are penetrating and influencing every aspect of our private life, biological existence and social behaviour.

We know all this and more.

But the question more and more people are now asking is: why?

Why is this being done, and to what end?

Of what benefit, and to whose benefit, is the impoverishment of the population of the UK and of most other Western liberal democracies around the world?

Why would the governments of capitalist economies deliberately set out to bankrupt millions of small businesses and drive tens of millions of workers into unemployment and destitution?

And what, if anything, can we do to resist it? This article is my attempt to respond to these questions, although not necessarily by answering them.

The above text is part of a longer article on the corona crisis

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***

Government data show that, compared with the Pfizer vaccine, there have been 43% more reports of injuries related to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in the UK, including 77% more adverse events and 25% more deaths — but no red flags from UK regulators.

Between Dec. 9, 2020 (when the first COVID vaccine was administered in the UK) and Feb. 14, 2021, 402 deaths following COVID vaccines have been reported to YellowCard, the UK government’s system for reporting side effects to COVID-related medicines, vaccines, devices, and defective or falsified products.

Britain’s regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), runs YellowCard, which is the nearest British equivalent to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System or VAERS in the U.S.

So far, only the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines have been administered in the UK. The Pfizer vaccine was deployed during the second week of December 2020, and Oxford-AstraZeneca at the beginning of January. (Moderna’s COVID vaccine is approved for emergency use in the UK, but the country has not as of yet obtained any vaccines from the company).

The MHRA has expressed no concern about the number of reports of adverse events connected with these new products, even failing to note how much worse the Oxford product has performed in comparison to the Pfizer vaccine.

Similarly, the accumulation of hundreds of deaths has failed to register a flicker of concern from them.

In January, the deaths of 23 frail elderly in Norway made international news — and raised questions about whether we should even be vaccinating people who are already near death. While it’s true that thousands of frail elderly people inevitably die every week, the lack of evidence of an active attempt to find out what is going on in individual cases is troubling.

The MHRA responded to the Norwegian report by saying “it did not currently anticipate any specific concerns,” a highly prejudicial statement. At the time The British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a short on-line response from the author under the title “Is the MHRA up to it?”:

“But the MHRA also did not detect concerns with narcolepsy and the Pandemrix vaccine in 2009 and was unapologetic nine years on in these columns (while Clifford Miller going through the available data found as many as 178 potentially related reports in the first 67 days) … More recently they did not anticipate problems with PEG and anaphylaxis before the rollout of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, though these were already identified by others…”

However, it is even more worrying that even after 400 reported deaths the BMJ (British Medical Journal) would not publish my letter critiquing the MHRA data.

A major difficulty is that the MHRA system breaks down the data so that it is impossible to connect these deaths with preceding adverse events, although most reports are said to include multiple reactions.

Yet it is reasonable to assume that the preponderance of these reported deaths were preceded by a sequence of events — otherwise no one would have thought to make a report. However, the YellowCard format masks this information.

As with any passive reporting database we are met with the paradox that no single vaccine death is confirmed (and any doctor who confirmed one would likely say good-bye to their career in the UK). We also know vaccine-related injuries are generally  under-reported by many times.

Nevertheless, the very distinct event profiles of two products filtered through the same same system after 15 million vaccine administrations would suggest that there is something to be investigated and explained.

The BMJ has declined to publish my successive letters on the subject of investigating COVID vaccine injuries and deaths, but here’s my latest (unpublished) letter to the BMJ:

Dear Editor:

Paul Thacker raises important concerns over transparency and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, but I believe there are also questions about safety.

In January, eyebrows were raised because of 23 deaths in frail elderly Norwegian patients following the Pfizer vaccine. Since then we seem to have come a dangerous distance.

MHRA data so far lists a combined 402 fatal reactions to the Pfizer BioNTech (197) and Oxford AstraZeneca (205) products. According to the MHRA publication, the data was updated Feb. 14 when approximately 8.3 million Pfizer and 6.9 million Oxford AstraZeneca products had been administered.

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.

When it comes to fatalities, the Oxford-AstraZeneca product records a rate of 3 in 100,000 while Pfizer has 2.4 in 100,000 which is again 25% higher for Oxford-AstraZeneca.

Tabulated, as of 14 Feb:

Pfizer BioNTech: 26,823 reports, 77, 207 reactions and 197 deaths (per 8.3 million doses).

Oxford Astra Zeneca: 31,427 reports, 114,625 reactions and 205 deaths (per 6.9 million doses)

Pfizer BioNTech:

Reports 1 in 309.5 doses

Reactions 2.9 per report

Fatal reactions 1 in 42,131

Oxford AstraZeneca:

Reports  1 in 219.5 doses

Reactions 3.6 per report

Fatal reactions 1 in 33,659

It is important to recognize that these data are by no means random: The reports are filtered through the same system (even though it is passive and likely to represent only a fraction of cases) and these products have quite distinct profiles.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca safety profile should also be borne in mind considering that the company is planning to conduct trials with children.

Whether it is ethical to administer vaccines with such open safety issues is one thing, but it is another when the data from one product seems to be so markedly inferior to the other.

Note that the linked MHRA documents (here, here and here) have a rolling update and this data will only be correct for the week Feb. 26 – March 4, 2021.

Finally, I would be grateful to have any errors of transcription or mathematics pointed out to me.

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John Stone is the UK Editor of the Age of Autism

An Earlier version of this article was published by Children’s Defense and Age of Autism

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***

France has recently sent one of its nuclear attack submarines over 10,000 kilometers to the South China Sea for a “patrol.” It is the latest indicator of how strained the underlying credibility is of US foreign policy regarding the South China Sea and its growing conflict with Beijing.

France24 in an article titled, “France wades into the South China Sea with a nuclear attack submarine,” would claim:

The week in France kicked off with a Twitter thread by Defence Minister Florence Parly revealing that French nuclear attack submarine SNA Emeraude was among two navy ships that recently conducted a patrol through the South China Sea.

“This extraordinary patrol has just completed a passage in the South China Sea. A striking proof of our French Navy’s capacity to deploy far away and for a long time together with our Australian, American and Japanese strategic partners,” she tweeted along with a picture of the two vessels at sea.

The mention of Australia, America and Japan is clearly a reference to American efforts to create a united front against China in the Indo-Pacific region.

Red line denoting the Pentagon’s “first island chain” (Wikimedia Commons)

The omission of India, one of the supposed “Quad Alliance” members, should not go unnoticed. Even though it is mentioned elsewhere in the article, it is done as an afterthought.

France is the second European nation to sign up for Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy, following the UK which has pledged to send a carrier strike group to the region later this year.

The UK Defence Journal in an article titled, “British Carrier Strike Group heading to Pacific this year,” would note that the UK’s latest aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, would also become involved in the South China Sea dispute along with what the journal reported as:

NATO’s most sophisticated destroyers — the Royal Navy’s Type 45s HMS Diamond and HMS Defender and US Navy Arleigh Burke-class USS The Sullivans as well as frigates HMS Northumberland and HMS Kent from the UK.

It wouldn’t take much imagination to predict the reactions in the West if China, Russia and Iran created a “strike group” and sailed it thousands of miles around the globe to menace the shores of Western nations, yet the provocative and revealing nature of Washington’s policies and the participation of nations in its Indo-Pacific strategy being drawn from further and further away from the actual region is treated as entirely normal, even necessary by the Western media.

The inclusion of the French and British in Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy is necessary because the actual nations in the region, specifically in Southeast Asia, have little interest in provoking China or turning relatively common maritime disputes into a regional or international crisis.

The US, by attempting to do just that, is actually endangering peace, prosperity and stability in the region, despite posing as the underwriter of all three and on behalf of the very nations refusing to join its provocative naval exercises. Nations in the actual region refuse to join US military activities there specifically because they are seen as counterproductive and a needless, even dangerous escalation.

Creating Conflict, Not Resolving It 

The US, Australia, France and the UK have contributed to the most destructive conflicts of the 21st century including the 2001 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, the 2011-onward wars in Libya, Syria and Yemen, and numerous regime change campaigns around the globe.

France in particular also has its military deployed across the continent of Africa, including in several of its former colonies.

The notion that France, alongside its other partners in carrying out military aggression worldwide, is becoming involved in the Indo-Pacific to confront aggression and expansionism rather than to participate in it itself, is dubious at best.

The France24 article would also note that:

In this increasingly tense maritime geopolitical context, France wants to restate that it has its own interests to look out for in the region. In 2019, the French defence ministry released a policy report, “France and Security in the Indo-Pacific” recalling that around 1.5 million French nationals live between Djibouti in the Horn of Africa and the overseas territory of French Polynesia. This means that Paris views its Indo-Pacific zone as stretching from the Gulf of Aden to beyond Australia.

In other words, Paris’ mission to the Indo-Pacific is a continuation of its colonial injustices in the region in past centuries, pursuing everything and openly for itself and its own sense of hegemony, that it, London and Washington are accusing Beijing of.

The West’s failing fortunes across Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia will not benefit from their collective economies and armed forces being stretched further still to confront an Asian nation in Asia, and one that is poised to surpass them all economically and militarily in short order.

For Beijing’s part, it has successfully reached this point through careful and patient planning, strategy and diplomacy. It will be very unlikely that Beijing will find itself drawn into a conflict with the West and will instead continue building ties within the region, particularly with Southeast Asia, creating its own regional order, and one built on economic cooperation rather than military confrontation, a process already well under way and why Washington feels the need to recruit Western European nations for its “Indo-Pacific” strategy in the first place.

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Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. 

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***

Pope Francis arrived yesterday at the Baghdad International Airport to begin a three-day visit, the first of its kind, and the first visit for the Pope abroad since the COVID-19 pandemic began one year ago.  Critics have wondered what difference the compassionate tourist could make, but the Pope has aimed to stand in solidarity with Iraqis, and their Christian fellow citizens.

While most of Iraq has yet to be vaccinated, the Pope and his entourage have been.

Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi welcomed the pontiff, although Kadhimi oversees a government that is riddled with corruption and struggles to provide basic services.

The pope’s vehicle was escorted by police motorcycles as he passed miles of concrete blast walls that were put up during Iraq’s sectarian violence after 2003, the road was one of the most dangerous in Baghdad, with frequent roadside bombs and suicide car bombs.

The official slogan for the trip is, “we are all brothers”, while the trip’s agenda begins in Baghdad, goes to Najaf, Irbil in the north, as well as Mosul.

Outside the airport, hundreds lined the roads, holding flags and waving as the pope passed by the site of a Trump-ordered drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani and a senior Iraqi security official a year ago.

The wreckage of one of the vehicles has been preserved by Iraq’s government as a memorial to the dead and in sharp criticism of the attack.

On Wednesday, 10 rockets were fired at a military base in western Iraq that houses US forces. The Iraqi parliament has voted last year to order the US troops to leave the country, but the US under Trump, and now Biden, have refused.  The US is illegally occupying both Iraq and Syria.

Iraq’s church leaders have said they are threatened with “extinction” in the Muslim-majority country.

“Over the past several decades, Iraq has suffered the disastrous effects of wars, the scourge of terrorism and sectarian conflicts often grounded in a fundamentalism incapable of accepting the peaceful coexistence of different ethnic and religious groups,” the Pope said.

“I come as a penitent,” the Pope said, “asking forgiveness of heaven and my brothers and sisters for so much destruction and cruelty.”

The Christians of Iraq are one of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world. Most Iraqi Christians are indigenous Eastern Aramaic-speaking ethnic Assyrians of the Syriac Christian tradition. Non-Syriac Iraqi Christians are largely Arab Christians and Armenians, and Christians have been present in areas now known as Iraq since around the 1st century AD.

In 1916, the Turkish Ottoman Empire committed a genocide that left at least two million Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks dead. Nearly all were Christian.

The US state department seized upon a weak spot on the underbelly of Iraq, knowing there were ideological differences between Sunnis and Shiites, which are sects of Islam.  By instigating attacks and propaganda campaigns creating hatred between the two neighbors who have lived side by side in the Middle East for centuries, the west was able to leverage the sectarian strife to their advantage.  This allowed not only harvesting the Iraqi energy resources but maintaining an occupation presence in the region to this day.

The US, along with its allies, invaded Iraq in 2003 and killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and maimed and displaced even more. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and the UN’s Hans Blix confirmed that before the invasion while he was in Iraq. There was not a big Al Qaeda presence in Iraq, but the invasion caused them to arrive on the scene to repel the invaders.  The invasion of Iraq is the cause of the suffering of Iraqis and especially their Christian communities.

”Americans and the West were telling us they came to bring democracy, freedom, and prosperity,” said Louis Sako, the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch of Babylon. He added, ‘‘What we are living is anarchy, war, death and the plight of three million refugees.’’

In Palestine, Syria, and Iraq the Christians are under attack.  Ethnic cleansing of Christian communities was perpetrated by the Israeli Army, the US-sponsored Free Syrian Army, Al Qaeda, and ISIS.

Iraq was once a rich tapestry of faiths, but during the period from 2013–2017 Christians fled as ISIS rapidly swept through western Iraq executing, maiming, and kidnapping.

Mosul was decimated by the US attacks on ISIS.  The Pope will visit the Syriac Catholic Church ruins in Mosul.

Saddam Hussain led the Ba’ath Party, with a secular socialist platform.  He was an authoritarian leader who ruled with an iron fist, and many citizens suffered during his tenure as president of Iraq, but the Christians were secure under secularism.

Because of the fall of Saddam Hussein, Christians began to leave Iraq, and the population shrank to less than 500,000 today from as many as 1.5 million in 2003.

The Arab Spring, a US-NATO project, only made things worse. As dictators like Mubarak in Egypt and Qaddafi in Libya were toppled, their longstanding protection of minorities also ended. The US supported sectarian terrorists like the Free Syrian Army, sometimes called the “John McCain Army”, who from the outset of conflict unfurled sectarian banners against Christians and non-Sunni sects.  While the US ‘regime change’ projected failed in Syria, the US remains illegally occupying the northeast and supporting the Kurds as they drive Christians from their ancestral homes and lands.

Andrew White is known as the vicar of St George’s Church, Baghdad, the only Anglican church in Iraq, until his departure in November 2014.

Andrew White supported the US-UK invasion of Iraq.  He knew the Christians would be slaughtered and decimated.  He corralled the Christians in his church in Baghdad while being guarded by US Army snipers and tanks.  He treated the Iraqi Christians like circus animals: soon to be extinct, and valuable assets for charity donations. He moved them to Jordan and perpetuates the notion that they are only safe in a country that has an Israeli peace agreement. He was found culpable of charity fraud in his former organization, and he has formed a new charity that has faced similar fraud accusations.

Middle Eastern Christians are in solidarity with their Palestinian brothers and sisters. The blind, and unconditional support of the Jewish State of ‘Israel’ is the central core belief of the American Evangelical political ideology. Instead of defending the human rights of Christians throughout the Middle East, the birthplace of Jesus, most American Christians feel no empathy for their counterparts in Palestine, Iraq, and Syria.

In 2015, Senator Ted Cruz admonished an audience of Middle Eastern Christians at an ‘In Defense of Christians’ event in Washington, telling them that Christians ‘‘have no better ally than the Jewish state.’’ The audience booed Cruz.

Iraqi Christians cannot safely return home to Iraq.  The government and society have become sectarian. The US insisted on an Iraqi constitution which kept the country firmly divided between the Sunni and Shiite sects. The US prides itself on being secular but demands that Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq be cut-up in sectarian strife.  Only Syria has determinedly resisted the US demands for a “New Middle East”.

The Sunnis and Shiites have been pitted against each other, and the Christians are a minority without a safety net.  Perhaps, if a new secular government was formed, and school children were educated in tolerance and respect for all religions, we might see a future for Iraqi Christian returning and reestablishing their rights to live in their ancestral homes.

Bashar Matti Warda, the Chaldean archbishop of Irbil, said of the Pope’s visit,

“It’s not going to help the Christians materially or directly,” Warda conceded, “because we are really in a very corrupt political and economic system. No doubt about that. He [Pope Francis] will hear nice words … But when it comes to day-to-day issues, no, I think that’s a different story.”

“Our fortune is not in oil,” said Saad Salloum, a political scientist, “It is in diversity.”

‘‘We’ve been here as an ethnicity for 6,000 years and as Christians for 1,700 years,’’ says Dr. Srood Maqdasy. ”We have our own culture, language, and tradition. If we live within other communities, all of this will be dissolved within two generations.”

