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“We foreign bankers are in favor of free markets when we’re out to make a buck and believe in the state when we are about to lose a buck.” (Anonymous foreign banker(1)) 

The Success of Mixed Economies 

A full discussion of how rich countries developed would require a whole book, so I shall simply highlight a few basic principles. The world’s advanced nations have achieved their current level of development using what is known as a mixed economy. This has three main parts.  First, huge investment by the government in public services, such as education, healthcare and social safety nets. Second, a system of trade, where private businesses sell goods and services to each other, the public and the government. Third, government support for big business. This post will focus on this third part. The mainstream media tend to focus on the role of private businesses in creating wealth, whilst downplaying the other two parts. This is propaganda. As we shall see, the role of government is crucial. 

There is an additional reason for the success of advanced nations. That is, their role in ‘stealing’ from poor countries. I will not discuss that in this post.

The Biggest Welfare Scroungers are Big Business 

A subsidy is when a government provides some assistance to a business. This can take many forms. Giving a company a tax-break is a subsidy. If a government does not charge tax on aviation fuel, this is a subsidy to the airline industry. Purchases of weapons by the government subsidise many high-tech industries. Sending your soldiers to protect oil pipelines is a subsidy to the oil industry. When the US and British governments lend money to poor countries and insist that it has to be spent on exports from US or British companies, this is a subsidy to those companies. Government spending on research which leads to profitable products sold by private companies is a huge subsidy. Governments in rich countries have subsidised almost every major corporation at some point.(2)

It is estimated that the US government spends at least $800 billion dollars subsidising the biggest US corporations each year.(3) It has helped to finance the development of the aerospace, biotech, nuclear, electronics, synthetics, space communications, mineral exploration, computing and many other industries. The government, and therefore the taxpayer, covers much of the costs and takes many of the risks, then hands the profits to private companies. Many of the recipients of these subsidies dominate their industries, make big profits and pay large amounts to shareholders and senior executives. America’s oil, gas and mining corporations are among the most profitable in the world, yet they receive tax breaks and other subsidies worth billions of dollars. The big agricultural companies, particularly rice, wheat, corn, cotton and soybeans, receive some of the biggest subsidies, totaling approximately $30 billion each year in the US. One-tenth of the farms, usually the biggest, get three-quarters of the subsidies. Similarly, studies of European farming show that most of the subsidies go to a small number of the biggest farms.(4)

In Britain, a 2013 report entitled ‘The Great Train Robbery’(5) showed how private rail companies took big subsidies from the government and paid substantial amounts to executives and shareholders. The billionaire, Richard Branson, received almost £3billion in subsidies for the West Coast Line between 1997 and 2012. Shareholders took over £500 million in dividends. Without the subsidies, the companies would have lost money. In fact there are additional, hidden subsidies, that amount to £30 billion for all of the train companies.

Most advanced nations have similar systems of government support for big business. We saw this in banking, where banks in many countries were bailed out by their governments in 2008 because the financial system was in danger of collapsing, and some of the biggest companies were in danger of going bust due to their gambling and fraudulent activities in the previous few years. This is like an insurance policy valued at over $40 billion per year in the US (maybe much more), which allows the banks to take extreme risks, knowing that someone else will pay for it when it all goes wrong. Many of the world’s biggest businesses would have gone bust at some point in the past if they had not been bailed out by their government. The academic, Noam Chomsky, uses the expression ‘really existing capitalism’(6) to describe this system based on government support for big business. Others use the term ‘crony capitalism’.

Business as an Extension of Government 

The connection between governments and some of the biggest corporations is so strong that it can sometimes be hard to know where one ends and the other begins. We have already seen in earlier posts that personnel move seamlessly between business and government. The software that enables Google to search through trillions of items on the internet is the same technology that enables the US spy agency, the NSA, to illegally analyse trillions of items of electronic communications.(7) The US government provides huge assistance with research to help make US companies dominant, and government-to-government lobbying to enable them to gain a foothold in other countries. Many big companies obtain guaranteed contracts with the government. Noam Chomsky has explained that these contracts are yet another form of government subsidy.(8) This even involves funding things for which there is initially no demand, such as early electronic components, like transistors after world war 2. This is particularly noticeable with military contracts, aeroplanes, and technology companies. As we saw in earlier posts about the weapons industry, governments often overpay for these contracts by large amounts.

Chomsky has been writing and speaking about the role of government in supporting big business for many years, but has been mostly ignored by the mainstream media. However, Mariana Mazzucato wrote a book in 2013 called ‘The Entrepreneurial State’,(9) which has attracted mainstream attention. In it, she debunks the myth that private business is the source of most innovation, pointing out, for example, that in the US, 75% of new drugs come from state-funded investment and research.

Neoliberalism – Crony Capitalism is being used to destroy the US, Britain and many other countries 

The close relationship between government and corporations can take many forms. If governments choose to use their power to limit the worst excesses of business, then business can be forced to operate in a way that primarily benefits society. This has been the case for many years in some European countries, and perhaps Britain and the US were closer to this system during the years 1945-1970.

At the other extreme, government can be ‘captured’ by business. We have seen in earlier posts, about corruption and lobbying, that big companies bribe governments, particularly in the US, to manipulate policy. The extreme system that has developed is usually known as neoliberalism. The key aspects of neoliberalism are as follows:

• Huge global companies pursue their own profits, irrespective of the downsides to society.
• They have too much influence over politics, so the government helps them extract ever more wealth from the economy.
• They have the power to exploit customers, suppliers, staff, governments and the environment.
• They effectively operate outside the law. They are able to commit crime after crime with no punishment worse than a fine.

The US and Britain in the 21^st Century are examples of this type of extreme system, and some other advanced nations are heading in this direction. President Trump and his corporate cronies were openly rigging the economy to benefit themselves. In Britain in 2020, there was widespread evidence of corruption in the awarding of contracts for personal protective equipment in hospitals. The more neoliberal Britain and the US become, the more wealth the rich are able to extract, and the more problems we see. For example, millions of people were already using food banks before 2020, and that number has increased hugely during the Coronavirus lockdowns.(10) More and more people are finding it difficult to make ends meet, whilst the wealth of the world’s richest people is increasing dramatically.   

Even the most ardent supporters of capitalism, such as Milton Friedman, believed that companies had to operate without deception or fraud, and should conform to the basic rules of society according to the law and to ethical custom.(11) Mainstream commentators, such as the former governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, have commented on how the relationship between the government and big business has changed for the worse.(12) The extreme focus on profit (which some people call the ‘greed economy’) is destroying our societies.

Extreme economic systems do not work 

All over the world, those countries that have neglected government provision of basic services have fared badly. Governments in South America and Africa were ‘encouraged’ to spend very little on basic services (discussed in later posts) with disastrous consequences for the poorest parts of their populations. The same is true in Greece, where the government has been forced to cut basic services (this is known as austerity) since 2010.(13)

Other countries that focused too much on the government control of the economy, whilst neglecting private businesses (sometimes described as communist) were only partly successful. Russia before 1989 is a good example. It provided education, healthcare, homes and jobs for almost everyone, but the variety of consumer goods available in Russia was much less than in Western nations. British and American television frequently showed Russians queuing for bread, but people in Russia in the 1980s were surprised to discover that there were homeless people in New York. They were so surprised that they thought it must be propaganda by their government.(14)

It was recognised many years ago that extreme economic systems do not work very well. In 1953 an influential report stated “Both capitalism and communism in their raw forms had failed.”(15) The evidence suggests that there is no single, best economic system. Each country’s economy is different from every other country, and any one country’s economy needs to evolve and adapt over time as circumstances change.

Benign Government and Industrialisation Is The Key 

Real wealth begins when governments ensure that everyone has food, a home, healthcare, education, energy, clean water and sanitation, social safety nets, a fire service, the rule of law and equal rights for everyone. There are then two main ideas that have enabled nations to become extremely prosperous in the last few hundred years. The first is industrialisation. This means replacing human and animal labour with machines. The second is specialisation. This means getting each worker to do a single task over and over again very efficiently, and is associated with production lines in factories. These ideas are not directly related to capitalism. They have all been used in communist countries. Private companies are very good at providing lots of consumer goods, and allow people to experiment with products and business ideas, but they are not the most important ingredient in the functioning of an advanced nation. As we will see in later posts, they have a poor track record in getting people out of poverty.

Mainstream Journalists and Economics Lecturers Don’t Understand that the Economic System in Britain and the US is Crony Capitalism 

When people use the term ‘capitalism’, they give the impression that it is a well-defined system. In fact it is a general term meaning the private (as opposed to government) ownership of business, and the right of those with money to make profits. There have been big debates about whether private businesses should be able to own essential industries such as the water supply, or whether those industries should be controlled by the government. There have also been debates about what the laws should be concerning how those businesses operate.

However, those debates tend to present private companies as separate from government, and to ignore the real-world role of governments helping those companies to make profits. Executives and shareholders of the biggest companies do not want you to understand how really existing capitalism works. They want you to believe that big companies are dynamic risk-takers who deserve immense rewards if they are successful. Most mainstream journalists (and many economics lecturers) writing about capitalism have fallen for this propaganda, and repeat it themselves with little questioning. They are aware that crony capitalism exists in other countries, but they fail to understand how widespread it is in the US and Britain.

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This article was first posted at medium.com/elephantsintheroom

Rod Driver is a part-time academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking modern-day US and British propaganda, and explaining war, terrorism, economics and poverty, without the nonsense in the mainstream media. 

Sources

Noam Chomsky, ‘Can human civilization survive really existing capitalism’, talk given at University College, Dublin, 2013, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uuYjUxf6Uk 

Notes

1) George Hatch,’Argentina’s banking woes aren’t likely to lead to system’s collapse, experts say’, Wall Street Journal, May 24, 1985 

2) Ruigrock and Van Tulder, cited in Deconstructing Laissez-Faire, at www-tech.mit.edu/V120/N1/col1guest.1c.html

3) Mark Zepezauer, Take The Rich Off Welfare

4) Crispin Dowler and Lawrence Carter, Common Agricultural Policy: Rich List receive millions in EU subsidies’, Greenpeace, 29 Sep 2016, at https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2016/09/29/common-agricultural-policy-millions-eu-subsidies-go-richest-landowners/

5) Aditya Chakrabortty, ‘The truth about Richard Branson’s Virgin Rail profits’, theGuardian, 10 Jun2013, at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/10/truth-richard-branson-virgin-rail-profits 

6) Noam Chomsky, ‘Can civilization survive really existing capitalism’, 2013 University College Dublin Philosophy Society, 3 April 2013, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uuYjUxf6Uk

Some writers have labeled this system as ‘corporatism’, although the exact meaning of the term is debated.

7) Julian Assange, When Google Met Wikileaks, 2014

8) Chomsky – talk Can human civilization survive really existing capitalism – 2013

9) Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths, 2013

10) Danielle Zoellner, Americans join mile-long queues at food banks across the US as thousands face hunger during pandemic, Independent, 25 Nov 2020, at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-food-banks-thanksgiving-poverty-b1761426.html

https://www.statista.com/statistics/382695/uk-foodbank-users/

11) Peter Prevos and Ian Watson, ‘Milton Friedman on Corporate Social Responsibility’, Lucid Manager, 16 July 2020, at https://lucidmanager.org/management/milton-friedman-corporate-social-responsibility/ 

12) Mark Carney, ‘How we get what we value – From Moral to Market Sentiments’, The Reith Lectures, at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000py8t

Mark cites Thomas Hobbes 

13) Oxfam, The True Cost of Austerity and Inequality: Greece case study, Sep 2013, at https://www-cdn.oxfam.org/s3fs-public/file_attachments/cs-true-cost-austerity-inequality-greece-120913-en_0.pdf

14) Anelaukas, V. (1999) Discovering America As It Is, Clarity Press (For an insight into Russian perceptions of the US)

15) R. Dahl and C. Lindblom, ‘Politics, Economy and Welfare: Planning and Politico-Economic Systems Resolved into Basic Social Processes’, cited in David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p.10

Featured image is from Black Agenda Report

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This article was originally published on Asia Times.

Future historians may register it as the day when usually unflappable Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov decided he had had enough:

We are getting used to the fact that the European Union are trying to impose unilateral restrictions, illegitimate restrictions and we proceed from the assumption at this stage that the European Union is an unreliable partner.

Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, on an official visit to Moscow, had to take it on the chin.

Lavrov, always the perfect gentleman, added, “I hope that the strategic review that will take place soon will focus on the key interests of the European Union and that these talks will help to make our contacts more constructive.”

He was referring to the EU heads of state and government’s summit at the European Council next month, where they will discuss Russia. Lavrov harbors no illusions the “unreliable partners” will behave like adults.

Yet something immensely intriguing can be found in Lavrov’s opening remarks in his meeting with Borrell: “The main problem we all face is the lack of normalcy in relations between Russia and the European Union – the two largest players in the Eurasian space. It is an unhealthy situation, which does not benefit anyone.”

The two largest players in the Eurasian space (italics mine). Let that sink in. We’ll be back to it in a moment.

As it stands, the EU seems irretrievably addicted to worsening the “unhealthy situation”. European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen memorably botched the Brussels vaccine game. Essentially, she sent Borrell to Moscow to ask for licensing rights for European firms to produce the Sputnik V vaccine – which will soon be approved by the EU.

And yet Eurocrats prefer to dabble in hysteria, promoting the antics of NATO asset and convicted fraudster Navalny – the Russian Guaido.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, under the cover of “strategic deterrence”, the head of the US STRATCOM, Admiral Charles Richard, casually let it slip that “there is a real possibility that a regional crisis with Russia or China could escalate quickly to a conflict involving nuclear weapons, if they perceived a conventional loss would threaten the regime or state.”

So the blame for the next – and final – war is already apportioned to the “destabilizing” behavior of Russia and China. It’s assumed they will be “losing” – and then, in a fit of rage, will go nuclear. The Pentagon will be no more than a victim; after all, claims Mr. STRATCOM, we are not “stuck in the Cold War”.

STRATCOM planners could do worse than read crack military analyst Andrei Martyanov, who for years has been on the forefront detailing how the new hypersonic paradigm – and not nuclear weapons – has changed the nature of warfare.

After a detailed technical discussion, Martyanov shows how “the United States simply has no good options currently. None. The less bad option, however, is to talk to Russians and not in terms of geopolitical BS and wet dreams that the United States, somehow, can convince Russia “to abandon” China – US has nothing, zero, to offer Russia to do so. But at least Russians and Americans may finally settle peacefully this “hegemony” BS between themselves and then convince China to finally sit as a Big Three at the table and finally decide how to run the world. This is the only chance for the US to stay relevant in the new world.”

The Golden Horde imprint

As much as the chances are negligible of the EU getting a grip on the “unhealthy situation” with Russia, there’s no evidence what Martyanov outlined will be contemplated by the US Deep State.

The path ahead seems ineluctable: perpetual sanctions; perpetual NATO expansion alongside Russia’s borders; the build up of a ring of hostile states around Russia; perpetual US interference on Russian internal affairs – complete with an army of fifth columnists; perpetual, full spectrum information war.

Lavrov is increasingly making it crystal clear that Moscow expects nothing else. Facts on the ground, though, will keep accumulating.

Nordstream 2 will be finished – sanctions or no sanctions – and will supply much needed natural gas to Germany and the EU. Convicted fraudster Navalny – 1% of real “popularity” in Russia – will remain in jail. Citizens across the EU will get Sputnik V. The Russia-China strategic partnership will continue to solidify.

To understand how we have come to this unholy Russophobic mess, an essential road map is provided by Russian Conservatism, an exciting, new political philosophy study by Glenn Diesen, associate professor at University of Southeastern Norway, lecturer at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, and one of my distinguished interlocutors in Moscow.

Diesen starts focusing on the essentials: geography, topography and history. Russia is a vast land power without enough access to the seas. Geography, he argues, conditions the foundations of “conservative policies defined by autocracy, an ambiguous and complex concept of nationalism, and the enduring role of the Orthodox Church” – something that implies resistance to “radical secularism”.

It’s always crucial to remember that Russia has no natural defensible borders; it has been invaded or occupied by Swedes, Poles, Lithuanians, the Mongol Golden Horde, Crimean Tatars and Napoleon. Not to mention the immensely bloody Nazi invasion.

What’s in a word? Everything: “security”, in Russian, is byezopasnost. That happens to be a negative, as byez means “without” and opasnost means “danger”.

Russia’s complex, unique historical make-up always presented serious problems. Yes, there was close affinity with the Byzantine empire. But if Russia “claimed transfer of imperial authority from Constantinople it would be forced to conquer it.” And to claim the successor, role and heritage of the Golden Horde would relegate Russia to the status of an Asiatic power only.

On the Russian path to modernization, the Mongol invasion provoked not only a geographical schism, but left its imprint on politics:  “Autocracy became a necessity following the Mongol legacy and the establishment of Russia as an Eurasian empire with a vast and poorly connected geographical expanse”.

“A colossal East West”

Russia is all about East meets West. Diesen reminds us how Nikolai Berdyaev, one of the leading 20^th century conservatives, already nailed it in 1947: “The inconsistency and complexity of the Russian soul may be due to the fact that in Russia two streams of world history – East and West – jostle and influence one another (…) Russia is a complete section of the world – a colossal East West.”

The Trans-Siberian railroad, built to solidify the internal cohesion of the Russian empire and to project power in Asia, was a major game-changer: “With Russian agricultural settlements expanding to the east, Russia was increasingly replacing the ancient roads who had previously controlled and connected Eurasia.”

It’s fascinating to watch how the development of Russian economics ended up on Mackinder’s Heartland theory – according to which control of the world required control of the Eurasian supercontinent. What terrified Mackinder is that Russian railways connecting Eurasia would undermine the whole power structure of Britain as a maritime empire.

Diesen also shows how Eurasianism – emerging in the 1920s among émigrés in response to 1917 – was in fact an evolution of Russian conservatism.

Eurasianism, for a number of reasons, never became a unified political movement. The core of Eurasianism is the notion that Russia was not a mere Eastern European state. After the 13^th century Mongol invasion and the 16^th century conquest of Tatar kingdoms, Russia’s history and geography could not be only European. The future would require a more balanced approach – and engagement with Asia.

Dostoyevsky had brilliantly framed it ahead of anyone, in 1881:

Russians are as much Asiatics as European. The mistake of our policy for the past two centuries has been to make the people of Europe believe that we are true Europeans. We have served Europe too well, we have taken too great a part in her domestic quarrels (…) We have bowed ourselves like slaves before the Europeans and have only gained their hatred and contempt. It is time to turn away from ungrateful Europe. Our future is in Asia.

Lev Gumilev was arguably the superstar among a new generation of Eurasianists. He argued that Russia had been founded on a natural coalition between Slavs, Mongols and Turks. The Ancient Rus and the Great Steppe, published in 1989, had an immense impact in Russia after the fall of the USSR – as I learned first hand from my Russian hosts when I arrived in Moscow via the Trans-Siberian in the winter of 1992.

As Diesen frames it, Gumilev was offering a sort of third way, beyond European nationalism and utopian internationalism. A Lev Gumilev University has been established in Kazakhstan. Putin has referred to Gumilev as “the great Eurasian of our time”.

Diesen reminds us that even George Kennan, in 1994, recognized the conservative struggle for “this tragically injured and spiritually diminished country”. Putin, in 2005, was way sharper. He stressed,

the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. And for the Russian people, it was a real drama (…) The old ideals were destroyed. Many institutions were disbanded or simply hastily reformed…With unrestricted control over information flows, groups of oligarchs served exclusively their own corporate interests. Mass poverty started to be accepted as the norm. All this evolved against a background of the most severe economic recession, unstable finances and paralysis in the social sphere.

Applying “sovereign democracy”

And so we reach the crucial European question.

In the 1990s, led by Atlanticists, Russian foreign policy was focused on Greater Europe, a concept based on Gorbachev’s Common European Home.

And yet post-Cold War Europe, in practice, ended up configured as the non-stop expansion of NATO and the birth – and expansion – of the EU. All sorts of liberal contortionisms were deployed to include all of Europe while excluding Russia.

Diesen has the merit of summarizing the whole process in a single sentence: “The new liberal Europe represented a British-American continuity in terms of the rule of maritime powers, and Mackinder’s objective to organize the German-Russian relationship in a zero-sum format to prevent the alignment of interests”.

No wonder Putin, subsequently, had to be erected as the Supreme Scarecrow, or “the new Hitler”. Putin rejected outright the role for Russia of mere apprentice to Western civilization – and its corollary,  (neo) liberal hegemony.

Still, he remained quite accommodating. In 2005, Putin stressed, “above all else Russia was, is and will, of course, be a major European power”. What he wanted was to decouple liberalism from power politics – by rejecting the fundamentals of liberal hegemony.

Putin was saying there’s no single democratic model. That was eventually conceptualized as “sovereign democracy”. Democracy cannot exist without sovereignty; so that discards Western “supervision” to make it work.

Diesen sharply observes that if the USSR was a “radical, left-wing Eurasianism, some of its Eurasian characteristics could be transferred to conservative Eurasianism.” Diesen notes how Sergey Karaganov, sometimes referred to as the “Russian Kissinger”, has shown “that the Soviet Union was central to decolonization and it mid-wifed the rise of Asia by depriving the West of the ability to impose its will on the world through military force, which the West had done from the 16^th century until the 1940s”.

This is largely acknowledged across vast stretches of the Global South – from Latin America and Africa to Southeast Asia.

Eurasia’s western peninsula

So after the end of the Cold War and the failure of Greater Europe, Moscow’s pivot to Asia to build Greater Eurasia could not but have an air of historical inevitability.

The logic is impeccable. The two geoeconomic hubs of Eurasia are Europe and East Asia. Moscow wants to connect them economically into a supercontinent: that’s where Greater Eurasia joins China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). But then there’s the extra Russian dimension, as Diesen notes: the “transition away from the usual periphery of these centers of power and towards the center of a new regional construct”.

From a conservative perspective, emphasizes Diesen, “the political economy of Greater Eurasia enables Russia to overcome its historical obsession with the West and establish an organic Russian path to modernization”.

That implies the development of strategic industries; connectivity corridors; financial instruments; infrastructure projects to connect European Russia with Siberia and Pacific Russia. All that under a new concept: an industrialized, conservative political economy.

The Russia-China strategic partnership happens to be active in all these three geoeconomic sectors: strategic industries/techno platforms, connectivity corridors and financial instruments.

That propels the discussion, once again, to the supreme categorical imperative: the confrontation between the Heartland and a maritime power.

The three great Eurasian powers, historically, were the Scythians, the Huns and the Mongols. The key reason for their fragmentation and decadence is that they were not able to reach – and control – Eurasia’s maritime borders.

The fourth great Eurasian power was the Russian empire – and its successor, the USSR. A key reason the USSR collapsed is because, once gain, it was not able to reach – and control – Eurasia’s maritime borders.

The US prevented it by applying a composite of Mackinder, Mahan and Spykman. The US strategy even became known as the Spykman-Kennan containment mechanism – all these “forward deployments” in the maritime periphery of Eurasia, in Western Europe, East Asia and the Middle East.

We all know by now how the overall US offshore strategy – as well as the primary reason for the US to enter both WWI and WWII – was to prevent the emergence of a Eurasian hegemon by all means necessary.

As for the US as hegemon, that would be crudely conceptualized – with requisite imperial arrogance – by Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski in 1997: “To prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and keep the barbarians from coming together”. Good old Divide and Rule, applied via “system-dominance”.

It’s this system that is now tumbling down – much to the despair of the usual suspects. Diesen notes how, “in the past, pushing Russia into Asia would relegate Russia to economic obscurity and eliminate its status as a European power.” But now, with the center of geoeconomic gravity shifting to China and East Asia, it’s a whole new ball game.

The 24/7 US demonization of Russia-China, coupled with the “unhealthy situation” mentality of the EU minions, only helps to drive Russia closer and closer to China exactly at the juncture where the West’s two centuries-only world dominance, as Andre Gunder Frank conclusively proved, is coming to an end.

Diesen, perhaps too diplomatically, expects that “relations between Russia and the West will also ultimately change with the rise of Eurasia. The West’s hostile strategy to Russia is conditioned on the idea that Russia has nowhere else to go, and must accept whatever the West offers in terms of “partnership”. The rise of the East fundamentally alters Moscow’s relationship with the West by enabling Russia to diversify its partnerships”.

We may be fast approaching the point where Great Eurasia’s Russia will present Germany with a take it or leave it offer. Either we build the Heartland together, or we will build it with China – and you will be just a historical bystander. Of course there’s always the inter-galaxy distant possibility of a Berlin-Moscow-Beijing axis. Stranger things have happened.

Meanwhile, Diesen is confident that “the Eurasian land powers will eventually incorporate Europe and other states on the inner periphery of Eurasia. Political loyalties will incrementally shift as economic interests turn to the East, and Europe is gradually becoming the western peninsula of Greater Eurasia”.

Talk about food for thought for the peninsular peddlers of the “unhealthy situation”.

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Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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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Dr. Patrick Philips, who practices medicine in Englehart, Ontario, explains in an interview with MPP Randy Hillier, that current public health measures are harming the overall public health of Canadians.

At first glance, this appears to be counter-intuitive, since public health measures should improve public health, but in reality, public health “Covid Measures” are currently a threat to everyone’s health.

How is that?

Philips explains that the government’s singular focus on COVID means that other determinants of health, including social determinants, are being neglected and denied to the point that our overall health is suffering dramatically.

During lockdowns, surgical and dental procedures have been postponed or cancelled. Cancer screenings have been postponed or cancelled. Consequently, explains Philips, people are presenting, as an example, with late stage cancer, which under normal conditions, would have been detected and treated earlier. Similarly, people, from fear of contracting COVID, are waiting too long to address cardiac issues.

Hospital emergency services have been under-utilized, explains Hillier, and there were fewer diagnostic tests, and fewer Doctor visits between March and June of 2020.

Dr. Philips adds that ICU units have also been under-utilized.

Philips explains that whereas children have practically NO RISK of dying from COVID, he has seen vast increases in depression, anxiety, and suicidality amongst children. Likewise, elderly patients are suffering from isolation and depression, and are losing their will to live.

Whereas Public Health is focusing almost exclusively on COVID, with its fear-mongering propaganda and seriously flawed statistics, Philips explains that at the same time it is failing to address measures that would improve public health — and COVID outcomes. It is failing, for example, to address obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and myriad other factors that contribute to public health outcomes.

Exercise, diet, sunshine, Vitamin D, and social activities all contribute to health and well-being. They also mitigate risks from COVID.

Following the advice of “experts” says Philips, is the lowest form of evidence. Instead, data should be assessed against opposing data, and a meta-analysis should be conducted by competent authorities. Decisions should be based upon the meta-analysis. Currently, opposing views and data are being heavily censored by Mainstream Everything.

Current government measures, which violate our constitutional rights to assemble and protest and present alternate information, are all toxic in terms of our public health. Unsound public health diktats, an off-shoot of the censorship, have become a danger to our collective Public Health.

See the full interview here.

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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. Visit the author’s website at https://www.marktaliano.net where this article was originally published.

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Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has joined a coalition of two dozen press freedom, civil liberties, and international human rights organizations in urging the Biden Department of Justice to stop pursuing an appeal against the extradition decision and drop the charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

The full text of the letter is below.

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U.S. Department of Justice

950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20530-0001

February 8, 2021

Acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson:

We, the undersigned press freedom, civil liberties, and international human rights advocacy organizations, write today to share our profound concern about the ongoing criminal and extradition proceedings relating to Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, under the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

While our organizations have different perspectives on Mr. Assange and his organization, we share the view that the government’s indictment of him poses a grave threat to press freedom both in the United States and abroad. We urge you to drop the appeal of the decision by Judge Vanessa Baraitser of the Westminster Magistrates’ Court to reject the Trump administration’s extradition request. We also urge you to dismiss the underlying indictment.

The indictment of Mr. Assange threatens press freedom because much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely — and that they must engage in — in order to do the work the public needs them to do. Journalists at major news publications regularly speak with sources, ask for clarification or more documentation, and receive and publish documents the government considers secret. In our view, such a precedent in this case could effectively criminalize these common journalistic practices.

In addition, some of the charges included in the indictment turn entirely on Mr. Assange’s decision to publish classified information. News organizations frequently and necessarily publish classified information in order to inform the public of matters of profound public significance. We appreciate that the government has a legitimate interest in protecting bona fide national security interests, but the proceedings against Mr. Assange jeopardize journalism that is crucial to democracy.

The Trump administration positioned itself as an antagonist to the institution of a free and unfettered press in numerous ways. Its abuse of its prosecutorial powers was among the most disturbing. We are deeply concerned about the way that a precedent created by prosecuting Assange could be leveraged — perhaps by a future administration — against publishers and journalists of all stripes. Major news organizations share this concern, which is why the announcement of charges against Assange in May 2019 was met with vociferous and nearly universal condemnation from virtually every major American news outlet, even though many of those news outlets have criticized Mr. Assange in the past.

It is our understanding that senior officials in the Obama administration shared this concern as well. Former Department of Justice spokesperson Matthew Miller told the Washington Post in 2013, “The problem the department has always had in investigating Julian Assange is there is no way to prosecute him for publishing information without the same theory being applied to journalists.” It was reportedly the press freedom implications of any prosecution of Mr. Assange that led Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department to decide against indicting him after considering doing so.

It is unfortunately the case that press freedom is under threat globally. Now more than ever, it is crucial that we protect a robust and adversarial press — what Judge Murray Gurfein in the Pentagon Papers case memorably called a “cantankerous press, an obstinate press, an ubiquitous press” — in the United States and abroad. With this end in mind, we respectfully urge you to forgo the appeal of Judge Baraitser’s ruling, and to dismiss the indictment of Mr. Assange.

Respectfully,

(in alphabetical order)

Access Now

American Civil Liberties Union

Amnesty International – USA

Center for Constitutional Rights

Committee to Protect Journalists

Defending Rights and Dissent

Demand Progress

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Fight for the Future

First Amendment Coalition

Free Press

Freedom of the Press Foundation

Human Rights Watch

Index on Censorship

Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University

National Coalition Against Censorship

Open The Government
Partnership for Civil Justice Fund

PEN America

Project on Government Oversight

Reporters Without Borders

Roots Action

The Press Freedom Defense Fund of First Look Institute

Whistleblower & Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) at ExposeFacts

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Ecuador’s presidential candidate Yaku Pérez supported coups in Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. His US-backed party Pachakutik and supposedly “left-wing” environmentalist campaign is being promoted by right-wing corporate lobbyists.

Ecuador’s February 7 presidential election concluded in a surprise: The quick count published by the country’s National Electoral Council appeared to show a little-known candidate named Yaku Pérez Guartambel in second place, securing a narrow victory over right-wing candidate Guillermo Lasso, a banker with significant influence in the country.