*

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Steven Sahiounie is an award-winning journalist. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Middle East Eye

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***

Ten U.S. presidents,^[1] 20 CIA directors,^[2] and 56 years of covert action^[3] screwed over Brazil’s poor and paved the way for the election of Jair Bolsonaro

Covid-19, murder, evangelical Christianity, crime, environmental destruction, drugs, shantytowns, inequality, corruption, doesn’t matter what you pick, Brazil is a world leader in them all—and more.

With the Worker’s Party now waning, a tiny minority dominates the country’s economy. About 1% of the population, i.e., 1.5 million people control 47% of all real estate.^[4] Brazil’s poverty rate stands at around 20 percent—which Brazil’s President, Jair Bolsonaro, has no problem with.

The perils of large-scale privatization initiatives under Bolsonaro were evident when the Amazon city of Manaus ran out of oxygen to help COVID-19 patients.

Even when a private contractor informed the government that it could not adequately supply the city, the government did nothing, stating—against all scientific evidence—that early treatment for COVID-19 did not work.

Gun ownership meanwhile has risen considerably since Bolsonaro took office in 2019, exploding in 2020.^[5]

It’s the law of the jungle, a jungle which Bolsonaro is busy burning down. It’s tropical neoliberalism. Nothing is sacred, least of all the lives of common people.

Bolsonaro has put the economy in the hands of a team of “Chicago boys,” disciples of so-called “free-market” theorist Milton Friedman.^[6]

The leader of this team, Economy Minister Paulo Guedes—a former investment banker—was a graduate of the University of Chicago where he studied under Friedman. He has appointed other Chicago grads to top posts, including Joaquim Levy to run a major state bank, Rubem Novaes another, and Roberto Castello Branco to manage oil giant Petrorbras.^[7]

Guedes himself lived in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and liked what he saw. His plan for Brazil is to cut taxes, cut pensions and cut government. In other words, he wants the wealthy at the top to own even more of Brazil.

It wasn’t meant to be like this

Brazil began to modernize itself in 1930. The centralization of the Brazilian state followed a “lieutenants rebellion.”

Building and strengthening the nation became the rule. This included the mobilization of the masses. It meant industrialization and development. All under the guiding eye of the Brazilian government.

The leader of this brave new Brazil was Getúlio Vargas (1882-1954). This predominantly benevolent dictator unleashed the power of the state.

Breaking with the semi-feudalism of Brazil’s First Republic (1889-1930), Vargas politicized Brazil’s working class. And therefore subverted the traditional power of a tiny minority who owned everything.

And by developing Brazil’s natural resources for the good of Brazil (Vargas created Petrobras—the government owned oil company—in 1953), he subverted the “foreign markets and foreign investors,” which had dominated Brazil since the 16th century.

How do we know that he subverted the local aristocracy and the global imperialists? Because Vargas said as much in his 1954 suicide note:

How can we trust his words? Because the dynamic or dialectic he describes explains perfectly the decades which followed his suicide. Time proved him right.

The presidents who succeeded Vargas, Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-61) and João Goulart (1961-64), continued the project which Vargas started: the construction of a popular state-led Brazilian economy. However, an underground campaign of international groups and national groups brought this project to a dramatic end in the infamous 1964 coup.

The national dimension of this coup that ended the vision of Vargas—known as “the father of the poor”—involved the overt actions of the Brazilian military. And the international dimension involved the covert activities of the U.S. government, which was the main instigator of the coup.

Washington, D.C. had a code name for the removal of João Goulart—”Operation Brother Sam”—and was prepared to invade if the coup did not go according to plan.

U.S. warships (for example, the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal) were sent to Brazil to assist if necessary. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was the architect of the operation.

It funded and linked the domestic opposition to Goulart’s popular nationalism. One million dollars was provided to the AFL-CIO’s USAID funded American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), which instructed trade union leaders on how to organize strikes and demonstrations against Goulart.^[9]

Afterwards, the CIA, under the cover of USAID’s Office of Public Safety (OPS), ramped up training of the Brazilian police, who set up Operation Bandeirantes, a forerunner of the Phoenix program whose focus was to round up and torture leftist dissidents.^[10]

New York Times (August 5, 1978) [Source: nytimes.com. See also pando.com]

Foreign automakers collaborated with the new military junta by helping to identify “subversives” on their payrolls who were arrested or detained as part of Bandeirantes.

Lincoln Gordon, the U.S. ambassador to Brazil from 1961-1966, claimed that the 1964 coup was “the single most decisive victory for freedom in the mid-twentieth century.”^[11]

Freedom for U.S. elite interests, that is—and that of U.S. corporations and a minority of Brazilians who monopolized most of the wealth.

In the middle of the Cold War, Washington did not want another Cuba or another China. It viewed the popular agenda of Vargas and his successors as a threat to its global elitism as well as continued access to Brazil’s oil, minerals, and other natural resources. By acting the way it did in Brazil, the U.S., in effect, was directly conserving the semi-feudal social relations which Vargas sought to modernize.

It was the signal foreign investors and foreign creditors were waiting for. Foreign money flowed into Brazil after 1964—while Brazil’s workers and peasants were once again trapped in their own country and forced to accept the lowest wages and worst working conditions. In the eyes of the U.S.-backed elite minority inside (and outside of) Brazil: It was an “economic miracle.”

Never mind the fact that, according to the National Truth Commission, which released a report in 2014, 8,000 indigenous people and at least 434 political dissidents were killed during the period of military rule.

Today, when Jair Bolsonaro celebrates the coup of 1964, he is celebrating a U.S. plutocratic version of Brazil. He is rejecting Brazilian sovereignty and reviving a National Security Doctrine which the U.S. exported to Brazil during the Cold War—a doctrine that highlights an “internal enemy” (working class politics or environmental politics or landless politics or Indio politics).

In short, he is celebrating a doctrine that criminalizes modern social relations and institutionalizes semi-feudal social relations.

After World War Two, this doctrine was transmitted from the U.S. to Brazil via military colleges and the U.S. School of the Americas, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. And its purpose was anything but Brazil’s “national security.” On the contrary, it was designed to secure the economic and geopolitical interests of the U.S. and its constituency in Brazil—the tiny minority which owned everything.^[12]

Washington, D.C.’s top Cold War planner, George F. Kennan, succinctly summed up the idea behind the doctrine (and therefore outlined the future of Brazil) in 1950—when writing about Latin America:

The final answer might be an unpleasant one, [a military dictatorship, extreme inequality, but] we should not hesitate before police repression by the local government. This is not shameful, since the communists [popular and nationalistic politicians] are essentially traitors […] It is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by communists [socially progressive nationalists].^[13]

Considering the 1964 coup a “triumphant strike against communism,” Bolsonaro directly served the military government in Brazil in the late 1970s as an army captain.

His superior officers stated that he “had aggressive ambition”including for “financial and economic gain,” a reference to Bolsonaro’s attempt to mine gold in Bahia state.

The Obama administration helped facilitate Bolsonaro’s rise by failing to condemn the illegal impeachment in August 2016 of Dilma Rousseff of the Brazilian Workers Party, who in her youth had been tortured by the Brazilian army.^[14]

Rousseff was accused of illegally manipulating government accounts, but the charges were heavily politicized.

Her successor, Michel Temer, was later arrested on more substantiated charges that included accepting a $1 million bribe in exchange for awarding three companies a construction contract for a nuclear power plant.^[15]

The day after Rousseff’s impeachment, the leader of Brazil’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Aloysio Nunes, came to the U.S. and met with Thomas Shannon, the Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, which signaled backing for the de facto coup that brought an end to what the World Bank called Brazil’s “golden decade” under Workers Party rule, during which millions were lifted out of poverty.^[16]

Aloysio Nunes and Brazilian Ambassador Sergei Amaral present the Grand Cross of the Rio Branco order to U.S. Ambassador Thomas Shannon in 2018. [Source: twitter.com]

Bolsonaro has continued Brazil’s great reversal, never hiding his allegiance to the U.S.

Nor is he hiding his contempt for the Brazil which Vargas and his successors tried to build. In March 2019, after becoming Brazilian President in January—in an act of homage and an act of obedience—he visited the U.S. headquarters of the CIA—the architects of the 1964 coup.

In August 2019, Bolsonaro declared that it is his intention, by 2022, to completely privatize Vargas’s greatest legacy—Petrobras—the state-owned oil company.

There is one more U.S. doctrine which encapsulates post-1964 Brazil and particularly the Brazil of Bolsonaro: the Low-Intensity Conflict doctrine. This is “characterized by the military taking on police roles and the police acting more like the military.”^[17]

When a minority owns a disproportionate share of the wealth, the tendency is to criminalize the majority poor. The class war begins to feel like a low-intensity war.

Since the U.S.-made coup of 1964, Brazil has been caught up in a low-intensity conflict in which—to paraphrase President Bolsonaro—people die like cockroaches. Since the beginning of the 21st century—more than 1,000,000 people have been murdered in Brazil.^[18] It is safe to say that almost all were poor people—“the children of Vargas.”

*

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Aidan O’Brien is a hospital worker in Dublin, Ireland. On break last year, he visited Brazil and conducted in-country research. Aidan can be reached at: [email protected].

Notes

[1] Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush1 Clinton, Bush2, Obama, Trump.

[2] Dulles, McCone, Raborn, Helms, Schlesinger, Colby, Bush, Turner, Casey, Webster, Gates, Woolsey, Deutch, Tenet, Goss, Hayden, Panetta, Petraeus, Brennan, Pompeo.

[3] 1964-2018.

[4] Lulu Garcia-Navarro, “For Brazil’s 1 Percenters The Land Stays In The Family Forever,” August 25, 2015, https://landportal.org/news/2015/08/brazils-1-percenters-land-stays-family-forever

[5] Alicia Prager and Laís Martins, “Firearms exports to Brazil surge as gun ownership increases under Bolsonaro,” July 31, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com

[6] David Biller and Raymond Colitt, “Milton Friedman’s Brazil Moment: Band of Disciplines Take Charge,” Bloomberg News, December 12, 2018.

[7] Biller and Colitt, “Milton Friedman’s Brazil Moment.”

[8] Getúlio Vargas “suicide note,” August 24, 1954, quoted in Thayer Watkins, “Getulio Vargas and the Estado Nôvo,” San José State University Department of Economics, https://www.sjsu.edu 

[9] Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 69.

[10] Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 225; Martha K. Huggins, Political Policing: The United States and Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

[11] David Binder, “U.S. Assembled a Force in 1964 For Possible Use in Brazil Coup,” December 30, 1976, https://www.nytimes.com; The Dominion news from the grassroots, “US Role in 1964 Brazilian Military Coup Revealed: National Security Archive,” April 6, 2004, https://www.dominionpaper.ca; James G. Hershberg and Peter Kornbluh, “Brazil Marks 50th Anniversary of Military Coup,” April 2, 2014, The National Security Archive, https://www.nsarchive2.gwu.edu;  Wright, Thomas C., Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2001).

[12] Eduardo Munhoz Svartman, “Brazil-United States Military Relations during the Cold War: Political Dynamic and Arms Transfers,” January 2011, brazilianpoliticssciencereview, https://www.oaji.net 

[13] George F. Kennan, 1950, quoted in Anthony W. Pereira, “The US Role in the 1964 Coup in Brazil: A Reassessment,” Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1111/blar.12518

[14] Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019), 303.

[15] Anna Jean Kaier, “Brazil’s Former President Michel Temer Arrested in Corruption Investigation,” The Guardian, March 21, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/21/brazils-former-president-michel-temer-arrested-in-corruption-investigation

[16] Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 303, 304.

[17] Joseph Nevins and Timothy Dunn, “Conflict of a Different Sort,” October 31, 2008, NACLA Report, https://www.nacla.org 

[18] Robert Muggah, “Brazil’s Murder Rate Finally Fell – and by a Lot,” April 22, 2019, https://www.foreignpolicy.com 

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***

A book that has a very narrowly defined title often fails to look at the larger context, either regional or global.  In “Decolonizing Palestine – Hamas Between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial”  Somdeep Sen succeeds surprisingly well in placing the struggles of Hama/Gaza/Palestine well beyond the regional into a thought provoking global perspective.

What is missing from the title is one of his fundamental themes, that of liberation.   Not only is Hamas caught between the anticolonial and the postcolonial, but the idea of liberation, of freeing Palestine from the Israeli colonial-settler context is also caught between the two ideas.  In short, liberation is not a point in time, not a date in a history book, but an ongoing process that precedes that noted timeline and succedes the same.

Liberation then becomes not only just Palestine, but Palestine as a liberating idea within the global network of postcolonial acts of liberation.

Hamas

The focus is on Hamas, but does not cover its full history as a grassroots organization that in its early formation provided much needed social services to the refugees and victims from the 1948 nakba.  Sen concentrates on Hamas’ current predicament of being both a resistance force to settler-colonialism and a governing force in an area nominally ‘liberated’ from Israeli settlements, while still carrying the burden of both forwards.

One of the more striking ideas was the concept that even as Hamas is criticized for its sometimes coercive and violent control of Gaza, those very acts create and sustain the idea of ‘Palestine’. The inhabitants of Gaza recognize Hamas not just as Hamas but as the government, as the nation – as Palestinian.   Even earlier than Hamas’ takeover of Gaza’s government, Sen discusses the idea that the the postcolonial moment began with the Oslo Accords, and in spite of all its flaws and the poverty of its intentions, it put into writing the concept of ‘Palestine’ – undefined and subject to many onerous conditions, but still – Palestine.

Liberation in this context starts well before Oslo.  Palestine has been seeking liberation since the end of World War I:  first from the British empire and its League of Nations imposed mandate; and subsequently from Jewish settler-colonialism during the mandate and on into the establishment of Israel.

What is occurring in Gaza today is the ongoing struggle for liberation within both an anticolonial and a postcolonial set of ideas and actions:

“Hamas’ persistence with the simultaneous roles of resistance and assumption of governmental authority confirmed that the anticolonial and postcolonial can indeed exist in the era of colonial rule in service of the liberation struggle….[it] is also a microcosm of the entirety of the Palestinian long moment of liberation….it is the Palestinian coastal enclave that exemplifies the long moment before the withdrawal of the colonizer in its entirety, consolidated under a single leadership….”

“Despite the their faults and inadequacies, both resistance and governance somehow evoked the colonized’s retort, “We are here, we exist, we are organized”…And even though actual liberation is far from being realized [it] has already begun under the auspices of Hamas’ rule over Gaza.”

Global perspective and liberation

When Sen extends his arguments to global comparisons his ideas take on a more powerful significance.  His arguments are well founded as he incorporates examples from around the world.

Sen’s correlations with other liberation struggles cover much of the rest of the world.  South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Cuba, India, Ecuador, Algeria, and North America are mentioned in his discussions.  Early in the work he writes “…characterizing the socioeconomic crisis as extreme overlooks the reality that the treatment meted out to Gaza is the norm under settler colonial rule.”

If I take my home country Canada as an extended example of North American settler-colonialism, all Sen’s arguments are applicable. Canada (and the U.S.) were attributed as being “empty land”, a “land without people.”  The indigenous people were removed from the land by various devices – wars, starvation, forced removal – and the remnant populations were placed on “reservations”, the North American system of apartheid.  Those that were not removed from settler society were subject to racist and discriminatory legislative and judicial action.

Physical genocide/ethnic cleansing was accompanied by cultural ‘cleansing’.  The indigenous celebrations were forbidden (here on the West Coast, the tradition of the Potlatch was outlawed) and children were forcibly removed from their families in order to “civilize” the “savages”, without granting them even then the right of equality.

Under the concept of liberation, the indigenous people of Canada are still resisting colonization and all its depredations and are undergoing a “long liberation”, claiming their rights, protecting their land against militarized police forces, and still seeking equality before the law even as their inequality is written into the constitution.

Sen’s description becomes universal as in the end he suggests “that the nature of the (settler) colonial endeavor, and its ability to alienate their sense [of] self, is such that the struggle for liberation from the legacies of colonial rule may persist perpetually.”   Society itself is changed, and the liberation process includes the adaptation to those changes, “the colonized are undone from their sense of self in a way that they do not have any memory of an identity sans the legacies of the colonization.”   Society is changed, there is no reset button, liberation involves finding a national identity, part of that being “the national anticolonial struggle itself.”

Sen’s work, “Decolonizing Palestine – Hamas Between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial” is a powerful and well argued presentation on Hamas’ actions in Gaza.  At the same time he very thoughtfully extends his arguments as being part of the global system of settler-colonialism.

These arguments my sound rather esoteric in light of the brutality and racist attitudes of the colonial projects around the world, but ultimately they find the truth:   no person is free, no person is liberated until all are liberated, until all the constructs of colonial settler activities, all the racism, the economic dominance, the cultural denials are deconstructed and remade into a society that provides equality in all areas to all the people of the world.  We are, in that sense, all Palestinians.

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***

Between November 11 and 16, 2020, between the passing of Hurricane Eta and the arrival of Hurricane Iota, the Tortilla con Sal media collective visited Nicaragua’s Autonomous Region of the Northern Caribbean Coast. There we interviewed representatives of different indigenous and afro-descendant territorial governments in Siuna, Bilwi, Waspam and community members of the Miskito communities of Wisconsin and Santa Clara. We also spoke with cattle farmers, residents and officials from the municipalities of Siuna and Prinzapolka about various aspects of the area’s social and economic development. 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 in large part due to the commitment to the reincorporation of the Caribbean Coast by the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional) ever since their historic program of 1969. While in government in 1987, the FSLN passed Law 28 “Statute of Autonomy of the Regions of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua”. Later, while in opposition, the FSLN in 2005 managed to secure the passage of Law 445 “Law of Communal Property Regime of the Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Communities of the Autonomous Regions of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua and of the Bocay, Coco, Indio and Maíz Rivers”.

To date on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast, 23 original peoples’ territories have been titled and delimited, covering 314 communities with a territorial extension of 37,859.32 km² in which lives a population of more than 200,000 people in more than 35,000 families. The area is equivalent to 31% of the national territory and more than 55% of the territory of Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast. A significant body of laws, administrative norms and declarations attest to the reality of an innovative and ambitious process vindicating the rights of Nicaragua’s indigenous and afro-descendant peoples.

The interviews collected here also explain how these legislative and administrative advances were achieved in various extremely adverse contexts. For example, in 1987 Nicaragua was in the seventh year of a war imposed by the U.S. government in which much of Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast was the scene of constant military conflict.

Then, after 1990, during the period of the Liberal party governments, the process of defending and promoting the rights of Nicaragua’s native peoples was in effect deliberately undermined. So, when Daniel Ortega and the FSLN took office in January 2007, they inherited a process seriously sabotaged and damaged by the neoliberal policies of the previous sixteen years.

The interviews collected here demonstrate, too, the great scope of the process of restitution of the rights of Nicaragua’s original peoples since 2007, in all its social, political, economic and cultural complexity. For example, they clarify that the leaders of the Indigenous and Afro-descendant Territories are people elected by their communities not on the basis of political allegiances but on the basis of community criteria.

Their Territorial Governments and their Community Governments are two of the five levels of government working together in the Autonomous Regions of the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. The two levels of government of the indigenous peoples collaborate intimately with the relevant instances of the National Government, with the Regional Governments and with the respective municipal authorities.

This system of government has enabled important changes on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast, for example, in terms of electrification and the development of health and water infrastructure and land communications with the Pacific Coast and also in terms of judicial practice, education and health care.

On the Northern Caribbean Coast, the new road to Bilwi, which includes the construction of a 240-meter long bridge over the Wawa River, will shorten the overland travel time to Managua from 24 to 12 hours. In 2021, the entire northern Caribbean coast will be connected to the national electric power system.

A new regional hospital and a new drinking water system are being built in Bilwi. Economic democratization promoted by the central government has promoted new commercial possibilities for the region’s agricultural, fishing and other producers.

In this context of infrastructure modernization and important social and economic advances, the political opposition desperately uses downright falsehoods exploiting the issue of property conflicts in order to attack the Sandinista government led by President Comandante Daniel Ortega.

The big lie promoted by the political opposition in relation to the phenomenon of property conflicts in the territories and communities of the native peoples is that the Sandinista government promotes the invasion by mestizo families of indigenous and afro-descendant lands.

These interviews with indigenous and afro-descendant leaders completely disprove this gross lie. Instead, they explain the historical context in which indigenous leaders associated with the Miskito Yatama political party, have sold lands that were allocated to them under the government of Violeta Chamorro.

Subsequently, during the period in which Yatama and the ruling government Liberal party controlled the regional government and most of the region’s municipal authorities, various corrupt indigenous leaders continued with the illegal sale of indigenous lands to mestizo families. The natural consequence of this process has been that the mestizo families who bought those lands, in turn sold them on to other mestizo families, thus making the problem progressively more complicated and difficult to solve.

The problem of property conflicts only became international news from 2012 onward because in that year the FSLN displaced Yatama in the municipal elections as the region’s main political force and then in 2014 managed to gain control of the regional government.

The following table indicates the development of the change of political control in the Northern Caribbean of Nicaragua at the municipal level through the results of municipal elections from 2008 to 2017.

In 2009 Yatama and the Constitutional Liberal Party controlled seven of the eight municipalities in the Northern Caribbean Region. In the 2012 municipal elections Yatama and the Independent Liberal Party won four municipalities between them and the FSLN also four. Then in 2014 Yatama lost the regional elections to the FSLN and in the 2017 municipal elections the FSLN won seven municipalities, leaving only the municipality of Mulukukú in the hands of the PLC. Yatama and the PLC still won a good number of municipal councilors, but without overall control of any municipality.

In response to this decline in the power and influence of Yatama and the Liberal parties in the region, an intense smear campaign has been mounted against the Sandinista government. The campaign is promoted by Yatama and its allies in Nicaragua’s non-governmental organizations associated with the national political opposition, such as the Movimiento Renovador Sandinista, financed from the United States and countries of the European Union.

Similarly, Yatama lost influence at the territorial government level partly because of the deep internal differences within the party and partly because many community members stopped giving the same level of support they had previously given to Yatama’s historic leader Brooklyn Rivera and the indigenous leaders associated with him.

This reality of the unfolding political scene in the Caribbean Coast region of Nicaragua has been systematically suppressed, both by national opposition aligned media and intellectuals and, internationally, by foreign academics and intellectuals allied with Yatama and the MRS. However, the testimony of the indigenous leaders in these interviews convincingly demonstrates the reality, completely disproving the lies that have been spread internationally.

In relation to the issue of bad faith on the part of non-governmental human rights organizations, it may well be worth noting the personal testimony from our visit to interview community members of the Miskito communities of Wisconsin and Santa Clara in the Tasba Raya area, southwest of Waspam. Since 2013, this area has been the scene of some of the most violent incidents of conflict between the indigenous peoples and mestizo settlers.

We arrived in Wisconsin around four o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday, November 14th, 2020. Despite the heavy rains from Hurricane Eta, the road had not deteriorated so badly as to prevent our journey. We went to Wisconsin and Santa Clara because we wanted to talk to people there about their version of local history and events in their community since 2012.

However, the people we were seeking in Wisconsin told us they did not want to be interviewed because they were being watched by community members collaborating with the Center for Justice and Human Rights of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua (CEJUDHCAN) led by Lottie Cunningham Wren. One of the people we wanted to talk to told us, in the presence of three witnesses, they were especially afraid to be interviewed because shortly before our visit, at a community assembly with CEJUDHCAN, Lottie Cunningham Wren had incited hatred against this person, saying that they deserved “to have their throat cut”.

Wisconsin is an impoverished community. However, the people observing our visit had the latest smart phones with which they filmed us. When we asked how it was possible for these very poor people to have such expensive cell phones, we were told that the phones were given out by Lottie Cunningham Wren and her colleagues to CEJUDHCAN collaborators in the community. In any case, we agreed with the community members at that time to record some brief interviews on the subject of local property conflicts and their possible resolution, which we did in a superficially friendly but somewhat tense atmosphere.

Indeed, without the presence of the territorial authorities who accompanied us, we believe it would not have been possible to record interviews in this community. Subsequently, after recording the interviews in Wisconsin, we went to the community of Santa Clara.

There, the community members spoke freely, without fear. They explained what had happened to them in previous years. They spoke of their anxieties and fears regarding the Mestizos and explained their hopes of being able to resolve the problem of property conflicts according to the law.

In both communities, Wisconsin and Santa Clara, the community members insisted that they wanted to avoid the kind of violent incidents of the past and called on the regional and central government authorities to provide the necessary support to expedite the last phase of the titling of their lands, which is called remediation. This term is interpreted in different ways, but the Wisconsin and Santa Clara community members believe that this phase requires clearing a direct lane between the already established trig points in order to clearly define the limits of each territory on the ground.

Taken together, this series of interviews provides an extensive overview of the reality of the Northern Caribbean Coast region based on the concrete experiences of five of the region’s territorial leaders as well as local community members. An undeniable part of that experience has been the incitement to violence by political forces and allied organizations in opposition to the government.

The interviews make clear the mercenary role of foreign funded neocolonial clients like Lottie Cunningham Wren and CEJUDHCAN in that regard. But they also make clear how Liberal party activists and municipal officials have historically promoted the illegal invasion of indigenous lands.

They also highlight the political aspect of organized crime activities in the region, for example the massacre of three police officers in June 2018 near Mulukukú. That massacre occurred in the context of a long-running campaign of systematic harassment in the Mining Triangle of Siuna, Rosita and Bonanza in which dozens of Sandinista militants have been killed in recent years.

It has been a campaign of violence promoted by people associated with the region’s Liberal parties very similar to what has happened in the South Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. There, the activities of the so-called Anti-Canal Movement have been used to cover up organized crime activities aimed at displacing Sandinista families from the area on the municipal border between Nueva Guinea and Bluefields.

The interview series “Nicaragua 2018 – Uncensoring the Truth” extensively details the criminal activities promoted at the time by Anti Canal Movement leaders Francisca Ramirez and Medardo Mairena. Similarly, the interviews compiled here on the reality of Nicaragua’s Northern Caribbean Coast region reveal how opportunist local NGOs such as CEJUDHCAN distort the truth under the guise of promoting the rights of indigenous peoples.

These interviews demonstrate once again that international human rights organizations by no means rigorously and seriously corroborate the denunciations they receive. On the contrary, they act in a morally obtuse, methodologically incompetent and politically biased way, in effect promoting the sinister anti-democratic and anti-humanitarian political agenda of the U.S. government and its allies.

In doing so, they harm and betray the human rights of the very populations they falsely claim they want to defend. Their bad faith has been demonstrated on multiple occasions in the case of Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela as well as other countries defending their autonomy and sovereignty against the North American and European imperialist powers.

When former UN Human Rights Rapporteur Alfredo de Zayas said in relation to Venezuela “I realized that the media narrative does not correspond to reality” he could just as well have been talking about Nicaragua. Taken together, the interviews compiled here offer yet more confirmation of the moral bankruptcy of the Western human rights industry and the international media that disseminate their reports with no serious effort to corroborate them, while suppressing other information, such as interviews like these, which contradict them.

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Is Wi-Fi sickness a disability? The California Court of Appeal just said it is in Brown v. Los Angeles Unified School District (2d Dist., Div. Eight), Case No. B294240. In a case that tests the limits of California’s liberal pleading standard, the appellate court green-lighted a claim of a woman who asserted a disability of “electromagnetic hypersensitivity,” or, as the concurring justice put it, “Wi-Fi sickness.”

The trial court had sustained a demurrer, granting judgment for the employer, a school district. The appellate court revived the plaintiff’s claim for failure to provide a reasonable accommodation.

The court acknowledged that it is likely the first to recognize Wi-Fi sickness as a disability under laws against discrimination. In fact, the court discussed contrary federal court authority, distinguishing those cases by concluding that the definition of “disability” in California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act is broader than in the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Apart from the holding that Wi-Fi sickness is a disability under FEHA, California employers should take note of the facts alleged about the failure to provide a reasonable accommodation.

After the school district installed a new Wi-Fi system, the plaintiff teacher complained of headaches and other symptoms caused by exposure to the electromagnetic waves. The school district initially tried to accommodate the teacher by turning off the Wi-Fi in her classroom and an adjacent one. The teacher said that her symptoms persisted and asked for additional accommodations. By that point, the school district’s consultant had reported that the Wi-Fi and radio frequencies at the school “evidenced a safe and non-hazardous working environment.” Based on that report, the school district did not grant any further accommodation, and the teacher sued.

In his concurring opinion, Justice Wiley expressed reluctance “about giving any sort of green light to this unprecedented and unorthodox disability claim.” But that’s exactly what the court did.

The decision serves as a reminder of just how easy it is to survive a pleading challenge in California.

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The commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific region submitted a request to Congress March 1 for $27.3 billion in new anti-China spending. Admiral Philip Davidson, who can fairly be termed an anti-China fanatic, leads the Indo-Pacific Command made up of 380,000 military and civilian personnel and a vast array of air, land and sea weaponry. It is the largest of the 11 commands that span the globe and outer space — the enforcers of the most far-flung empire in history.

The funding increase that Davidson is seeking for his command — not the total allocation — is greater than the entire budget of the whole armed forces of Brazil.

In an October 2020 public forum, Davidson stated: “I believe China is the strategic threat of the century to the U.S., but really certainly to the entire free world.” Extreme hostility toward China has been expressed by other top officials in the new administration, including by President Biden himself.

In reality, it is the United States which has engaged in endless war for many decades that is the real “strategic threat” to its allies as well as it enemies.

Red line denoting the Pentagon’s “first island chain” (Wikimedia Commons)

The Indo-Pacific Command covers 34 countries encompassing 60% of the world’s population. As a part of the “pivot to Asia” announced under the Obama administration — and continued under Trump and now Biden — a major shift is underway. The aim is to base over 70% of U.S. overseas military forces in the Asia/Pacific region, clearly aimed at the People’s Republic of China.

The additional request comes on top of the $738 billion Pentagon budget for this year which passed — as do all military budgets — with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress. The Pentagon budget is larger than the military budgets of the next 13 countries combined, and four times the size of China’s.

The Pentagon and virtually the entire political establishment falsely promote Cold War-style propaganda depicting China as an aggressor. But it is not China that is encircling the United States with military power — it is the other way around. Davidson’s request for additional funding is explicitly meant to accelerate the encirclement.

The ‘First Island Chain’ — A sacrifice zone in Pentagon planning

In his demand for extra funds, Davidson wrote that the United States “requires highly survivable, precision-strike networks along the first island chain, featuring increased quantities of ground-based weapons. … These networks must be operationally decentralized and geographically distributed along the western Pacific archipelagos.”

The “first island chain” in Pentagon-ese are those island states and provinces ringing China’s east coast, including Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan, northern Philippines, Borneo and smaller islands. As a glance at a map of the region shows, Taiwan — a province of China still ruled by the side of the civil war that was defeated in 1949 — is the key link of the chain and would be of immense strategic importance in case of a war. This motivates the vast U.S. military sales to Taiwan.

The words “requires highly survivable, precision-strike networks along the first island chain” means that the Pentagon anticipates those countries would suffer major losses in case of a U.S. war on China. John Foster Dulles, the former U.S. secretary of state who devised the island chain strategy in the 1950s, referred to these countries as “unsinkable aircraft carriers.”

Such an outcome means nothing to the war planners. Nor do they regard participation as optional. “These networks must be … geographically distributed along the western Pacific archipelagos” (writer’s emphasis).

Contrary to the media propaganda here, China is not seeking either a new war or global domination. Nor do any of the peoples of the region, who have suffered greatly at the hands of imperialism, want a new war.

As the latest demand for ever-greater military spending makes clear, the grave danger of new wars comes from the Pentagon, the military-industrial corporations, and the capitalist politicians in Washington. They are fanning the flames of racism and chauvinism to prepare public opinion for aggression to come.

A new U.S. war with China would threaten the world with unthinkable destruction. The danger of such a war cannot be ignored, it must be resisted.

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The European Union has been keeping up appearances in encouraging the equitable distribution of vaccines to combat SARS-CoV-2 and its disease, COVID-19.  Numerous statements speak to the need to back the COVAX scheme, to ensure equity and that no one state misses out.  And EU member states could be assured of a smooth vaccine rollout, led by the EU apparatus, humming with needle jabbing efficiency.  Negotiating as a bloc, lower prices could be assured, along with an appropriate supply of vaccines across the 27 member states. 