Most polls had predicted that the presidential race would boil down to two presidential candidates, who could hardly have been more different: On one side was the conservative banker Lasso, who had the backing of Ecuadorian elites and the United States, and had unsuccessfully run for president twice before; while on the other was a youthful left-wing economist, Andrés Arauz, who follows in the footsteps of socialist former President Rafael Correa and wants to return to his Citizens’ Revolution.

But while polling consistently showed him coming in third place, Yaku Pérez stayed in the race until the end. And unlike Lasso, Pérez didn’t claim fidelity to the right-wing; he ran what was marketed as a progressive environmentalist campaign.

Pérez, an Indigenous leader from Ecuador’s party Pachakutik, purported to be the true left-wing option in the election, condemning Arauz and the socialist Correista movement he represents for being insufficiently pure. But Pérez’s political record suggests he is a Trojan horse for the left’s most bitter enemies.

The support Pérez apparently has from the US embassy reflects his dubious role. Immediately after the election, when Ecuador’s National Electoral Council (CNE) had still not officially published results determining who would go to the presidential run-off in April, Pérez said the US embassy called him and assured he would be the second-place candidate.

🚨La Embajada de #EEUU llamó a ⁦@yakuperezg⁩ a darle los resultados y confirmar que pasaba a segunda vuelta! ⁦@CarlosVerareal⁩ lo confirma! ¿Ese es el rol de ⁦@JoeBiden⁩ en #DecideEcuador y asumió como información oficial el candidato de ⁦@PKnacional18⁩ ? pic.twitter.com/wvSWGmqeCH

— Ruta Krítica (@RutaKritica) February 9, 2021

Pérez has viciously attacked other progressive movements in Latin America, supporting right-wing US-backed coups targeting Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, and demonizing those countries’ leftist governments as “racist.”

His political views fuse ultra-leftist, anarchistic critiques of existing left-wing states with an objectively right-wing political agenda. And his opposition to state power is deeply opportunistic. While Pérez harshly criticizes China, he has simultaneously pronounced he “will not think twice” about signing a trade deal with the United States.

Pérez’s ostensibly progressive ideology is filled with contradictions. While the Correista candidate Arauz has proposed giving $1000 checks to one million working-class Ecuadorian families, Pérez has attacked the plan on the grounds that poor citizens would spend all the money on beer in one day.

And while Pérez has criticized the current government of Ecuador and protested against its right-wing, US-backed President Lenín Moreno — who has an approval rating of just 8 percent, and is thus politically poisonous for all of the country’s electoral candidates — Pérez previously praised the corrupt and authoritarian leader as “a good man.”

Another Indigenous leader in Ecuador, Leonidas Iza, publicly warned that right-wing activists and members of the banker Guillermo Lasso’s conservative CREO party are in Pérez’s inner circle and are advising him.

#ATENCIÓN | @LeonidasIzaSal1 advierte que hay gente cercana a CREO y a la derecha, que están dentro del círculo de Yaku Pérez: “Ya he sido claro con qué propuestas no estamos de acuerdo y que apuntalan a ciertos sectores alrededor del Dr. Yaku Pérez”.
Vía: @UnCafeConJJ pic.twitter.com/GARs7WmV3i

— Pichincha Comunicaciones (@pichinchauniver) February 8, 2021

The party of Yaku Pérez, Pachakutik, identifies as “ecosocialist” and claims to represent Ecuador’s Indigenous communities. But like the candidate that represents it, the party employs left-wing rhetoric to paper over regressive goals.

Pachakutik is closely linked to NGOs funded by Washington and EU member states. The party’s leaders have been trained by the US government-funded National Democratic Institute (NDI), a CIA cutout that operates under the auspices of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

The NED publicly lists more than $5 million in grants for NGOs in Ecuador just in the years from 2016 to 2019. Much of this money has bankrolled anti-Correa opposition groups like Pachakutik and its allies.

Pachakutik is the political arm of the Indigenous confederation CONAIE, which helped lead protests against Ecuador’s former President Correa, forming an unspoken alliance with the country’s right-wing oligarchs in a bid to destabilize and overthrow the socialist president.

In fact, CONAIE and Pachakutik played a significant role in a violent US-backed 2010 coup attempt, supporting treasonous police that turned against the elected Correista government, kidnapped the president, and came close to undemocratically removing Correa from power.

In 2012, a co-founder of Pachakutik and former leader of CONAIE, Auki Tituaña, went so far as to form an open alliance with right-wing presidential candidate Guillermo Lasso, announcing that he would run as the banker’s vice president. In response, CONAIE expelled him.

CONAIE has internal divisions, some more right-wing and some more left-wing. The CONAIE leaders Leonidas Iza and Jaime Vargas helped lead October 2019 protests against neoliberal reforms imposed by sitting President Lenín Moreno. Pérez was noticeably not a leader of these anti-neoliberal demonstrations. But in general CONAIE has been a significant voice of opposition to Correismo.

Lasso is not threatened by the “ecosocialist” rhetoric of Pérez and Pachakutik; he seems keenly aware that the label is a marketing plot. The banker publicly declared before the February 7, 2021 vote that, if Pérez made it to a second round, Lasso would gladly support Pérez to defeat the Correistas.

The banker’s endorsement is unsurprising when one considers that, back in 2017, before he changed his name from Carlos to Yaku, Pérez himself supported Lasso’s presidential bid.

Carlos Pérez Guartambel, before he changed his name to Yaku in August 2017

Pachakutik’s ties to Washington are extensive. One of its most prominent former members is Fernando Villavicencio, an Ecuadorian journalist who spearheaded a disinformation campaign targeting journalist Julian Assange, peddling discredited but deeply damaging claims about the Wikileaks publisher through the major British newspaper The Guardian.

Villavicencio’s anti-Correa activism also appears to have been funded by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy.

Villavicencio served as an advisor for Pachakutik National Assembly member Cléver Jiménez, who helped lead the 2010 coup attempt against Correa.

Yaku Pérez held a public demonstration in support of Villavicencio and Jiménez when Correa sued them for defamation for spreading blatant fake news about him.

Pachakutik even has links to Ecuador’s National Electoral Council (CNE), which runs the elections, and which was taken over and deeply politicized by the US-backed Moreno government. After purging all pro-Correista officials from the CNE, Moreno selected a former Pachakutik member of the National Assembly, Diana Atamaint, to serve as president of the electoral council.

Under Atamaint’s leadership, the CNE put up many obstacles to prevent the leftist Correista movement from being able to freely participate in the election, blocking Correa’s attempt to run as vice president and even banning Andrés Arauz’s political party.

Before joining Pachakutik and being appointed head of Ecuador’s top electoral body, Atamaint worked with the World Bank, a notorious US government-backed institution that has imposed devastating neoliberal shock therapy across Latin America. Atamaint oversaw the World Bank’s initiatives in her country, including its so-called “Development Project for Indigenous and Black Peoples of Ecuador.”

Pachakutik’s tactics echo those of Nicaragua’s Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), another fringe US-backed party that played a leading role in a violent 2018 coup attempt against the Central American nation’s democratically elected Sandinista government. Like Pachakutik, the MRS is supported by the US government and works closely with Western-funded NGOs. Both groups act as though they are principled left-wing critics of popular leftist movements, when in reality they form de facto political alliances with right-wing oligarchs.

Then there is Pérez’s wife Manuela Picq, a French-Brazilian academic, herself a prominent anti-Correista activist and opponent of leftist governments in Latin America who was deported by Correa in 2015. Her opposition work in Ecuador has been funded by NGOs bankrolled by Western governments.

Although she is today a liberal specialist on sexuality and gender studies, Picq previously worked for Florida’s Republican government and was involved in unsuccessful negotiations of a neoliberal US trade agreement in Latin America, which leftist leaders condemned as “colonial.”

A January poll of Ecuador’s presidential candidates, showing Andrés Arauz with 43.22%, Guillermo Lasso with 25.54%, and Yaku Pérez with 19.87%

The tactics of Pérez, his partner Picq, and his party Pachakutik mirror another campaign in South America that exploited ostensibly left-wing forces on behalf of right-wing ends.

During the lead-up to the US-backed coup against Bolivia’s democratically elected socialist government in 2019, NGOs that claimed to support environmentalist causes participated in a disinformation operation to demonize then-President Evo Morales, the first Indigenous president in Bolivia’s history, himself a strong supporter of environmental protections.

Regime-change activists from organizations funded by the US and European governments accused the Morales administration of fueling fires in the Amazon rainforest that were most concentrated in Brazil, where far-right President Jair Bolsonaro proudly branded himself “captain chainsaw.”

Yaku Pérez and Pachakutik play a similar role in Ecuador, attacking popular leftist forces from the left, thereby opening up space for the right-wing to advance.

As in Bolivia, where Western environmental groups like Extinction Rebellion helped support the 2019 coup on the grounds of green concerns, self-declared anarchists from the ostensibly progressive organization are heaping praise on Pérez.

Extinction Rebellion is joined in its praise for the marginal pseudo-left figure by right-wing corporate lobby groups like the Americas Society and Council of the Americas (AS/COA), which is funded by planet-destroying fossil fuel corporations, weapons manufacturers, and banks that have a vested interest in trying to stop the Correistas from returning to power.

“Left-wing” support for right-wing coups in Latin America

Yaku Pérez Guartambel says he wants Ecuadorians to use fewer cars and plant more trees. With campaign photos often showing him riding a bicycle at rallies, Perez’s image seems custom tailored to appeal to the sensibility of Western green activists.

Pérez is especially critical of the Correista movement for its reliance on extraction. He has proposed an end to mining in Ecuador and a restriction of oil extraction.

Ecuador is a developing, formerly colonized country and thus relatively poor compared to Global North imperialist nations. But it has an advantage: large oil and mineral reserves.

These resources have been key to the political and economic program of Correa and his followers, who used them to turbocharge development of Ecuador, fund popular social programs, and invest billions of dollars in universal healthcare, high-quality education, and advanced infrastructure.

Yet the supposed progressive appearance of Pérez’s political program ends with his environmental policies. When it comes to international politics, he has shown himself to be deeply right-wing.

And while Pérez uses his Indigenous Kañari heritage to claim to represent Ecuador’s Native communities, many are in fact strongly against him and his party.

Indigenous outrage against Pérez especially grew when he supported the US-backed military coup in Bolivia in November 2019.

In October 2020, Evo Morales’ Indigenous-majority Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party won the election in a landslide, defeating the US-backed coup regime. Numerous Ecuadorian Indigenous leaders were invited to the inauguration of MAS President Luis Arce, but Pérez was not. When asked why, it was made clear that Pérez was shunned because he had supported the coup.

Even before the violent regime-change operation, Pérez was a harsh critic of Morales, accusing him and Correa of “authoritarianism, machismo, extractivism, and populism.” Pérez flatly refused to recognize the legitimacy of Evo’s government.

In 2017, Pérez attacked Evo again, tweeting, “His ignorance is encyclopedic. Evo is biologically Indigenous; in terms of his identity he whitewashed and colonized himself and doesn’t feel or understand the Native cosmovision.”

Enciclopédica su ignorancia Evo biológicamente es indígena, identitariamente se blancó colonizó no siente ni comprende la cosmovivencia runa https://t.co/19WujAico0

— Yaku Pérez Guartambel (@yakuperezg) May 27, 2017

After backing the coup, Pérez went silent about Bolivia, saying nothing as the junta, led by racist Christian extremists, massacred Indigenous protesters they dehumanized as “satanic.”

But the coup in Bolivia is not the only US-led regime-change campaign in Latin America that Yaku Pérez has supported.

In November 2016, Pérez praised the US-backed soft coup that removed Brazil’s left-wing Workers’ Party government from power, while endorsing a right-wing “lawfare” (legal warfare) campaign that had targeted Argentina’s progressive President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Pérez also openly called for Ecuador’s leftist President Correa and Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolás Maduro to be overthrown.

“Corruption ended the governments of Dilma [Rousseff] and Cristina,” Pérez tweeted approvingly. “Now all that’s missing is for Rafael Correa and Maduro to fall. It is just a matter of time.”

La #Corrupción acabó al gob d Dilma y Cristina; ahora falta q caigan @MashiRafael y Maduro. Solo es cuestión d tiempo https://t.co/6JPpgBicZM

— Yaku Pérez Guartambel (@yakuperezg) November 15, 2016

Pérez condemned the socialist governments of Correa in Ecuador and Maduro in Venezuela as “colonial, ethnocidal, and racist.” And he denounced the elected left-wing governments in Venezuela and Argentina as “authoritarian, extractivist, and corrupt.”

No habido gobierno en Ecuador tan colonial etnocida y racista q @MashiRafael y será algo parecido su sucesor @Lenin como Maduro en Venezuela https://t.co/jxS4BvxcOD

— Yaku Pérez Guartambel (@yakuperezg) December 2, 2016

Pérez resorted to the kind of superficial anti-Venezuela rhetoric favored by the Latin American right-wing once again on the day of the February 7 election. In a friendly interview with a conservative media outlet, Pérez denounced the leading leftist presidential candidate, stating, “Rafael Correa, as Chávez did giving power to Maduro, today he is trying to give power to Andrés Arauz. Arauz is the Maduro of Ecuador.”

#EcuadorElige | "Rafael Correa, como hizo Chávez de entregar el poder a Maduro, hoy él pretende entregar el poder a Andrés Arauz. Arauz es el Maduro del Ecuador": @yakuperezg candidato a la Presidencia de Ecuador https://t.co/CRHZkuP4FN pic.twitter.com/TjNCPrMM2I

— NTN24 (@NTN24) February 7, 2021

In 2017, when Brazil was ruled by the unelected neoliberal coup government of Michel Temer, Pérez publicly expressed hope that former left-wing Presidents Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff would be arrested, alongside Correa and his former Vice President Jorge Glas. (Ecuador’s US-backed Lenín Moreno government did arrest Glas and throw him in prison on bogus charges, as part of an authoritarian crackdown on leftist Correista politicians.)

En #Brasil están peces gordos Lula y Dilma curioso en #Ecuador todavia nada #juicio a @MashiRafael y @JorgeGlas.La justicia tarda pero llega https://t.co/RIUjVx033O

— Yaku Pérez Guartambel (@yakuperezg) June 9, 2017

In the same vein, Pérez supported a brutal US-backed coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018.

After right-wing extremists, with support from Washington, spent months murdering, torturing, and terrorizing supporters of the socialist Sandinista Front, Pérez responded by blaming all of the violence on Nicaragua’s elected left-wing government.

“Who would have thought that the Sandinistas that before fought against the dictatorship are now shooting their people,” Pérez wrote in October 2018.

Nicaragua es singular desde el 19 abril cerca d 500 muertos, 558 presos políticos, pueblo vigilado por paramilitares a Rosen d OrtegaMurillo. Quien pensaría q los Sandinistas q antes luchaban contra la dictadura ahora estos disparan a su pueblo pic.twitter.com/LHtI7DKqYv

— Yaku Pérez Guartambel (@yakuperezg) October 30, 2018

Everything Pérez has said about Ecuador’s neighbors shows that, if he were to take power, he would help Washington and the region’s right-wing oligarchs wage war against the so-called Pink Tide, the wave of leftist governments that won power in Latin America starting in the early 2000s.

Friendly ties with the US government

While Yaku Pérez Guartambel has no problem demonizing revolutionary left-wing governments in Latin America as “colonial, ethnocidal, and racist,” he is curiously silent about the US government’s massive human rights violations.

That is because Pérez has fostered cozy ties with Washington, while advancing its agenda in his country.

Before running for president, Pérez served as the prefect for Ecuador’s Azuay province, whose capital, Cuenca, has become a major hub for US expats.

Entire communities of North Americans exist in Cuenca, speaking only English and paying for everything in US dollars (which have been the official currency of Ecuador since 2000 dollarization, following a 1999 economic crash overseen by former Economic Minister Guillermo Lasso, now the major right-wing candidate in the 2021 election).

In June 2019, just as the Donald Trump administration’s new representative in Ecuador, Michael J. Fitzpatrick, was sworn in, Pérez publicized his meeting with the US ambassador in Cuenca.

Yaku Pérez with US Ambassador to Ecuador Michael J. Fitzpatrick in June 2019

A month later, Pérez attended a celebration marking Independence Day in the United States, again welcoming the new US ambassador. He posed for a photo smiling in front of an illuminated US flag.

Yaku Perez celebrating United States Independence Day and the swearing in of the new US ambassador in July 2019 in Cuenca, Ecuador

During his presidential campaign, despite garnering little support from the Ecuadorian public, Pérez has found an eager audience from the ambassadors of France and Germany.

Hoy en #Quito, nos reunimos con Jean Baptiate Chauvin Embajador de #Francia y Philipp Schaver Embajador de #Alemania en #Ecuador, hablamos de como generar trabajo y desarrollo para nuestra gente del #Azuay y el país, disminuyendo afectaciones al medio ambiente. pic.twitter.com/TSs2agJVlB

— Yaku Pérez Guartambel (@yakuperezg) September 10, 2020

US-backed “ecosocialists” ally with right-wing in coup attempt against Rafael Correa

The deployment of ostensibly progressive “environmentalist” talking points to destabilize left-wing governments in Bolivia, Venezuela, Mexico, and beyond was developed over a decade ago, to weaken the democratically elected government of Ecuador’s former socialist President Rafael Correa.

To undercut Correa, the United States and Western European governments funded civil society groups in Ecuador that claimed to support environmental causes and indigenous rights, but ended up serving as tentacles of the right-wing opposition.

Throughout their tenures in office, Ecuador’s Correa and Bolivia’s Evo Morales faced heavy opposition to their ambitious infrastructure initiatives. Environmentalist and indigenous groups, many supported by the United States, initiated widespread protests in 2011 to try to stop the construction of a large highway in Bolivia, with similar demonstrations to obstruct mining projects in Ecuador in 2012.

Cables from the intelligence firm Stratfor, known as the “shadow CIA,” that were published by WikILeaks show that the US government contractor was carefully monitoring anti-Correa protests, and specifically named Pérez Guartambel, then known as Carlos Pérez, in 2011.

The most extreme attempt at destabilizing Correa’s government came with a violent US-backed coup attempt on September 30, 2010. Defectors from the Ecuadorian police and military occupied the parliament, blocked major streets, took over state institutions, and effectively kidnapped Correa.

Five people were killed in the attempted putsch, and hundreds were wounded. Ecuador’s opposition nearly succeeded in removing the elected president from power.

One of the main organizations involved in this coup attempt was the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (CONAIE). CONAIE is an indigenous organization that advances an ultra-leftist, anarchist-inspired politics that is deeply suspicious of the state and industrial development, even if the government is led by a democratically elected socialist.

CONAIE took a hardline position against Correa, hammering him constantly and demanding his removal. This undercut Correa’s support from leftists abroad and drove criticism of his Citizens’ Revolution movement.

What CONAIE did not acknowledge in its constant attacks on Correa was that its political wing was heavily supported by the US government.

Indeed, CONAIE’s de facto political arm is the party Pachakutik, whose 2021 presidential candidate is Yaku Pérez.

During the September 2010 coup attempt, Pachakutik published an open call for Correa to be removed from power, expressing public support for the police and soldiers who had defected. Pachakutik sent out a press release accusing Correa of a “dictatorial attitude,” and Pachakutik leader and National Assembly member Cléver Jiménez “called on the indigenous movement, social movements and democratic political organizations to form a single national front to demand the exit of President Correa.”

The Pachakutik press release stressed that “Jiménez backed the struggle of the country’s public servants, including the police troops who have mobilized against the regime’s authoritarian policies.”

Journalist Eva Golinger later showed how Pachakutik had been supported by the US government’s National Democratic Institute (NDI), a subsidiary of the NED regime-change umbrella that is loosely affiliated with the Democratic Party and acts as a cutout for the CIA.

A 2007 NDI document showed that Pachakutik had been directly trained by the US government’s NDI, along with activists from Venezuela’s anti-Chavista opposition parties Acción Democrática and Primero Justicia, as well as Mexico’s right-wing National Action Party (PAN).

A 2007 document showing how the US government’s National Democratic Institute (NDI) trained the Ecuadorian opposition group Pachakutik

CONAIE and Pachakutik do not represent all Indigenous communities in Ecuador. There are major political divisions, and some communal organizations and leaders support Correismo.

The United States has a history of backing specific Indigenous organizations in order to divide Native communities. This strategy is far from new. During Washington’s terror war on Nicaragua in the 1980s, for instance, the CIA supported leaders from Nicaragua’s Miskito community in order to undermine the revolutionary Sandinista government.

The New York Times reported in 1986, “Some Indian leaders said they fear that their people could become like the Hmong and Meo tribesmen in Asia – indigenous people drafted into a war by the C.I.A. and later abandoned.”

Today the Miskitos remain politically divided, but there are some Nicaraguan Native organizations and leaders who support Sandinismo, just as there are Ecuadorian Indigenous groups that support Correismo.

In a 2019 report, Ecuadorian-Canadian writer Joe Emersberger exposed CONAIE’s role as a Trojan horse for the right-wing.

Virgilio Hernandez, a leader from Ecuador’s left-wing Correista movement who was forced into asylum in Mexico’s embassy following a brutal crackdown by the US-backed Lenín Moreno government, explained to Emersberger:

Since about the end of the 1990s and the beginning of this century I would say what is evident in CONAIE is that a current became dominant that we’d call a ‘conservative indigenist’ current that has put everything into what they call the ‘ethnic cause’ and left aside the causes of social movements and the left in the country. That explains … that in the last presidential campaign they openly supported the candidate of the oligarchy and the banks, Guillermo Lasso. It is very clear for almost two decades they lost course and have been useful to the oligarchic groups that have always rabidly opposed Rafael Correa and the Citizens Revolution.

Non-Indigenous anti-Correa activist from Indigenous party spreads disinformation against Julian Assange

One of the co-founders of Pachakutik, who is not indigenous, Fernando Villavicencio, played a major but under-acknowledged role in the Russiagate conspiracy that consumed official Washington during the Trump era.

Villavicencio is an Ecuadorian opposition activist and journalist who dedicated years of his life to destroying Rafael Correa. Besides his work with Pachakutik, Villavicencio established an anti-Correa media outlet to spread disinformation against the leftist president.

Villavicencio hated Correa so much that he publicly called for the United States to impose sanctions on Ecuador to punish his government, and said he would lobby the US Senate to do so. (This led Correa to dub Villavicencio a “traitor.”)

In 2018, Villavicencio went on to co-author a highly dubious report in the major British newspaper The Guardian, alongside its Russiagate-promoting reporters Luke Harding and Dan Collyns, accusing WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange of holding secret meetings with Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

Una de mis mayores experiencias periodísticas fue trabajar durante meses la investigación sobre Assange con los colegas del diario británico The Guardian, Luke Harding, Dan Collins y con la joven periodista Cristina Solórzano de @somos_lafuente pic.twitter.com/IQbZwAkKNx

— Fernando Villavicencio (@VillaFernando_) December 2, 2018

WikiLeaks strongly denied the report, calling it a complete fabrication and launching a legal fund to sue The Guardian over the story.

The Guardian removed Villavicencio’s byline from the article, even as the Ecuadorian activist boasted on Twitter that he had been a co-author and the apparent source of the questionable claims.

La reunión entre Lenín Moreno y Paul Manafort y las visitas a Assange del exgerente de campaña de Trump, están en la agenda del fiscal Robert Mueller que investiga una presunta conspiración para filtrar los mails de Hillary Clinton. Aquí la versión impresa del diario The Guardian pic.twitter.com/etdqeWCRXx

— Fernando Villavicencio (@VillaFernando_) November 28, 2018

Villavicencio also runs a website that publishes constant questionable materials demonizing Correa and WikiLeaks. He calls it La Fuente – Periodismo de Investigación, or The Source – Investigative Journalism.

This publication appears to be funded by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA front founded by the Ronald Reagan administration to push regime-change in foreign socialist countries.

In its database, the NED has listed annual $65,000 grants for a media outlet in Ecuador that is “Promoting Investigating Journalism,” using a description that is almost identical to the about page on Villavicencio’s website La Fuente.

Ecuadorian opposition activist and Guardian contributor Villavicencio runs an "investigative journalism" site that churns out nonstop propaganda against Correa, the left, and @WikiLeaks.

He does not disclose his funding, but this NED (US gov) grant description looks very similar pic.twitter.com/XDOloHNIP5

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) December 18, 2018

Villavicencio frequently faced legal troubles when Correa was president. He and Pachakutik National Assembly member Cléver Jiménez, for whom Villavicencio served as an advisor, were accused of helping to hack Correa’s emails and then publishing them to hurt the Ecuadorian president — charges they denied.

Correa took Villavicencio and Jiménez to court for spreading false, defamatory claims about him and accusing the president of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” for quelling the September 30, 2010 coup attempt.

Yaku Peréz helped organized public demonstrations in support of Villavicencio and Jiménez. Pérez condemned Correa as a “caudillo” over the case, and in 2017 held a protest outside of the appeals court, which he called a “court of injustice.”

Aprestamos a la audiencia d recurso d revisión en corte d injusticia caso cleverjimenez fernando Villavicencio y carlos Figueroa pic.twitter.com/0eUf5K96Tu

— Yaku Pérez Guartambel (@yakuperezg) July 6, 2017

Villavicencio went on to leave Pachakutik in 2017. In the 2021 election, he was a National Assembly candidate running with the center-left Socialist Party of Ecuador, another fringe anti-Correa group that officially broke all ties with Marxism, calling itself social democratic, and has often found itself in alliance with the right-wing.

Husband of Western government-linked, NGO-backed anti-Correa academic Manuela Picq

Yaku Pérez’s longtime partner is also a prominent opponent of Correismo who has previously worked for the US government and whose activism has been funded by NGOs bankrolled by Western governments.

In 2013, Pérez married Manuela Picq, a French-Brazilian academic who specializes in Indigenous, sexuality, and gender studies, and who, like her husband, is a staunch critic of leftist governments in Latin America who supported the US-backed coup in Bolivia in 2019.

Picq works closely with regime-change-lobbying NGOs, and is infamous in Ecuador for her anti-Correa activism.

Yaku Pérez with his wife, anti-Correa activist Manuela Picq, in 2015

Picq played a significant role in 2015 protests against President Correa, which were often very violent. She was arrested at a demonstration in August, and her visa was cancelled and she was deported from Ecuador.

With support from the European Union and billionaire-funded NGOs, Picq turned her deportation case into a scandal, portraying herself as a victim and using it to attack Correa and demonize his elected socialist government as a chronic human rights violator.

Picq was allowed to return in Ecuador in 2018, under the right-wing US-backed government of Lenín Moreno.

And while Yaku Pérez and Picq claim to be critics of Moreno, after he entered power, a video interview shows that Picq called on Ecuadorians to vote in a referendum that handed Moreno absolute power.

Before she became an academic, Manuela Picq worked with right-wing US government institutions. According to her professional CV, in 2003, Picq served as a “foreign affairs specialist” in the Office of International Relations for Florida’s Republican Governor Jeb Bush.

That same year, Picq served as a Miami-based “co-coordinator for the participation of civil society organizations” for the Trade Ministerial for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a neoliberal agreement pushed aggressively by the US government.

The left-wing governments in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia opposed the FTAA. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez called it a “tool of imperialism” that would help Washington further exploit and dominate the region.

It was in fact in rejection of the FTAA that Venezuela and Cuba in 2004 founded by the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – Peoples’ Trade Treaty, or ALBA-TCP, to integrate Latin America’s economies together, excluding the United States, and strengthen their sovereignty.

Ecuador joined the ALBA under President Correa in 2009. His membership in the organization was one of the reasons for the US-backed coup attempt targeting him in 2010. Ecuador’s right-wing US-backed Moreno government went on to withdraw from the ALBA in 2018.

Manuela Picq’s CV, showing her work for the Florida government and Free Trade Area of the Americas

According to her CV, Picq has worked since 2015 with Front Line Defenders, an NGO funded by the European Union, numerous Western European governments, Taiwan, anti-communist billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and the CIA cutout the Ford Foundation.

In 2016, Picq was rewarded for her anti-Correa activism in Ecuador with a “Human Rights Defender” grant from ProtectDefenders.eu, a soft-power instrument funded by the European Union that weaponizes human rights to push regime change in foreign nations and advance the EU’s economic interests.

In 2018, the publication Global Americans dubbed Manuela Picq one of the “20 New Public Intellectuals in the Americas.” As The Grayzone previously reported, Global Americans is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a regime-change arm of the United States that acts as a CIA cutout, and the website boasted of the NED’s role in “laying the groundwork for insurrection” during a bloody US-backed coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018.

Today, Picq is a professor of “Latinx and Latin American Studies” at Amherst College in the United States. She is author of books with titles like “Queering Narratives of Modernity,” “Sexualities in World Politics,” and “Sex and Tongue in International Politics.”

Picq has also taught for years at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, one of Ecuador’s most elite schools.

Before establishing her professional academic career, Picq got her start as a postdoctoral fellow in the “Study of Democracy in Latin America” at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a US government-funded think tank that has a revolving door with the State Department and intelligence agencies, and is physically located in the US government’s Ronald Reagan Building.

From the United States, Picq continues writing anti-Correista articles for liberal media outlets and the regime-change-lobbying NGO NACLA.

And like her partner Yaku Pérez, Manuela Picq has aggressively attacked other leftist governments in Latin America and supported US-backed coup attempts. (In 2019, she also called for Western governments to make a “no fly zone” in northeastern Syria.)

Before a US-backed soft coup removed Brazil’s elected government from power in 2016, Picq published articles criticizing its developmental projects.

Picq has expressed support for the right-wing opposition in Nicaragua, demonizing the elected leftist Sandinista government as a “patriarchal macho rapist anti-women state.” (In reality Nicaragua has the highest level of gender equality in all of Latin America, and the fifth-best in the entire world.)

In September 2019, in the lead-up to the US-backed coup in Bolivia, Picq published an outlandish article preposterously accusing the country’s first and only ever Indigenous President Evo Morales of carrying out an “ecocide” and “genocide.” This helped fuel a smear campaign against Morales, setting the stage for the violent putsch.

Evo Morales’ ecocide is a genocide https://t.co/gIEEwYcaIT

— Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (@chgsumn) September 26, 2019

Mere days before the coup, Picq then joked on Twitter that she had “wet dreams” fantasizing about overthrowing Evo Morales.

Wet dreams from midia ninja….. falta o Evo na lista pic.twitter.com/49NtMOM4qy

— Manuela Picq (@manuelapicq) October 29, 2019

Then when the coup was being carried out in November, Picq spread absurd disinformation, writing, “Sisters from the Indigenous base in Bolivia are denouncing massive violence by groups from the MAS [ruling Movement Toward Socialism party] — not only houses of the opposition being burnt, there is also a network and rapes in the streets. There is fear that Evo is launching a civil war with his militias.”