These initial hopes have been shredded.  While the vaccination programs in Israel, the United Kingdom and even the United States have gathered form and speed, it has stuttered and stumbled in the EU.  The companies behind the vaccines have been patchy in their production lines.  Authorities have put halts on jabs and in some cases, introduced rationing.      

In January, the manufacturers of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine informed the European Commission that it would ship fewer doses to the bloc than originally understood.  “While there is no scheduled delay to the start of shipments of our vaccine should we receive approval in Europe,” a spokesperson for AstraZeneca explained, “initial volumes will be lower than originally anticipated due to reduced yields at a manufacturing site within our European supply chain.”  The initial cut in supply was dramatic: from the initially promised number of 90 million does, the number would be 40 million. 

Stella Kyriakides, European commissioner for health and food safety, was indignant. Discussions with the company, she recorded on Twitter, “resulted in dissatisfaction with the lack of clarity and insufficient explanations.”  Members of the EU were “united: vaccine developers have societal and contractual responsibilities they need to uphold.” 

The company then promised in early February to make up the missing doses.  In this, the EU was found wanting in its contractual negotiations with AstraZeneca.  The EU-AstraZeneca deal, written in Belgian law, stresses the “best reasonable effort” of both parties to deliver the goods in question and acting in good faith.  The UK-AstraZeneca agreement, written in English law, also contains the best reasonable effort clause, but features a toothier provision.  Should AstraZeneca or its subcontractors be persuaded to do anything that might hold up the supply of vaccine doses, the UK government reserves the right to terminate the contract and invoke penalties.

The EU was left with essentially meek retaliations: withholding payments till the company coughed up promised supply, or till it assisted finding other producers who might make the vaccine.  Tellingly, the EU had also waived its right to sue AstraZeneca in the event of delays. 

The UK negotiators were also sharp enough to clarify the chain of supply (places of manufacture, for instance), putting the onus on the company to cover any unpredicted fall promised doses.  The EU, in an act fit for commercial dunces, had tied itself in knots. 

The AstraZeneca drama was but one in what can only be seen as a failure in manufacture, supply and distribution.  Pfizer-BioNTech, having made a deal for the supply of 300 million doses with the EU, also saw reductions in their deliveries to enable its Belgium processing plant to increase capacity.  In January, Italy was informed about successive reductions of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine: 20% and 29% in respective quarters of the month.  The more granular picture was even more severe, with various Italian regions seeing a fall of 60% of doses.

This picture of struggle was repeated that same month in Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic, Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia and the Spanish capital, Madrid. Rationing of distribution was introduced by the Spanish government.  Polish officials were sufficiently angered by Pfizer-BioNTech to threaten legal action. 

Hungary, preferring a different, more unilateral way of coping with the shambles, approved the use of other vaccines otherwise held up in the queue of the European Medicines Agency.  The vaccines from China’s Sinopharm and Russia’s Sputnik V have passed regulator muster, with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán himself receiving the former at the end of last month.  “Without the Chinese and Russian vaccines,” the pugnacious populist reasoned, “we would have big problems.” 

Last month, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was rather confessional in a speech on the failings of the EU vaccination policy.  “We were late in granting authorisation. We were too optimistic about mass production.  And maybe we also took for granted that the doses ordered would actually arrive on time.”

The European scene was ready for a more global brawl over vaccines and their shipments.  On February 26, Italian authorities urged the European Commission to block 250,700 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine destined for Australia.  The reason was put down to AstraZeneca’s failure to live up to expectations in supply and Australia not being a “vulnerable country”.  The request was also based on the EU export control mechanism on COVID-19 vaccines, introduced in January with the intention to block exports of vaccines outside the union.  “The objective of this measure,” came the European Commission’s justification, “is to ensure timely access to COVID-19 vaccines for all EU citizens and to tackle the current lack of transparency of vaccine exports outside the EU.”

Since its inception, the European Commission has proved slow on the draw; 174 authorisations for millions of shots to 30 countries have been granted.  Set to expire on March 31, the European Commission is proposing the extension of this measure into June.  Many member states approve.  France even went so far as to publicly back Italy’s request.  The country’s Health Minister Olivier Véran summed up the mood in an interview with BFMTV channel: “Believe me, the more doses I have, the happier I am as health minister.” 

Germany also added its voice of approval.  “In general,” stated German government spokesman Steffen Seibert, “vaccine exports aren’t stopped as long as the contracts with the EU are abided by.”  Cattily, Seibert excused the EU’s regulatory restrictions by claiming that many “vaccines go from the EU to third countries, while nothing or almost is exported from the United States and Great Britain.”  German Health Minister Jens Spahn was more reserved, warning that such moves could cause “problems in the medium term by disrupting the supply chains for vaccines”. 

Australia’s protests were more of minor irritation than anger.  Canberra had, according to Health Minister Greg Hunt, “raised the issue with the European Commission through multiple channels, and in particular we have asked the European Commission to review this decision.”  Prime Minister Scott Morrison was even understanding to a point, acknowledging that Italy was seeing a death rate of 300 a day.  Europe faced “an unbridled situation.  That is not the situation in Australia.”

Vaccine patriotism was always going to surface to dampen any optimism on the part of public health utopians.  Countries and self-interest come before the noble aspirations of humanity.  The Director General of the World Trade Organization, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala laments that WTO members, to the extent they had “export restrictions or even prohibitions of these goods [vaccines]” were holding “back recovery.” 

A great danger to the EU in this ugly affair will be whether certain nation states within the family will take its efforts in combating COVID-19 seriously.  As shown by Hungary’s example, the bunglers in Brussels risk being ignored altogether. 

As for the blocking of vaccine exports to third countries, Bernd Lange, the German MEP who chairs the European Parliament’s trade committee, is gloomy and regretful.  The European export mechanism risked constituting a de facto ban.  “Pandora’s box opened,” he wrote on Twitter in response to the Italian decision.  “Mistake.”  Imitators would follow, as could “fatal consequences on supply chains.”  A global conflict over the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines is in the offing. 

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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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***

This article was first published on Global Research in February 2018.

People today spend a lot of time talking about conspiracy theories.

These theories often do harm because they divert attention away from the facts and thereby allow real crimes and other harmful effects to continue.

Such conspiracy theories can be spotted based on three basic characteristics.

1. They lack evidence.
2. They spread widely before the facts are examined.
3. Much simpler alternatives are not considered.

For example, take the most popular conspiracy theory of recent times—the official account for the crimes of 9/11.

1. This theory was produced by mythologist Philip Zelikow, who, before the investigation began, created an outline that was kept secret from his own Commission staff. Zelikow’s outline determined the outcome of the investigation before any facts were examined. Moreover, the 9/11 Commission claimed sixty-three times in its report that it could find “no evidence” related to important aspects of the crimes. Evidence that the Commission did rely on, as a basis for its report, was later found to be false. Similarly, the evidence collected and held secret by World Trade Center investigating agency NIST was later found to contradict the agency’s conclusions. Much of that evidence is still being held secret including the computer model data that NIST was forced to substitute for physical testing that contradicted its conclusions.
2. The conspiracy theory reports provided by the 9/11 Commission and NIST spread quickly before anyone could examine them. Getting government representatives to commit to any explanation for what had happened on 9/11 took years but, once ready, news media sources were prepped in advance to allow rapid parroting of the official line. The timing of NIST’s reports coincided with political events, like each anniversary of the 9/11 crimes, so that media could quickly present the official story while public interest was high but critical review was not possible. With the report on WTC 7, the public was given just three weeks to comment on a report that was nearly seven years in the making. The report was later found to be unscientific and false.
3. The official conspiracy theory for 9/11 calls for belief in unbelievable things. That is, to believe the official account you must accept that otherwise honest military leaders will lie repeatedly for years to make themselves look bad. Buildings will collapse in unprecedented ways, through the path of most resistance, with no scientific evidence to explain it. The Secret Service will fail to do its job, insider trading can occur with no insiders, and “the enemy”—a vaguely defined group of dark-skinned people who just happen to live on strategically critical resources—can remain omnipotent and elusive. All the while, much simpler explanations are evident but cannot be considered.

The official conspiracy theory for 9/11 has led to tremendously harmful effects. Many Americans have forgotten completely what it means to be an American. An ongoing terrorism lottery, that could select any of us as a victim at any time, continues with no end in sight. And the 9/11 Wars that were based on the official account are bankrupting the nation both financially and morally.

Yes, conspiracy theories are a problem when not examined closely. Let’s all take a closer look at this one.

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This article was originally published by Dig Within.

Featured image is from the author.

by Michel Chossudovsky

ISBN Number: 9780973714715

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In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”.  Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.

The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.

According to Chossudovsky, the  “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.

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***

‘They have discovered smart weapons. We have discovered something more important: people think and feel.’ – Fidel Castro

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the failure of most Western capitalist countries in their public health policies.

Decades of neoliberal austerity, of cuts in health and education programs induced by restructuring programs by the IMF and the World Bank, are now showing their results in alarming numbers of contagion and deaths spreading throughout Latin America, Europe and the U.S.

In the West, Cuba has set an example of efficiency and shown that another way is possible in the fight against the pandemic. The numbers speak for themselves; we only need to compare Cuba with other countries or even big cities with similar populations to get a very clear picture of the difference in results.

With a population of about 11,350,000 people, Cuba has had – as of February 21 – 45,361 cumulative cases of COVID-19 with 300 deaths.

The Greater New York City area, with a population of about 18,800,00, has a cumulative total of 700,815 cases with 28,888 deaths. Switzerland, with a smaller population than Cuba, about 8,600,000 people, has 550,224 cumulative cases of COVID-19 with 9,226 deaths. How to explain that a country that has far fewer resources than a city like New York or a country like Switzerland can be so much more efficient in its fight against the pandemic?

The answer is simple: the Cuban Revolution of 1959 focused the few resources available in the country on building a health care system that would serve the needs of the people first, and not the interests of the various sectors of privatized medicine, such as medical insurance plans, big pharmaceutical companies and the expensive ‘high-tech’ medicine of which the developed countries are so proud.

Public Health History 

After the Revolution, almost half of the Cuban doctors left the country, greatly limiting the new government’s ability to meet the health needs of its population. The revolutionary government decision was to invest in the training of new health professionals – in people – and to expand access to medical care to the rural population and especially to black Cubans, who had hitherto been left out. In this way, Cuba was able to increase the number of nurses from 2,500 in 1958 to 4,300 a decade later. Through its massive vaccination campaigns, Cuba eliminated polio in 1962, malaria in 1967, neonatal tetanus in 1972, diphtheria in 1979, congenital rubella syndrome in 1989, post-cause meningitis in 1993, rubella in 1995, and tuberculous meningitis in 1997.

Today, Cuba’s infant mortality rate is lower than that of the United States and less than half that of the black population in the United States. By 1983, just over two decades after the Revolution, life expectancy in Cuba had increased to 73.8 years, when in the previous period it had been only 58.8 years.

While many public health experts often attribute the chronic shortage of health care in Latin America to lack of resources, the Cuban Revolution has shown that when limited resources are distributed equitably and with an emphasis on people and prevention, public health outcomes previously unimaginable can be achieved. Neoliberalism, imposed by force in many Southern countries, and chosen by Northern economic elites as the preferred policy in their own countries, led to a path opposite to the Cuban one. And the COVID-19 pandemic is showing very clearly which path was the right one.

In the rich countries of the North, neoliberal austerity has for decades caused successive reductions in health budgets, with cuts especially in the number of qualified personnel available. Cuba, by contrast, has invested in the training of an ever-increasing number of health professionals. When the pandemic arrived, it was clear that Cuba already had the necessary personnel and resource allocation capacity to face such a situation. In the wealthy countries of the North, by contrast, the lack of personnel and public infrastructure was compounded by an inability to take the right measures when these conflicted with established private interests.

Consequently, for the first time, Cuba was asked to bring its aid to some rich and developed Northern countries, such as Italy. Cuban doctors and other health professionals also took their aid to Andorra and to France’s ultra-marine Caribbean departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe. One cannot imagine a greater demonstration of the bankruptcy of the neoliberal model.

The Cuban Revolution, from its very beginning and despite all the material difficulties faced by the new government, did everything possible to help other countries. In 1963, only four years after the Revolution, still struggling with enormous internal problems, Cuba sent its first medical aid mission to Algeria, a nation devastated after decades of a bloody war of independence against France. In 1966, with the help of 200,000 doses of polio vaccine donated by the Soviet Union, Cuba and its medical personnel, in collaboration with the government of Congo, coordinated the vaccination of more than 61,000 children in what was the first mass vaccination campaign in Africa. To date, Cuba has sent some 124,000 health professionals to provide medical care in more than 154 countries.

Besides this impressive aid brought by its own medical personnel to various parts of the world, another important contribution of Cuba is the training of health professionals, mainly from poor countries, at its Escuela Latino Americana de Medicina (ELAM – Latin American School of Medicine). Founded in 1999, ELAM trains students according to the Cuban model of Medicina General Integral (MGI – General Integral Medicine), focusing mainly on public health and primary care, with a holistic approach to understanding health, including disciplines such as biology, sociology, and politics. ELAM’s foreign students have all expenses paid by the Cuban state, except for airfare. By 2020, ELAM had graduated 30,000 new doctors from over 100 countries, mainly from Africa but including from the poorest areas of the United States. Many of these students would have no chance of studying medicine in their home countries, and upon their return provide an invaluable and sometimes previously unavailable service to their fellow citizens, including, now, care related to the pandemic. According to ELAM, there are about 52,000 health professionals from Cuba working in 92 countries, which means that Cuba has more doctors working abroad than all the health professional contributions of the G-8 countries combined.

Owing to their commitment to the health of people, especially the poorest and most disadvantaged, and not to a privatized health system in which profit determines where and how to allocate resources, Cuban doctors are frequent targets of attacks from the far right in the countries where they work. In Brazil, following the coup d’état against elected president Dilma Rousseff and the illegal ascension to power of Jair Bolsonaro, Cuban doctors had to leave the country. The same occurred in Bolivia after the coup against President Evo Morales and in Honduras after the coup against President Zelaya. In all these cases, it was the poor who suffered the most, for Cuban medical professionals were the only ones providing care previously unavailable to them. In 1979 Cuba sent a medical mission to Grenada, and by 1982 this country saw a 25% reduction in its infant mortality rate, thanks mainly to the work done by Cuban professionals. But the United States invaded Grenada in 1983, and the Cuban health workers were expelled.

Regarding the pandemic of COVID-19, however, the example that perhaps best reveals the disastrous consequences that the combined effect of sending away the Cuban doctors and imposed structural readjustments can cause in a country is the case of Ecuador. Following the election of President Lenin Moreno in 2017, the Cuban health professionals working in this country with the support of the previous President Rafael Correa had to leave, and the International Monetary Fund recommended a 36% cut in the health budget, a measure adopted by President Moreno. These two actions left the country with virtually no health care system, hence no defense in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, the city of Guayaquil alone, Ecuador’s largest, with about 2,700 million inhabitants, had an estimated 7,600 deaths due to the pandemic, a number more than 25 times higher than that of all of Cuba.

The medical brigades and ELAM have so far been Cuba’s two greatest contributions in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. But another extremely important one is on the way: the Sovereign II vaccine, produced by the Finlay Vaccine Institute in Havana. Cuba hopes to immunize its entire population with its own vaccine later this year. Once again, Cuba’s socialist approach to vaccine production differs radically from that adopted by the world’s capitalist nations. The result of Cuba’s international experience, accumulated through its many missions conducted in various parts of the world, the Cuban vaccine is a hope for the poor nations since, again, Cuba’s international solidarity can be counted on. According to an article by W. T. Whitney, Jr:

“100 million doses of Sovereign II are being prepared, enough to immunize all 11 million Cubans, beginning in March or April. The 70 million remaining doses will go to Vietnam, Iran, Pakistan, India, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua. Sovereign II ‘will be the vaccine of ALBA’ explained Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, referring to the solidarity alliance established in 2004 by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro.”

The article’s author added:

“‘Cuba’s strategy in commercializing the vaccine represents a combination of what’s good for humankind and the impact on world health. We are not a multinational where a financial objective comes first,’ says Vicente Vérez Bencomo, director of Cuba’s Finlay Vaccine Institute. Income generated by vaccine sales abroad will pay for health care, education, and pensions in Cuba, just as is the case with exports of medical services and medicines.”

In contrast to the Cuban approach, the author further wrote:

“According to forbes.com in November 2020, ‘If Moderna’s [vaccine] can get FDA approval and can make enough doses, its top line could be nearly $35 billion higher … than … in the last 12 months.” Another report suggests that, ‘The companies (Pfizer and Moderna) stand to earn billions of dollars in profits from their COVID vaccines this year [and] there will be more profits in later years.’ The companies ‘claim the rights to vast amounts of intellectual property’.

“With corporations in charge, distribution of Covid-19 vaccines is skewed. As of January 27, ‘some 66.83 million doses have been sent out, of which 93 percent were supplied to only 15 countries.’ In Latin America, only Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Chile have secured purchase contracts adequate for immunizing entire populations. The companies’ contracts with African nations allow for immunization of only 30 percent of Africans in 2021. Meaningful immunization has yet to begin there.

“The wealth divide determines distribution. Epidemiologists at Duke University report that, ‘While high-income countries represent only 16% of the world’s population, they currently hold 60% of the vaccines for COVID-19 that have been purchased so far.’ Cuban journalist Randy Alonso reports that only ‘27 percent of the total population of low and middle-income countries can be vaccinated this year’.”

Since its revolution, Cuba has been under uninterrupted attack by the Empire and its accomplices.

Economic sanctions and blockades make its population suffer and harm considerably Cuba’s capacity to keep doing the international work. Even so, this small nation, always so stubborn and generous continues to be a source of hope for the world. Above all, Cuba points the way forward, with great firmness, detachment, courage, and an inexhaustible joy.

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The world has been fixated for months on novel-coronavirus PCR testing, contact tracing and vaccination.

Meanwhile, another major part of the Covid biomedical complex has received far less attention: the use of antibodies for detecting, diagnosing and treating infection with the novel coronavirus.

Hundreds of antibodies have been approved for these purposes since January 2020. And hundreds more are poised to start being marketed soon.

This is part of the biomedical gold rush: by last summer already, antibodies were on track to become the most lucrative medical product, with global revenue projected to reach nearly half a trillion dollars by 2024. Profit margins in the range of 67% aren’t uncommon.

Pharma giants such as AstraZeneca, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly are among the companies grabbing the largest chunks of the novel-coronavirus-antibody market. And some of the most muscular government agencies, including Anthony Fauci’s US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the US’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, are part of the action (see, for example, the second-last section of this article, on antibodies used to treat Covid).

Virtually every study and piece of marketing material related to Covid is premised on scientists having positively and correctly identified the presence of the novel coronavirus (also known as SARS-CoV-2) in the material they’re working with.

The job of that identification is usually given to antibodies that are said to bind to the novel coronavirus. The assumption is these antibodies are able to pick out the virus and only the virus from among every other organism and substance surrounding it.

Unfortunately it turns out that the antibodies rarely (if ever) do that. This is because of, among other things, inadequate verification of the antibodies’ accuracy in targeting the virus by the companies that manufacture and sell them. And there’s even less verification by government regulators.

Let’s take a 30,000-foot tour of a couple of the main features of the antibody-industry landscape, which is awash in complexity and cash.

Can Antibodies be Created That Only Bind to One Type of Virus or Another?

Antibodies are tiny, finely-tuned, parts of our immune system. One of their main functions is to seek out viruses and bacteria that may have the potential to cause disease. Antibodies bind to and neutralize these microbes so they can’t multiply and spread.

Humans and our ancestors have been making antibodies in our bodies to fend off infections for millions of years. Then a few decades ago companies got involved in the discovery and manipulation of antibodies, partnering with university labs.

There are two main categories of antibodies. One is ‘polyclonal’ antibodies. These are garden-variety antibodies that bind to a variety of different substances and/or organisms.

The other is monoclonal antibodies. As the name implies, cloning is involved in their creation. First an antibody that is specific to a particular amino-acid sequence (amino acids are the building blocks of proteins) of interest – for example, one from a protein on the surface of a virus or bacterium — is identified. Then the immune-system cell which produced that antibody is ‘cloned’ in the lab. As a result, each set of monoclonal antibodies binds to that particular amino-acid sequence.

I emailed one of the English-speaking world’s leading authorities on monoclonal antibodies, Harvard Medical School professor Clifford Saper, to get clarity on this. I asked him if it’s true that, as most in the antibody-commercializing arena claim, a monoclonal antibody can be created that’s specific for (that is, binds to) just one type of virus or just one other type of organism.

Saper replied [bolding and italics added by me for emphasis]:

“No, there is no such thing as a monoclonal antibody that, because it is monoclonal, recognizes only one protein or only one virus. It will bind to any protein having the same (or a very similar) sequence.”

The implication of Saper’s statement is that any attempt to use a monoclonal antibody to verify the presence of the novel coronavirus will yield a large rate of false-positive results. That is, they will indicate that the novel coronavirus is detected when in fact it hasn’t been. That’s because there’s a high probability that the monoclonal antibody is binding to something else besides the virus (this is known as ‘cross-reacting’).

(I recommend this review paper by Saper, and this one and this one co-authored by Yale pathology professor David Rimm, to anyone wishing to learn about antibody validation.)

And in fact, the vast majority of antibodies and monoclonal antibodies marketed as being specific for the novel coronavirus were developed years ago for detecting SARS-CoV-1. They were then simply repurposed for identifying SARS-CoV-2 — with very few if any checks for whether they also cross-react to other organisms or substances.

I sought confirmation of this repurposing from Zhen Lu. She’s the North American marketing manager for Sino Biological, a Beijing-headquartered company that develops and sells, among other things, hundreds of antibodies. Lu replied to me via email, “Yes, antibodies are repuposed [sic].”

I also checked and received confirmation from Pratiek Matkar, a senior staffer from BenchSci, an antibody-database company. And to see for myself, I logged into the BenchSci database (Matkar granted me a guest account), selected all antibodies for the novel coronavirus, and looked to see which organisms had been used in cross-reactivity tests for them. SARS-CoV-1 was the only one that came up in this check.

This all explains something I observed last week: Sino Biological had just changed the content of its home page for the section of their website on antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. The page now announces that they’ve introduced new “matched antibody pairs” that work better at finding the virus. The pair consists of a “capture antibody” and a “detection antibody.”

And they claim these pairs are more accurate at finding the novel coronavirus: that they “have high specificity without cross-reactivity with MERS-CoV, [or with the common human coronaviruses] 229E, NL63, HKU1, [and] OC43.”

The only way I can interpret that is they know the antibodies they’ve been marketing for months as being specific for the novel coronavirus bind to other things, such as common human coronaviruses. 

How Are Antibodies Harnessed in Tests for the Novel Coronavirus?

One of the main types of tests for the virus contains antibodies that are ostensibly specific for the novel coronavirus. The way they’re designed to work is that if the virus is present in a blood sample the antibodies bind to it and, as a result, the test gives a positive signal.

The other type of test contains sequences of protein from the novel coronavirus; if antibodies to the virus are present in a blood sample, they bind to the protein sequences and produce a positive result.

The manufacturers are supposed to conduct accuracy checks of their test kits before they put them on the market. These checks largely consist of estimation of the rates of false positives and false negatives (the latter is a negative result when the antibody or protein of interest is contained in the sample being tested by the kit).

However, companies do this cursory accuracy check with only very few samples of a small number of viruses — and rarely on bacteria or any other of the millions of biological substances that can be present in the blood.

Despite this very inadequate validation and the strong incentive for the companies to make their products look good, as documented last May by David Crowe, the manufacturers often record a significant rate of false positives. The false positives are to everything from West Nile virus to various types of human coronaviruses.

Usually the companies and governments wave that off as insignificant. Occasionally though, the test kits are so bad that they’re taken off the market.

For example, an antibody-testing kit sold by a company called Chembio Diagnostics was launched on March 31, 2020. It was almost immediately granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). An EUA allows companies to rush products onto the market with very minimal oversight. Brazil and the European Union also gave the nod for the Chembio test to be sold in their jurisdictions in April and May 2020, respectively.

Then in June 2020 the FDA pulled it off the market. The agency said ”this test generates a higher than expected rate of false results.” (Note that the top table on page 13 of the product insert for that “revoked” Chembio test indicates it cross-reacts to the human coronavirus 229E.)

But in November 2020 the Chembio antibody test again was approved for use in Brazil. And on January 14, 2021, the test got the nod in the European Union, the UK and Ireland.

Is it identical to the rest that was so inaccurate it was pulled off the market last June? It’s hard to tell. There is no product insert for it that I could find. In fact there’s very little information about it on the webpage for the test; you have to request the information. I submitted a request on Jan. 23 and haven’t received it yet.

Two of the heads of the FDA branch that approves testing devices penned a February 18, 2021, New England Journal of Medicine article. In it, the pair admitted that the FDA’s EUAs allowed too-loose approvals for serology tests.

They indicated the FDA has tightened its criteria for approval of these tests. They also point to efforts by other government agencies to evaluate serology tests. But the pair don’t say a word about the need to move toward objective, thorough test validation. They also are mute on the fact that EUAs are still being issued.

(Also note that the FDA and Health Canada listings of the 65 serology tests approved to date in the US and 19 approved to date in Canada continue to give the sensitivity [correct identification of positive samples] of the tests by ‘positive percent agreement’ and specificity [correct identification of negative samples] by ‘negative percent agreement.’ These are relative measures of accuracy – that is, compared to other tests – rather than objective/absolute accuracy, and therefore are poor facsimiles of accuracy.)

One of the many major figures in the Covid-biomedical complex who are priming the pump of the antibody pipeline is Ian Lipkin. He’s director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University in New York. Lipkin is involved at high levels in many global organizations including the World Health Organization and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well in pharmaceutical companies. (And he is quoted in a ‘fact-check’ of a July 2020 article I co-authored with Patrick Corbett titled, “No one has died from the coronavirus.” Lipkin states, among other things, in the fact-check piece that “Conspiracy theorists are not persuaded by data.”)

Lipkin co-authored a Feb. 12, 2021, paper in which he and his team claimed to have identified, using a new ‘peptide-microarray’ technology they invented, 29 amino-acid sequences unique to the novel coronavirus. They assert that antibodies specific to the sequences could be created – and that these in turn could be harnessed “to facilitate diagnostics, epidemiology, and vaccinology” for Covid. (The only conflict Lipkin and some of his co-authors disclose in the ‘competing interests’ paragraph at the end of article is that they invented the peptide-microarray technology described in the article.)

Do Antibodies Used to Treat Covid Fare Any Better?

Antibodies are also being marketed to treat Covid. Some are sold singly (known as ‘monotherapy’) and others in pairs. They are deemed to confer ‘passive immunity.’

Among the most-reported-on set of antibodies for treating Covid is the Regeneron monoclonal antibodies casirivimab and imdevimab. This pair reportedly was used in October 2020 to treat then-U.S. President Donald Trump. The combo subsequently was granted an EUA by the FDA on November 21, 2020. It also is being considered for approval by Health Canada.

I’d like to focus on a somewhat lesser-known monoclonal antibody called bamlanivumab. It’s being used both singly and as one half of a pair for treatment of symptomatic Covid patients early in the course of their infection. The antibody was discovered, and clinical study of it started, by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (which is headed by Anthony Fauci) and a Vancouver, British Columbia-based company called AbCellera Diagnostics. The antibody is being manufactured and sold by Eli Lilly. It costs more than $1,200 a vial.

AbCellera is developing a significant pipeline of other antibodies. Its capabilities for this were developed over the past two-plus years as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Pandemic Prevention Platform program.

(AbCellera also has received hundreds of millions of dollars from the Canadian government, including for building an antibody-manufacturing plant. And Peter Thiel, who co-founded both PayPal and Palantir, is a board member. So is John Montalbano, who’s also on the board of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and until 2015 was CEO of RBC [Royal Bank of Canada] Global Asset Management. This and significant positive media coverage helped propel the company to the biggest Canadian-biotech-company Initial Public Offering to date, on Dec. 11, 2020.)

Bamlanivumab was given an EUA by the FDA on November 9, 2020, for treatment of mild to moderate Covid. And Health Canada gave the monotherapy an interim authorization on November 17. It’s not getting much traction in clinical practice so far in Canada, though, perhaps because of the less-than-stellar results from clinical trials (see below).

But this hasn’t deterred the Canadian and US federal governments, which combined have purchased close to half a million of these tests. For example, most recently, on February 26, the US government bought 100,000 vials.

The only study on bamlanivimab made public prior to the November 9 FDA approval was one posted October 1, 2020, on the website of the online-only journal bioRχiv. [My Feb. 3, 2021, and Feb. 11, 2021, articles — on the new variants and the associated modelling papers, respectively – noted that the journal and its sister publication medRχiv contain only non-peer-reviewed articles and were created by an organization headed by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife.]

The study used rhesus monkeys and provided very extensive details about how the antibody was discovered and checked for specificity to the novel coronavirus. The researchers concluded that the antibody – at that time known as LY-CovV555 — has “potent neutralizing activity” against SARS-CoV-2.

On January 14 I emailed the lead author of that paper, Bryan Jones. He’s a researcher in Lilly’s Biotechnology Research Program. I asked Jones where in their paper is the proof the antibody is specific to SARS-CoV-2 (and therefore isn’t binding to something else instead of, or in addition to, the novel coronavirus).

He responded promptly, as follows [bolding added by me for emphasis]: “While we did determine that LY-CoV555 is specific to SARS-CoV-2 (and doesn’t bind to the spike protein of SARS-CoV), that is not specified or detailed in any of the figures or tables [in the paper].”

Jones pointed me to several parts of the paper and supplemental material published with it that he said show, via indirect extrapolation, that the antibody is specific for the novel coronavirus.

That’s not exactly convincing.

Then on December 22 a study in the New England Journal of Medicine gave a thumbs-down to the usefulness of bamlanivimab in people hospitalized after receiving a Covid diagnosis. The paper noted that in late October the study was stopped because the antibody didn’t help the patients any more than did placebo.

But this didn’t deter Lilly.

On January 21, 2021, the company issued a news release about a study of bamlanivumab in residents and staff of nursing homes. They claimed their research showed that the antibody “significantly reduced the risk of contracting symptomatic COVID-19.”

However, they didn’t back this up with much information. The study hasn’t been published in a journal or presented at a scientific/medical meeting. And there’s no word on when it will be.

Despite that, on the same morning the release was sent out by Lilly, glowing articles appeared in major media outlets stating that the study showed bamlanivumab appears to significantly reduce Covid symptoms in the frail elderly.

For example a Bloomberg article was posted at 8 a.m. on Jan. 21 with the headline, “Eli Lilly Antibody Cuts Covid-19 Risk Up to 80% in Nursing Home Study.” The article was carried in many other media outlets such as the Globe & Mail.

The article quoted Lilly’s Chief Scientific Officer Daniel Skovronsky as saying, “This is an urgent situation. Where there’s an outbreak in nursing homes and people haven’t yet received the vaccine, this could be a potential way to protect them before they get it.”

And January 21 New York Times piece by senior science journalist Gina Kolata quotes a vaccine expert at Boston Children’s Hospital, Ofer Levy, who wasn’t one of the scientists involved in the study, as saying, “I see only positives here. This is a win.”

Kolata also reported that Lilly plans to ask the FDA for an EUA for bamlanivimab for prevention of Covid in the frail elderly, focusing on those in nursing homes and long-term-care homes.

In parallel, Lilly is pivoting to using bamlanivumab in combination with another monoclonal antibody called etesevimab. A study on this combination in people with mild or moderate Covid was published on January 21, 2021. The results indicate it doesn’t reduce symptoms, but only lowers the viral load of people.

This didn’t deter Lilly either; it’s spinning this in the media as a very positive result. And so is the FDA: on February 9 the agency issued an EUA for the combination of the two antibodies for treating mild or moderate COVID.

Then the next twist in the plot happened, on February 16: a paper published that day in bioRχiv indicated that bamlanivumab doesn’t neutralize the South African and Brazilian variants of the novel coronavirus.

I’ll Leave the Last Words to Scott Adams

Dilbert-cartoon creator Scott Adams makes this observation on page 13 of his book Loserthink:

“One thing I can say with complete certainty is that it is a bad idea to trust the majority of experts in any domain in which both complexity and large amounts of money are involved.”

This perfectly describes the situation with antibodies for the novel coronavirus.