Hermanas de las bases indígenas en #Bolívia denuncian violencia masiva por grupos del #MAS – no solo casas de oposición quemadas, hay más red e violaciones en las calles. Se teme que Evo esté armando una guerra civil con sus milicias

— Manuela Picq (@manuelapicq) November 11, 2019

The work of Pérez and Picq shows how Western governments can use ostensibly left-liberal activists, academics, and NGOs to push their imperial interests, destabilizing socialist states in Latin America in the guise of purportedly protecting the environment, Indigenous communities, and human rights.

Right-wing corporate lobby group AS/COA promotes Yaku Pérez’s campaign

Articles by anarchist-oriented US environmentalist organizations like Extinction Rebellion leave readers with the impression that Yaku Pérez Guartambel is Ecuador’s best choice for the left.

But a look at some of Pérez’s most high-profile promoters, including powerful right-wing corporate lobby groups, illustrates an ulterior agenda.

On February 1, the US website Americas Quarterly published a puff piece praising the third-place candidate, titled “Yaku Pérez: The New Face of Ecuador’s Left?”

The article spread misleading disinformation demonizing Rafael Correa, trumpeting, “Pérez said he offers such voters an alternative to the ‘authoritarian and corrupt left’ of Correa.”

Americas Quarterly said it conducted a survey of a dozen analysts who “ranked Pérez further to the left than Arauz.”

The website also happily pointed out, “On foreign policy, Pérez has said he is open to a trade deal with the United States and has called out China’s ‘aggressive policies around extractivism and human rights.’”

Author Brendan O’Boyle shared the piece promoting “the anti-Correa, ‘ecological left’ that he represents.”

NEW: I spoke to @yakuperezg about his unlikely bid to become Ecuador's first indigenous president and the anti-Correa, "ecological left" that he represents.

Hope you'll take a look!https://t.co/6wz2DdeAmh

— Brendan O'Boyle (@BrenOBoyle) February 1, 2021

So what exactly is Americas Quarterly? Is it a left-liberal publication that promotes environmentalism and Indigenous rights?

On the contrary: Americas Quarterly is an arm of the Americas Society/Council of the Americas (AS/COA), a right-wing lobby group funded by most major US corporations.

AS/COA has played an important role in backing coups against progressive governments in Latin America and propping up unpopular neoliberal regimes.

AS/COA’s list of corporate members is a Who’s Who of the most powerful companies on the planet, many of which profit from destroying the environment and waging war, such as Amazon, Apple, BlackRock, Boeing, Caterpillar, Chevron, Chiquita, Exxon Mobil, Ford, GE, Goldman Sachs, Google, JP Morgan, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Walmart.

AS/COA’s corporate members

So why would an organization funded by these mega-corporations, which normally supports right-wing politicians across Latin America, suddenly promote a left-wing candidate in Ecuador? And why would it have us believe that Yaku Pérez is in fact even more left-wing than Andrés Arauz and the Correista movement?

The answer is that Pérez does not truly represent the left; he is an insidious vehicle for Washington’s interests in Ecuador. AS/COA has sought to falsely portray Pérez as the left-wing alternative to Correismo because it recognizes that he would serve their interests if he somehow managed to win, and is splitting the left by simply staying in the race, making a second round more likely.

It is for the same reason that right-wing banker Guillermo Lasso has said he would support Pérez.

The United States is desperate to prevent the socialist wave that washed across Latin America during the first decade of the 21st century from coming back. And in Washington’s bid to stop the tide, “ecosocialist” figures like Yaku Pérez are perfect tools.

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Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.

All images in this article are from The Grayzone unless otherwise stated

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***

On January 28th, a group of U.S. Congressmen, led by former Green Beret and now Republican Party legislator, Michael Waltz, introduced to the U.S. Congress a new bill dedicated to Venezuela entitled the “Bipartisan Banning Operations and Leases with Illegitimate Authoritarian Regime Act”.

Today, Congressman Waltz introduced the bipartisan Banning Operations and Leases with Illegitimate Authoritarian Regime Act, or the BOLIVAR Act, that will prohibit government contracting with persons that have business operations with the Maduro regime. pic.twitter.com/sdw2RO0OhY

— Congressman Waltz Press (@RepWaltzPress) January 28, 2021

In an act of cynicism, the creators and promoters of the law tendentiously and symbolically established the contradictory short title of “BOLIVAR Act”, its acronym in English.

The immediate precedent dates back to 2019, when Senator Rick Scott, obsessive opponent of the Venezuelan Government since his years as Governor of Florida, sponsored together with Marco Rubio and Waltz himself the Venezuelan Restriction on Contracting Act, which at that time did not even pass to a vote in the plenary.

It should be noted that the bill reached the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, where the now Vice President Kamala Harris was a member, and that through a report they justified that legislation.

Rick Scott promoter of the Venezuelan Contracting Restriction Act (2019 – S 1151)

Scott is one of the most active operators in the anti-Venezuelan lobby, a character who has been in charge of pressuring the U.S. Government to intensify the unilateral coercive measures against Venezuela, accompanied by Rubio and the fugitive from national justice Carlos Vecchio.

He rejoices about it in his web portal rickscott.senate. gov, when he highlights his impressions after the signing of the Executive Order that imposed the economic embargo on Venezuela in August 2019: “I have been asking the [then] [Trump] Administration to use all available options, including an embargo,” commented the Republican senator referring to the fact that months earlier, during that same year, he urged Mike Pompeo and Steven Mnuchin, the then Secretaries of State and Treasury respectively, the implementation of stricter “sanctions” against Cuba, Venezuela and their international allies.

The focus of the new mutation of the title in the bill (“Contracting Restriction”) alludes to another operation of the well-known plan to make impossible the financial transactions of the Venezuelan State with any entity, subject or company prominent in international trade. According to the document, the purpose is to prohibit the head of the U.S. Government from contracting persons who have commercial operations with the “Maduro regime”.

Who are the promoters of the proposal?

Most of the U.S. congressmen in the House of Representatives who are pushing the legislative proposal against Bolivarian Venezuela belong to the representation of Florida districts.

Although on this occasion Rick Scott does not appear in the list because he is a senator, it is important to mention part of his dossier as the original promoter of the iniquitous project.

Scott is implicated in the largest Medicare fraud in the United States, when he was CEO of the health care company Columbia/Hospital Corporation of America (HCA). That controversial matter gravitated to the FBI investigation, later made public in 1997, in which the company in question admitted to felony billing and fraudulent practices three years later. Most of these events occurred under Scott’s leadership.

According to Sun Sentinel columnist Randy Schultz, Columbia/HCA gave kickbacks to doctors to refer patients to make them look sicker than they were, so Medicare would pay more.

With that attitude of false concern for Venezuela and a questionable track record, Scott used the Fifth Amendment (part of the U.S. Bill of Rights that guarantees certain protections to a person accused of a crime or involved in a legal proceeding) 75 times for this case and walked away from the company with $300 million in stock and a $5.1 million severance package.

Now, who is Michael Waltz?

• He served for 20 years in the U.S. Army Special Forces, known as the Green Berets, participating in the invasions of Afghanistan and other missions of interference in the Middle East and Africa.
• He then went on to serve in the White House as a counterterrorism advisor to then Vice President Dick Cheney (a noted neoconservative) during the George W. Bush administration.
• Waltz voted for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuelans in the United States.
• On February 1, he signed a petition to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to reconsider his possible plans to close the Guantanamo prison.
• He is president of METIS, a firm dedicated to advising and strategizing for the U.S. defense, national security and intelligence community.
• He is also a co-founder and partner in an international consulting firm, Askari Associates, which provides consulting and strategic advisory services to foreign governments.
• At the end of 2019, he stated that he was promoting the plan to create the zone of distension or strip on the Colombian-Venezuelan border, managed by the Lima Group with support from the U.S. armed forces.
• Likewise, he added a provision to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to prohibit the U.S. Department of Defense from signing contracts with companies working with the Venezuelan State.

Waltz’s discursive and repetitive line on Venezuela is no surprise, nor is the list of co-sponsors joining him on the bill. Congressmen such as Debbie Schultz and Mario Diaz-Balart are a case in point, as they put forward the idea of labeling Venezuela as a terrorist state.

Each one of the members of that clique is in sync with the interests of the anti-Venezuelan lobby in Miami, without half measures.

Some implications of the Bolivar Act

The new U.S. legislative project takes the character of “bipartisan”, while Congressman Waltz commented that said instrument is the road map that the rest of the countries in the world should take as an example. In addition, he made the worn-out call that the United States must use all means to eliminate any financing mechanism of the “Maduro regime”.

The United States has a history of using “humanitarian aid” as a weapon of war against the Bolivarian Republic and unscrupulous financing of the Venezuelan opposition (Photo: Image capture).

Within the pantomime in which they wrap the subject of “sanctions”, postulating some supposed exceptions that in the end are not taken into account or are an ordinary play on words to the legal sound of the congressmen, the bill adds a couple of points, little specified, which refer to the exception on the shipments of “humanitarian aid”, of course, under the conditions and schemes that the U.S. administration considers.

Under the guise of “humanitarian aid”, the U.S. Government through agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) have channeled funding to the Venezuelan anti-Chávez leadership in order to stimulate the strategy of “regime change” in Venezuela.

A fraction of that amount was transferred to Julio Borges, Carlos Vecchio and Lilian Tintori in September/2019, as announced by Mark Green, director of the agency pic.twitter.com/mb0iMWTFQG

– Sures Organization (@SuresDDDHH) January 18, 2020

La #USAID informó que ha entregado 654 millones de dólares a la oposición del gobierno de #Venezuela para derrocarlo

Una fracción de ese monto fue transferido a Julio Borges, Carlos Vecchio y Lilian Tintori en septiembre/2019, tal como anunció Mark Green, director de la agencia pic.twitter.com/mb0iMWTFQG

— Organización Sures (@SuresDDHH) January 18, 2020

The #USAID reported that it has delivered $654 million to the opposition #Venezuela government to overthrow it.

On the other hand, and in light of what characterizes that proposed law, when mention is made of “business operations,” it refers to engaging in commerce in any form, including the acquisition, development, maintenance, possession, sale, lease, or operation of equipment, facilities, personnel, products, services, personal property, real property, or any other apparatus of business or commerce.

The “BOLIVAR Act” intends to deepen the blockade against Venezuela (Photo: Archive)

Based on this, it is evident, firstly, that the oil and service companies in that sector at an international level should cease their operations with Venezuela or should triangulate in order to avoid the attacks of the US blockade.

But not only that: the companies must choose whether to do business with Venezuela or with the oil companies of the United States, taking into consideration both monetary and sanction retaliations. However, what is striking about this description is its breadth, since it covers any commercial dynamics, including the acquisition of drugs, medical supplies or even vaccines. Not to mention the food sector. And the same premise applies: companies must decide between doing business with the United States or with the Venezuelan State.

Although in practice the U.S. Government has prevented imports in the food and pharmaceutical sectors by the Venezuelan State through executive orders, through the “BOLIVAR Act” it intends to make this imprint official on the legislative paper, a trademark of the blockade against Venezuela and key to the deepening of the economic and social crisis that the country is experiencing in an induced manner.

The U.S. political class continues to apply its economic and financial gunboat diplomacy disguised as progressive humanitarianism. These congressmen, unified Democrats and Republicans under the same anti-Venezuelan criteria, continue to move in this macabre and pestilent enjoyment.

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Featured image: Rick Scott and Marco Rubio are the most active operators in the lobby against Venezuela (Source: Internationalist 360)

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The average energy investor is by now well aware of the sector’s monumental shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Coal-powered power plants have been shuttering at an alarming clip as the price of electricity from natural gas and renewables undercuts them while wind and solar generation continue to gain the ascendancy.

But nowhere has this change been as dramatic as the transport industry, with EV titans such as Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) and NIO Ltd. (NYSE:NIO) now commanding substantially higher valuations than their imposing ICE brethren, General Motors (NYSE:GM) and Ford Motors (NYSE:F). Indeed, the global EV sector now carries a higher valuation than the global ICE sector despite accounting for less than 3% of new vehicle sales in 2020.

It’s a situation eerily reminiscent of the thousands of buggy and whip companies that were rendered obsolete in the early 20th century.

But now, a section of Wall Street says the situation is a lot more dire than that.

Morgan Stanley has argued that traditional ICE makers are destined to become money-losers as early as 2030.

MS’ analyst Adam Jonas says the market may be ascribing zero or even negative value for ICE-derived revenues at GM and Ford and has listed a variety of factors that are likely to transform the companies’ once-profitable assets into potentially cash-burning and loss-making businesses.

Pivoting to EVs

Morgan Stanley is hardly alone in its very dim outlook of the traditional auto industry.

A recent survey on institutional investors by the investment firm has revealed that 17% of respondents think ICE technology has no zero or negative value today, while 60% have rated ICE technology as only slightly positive. Just 23% think gasoline and diesel tech still carries a significant positive value.

But don’t get us wrong: Nobody is saying that GM and F stocks are about to go the way of DMC, maker of the once-iconic DeLorean car of the Back to the Future fame.

In fact, GM and Ford could gain a new lease of life after belatedly going all-in into the EV megatrend.

Indeed, General Motors has vowed to end production of all diesel and gasoline-powered cars, trucks and SUVs by 2035 as part of the company’s plan to shift its entire new fleet to electric vehicles.

GM also says it plans to use 100% renewable energy to power its U.S. facilities by 2030 and in its global facilities by 2035 and intends to become GM carbon neutral in both its global products and its operations by 2040. Further, the automaker says it will focus on offering zero-emissions vehicles across a wide range of price points and work with various stakeholders to build out the necessary charging infrastructure while promoting consumer acceptance.

If you think that does not sound like the usual GM playbook, you are not imagining things.

GM supported the Trump administration’s pro-carbon lawsuit that was meant to force California and several other states with gas-mileage standards to lower them to the national standards. GM, however, flipped after Trump lost in November and withdrew from the suit on Nov. 23 after Biden became the clear winner. Since then, GM has announced a raft of electrification plans, which has helped GM stock rally 35% in the year-to-date.

Morgan Stanley itself prefers General Motors to Ford, maintaining an Overweight rating on the stock while dropping Ford to an Underweight rating from Equal Weight due to a less-than-stellar sum-of-the-parts value.

In fact, Adam Jonas thinks GM’s fair value could exceed 50% of current share price while Ford’s is 20% lower:

“Our revised DCF and SOTP composition through the 2030 horizon factors in greater caution on our ICE forecasts for both companies, while increasing the value of the EV and AV-related businesses for each. For GM, the offset of the negative ICE adjustments and positive EV adjustments drives an increase in our price target to $80, suggesting over 50% upside. For Ford, our adjustments are substantially offsetting. This, combined with the recent run-up in the stock (which has kept pace with GM YTD) offers more than 20% downside to our price target.”

Nevertheless, F shares have similarly climbed 35% YTD.

Need we say that both ICE stocks have handily outperformed TSLA, which has only managed a 20% YTD return.

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***

Victoria Nuland exemplifies the neocons who have led US foreign policy from one disaster to another for the past 30 years while evading accountability. It is a bad sign that President Joe Biden has nominated Victoria Nuland for the third highest position at the State Department, Under Secretary for Political Affairs.

As a top-level appointee, Victoria Nuland must be confirmed by the US Senate.  There is a campaign to Stop her confirmation. The following review of her work shows why Victoria Nuland is incompetent, highly dangerous and should not be confirmed.

Afghanistan and Iraq

From 2000 to 2003, Nuland was US permanent representative to NATO as the Bush administration attacked then invaded Afghanistan. The Afghan government offered to work with the US remove Al Qaeda, but this was rejected. After Al Qaeda was defeated, the US could have left Afghanistan but instead stayed, established semi-permanent bases, split the country, and is still fighting there two decades later.

From 2003 to 2005 Nuland was principal foreign policy advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney who “helped plan and manage the war that toppled Saddam Hussein, including making Bush administration’s case for preemptive military actions based on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.” The foreign policy establishment, with Nuland on the far right, believed that removing Saddam Hussein and installing a US “ally” would be simple.

The invasion and continuing occupation have resulted in over a million dead Iraqis, many thousands of dead Americans, hundreds of thousands with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder at a cost of 2 to 6 TRILLION dollars.

From 2005 to 2008 Victoria Nuland was US Ambassador to NATO where her role was to “strengthen Allied support” for the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

On the 10^th anniversary of the invasion, when asked about the lessons learned Nuland responded “Compared to where we were in the Saddam era, we now have a bilateral security agreement … We have deep economic interests and ties. We have a security relationship. We have a political relationship.”  Nuland is oblivious to the costs. Nuland’s loyalties are to the elite who have benefitted from the tragedy. According to online google, “One of the top profiteers from the Iraq War was oil field services corporation, Halliburton. Halliburton gained $39.5 billion in ‘federal contracts related to the Iraq war.’ Nuland’s boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, was the former the CEO of Halliburton.

In January 2020, seventeen years after the US invasion,  the Iraqi parliament passed a resolution demanding the US troops and contractors leave.  Now, over one year later, they still have not left.

Libya

In spring 2011, Victoria Nuland became State Department spokesperson under Hillary Clinton as she ramped up the “regime change” assault on Moammar Ghaddafi of Libya. UN Security Council resolution 1973 authorized a “No Fly Zone” for the protection of civilians but NOT an air assault on Libyan government forces.

That summer, as US and others bombed and attacked Libyan forces, she dismissed the option of a peaceful transition in Libya and falsely suggested the UN Security Council required the removal of Ghaddafi.

The campaign led to the toppling of the Libyan government and killing of Ghadaffy. Commenting on the murder and bayonet sodomizing of Ghaddafi, Nuland’s boss Hillary Clinton chortled “We came, we saw, he died.”

Before the overthrow, Libya had the highest standard of living in all of Africa. Since the US led assault, Libya has become a failed state with competing warlords, huge inflation, huge unemployment, and exploding extremism and violence that has spread to neighboring countries. Most of the migrants who have crossed the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe, or drowned trying to, are coming from Libya. By any measure, the goal of “protecting” Libyan civilians has failed spectacularly.

Syria

One reason that Clinton and hawks such as Nuland wanted to overthrow Ghaddafi was to get access to the Libyan military arsenal. That way they could funnel arms to insurgents seeking to overthrow the Syrian government. This was confirmed in secret DOD documents which state: “During the immediate aftermath of, and following the uncertainty caused by, the downfall of the ((Qaddafi)) regime in October 2011 and up until early September of 2012, weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles located in Benghazi, Libya were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to the ports of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria”

In January 2012, Nuland claimed the US is “on the side of those wanting peaceful change in Syria.” While saying this, the US was supplying sniper rifles, rocket propelled grenades, and 125 mm and 155 mm howitzer missiles to the “peaceful” protestors.

The US “regime change” strategy for Syria followed the pattern of Libya. First, claim that the protestors are peaceful. Then claim the government response is disproportionate. Put pressure on the target government to paralyze it, while increasing support to proxy protesters and terrorists. As documented, there were violent Syrian protesters from the start. During the first days of protest in Deraa in mid-March 2011, seven police were killed. As spokesperson for the State Department, Nuland was a major figure promoting the false narrative to justify the “regime change” campaign.

Ukraine

In September 2013 Victoria Nuland was appointed Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. The uprising in the central plaza known as the Maidan began soon after her arrival. To underscore the US support for the protests, Nuland and Senator John McCain passed out bread and cookies to the crowd.

Protests continued into January 2014. The immediate issue was whether to accept a loan from the International Monetary Fund which was going to require a 40% increase in natural gas bills or to accept a loan from Russia with the inclusion of cheap oil and gas. The opposition wanted the Yanukovych government to take the EU/IMF loan. The opposition was comprised of different factions, including the neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and Right Sector.

In early February 2014, an audio recording of Victoria Nuland talking the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, was leaked to the public. The 4-minute conversation was a media sensation because it included Victoria Nuland saying, “Fuck the EU.”.

But Nuland’s cursing was a distraction from what was truly significant. The recording showed that Nuland was meddling in domestic Ukraine affairs, had direct contacts with key opposition leaders, and was managing the protests to the extent she was deciding who would and would not be in the post-coup government! She says, “I don’t think Klitsch [Vitaly Klitschko] should go into government…… I think Yats [Arseniy Yatseniuk] is the guy… “

The reason she wanted to “Fuck the EU” was because she did not approve the EU negotiations and compromise. Nuland and Pyatt wanted to “midwife” and “glue” the toppling of the Yanukovych government despite it being in power after an election that was observed and substantially approved by the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe).

Over the next few weeks, the protests escalated. The President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Kiev, Bernard Casey, described what happened next. “On February 18-20, snipers massacred about 100 people [both protestors and police] on the Maidan …. Although the US Ambassador and the opposition blamed the Yanukovych Administration, the evidence points to the shots coming from a hotel controlled by the ultranationalists, and the ballistics revealed that the protestors and the police were all shot with the same weapons.”

The Estonian Foreign Minister later said the same thing: “behind the  snipers it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new (opposition) coalition”.

President of the American Chamber of Commerce President for Ukraine, Bernard Casey, continues: “On February 20, 2014 an EU delegation moderated negotiations between President Yanukovych and the protestors, agreeing to early elections – in May 2014 instead of February 2015…. Despite the signing of an agreement … the ultranationalist protestors, and their American sponsors, rejected it, and stepped up their campaign of violence.”

The coup was finalized over the coming days.  Yanukovych fled to for his life and Yatsenyuk became President after the coup as planned.

One of the first acts of the coup leadership was to remove Russian as an official state language, even though it is the first language of millions of Ukrainians, especially in the south and east. Over the coming period, the “birth” of the coup government, violence by ultranationalists and neo-Nazis was prevalent. In Odessa, they attacked people peacefully protesting the coup. This video shows the sequence of events with the initial attack followed by fire-bombing the building where protestors had retreated. Fire trucks were prevented from reaching the building to put out the fire and rescue citizens inside. Forty-two people died and a 100 were injured.

A bus convoy heading back to Crimea was attacked with the anti-coup passengers beaten and some killed.

In the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, protests against the coup were met by deadly force.

Victoria Nuland claims to be a “victim” because her conversation was leaked publicly. The real victims are the many thousands of Ukrainians who have died and hundreds of thousands who have become refugees because of Nuland’s crusade to bring Ukraine into NATO.

The audio recording confirms that Nuland was managing the protests at a top level and the results (Yats is the guy) was as planned. Thus, it is probable that Nuland approved the decision to 1) deploy snipers to escalate the crisis and 2) overturn the EU mediated agreement which would have led to elections in just 3 months.

Why were snipers deployed on February 18? Probably because time was running out. The Russian leadership was distracted with the Sochi Olympic Games ending on February 23. Perhaps the coup managers were in a hurry to “glue” it in advance.

Russia

During the 1990’s, Nuland worked for the State Department on Russia related issues including a stint as deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs. The US meddled in Russian internal affairs in myriad ways. Time magazine proudly proclaimed “Yanks to the rescue: the secret story of how American advisors helped Yeltsin win.”  The Yeltsin leadership and policies pushed by the US had disastrous consequences. Between 1991 and 1999, Russian Gross Domestic Product decreased by nearly 50% as the social safety net was removed. The Russian economy collapsed, oligarchs and lawlessness arose. Nuland was part of the US group meddling in Russia, deploying economic “shock therapy” and causing widespread social despair.

Meanwhile, the U.S. reneged on promises to Soviet leader Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch” eastward. Instead, NATO became an offensive pact, bombing Yugoslavia in violation of international law and then absorbing Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, the Baltic states, the Czech Republic, Albania, Croatia and more.

Coming into power in 2000, Putin clamped down on the oligarchs, restored order and started rebuilding the economy. Oligarchs were forced to pay taxes and start investing in productive enterprises. The economy and confidence were restored. Over seven years, GDP went from $1300 billion (US dollars) to $2300 billion.  That is why Putin’s public approval rating has been consistently high, ranging between 85% and a “low” approval rating of 60%.

Most Americans are unaware of these facts. Instead, Putin and Russia are persistently demonized. This has been convenient for the Democratic Party establishment which needed a distraction for their dirty tricks against Bernie Sanders and subsequent loss to Donald Trump. The demonization of Russia is also especially useful and profitable for the military industrial media complex.

Victoria Nuland boosted the “Steele Dossier” which alleged collaboration between Russia and Trump and other salacious claims. The allegations filled the media and poisoned attitudes to Russia.  Belatedly, the truth about the “Steele Dossier” is coming out. Last summer the Wall Street Journal reported “the bureau (FBI) knew the Russia info was phony in 2017” and that “There was no factual basis to the dossier’s claims”.

While promoting disinformation, Victoria Nuland is pushing for a more aggressive US foreign policy. In an article titled “Pinning Down Putin”, she says “Russia’s threat to the liberal world has grown”, that Washington should “deter and roll back dangerous behavior by the Kremlin” and “rebuff Russian encroachments in hot spots around the world.”

The major “hot spots” are the conflicts which Victoria Nuland and other Washington neocons promoted, especially Syria and Ukraine. In Syria, the US and allies have spent hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars promoting the overthrow of the Assad government. So far, they have failed but have not given up. The facts are clear: US troops and military bases in Syria do not have the authorization of the Syrian government.  They are actively stealing the precious oil resources of the Syrian state. It is the US not Russia that is “encroaching”. The dangerous behavior is by Washington not Moscow.

Conclusion

Victoria Nuland has promoted a foreign policy of intervention through coups, proxy wars, aggression, and ongoing occupations. The policy has been implemented with bloody and disastrous results in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.

With consummate hypocrisy she accuses Russia of spreading misinformation in the US, while she openly seeks to put “stress on Putin where he is vulnerable, including among his own citizens.”  She wants to “establish permanent bases along NATO’s eastern border and increase the pace and visibility of joint training exercises.”

Victoria Nuland is the queen of chicken hawks, the Lady Macbeth of perpetual war. There are hundreds of thousands of victims from the policies she has promoted.   Yet she has not received a scratch. On the contrary, Victoria Nuland probably has profited from a stock portfolio filled with military contractors.

Now Victoria Nuland wants to provoke, threaten and “rollback” Russia. A quick look at a map of US military bases shows who is threatening whom.

Victoria Nuland is  dangerous and should not be confirmed.

 

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Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist in the SF Bay Area. He can be reached at [email protected].

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).

***

It’s been apparent for decades that Big Pharma hates natural vitamins and supplements with a passion. They consider them competition, and so they induce the media, government and public health officials to malign vitamins in every way they can.

This is easy, because they give vast sums of cash to the media through advertising, fund politicians’ campaigns, and provide rich, cushy jobs to cooperative public health officials when they leave government. And they fund scientists to run rigged studies intended to discredit vitamins and other natural treatments.

That’s why we’re always reading propaganda from the media and government that claim vitamins and supplements are ineffective and dangerous.

US health officials, with their eye on that sweet Pharma paycheck they will be getting in a few years, dutifully set the daily vitamin requirements (RDA) much lower than what is needed to maintain peak health and immunity. They are set at a level that will prevent you from dying but keep you highly susceptible to profitable illnesses, instead of a level that will maintain vigorous health. And, unfortunately, many other countries copy the US’s RDA for their own populations, in the misguided belief that the US has the best science.

So, to use the disparaging language that the Pharma shills routinely use against advocates of natural health, Big Pharma and their confederates are “Nutrient Deniers.”

But it goes beyond that. They are also Immunity Deniers. Our immune systems, which are a marvel of engineering vastly more effective than anything invented by Pharma or the medical establishment, are increasingly the targets of their assaults.

Covid-19 is a perfect example, but far from the only one. Here we have a disease that 99.8% of infected people survive thanks to their immune systems. But that comforting fact must be denied or censored to promote fear and terror in the public mind, providing a justification for lockdowns, travel restrictions, and other unprecedented dictatorial measures to “keep us safe.”

With most people nutrient-deficient these days thanks to inadequate RDAs, poor diets, and food that is depleted of nutrients due to chemically based overfarming of the soil, it is remarkable, and a tribute to the Immune System, that so many of them recover from Covid regardless. They would probably never get sick in the first place, or even test positive on the highly inaccurate tests, if they maximized their immunity with proper nutrition, exercise, sleep, and by avoiding toxins, pollution, and stress.

Yet practically nowhere from official government authorities like the WHO or CDC, or most of the media, do we see suggestions to boost your immune system to fight the virus. Even though there is plenty of evidence that vitamins, especially D, C, A, B, E, probiotics and minerals like zinc, magnesium, iodine and selenium, given in strong doses, exercise and quality sleep boost your immunity.

Thomas E. Levy, MD, JD, writes:

“Vitamin C has been documented to readily cure all acute viral syndromes in which it has been adequately dosed. As the ultimate virucide, vitamin C has been documented to inactivate/destroy every virus against which it was tested in vitro (in the test tube). Similarly, vitamin C has consistently resolved nearly all acute viral infections in patients treated with sufficient doses.”

Dr. Joseph Mercola wrote:

“Dr. Andrew G. Weber, a pulmonologist and critical-care specialist affiliated with two Northwell Health facilities on Long Island, said his intensive-care patients with the coronavirus immediately receive 1,500 milligrams of intravenous vitamin C. Identical amounts of the powerful antioxidant are then re-administered three or four times a day, he said…The regimen is based on experimental treatments administered to people with the coronavirus in Shanghai, China…‘The patients who received vitamin C did significantly better than those who did not get vitamin C,’ he said. ‘It helps a tremendous amount, but it is not highlighted because it’s not a sexy drug.’”

Although forced by the huge number of Vitamin C studies to acknowledge that Vitamin C can boost the immune system, the NIH denies that this boost will help you fight Covid in any way. “There are insufficient data for the COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel (the Panel) to recommend either for or against the use of vitamin C for the treatment of COVID-19 in [critically ill or] non-critically ill patients.” And, thanks to this rationale, IV vitamin C is not an approved treatment for Covid.

Internet Pharma shills, naturally, sing the same tune as the NIH. Arjun Walia notes:

“An article published by LiveScience, a mainstream science website, states that ‘Vitamin C is extremely unlikely to help people fight off the new coronavirus.’ This is the narrative that’s been portrayed by multiple mainstream media outlets since the beginning of the new coronavirus outbreak. In fact, they’ve gone as far as labelling the suggestion that vitamin C could help, as ‘fake news’ in some cases.”

Richard Z. Cheng, MD, PhD, a Chinese physician who has had remarkable results treating Covid-19 with intravenous Vitamin C, has had his Youtube Channel censored, also Facebook. He writes:

“I was made aware that FB Fact Check claims “Shanghai did not officially recommend high-dose IVC for the treatment of Covid-19”. Let me make it clear that not only Shanghai, but also Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, another major city in China, publicly endorsed high-dose IVC for the treatment of Covid-19. Those who does Fact Check, please be more careful.”