Buyer beware, follow the money, and stay tuned.

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After obtaining an MSc in molecular biology from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary, Rosemary Frei became a freelance writer. For the next 22 years she was a medical writer and journalist. She pivoted again in early 2016 to full-time, independent activism and investigative journalism. Her website is RosemaryFrei.ca.

Featured image is from OffGuardian

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The new leadership of the United States is attempting to position itself as the strongman in the Middle East. Or at least make it appear so.

Following the Biden Administration’s first strike on pro-Iranian groups on or near the Syrian-Iraq border, it showed that it can bite. What was left is to show that nothing can hurt it. In recent months, its bases have been under rocket fire. Its convoys have been targeted by IED attacks numerous times. None of these, however, resulted in any significant injuries or deaths.

As such, Washington needs to look further back and one thing stands out – it happened more than a year ago.

The time has come to correct the blemish that is the Iranian ballistic missile strike on the Ain al-Asad base in Iraq in 2020, which happened in response to the US assassination of Iranian Brigadier General Qassem Soleimani.

The strike took place on January 8th, and initially official reports said that it had caused close to no damage. Then it turned out that helicopters had been almost entirely destroyed, and that buildings had been razed. Finally, in the following weeks and months, dozens of soldiers turned out to have had “traumatic brain injuries”.

What really happened? US TV channel CBS made a special documentary on the strikes and released it on March 1st, 2021. The recollection is based on the Pentagon’s version of events and the timeline that the US Defense officials have provided.

On January 8th, hours before the strike all the soldiers knew it was coming and hid to safety. The flights of the Iranian missiles were all tracked by US Central Command. More than 50 aviation units and 1,000 people were evacuated. 16 missiles were launched from 3 different locations, five of which missed. A video was released, taken by an UAV, showing that the base “didn’t receive any significant damage”. All the grainy footage showed was finding an excuse and attempting to change the facts one year later.

The United States is attempting to present it in a way that shows its one strike along the Syrian-Iraqi border as a significant one, while downplaying the most notable strike on its own positions in the last year.

The Biden administration wants to present itself as the strong man, and promises to send more troops to the region. Trump’s troop withdrawal and limited military involvement approaches have been abandoned.

In reality, its convoys are under constant fire in Iraq and its positions are regularly targeted. And they are targeted in such a precise manner, that no human life is taken, except a few exceptions.

Who, exactly is Biden trying to impress?

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The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

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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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).

***

Covid related restrictions put in place since early 2020 caused infinitely more harm than any combination of major diseases.

What never should have been instituted by US, Western and other governments should end straightaway.

Lockdowns, quarantines, scam PCR tests, face masks that don’t protect and risk harm, socially destructive social distancing, and mass-jabbing with unapproved, experimental, hazardous drugs were ordered based on Big Lies and mass deception.

Texas and Mississippi took steps in the right direction — short of restoring normal life entirely.

On Tuesday, Texas Governor Gregg said the following:

“It is now time to open Texas 100%.”

Restrictions never should have been imposed in the first place.

Abbott: “(P)eople and businesses don’t need the state telling them how to operate” any longer.

Nor did they since seasonal flu was renamed covid as part of a state-sponsored mass deception campaign to get millions of Americans and others abroad to self-inflict harm on themselves.

Abbott said he’s rescinding “most of (his) earlier (covid related) executive orders.”

Starting March 10, “all businesses of any type are allowed to open 100%.”

His spokesperson confirmed that his action applies to all public activities, including sporting events, other forms of entertainment, dining, work places, and retail store shopping.

Mask-wearing in public is no longer required.

Abbott stopped short of exposing and ordering an end to hazardous to health mass-jabbing that doesn’t protect and risks irreversible harm or death when used as directed.

His order left it optional for businesses to stick with the mask-wearing mandate for employees and/or customers.

It lets them decide whether to operate at full or limited capacity.

After his announcement, the H-E-B grocery chain said customers no longer are required to wear face masks in its stores.

Under Abbott’s order, if hospitalizations from seasonal flu — now called covid — rise above 15% of capacity of facilities in any of the state’s 22 hospital regions for seven straight days, covid “mitigation strategies” may be judicially ordered in affected counties.

At the same time, his order prohibits jail time or other penalties for violators.

State universities are reviewing the new order before deciding whether to end restrictions.

North Texas University said in-person commencement this year will require masks and social distancing.

Rice University indicated no plan to end mask-wearing on campus.

Texas public schools may continue virtual learning over classroom instruction.

The latter is second class eduction that prevents students from interacting with each other and teachers — an important part of what education and learning are all about.

Abbott’s order calls for schools to follow “guidance issued by the Texas Education Agency.”

On Tuesday, the TEA said it’ll update its guidance this week.

Critics of Abbott’s order unjustifiably called it “extraordinarily dangerous…a death warrant for Texans…killing the people of Texas,” and other unacceptable fear-mongering claims.

Separately on Tuesday, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves announced the following:

Lifting the state’s mask wearing mandate in public, he said he’s  getting out of the business of telling people what they can and cannot do.

“The reason the government is no longer telling you that is because of the actions we’ve taken over the last 12 months has gotten us to a point where our total hospitalizations today the second day of March 2021 is about where we were in late May” last year, he said, adding:

“This new order removes all of our county mask mandates and allows businesses to operate at full capacity without state-imposed rules or restrictions.”

“If businesses or individuals decide to take additional precautions, they are absolutely within their rights.”

According to State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs:

“Do stuff outdoors. Don’t group together indoors with a lot of folks.”

“There’s no way in heck I would go sit in a crowded bar right now indoors or out really. Please exercise caution right now.”

The order was effective on March 2 through at least end of month.

K-12 school still requires masks where social distancing isn’t possible.

K-12 extracurricular activities outdoors is limited to 50% of capacity and 25% of seating indoors.

Capacity for indoor bowl and arena seating was increased to 50%.

The above orders in Texas and Mississippi are steps in the right direction.

Other states loosening restrictions this week include Arkansas, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Virginia.

It’s good news but short of entirely normalizing activities as existed before seasonal flu was renamed covid last year.

Nor did new orders halt harmful to health mass-jabbing with experimental, hazardous drugs.

As expected, CDC director Rochelle Walensky said the following at a mass deception White House briefing:

“I am really worried about reports that more states are rolling back the exact public health measures we have recommended to protect people from” covid (sic).”

“At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard earned ground we have gained (sic).”

The pro-Pharma, pro-mass-jabbing NYT and other establishment media expressed concern about loosened restrictions.

Washington Post editors said the following:

Texas Governor Abbott “is gambling with the health of his state and beyond (sic).”

His “decision is premature and reckless (sic).”

“(T)he result of opening too soon will be viral spread, and more suffering (sic).”

The above and similar fear-mongering is responsible for getting most Americans to falsely feel endangered by a killer virus.

The same one shows up annually in similar and/or new strains during flu season that lasts from around October to May.

Until 2020, it’s been unaccompanied by everything instituted over the past year, along with mass deception to manipulate people to feel endangered when there’s nothing to fear but fear itself.

According to Pharma-connected Anthony Fauci, it’s OK for small groups to gather as long as people together were inoculated for covid — instead of warning against the hazards of using unapproved, experimental drugs.

Since unacceptable federal, state, and local policies were instituted last year, unprecedented harm affected public health and welfare of most people.

As long as mass-jabbing for covid and other unacceptable policies remain in place, enormous harm will continue increasing exponentially.

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

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

“How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/how-wall-street-fleeces-america/

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/banker-occupation-waging-financial-war-on-humanity/

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Just over two months into the new year, 2021 has already seen a flurry of public banking activity. Sixteen new bills to form publicly-owned banks or facilitate their formation were introduced in eight U.S. states in January and February. Two bills for a state-owned bank were introduced in New Mexico, two in Massachusetts, two in New York, one each in Oregon and Hawaii, and Washington State’s Public Bank Bill was re-introduced as a “Substitution.” Bills for city-owned banks were introduced in Philadelphia and San Francisco, and bills facilitating the formation of public banks or for a feasibility study were introduced in New York, Oregon (three bills), and Hawaii. 

In addition, California is expected to introduce a bill for a state-owned bank later this year, and New Jersey is moving forward with a strong commitment from its governor to implement one. At the federal level, three bills for public banking were also introduced last year: the National Infrastructure Bank Bill (HR 6422), a new Postal Banking Act (S 4614), and the Public Banking Act (HR 8721). (For details on all these bills, see the Public Banking Institute website here.)

As Oscar Abello wrote on NextCity.org in February, “2021 could be public banking’s watershed moment.… Legislators are starting to see public banks as a powerful potential tool to ensure a recovery that is more equitable than the last time.”

Why the Surge in Interest?

The devastation caused by nationwide Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 has highlighted the inadequacies of the current financial system in serving the public, local businesses, and local governments. Nearly 10 million jobs were lost to the lockdowns, over 100,000 businesses closed permanently, and a quarter of the population remains unbanked or underbanked. Over 18 million people are receiving unemployment benefits, and moratoria on rent and home foreclosures are due to expire this spring.

Where was the Federal Reserve in all this? It poured out trillions of dollars in relief, but the funds did not trickle down to the real economy. They flooded up, dramatically increasing the wealth gap. By October 2020, the top 1% of the U.S. population held 30.4% of all household wealth, 15 times that of the bottom 50%, which held just 1.9% of all wealth.

State and local governments are also in dire straits due to the crisis. Their costs have shot up and their tax bases have shrunk. But the Fed’s “special purpose vehicles” were no help. The Municipal Liquidity Facility, ostensibly intended to relieve municipal debt burdens, lent at market interest rates plus a penalty, making borrowing at the facility so expensive that it went nearly unused; and it was discontinued in December.

The Fed’s emergency lending facilities were also of little help to local businesses. In a January 2021 Wall Street Journal article titled “Corporate Debt ‘Relief’ Is an Economic Dud,” Sheila Bair, former chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Lawrence Goodman, president of the Center for Financial Stability, observed:

The creation of the corporate facilities last March marked the first time in history that the Fed would buy corporate debt… The purpose of the corporate facilities was to help companies access debt markets during the pandemic, making it possible to sustain operations and keep employees on payroll. Instead, the facilities resulted in a huge and unnecessary bailout of corporate debt issuers, underwriters and bondholders….This created a further unfair opportunity for large corporations to get even bigger by purchasing competitors with government-subsidized credit.

….This presents a double whammy for the young companies that have been hit hardest by the pandemic. They are the primary source of job creation and innovation, and squeezing them deprives our economy of the dynamism and creativity it needs to thrive.

In a September 2020 study for ACRE called “Cancel Wall Street,” Saqib Bhatti and Brittany Alston showed that U.S. state and local governments collectively pay $160 billion annually just in interest in the bond market, which is controlled by big private banks. For comparative purposes, $160 billion would be enough to help 13 million families avoid eviction by covering their annual rent; and $134 billion could make up the revenue shortfall suffered by every city and town in the U.S. due to the pandemic.

Half the cost of infrastructure generally consists of financing, doubling its cost to municipal governments. Local governments are extremely good credit risks; yet private, bank-affiliated rating agencies give them a lower credit score (raising their rates) than private corporations, which are 63 times more likely to default. States are not allowed to go bankrupt, and that is also true for cities in about half the states. State and local governments have a tax base to pay their debts and are not going anywhere, unlike bankrupt corporations, which simply disappear and leave their creditors holding the bag.

How Publicly-owned Banks Can Help 

Banks do not have the funding problems of local governments. In March 2020, the Federal Reserve reduced the interest rate at its discount window, encouraging all banks in good standing to borrow there at 0.25%. No stigma or strings were attached to this virtually free liquidity – no need to retain employees or to cut dividends, bonuses, or the interest rates charged to borrowers. Wall Street banks can borrow at a mere one-quarter of one percent while continuing to charge customers 15% or more on their credit cards.

Local governments extend credit to their communities through loan funds, but these “revolving funds” can lend only the capital they have. Depository banks, on the other hand, can leverage their capital, generating up to ten times their capital base in loans. For a local government with its own depository bank, that would mean up to ten times the credit to inject into the local economy, and ten times the profit to be funneled back into community needs. A public depository bank could also borrow at 0.25% from the Fed’s discount window.

North Dakota Leads the Way

What a state can achieve by forming its own bank has been demonstrated in North Dakota. There  the nation’s only state-owned bank was formed in 1919 when North Dakota farmers were losing their farms to big out-of-state banks. Unlike the Wall Street megabanks mandated to make as much money as possible for their shareholders, the Bank of North Dakota (BND) is mandated to serve the public interest. Yet it has had a stellar return on investment, outperforming even J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. In its 2019 Annual Report, the BND reported its sixteenth consecutive year of record profits, with $169 million in income, just over $7 billion in assets, and a hefty return on investment of 18.6%.

The BND maximizes its profits and its ability to serve the community by eliminating profiteering middlemen. It has no private shareholders bent on short-term profits, no high-paid executives, no need to advertise for depositors or borrowers, and no need for multiple branches. It has a massive built-in deposit base, since the state’s revenues must be deposited in the BND by law. It does not compete with North Dakota’s local banks in the retail market but instead partners with them. The local bank services and retains the customer, while the BND helps as needed with capital and liquidity. Largely due to this amicable relationship, North Dakota has nearly six times as many local financial institutions per person as the country overall.

The BND has performed particularly well in economic crises. It helped pay the state’s teachers during the Great Depression, and sold foreclosed farmland back to farmers in the 1940s. It has also helped the state recover from a litany of natural disasters.

Its emergency capabilities were demonstrated in 1997, when record flooding and fires devastated Grand Forks, North Dakota. The town and its sister city, East Grand Forks on the Minnesota side of the Red River, lay in ruins. The response of the BND was immediate and comprehensive, demonstrating a financial flexibility and public generosity that no privately-owned bank could match. The BND quickly established nearly $70 million in credit lines and launched a disaster relief loan program; worked closely with federal agencies to gain forbearance on federally-backed home loans and student loans; and reduced interest rates on existing family farm and farm operating programs. The BND obtained funds at reduced rates from the Federal Home Loan Bank and passed the savings on to flood-affected borrowers. Grand Forks was quickly rebuilt and restored, losing only 3% of its population by 2000, compared to 17% in East Grand Forks on the other side of the river.

In the 2020 crisis, North Dakota shone again, leading the nation in getting funds into the hands of workers and small businesses. Unemployment benefits were distributed in North Dakota faster than in any other state, and small businesses secured more Payroll Protection Program funds per worker than in any other state. Jeff Stein, writing in May 2020 in The Washington Post, asked:

What’s their secret? Much credit goes to the century-old Bank of North Dakota, which — even before the PPP officially rolled out — coordinated and educated local bankers in weekly conference calls and flurries of calls and emails.

According Eric Hardmeyer, BND’s president and chief executive, BND connected the state’s small bankers with politicians and U.S. Small Business Administration officials and even bought some of their PPP loans to help spread out the cost and risk….

BND has already rolled out two local successor programs to the PPP, intended to help businesses restart and rebuild. It has also offered deferments on its $1.1 billion portfolio of student loans.

Public Banks Excel Globally in Crises

Publicly-owned banks around the world have responded quickly and efficiently to crises. As of mid-2020, public banks worldwide held nearly $49 trillion in combined assets; and including other public financial institutions, the figure reached nearly $82 trillion. In a 2020 compendium of cases studies titled Public Banks and Covid 19: Combatting the Pandemic with Public Finance, the editors write:

Five overarching and promising lessons stand out: public banks have the potential to respond rapidly; to fulfill their public purpose mandates; to act boldly; to mobilize their existing institutional capacity; and to build on ‘public-public’ solidarity. In short, public banks are helping us navigate the tidal wave of Covid-19 at the same time as private lenders are turning away….

Public banks have crafted unprecedented responses to allow micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), large businesses, public entities, governing authorities and households time to breathe, time to adjust and time to overcome the worst of the crisis. Typically, this meant offering liquidity with generously reduced rates of interest, preferential repayment terms and eased conditions of repayment. For the most vulnerable in society, public banks offered non-repayable grants.

The editors conclude that public banks offer a path toward democratization (giving society a meaningful say in how financial resources are used) and definancialization (moving away from speculative predatory investment practices toward financing that grows the real economy). For local governments, public banks offer a path to escape monopoly control by giant private financial institutions over public policies.

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

She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Before trekking through open Himalayan valleys, tourists might stroll along Thamel, Kathmandu’s congested quarter of hiker hostels, bakeries and cafes. They’d pass a landscape studded with bookstores, and perhaps pause to flip through glossy picture books and Tibet-wisdom manuals, lingering to inspect storybooks or development reports stacked on higher shelves. On exiting, they’ll pass a rack of 3 or 4 English language dailies.

Only visitors really curious about the how the nation’s citizens think and feel might search out a volume of poetry or a novel by a local writer. If so, they’ll find a surprising number of Nepalis choosing to pen their experiences, their struggles and their dreams in English. 

Nepali prose and poetry in English is of course far less than exists in Nepali language which on its part has grown enormously in recent years. But there’s a correlation between literature in the two languages going back to Nepal’s most widely read and revered poet, Laxmi Prasad Devkota (1909-1959). Although Devkota did not live beyond 50, he penned no fewer than 24 volumes of essays and poetry, including epic poems. His work is recited and discussed by Nepalis young and old today.

Devkota was highly proficient in English as well as learned in Sanskrit and Nepali. Kumari Lama, Assistant Professor of English, Tribhuvan University and a literary critic, speaks fondly of her country’s supreme literary figure: “He was my introduction to English literature; I decided to pursue this field of study as a result of that exposure.”Besides translating other Nepali authors and rendering Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ into Nepali, Devkota composed in English, e.g., ‘Bapu and other sonnets’ in tribute to Mahatma Gandhi.

Devkota was writing and translating seventy-five years ago. Nepal was barely connected to the English-speaking world then, and English was exclusive to privately tutored children of royalty and high officials.

Lecturer, translator and poet Mahesh Paudyal also attributes to Devkota his introduction to English literature. “I read his English essays and poems in my first university course in non-Nepali literature.”

Today we find a new generation of Nepali writers among the ranks of international authors of modern English literature. Kumari Lama highlights Manjushree Thapa and Samrat Upadhyay for pushing the boundaries of Nepali creativity into English. With stories set within Nepal and in the diaspora, these authors attract an enthusiastic Nepali following while also winning a solid western readership. They are joined by Peter Karthak, Shushma Joshi, Sangeeta Rajamajhi, Abhi Subedi, Niranjan Kumar, and Narayan Wangle whose Palpasa Café is translated into no less than 12 languages. Now established in the international literary community their writings offer a compassionate, personalized experience of Nepal which is simply absent in ethnographies, touristic journals and development studies of the country.

Perhaps from Devkota’s inspiration, we find Nepali-language literature and English literature by Nepalis still interconnected. Thapa, Nepal’s most widely published author in English, is also engaged in translations from Nepali to English, e.g. This Country is Yours, a collection of 49 authors.

Online literary platforms feature Nepalis composing in English alongside translations of stories, poems and essays penned in Nepali. Publiknama is one; another is TheGorkhaTimes, recently launched by Paudyal and colleagues. Executive editor Himanshu Kunwar notes that readers access TGT from more than 100 nations.

La.lit literary magazine is a handsome production by Nepalis in the U.K. which features creative writing (including translations) by Nepalis across the world.

Nepal itself hosts venues like Himalayan Readers Corner in Pokhara and Martin Chautari in Kathmandu. The Open Institute directed by writer Muna Gurung and Aahwaan with a focus on women also sponsor literary discussions and workshops in both languages.

Considering the strong Indian presence in Nepal through film and other media, one might have expected India’s celebrated English-language authors to have impacted Nepal in this field. While this may have been so earlier, Ms. Lama and Mr. Paudyal minimize Indian influence today.

Kumari Lama points to domestic political factors behind the groundswell in literature within Nepal. “First, when democracy took hold in 2008, we had an expanded opportunity for free and open dialogue. Second, Nepal’s many indigenous minorities eagerly began writing about their aspirations and history which were earlier suppressed or altogether banned.” Paudyal agrees the nationalist movement that ushered in free speech was a great impetus to creative writing.

Global factors and the internet are impacting Nepal too. “We communicate with sister Asian cultures through English; it’s our common medium with Bangladesh, China, Korea, Japan, and Malaysia. That includes literature,” explains Lama.

As a professor of literature, Lama sees fewer students enrolled in university English Literature programs, whereas more Nepalis seek to master English for economic reasons. Whether they work inside Nepal or have ambitions to study overseas, being able to converse in English is essential.

And if the millions of jobless in search of work in the Arab states or Malaysia know no English when they set out, many return to Nepal with a conversational knowledge of the language.

To appreciate just how embedded and promising English literature in Nepal is today, we can consult Manjushree Thapa’s A Translation Manual: To Bring English Literature to Nepali Readers published in 2002 and Paudyal’s 2017 survey Nepali Literature in English. Finally, Kumari Lama’s 2017 review What they are writing in English offers an excellent comparative critique of authors (and others) discussed above.

Or on your next Himalayan trip, add a Nepali novel to your souvenirs.

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BN Aziz whose anthropological research has focused on the peoples of the Himalayas is the author of the newly published “Yogmaya and Durga Devi: Rebel Women of Nepal”, available on Amazon. 

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March 2, 2021 was the five year anniversary of the murder of Berta Cáceres, who opposed the Agua Zarca dam in Honduras.  That date was less than one month after the deaths of dozens of people from Tehri Dam disaster in Uttarakhand, India.  The two stories together tell us far more about consequences of the insatiable greed of capitalism for more energy than either narrative does by itself.

In addition to being sacred to the indigenous Lenca people of Honduras, the Gualcarque River is a primary source of water for them to grow their food and harvest medicinal plants.  Dams can flood fertile plains and deprive communities of water for livestock and crops.  The Lenca knew what could happen if the company Desarrollos Energéticos SA (DESA) were to build the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam on the Gualcarque.  As Nina Lakhani describes in Who Killed Berta Cáceres?, the La Aurora Dam, which started generating electricity in 2012 “left four miles of the El Zapotal River bone dry and the surrounding forest bare.”

In 2015, Cáceres won the Goldman Environmental Prize for organizing opposition to the Agua Zarca.  She had been a co-founder of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH).  The following year, thousands of Lenca marched to the capital Tegucigalpa demanding schools, clinics, roads and protection of ancestral lands.  Indigenous groups uniting with them included Maya, Chorti, Misquitu, Tolupan, Tawahka and Pech.  Lakhani describes that “From the north coast came the colorfully dressed, drumming Garifunas: Afro-Hondurans who descend from West and Central African, Caribbean, European and Arawak people exiled to Central America by the British after a slave revolt in the late eighteenth century.”

A Garifuna leader, Miriam Miranda remembered that Berta stopped to sketch anti-imperialist murals on the US airbase in Palmerola.  As Berta and Miranda became close during the more than two decades of joint work Berta began to identify with the Garifuna.  She loved going with Miranda to the town of Vallecito to join Garifuna rituals with drums, smoke and dancing while enjoying herb-infused liquor.

She knew that the Garifuna suffered landgrabs parallel to rivergrabs the Lencas experienced.  Lakhani relates how the government ignored the ancestral land claims of the Garifuna as it gave land to “settlers” who sold them to palm oil magnates.  In less than a decade lands held by Garifuna communities plummeted from 200,000 to 400 hectares.

Similarly, in the Bajo Aguán region the government allowed construction of a resort on ancient Garifuna burial sites and ancestral lands. The community was not consulted prior to the landgrab and 150 people died resisting it.

Manufacturing impressions

The dam-building elite had a thorn in its side that threatened the megaprojects.  Due in no small part to 1995 efforts of Berta’s mother Doña Austra, Honduras had signed onto the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention of the International Labor Organization (known as ILO 169).  It guarantees the right of indigenous communities to have “free, prior and informed consultations” for any development affecting their land, culture or way of life.

The first tactic of the elite for getting around this obstacle was to promise enormous benefits such as building roads and schools.  Or else, they claimed that the project would bring electricity for homes, a health clinic, an ambulance, and a flood of jobs.  By the time the project was completed, few or no benefits had materialized.  Who Killed Berta Cáceres? documents what happened in communities that did not fall for empty promises.  For the Honduran Los Encimos dam, the power brokers bused in hundreds of people from neighboring El Salvador to sign a decree favoring the project.  Following an October 2011 town hall meeting when residents voted 401 to 7 against the Agua Zarca dam, the mayor curried favor of the elite by issuing a permit for it two months later.

Representatives of the company owning the future dam, DESA, repeated the absurd claim that they only bought land from willing sellers.  Dam proponents then denounced Berta’s COPINH organization as causing the division.  In other words, the developers were skilled at shouting that project opponents were doing what they, the dam pushers, were in fact doing.  Outside observers would then have difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction.  If these impression management tricks failed to overcome Earth defenders, the method of threats and violence remained.

Threats and hit lists

Berta was rare as she “could understand and analyze local struggles in a global context and had the capacity to unite different movements, urban and rural, teachers and campesinos, indigenous groups and mestizos.”  More than any other reason, this meant that Berta would be targeted by the cabal of business owners, government heads, military brass and foreign investors.

Berta had told Lakhani that “Seventy million people were killed across the continent for our natural resources.”  When a researcher for the Goldman prize committee visited Berta in Tegucigalpa, she asked him what would happen if she died before receiving the prize money, a question no recipient had asked before.  She had been warned not to stay in the same hotel two nights in a row.

Nina Lakhani documents how widespread and intensely grisley the murders in Honduras were.  “Olvin Gustavo García Mejía was widely feared by COPINH.”  He boasted of having a personal hit list with Berta’s name on it.  In March 2015, Olvin used his machete to chop off the fingers of a dam opponent.

Even more revealing were eyewitness reports to Lakhani from First Sergeant Rodrigo Cruz who saw a military hit list which included Berta.  Cruz had survived a specialist training so grueling that only 8 of 200 completed it. The graduation ceremony included killing a dog, eating the raw meat, and getting a hug from the commander.

On one mission Cruz reported being “ordered to shovel decomposing human remains into sacks which they took to an isolated forest reserve, doused them in diesel, petrol and rubbish and burned.”  At Corocito he saw “torture instruments, chains, hammers and nails, no people, but fresh clots of blood.”  During his Trujillo mission “naval colleagues handed over plastic bags containing human remains.  Later that night they tossed them into a river heaving with crocodiles.”  After seeing Berta’s name on a hit list belonging to his lieutenant, Cruz was sent on an extensive leave.  When he heard that Berta was dead, he fled from Honduras fearing that he himself would be murdered.

The Honduran elite discovered another weapon for its arsenal against environmental defenders: criminalization.  During a 2020 interview with InSight Crime, Lakhani reported a pattern suggestively similar to that practiced in the US and many other countries: “People are still being killed but really the main weapon being used currently is criminalization.  There’s so much fear involved, and it can really break up and silence a movement. All of your energy and resources go to trying to stay out of prison.”

2009 coup as a game changer

On January 27, 2006 Manuel Zelaya was inaugurated as president of Honduras as an advocate of modest reforms such as such as reforestation, small business assistance, reduction of fossil fuels and an end to open pit mining.  But even these baby steps were too much for the country’s increasingly corrupt elites, who had the military march him out of his home in pajamas and into exile on June 28, 2009.  As bad as the situation was before 2009, the coup intensified the violence.

Though Barack Obama acknowledged that the coup was a coup, his underling Hillary Clinton quickly altered the official rhetoric, claiming that it was not a coup.  She explained “in her 2014 memoir, Hard Choices, the US ensured that elections could take place before the ousted president, Manuel Zelaya, was restored to office.”  This helped the coup ensure that Zelaya and his tiny improvements would not show their face again.

The economic consequences of the coup were an avalanche of projects attacking the country’s land, water, air and indigenous cultures.  The congress rushed to approve them without studies or oversight required by Honduran law.  During the next eight years, almost 200 mining projects received a nod.  Lakhani records how, during one late night session in September 2010 congressional president Juan Orlando Hernández “sanctioned 40 hydroelectric dams without debate, consultation or adequate environmental impact studies.”  John Perry wrote in CounterPunch that “Cáceres received a leaked list of rivers, including the Gualcarque, that were to be secretly ‘sold off’ to produce hydroelectricity. The Honduran congress went on to approve dozens of such projects without any consultation with affected communities. Berta’s campaign to defend the rivers began on July 26, 2011 when she led the Lenca-based COPINH in a march on the presidential palace.”

Dubious partners of green energy

So-called “green” energy companies profited at least as much as other corporations from the great sell-off of Honduran treasures.  Lakhani’s research reveals that on June 2, 2010, the National Electric Company approved contracts for eight renewable energy corporations, including DESA, the owners of the Agua Zarca dam project.  Though it had no track record of constructing anything, it received permits, a sales contract, and congressional approval.  A 50-year license for the dam sailed through without any free, prior or informed consent from the Lenca people.  Lakhani also documents that January 16, 2014 was a particularly good day

“… for solar and wind entrepreneurs as congress approved 30 energy contracts for 21 companies in one quick sitting.  There was no bidding process… After the rivers were all sold, they started on wind and solar contracts…  Honduras boasts more than 200 tax exemption laws, which cost state coffers around $1.5 bn each year.  Renewable energy entrepreneurs have benefited enormously, saving a whopping $1.4 bn between 2012 and 2016.”

Even the World Bank had its finger in the pie, despite its requirement to give socially responsible loans.  It sought to cover up its role in Agua Zarca by channeling funds through intermediaries.

Lakhani also relates stories of (a) how six members of congress embezzled $879,000 using a fake environmental group, Planeta Verde (Green Planet); (b) connections between a criminal family and the solar company Proderssa; and, (c) the link between the solar plant in Choluteca and Douglas Bustillo, who was sentenced to 30 years for his role in the murder of Berta.

Jorge Cuéllar writes that, “DESA’s Agua Zarca hydroelectric project, like similar megaprojects, effectively reconfigures communities into sacrifice zones for insatiable energy needs.”  “Alternative” energy (Alt E) is just one more category of energy which is added to the mix with fossil fuels.  Increases in Alt E are not replacing fossil fuels, but are mainly being used to create feelings of do-goody.  In cases where there is a preference for Alt E, it is due to short term profit.  As Lakhani explains, “African palms were the most profitable crops because the oil was sold to North America and Europe for biofuel and could be traded in the carbon credit market.”

A farcical trial

On March 2, 2016 Berta Cáceres was brutally murdered in her hometown of La Esperanza in western Honduras.  The trial that followed was a transparent cover up.  As Vijay Prashad notes, none of the executives of DESA, the dam company responsible for the murder, were charged with the crime.  Lakhani reported in the InSight Crime interview that “The crime was never framed as political murder, as gender-based violence or a hate crime against indigenous people despite the vitriolic and racist language that was used in phone chats about the Lenca people. There was a decision to make sure that anybody political, and the military and police as institutions, would be completely left out.”

Adam Isacson hit the nail on the head in his blog when describing those found guilty as “… just trigger-pullers, mid-level planners, or scapegoats… They are employed by Honduras’s elite, but they aren’t of the elite. They’re on the make, and have found a rare path to social mobility in Honduras, beyond gang membership and drug trafficking.”

Lakhani’s own account reflects how bizarre and contrived the trial was.  She recalls that “My request to read the admitted documents was denied. ‘Yes, it’s a public trial, yes, the documents are public, no, you can’t read them,’ said the court archivist.”  She heard international observers being told “Don’t worry, people will be convicted” as if it was common knowledge that the outcome had been prescripted.   It was yet another exercise in impression management.

US role

Though there is no evidence that the US directly planned and executed the 2009 coup, its role has been to ensure that the coup remains intact.  As Isacson asks, “Why did 1 in every 37 citizens of Honduras end up detained at the US-Mexico border in 2019, after fleeing all the way across Mexico? Why did 30,000 more Hondurans petition for asylum in Mexico that same year?”  People are fleeing Honduras in such numbers in large part because the coup gang has shown that if it can get away with murdering someone as well known as Berta, it can murder anyone.

In the New York Journal of Books, Dan Beeton observes that “authors of the assassination have yet to be brought to justice. The US government could insist that this happen; it could pressure Honduran authorities to find and arrest them, but it has not…” In fact, Lakhani points out that the US is doing the opposite by persecuting those trying to escape from the violence: “… in 2010 US border patrol detained 13,580 Honduran nationals.  The numbers jumped to over 91,000 in 2014 under Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama.”