It seems that medical researchers and Public Health officials in China are much less corrupted by Pharma than their counterparts in the US.

The WHO recently took its war on the immune system to new heights. Jeffrey A. Tucker of the American Institute for Economic Research recently discovered that the WHO has altered its website’s explanation of “Herd Immunity” to airbrush out the role that natural exposure to microbes plays in achieving this protection.

Where several months earlier the WHO’s webpage had said that herd immunity was achievable either by natural exposure to a microbe or by vaccination, their new revised page insists that herd immunity requires vaccination. “Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it,” says the Pharma and Gates-funded WHO.

 

Tucker points out that “In effect, this change at WHO ignores and even wipes out 100 years of medical advances in virology, immunology, and epidemiology. It is thoroughly unscientific – shilling for the vaccine industry in exactly the way the conspiracy theorists say that WHO has been doing since the beginning of this pandemic.”

The people who are dying “from” Covid are the ones whose immune systems are weakened by diabetes, heart and lung diseases, obesity, cancer, toxic medicines and old age as well as nutrient deficiency. (That’s not counting the legions of motorcycle accident victims, heart attack victims, flu, cancer and trauma victims who are being branded “Covid” on their death certificates to boost the death count and swell hospitals’ coffers with the Covid bonus payment that the US government gives them — those are a different story.)

Studies have found that most Covid-19-positive people who actually get symptoms (most have no symptoms) are deficient in Vitamin D. Other studies have shown that people with ample Vitamin D are much less likely to test positive. Coincidence?

And the naturally derived medicine hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), combined with zinc, has been shown in numerous studies to help the immune system cure Covid-19 in its early stages. But it’s been banned in many countries because the Pharma-Med-WHO-CDC establishment hate it, because it’s cheap, natural (from quinine) and its patent expired many years ago, so there’s no profit in it. Ivermectin is the same story. Cheap, naturally derived, and it works. Of course, the Covid promoters don’t want a cure, because a cure would make the vaccine unnecessary, and they are absolutely determined to inject everyone with their dubious vaccines, for motives about which one can only speculate.

Instead of these facts, we get “fact checker” websites, run and funded by the Pharma Disinformation Complex (media, pharma, NGOs, globalists), that tell us that vitamins and your immune system will not help you fight Covid, and that people that claim they will help are providing “medical misinformation.” And we get outright censorship of pro-vitamin facts from the media: Facebook, Twitter, Google and many other popular websites and media outlets.

If our governments were not saturated with corruption, they would be dispensing Vitamins, C, D, A, essential minerals and HCQ to our malnourished public for free, not tyranically locking people in their homes, quarantining them, thus depriving them of Vitamin D from sunlight, exercise, and effectively motivating them to eat Spam and potato chips instead of fresh, healthy food. It’s crystal clear that they don’t want the public to be healthy, there’s no profit in that for their paymasters.

Instead, governments give billions of taxpayer dollars to the drug companies to develop vaccines, even though Pharma is the most profitable industry on earth and its companies can well afford to spend their own money on R&D.

Nutrient denial is not Pharma-Med’s only assault on the Immune System. Antibiotics, chemotherapy, antivirals, radiation, vaccines — the most used “remedies” in the Pharma-Med toolbox — have all been implicated in immune system damage and death.

Pharma and their media and government accomplices mass produce stress and depression in the public with their relentless scaremongering about the latest “deadly virus,”and these are very powerful immune system depressors. Face masks deprive you of oxygen which damages immunity as well as causing brain damage. Depression, lack of exercise, lack of sunlight, lack of human contact caused by Covid lockdowns, all damage immunity.

Back in 1984, Pharma-friendly scientists claimed there was a new virus that destroyed the immune system. Although never proven, and fiercely rebutted by many distinguished scientists, the HIV causes AIDS theory became accepted fact through sheer repetition by the terror-mongering media, and by the fact that drug companies knew that it would be a money tree for them, and researchers understood the reality that they would be blacklisted if they dissented. Much as with today’s Covid narrative, one of the main promoters of the idea was Anthony Fauci, and one of its main funders over the years has been Bill Gates.

To treat a virus that was hypothesized to destroy the immune system, they prescribed toxic drugs that were well known to destroy the immune system, such as AZT. And when the person died, they blamed the virus.

Would it be presumptuous to suggest that the virus that destroys the immune system is none other than the Pharma-Med-Media-Government complex itself?

Now the elitists are busily developing “immunity passports” to enable people to freely travel and shop. But these passports, as planned, will not confirm that you have a strong natural immune system and thus are in no danger of getting infected or infecting others. They will not confirm that you’ve had Covid already, or a related coronavirus, and thus are protected by natural immunity that’s generally far superior to vaccine immunity.

They will only confirm that you’ve been vaccinated with vaccines that, by the manufacturers’ own admissions, have not been proven to effectively prevent infection, nor to make a person non-contagious. And they want to make these passports a prerequisite to travel or to attend concerts or sporting events, even to be able to enter a supermarket.

These are the actions of a cabal that view the immune system as their competition. And how does a business deal with its competition? They try to put it out of business. Which seems to be exactly what the Pharma folks are doing.

But, looking at it from their point of view, one can sort of understand their position. Why should people have natural immunity for free when they can pay Big Pharma for it? It’s not right. Pharma must be paid. After all, they are the saviors of humanity according to their PR agencies.

People like me, who never get sick during “flu season”, even though we have never taken flu vaccines, are just crazy to suggest that our strong nutrient intakes and avoidance of vaccines and toxic medicines have anything to do with that.

So, I hope this will become a meme, because, although it’s obvious, I’ve never seen it stated so plainly: Big Pharma and the Medical Establishment regard the human Immune System as their competition.

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Reggie Selwyn is a writer with a special interest in alternative medicine.

Sources

Fact #1: The Infection Fatality Rate for COVID-19 is somewhere between 0.07-0.20%, in line with seasonal flu
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/news/lockdown-lunacy-the-thinking-persons-guide/ 

COVID-19. How can I cure thee? Let me count the ways. Thomas E. Levy, MD, JD:
http://www.orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v16n37.shtml

Vitamin D Insufficiency May Account for Almost Nine of Ten COVID-19 Deaths: Time to Act. Comment on: “Vitamin D Deficiency and Outcome of COVID-19 Patients”. Nutrients 2020, 12, 2757  https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/12/12/3642/htm

Short term, high-dose vitamin D supplementation for COVID-19 disease: a randomised, placebo-controlled, study (SHADE study)
https://pmj.bmj.com/content/early/2020/11/12/postgradmedj-2020-139065

https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2020/09/17/Vitamin-D-deficiency-increases-COVID-19-risk-by-more-than-50/1751600361571/

https://www.newsweek.com/key-defeating-covid-19-already-exists-we-need-start-using-it-opinion-1519535 (about Hydroxychloroquine)

Early Large Dose Intravenous Vitamin C is the Treatment of Choice for 2019-nCov Pneumonia
http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v16n11.shtml

China Treating Coronavirus COVID-19 with Intravenous Vitamin C

http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v16n16.shtml

Shanghai Government Officially Recommends Vitamin C for COVID-19
http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v16n16.shtml

https://www.collective-evolution.com/2020/03/29/high-dose-vitamin-c-has-successfully-treated-50-moderate-to-severe-covid-19-patients/

Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk COVID-19 Patients That Should Be Ramped Up Immediately as Key to the Pandemic Crisis (about Hydroxychloroquine)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32458969/

https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/adjunctive-therapy/vitamin-c/

WHO Deletes Naturally Acquired Immunity from Its Website
https://www.aier.org/article/who-deletes-naturally-acquired-immunity-from-its-website/

https://nypost.com/2020/11/24/moderna-boss-says-covid-shot-not-proven-to-stop-virus-spread/

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 Russian Revolution in 1917 panicked Europe’s upper middle classes, already much discredited and weakened by the gigantic tragedy of the First World War, the result of their own greed, irresponsibility and incompetence. The crash of 1929, which almost ruined most of the industrialized capitalist countries but hardly affected the young Soviet Union, further strengthened the alternative posed by the Russian Revolution. This “bourgeoisie” subsequently faced two huge tasks: rebuild the international capitalist order and respond to the challenge posed by Marxist criticism and the Russian Revolution.

A group of intellectuals hostile to communism, to the left in general, and even to New Deal capitalism in the U.S., sought to develop and impose a more authoritarian and profoundly anti-democratic reconstruction of capitalism: neoliberalism. As mentioned in a previous article, Switzerland was the first country to welcome and finance these intellectuals, playing a key role in shaping the neoliberal order.

Quinn Slobodian, author of Globalists, gave a name to Switzerland’s contribution to neoliberalism: the Geneva School.

For Slobodian:

“The Geneva School includes: thinkers who held academic positions in Geneva, among whom Wilhelm Röpke, Ludwig von Mises, and Michael Heilperin; those who pursued or presented key research there, including Friedrich Hayek, Lionel Robbins, and Gottfried Haberler; and those who worked at the secretariat of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), such as Jan Tumlir and Frieder Roessler. Geneva School neoliberals transposed the ordoliberal idea of ‘the economic constitution’ – or the totality of rules governing economic life – to a scale beyond the nation.”

Still according to this author:

“Geneva – later the home of the WTO – became the spiritual capital of the group of thinkers who sought to solve the riddle of postimperial order “– the period following the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – that obviously included the challenge posed by the Russian Revolution. Slobodian added:

“What the neoliberals of the Geneva School sought was not a partial but a complete protection of the rights of private capital, and the ability of supranational judiciary bodies like the European Court of Justice and the WTO to override national legislation that might disrupt the global rights of capital”, in short, an economic constitution for the world.

For the Geneva School, always according to Slobodian:

“Commitments to national sovereignty and autonomy were dangerous if taken seriously. The Geneva School stalwarts thus believed that after empire, nations must remain embedded in an international institutional order that safeguarded capital and protected their right to move it freely throughout the world. The cardinal sin of the twentieth century was unfettered national independence, and the neoliberal world order required enforceable isonomy – or “same laws”, as Hayek would later call it – against the illusion of autonomy, or “own laws”.”

Put another way, for neoliberals in the Geneva School, laws defending the ‘rights’ of capital should overlap with national laws concerning workers’ rights or environmental protection, for example.

Many of the Geneva School’s participants were among the founders of the Mont Pélerin Society in Switzerland, an organization that played a key role in the intellectual construction of neoliberalism and the international dissemination of its proposals. The Mont Pélerin Society has served as an inspiration and model for other important organizations on the international right such as the Atlas Network and the Atlantic Council.

Faced with the challenge posed by the Russian Revolution, the Swiss elites very early on sided with capital, embracing even the most authoritarian extremes of capitalism as represented by neoliberalism, all to stop the ever more threatening ‘danger’ of the left, always much more menacing, from the point of view of capital, than any totalitarian threat from the right.

An important testimony of the Swiss bourgeoisie’s crusade against communism and the left in general is given by the writings of Harry Gmür, Swiss writer and communist. Born in Bern in 1908, Gmür witnessed the rise of fascism in Europe and the neo-liberal reaction in Switzerland, both reactions to the challenge posed by workers and the Russian Revolution. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Gmür embraced the left and its humanitarian values. In a text published in 1965 under the title Hitler’s War and Switzerland, Gmür wrote: “After the outbreak of war, the government in Bern, under German pressure, but certainly availing itself all too readily of the opportunity, had hastened to ban and subject to police surveillance all consistently anti-fascist parties, associations, newspapers, book distributors, and so on.”

And in another article published in 1975 – At that time in Switzerland – Gmür wrote:

“The Swiss Left was subjected to particular pressure during the war…After the outbreak of the war, the Federal Council, out of anti-Communism no less than out of servility to the Third Reich, had suppressed Freiheit, the organ of the Communist Party, and the two daily newspapers of the Left Socialists of Vaud and Geneva, which had split from Social Democracy. After the French surrender, the Communist Party, the left socialist parties of French-speaking Switzerland, the German-Swiss Socialist Party Opposition (a faction working against the right-wing course of the party leadership) and the Switzerland-Soviet Union Society were banned outright. Their property – printers, bookshops, even office inventory – was confiscated and never returned even later.

Justifiable complaints by the Soviet press about the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war who had fled to Switzerland were rejected by the chief of justice and police.”

Gmür’s two articles were published in Weltbühne, a publication in the former Democratic Republic of Germany, under the pseudonym of Stefan Miller, certainly to avoid repression from the right wing in Switzerland.

However, the most compelling document about Switzerland’s bourgeoisie, its ceaseless war against the left and its uncompromising defence of capital above all else is the Bergier Report.

In December 1996, an independent commission was created by the Swiss Federal Council under the direction of the historian Jean François Bergier, with the mandate, according to Bergier himself:

“to answer a series of specific questions: on “unclaimed” assets, i.e. assets deposited in Swiss banks before the (Second World) War by future victims (of Nazism) and never later recovered by them or their heirs; on the treatment of refugees; on all economic and financial relations between Switzerland and nazi Germany – trade, industrial production, credit and capital movements, insurance, arms trafficking, the market in art works and property looted or sold by force, rail transit, electricity, forced labour in the German subsidiaries of Swiss companies.”

The Bergier Report as a whole consists of 11,000 pages distributed over 28 volumes. It is an immense and invaluable piece of work.

For Pietro Boschetti, author of a book that summarizes the Bergier Report titled Les Suisses et les Nazis [The Swiss and the Nazis], from which Bergier’s previous quote comes,

“the report in general confirmed what historians already knew: yes, asylum policy was extremely harsh during the war; yes, the National Bank bought a lot of suspicious gold from Nazi Germany, thus providing it with a much-appreciated service.”

In his book, Boschetti mentions a few examples of the cooperation of big business in Switzerland with nazi Germany as revealed by the Bergier Report. From the examples given by Boschetti, I mention some below, to give an idea of the scope of the Bergier Report.

On business between Switzerland and nazi Germany, Boschetti wrote: “Relationships between businessmen were obviously very close and lasting. Thus, after the war, the president of the [Bank] SBS [Rudolf Speich] and the director of the [Bank] UBS [Alfred Schaefer] supported the only Nazi banker [Karl Rasche, member of the SS, of Dresdner Bank] before the International Tribunal in Nuremberg.”

On ‘aryanisation’: “Aryanity certificates to prove racial purity appear to have been a fairly common practice. For example, in order to obtain the right to land in Munich, Swissair accepted that its crews prove their aryanity. Nestlé did the same, as did insurance companies.”

And again, about Nestlé: “From Vevey, Nestlé remained in contact throughout the war with the Swiss Hans Riggenbach, who was in charge of the multinational’s German operations in Berlin. Nestlé sold its Nescafé to the Wehrmacht during the Russian campaign, despite the difficult of importing of coffee beans.”

On forced labour by prisoners of war:

“‘Struck, like their competitors, by the lack of workers, Swiss firms resort to forced labour. …at the Lonza factories in Waldshut, where 150 Frenchmen landed between July 1940 and April 1942. From then until the end of the conflict, more than 400 Russian prisoners of war worked there. Georg Fischer, BBC, Maggi, Nestlé and many others did not hesitate to draw on this pool of labour.”

“Ill-treatment was commonplace, including in the Swiss subsidiaries… Until August 1944, Switzerland repatriated fleeing forced labourers, especially Russians and Poles, to Germany.”

For Bergier, the authorities and the people responsible for Swiss companies at the time, “did not fail to justify each of the measures they took, or their refusal to take them, or their hesitation. But their explanations rarely stand up to scrutiny”, as he wrote in the introduction to Boschetti’s book.

However, the public debate that should have taken place after the Report was published – the ultimate goal of all the effort employed – was thwarted. In the words of Pietro Boschetti:

Curious country all the same! While it has just completed a praiseworthy work of historical introspection recognised almost everywhere as exemplary, while it has invested considerable resources to enable historians to work seriously and independently, while it has gone through an ‘identity crisis’ caused by the scandal of unclaimed assets which gave rise to all sorts of exaggerations and excesses, this country, at a time when it has the historical material necessary to have a serene debate, refuses to hold it…. What a pity!

The suppression of this debate was a fundamental victory for the bourgeoisie and big business in their endeavour to protect their own image and maintain within Switzerland the space and credibility needed to continue the expansion of the neoliberal agenda. Were it not for this, institutions as different as the World Economic Forum and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), both based in Switzerland and both heirs and proponents of the neoliberal vision of the world, i.e., the market as the main instrument for organizing society and even the ‘saviour’ of the planet, might not have achieved such renown.

2022 marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of the Bergier Report. It is an occasion to hold the suppressed but still necessary discussion about this document, not only for a deeper understanding of the role of the Swiss bourgeoisie and big business and their ideology at the time of the Second World War, but above all to understand current developments. After all, the neoliberal world view and its representatives still hold enormous political power in this country, hostility against the left remains as aggressive as it was during the Cold War, and Switzerland continues to be an important partner in the construction and dissemination of the fake U.S. narratives supporting anti-democratic campaigns against Cuba and Venezuela, to cite just these two examples. The political forces and economic interests that led to the collaboration of large Swiss companies with nazi Germany are the same as those behind the proposals to reorganize the state according to the interests of capital as advocated by the Mont Pélerin Society and the World Economic Forum; they are also the same forces that prevented public discussion of the Bergier Report.

Neoliberal capitalism continues to be advanced in Switzerland as the only possible solution to the various problems facing humanity today, from the ecological crisis to the health crisis represented by the pandemic. The role of neoliberal capitalism as the cause of these same problems is never even mentioned.

When the climate movement dared to question neoliberalism in Switzerland, the reaction was brutal and repressive legislation. Despite the Mont Pélerin Society and the Geneva School, the World Economic Forum and the WWF, there is another tradition in Switzerland, one that was embodied in Harry Gmür, in the Bergier Commission and is now reappearing in the climate movement. It is now up to this tradition to reopen the necessary debate and challenge neoliberalism in one of its most important and influential centres, Switzerland.

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***

This text  was first published in 2010 following the investigation of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe into the H1N1 swine flu pandemic.

“We were told this was a ‘flu which would threaten humanity, and millions would fall ill”

“With H1N1, did the WHO, once again, frighten the world without any substantial evidence?”

“Millions Vaccinated for No Good Reason”

***

Paul Flynn (United Kingdom, SOC), appointed to prepare a PACE report on this subject, for possible debate in June 2010:

The world has been frightened by a serious of health scares – SARS, Avian ‘Flu and now Swine ‘Flu. We now know, in hindsight, that the fears that were aroused do not appear to be justified. So we want to know how decisions on pandemics are taken – are they taken on the best scientific, epidemiological evidence, or are they influenced by other interests? That is the basis of this complaint. With H1N1, did the WHO, once again, frighten the world without any substantial evidence?

Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, medical expert specialising in epidemiology and former Chair of the PACE Sub-committee on Health:

We were told this was a ‘flu which would threaten humanity, and millions would fall ill. This is why millions of dollars of medications were bought. The WHO basically held the trigger for the pandemic preparedness plans, they had a key role to play in deciding on the pandemic. Around 18 billion dollars was spent on this pandemic worldwide.

 “. It was only this change of definition which made it possible to transform a run-of-the-mill ‘flu into a worldwide pandemic – and made it possible for the pharmaceutical industry to transform this opportunity into cash, under contracts which were mainly secret.

Millions were vaccinated for no good reason. It is not even clear that the vaccine had a positive effect, because it was not clinically tested.

In my view, the WHO undertook an incomprehensible action, which cannot be justified by the scientific evidence. The Council of Europe should investigate this to see how WHO can undertake this kind of dangerous nonsense.

Dr Keiji Fukuda, Special Advisor on Pandemic Influenza to the Director-General, World Health Organisation (WHO):

There is much to learn about how the world can improve its handling of such events and a need to separate fact from rhetoric. Again, we welcome this opportunity. ‘Flu viruses mutate constantly and are notoriously unpredictable. History has shown that influenza pandemics can range enormously in their impact, but that it is impossible to accurately predict the eventual impact at the beginning. What is seen early may be very different from what has been experienced by the end. The 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, started with relatively mild waves of illness and then evolved into the most severe influenza pandemic in history. The new virus spread with unprecedented speed, reaching 120 countries and territories in about 8 weeks, and now has been reported from virtually all countries.

The H1N1 pandemic is not the same as seasonal influenza and differs in major respects. Large outbreaks occurred outside the usual season for influenza. The virus caused a striking and unusual pattern of severe illness and deaths in younger people, with many deaths caused by viral pneumonia, an especially aggressive form of pneumonia. This pattern is not typically seen during seasonal influenza.

The pandemic is not over, but to date, more than 14,000 laboratory confirmed deaths have been reported. We often see the number of deaths compared with figures from seasonal influenza. The is comparing apples with oranges. Deaths from seasonal influenza are based on statistical models. Deaths from the pandemic have been confirmed one by one through laboratory tests and unquestionably are much lower than the true number.

WHO takes seriously providing independent advice. The ‘flu pandemic policies and responses were not improperly influenced by the pharmaceutical industry. Co-operation with a range of partners, including the private sector, is necessary, but numerous safeguards are in place to avoid conflict of interest.

WHO is confident of the scientific validity of its recommendations. The labelling of the pandemic as “fake” is to ignore recent history and science and to trivialize the deaths of over 14,000 people and the many additional serious illnesses experienced by others.

Dr Luc Hessel, European Vaccine Manufacturers:

The EVM rejects this motion, particularly the accusation of inappropriate response of vaccine manufacturers in their response to H1N1. The vaccine industry did what it was asked to do. The industry’s role is to produce safe vaccines in a timely manner and respond to government’s requests. It is governed by stringent international health regulations and rigorous safeguards against conflict of interest. Decision-making regarding vaccine needs can only be based on the best available data at the time.

The industry responded quickly effectively and was able to deliver the vaccines ordered by governments. Our industry responded to requests from WHO and governments who wanted to have fast access to a large quantity of vaccines. It is too early to speculate on the overall return for the industry, but in my view the industry has been a responsible and reliable partner.

Pandemic vaccines were properly developed and tested – for the first time in history, vaccines were available shortly after the declaration of a pandemic. This was only possible thanks to a decade of research and development and 60 years of experience.

Professor Dr Ulrich Keil, Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Epidemiology at the University of Munster:

A number of scientists and others are questioning the decision of the WHO to declare an international pandemic. The H1N1 virus is not a new virus, but has been known to us for decades. The H1N1 vaccination campaign was stopped abruptly when it was realised that the effects were milder than anticipated. I am asking for a reconsideration of this pandemic announcement by the WHO.

In Germany, about 10,000 deaths are attributed to seasonal ‘flu, especially among older and frail people. Only a very small number of deaths, namely 187, can be attributed to the H1N1 virus in Germany – and many of those are dubious.

The Director General of WHO declared the H1N1 pandemic in June 2009, triggering a cascade of actions by individual countries who were prepared for this by the SARS and Avian ‘Flu scares.

We are witnesssing a gigantic misallocation of resources in terms of public health. Governments and public health services are wasting huge amounts of money in investing in pandemic diseases whose evidence base is weak.

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First published on November 11, 2013

In the night of February 13-14, 1945, the ancient and beautiful capital of Saxony, Dresden, was attacked three times, twice by the RAF and once by the USAAF, the United States Army Air Force, in an operation involving well over 1,000 bombers. The consequences were catastrophic, as the historical city centre was incinerated and between 25,000 and 40,000 people lost their lives.[1]

Dresden was not an important industrial or military centre and therefore not a target worthy of the considerable and unusual common American and British effort involved in the raid. The city was not attacked as retribution for earlier German bombing raids on cities such as Rotterdam and Coventry, either. In revenge for the destruction of these cities, bombed ruthlessly by the Luftwaffe in 1940, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and countless other German towns big and small had already paid dearly in 1942, 1943, and 1944.

Furthermore, by the beginning of 1945, the Allied commanders knew perfectly well that even the most ferocious bombing raid would not succeed in “terrorizing [the Germans] into submission,”[2] so that it is not realistic to ascribe this motive to the planners of the operation. The bombing of Dresden, then, seems to have been a senseless slaughter, and looms as an even more terrible undertaking than the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is at least supposed to have led to the capitulation of Japan.

In recent times, however, the bombing of countries and of cities has almost become an everyday occurrence, rationalized not only by our political leaders but also presented by our media as an effective military undertaking and as a perfectly legitimate means to achieve supposedly worthwhile objectives. In this context, even the terrible attack on Dresden has recently been rehabilitated by a British historian, Frederick Taylor, who argues that the huge destruction wreaked on the Saxon city was not intended by the planners of the attack, but was the unexpected result of a combination of unfortunate circumstances, including perfect weather conditions and hopelessly inadequate German air defenses.[3]

However, Taylor’s claim is contradicted by a fact that he himself refers to in his book, namely, that approximately 40 American “heavies” strayed from the flight path and ended up dropping their bombs on Prague instead of Dresden.[4] If everything had gone according to plan, the destruction in Dresden would surely have been even bigger than it already was. It is thus obvious that an unusually high degree of destruction had been intended. More serious is Taylor’s insistence that Dresden did constitute a legitimate target, since it was not only an important military centre but also a first-rate turntable for rail traffic as well as a major industrial city, where countless factories and workshops produced all sorts of militarily important equipment.

A string of facts, however, indicate that these “legitimate” targets hardly played a role in the calculations of the planners of the raid. First, the only truly significant military installation, the Luftwaffe airfield a few kilometres to the north of the city, was not attacked. Second, the presumably crucially important railway station was not marked as a target by the British “Pathfinder” planes that guided the bombers. Instead, the crews were instructed to drop their bombs on the inner city, situated to the north of the railway station.[5] Consequently, even though the Americans did bomb the station and countless people perished in it, the facility suffered relatively little structural damage, so little, in fact, that it was again able to handle trains transporting troops within days of the operation.[6] Third, the great majority of Dresden’s militarily important industries were not located downtown but in the suburbs, where no bombs were dropped, at least not deliberately.[7]

It cannot be denied that Dresden, like any other major German city, contained militarily important industrial installations, and that at least some of these installations were located in the inner city and were therefore wiped out in the raid, but this does not logically lead to the conclusion that the attack was planned for this purpose. Hospitals and churches were also destroyed, and numerous Allied POWs who happened to be in the city were killed, but nobody argues that the raid was organized to bring that about.

Similarly, a number of Jews and members of Germany’s anti-Nazi resistance, awaiting deportation and/or execution, were able to escape from prison during the chaos caused by the bombing,[8] but no one claims that this was the objective of the raid. There is no logical reason, then, to conclude that the destruction of an unknown number of industrial installations of greater or lesser military importance was the raison d’être of the raid. The destruction of Dresden’s industry – like the liberation of a handful of Jews – was nothing more than an unplanned “by-product” of the operation.

It is frequently suggested, also by Taylor, that the bombing of the Saxon capital was intended to facilitate the advance of the Red Army. The Soviets themselves allegedly asked their western partners during the Yalta Conference of February 4 to 11, 1945, to weaken the German resistance on the eastern front by means of air raids. However, there is no evidence whatsoever that confirms such allegations. The possibility of Anglo-American air raids on targets in eastern Germany was indeed discussed at Yalta, but during these talks the Soviets expressed the concern that their own lines might be hit by the bombers, so they requested that the RAF and USAAF would not operate too far to the east.[9] (The Soviets’ fear of being hit by what is now called “friendly fire” was not unwarranted, as was demonstrated during the raid on Dresden itself, when a considerable number of planes mistakenly bombed Prague, situated about as far from Dresden as the Red Army lines were.) It was in this context that a Soviet general by the name of Antonov expressed a general interest in “air attacks that would impede enemy movements,” but this can hardly be interpreted as a request to mete out to the Saxon capital – which, incidentally, he did not mention at all – or to any other German city the kind of treatment that Dresden received on February 13-14.

Neither at Yalta, nor at any other occasion, did the Soviets ask their Western Allies for the kind of air support that presumably materialized in the form of the obliteration of Dresden. Moreover, they never gave their approval to the plan to bomb Dresden, as is also often claimed.[10] In any case, even if the Soviets would have asked for such assistance from the air, it is extremely unlikely that their allies would have responded by immediately unleashing the mighty fleet of bombers that did in fact attack Dresden.

In order to understand why this is so, we have to take a close look at inter-Allied relations in early 1945. In mid- to late January, the Americans were still involved in the final convulsions of the “Battle of the Bulge,” an unexpected German counter-offensive on the western front which had caused them great difficulties. The Americans, British, and Canadians had not yet crossed the Rhine, had not even reached the western banks of that river, and were still separated from Berlin by more than 500 kilometers. On the eastern front, meanwhile, the Red Army had launched a major offensive on January 12 and advanced rapidly to within 100 kilometers of the German capital. The resulting likelihood that the Soviets would not only take Berlin, but penetrate deep into Germany’s western half before the war ended, greatly perturbed many American and British military and political leaders. Is it realistic to believe that, under those circumstances, Washington and London were eager to enable the Soviets to achieve even greater progress?

Even if Stalin had asked for Anglo-American assistance from the air, Churchill and Roosevelt might have provided some token assistance, but would never have launched the massive and unprecedented combined RAF-USAAF operation that the bombing of Dresden revealed itself to be. Moreover, attacking Dresden meant sending hundreds of big bombers more than 2,000 kilometers through enemy airspace, approaching the lines of the Red Army so closely that they would run the risk of dropping their bombs by mistake on the Soviets or being fired at by Soviet anti-aircraft artillery.

Could Churchill or Roosevelt be expected to invest such huge human and material resources and to run such risks in an operation that would make it easier for the Red Army to take Berlin and possibly reach the Rhine before they did? Absolutely not. The American-British political and military leaders were undoubtedly of the opinion that the Red Army was already advancing fast enough.

Towards the end of January 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill prepared to travel to Yalta for a meeting with Stalin. They had asked for such a meeting because they wanted to make binding agreements about postwar Germany before the end of the hostilities. In the absence of such agreements, the military realities in the field would determine who would control which parts of Germany, and it looked very much as if, by the time the Nazis would finally capitulate, the Soviets would be in control of most of Germany and thus be able to unilaterally determine that country’s political, social, and economic future. For such a unilateral course of action, Washington and London themselves had created a fateful precedent, namely when they liberated Italy in 1943 and categorically denied the Soviet Union any participation in the reconstruction of that country; they did the same thing in France and Belgium in 1944.[11] Stalin, who had followed his allies’ example when he liberated countries in Eastern Europe, obviously did not need or want such a binding inter-allied agreement with respect to Germany, and therefore such a meeting. He did accept the proposal, but insisted on meeting on Soviet soil, namely in the Crimean resort of Yalta.

Contrary to conventional beliefs about that Conference, Stalin would prove to be most accommodating there, agreeing to a formula proposed by the British and Americans and highly advantageous to them, namely, a division of postwar Germany into occupation zones, with only approximately one third of Germany’s territory – the later “East Germany” – being assigned to the Soviets. Roosevelt and Churchill could not have foreseen this happy outcome of the Yalta Conference, from which they would return “in an exultant spirit.”[12] In the weeks leading up to the conference, they expected the Soviet leader, buoyed by the recent successes of the Red Army and enjoying a kind of home-game advantage, to be a difficult and demanding interlocutor. A way had to be found to bring him down to earth, to condition him to make concessions despite being the temporary favourite of the god of war.

It was crucially important to make it clear to Stalin that the military power of the Western Allies, in spite of recent setbacks in the Belgian Ardennes, should not be underestimated. The Red Army admittedly featured huge masses of infantry, excellent tanks, and a formidable artillery, but the Western Allies held in their hands a military trump which the Soviets were unable to match. That trump was their air force, featuring the most impressive collection of bombers the world had ever seen. This weapon made it possible for the Americans and the British to launch devastating strikes on targets that were far removed from their own lines. If Stalin could be made aware of this, would he not prove easier to deal with at Yalta?

It was Churchill who decided that the total obliteration of a German city, under the noses of the Soviets so to speak, would send the desired message to the Kremlin. The RAF and USAAF had been able for some time to strike a devastating blow against any German city, and detailed plans for such an operation, known as “Operation Thunderclap,” had been meticulously prepared. During the summer of 1944, however, when the rapid advance from Normandy made it seem likely that the war would be won before the end of the year, and thoughts were already turning to postwar reconstruction, a Thunderclap-style operation had begun to be seen as a means to intimidate the Soviets. In August 1944, an RAF memorandum pointed out that “the total devastation of the centre of a vast [German] city…would convince the Russian allies…of the effectiveness of Anglo-American air power.”[13]

For the purpose of defeating Germany, Thunderclap was no longer considered necessary by early 1945. But towards the end of January 1945, while preparing to travel to Yalta, Churchill suddenly showed great interest in this project, insisted that it be carried out tout de suite, and specifically ordered the head of the RAF Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, to wipe out a city in Germany’s east.[14] On January 25 the British Prime Minister indicated where he wanted the Germans to be “blasted,” namely, somewhere “in their [westward] retreat from Breslau [now Wroclaw in Poland].”[15] In terms of urban centres, this was tantamount to spelling D-R-E-S-D-E-N. That Churchill himself was behind the decision to bomb a city in Germany’s east is also hinted at in the autobiography of Arthur Harris, who wrote that “the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself.”[16] It is obvious that only personalities of the calibre of Churchill were able to impose their will on the czar of strategic bombing. As the British military historian Alexander McKee has written, Churchill “intended to write [a] lesson on the night sky [of Dresden]” for the benefit of the Soviets.

However, since the USAAF also ended up being involved in the bombing of Dresden, we may assume that Churchill acted with the knowledge and approval of Roosevelt. Churchill’s partners at the top of the United States’ political as well as military hierarchy, including General Marshall, shared his viewpoint; they too were fascinated, as McKee writes, by the idea of “intimidating the [Soviet] communists by terrorising the Nazis.”[17] The American participation in the Dresden raid was not really necessary, because the RAF was undoubtedly capable of wiping out Dresden in a solo performance. But the “overkill” effect resulting from a redundant American contribution was perfectly functional for the purpose of demonstrating to the Soviets the lethality of Anglo-American air power. It is also likely that Churchill did not want the responsibility for what he knew would be a terrible slaughter to be exclusively British; it was a crime for which he needed a partner.

A Thunderclap–style operation would of course do damage to whatever military and industrial installations and communications infrastructure were housed in the targeted city, and would therefore inevitably amount to yet another blow to the already tottering German enemy. But when such an operation was finally launched, with Dresden as target, it was done far less in order to speed up the defeat of the Nazi enemy than in order to intimidate the Soviets. Using the terminology of the “functional analysis” school of American sociology, hitting the Germans as hard as possible was the “manifest function” of the operation, while intimidating the Soviets was its far more important “latent” or “hidden” function. The massive destruction wreaked in Dresden was planned – in other words, was “functional” – not for the purpose of striking a devastating blow to the German enemy, but for the purpose of demonstrating to the Soviet ally that the Anglo-Americans had a weapon which the Red Army, no matter how mighty and successful it was against the Germans, could not match, and against which it had no adequate defenses.

Many American and British generals and high-ranking officers were undoubtedly aware of the latent function of the destruction of Dresden, and approved of such an undertaking; this knowledge also reached the local commanders of the RAF and USAAF as well as the “master bombers.” (After the war, two master bombers claimed to remember that they had been told clearly that this attack was intended “to impress the Soviets with the hitting power of our Bomber Command.”)[18] But the Soviets, who had hitherto made the biggest contribution to the war against Nazi Germany, and who had thereby not only suffered the biggest losses but also scored the most spectacular successes, e.g. in Stalingrad, enjoyed much sympathy among low-ranking American and British military personnel, including bomber crews. This constituency would certainly have disapproved of any kind of plan to intimidate the Soviets, and most certainly of a plan – the obliteration of a German city from the air – which they would have to carry out. It was therefore necessary to camouflage the objective of the operation behind an official rationale. In other words, because the latent function of the raid was “unspeakable,” a “speakable” manifest function had to be concocted.

And so the regional commanders and the master bombers were instructed to formulate other, hopefully credible, objectives for the benefit of their crews. In view of this, we can understand why the instructions to the crews with respect to the objectives differed from unit to unit and were often fanciful and even contradictory. The majority of the commanders emphasized military objectives, and cited undefined “military targets,” hypothetical “vital ammunition factories” and “dumps of weapons and supplies,” Dresden’s alleged role as “fortified city,” and even the existence in the city of some “German Army Headquarters.” Vague references were also frequently made to “important industrial installations” and “marshalling yards.” In order to explain to the crews why the historical city centre was targeted and not the industrial suburbs, some commanders talked about the existence there of a “Gestapo headquarters” and of “a gigantic poison gas factory.” Some speakers were either unable to invent such imaginary targets, or were for some reason unwilling to do so; they laconically told their men that the bombs were to be dropped on “the built-up city centre of Dresden,” or “on Dresden” tout court.[19] To destroy the centre of a German city, hoping to wreak as much damage as possible to military and industrial installations and to communication infrastructures, happened to be the essence of the Allied, or at least British, strategy of “area bombing.”[20]

The crew members had learned to accept this nasty fact of life, or rather of death, but in the case of Dresden many of them felt ill at ease. They questioned the instructions with respect to the objectives, and had the feeling that this raid involved something unusual and suspicious and was certainly not a “routine” affair, as Taylor presents things in his book. The radio operator of a B-17, for example, declared in a confidential communication that “this was the only time” that “[he] (and others) felt that the mission was unusual.” The anxiety experienced by the crews was also illustrated by the fact that in many cases a commander’s briefing did not trigger the crews’ traditional cheers but were met with icy silence.[21]

Directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally, the instructions and briefings addressed to the crews sometimes revealed the true function of the attack. For example, a directive of the RAF to the crews of a number of bomber groups, issued on the day of the attack, February 13, 1945, unequivocally stated that it was the intention “to show the Russians, when they reach the city, what our Bomber Command is capable of doing.”[22] Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that many crew members understood clearly that they had to wipe Dresden from the map in order to scare the Soviets. A Canadian member of a bomber crew was to state after the war to an oral historian that he was convinced that the bombing of Dresden had aimed to make it clear to the Soviets “that they had to behave themselves, otherwise we would show them what we could also do to Russian cities.”[23]

The news of the particularly awful destruction of Dresden also caused great discomfort among British and American civilians, who shared the soldiers’ sympathy for the Soviet ally and who, upon learning the news of the raid, likewise sensed that this operation exuded something unusual and suspicious. The authorities attempted to exorcize the public’s unease by explaining the operation as an effort to facilitate the advance of the Red Army. At an RAF press conference in liberated Paris on February 16, 1945, journalists were told that the destruction of this “communications centre” situated close to “the Russian front” had been inspired by the desire to make it possible for the Russians “to continue their struggle with success.” That this was merely a rationale, concocted after the facts by what are called “spin doctors” today, was revealed by the military spokesman himself, who lamely acknowledged that he “thought” that it had “probably” been the intention to assist the Soviets.[24]

The hypothesis that the attack on Dresden was intended to intimidate the Soviets explains not only the magnitude of the operation but also the choice of the target. To the planners of Thunderclap, Berlin had always loomed as the perfect target. By early 1945, however, the German capital had already been bombed repeatedly. Could it be expected that yet another bombing raid, no matter how devastating, would have the desired effect on the Soviets when they would fight their way into the capital? Destruction wreaked within 24 hours would surely loom considerably more spectacular if a fairly big, compact, and “virginal” – i.e. not yet bombed – city were the target. Dresden, fortunate not to have been bombed thus far, was now unfortunate enough to meet all these criteria. Moreover, the British American commanders expected that the Soviets would reach the Saxon capital within days, so that they would be able to see very soon with their own eyes what the RAF and the USAAF could achieve in a single operation. Although the Red Army was to enter Dresden much later than the British and the Americans had expected, namely, on May 8, 1945, the destruction of the Saxon capital did have the desired effect. The Soviet lines were situated only a couple of hundred of kilometers from the city, so that the men and women of the Red Army could admire the glow of the Dresden inferno on the nocturnal horizon. The firestorm was allegedly visible up to a distance of 300 kilometers.

If intimidating the Soviets is viewed as the “latent,” in other words the real function of the destruction of Dresden, then not only the magnitude but also the timing of the operation makes sense. The attack was supposed to have taken place, at least according to some historians, on February 4, 1945, but had to be postponed on account of inclement weather to the night of February 13-14.[25] The Yalta Conference started on February 4. If the Dresden fireworks had taken place on that day, it might have provided Stalin with some food for thought at a critical moment. The Soviet leader, flying high after the recent successes of the Red Army, would be brought down to earth by this feat of his allies’ air forces, and would therefore turn out to be a less confident and more agreeable interlocutor at the conference table. This expectation was clearly reflected in a comment made one week before the start of the Yalta Conference by an American general, David M. Schlatter:

I feel that our air forces are the blue chips with which we will approach the post-war treaty table, and that this operation [the planned bombing of Dresden and/or Berlin] will add immeasurably to their strength, or rather to the Russian knowledge of their strength.[26]

The plan to bomb Dresden was not cancelled, but merely postponed. The kind of demonstration of military potency that it was supposed to be retained its psychological usefulness even after the end of the Crimean conference. It continued to be expected that the Soviets would soon enter Dresden and thus be able to see firsthand what horrible destruction the Anglo-American air forces were able to cause to a city far removed from their bases in a single night. Afterwards, when the rather vague agreements made at Yalta would have to be put into practice, the “boys in the Kremin” would surely remember what they had seen in Dresden, draw useful conclusions from their observations, and behave as Washington and London expected of them. When towards the end of the hostilities American troops had an opportunity to reach Dresden before the Soviets, Churchill vetoed this: even at that late stage, when Churchill was very eager for the Anglo-Americans to occupy as much German territory as possible, he still insisted that the Soviets be allowed to occupy Dresden, no doubt so they could benefit from the demonstration effect of the bombing.

Dresden was obliterated in order to intimidate the Soviets with a demonstration of the enormous firepower that permitted bombers of the RAF and the USAAF to unleash death and destruction hundreds of kilometers away from their bases, and the subtext was clear: this firepower could be aimed at the Soviet Union itself. This interpretation explains the many peculiarities of the bombing of Dresden, such as the magnitude of the operation, the unusual participation in one single raid of both the RAF and USAAF, the choice of a “virginal” target, the (intended) enormity of the destruction, the timing of the attack, and the fact that the supposedly crucially important railway station and the suburbs with their factories and Luftwaffe airfield were not targeted. The bombing of Dresden had little or nothing to do with the war against Nazi Germany: it was an American British message for Stalin, a message that cost the lives of tens of thousands of people. Later that same year, two more similarly coded yet not very subtle messages would follow, involving even more victims, but this time Japanese cities were targeted, and the idea was to direct Stalin’s attention to the lethality of America’s terrible new weapon, the atomic bomb.[27] Dresden had little or nothing to do with the war against Nazi Germany; it had much, if not everything, to do with a new conflict in which the enemy was to be the Soviet Union. In the horrible heat of the infernos of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cold War was born.

Notes

[1] Frederick Taylor. Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, New York, 2004, pp. 354, 443-448; Götz Bergander, Dresden im Luftkrieg. Vorgeschichte, Zerstörung, Folgen, Weimar, 1995, chapter 12, and especially pp. 210 ff., 218-219, 229;

“Luftangriffe auf Dresden“, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luftangriffe_auf_Dresden,  p. 9.

[2] See for example the comments made by General Spaatz cited in Randall Hansen, Fire and fury: the Allied bombing of Germany, 1942-45, Toronto, 2008, p. 243.

[3] Taylor, p. 416.

[4] Taylor, pp. 321-322.

[5] Olaf Groehler. Bombenkrieg gegen Deutschland, Berlin, 1990, p. 414; Hansen, p. 245; “Luftangriffe auf Dresden,” http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luftangriffe_auf_Dresden,  p.7.

[6] “Luftangriffe auf Dresden,” http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luftangriffe_auf_Dresden,  p. 7. 

[7] Taylor, pp. 152-154, 358-359.

[8] Eckart Spoo, “Die letzte der Familie Tucholsky,” Ossietzky, No. 11/2, June 2001, pp. 367-70.

[9] Taylor, p. 190; Groehler, pp. 400-401. Citing a study about Yalta, the British author of the latest study of Allied bombing during World War II notes that the Soviets “clearly preferred to keep the RAF and the USAAF away from territory they might soon be occupying,” see C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: Was the Allied Bombing of Civilians in WWII a Necessity or a Crime?, London, 2006, p. 176.

[10] Alexander McKee. Dresden 1945: The Devil’s Tinderbox, London, 1982, pp. 264-265; Groehler, pp. 400-402.

[11] See e.g. Jacques R. Pauwels, The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, Toronto, 2002, p. 98 ff.

[12] Ibid., p. 119.

[13] Richard Davis, “Operation Thunderclap,” Journal of Strategic Studies, 14:1, March 1991, p. 96.

[14] Taylor, pp. 185-186, 376; Grayling, p. 71; David Irving. The Destruction of Dresden, London, 1971, pp. 96-99.

[15] Hansen, p. 241.

[16] Arthur Travers Harris, Bomber offensive, Don Mills/Ont., 1990, p. 242.

[17] McKee, pp. 46, 105.

[18] Groehler, p. 404.

[19] Ibid., p. 404.

[20] The Americans preferred “precision bombing,” in theory if not always in practice.

[21] Taylor, pp. 318-19; Irving, pp. 147-48.

[22] Quotation from Groehler, p. 404. See also Grayling, p. 260.

[23] Cited in Barry Broadfoot, Six War Years 1939-1945: Memories of Canadians at Home and Abroad, Don Mills, Ontario, 1976, p. 269.

[24] Taylor, pp. 361, 363-365.

[25] See e.g. Hans-Günther Dahms, Der Zweite Weltkrieg, second edition, Frankfurt am Main, 1971, p. 187.

[26] Cited in Ronald Schaffer. “American Military Ethics in World War II: The Bombing of German Civilians,” The Journal of Military History, 67: 2, September 1980, p. 330.

[27] A. C. Grayling, for example, writes in his new book on Allied bombing that “it is recognized that one of the main motives for the atomb-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to demonstrate to the Russians the superiority in waponry that the United States had attained…In the case of Dresden something similar is regrettably true.”

---

The Myth of the Good War
The USA in World War II

by Jacques Pauwels

James Lorimer, Toronto, 2002.
First published in October 2002. 264 Pages / Paperback/ $24.95.

Visit the publisher’s page for this book

This book offers a fresh and provocative look at the role of the USA in World War II. It spent four months on the nonfiction bestseller lists in Europe when it was first published in Belgium in 2001. Since then it has been translated into French, German and Spanish.

Popular historian Jacques Pauwels attacks the widely held belief that World War II was the “good war,” the war in which America led the forces of democracy and freedom to victory over fascist dictatorship and Japanese militarism. He argues that the role of the USA in World War II was determined not by idealism, but by the interests of America’s corporations and by the country’s social, economic, and political leaders.

JACQUES R. PAUWELS has taught European history at the University of Toronto, York University, and the University of Western Ontario.

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***

The fact, that Matteo Renzi was received in Riyadh by His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman and praised Saudi Arabia, aroused criticism. No criticism raised, however, but substantial consent, when Renzi himself, as President of the Italian Government and Secretary of the Democratic Party, in November 2015 went on an official visit to Riyadh to consolidate relations between the two countries. And at the time Saudi Arabia was substantially the same and had already started the war against Yemen. The visit was part of the traditional Italian policy of friendly relations with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Monarchies. Just recall Emma Bonino who, as Foreign Minister of Premier Letta’s Government, declared in 2013: “Italy and Saudi Arabia really have a lot in common and there are profound reasons for strengthening our ties.”

The visit that Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio made to Saudi Arabia on  January 10 (more than two weeks before Renzi) fits in the same line. Here he  did not only meet Prince Mohammed bin Salman, extolling “the constant strengthening of friendship and cooperation relations,” but he performed a much more important official act: he signed with the Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, a memorandum of understanding on the “strategic dialogue” between Italy and Saudi Arabia. This act, far more serious than Renzi’s declaration on the “New Renaissance” of Saudi Arabia, did not arouse criticism in Italy and  practically passed over in silence.

The new agreement links Italy even more to an absolute monarchy, in which the Sovereign holds political and economic, legislative, executive, and judicial powers. It is currently in the hands of Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who seized power with an act of force within the ruling family. There is no Parliament in Saudi Arabia, only an Advisory Council appointed by the Sovereign. Political parties and trade unions are illegal. The judicial system is based on Quranic law, administered by religious courts. Frequent are the sentences of beheading or cutting off hands, carried out in public. Opponents and critics are jailed, tortured, and murdered. Journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul and his body was dismembered to make it disappear. About 10 million immigrants, half of the workforce in Saudi Arabia, live in conditions of over-exploitation and slavery: over 4 million have been arrested in 3 years for alleged violations of immigration laws. 

The “strategic dialogue” agreement strengthened the ties between the Italian military-industrial complex and Saudi Arabia, one of the biggest buyers of weapons. While the Italian government is revoking the sale of bombs to Saudi Arabia as a measure against Saudi Arabia’s war massacring Yemen, Leonardo, Italy’s largest military industry, is assisting Saudi Arabia in using the Eurofighter Typhoon fighters that bomb Yemen. Riyadh bought 72 fighters from the Consortium where Leonardo holds 36% of the industrial share. The Eurofighter Typhoon, as the manufactory industry itself certified, is “combat-proven” having already been “tested in operations in Libya, Iraq and Syria,” and Yemen must be added too. Leonardo itself documented that “for over 40 years we have supplied the avionics and communication systems of the Typhoon and Tornado operated by Saudi Arabia Royal Air Force ” and we offer the Saudi Arabia Royal Air Force aircraft without pilot and target acquisition solutions “(i.e. drones capable to identify targets to be bombed). Leonardo itself also stated that “we have personnel in the Kingdom’s military bases.” At the same time, the Italian Public Company Fincantieri is building in the United States 4 warships of the most advanced type (Multi-Mission Surface Combatants)  for Saudi Arabia on the basis of a “multi-billion-dollar order.” There is, therefore, a solid foundation for the “strategic dialogue” development between Italy and Saudi Arabia.

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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image is CC BY-SA 4.0

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***

We already know based on objective, impartial, empirical data, that there is effectively no difference in covid case counts/hospitalizations/deaths in states that mandate masks and business restrictions (such as North Dakota) vs states which do not (such as its southern neighbor).

So, perhaps while looking at this graphic, the CDC had a brilliant idea: ok, one mask does not work, but what about… two masks!

That’s right: starting Wednesday, the CDC (aka the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) began recommending that Americans wear two masks, or specifically a cloth mask over a medical mask to slow the spread of Covid-19.

The guidance followed the release of an agency study (because “scientists”) that found double masking can boost protection from aerosolized particles.

Whereas government officials previously said the CDC was waiting to gather evidence on double masking, they now appear to have a greenlight to mandate double-masking. The new study, part of the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, also examined the efficacy of modifications made to improve the fit of a medical mask. Either double masking or tightening a mask’s fit reduced exposure to aerosols that could be infectious by about 95%, the research concluded.

“These experiments highlight the importance of good fit to maximize mask performance,” the authors wrote.

“There are multiple simple ways to achieve better fit of masks to more effectively slow the spread of Covid-19.”

The findings came from experiments done by the agency last month, which tested how double masking and changes to improve mask fit worked amid coughing, which the researchers simulated. Knotting the loops of a surgical mask and tucking in extra fabric near the face was found to reduce exposure, as was wearing a cloth mask over a surgical mask.

As a result, the CDC’s new guidance now recommends that Americans should ensure that masks fit tightly on their face and have layers, both of which improve protection.  There are several routes to do that, including wearing a disposable mask beneath a cloth mask or choosing a mask with multiple layers of fabric, according to the recommendation.

That said, double-masking with two disposable masks, or with a KN95, isn’t recommended.

“The bottom line is this: Masks work and they work best when they have a good fit and are worn correctly,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said at a White House briefing on Wednesday.

And while the CDC may argue that “the bottom line” is whatever it wants it to be, at least until it changes its mind in a month to suit some political interest du jour, the reality is that wearing just one mask has shown no tangible improvement on infection numbers.

In fact, none other than Dr Anthony Fauci said one week ago that “there’s no data that indicates that [double masking] is going to make a difference.”

Fauci on double masking:

“There’s no data that indicates that that is going to make a difference” pic.twitter.com/ptVivQfuwt

— Eli Klein (@TheEliKlein) January 31, 2021

But that was science in January. We now have February science. As a result, it’s time to reset the count and start with two…. then three masks…. then four…. until eventually we all will look like this…

… at least for a few minutes before everyone dies from asphyxiation.

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***

With changes of presidential administrations, radical departures in policy are always exaggerated.  Continuity remains, for the most part, a standard feature.  It is precisely that continuity being challenged by groups fearful of the continuing prosecution of Julian Assange. 

The effort by the US Justice Department to extradite Assange from the UK on eighteen charges based on the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act met a stumbling block in the courts on January 4 this year.  The decision by District Judge Vanessa Baraitser proved exceedingly unsympathetic to the press and to Assange in general, but found his “the mental condition … such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America.”

Undeterred, the Justice Department promised to appeal (the February 12 deadline looms), while President Donald Trump showed little interest in dropping the case or using his pardoning powers.  With the Biden administration still finding its feet, advocacy groups have gathered to press for the dropping of the case against the founder of WikiLeaks.  On February 9, the Freedom of the Press Foundation sent a letter to President Joe Biden making the case.  Signatories included Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, the Knight First Amendment Institute, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders.  

“While our organizations have different perspectives on Mr Assange and his organization,” states the letter, “we share the view that the government’s indictment of him poses a grave threat to press freedom both in the United States and abroad.”  The letter distils the implications of the continued prosecution to model simplicity.  The indictment is a threat to press freedom given that it covers the sort of conduct “journalists engage in routinely – and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do.”  Journalism entails speaking with sources, seeking clarification or further documentation and receiving and publishing “documents the government considers secret.”

Biden is weakly kitted out in the garb of a press defender, having positioned himself against Trump’s designation of the fourth estate as “the Enemy of the People”.  In May last year, he promised that a Biden White House would ensure that there was “no bullying of the media from the press room podium or by tweet.”  But for a good stretch of the presidential campaign, Biden tended to ignore the press, part of a general strategy to avoid his famed bumbling.  For three months he did not hold a single news conference, even in virtual format.

Biden was also Vice President in an administration that preached mightily about the values of the press while regularly resorting to the Espionage Act in prosecuting journalistic sources and whistleblowers.  Parker Higgins of the Freedom of the Press Foundation even argues that the Obama administration created a model Trump would grasp with glee, one characterised by the Espionage Act, efforts to “eviscerate reporter’s privilege,” the use of surveillance and the “abuse of the classification system”.

The new president does not count himself among Assange’s fans.  In the aftermath of the publication of US State Department cables by WikiLeaks in 2010, Biden went so far as to call the publisher a “high-tech terrorist”, a position almost intemperate relative to other White House officials.  The point is worth reiterating, given the Obama administration’s general reluctance to prosecute either Assange or WikiLeaks given the proximity of their activities to journalism.  In 2013, Obama’s officials fell back on precedent, sparing WikiLeaks, and by virtue of that other press outlets, from legal action.

In that unfortunate interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, an irony that eluded him at the time, the then Vice President revealed that the Justice Department was “taking a look” at possible charges.  If conspiracy could be proven behind obtaining “these classified documents with a member of the US military that is fundamentally different than if someone drops on your lap … if you are a press person, here is classified material.”

Biden also threw cold water on any claims that the publications had been anything like the Pentagon Papers released during the Nixon administration.  Assange had “done things that have damaged and put in jeopardy the lives and occupations of people in other parts of the world.”  There was also a complaint that meeting world leaders had become more onerous.  “For example, in my meetings … there is a desire to meet with me alone, rather than have staff in the room.  It makes things more cumbersome – so it has done damage.”

Such reasoning has been essentially duplicated in the current indictment, despite a paucity of evidence as to what actual harm the disclosures are said to have caused.   Daniel Ellsberg, the man behind the release of the Pentagon Papers, told the court in Assange’s extradition trial that US authorities had “not been able to identify a single person at risk of death, incarceration or physical harm.”

Given Biden’s previous form on the subject, it is hardly surprising that his administration is promising to continue the prosecution.  On February 9, Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi revealed that there would be no change of tack in pursuing Assange. “We continue to seek his extradition.”  The new is looking awfully like the old on this point.

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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 Another Day in the Empire

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).

***

Trillions of barely visible pieces of plastic are floating in the world’s oceans, from surface waters to the deep seas. These particles, known as microplastics, typically form when larger plastic objects such as shopping bags and food containers break down.

Researchers are concerned about microplastics because they are minuscule, widely distributed and easy for wildlife to consume, accidentally or intentionally. We study marine science and animal behavior, and wanted to understand the scale of this problem. In a newly published study that we conducted with ecologist Elliott Hazen, we examined how marine fish – including species consumed by humans – are ingesting synthetic particles of all sizes.

In the broadest review on this topic that has been carried out to date, we found that, so far, 386 marine fish species are known to have ingested plastic debris, including 210 species that are commercially important. But findings of fish consuming plastic are on the rise. We speculate that this could be happening both because detection methods for microplastics are improving and because ocean plastic pollution continues to increase.

Researchers at California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium have found microplastic particles from the surface to the seafloor, where they can be ingested by a wide range of sea creatures.

Solving the plastics puzzle

It’s not news that wild creatures ingest plastic. The first scientific observation of this problem came from the stomach of a seabird in 1969. Three years later, scientists reported that fish off the coast of southern New England were consuming tiny plastic particles.

Since then, well over 100 scientific papers have described plastic ingestion in numerous species of fish. But each study has only contributed a small piece of a very important puzzle. To see the problem more clearly, we had to put those pieces together.

We did this by creating the largest existing database on plastic ingestion by marine fish, drawing on every scientific study of the problem published from 1972 to 2019. We collected a range of information from each study, including what fish species it examined, the number of fish that had eaten plastic and when those fish were caught. Because some regions of the ocean have more plastic pollution than others, we also examined where the fish were found.

For each species in our database, we identified its diet, habitat and feeding behaviors – for example, whether it preyed on other fish or grazed on algae. By analyzing this data as a whole, we wanted to understand not only how many fish were eating plastic, but also what factors might cause them to do so. The trends that we found were surprising and concerning.

Leopard sharks swim past plastic debris in shallow water off southern California. Ralph Pace, CC BY-ND

A global problem

Our research revealed that marine fish are ingesting plastic around the globe. According to the 129 scientific papers in our database, researchers have studied this problem in 555 fish species worldwide. We were alarmed to find that more than two-thirds of those species had ingested plastic.

One important caveat is that not all of these studies looked for microplastics. This is likely because finding microplastics requires specialized equipment, like microscopes, or use of more complex techniques. But when researchers did look for microplastics, they found five times more plastic per individual fish than when they only looked for larger pieces. Studies that were able to detect this previously invisible threat revealed that plastic ingestion was higher than we had originally anticipated.

Our review of four decades of research indicates that fish consumption of plastic is increasing. Just since an international assessment conducted for the United Nations in 2016, the number of marine fish species found with plastic has quadrupled.

Similarly, in the last decade alone, the proportion of fish consuming plastic has doubled across all species. Studies published from 2010-2013 found that an average of 15% of the fish sampled contained plastic; in studies published from 2017-2019, that share rose to 33%.

We think there are two reasons for this trend. First, scientific techniques for detecting microplastics have improved substantially in the past five years. Many of the earlier studies we examined may not have found microplastics because researchers couldn’t see them.

Second, it is also likely that fish are actually consuming more plastic over time as ocean plastic pollution increases globally. If this is true, we expect the situation to worsen. Multiple studies that have sought to quantify plastic waste project that the amount of plastic pollution in the ocean will continue to increase over the next several decades.

Most global plastic waste is discarded

Chart: The Conversation, CC-BY-ND Source: Our World in Data Get the data

Risk factors

While our findings may make it seem as though fish in the ocean are stuffed to the gills with plastic, the situation is more complex. In our review, almost one-third of the species studied were not found to have consumed plastic. And even in studies that did report plastic ingestion, researchers did not find plastic in every individual fish. Across studies and species, about one in four fish contained plastics – a fraction that seems to be growing with time. Fish that did consume plastic typically had only one or two pieces in their stomachs.

In our view, this indicates that plastic ingestion by fish may be widespread, but it does not seem to be universal. Nor does it appear random. On the contrary, we were able to predict which species were more likely to eat plastic based on their environment, habitat and feeding behavior.

For example, fishes such as sharks, grouper and tuna that hunt other fishes or marine organisms as food were more likely to ingest plastic. Consequently, species higher on the food chain were at greater risk.

We were not surprised that the amount of plastic that fish consumed also seemed to depend on how much plastic was in their environment. Species that live in ocean regions known to have a lot of plastic pollution, such as the Mediterranean Sea and the coasts of East Asia, were found with more plastic in their stomachs.