Though the US insists that it does not train the executioners in the Honduran militarized police, it does not deny that it trains the trainers – many of torturers in Central America attended the notorious School of the Americas.  Even if the US were to withdraw its support from individual criminals in Honduras, they would be replaced by clones who would preserve the post-coup structure and power.  Control was successfully passed from a mildly reformist Zelaya government to a criminal extractionist network which permeates state and corporate institutions.  With aide and comfort from the US, the Honduran energy mob has reinvented itself.

Coming to Uttarakhand

The story of dams in India may seem highly different from events on the other side of the globe.  But lurking deep beneath surface appearances an eerie consistency links the two.  One similarity between the widely separated areas is that, as in Honduras, the Indian government has aggressively pursued a development strategy of mines, logging and hydro-power.  This often results in tribal people suffering the disruption of their farming systems and relocation.

On February 7, 2021 a deluge washed away two power plants of the Tehri Dam on the Bhagirathi River in the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand, India.  At least 32 people were found dead and more than 150 were missing.  The event barely made it to US media but has been extensively covered by the progressive Indian online publication Countercurrents.  With 34 people trapped, “Rescue workers armed with heavy construction equipment, drones and even sniffer dogs were struggling to penetrate the one-and-a-half-mile long tunnel that filled with ice-cold water, mud, rocks and debris.”

A pic of the Tehri dam taken from a moving bus… the Tehri dam on the Bhagirathi river is a man made wonder, and is the largest rock and earth fill dam in Asia. The reservoir of the dam drowned the District headquarters of Tehri, which have now been shifted to New Tehri (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Years before construction of the Tehri Dam began, there was controversy regarding if it should even be built.  Bharat Dogra, a regular contributor to Countercurrents, wrote that “the Environmental Appraisal Committee (River Valley Projects) of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India … has come to the unanimous conclusion that the Tehri Dam Project, as proposed, should not be taken up as it does not merit environmental clearance.”

The region has a history of dam disasters:

“At least 29 workers were killed in a serious accident at the Tehri dam site (in Uttarakhand) on August 2 2004… On 14 February 2010 six workers died and 16 were seriously injured in Kinnaur district (Himachal Pradesh) when stones and boulders destabilized by the blasting work carried out for dam construction… Over 154 workers were killed in a span of 12 years, as over one worker was killed every month during the construction of the Nagarjunasagar dam.”

Actually existing dangers in the Himalayas 

Several factors compound dangers of dams which are built in hazard-prone region of the Himalayas.  First is the observation by seismologist Prof. James N. Brune that “No large rock-fill dam of the Tehri type has ever been tested by the shaking that an earthquake in this area could produce… Given the number of persons who live downstream, the risk factor is also extreme.”  Second, the reservoirs created by the dams can themselves increase the likelihood of quakes, a phenomenon called reservoir induced seismicity.  Third is the huge tectonic plate below India called the “Indian Plate.”

As economist Bharat Jhunjhunwala explains, “The rotation of the earth is causing this plate to continually move northward just like any matter moves to the top in a centrifugal machine. The Indian Plate crashes into the Tibetan Plate as it moves to the north. The pressure between these two plates is leading to the continual rise of the Himalayas and also earthquakes in Uttarakhand in particular.”   The result is an earthquake in the region roughly every 10 years.

Which of these was the primary cause of the February 2021 dam disaster?  None of them.  According to public health specialist Dr. Anamika Roy, the most likely cause was “retreating glaciers which result in the formation of proglacial lakes, which are often bounded by their sediments and stones, and therefore any breach in the boundaries may lead to a large stream of water rushing down the streams and lakes resulting in a flood down streams.”  Dr. Roy thinks that climate change is a leading factor in the formation of proglacial lakes.

Professor of glaciology and hydrology Dr. Farooq Azam suggests that a hanging glacier falling from 5600 meters could have caused a rock and ice avalanche, leading to the dam accident.  Taken together, these factors indicate that the Himalayan region is a very bad place to build a dam.  We might even say that the reason for the Tehri dam disaster was that the dam was built.

Social problems of dam disasters 

Bharat Dogra details a host of problems for those constructing dams in very remote areas such as the Himalayas:

• First, a large portion of those constructing dams are migrant workers who are less familiar with floods and other risks than are local residents;
• Second, even if migrant workers begin to understand on-site risks, they have little or no ability to find other employment if companies order them to continue at their jobs;
• Third, migrant workers typically live in temporary housing that offers little protection;
• Fourth, not being near to family or friends, they have little ability to go to others with health problems, special needs, distress, or risk; and,
• Fifth, it is easier for contractors to suppress information concerning accidents so that workers or surviving families may not receive compensatory payments.

Common to all of these issues is the fact that laboring in remote parts of the world leaves workers out of the pubic eye, meaning that they can easily be ignored or quickly forgotten after a tragedy.

A different type of tragedy results from the release of water from the dam reservoir.  The two types are (a) routine releases, which are typically scheduled to occur during peak demand for hydropower generation, and (b) emergency releases, which occur during heavy rain or other high water events.  Release disasters are typically due to emergency releases.  But, on April 11, 2005 thousands of pilgrims attending a religious fair at Dharaji in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh were in the water when 150 were swept away by a huge water surge, causing the death of 65.  This was caused by a routine water release from the Indira Sagar dam on the Narmada River.  Bad judgment during routine operation of a dam can be as deadly as bad judgment regarding where to build a dam.

Dams in the time of exponential growth

It is an obscenity to call hydro-power “clean” when it is so closely tied to destruction of aquatic life, threats to land-dwelling flora and fauna, displacement of indigenous people and destruction of their culture, murder of Earth defenders, and exploitation of workers.  It is a double obscenity to claim that hydro-power is an “alternative” to fossil fuels when dams can produce more greenhouse gases than does coal.  Not only do their reservoirs produce methane by rotting organic matter, dams interfere with the ability of downstream ecosystems to remove carbon and they require massive amounts of fossil fuel for the manufacture of concrete and steel for their construction and removal of their debris when they reach the end of their life cycle.

Nor are dams “renewable.” They do not last nearly as long as the rivers they disrupt.  Concrete and steel eventually rot, which leads to construction of yet another dam.

A core problem of dams is their exponential growth during the 21^st century as it becomes increasingly obvious that they can more rapidly replace fossil fuel energy than can solar and wind power.  The climate crisis is fundamentally due to the uncontrollable growth of capitalism, which requires exponential expansion of energy production.

Exponential expansion means that every year requires not just more energy but a larger quantity of new energy than the year before.  Eternal economic growth was the root cause behind the murder of Berta Cáceres and the hundreds or thousands of other Earth defenders in Honduras and across the globe.  The unquenchable thirst for energy is why India foreshadows a world building an increasing number of dams where dams should not be built.

To satisfy their need for energy, corporations first grab the low hanging fruit.  Energy fruit can be “low hanging” because it is in an extremely good location, and/or current land owners are eager for the development, and/or those living on the land can be easily swayed.  The nature of first picking that which is lowest hanging means that, once it is gone, the energy corporations will go to the next lowest hanging fruit.  As time goes by, capital will get closer and closer to the most difficult-to-pick fruit until the last drop of energy is sucked from the planet.  Obviously, having less corrupt politicians and an educated and organized people is much better.  But this will not stop them from being victimized – it will only place them later in line.

Is “free, prior and informed consent” real or an illusion?  As time passes, the commitment to infinite energy growth intensifies pressure to falsify consent.  What is presented to poor people throughout the world who do not have enough to feed and clothe their families is the question “Do you voluntarily choose to improve your life by giving consent to this project which will destroy the lives of your grandchildren or great-grandchildren after you are gone or do you chose to watch your children go without schools and medical care right now?  Thank you so much for your free and prior consent to this dam/wind farm/solar array.”

There are essential lessons to learn from the murder of environmentalists and dam collapses.  Capital must bring more violence to communities when using less violence for building dams is not as effective.  Capital must build in increasingly unsafe locations after the safest locations are used up.  If dams which threaten the fewest number of aquatic species are built first, then corporate expansion dictates that dams which threaten more riparian extinctions are next in line.  Capital must move into increasingly biodiverse environments after less biodiverse environments are no longer available.

This is true for the construction of dams just as it is true for fossil fuels.  It is also true for the location of solar arrays and the location of wind farms.  It is likewise the case for mining the massive number of minerals that go into the production of various type of energy.  This is why “alternative” energy cannot be “clean” or “renewable.”  Perhaps it is time to realize that there is only one form of “clean” energy – less energy.

A webinar at 7 pm CT on March 10, 2021 will honor the life of Berta Cáceres with a panel featuring Nina Lakhani, author of Who Killed Berta Cáceres?: Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet.  Email the address of the author below for details.

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Don Fitz ([email protected]) is on the Editorial Board of Green Social Thought where a version of this article was first published.  He was the 2016 candidate of the Missouri Green Party for Governor.  His book on Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution has been available since June 2020.

Featured image is CC BY 3.0

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Let’s not mince words.

Biden and hardliners around him are like their predecessors.

They’re hostile toward virtually everything just societies hold dear — notably democracy the way it should be.

The US and West have fantasy versions, the real thing virtually banned.

Established by Hugo Chavez in 1999, continued by Nicolas Maduro, Venezuelans have governance of, by, and for everyone equitably — social democracy.

US policymakers consider it a threat of a good example — why they’ve gone all out to replace it with fascist tyranny short of hot war that remains an ominous possibility.

Since establishment of Venezuelan social democracy, US regimes from the Clinton co-presidency to Obama/Biden, then Trump, and now Biden/Harris aim to return the country to client state status.

They seek control over its vast oil resources, the world’s largest.

In 2013, Obama/Biden killed Chavez. Poisoned or infected with cancer causing substances, four major surgeries in 18 months couldn’t save him.

At the time, William Blum explained that the CIA worked diligently to develop substances that could kill without leaving a trace.”

“I Personally believe that Hugo Chavez was murdered by the United States,” he said.

Coup plots against him and Maduro failed. Other dirty tricks worked no better, including intermittent, US orchestrated, street violence.

Virtually everything US regimes threw at Venezuela to eliminate its model social democracy failed.

Further attempts are virtually certain. The US is hellbent to transform all sovereign independent nations into subservient client states.

It’s likely just a matter of time before another attempted regime change plot surfaces.

At the same time, endless US war by other means continues.

In 2015, Obama/Biden declared Bolivarian social democracy an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States (sic).”

On Wednesday, Biden/Harris reaffirmed the above, saying the following:

“(C)ircumstances described in Executive Order 13692 (2015), and subsequent executive orders issued with respect to Venezuela, have not improved (sic), and they continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States (sic).”

“Therefore in accordance with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act (50 USC 1622(d), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13692 (sic).”

Bolivarian Venezuela prioritizes peace, stability, and cooperative relations with other countries — threatening no one, surely not the USA, armed and dangerous with nuclear and other super-weapons.

Biden’s new executive order maintains a US state of war by other means on the Bolivarian Republic.

No US national emergency exists with Venezuela or any other countries. No US enemies exist.

So time and again they’re invented by US policymakers to justify what’s unjustifiable under international and US constitutional law.

On March 2, Tony Blinken’s spokesman Ned Price said the following:

His boss spoke with widely despised, usurper-in-waiting, self-declared Venezuelan president with no legitimacy Guaido.

“Blinken stressed the importance of a return to democracy in Venezuela through free and fair elections (sic).”

After Maduro’s PSUV party won an overwhelming legislative majority last December with over two-thirds public support — a landslide triumph — the EU withdrew support for Guaido as (self-declared) interim president (with no legitimacy).

Jimmy Carter called Venezuela’s electoral process “the best in the world” for good reason. Elections when held are scrupulously open, free and fair.

When Maduro was reelected in May 2018, over 150 members of the International Electoral Accompaniment Mission said the following:

“The technical and professional trustworthiness and independence of the National Electoral Council of Venezuela are uncontestable.”

The Council of Electoral Experts of Latin America, one of the observer groups, said “results communicated by the National Electoral Council reflect the will of the voters who decided to participate in the electoral process.”

Similar assessments follow all Bolivarian elections.

They shame US fantasy democracy — a totalitarian police state, masquerading as democratic.

According to Price, Blinken is “increas(ing) multilateral pressure… for a peaceful, democratic transition (sic).”

Longstanding US policy calls for eliminating Bolivarian social democracy, wanting Venezuela transformed into a vassal state under US-installed puppet rule.

The above is how the scourge of US imperialism operates worldwide.

All nations free from its control are targeted for regime change — wars by hot and/or other means its favored strategies.

Illegal sanctions are weapons of war by other means.

Blinken said they’ll remain in place to continue US maximum pressure on the country.

Venezuelan social democracy conflicts with US imperial aims to dominate planet earth, control its resources, and exploit its people everywhere.

As long as Bolivarianism exists, both right wings of the US war party won’t likely cease trying to eliminate it.

*

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

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

“How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/how-wall-street-fleeces-america/

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/banker-occupation-waging-financial-war-on-humanity/

Featured image: Protest against U.S. intervention on Venezuela, in front of the White House, Washington DC. (Credit)

“If they’re going to take the next step on their plan to re-engineer both the financial system and global governance with it, you needed all sorts of actions in the economy that would be very difficult to justify politically through another financial crisis. So, rather than have a financial crisis they decided to have a health care crisis!”

– Catherine Austin Fitts from this week’s interview

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The Real Agenda

Throughout the world, we have seen nearly a year of devastating hardships facing broad sectors of the global population, people confined to their homes (if they have one), people compelled by law to going to any indoor location outside the home wearing a diaper over their faces, social distancing, businesses in large masses going under, and now facing denial of certain privileges if you don’t get the experimental vaccine shot.

Politicians, chief public health officers, and media have all normalized these practices as being what ‘science’ demands of our citizens. The alternative is utter devastation of people across the planet. And the people by and large have gone along with it.

Some scientists have observed that SARS-CoV-2 is not the massive killer everyone accuses it of being. The RT-PCR test was exposed eventually even the the World Health Organization of elevating numbers of false positives among case loads. ‘Experts’ have, suspiciously, equated dying with the SARS-COV-2 as equivalent to dying because of the SARS-COV-2 to the point where even if a person infected died in an automobile accident, he is placed on the COVID-19 list. Meanwhile, the tragic consequences to life and limb affected by the lockdowns are taking an even more dynamic toll on people everywhere. [1]

These facts and arguments are amply documented on past episodes of this program over the course of the last few months, and throughout Global Research, including the e-book by Professor Michel Chossudovsky.

So the rationality of the chief personnel instructing the public to abandon their rights in the name of protecting public health is ….well….missing!

Further, it is absolutely untrue that the mass of humanity is equally abandoning certain privileges to fight the virus as a single species. According to the BBC, the ‘Billionaire Club’ have seen their collective wealth soar by as much as 27% on average. And according to the BBC, the big pharmaceutical corporations have truly been cashing in on the new fascination with ever before tested experimental vaccine against an ailment that is not as harmful as they claim.

The question we are going to explore in this part of our investigation, is into the subject of why this immense spectacle was orchestrated. For this discussion we are very honored to have two individuals with us.

In our first half hour, we are joined by the Catherine Austin Fitts. She has a background as an investment banker, investment adviser and government official. For the duration of her interview, she explains that COVID is a cover for a major move by the G7 Central Banks to re-organize their financial systems under a plan called ‘Going Direct Reset.’ This would result in a major flush of economic wealth upwards, and bring in new technologies that would resemble a return to control of the mass population. This all masked by an effort to ‘protect public health.’

In our second half hour, we are introduced to a remarkable theory by psychologist and psychopathologist Dr. Mila Alečković-Bataille. She examines the history of psychological manipulation and the relevance to the current crisis.

Catherine Austin Fitts is the president of Solari, Inc., publisher of the Solari Report, and managing member of Solari Investment Advisory Services, LLC. She served as managing director and member of the board of directors of the Wall Street investment bank Dillon, Read & Co. Inc., as Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Bush Administration. She blogs at solari.com

Dr. Mila Alečković-Bataille is a professor of psychopathology and psychology. She holds a doctorate from The Sorbonne, University in Paris. She has written over 100 scientific papers in several languages, as well as several books. And she is a member of the World Society of Psychopathology of Expression and Art Therapy. And In 2015 she was the President of the International Congress of Psychopathology.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 307)

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

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Notes:

1. www.globalresearch.ca/the-second-wave-destroying-peoples-lives-global-coup-detat/5728207

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