WATCH: People are ingesting plastic from drinking water but also through foods like shellfish, which tends to be eaten whole so the plastic in their digestive systems is also consumed https://t.co/ADCNQQAcRG pic.twitter.com/dtciVhybuY

— Reuters (@Reuters) December 16, 2020

Effects of a plastic diet

This is not just a wildlife conservation issue. Researchers don’t know very much about the effects of ingesting plastic on fish or humans. However, there is evidence that that microplastics and even smaller particles called nanoplastics can move from a fish’s stomach to its muscle tissue, which is the part that humans typically eat. Our findings highlight the need for studies analyzing how frequently plastics transfer from fish to humans, and their potential effects on the human body.

Our review is a step toward understanding the global problem of ocean plastic pollution. Of more than 20,000 marine fish species, only roughly 2% have been tested for plastic consumption. And many reaches of the ocean remain to be examined. Nonetheless, what’s now clear to us is that “out of sight, out of mind” is not an effective response to ocean pollution – especially when it may end up on our plates.

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***

At the behest of Trump regime hardliners, truth-telling investigative journalist/whistleblower Assange was politically imprisoned in Britain on spurious US charges with no legitimacy.

On January 4, UK District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser rejected the Trump regime’s request to extradite Assange to the US, saying:

“I have decided that extradition would be oppressive and I order his discharge.”

Instead of ordering him released straightaway from unjust confinement under harsh conditions, she denied his legal team’s bail request — based on the following phony reason, saying:

“I am satisfied that there are substantial grounds for believing that if Mr Assange is released today he would fail to surrender to court to face the appeal proceedings (sic),” adding:

“As far as Mr Assange is concerned, this case has not yet been won…The outcome of this appeal is not yet known.”

Assange remains in harsh Belmarsh prison confinement.

Injustice against him continues with no near-term prospect for resolution.

Biden regime hardliners are no different from their predecessors.

According to their injustice department spokesman Marc Raimondi:

“We continue to seek (Assange’s) extradition.”

On February 8, speech, media, and academic freedom advocates — along with champions of civil liberties and human rights groups — wrote to Biden regime’s acting attorney general Monty Wilkerson as follows, saying:

“We…share our profound concern about the ongoing criminal and extradition proceedings relating to Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, under the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,” adding:

“(W)e share the view that the government’s indictment of him poses a grave threat to press freedom both in the United States and abroad.”

“We urge you to drop the appeal of the decision by Judge Vanessa Baraitser of the Westminster Magistrates’ Court to reject the Trump administration’s extradition request.”

“We also urge you to dismiss the underlying indictment.”

“The indictment of Mr. Assange threatens press freedom because much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely—and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do.”

“Journalists at major news publications regularly speak with sources, ask for clarification or more documentation, and receive and publish documents the government considers secret.”

“In our view, such a precedent in (Assange’s) case could effectively criminalize these common journalistic practices.

A total of 24 organizations signed the letter, including:

• The ACLU
• Center for Constitutional Rights
• Committee to Protect Journalists
• Defending Rights and Dissent
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• First Amendment Coalition
• Free Press
• Freedom of the Press Foundation
• National Coalition Against Censorship
• Roots Action
• Press Freedom Defense Fund of First Look Institute
• Whistleblower & Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) at ExposeFacts

The above and other calls on Biden to drop spurious charges against Assange and order his release were rejected.

Criminalizing his truth-telling journalism continues — a US dagger thrust into the heart of constitutionally affirmed First Amendment rights bipartisan hardliners want undermined by repressive legislation.

If occurs, extraditing Assange to the US for politicized show trial persecution will be another major body blow to digital democracy, the last frontier of media freedom.

Crucifying him for truth-telling journalism and whistleblowing revelations of government wrongdoing reflects the hallmark of totalitarian rule.

Censorship of what’s vital to know is likely prelude for much greater harshness to come.

We’re all Julian Assange. His fate is ours.

Free and open societies in the US and West hang in the balance.

Growing tyranny threatens their elimination altogether.

If digital democracy goes, what remains of fundamental freedoms will go with it.

When truth-telling and dissent are considered existential threats, free and open societies no longer exist.

That’s the slippery slope where the US and other Western states are heading.

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

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

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

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

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

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

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

Featured image is from Lawyers for Assange

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).

***

Pfizer and Moderna mRNA inoculations aren’t what they’re promoted to be.

As medically defined by the CDC, vaccines are supposed to stimulate the “immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease.”

Immunization is a “process by which a person becomes protected against a disease through vaccination.”

The above is not what mRNA inoculations are designed to do. They’re something else entirely.

They’re gene modifying delivery systems that don’t produce immunity —what Moderna calls “gene therapy technology.”

Not designed to prevent seasonal flu-renamed covid illness, at most they may somewhat reduce symptoms short-term.

Promoting mRNA technology as vaccine protection from covid is part of a state-approved/media proliferated mass deception scam.

The above technology is unapproved by the FDA for human use because it’s experimental, inadequately tested, and high-risk — especially for the elderly with weakened immune systems.

The nanoparticle-based delivery system is unapproved.

mRNA inoculations contain hazardous polyethylene glycol (PEG) to deliver their DNA-altering technology to human cells.

The risk of adverse events increases greatly from follow-up inoculations, including to potentially life-threatening anaphylactic shock.

In 2017, Moderna abandoned mRNA technology and lipid nanoparticles because tests caused large numbers of adverse effects.

Yet the same gene therapy and nanoparticle delivery system are used by Moderna and Pfizer in their misnamed mRNA “vaccines” that aren’t what they’re called.

According to statnews.com, “mRNA is a tricky technology.”

“Several major pharmaceutical companies have tried and abandoned the idea, struggling to get mRNA into cells without triggering nasty side effects.”

“(N)anoparticles created a daunting challenge: Dose too little, and you don’t get enough enzyme to affect the disease.”

“(D)ose too much, and the drug is too toxic for patients.”

“Moderna could not make its therapy work, former employees and collaborators said.”

“The safe dose was too weak, and repeat injections of a dose strong enough to be effective had troubling effects on the liver in animal studies.”

Moderna earlier admitted that its lipid nanoparticles (LNP) risked “significant adverse events,” adding:

“No mRNA drug has been approved in this new potential category of medicines, and may never be approved as a result of efforts by others or us.”

“mRNA drug development has substantial clinical development and regulatory risks due to the novel and unprecedented nature of this new category of medicines.”

“(T)here can be no assurance that our LNPs will not have undesired effects.”

According to virologist Judy Mikovits, LNPs can enter the brain, risking pathologic neuro-inflammation that could cause multiple sclerosis, ALS, or other serious diseases.

Johns Hopkins explained that potentially serious adverse events may occur after receiving follow-up mRNA inoculations.

According to Children’s Health Defense, “doctors link Pfizer (and) Moderna ‘vaccines’ to (a) life-threatening blood disorder.”

Health Impact News reported the following:

“An entire school district in Ohio canceled classes on Monday this week after so many of the staff suffered side effects from one of the experimental COVID mRNA injections over the weekend.”

Fox News Cleveland reported that “(t)wo days after employees were given their first round of COVID-19 vaccinations, the Fairless Local School District canceled classes, attributing it to many developing side effects and becoming ill.”

Similar events to the above are happening in the US and European countries after Pfizer and Moderna inoculations.

The more people jabbed, the more adverse events that at times are fatal.

Going along with experimental mRNA inoculations is playing Russian roulette with human health.

There’s high risk of things turning out badly in the short or longer-term.

Deceased 39-year-old Dr. Keshav Raman Sharma is an mRNA statistic.

Inoculated on January 5, he was found dead at home five days later.

He’s not alone. Others suffered the same fate.

Protecting health and well-being requires avoidance of these experimental, inadequately tested high-risk, unapproved inoculations.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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/

First published on June 29, 2020

Lockdowns and hygienic measures around the world are based on numbers of cases and mortality rates created by the so-called SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR tests used to identify “positive” patients, whereby “positive” is usually equated with “infected.”

But looking closely at the facts, the conclusion is that these PCR tests are meaningless as a diagnostic tool to determine an alleged infection by a supposedly new virus called SARS-CoV-2.

Unfounded “Test, Test, Test, …” mantra

At the media briefing on COVID-19 on March 16, 2020, the WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said:

We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test.”

The message was spread through headlines around the world, for instance by Reuters and the BBC.

Still on the 3 of May, the moderator of the Heute journal — one of the most important news magazines on German television— was passing the mantra of the corona dogma on to his audience with the admonishing words:

Test, test, test—that is the credo at the moment, and it is the only way to really understand how much the coronavirus is spreading.”

This indicates that the belief in the validity of the PCR tests is so strong that it equals a religion that tolerates virtually no contradiction.

But it is well known that religions are about faith and not about scientific facts. And as Walter Lippmann, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and perhaps the most influential journalist of the 20th centurysaid: “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”

So to start, it is very remarkable that Kary Mullis himself, the inventor of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technology, did not think alike. His invention got him the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1993.

Unfortunately, Mullis passed away last year at the age of 74, but there is no doubt that the biochemist regarded the PCR as inappropriate to detect a viral infection.

The reason is that the intended use of the PCR was, and still is, to apply it as a manufacturing technique, being able to replicate DNA sequences millions and billions of times, and not as a diagnostic tool to detect viruses.

How declaring virus pandemics based on PCR tests can end in disaster was described by Gina Kolata in her 2007 New York Times article Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn’t.

Lack of a valid gold standard

Moreover, it is worth mentioning that the PCR tests used to identify so-called COVID-19 patients presumably infected by what is called SARS-CoV-2 do not have a valid gold standard to compare them with.

This is a fundamental point. Tests need to be evaluated to determine their preciseness — strictly speaking their “sensitivity”[1] and “specificity” — by comparison with a “gold standard,” meaning the most accurate method available.

As an example, for a pregnancy test the gold standard would be the pregnancy itself. But as Australian infectious diseases specialist Sanjaya Senanayake, for example, stated in an ABC TV interview in an answer to the question “How accurate is the [COVID-19] testing?”:

If we had a new test for picking up [the bacterium] golden staph in blood, we’ve already got blood cultures, that’s our gold standard we’ve been using for decades, and we could match this new test against that. But for COVID-19 we don’t have a gold standard test.”

Jessica C. Watson from Bristol University confirms this. In her paper “Interpreting a COVID-19 test result”, published recently in The British Medical Journal, she writes that there is a “lack of such a clear-cut ‘gold-standard’ for COVID-19 testing.”

But instead of classifying the tests as unsuitable for SARS-CoV-2 detection and COVID-19 diagnosis, or instead of pointing out that only a virus, proven through isolation and purification, can be a solid gold standard, Watson claims in all seriousness that, “pragmatically” COVID-19 diagnosis itself, remarkably including PCR testing itself, “may be the best available ‘gold standard’.” But this is not scientifically sound.

Apart from the fact that it is downright absurd to take the PCR test itself as part of the gold standard to evaluate the PCR test, there are no distinctive specific symptoms for COVID-19, as even people such as Thomas Löscher, former head of the Department of Infection and Tropical Medicine at the University of Munich and member of the Federal Association of German Internists, conceded to us[2].

And if there are no distinctive specific symptoms for COVID-19, COVID-19 diagnosis — contrary to Watson’s statement — cannot be suitable for serving as a valid gold standard.

In addition, “experts” such as Watson overlook the fact that only virus isolation, i.e. an unequivocal virus proof, can be the gold standard.

That is why I asked Watson how COVID-19 diagnosis “may be the best available gold standard,” if there are no distinctive specific symptoms for COVID-19, and also whether the virus itself, that is virus isolation, wouldn’t be the best available/possible gold standard. But she hasn’t answered these questions yet – despite multiple requests. And she has not yet responded to our rapid response post on her article in which we address exactly the same points, either, though she wrote us on June 2nd: “I will try to post a reply later this week when I have a chance.”

No proof for the RNA being of viral origin

Now the question is: What is required first for virus isolation/proof? We need to know where the RNA for which the PCR tests are calibrated comes from.

As textbooks (e.g., White/Fenner. Medical Virology, 1986, p. 9) as well as leading virus researchers such as Luc Montagnier or Dominic Dwyer state, particle purification — i.e. the separation of an object from everything else that is not that object, as for instance Nobel laureate Marie Curie purified 100 mg of radium chloride in 1898 by extracting it from tons of pitchblende — is an essential pre-requisite for proving the existence of a virus, and thus to prove that the RNA from the particle in question comes from a new virus.

The reason for this is that PCR is extremely sensitive, which means it can detect even the smallest pieces of DNA or RNA — but it cannot determine where these particles came from. That has to be determined beforehand.

And because the PCR tests are calibrated for gene sequences (in this case RNA sequences because SARS-CoV-2 is believed to be a RNA virus), we have to know that these gene snippets are part of the looked-for virus. And to know that, correct isolation and purification of the presumed virus has to be executed.

Hence, we have asked the science teams of the relevant papers which are referred to in the context of SARS-CoV-2 for proof whether the electron-microscopic shots depicted in their in vitro experiments show purified viruses.

But not a single team could answer that question with “yes” — and NB., nobody said purification was not a necessary step. We only got answers like “No, we did not obtain an electron micrograph showing the degree of purification” (see below).

We asked several study authors “Do your electron micrographs show the purified virus?”, they gave the following responses:

Regarding the mentioned papers it is clear that what is shown in the electron micrographs (EMs) is the end result of the experiment, meaning there is no other result that they could have made EMs from.

That is to say, if the authors of these studies concede that their published EMs do not show purified particles, then they definitely do not possess purified particles claimed to be viral. (In this context, it has to be remarked that some researchers use the term “isolation” in their papers, but the procedures described therein do not represent a proper isolation (purification) process. Consequently, in this context the term “isolation” is misused).

Thus, the authors of four of the principal, early 2020 papers claiming discovery of a new coronavirus concede they had no proof that the origin of the virus genome was viral-like particles or cellular debris, pure or impure, or particles of any kind. In other words, the existence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA is based on faith, not fact.

We have also contacted Dr Charles Calisher, who is a seasoned virologist. In 2001, Science published an “impassioned plea…to the younger generation” from several veteran virologists, among them Calisher, saying that:

[modern virus detection methods like] sleek polymerase chain reaction […] tell little or nothing about how a virus multiplies, which animals carry it, [or] how it makes people sick. [It is] like trying to say whether somebody has bad breath by looking at his fingerprint.”[3]

And that’s why we asked Dr Calisher whether he knows one single paper in which SARS-CoV-2 has been isolated and finally really purified. His answer:

I know of no such a publication. I have kept an eye out for one.”[4]

This actually means that one cannot conclude that the RNA gene sequences, which the scientists took from the tissue samples prepared in the mentioned in vitro trials and for which the PCR tests are finally being “calibrated,” belong to a specific virus — in this case SARS-CoV-2.

In addition, there is no scientific proof that those RNA sequences are the causative agent of what is called COVID-19.

In order to establish a causal connection, one way or the other, i.e. beyond virus isolation and purification, it would have been absolutely necessary to carry out an experiment that satisfies the four Koch’s postulates. But there is no such experiment, as Amory Devereux and Rosemary Frei recently revealed for OffGuardian.

The necessity to fulfill these postulates regarding SARS-CoV-2 is demonstrated not least by the fact that attempts have been made to fulfill them. But even researchers claiming they have done it, in reality, did not succeed.

One example is a study published in Nature on May 7. This trial, besides other procedures which render the study invalid, did not meet any of the postulates.

For instance, the alleged “infected” laboratory mice did not show any relevant clinical symptoms clearly attributable to pneumonia, which according to the third postulate should actually occur if a dangerous and potentially deadly virus was really at work there. And the slight bristles and weight loss, which were observed temporarily in the animals are negligible, not only because they could have been caused by the procedure itself, but also because the weight went back to normal again.

Also, no animal died except those they killed to perform the autopsies. And let’s not forget: These experiments should have been done beforedeveloping a test, which is not the case.

Revealingly, none of the leading German representatives of the official theory about SARS-Cov-2/COVID-19 — the Robert Koch-Institute (RKI), Alexander S. Kekulé (University of Halle), Hartmut Hengel and Ralf Bartenschlager (German Society for Virology), the aforementioned Thomas Löscher, Ulrich Dirnagl (Charité Berlin) or Georg Bornkamm (virologist and professor emeritus at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Munich) — could answer the following question I have sent them:

If the particles that are claimed to be to be SARS-CoV-2 have not been purified, how do you want to be sure that the RNA gene sequences of these particles belong to a specific new virus?

Particularly, if there are studies showing that substances such as antibiotics that are added to the test tubes in the in vitro experiments carried out for virus detection can “stress” the cell culture in a way that new gene sequences are being formed that were not previously detectable — an aspect that Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock already drew attention to in her Nobel Lecture back in 1983.

It should not go unmentioned that we finally got the Charité – the employer of Christian Drosten, Germany’s most influential virologist in respect of COVID-19, advisor to the German government and co-developer of the PCR test which was the first to be “accepted” (not validated!) by the WHO worldwide – to answer questions on the topic.

But we didn’t get answers until June 18, 2020, after months of non-response. In the end, we achieved it only with the help of Berlin lawyer Viviane Fischer.

Regarding our question “Has the Charité convinced itself that appropriate particle purification was carried out?,” the Charité concedes that they didn’t use purified particles.

And although they claim “virologists at the Charité are sure that they are testing for the virus,” in their paper (Corman et al.) they state:

RNA was extracted from clinical samples with the MagNA Pure 96 system (Roche, Penzberg, Germany) and from cell culture supernatants with the viral RNA mini kit (QIAGEN, Hilden, Germany),”

Which means they just assumed the RNA was viral.

Incidentally, the Corman et al. paper, published on January 23, 2020 didn’t even go through a proper peer review process, nor were the procedures outlined therein accompanied by controls — although it is only through these two things that scientific work becomes really solid.

Irrational rest results

It is also certain that we cannot know the false positive rate of the PCR tests without widespread testing of people who certainly do not have the virus, proven by a method which is independent of the test (having a solid gold standard).

Therefore, it is hardly surprising that there are several papers illustrating irrational test results.

For example, already in February the health authority in China’s Guangdong province reported that people have fully recovered from illness blamed on COVID-19, started to test “negative,” and then tested “positive” again.

A month later, a paper published in the Journal of Medical Virology showed that 29 out of 610 patients at a hospital in Wuhan had 3 to 6 test results that flipped between “negative”, “positive” and “dubious”.

A third example is a study from Singapore in which tests were carried out almost daily on 18 patients and the majority went from “positive” to “negative” back to “positive” at least once, and up to five times in one patient.

Even Wang Chen, president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, conceded in February that the PCR tests are “only 30 to 50 per cent accurate”; while Sin Hang Lee from the Milford Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory sent a letter to the WHO’s coronavirus response team and to Anthony S. Fauci on March 22, 2020, saying that:

It has been widely reported in the social media that the RT-qPCR [Reverse Transcriptase quantitative PCR] test kits used to detect SARSCoV-2 RNA in human specimens are generating many false positive results and are not sensitive enough to detect some real positive cases.”

In other words, even if we theoretically assume that these PCR tests can really detect a viral infection, the tests would be practically worthless, and would only cause an unfounded scare among the “positive” people tested.

This becomes also evident considering the positive predictive value (PPV).

The PPV indicates the probability that a person with a positive test result is truly “positive” (ie. has the supposed virus), and it depends on two factors: the prevalence of the virus in the general population and the specificity of the test, that is the percentage of people without disease in whom the test is correctly “negative” (a test with a specificity of 95% incorrectly gives a positive result in 5 out of 100 non-infected people).

With the same specificity, the higher the prevalence, the higher the PPV.

In this context, on June 12 2020, the journal Deutsches Ärzteblattpublished an article in which the PPV has been calculated with three different prevalence scenarios.

The results must, of course, be viewed very critically, first because it is not possible to calculate the specificity without a solid gold standard, as outlined, and second because the calculations in the article are based on the specificity determined in the study by Jessica Watson, which is potentially worthless, as also mentioned.

But if you abstract from it, assuming that the underlying specificity of 95% is correct and that we know the prevalence, even the mainstream medical journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt reports that the so-called SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR tests may have “a shockingly low” PPV.

In one of the three scenarios, figuring with an assumed prevalence of 3%, the PPV was only 30 percent, which means that 70 percent of the people tested “positive” are not “positive” at all. Yet “they are prescribed quarantine,” as even the Ärzteblatt notes critically.

In a second scenario of the journal’s article, a prevalence of rate of 20 percent is assumed. In this case they generate a PPV of 78 percent, meaning that 22 percent of the “positive” tests are false “positives.”

That would mean: If we take the around 9 million people who are currently considered “positive” worldwide — supposing that the true “positives” really have a viral infection — we would get almost 2 million false “positives.”

All this fits with the fact that the CDC and the FDA, for instance, concede in their files that the so-called “SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR tests” are not suitable for SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis.

In the “CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel“ file from March 30, 2020, for example, it says:

Detection of viral RNA may not indicate the presence of infectious virus or that 2019-nCoV is the causative agent for clinical symptoms”

And:

This test cannot rule out diseases caused by other bacterial or viral pathogens.”

And the FDA admits that:

positive results […] do not rule out bacterial infection or co-infection with other viruses. The agent detected may not be the definite cause of disease.”

Remarkably, in the instruction manuals of PCR tests we can also read that they are not intended as a diagnostic test, as for instance in those by Altona Diagnostics and Creative Diagnostics[5].

To quote another one, in the product announcement of the LightMix Modular Assays produced by TIB Molbiol — which were developed using the Corman et al. protocol — and distributed by Roche we can read:

These assays are not intended for use as an aid in the diagnosis of coronavirus infection”

And:

For research use only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.”

Where is the evidence that the tests can measure the “viral load”?

There is also reason to conclude that the PCR test from Roche and others cannot even detect the targeted genes.

Moreover, in the product descriptions of the RT-qPCR tests for SARS-COV-2 it says they are “qualitative” tests, contrary to the fact that the “q” in “qPCR” stands for “quantitative.” And if these tests are not “quantitative” tests, they don’t show how many viral particles are in the body.

That is crucial because, in order to even begin talking about actual illness in the real world not only in a laboratory, the patient would need to have millions and millions of viral particles actively replicating in their body.

That is to say, the CDC, the WHO, the FDA or the RKI may assert that the tests can measure the so-called “viral load,” i.e. how many viral particles are in the body. “But this has never been proven. That is an enormous scandal,” as the journalist Jon Rappoport points out.

This is not only because the term “viral load” is deception. If you put the question “what is viral load?” at a dinner party, people take it to mean viruses circulating in the bloodstream. They’re surprised to learn it’s actually RNA molecules.

Also, to prove beyond any doubt that the PCR can measure how much a person is “burdened” with a disease-causing virus, the following experiment would have had to be carried out (which has not yet happened):

You take, let’s say, a few hundred or even thousand people and remove tissue samples from them. Make sure the people who take the samples do not perform the test.The testers will never know who the patients are and what condition they’re in. The testers run their PCR on the tissue samples. In each case, they say which virus they found and how much of it they found. Then, for example, in patients 29, 86, 199, 272, and 293 they found a great deal of what they claim is a virus. Now we un-blind those patients. They should all be sick, because they have so much virus replicating in their bodies. But are they really sick — or are they fit as a fiddle?

With the help of the aforementioned lawyer Viviane Fischer, I finally got the Charité to also answer the question of whether the test developed by Corman et al. — the so-called “Drosten PCR test” — is a quantitative test.

But the Charité was not willing to answer this question “yes”. Instead, the Charité wrote:

If real-time RT-PCR is involved, to the knowledge of the Charité in most cases these are […] limited to qualitative detection.”

Furthermore, the “Drosten PCR test” uses the unspecific E-gene assay as preliminary assay, while the Institut Pasteur uses the same assay as confirmatory assay.

According to Corman et al., the E-gene assay is likely to detect all Asian viruses, while the other assays in both tests are supposed to be more specific for sequences labelled “SARS-CoV-2”.

Besides the questionable purpose of having either a preliminary or a confirmatory test that is likely to detect all Asian viruses, at the beginning of April the WHO changed the algorithm, recommending that from then on a test can be regarded as “positive” even if just the E-gene assay (which is likely to detect all Asian viruses!) gives a “positive” result.

This means that a confirmed unspecific test result is officially sold as specific.

That change of algorithm increased the “case” numbers. Tests using the E-gene assay are produced for example by Roche, TIB Molbiol and R-Biopharm.

High CQ values make the test results even more meaningless

Another essential problem is that many PCR tests have a “cycle quantification” (Cq) value of over 35, and some, including the “Drosten PCR test”, even have a Cq of 45.

The Cq value specifies how many cycles of DNA replication are required to detect a real signal from biological samples.

“Cq values higher than 40 are suspect because of the implied low efficiency and generally should not be reported,” as it says in the MIQE guidelines.

MIQE stands for “Minimum Information for Publication of Quantitative Real-Time PCR Experiments”, a set of guidelines that describe the minimum information necessary for evaluating publications on Real-Time PCR, also called quantitative PCR, or qPCR.

The inventor himself, Kary Mullis, agreed, when he stated:

If you have to go more than 40 cycles to amplify a single-copy gene, there is something seriously wrong with your PCR.”

The MIQE guidelines have been developed under the aegis of Stephen A. Bustin, Professor of Molecular Medicine, a world-renowned expert on quantitative PCR and author of the book A-Z of Quantitative PCR which has been called “the bible of qPCR.”

In a recent podcast interview Bustin points out that “the use of such arbitrary Cq cut-offs is not ideal, because they may be either too low (eliminating valid results) or too high (increasing false “positive” results).”

And, according to him, a Cq of 20 to 30 should be aimed at, and there is concern regarding the reliability of the results for any Cq over 35.

If the Cq value gets too high, it becomes difficult to distinguish real signal from background, for example due to reactions of primers and fluorescent probes, and hence there is a higher probability of false positives.

Moreover, among other factors that can alter the result, before starting with the actual PCR, in case you are looking for presumed RNA viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, the RNA must be converted to complementary DNA (cDNA) with the enzyme Reverse Transcriptase—hence the “RT” at the beginning of “PCR” or “qPCR.”

But this transformation process is “widely recognized as inefficient and variable,” as Jessica Schwaber from the Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine in Toronto and two research colleagues pointed out in a 2019 paper.

Stephen A. Bustin acknowledges problems with PCR in a comparable way.

For example, he pointed to the problem that in the course of the conversion process (RNA to cDNA) the amount of DNA obtained with the same RNA base material can vary widely, even by a factor of 10 (see above interview).

Considering that the DNA sequences get doubled at every cycle, even a slight variation becomes magnified and can thus alter the result, annihilating the test’s reliable informative value.

So how can it be that those who claim the PCR tests are highly meaningful for so-called COVID-19 diagnosis blind out the fundamental inadequacies of these tests—even if they are confronted with questions regarding their validity?

Certainly, the apologists of the novel coronavirus hypothesis should have dealt with these questions before throwing the tests on the market and putting basically the whole world under lockdown, not least because these are questions that come to mind immediately for anyone with even a spark of scientific understanding.

Thus, the thought inevitably emerges that financial and political interests play a decisive role for this ignorance about scientific obligations. NB, the WHO, for example has financial ties with drug companies, as the British Medical Journal showed in 2010.

And experts criticize “that the notorious corruption and conflicts of interest at WHO have continued, even grown“ since then. The CDC as well, to take another big player, is obviously no better off.

Finally, the reasons and possible motives remain speculative, and many involved surely act in good faith; but the science is clear: The numbers generated by these RT-PCR tests do not in the least justify frightening people who have been tested “positive” and imposing lockdown measures that plunge countless people into poverty and despair or even drive them to suicide.

And a “positive” result may have serious consequences for the patients as well, because then all non-viral factors are excluded from the diagnosis and the patients are treated with highly toxic drugs and invasive intubations. Especially for elderly people and patients with pre-existing conditions such a treatment can be fatal, as we have outlined in the article “Fatal Therapie.”

Without doubt eventual excess mortality rates are caused by the therapy and by the lockdown measures, while the “COVID-19” death statistics comprise also patients who died of a variety of diseases, redefined as COVID-19 only because of a “positive” test result whose value could not be more doubtful.

Addendum: We thank Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos and Val Turner in particular who made valuable contributions to the realization of this article.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Torsten Engelbrecht is an award-winning journalist and author from Hamburg, Germany. In 2006 he co-authored Virus-Mania with Dr Klaus Kohnlein, and in 2009 he won the German Alternate Media Award. He has also written for Rubikon, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Financial Times Deutschland and many others.

Konstantin Demeter is a freelance photographer and an independent researcher. Together with the journalist Torsten Engelbrecht he has published articles on the “COVID-19” crisis in the online magazine Rubikon, as well as contributions on the monetary system, geopolitics, and the media in Swiss Italian newspapers.

Notes

[1] Sensitivity is defined as the proportion of patients with disease in whom the test is positive; and specificity is defined as the proportion of patients without disease in whom the test is negative.

[2] E-mail from Prof. Thomas Löscher from March 6, 2020

[3] Martin Enserink. Virology. Old guard urges virologists to go back to basics, Science, July 6, 2001, p. 24

[4] E-mail from Charles Calisher from May 10, 2020

[5] Creative Diagnostics, SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus Multiplex RT-qPCR Kit

Immunologist: Pfizer, Moderna Vaccines Could Cause Long-Term Chronic Illness

By Children’s Health Defense, February 10 2021

By Prof. Ociel Alí López, February 10 2021

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 following text is Chapter VII of  Prof Michel Chossudovsky’s E-Book entitled:

The 2020 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset” , (December 2020, revised January 2021)

click the above link to access the complete E-book consisting of a Preface, Highlights and Nine Chapters.

Introduction

The plan to develop the Covid-19 vaccine is profit driven.

The US government had already ordered 100 million doses back in July 2020 and the EU is to purchase 300 million doses. It’s Big Money for Big Pharma, generous payoffs to corrupt politicians, at the expense of tax payers.

The objective is ultimately to make money, by vaccinating the entire planet of 7.8 billion people for SARS-CoV-2.

The Covid vaccine in some cases envisages more than one shot. If this initiative were to go ahead as planned, it would be the largest vaccine project in World history and the biggest money making operation for Big Pharma.

The Second Wave of the pandemic commenced in October 2020. The Pfizer Moderna corona vaccine was launched in early November 2020.

Worldwide, people are led to believe that the corona vaccine is a solution. And that “normality” will then be restored.

How is it that a vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which under normal conditions would take years to develop, was promptly launched on the 9th of November?

Moreover, the vaccine announced by Pfizer and Moderna is based on an experimental gene editing mRNA technology which has a bearing on the human genome. Coupled with the vaccine initiative is the development of a so-called digital passport which will be imposed on entire populations. (See analysis below).

And why do we need a vaccine for Covid-19 when the WHO, the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as well as numerous scientists have confirmed unequivocally that Covid-19 is  “similar to seasonal influenza”.( See our analysis in Chapter II).

The Drive to Develop a Corona Vaccine is Profit

It would appear that the standard lab tests using ferrets and mice will not be conducted.

Pfizer has “gone straight to human “guinea pigs.” … (See Incisive analysis by F. William Engdahl, Global Research, November 2020)

“Human tests began in late July and early August [2020]. Three months is unheard of for testing a new vaccine. Several years is the norm.”

This caricature by Large + JIPÉM  explains our predicament:

Mouse No 1: “Are You Going to get Vaccinated”,

Mouse No. 2: Are You Crazy, They Haven’t finished the Tests on Humans”

Un grand merci aux caricaturistes Large et JIPÉM

Dr. Michael Yeadon, a former Vice President of Pfizer has taken a firm stance: 

“All vaccines against the SARS-COV-2 virus are by definition novel. No candidate vaccine has been… in development for more than a few months.”:

“If any such vaccine is approved for use under any circumstances that are not EXPLICITLY experimental, I believe that recipients are being misled to a criminal extent.”

In early December,  Dr Michael Yeadon together with Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg “filed an application with the EMA, the European Medicine Agency responsible for EU-wide drug approval, for the immediate suspension of all SARS CoV 2 vaccine studies, in particular the BioNtech/Pfizer study on BNT162b (EudraCT number 2020-002641-42).

It is important to review the complex history of the novel vaccine.

History of the SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine Project 

There are many contradictions. The analysis below addresses the earlier stages of the vaccine project as well as the role of the 201 Simulationunder the auspices of the John Hopkins School of Medicine held in New York on  October 19, 2019.

The Covid vaccine is a multibillion dollar Big Pharma operation which will contribute to increasing the public debt of more than 150 national governments.

Supported by the fear campaign, Money rather than Public Health is the driving force behind this initiative.

The GSK-Pfizer Partnership 

Five months before the onset of the Covid-19 crisis, two of the largest Worldwide Pharma conglomerates decided to join hands in a strategic relationship. In August 2019, GSK confirmed the formation of a major partnership with Pfizer entitled the Consumer Health Joint Venture.

The coronavirus was initially named nCoV-19 by CEPI and the WHO: exactly the same name as that adopted in the WEF-Gates-John Hopkins Event 201 (2019-nCov) pertaining to a coronavirus simulation exercise held in Baltimore in mid October 2019.

The Event 201 John Hopkins simulation addressed the development of an effective vaccine in response to millions of cases (in the October 2019 simulation) of the 2019 nCoV. The simulation announced a scenario in which the entire population of the planet would be affected: “During the initial months of the pandemic, the cumulative number of cases [in the simulation] increases exponentially, doubling every week. And as the cases and deaths accumulate, the economic and societal consequences become increasingly severe.”

The scenario ends at the 18-month point, with 65 million deaths. The pandemic is beginning to slow due to the decreasing number of susceptible people. The pandemic will continue at some rate until there is an effective vaccine or until 80-90 % of the global population has been exposed. From that point on, it is likely to be an endemic childhood disease.

According to the WEF Video below, produced in relation to the 201 Simulation, “we ran a massive viral pandemic simulation.., 65 million deaths Worlwide.”.

See also the analysis of  F. William Engdahl on the 201 Simulation

Video Produced by the World Economic Forum in association with the 201 John Hopkins Simulation

Ironically, on January 30th 2020, the WHO defined the new virus as 2019-nCoV, i.e. the same name as that used in the 201 simulation in October 2019.

It was only later that Covid-19 was identified by the WHO not as a virus but as a disease: coronavirus disease (COVID-19), the Virus was identified as “severe acute respiratory syndrome” coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)

Two weeks after the virus had been formally identified by the People’s Republic of China (Jan 7, 2020), a vaccine for the novel coronavirus was announced by CEPI at the Davos World Economic Forum, January 20-24, 2020.

The Central Role of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI)

The lead entity for the novel coronavirus vaccine initiative is the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) an organization sponsored and financed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Note the chronology: The development of the 2019 nCoV vaccine was announced at the Davos World Economic Forum (WEF) a week prior to the official launching by the WHO of  a Worldwide Public Health Emergency (January 30) at a time when the number of “confirmed cases” Worldwide (outside China) was 83. (see Chapter II)

The pandemic was launched by the WHO on March 11. And five days later, barely covered by the media, the first tests involving human volunteers were conducted by Moderna in Seattle on March 16.

According to Richard Hatchett, CEO of  the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) the project to develop a vaccine commenced not only prior to the discovery and identification of the coronavirus (January 7, 2020) but several months prior to the October 2019 Scenario 201 simulation exercise.

“We did that in the last year or so [early 2019]. … ”

(scroll down for interview with Richard Hatchett)

CEPI is seeking a “monopoly” role in the vaccination business the objective of which is a “global vaccine project”, in partnership with a large number of “candidates”.

It announced funding for its existing partnership with Inovio and The University of Queensland (Australia). In addition, CEPI confirmed (January 23, 2020) its contract with Moderna, Inc. and the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been instrumental in waging the fear and panic campaign across America: “Ten Times Worse than Seasonal Flu”. (See WEF Video)

CEPI was dealing simultaneously with several pharmaceutical companies. The Moderna- NIAID agreement was implemented. The mRNA COVID-19 vaccine was launched in the US in late November 2020.

On January 31st, 2020 the day following the WHO’s official launching of the global public health emergency (PHEIC) and Trump’s decision to curtail air travel with China, CEPI announced its partnership with CureVac AG, a German-based  biopharmaceutical company.

A few days later, in early February 2020, CEPI “announced that major vaccine manufacturer GSK would allow its proprietary adjuvants— compounds that boost the effectiveness of vaccines — to be used in the response”. (The pandemic was officially launched on March 11).

There were many “potential vaccines in the pipeline” with “dozens of research groups around the world  racing to create a vaccine against COVID-19”.

The COV-19 Global Vaccination Program 

CEPI (on behalf of Gates-WEF, which funded the 201 simulation exercise) is currently playing a key role in a large scale Worldwide vaccination program in partnership with biotech companies, Big Pharma, government agencies as well as university laboratories.

The foregoing statement by CEPI was made nearly two months prior to the official declaration of a pandemic on March 11.

“We’re having conversations with a broad array of potential partners”. And critical to those conversations is: What’s the plan to make very large quantities of vaccine within a time frame that is potentially relevant to what people seem to be increasingly certain will be a pandemic, if it isn’t already there? …” [Richard Hatchett, CEPI CEO in interview with stat.news.com].  …

The underlying focus was to develop a global vaccine:

And part of that was doing a global survey of manufacturing capacity to think about where we wanted to plant the manufacturing of any successful products we were able to bring forward.

Of significance, Hatchett  confirmed that the project to develop a vaccine commenced not only prior to the discovery and identification of the coronavirus (January 7, 2020) but several months prior to the October 2019 201 simulation exercise.

“We did that in the last year or so. [early 2019]…  We are using the information that we have collected and have that team now thinking about opportunities for scaling vaccines of various different types. That is a work in progress. For some of the technologies the tech transfer [to a manufacturer] may be something that could be done in a time frame that was pertinent to the epidemic, potentially.

I think it is going to be really important to engage those folks who have access to really substantial production capacity. And having the big producers at the table — because of their depth, because of their experience, because of their internal resources — would be very, very important.

The candidate vaccines will be very, very quick. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID [who has been spreading panic on network TV], is out in public as saying he thinks the clinical trial for the Moderna vaccine may be as early as the spring. (emphasis added)

What is now unfolding in real life is in some regards similar to the October 2019 201 Simulation exercise at John Hopkins.

The scenario is how to produce millions of vaccine shots on the presumption that the pandemic will spread Worldwide, and for that you need the Covid-19 “positive cases” to go fly high.

The CEPI sponsored vaccine conglomerates had already planned their investments well in advance of the global Worldwide health emergency (PHEIC) (declared by the WHO on January 30, 2020):

I [Hachett] think part of the general strategy is to have a large number of candidates. [and] you want to have enough candidates that at least some of them are moving rapidly through the process.

And then for each candidate, you need to ask yourself the question: How do you produce that? … [And] how are you going to get to that point with production at a scale that is meaningful in the context of a disease that is going to infect the whole of society? (Interview conducted by Helen Branswell, statsnews, February 3, 2020)

Moderna Inc 

Moderna Inc based in Seattle was one of the several candidates involved and supported by CEPI.

Moderna announced on February 24th the development of “an experimental mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, known as mRNA-1273″. “The initial batch of the vaccine has already been shipped to U.S. government researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)” headed by Dr. Antony Fauci.

While Moderna Inc initially stated that the first clinical trials would commence in late April, tests involving human volunteers started in mid-March in Seattle: (bear in mind the pandemic was officially launched on March 11)

The Covid Vaccine and “Herd Immunity”: Changing the Definitions 

Herd immunity is an important concept in medicine. According to Healthline:

“It happens when so many people in a community become immune to an infectious disease that it stops the disease from spreading.

This can happen in two ways:

1. Many people contract the disease and in time build up an immune response to it (natural immunity).

2. Many people are vaccinated against the disease to achieve immunity.

Herd immunity can work against the spread of some diseases. There are several reasons why it often works.” (See Healthline)

The WHO has redefined herd immunity with a view to supporting the multibillion dollar Covid vaccine initiative:

Below (Left) is the official WHO definition (June 2020). And in November (Right) the WHO decided unilaterally to  redefine a fundamental medical concept, focussing solely on the role of vaccination in achieving herd immunity.

To our knowledge, the peer reviewed definition of herd immunity has not changed.

The new “definition” of the WHO visibly serves the interests of Big Pharma.

Flashback: The 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic

Michael Fomento  concludes:

Even within the agency, the director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Epidemiology in Munster, Germany, Dr. Ulrich Kiel, has essentially labeled the pandemic a hoax. “We are witnessing a gigantic misallocation of resources [$18 billionso far] in terms of public health,” he said.

They’re right. This wasn’t merely overcautiousness or simple misjudgment. The pandemic declaration and all the Klaxon-ringing since reflect sheer dishonesty motivated not by medical concerns but political ones.

Unquestionably, swine flu has proved to be vastly milder than ordinary seasonal flu. It kills at a third to a tenth the rate, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. Data from other countries like France and Japan indicate it’s far tamer than that.

The above text is Chapter VII of  Prof Michel Chossudovsky’s E-Book entitled:

The 2020 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset” , (December 2020, revised January 2021)

click the above link to access the complete E-book consisting of a Preface, Highlights and Nine Chapters.

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GR Editor’s Note

The following text is a translation of an article published in Die Welt am Sonntag, which reveals a secret plan by Germany’s Ministry of the Interior to justify repressive social measures pertaining to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The intent was to deliberately trigger a fear campaign based on what might be described “fake science”.

A “worst-case scenario” was calculated according to which more than a million people in Germany could die of the coronavirus if social life were to continue as it was before the pandemic”.

The original article in German is published below. Translation by Global Research.

The secret plan had been revealed in May 2020 by a Ministry of the Interior official.

In May GR published an article entitled  German Official Leaks Ministry of Interior Report Denouncing Corona as ‘A Global False Alarm’.

As reported by Der Spiegel on May 15, “Stephen Kohn, the whistleblower working for the Ministry of Interior was fired”.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, February 10, 2021

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An extensive correspondence, which WELT AM SONNTAG has reviewed confirms that in the first high phase of the pandemic, the office of Interior Minister Horst Seehofer commissioned the hiring of researchers. Thereupon they provided results for a dramatic “secret paper” of the ministry.

The Federal Ministry of the Interior engaged scientists from several research institutes and universities for political purposes in the first wave of the corona pandemic in March 2020. It commissioned the researchers from the Robert Koch Institute and other institutions to create a calculation model on the basis of which the Ministry of the Interior, Horst Seehofer (CSU), wanted to justify tough corona measures.

This emerges from more than 200 pages of internal correspondence between the management level of the Ministry of the Interior and the researchers, which WELT AM SONNTAG has received. A group of lawyers have revealed the e-mail correspondence in a legal dispute with the Robert Koch Institute that lasted several months.

In an exchange of e-mails, the State Secretary in the Ministry of the Interior, Markus Kerber, asked the researchers  to develop a model on the basis of which “preventive and repressive measures” could be planned.

According to the correspondence, the scientists worked in close coordination with the ministry in just four days to develop content for a paper that had been declared secret, which was distributed via various media over the following days.

A “worst-case scenario” was calculated according to which more than a million people in Germany could die of the coronavirus if social life were to continue as it was before the pandemic.

Original Text in German

Ein umfangreicher Schriftwechsel, der WELT AM SONNTAG vorliegt, zeigt: In der ersten Hochphase der Pandemie wirkte das Haus von Innenminister Horst Seehofer auf Forscher ein. Daraufhin lieferten sie Ergebnisse für ein dramatisches „Geheimpapier“ des Ministeriums.

Das Bundesinnenministerium spannte in der ersten Welle der Corona-Pandemie im März 2020 Wissenschaftler mehrerer Forschungsinstitute und Hochschulen für politische Zwecke ein.

Es beauftragte die Forscher des Robert-Koch-Instituts und anderer Einrichtungen mit der Erstellung eines Rechenmodells, auf dessen Basis die Behörde von Innenminister Horst Seehofer (CSU) harte Corona-Maßnahmen rechtfertigen wollte.Das geht aus einem mehr als 200 Seiten starken internen Schriftverkehr zwischen der Führungsebene des Innenministeriums und den Forschern hervor, der WELT AM SONNTAG vorliegt. Eine Gruppe von Juristen hat den E-Mail-Verkehr in einer mehrmonatigen rechtlichen Auseinandersetzung mit dem Robert-Koch-Institut erstritten.

Im E-Mail-Wechsel bittet etwa der Staatssekretär im Innenministerium, Markus Kerber, die angeschriebenen Forscher, ein Modell zu erarbeiten, auf dessen Basis „Maßnahmen präventiver und repressiver Natur“ geplant werden könnten.Die Wissenschaftler erarbeiteten dem Schriftverkehr zufolge in nur vier Tagen in enger Abstimmung mit dem Ministerium Inhalte für ein als geheim deklariertes Papier, das in den folgenden Tagen über verschiedene Medien verbreitet wurde.Darin wurde ein „Worst-Case-Szenario“ berechnet, laut dem in Deutschland mehr als eine Million Menschen am Coronavirus sterben könnten, würde das gesellschaftliche Leben so weitergeführt wie vor der Pandemie.

Copyright, Die Welt am Sonntag. Our thanks to Die Welt.

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Featured image: Bundesinnenminister Seehofer drängte während der ersten Hochphase der Pandemie auf harte Maßnahmen – und ließ sein Haus kreativ dabei werden, sie zu rechtfertigen

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Too much propaganda is merely propaganda. —Wm. T. Vollman, Europe Central

The mainstream media (MSM) has demonstrated how to stop the spread of real news, under cover of stopping the spread of a fake virus. In this perverse phase of our cultural evolution, the simulation is designed to outcompete reality. The beta test for this new generation of societal software was called Event 201, and the official release, Covid-19. The coding templates are known as Lockstep, Agenda 2020, Agenda 2030, and The Great Reset.

The open source software known as free-thinking humanity knows enough to look outside the narrative box the MSM has constructed to capture the entire human race, indeed reality itself. Because we have seen this movie before and we have reached the point of revelation.

Look at your television at night. Watch the ‘stories’ made up of everything fake. It’s all nonsense. All of it. It’s all totally fake. The anchors, the pundits, the ‘experts’ and interviews; fake, fake, fake and FAKE! The stories, the narratives, the ‘science’, the numbers; fake, fake, fake and FAKE! ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, the FOXNews Channel; ALL FAKE! You can see it on their faces, and you can hear it in their voice. They don’t believe a damn thing that they’re saying, and you know you’re right! You’re not crazy! –RealStewPeters, Telegram

“All the News That’s Fit to Print” —New York Timesmotto

The BBC in their piece on the above NYT motto mentions a longstanding debate on its exact meaning. At the outset it was “to differentiate the Times from… the yellow press” (BBC) with its “indecencies” and “reckless sensationalism.” Gabriel Snyder, NYT “Public Editor” and a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, describes the competition, with “their brightly colored and richly illustrated front pages, loud headlines, and heavy coverage of lurid crime, political scandals, and tear-jerking human-interest stories. The style was called ‘yellow journalism.’ Today it’d be called ‘clickbait’ or ‘fake news.’”

Of course, insider Gabriel Snyder fails to note that this 120-year script was flipped by the Trumpian revolution, which branded the MSM itself as the epitome of Fake News.

The Times, nicknamed “The Gray Lady,” was said to stand aloof, with the “intention to report the news impartially” (web). Snyder lets slip the key to this kingdom of truth when he proclaims, “This alignment in outlook of the powers that be and the Times newsroom allowed the Times to set itself above the fray: it could report and leave it to the politicians to fight it out.” That shocking admission “of alignment with the powers that be”—standing above the divide-and-conquer battles the paper reports and fuels—certainly paints a privileged, self-appointed role as arbiter (and unannounced sponsor) of partisan conflict. Or rather, as a mouthpiece for those entities (“powers that be”) who hold themselves above reproach, accountability, or challenge… and now, imperatively beyond discussion in its pages.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.
—Harold Pinter Nobel speech, quoted by Edward Curtin

Thus the meaning of the motto becomes clear. It is not all the news there is to report. It is neither complete nor balanced. The conditional filter “fit” is entirely fit to the ruling directive. One way this has manifested itself is the CIA Mockingbird program which explicitly targeted the Times, among a media spectrum of infiltration and censorship.

Source: instarix.com

Gabriel Snyder by June of 2020 was already seeing the threat to his crumbling hold on the high ground of Truth, and paints the narrative war in the pandemic context as:

a matter of life and death—of relying on science, facts, and expertise to guide society’s actions or adopting a political program that would junk them altogether. Given what is at stake, it is not enough to present conspiracy theories unchallenged—as, just to cite a single example, an April report on a Texas protest against lockdowns did when it quoted the right-wing internet fabulist Alex Jones’s pronouncement on covid-19 (“America knows it’s a hoax”)—in the hopes that readers will simply conclude on their own that they are beyond the pale. On matters where there is a very right and a very wrong answer—and not competing political talking points—such “both sides” coverage is irresponsible.

Snyder disparages Mark Zuckerberg for the remark “I think that’s kind of a dangerous line to get to in terms of deciding what is true and what isn’t.” Oblivious to the hypocrisy of Zuckerberg doing just that, with his own censorship campaign on Facebook, Snyder’s beef seems to be that Zuckerberg was too wishy-washy in his fake confession. Snyder says the NYT should double down on its championing of the one-and-only truth, and now, in times of greatest need, even become “adversarial.”

Like, even admit, maybe, you’re a Propaganda Rag for the Democrat Party?

Source: Cari Keleman, twitter

Attempting to play it both ways, Snyder falls flat, larding his language with supposed certitudes: life, death, science, facts, expertise, beyond the pale, very right, very wrong, irresponsible, cynical, misinformation…”

The esteemed editor should review legendaryNew Yorker editor E. B. White’s advice to avoid the word very, as it adds nothing substantial, and instead advertises a weak position. But such is the criteria for that absolute standard of truth, in the same vague and subjective terms claimed by an equally unimaginative political party and class, indeed the global elite itself when speaking directly from its perches in Davos or Brussels or the UN.

In short, what is inherently subjective is claimed to have a definite political meaning. Whichever party wins power—and whichever media buys market share—gets to rebrand subjective as objective (the newly anointed one-and-only Truth) through its own lens.

Source: Fox News

Snyder comes to the inevitable conclusion of the totalitarian mindset:

“Perhaps it’s time, as we confront two pandemics—one a virus, the other cynical misinformation peddled mostly for financial gain—that the Times stopped focusing on all the news, and took a stand once more on what is fit to print.”

Does he imagine that the average citizen cannot see the mirror image of his position: that the Times itself has become the chief purveyor of “cynical misinformation peddled mostly for financial gain”?

The result of certitude on either side is that “Right” and “Wrong” becomes “Us” and “Them.” Deniers of the ruling party’s version of truth become “Domestic Terrorists,”enemies of the state. All-out narrative war is declared.

Source: Narrative reframes, telegram

Follow this logic farther, and it ends one way: in genocide. The student of history will recognize the unfolding now of “a dangerous agenda built on a foundation of deception and delusion.”

At this point in 2021 it looks bleak for lovers of liberty, but the fight has just begun.
The coming deadly reckoning of this Fourth Turning will require tremendous courage, guile, personal sacrifice, dreadful alternatives, survival skills, intelligence, strategic thinking, and an audacity to win at all costs. Those still caught in the mindset of voting in good guys to change the outcome are delusional, as the outcome of this past election confirmed voting does not matter.

There are wealthy, powerful, sociopath, globalist oligarchs who constitute the real power in this world and unless they are confronted and defeated, the outcome of this Fourth Turning will result in a dark future for humanity and the final obliteration of our Constitution. There is no way to avoid the coming conflict. Sides must be chosen. You will not be able to sit this one out. They will come for you, whether you like it or not.
—Jim Quinn, Fourth Turning Detonation

That vision might be considered just the darker side of the same big-picture reality being foisted upon the world by the psychopathic elite. The difference is, Quinn is basing his view on evidence before us on every street in the world, indeed trumpeted proudly by that same elite. Whereas their justifications to the public, via their propaganda arms such as the NYT, are constructed from a tapestry of false flags, faked science, and big lies. The result, a narrative coup on reality itself.

In such a world, we cannot even utter the word reality anymore without invoking its political context: the officially sanctioned occupation of Reality itself. Yes, by none other than that supreme guardian of Truth, the New York Times, with a recent op-ed“ exploring the concept of a ‘Reality Czar’ to deal with our ‘Reality Crisis.’” (C.J. Hopkins).

The idea of a coup on reality is not new, after all; it is simply a plagiarism of Orwell’s infamous Ministry of Truth, aiming to rewrite not only the past and the present, but the future. The NYT’s partner in narrative crime, the Wall Street Journal, announces that the fake virus is “here to stay”; and (misnamed) “public health officers” such as BC’s Bonnie Henry are following in lockstep to extend their Orwellian orders “indefinitely.”

Source: Kulvinder Kaur MD

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This article was originally published on The New Agora.

Nowick Gray writes from Salt Spring Island, BC. His books of genre-bending fiction and creative nonfiction explore the borders of nature and civilization, imagination and reality, choice and manifestation. Connect at NowickGray.com to read more. A regular contributor to The New Agora,Nowick also offers perspectives and resources on alternative culture and African drumming, and helps other writers as a freelance copyeditor at HyperEdits.com. Sign up for the “Wild Writings” email newsletter for updates and free offers.

Featured image is from CH Smith, Of Two Minds blog via The New Agora

First published May 29, 2020

See the latest report on the German Ministry of Interior scandal revealed by Die Welt am Sonntag, (English)

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Germany’s federal government and mainstream media are engaged in damage control after a report that challenges the established Corona narrative leaked from Germany’s Ministry of the Interior.  

Wir machen unsere Leser auf die Zusammenfassung dieses wichtigen durchgesickerten Berichts aufmerksam, der im Auftrag des BMI – Bundesministerium des Innern, erstellt wurde.

Klicken Sie hier, um den vollständigen Bericht in deutscher Sprache anzuzeigen.

 

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Some of the report key passages are:

• The dangerousness of Covid-19 was overestimated: probably at no point did the danger posed by the new virus go beyond the normal level.
• The people who die from Corona are essentially those who would statistically die this year, because they have reached the end of their lives and their weakened bodies can no longer cope with any random everyday stress (including the approximately 150 viruses currently in circulation).
• Worldwide, within a quarter of a year, there has been no more than 250,000 deaths from Covid-19, compared to 1.5 million deaths [25,100 in Germany] during the influenza wave 2017/18.
• The danger is obviously no greater than that of many other viruses. There is no evidence that this was more than a false alarm.
• A reproach could go along these lines: During the Corona crisis the State has proved itself as one of the biggest producers of Fake News.

So far, so bad. But it gets worse.

The report focuses on the “manifold and heavy consequences of the Corona measures” and warns that these are “grave”.

More people are dying because of state-imposed Corona-measures than they are being killed by the virus.

The reason is a scandal in the making:

A Corona-focused German healthcare system is postponing life-saving surgery and delaying or reducing treatment for non-Corona patients.

Berlin in Denial Mode. The scientists fight back.

Initially, the government tried to dismiss the report as “the work of one employee”, and its contents as “his own opinion” – while the journalists closed ranks, no questions asked, with the politicians.

But the 93-pages report titled “Analysis of the Crisis Management” has been drafted by a scientific panel appointed by the interior ministry and composed by external medical experts from several German universities.

The report was the initiative of a department of the interior ministry called Unit KM4 and in charge with the “Protection of critical infrastructures”.

This is also where the German official turned whistleblower, Stephen Kohn, work(ed), and from where he leaked it to the media.

The authors of the report issued a joint press release already on Mai 11th, berating the government for ignoring expert advise, and asking for the interior minister to officially comment upon the experts joint statement:

“Therapeutic and preventive measures should never bring more harm than the illness itself. Their aim should be to protect the risk groups, without endangering the availibilty of medical care and the health of the whole population, as it is unfortunately occurring”

“We in the scientific and medical praxis are experiencing the secondary damages of the Corona-measures on our patients on a daily basis.”

“We therefore ask the Federal Ministry of the Interior, to comment upon our press release, and we hope for a pertinent discussion regarding the [Corona] measures, one that leads to the best possible solution for the whole population”

At the time of writing, the German government had yet to react.

But the facts are – sadly – vindicating the medical experts’ worries.

On Mai 23 the German newspaper Das Bild titled: “Dramatic consequences of the Corona-Measures: 52,000 Cancer Ops delayed.”

Inside, a aeading medical doctor warns that “we will feel the side-effects of the Corona crisis for years”.

Shooting the Whistleblower. Ignoring the Message.

As Der Spiegel reported on Mai 15th: “Stephen Kohn [the whistleblower] has since been suspended from duty. He was advised to obtain a lawyer and his work laptop was confiscated.”

Kohn had originally leaked the report on May 9th to the liberal-conservative magazine Tichys Einblick one of Germany’s most popular alternative media outlets.

News of the report went mainstream in Germany during the second week of May – but already in the third week media and politicians alike stopped discussing the issue by refusing to comment upon it.

Emblematic was the approach taken by Günter Krings, the representative for Interior Minister Horst Seehofer – the whistleblower’s boss:

Asked it he would treat the document seriously, Krings replied:

“If you start analyzing papers like that, then pretty soon you’ll be inviting the guys with the tin foil hats to parliamentary hearings.”

Men in tin foil hats – Aluhut in German – is a term used to describe people who believe in conspiracy theories.

Indeed one article by Der Spiegel adressing the Corona protest movement and the consequences of the leaked report contained the word “conspiracy” no fewer than 17 times!

And no discussions of the issues raised by the report itself.

Outside Germany the news has virtually gone unreported.

The Protest Movement – or “Corona-Rebellen”

Germans begun demonstrating against Lockdowns as early as April.

And thousands of citizens keep showing up at demos every week-end, even as the government is easing the restrictions.

The demos are not merely against restrictions, which have actually been comparatively mild compared to many other Western countries.

The demos question the entire Corona Narrative, and even more its principals, especially the role Bill Gates is playing, as the WHO second biggest donor (the first one since Trump suspended U.S. contribution).

Indeed the biggest such demos took place in Stuttgart on May 9th, where tens of thousands people assempled to say no – to the NWO.

Germans are saying no to any orwellian solution the government might one day impose out of a questionable “emergency status”, from mass surveillance Apps to mandatory vaccinations.

The leaked report has proved their fears to be well founded.

At least as far as the fake nature of the “Corona pandemic” is concerned.

The rest might soon follow.

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While war corporations, or so-called “defense contractors,” make billions in profits, Wall Street is the ultimate beneficiary of today’s nonstop wars. The prosaic nature of war profiteering—far from the work of a shadowy cabal—is precisely why the collusion is so destructive and should be outlawed.

The U.S. ruling class deploys the military for three main reasons: (1) to forcibly open up countries to foreign investment, (2) to ensure the free flow of natural resources from the global south into the hands of multinational corporations, and (3) because war is profitable. The third of these reasons, the profitability of war, is often lacking detail in analyses of U.S. imperialism: The financial industry, including investment banks and private equity firms, is an insatiable force seeking profit via military activity.

The war industry is composed of corporations that sell goods and services to the U.S. government and allied capitalist regimes around the world. Investment banks and asset management firms hold most shares of every major public war corporation.

The best-known financial firms holding the stock of war corporations include: Vanguard Group, BlackRock, State Street, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Wellington Management.

Consider Parsons, a corporation that sells goods and services pertaining to construction, command and control, espionage, and day-to-day military operations. Parsons’ initial public offering in May 2019, valued at roughly $3 billion, earned it an industry Corporate Growth Award. The top holders of Parsons stock are investment banks and asset management firms—including the familiar Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and State Street.

Cyber Wars and Intelligence Go Mainstream as Emerging Corporate Frontiers

New business sectors of war are created and then flooded. For example, the provision of “cyber” was virtually nonexistent in U.S. military contracting until roughly four years ago. A war industry push to militarize IT infrastructure has yielded a bonanza in cyber contracts. Today, “cyber” goods and services are sold stand-alone or as additions to previous contracts.

Nearly every major war corporation sells cyber goods and services.

The top public war corporations include Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, L3Harris, Textron, SAIC, Booz Allen Hamilton, Leidos, CACI, Honeywell, PAE, Accenture, KBRWyle, Amentum, Jacobs, and AECOM.

They all sell cyber. The main exception is Huntington Ingalls, a major shipbuilder, which does not sell stand-alone cyber goods, although it does mandate cybersecurity as part of its supply chain. The top private war corporations—Sierra Nevada Corp. and General Atomics, run by the billionaire Ozmens and Blue Brothers, respectively—also sell cyber goods and services.

This single business sector of war, cyber, is worth billions annually. Claims of Chinese and Russian cyber hacks, fabricated or hyped by war industry think tanks and media affiliates, fuel government purchases of cyber goods and services. For its part, the U.S. government—first to use devastating new weaponry, from atomic weapons to cyber weapons, and first to attack Moscow with cyber weapons—positions its aggression as purely defensive.

Accusations of Russian hacking lend support to huge investment in cyber-security. [Source: theintercept.com]

In November 2018, Parsons—whose leadership is packed with bankers, career war profiteers, military and intelligence retirees, and a coal tycoon—was contracted for cyberspace operations mission planning in Centerville, Virginia. In May 2019, Parsons was contracted with nine other corporations to expand the cyberspace backbone of the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific of San Diego, California, a military unit whose mandate is to dominate all forms of space (cyberspace, airspace, and Earth’s orbit).

In January 2020, Parsons and other corporations were contracted by the same unit to further develop, oversee, and employ broad cyber technology integral to that mandate, from the continental United States, to Guam, Japan, Australia, and Singapore, to Bahrain, Djibouti, and Italy. This is just one example of one corporation. Corporate America blankets U.S. military cyber operations worldwide.

No business sector of war is off limits.

As recently as the early 1990s, it was considered sacrilege for corporate employees (“contractors”) to be involved in intelligence matters. Not anymore. U.S. intelligence (both civilian and military) is corporatized.

Consider the Defense Intelligence Agency. DIA was established in the 1960s to consolidate the military’s disparate intelligence activities. It did not consolidate much, as the individual military branches continued to run distinct military-intelligence operations.

Since the 1960s, DIA has expanded dramatically in size. Corporations carrying out DIA’s activities during the most recent fiscal year included work in its Science & Technology Directorate (five years, $990,000,000), its National Media Exploitation Center, and its Missile & Space Intelligence Center (MSIC).

Parsons carries out modeling and simulation and analysis within DIA’s MSIC. Corporations also run planning and analysis of DIA’s workforce, sell technical support to DIA, conductemployee vetting and background investigations, and work on technology transfer analysis and assessment.

Corporations even develop and run software that aids “in the identification of intelligence requirements, management of priorities, planning and production of intelligence products, enterprise data analytics, communication and other associated processes,” offering further opportunities for profit-hungry entities to steer the espionage ship. Corporations (e.g., Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI, General Dynamics, Leidos, L3Harris, ManTech, PAE and SAIC, whose stocks are owned mostly by financial firms) functionally run U.S. military-intelligence, the operations of which ultimately enrich the U.S. ruling class.

Wall Street: the Ultimate War Profiteers

Wall Street plays the foundational role in the war industry by outright owning war corporations. Consider PAE, a subtle, potent corporation, which operates such diverse business sectors of war as vehicle maintenance, base operations, military construction, and military training. Gores Holdings III acquired PAE from Platinum Equity in early 2020. Gores then adopted the name PAE and took PAE public. PAE has since acquired the corporations CENTRA and Metis Solutions, which further increase PAE’s operations carrying out former governmental tasks within the U.S. military establishment and espionage agencies.

Again, all military and intelligence activity is up for grabs, even the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC), a military range for testing and evaluating the war industry’s technology (e.g., anti-submarine weapons, sonar tracking, and communications). Some have nicknamed AUTEC the “Navy’s Area 51” because of the testing of high-tech unconventional weapons. [Area 51 is a testing range in Nevada where classified programs are worked on and experimental aircraft are flown.]

The Navy established AUTEC on Andros Island in the Bahamas to take advantage of the deep oceanic trench that runs along the east coast of the island. PAE is traditionally the go-to corporation that operates and maintains AUTEC, though a newly formed corporation known as Amentum recently took over some of these functions.

The private equity firm Lindsay Goldberg owns Amentum, which was created in 2020 when AECOM, a massive engineering and project management firm, sold its management services business. Amentum now directs this business. Overseas, this management services business has recently transported equipment, cargo, and personnel around Europe; run logistics for prepositioned matériel in Germany, Kuwait, and Qatar; supported drone operations in the Middle East; and repaired support equipment and helped with maintenance at Navy sites in Comalapa, El Salvador. These operations now all belong to Amentum.

In November 2020, Amentum made another move: It acquired DynCorp, a corporation reported to have a deep history of mercenary activity in Latin America and the Middle East.

DynCorp CEO Lewis “Lou” Von Thaer (featured with DynCorp cap) visits with security contractors and soldiers in Afghanistan. [Source: twitter.com]

According to contract announcements, DynCorp has recently overseen war reserve matériel in the U.S., Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the UAE; maintained military aircraft around the world, including in Honduras, Germany, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kuwait; sold aircraft maintenance to Sweden and Saudi Arabia; and run substantial worldwide training and equipping of forces, emergency construction, and logistics.

Big Finance wheels and deals war corporations, viewing bases, troops, and warzones as numbers through which to profit.

Another prominent financial player is Veritas Capital, which once owned DynCorp and now owns such corporations as Alion and Peraton, the latter of which is about to acquireNorthrop Grumman’s IT business. Peraton’s recent sales to the U.S. military establishment have included: portable systems to foil radio-controlled explosive devices that sundry groups use to attack Western military forces that invade or occupy their countries; work on undersea drones; work to ensure nuclear missiles reenter Earth’s atmosphere properly; IT work that “directly supports American national security interests on the continent of Africa,” according to the contracting announcement; cyber activities for the Air Force Research Lab; and commercial satellite communications for Central Command. All is fair in profit and war.

Big Finance sits at the top of the war industry by purchasing most shares of war corporations and by owning war corporations. Insatiable demand for profit places immense structural pressure on the Pentagon and Capitol Hill for sky-high U.S. military and intelligence budgets, broad deployment of troops overseas, and the opening up of governmental jobs to corporations.

The most well-known industry pressure comes in the form of lobbying both political parties and funding their congressional campaigns (with extra focus on members of pertinent committees, such as Armed Services, Intelligence, Appropriations, and Foreign Relations).

This produces tangible results. As Steven Semler of the non-corporate Security Policy Reform Institute calculated, Democratic votes on the National Defense Authorization Act

correlate strongly with the campaign cash members accepted from the war industry. On average, House Democrats who voted for the NDAA accepted four times the amount of war industry cash as those who voted against it. In the Senate, Democrats who cast supporting votes took in six times as much industry cash.

Warmonger-In-Chief

The Executive Branch is not exempt. Rapacious financiers—including hedge fund chiefs and venture capitalists—top the list of donors to the Biden Administration, though dark money groups prevent a full understanding of the overall campaign finance picture. Between July and September at least 67 billionaires and their spouses made contributions of more than $100,000 to committees supporting Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission.

Biden’s campaign received over $9 million from Donald Sussman, CEO of Palmora Partners, a multi-billion dollar hedge fund, which has more than 260,000 shares in Raytheon, a preeminent weapons manufacturer and supplier of weapons to Saudi Arabia, which recently won a $100 million contract for Afghan Air Force training.

Another of Biden’s top donors, Jim Simons, who gave over $7 million, founded Renaissance Capital, which owns 1.2 million shares in Raytheon worth over $75 million, and 130,000 shares in Lockheed Martin worth $50 million.

Big Tech is positioned prominently among donors to the Biden inauguration celebration. Biden has been clear on the campaign trail that he does not intend to cut the military budget, even going so far as stating, “I’ve met with a number of my advisors and some have suggested in certain areas the budget is going to have to be increased.” Biden’s advisors are part and parcel of the military-industrial-congressional complex. Cozying up to wealthy donors, Biden infamously assured them that “nothing would fundamentally change” in a Biden presidency.

Corporate Media Kool-aid

Corporate media prevent the public from understanding the nature of the problem. A handful of business interests owns media outlets in the United States. Profit drives corporate media. U.S. corporate media (e.g. CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews) share the same business model: air what attracts the highest ratings in order to get more advertising revenue.

Corporate media air info-tainment, designed not to inform or foster critical thinking. Informing the public is not a priority. Maintaining the existing economic order is.

To the extent that corporate media air any information at all, the information reflects the opinions of the ruling class and the dogma of Corporate America.

Politically conditioning the U.S. public, corporate media never blame the military-industrial-congressional complex or capitalism for any of the problems in the world. Aiming for high ratings and lucrative advertising revenue, corporate media self-censor and taper the spectrum of acceptable foreign policy debate. War corporations purchase advertisements on corporate “news” shows to further confine the debate. Corporate pundits and newscasters do not speak out against advertisers.

Corporate media hire career militants (e.g. former CIA Director John Brennan, MSNBC; former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morrell, CBS News; retired General Jack Keane, FoxNews) who further confine the debate. Retired generals and admirals regularly contribute to all forms of corporate media, often without disclosing existing ties to war corporations or financial investments in war.

The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 allowed government to increase its propaganda in corporate media. Drawing funding from the wealthy donor class and large corporate interests, National Public Radio is similarly confined. NPR’s new CEO as of September 2019 is John Lansing, who recently led U.S. propaganda at the U.S. Agency for Global Media.

Other industry pressure comes in the form of funding and running pressure groups [e.g. National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), Association of the United States Army (AUSA)] to dominate the Pentagon, administer arms fairs, and push favorable policies; funding think tanks to keep the narrative neoliberal and pro-war; recruiting retired generals and admirals (e.g. Dunford at Lockheed Martin, Mattis at General Dynamics, Winnefeld at Raytheon) to leverage their knowledge for financial gain; and flooding the Pentagon’s civilian offices with corporate executives (e.g., Esper and then Austin, Secretary of Defense; Lord, Undersecretary for Acquisition and Sustainment; McCarthy, Secretary of the Army).

Wars must be created and expanded, and military bases, through which to route goods and services, must be established and entrenched to satisfy investors. Notwithstanding, ending the wars first requires addressing the embedded profit motive, otherwise it is business as usual.

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Christian Sorensen is an Air Force veteran and author of the new book entitled Understanding the War Industry. See CAM’s review of the book: Wars R Us: A Review of Christian Sorensen’s New Book.

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Africa No Filter is a not-for-profit organization set up to help shift harmful and stereotypical narratives about Africa through research, advocacy and grant-making to storytellers. Interestingly, one-third of all African stories in news outlets on the continent are sourced from foreign news services according to a new report from Africa No Filter.

The ‘How African Media Covers Africa’ highlights the fact that stories about Africa continue to be told through the same persistent and negative stereotypes and frames of poverty, disease, conflict, poor leadership and corruption. 

“In response to the persistent and ongoing framing of Africa as a broken continent, dependent on donors with its people lacking agency to make change. We do this through research, grant making and advocacy. Media is an influential platform on which these narratives are carried so we wanted to understand better what role African media had in perpetuating some of the stereotypical narratives,” Moky Makura, Executive Director of Africa No Filter, said in an interview.

The research surveyed 38 African editors, analyzed content from 60 African news outlets in 15 countries (Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, DRC, Egypt, Tunisia, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal) between September and October 2020. In addition, four facilitated focus groups were held with 25 editors of African media, editors of Pan African outlets and international correspondents.

The results confirmed challenges and experiences that are common knowledge within the industry: advertising revenue and newsrooms are shrinking, influencing the kind of news that Africans read and that news is largely negative and conflict filled.

Key findings from the report show that the sources for news gathering on African countries are problematic, the resulting content continues to feed old stereotypes, and often the quality of local journalism doesn’t allow for nuanced and contextualized storytelling that is critical for telling stories about the 54 countries in Africa.   

• 63% of outlets surveyed don’t have correspondents in other countries in Africa  
• 1/3 of all coverage on Africa was from non-African sources, with AFP and BBC  accounting for ¼ of all stories found in African outlets about other African countries. African news agencies contributed minimally.  
• 81% of the stories analyzed were classified as “hard news” e.g. conflicts and crises driven by events – they were also largely political in nature.   
• 13% of the news focused specifically on political violence, civil unrest and armed conflicts.  
• South Africa, followed by Egypt were the countries with the most diverse coverage that was not necessarily linked to newsy events meaning that those two countries are probably the ‘best known’ on the continent. 

“Media is incredibly influential in setting the agenda and determining narratives about Africa. The research clearly shows that despite years of independence, Africans still don’t hold the pen when it comes to writing our stories. More importantly, we continue to promote the narratives about Africa being broken, dependent and lacking agency through the stories we share in our media about each other. We need to take back the pen,” Makura said. 

According to her, the media is constrained by its business model so this is not so much about leadership and management. Advertising is the key revenue driver and that essentially pays for and influences what is written about in the media. But media leaders in Africa need to think up new models and reinvent themselves to maintain their relevance in a market where direct channels exist and where their very existence is threatened. 

“We need investment in media. We need better trained journalists and storyteller, investment in infrastructure and resources to be able to cover soft and hard news, fact check and keep up with the digital pace,” she explained, adding that it is necessary to make grants to support projects, and for capacity building of media.

Africa No Filter is on a mission to make some impact into how the continent is perceived by Africans and the rest of the world. It is funded by the Ford Foundation, Bloomberg, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Luminate, Open Society Foundation, Comic Relief, the Hilton Foundation and the British Council.

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The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps received 340 new speedboats during a ceremony at the southern Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas.

The delivered speedboats are co-produced by the IRGC Navy and the Defense Ministry and are capable of carrying various types of missiles to attack enemy targets. The delivery took place alongside the celebration of the 42nd anniversary of the Islamic Revolution. These boats are to be actively used in the Persian Gulf, Sea of Oman, and the Caspian Sea.

The IRGC Navy is focused on smaller vessels, aimed at swarming a potential adversary. The newly-delivered speedboats were described as agile, maneuverable and equipped with radar-evading stealth technology.

Tehran is continuing to reinforce its positions and pursue its interests. This is prompted by the fact that US President Joe Biden’s vow to rejoin the Nuclear Deal turned out to be entirely hollow. Iran demanded that the sanctions imposed by the Trump Administration be removed, otherwise rejoining the deal meant nothing.

On February 8th, Biden confirmed that sanctions on Iran wouldn’t be lifted, with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki saying that such a “big policy change” wasn’t planned.

To show some “reduction in pressure”, the USS Nimitz carrier strike group was pulled out of the region, in a signal that an escalation with Iran isn’t planned. That happened as Tehran, Moscow and Beijing announced they would hold joint naval drills.

In response, US Central Command’s Gen Kenneth McKenzie said that Iran was the “Main Driver of Instability”, in his first public address since Biden became president. McKenzie repeated a usual a US accusation against Tehran, claiming that for more than forty years it “has funded and aggressively supported terrorism and terrorist organizations.” The “maximum pressure” campaign is simply “on hold”, but is not canceled.

Iranian allies in the Middle East continue actively operating, hammering US interests and those of their allies.

US convoys continue suffering regular attacks in Iraq, with two being subject to attacks on February 7th. In Lebanon, Hezbollah said that it would continue targeting and downing Israeli drones and more. Israel’s lack of activity in the previous days is quite notable.

The most significant success is being achieved in Yemen, by the Houthis. The Ansar Allah movement is pushing the Saudi-led coalition back, as it destroyed ammunition depots and weapons in Marib. Riyadh also intercepted a swarm of suicide drones attributed to the Houthis, but there was no confirmation.

Saudi Arabia is also remaining active in airstrikes, and violating the al-Hudaydah ceasefire, but with few results to show.

US and allied interests are being pressured all around the Middle East, as the Biden administration refuses to turn its back on any of Trump’s “maximum pressure” policies. The withdrawal of the USS Nimitz CSG is a likely a welcome sign, but the sanction regime remaining, surely, spoils the party.

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The government’s admission that Covid-19 has not been categorised a “serious” workplace risk was described as “beyond belief” today.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has three categories of risk – serious, significant and minor.

Employment Minister Mims Davies said in a written statement that Covid-19 has been deemed by the HSE to be a “significant” risk to workers, as its effects are “non-permanent or reversible, non-progressive and any disability is temporary.”

The HSE has received 134,000 complaints since the pandemic started but issued just 192 enforcement notices (0.1 per cent).

Andy McDonald, Labour’s shadow employment rights and protections secretary, said:

“Given that almost 113,000 people have died from Covid-19 and as many as one in five people are suffering from the effects of ‘long Covid,’ it is beyond belief that the government does not consider the virus to be a serious risk to working people.

“With workplace health and safety enforcement almost non-existent and after a decade of cuts that has left agencies under-resourced, the government must urgently recategorise Covid-19 as a serious risk and bring in new safety rules and enforcement to protect workers’ lives.”

In the Commons, Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced that travellers required to quarantine in hotels in England from Monday – nearly a year after the pandemic hit Britain – will be charged £1,750 for their stay.

British nationals or residents returning from 33 “red list” countries will have to spend 10 days in one of 16 government-designated hotels and take two Covid tests.

Mr Hancock also announced fines of up to £10,000 for those who fail to quarantine. Arriving travellers who lie on their passenger locator forms face up to 10 years in jail.

During the Commons session, Plaid Cymru MP Hywel Williams, asked whether Mr Hancock would commit to increasing sick pay to “enable working people to self-isolate safely.”

Mr Hancock said that there was a £500 self-isolation payment for those on low incomes who cannot work from home.

Shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth noted that Mr Hancock had “boasted of the £500 payment” last Tuesday, but that over 70 per cent of requests for financial support are rejected.

Four in 10 people who needed financial support to self-isolate at the end of 2020 said that they could not access it, a new Red Cross survey suggests.

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The British Office of Communications (Ofcom) has pulled the license for China Global Television Network (CGTN) effectively terminating its ability to operate in the UK.

CGTN had asked for its license to be transferred to an entity called China Global Television Network Corporation, but “crucial information” was missing from the application, and the new owner would be disqualified from holding a license as it would be controlled by a body ultimately directed by the Chinese Communist Party, Ofcom said.

The article would also claim:

Ofcom is required by law to prevent bodies whose goals are mainly political from becoming or remaining TV license holders. Last year Ofcom found CGTN breached impartiality rules in its coverage of Hong Kong protests. 

Yet if CGTN was actually guilty of this, and this standard was practiced as an international norm, it would spell the end of the UK’s own British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) – British state media that admittedly exists to promote UK interests globally.

Accusing CGTN of Being Too Much Like the BBC?

The BBC’s own website claims:

The BBC should provide high-quality news coverage to international audiences, firmly based on British values of accuracy, impartiality, and fairness. Its international services should put the United Kingdom in a world context, aiding understanding of the United Kingdom as a whole, including its nations and regions where appropriate.

While there is no doubt that the BBC operates under and to promote British values, it is doubtful at best that those values include “accuracy, impartiality, and fairness.”

Even studies carried out in the UK itself regarding the BBC’s “accuracy, impartiality, and fairness” reveal quite the opposite.

A 2003 Guardian article titled, “Study deals a blow to claims of anti-war bias in BBC news,” would note:

Downing Street’s complaints about anti-war bias within the BBC appear to be disproved by an academic analysis that shows the corporation displayed the most “pro-war” agenda of any broadcaster.

Of course, the US-led invasion of Iraq, eagerly promoted by the British state and British state media like the BBC was predicated on a deliberate lie regarding Iraq’s possession of “weapons of mass destruction.”

The BBC’s lies were promoted specifically in service of UK special interests including corporate-financiers who sought to remove Iraq – as well as other nations – from the list of potential collaborators with a re-emerging Russia and a rising China.

The BBC’s deliberate campaign of lies about Iraq was not its first nor last role in supporting illegal armed aggression around the globe – including armed aggression the British military participated in.

Similar lies would be spread by the BBC regarding Libya and Syria – with at one point in the Syrian conflict BBC staff rode with militant extremists as they invaded Syria from Turkey.

Regarding Hong Kong – an area Ofcom cited as a breach of its impartiality rules – the BBC itself presented one-sided reporting, omitting mention of US government funding behind the Hong Kong protests and deliberately downplaying or omitting egregious violence carried out by the so-called “pro-democracy” protesters.

The BBC’s framing of the “One Country, Two Systems” arrangement was also decidedly leaning heavily toward the interests of the UK and far from any genuinely objective assessment of the colonial roots of that arrangement or the duress Beijing agreed to it under at the time.

The West’s Censorship Spree will Boomerang

In reality – shutting down CGTN and restricting other media operations from Eurasia is aimed at maintaining the West’s primacy within the global information sphere as a whole, and continuing its unimpeded intrusion into the information space of other nations.

However, habitually and transparent hypocrisy, coupled with the West’s waning economic and military power, will open the door for other nations to take the UK’s own practices of strangling alternative media within its own information space to finally and fully purge the BBC and other Western state media operations from their own, respective information spaces.

Members of the Western media – who often organize themselves into “Foreign Correspondent Clubs” in foreign nations and operate more like public relations agents, intelligence operators, lobbyists, and agents of foreign interests than actual journalists – have already been exposed in recent years as the public grows increasingly aware of their role in Western-backed political interference around the globe in places like Libya and Syria in 2011, Ukraine in 2013-2014, and more recently in places like Hong Kong, Thailand, and now Myanmar.

Coupled with Ofcom’s campaign of censorship is US-based social media giants purging their networks of alternative media – both independent and state-sponsored.

If allowing alternative voices to speak to international audiences on US-based social networks or to operate in the West is no longer permissible, why are US-based social media networks and Western media operations allowed to operate abroad with impunity? It is a lopsided equation that has long-since needed balancing – and one nations need to – and in some cases already are – addressing.

Just like Western sanctions against an ever-growing list of nations who refuse to submit to the West’s “international order” have ultimately begun isolating the West itself from the rest of the world – the same will happen to its media if the West finds itself incapable of striking a better balance and more respect for the nations its media operates in.

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Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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“All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.”—George Orwell, 1984

Let’s be clear about one thing: the impeachment of Donald Trump is a waste of time and money.

Impeaching Trump will accomplish very little, and it will not in any way improve the plight of the average American. It will only reinforce the spectacle and farce that have come to be synonymous with politics today

While the nation allows itself to be distracted by yet more bread-and-circus politics, the American kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians and corporate thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of the people) continues to suck the American people into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry are powerless to defend themselves against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

So here’s what I propose: let’s impeach the Deep State and its cabal of government operatives from every point along the political spectrum (right, left and center) for conspiring to expand the federal government’s powers at the expense of the citizenry.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward trajectory now, and things are moving fast.

Even now, we are being pushed and prodded towards a civil war, not because the American people are so divided but because that’s how corrupt governments control a populace (i.e., divide and conquer).

These are dangerous times.

These are indeed dangerous times but not because of violent crime, which remains at an all-time low, or because of terrorism, which is statistically rare, or because the borders are being invaded by foreign armies, which data reports from the Department of Homeland Security refute, or because a pandemic is spreading like a contagion, or even because raging mobs of so-called domestic terrorists are trying to overthrow elections.

No, the real danger that we face comes from none other than the U.S. government and the powers it has granted to its standing armies to rob, steal, cheat, harass, detain, brutalize, terrorize, torture and kill American citizens with immunity.

The danger “we the people” face comes from masked invaders on the government payroll who crash through our doors in the dark of night, shoot our dogs, and terrorize our families.

This danger comes from militarized henchmen on the government payroll who demand absolute obedience, instill abject fear, and shoot first and ask questions later.

This danger comes from greedy, power-hungry bureaucrats on the government payroll who have little to no understanding of their constitutional limits.

This danger comes from greedy politicians and corporations for whom profit trumps principle.

This danger comes from a surveillance state that grows more and more ominous.

Consider, if you will, all of the dastardly, devious, diabolical, dangerous, debilitating, deceitful, dehumanizing, demonic, depraved, dishonorable, disillusioning, discriminatory, dictatorial schemes inflicted on “we the people” by a bureaucratic, totalitarian regime that has long since ceased to be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

Americans have no protection against police abuse. It is no longer unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later. What remains all-too-usual, however, is the news that the officers involved in these incidents get off with little more than a slap on the hands.

Americans are little more than pocketbooks to fund the police state. If there is any absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off. This is true, whether you’re talking about taxpayers being forced to fund high-priced weaponry that will be used against us, endless wars that do little for our safety or our freedoms, bloated government agencies such as the National Security Agency with its secret budgets, covert agendas and clandestine activities.

Americans are no longer innocent until proven guilty. We once operated under the assumption that you were innocent until proven guilty. Due in large part to rapid advances in technology and a heightened surveillance culture, the burden of proof has been shifted so that the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty has been usurped by a new norm in which all citizens are suspects. This is exemplified by police practices of stopping and frisking people who are merely walking down the street and where there is no evidence of wrongdoing. Likewise, by subjecting Americans to full-body scans and license-plate readers without their knowledge or compliance and then storing the scans for later use, the government—in cahoots with the corporate state—has erected the ultimate suspect society. In such an environment, we are all potentially guilty of some wrongdoing or other.

Americans no longer have a right to self-defense. In the wake of various shootings in recent years, “gun control” has become a resounding theme. Those advocating gun reform see the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms as applying only to government officials. As a result, even Americans who legally own firearms are being treated with suspicion and, in some cases, undue violence. In one case, a Texas man had his home subjected to a no-knock raid and was shot in his bed after police, attempting to deliver a routine search warrant, learned that he was in legal possession of a firearm. In another incident, a Florida man who was licensed to carry a concealed firearm found himself detained for two hours during a routine traffic stop in Maryland while the arresting officer searched his vehicle in vain for the man’s gun, which he had left at home.

Americans no longer have a right to private property. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Likewise, if government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.

Americans are powerless in the face of militarized police. In early America, citizens were considered equals with law enforcement officials. Authorities were rarely permitted to enter one’s home without permission or in a deceitful manner. And it was not uncommon for police officers to be held personally liable for trespass when they wrongfully invaded a citizen’s home. Unlike today, early Americans could resist arrest when a police officer tried to restrain them without proper justification or a warrant—which the police had to allow citizens to read before arresting them. (Daring to dispute a warrant with a police official today who is armed with high-tech military weapons and tasers would be nothing short of suicidal.) As police forces across the country continue to be transformed into outposts of the military, with police agencies acquiring military-grade hardware in droves, Americans are finding their once-peaceful communities transformed into military outposts, complete with tanks, weaponry, and other equipment designed for the battlefield.

Americans no longer have a right to bodily integrity. Court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, strip search us, and probe us intimately. It’s no longer unusual to hear accounts of men and women being subjected to what is essentially government-sanctioned rape by police in the course of “routine” traffic stops. What remains to be seen is how the emerging hypervigilance over COVID-19 vaccines will impact that right to bodily integrity.

Americans no longer have a right to the expectation of privacy. Despite the staggering number of revelations about government spying on Americans’ phone calls, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Google searches, emails, bookstore and grocery purchases, bank statements, commuter toll records, etc., little to nothing has been done to counteract these abuses. Instead, we are daily being accustomed to life in this electronic concentration camp.

Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice. The U.S. Supreme Court was intended to be an institution established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency, the justices of the Supreme Court have become the architects of the American police state in which we now live, while the lower courts have appointed themselves courts of order, concerned primarily with advancing the government’s agenda, no matter how unjust or illegal.

Americans no longer have a representative government. We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age, let’s call it the age of authoritarianism. In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.

It is not overstating matters to say that Congress, which has done its best to keep their unhappy constituents at a distance, may well be the most self-serving, semi-corrupt institution in America.

In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism: a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.

Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.

Sound familiar?

Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests. We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism. Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many.

History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a totalitarian state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom.

Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal.

From Clinton to Bush, Obama to Trump, and now Biden, it’s as if we’ve been caught in a time loop, forced to re-live the same thing over and over again: the same assaults on our freedoms, the same disregard for the rule of law, the same subservience to the Deep State, and the same corrupt, self-serving government that exists only to amass power, enrich its shareholders and ensure its continued domination.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the powers-that-be want us to remain distracted, divided, alienated from each other based on our politics, our bank accounts, our religion, our race and our value systems.

Yet as George Orwell observed, “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

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“The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.” Carroll  Quigley (1910-1977), American historian, 1966.

“There are no nations. There are no peoples… There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today… We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies… The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business.” Network, 1976, (a corporation executive talking in the American satirical drama film ‘Network’.)

“By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens… By this method they not only conficscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some.” John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), British economist, 1936.

Has a forty-year trend reached an apex? Indeed, official measures of economic disparities are at an all-time high.

For example, in 2017, the three richest Americans (Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett) owned more wealth than all the people in the bottom 50 percent of the U.S. population. And although income disparity has increased in most advanced economies, the United States is leading the way with levels of income disparities not seen since 1928, just before the Great Depression (1929-1939). All this is happening while the U.S. federal minimum wage has remained fixed at $7.25 an hour since 2009!

A question that begs to be answered is: to what extent can such a record inequality be traced back, at least partly, to the public policies that have been followed over the last forty years?

Since the early 1980s, indeed, governments and central banks in Europe, the United States and in other industrialized economies have adopted an unusual mix of fiscal policy and monetary policy. Governments became the de facto bankers of the corporate world through large tax subsidies. For their part, central banks have been busy creating bubbles in the stock and bond markets. Sooner or later, that house of cards is bound to crash.

For one, governments have relied less and less on progressive income and wealth taxes and more on regressive taxes to finance public spending programs.

Secondly, central banks have  initiated round after round of money creation through a wholesale purchase of government bonds and other securities, such as mortgage-backed securities (MBS). This was labeled a process of ‘quantitative easing‘ (QE), through which central bankers pushed nominal interest rates to the floor and real interest rates (adjusted for inflation) into negative territory.

In some European countries (Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands and France) even nominal interest rates have turned negative for ten-year safe investments. Paradoxically, this means that some savers pay borrowers to accept their money. It’s the world upside down.

Such a super-aggressive monetary policy has created unintended consequences for some classes of consumers—for retirees, students, etc.—whose incomes and spending fell. In many cases, they were forced to go deeply into debt, in order to sustain a livable level of consumption.

Consequences of economic and financial globalization

Under the guise of financial and corporate globalization, governments became more and more responsive to the demands of international corporations, mega banks and rich individuals, to lower their taxes and to reduce regulations. Their argument was that this was a requirement to remain competitive and retain industrial investment at home. Moreover most governments abandoned domestic industrial policies and let corporate and banking world decisions structure their economies.

The process of de-industrialization in advanced economies and the shift of the tax burden

Many large corporations found it profitable to abandon their domestic production base and began searching the world for the lowest wages they could find, while collecting the most advantageous financial inducements from local governments to locate new industrial investments. International free trade of goods and services, which is in general beneficial to all counties, was extended to encompass the more controversial concept of a free international movement of financial capital and of industrial capital.

In such an international context, national governments were forced to enter into a zero-sum game competition to lower taxes and regulation for industrial investors and to extend subsidies to encourage new investment and employment at home.

Over time, this resulted in two important structural changes.

First, some advanced industrial economies began a gradual process of de-industrialization, when large companies began moving their high-productivity manufacturing activities abroad. This was accompanied by a relative structural shift in domestic employment from the high-productivity manufacturing sector to the generally less productive service sector. Among the latter, some high-knowledge service industries have been paying above average wages, but some labor-intensive service industries are paying relatively low wages. As a consequence, over the last forty years, real wages in advanced economies have remained relatively stagnant.

All the while, some high-income earners and the super rich strata of the population benefited from huge tax deductions. The most recent example is the ten-year $1.5 trillion tax cuts passed into law, in December 2017, by the Trump administration. That measure slashed the corporate tax rate in the U.S. from 35 percent to 21 percent, but with few new benefits for the economy. Contrary to what was expected, many corporations used the tax returns to buy back their own stock shares, rather than to invest in new plants or machinery.

Moreover, since labor is generally immobile internationally, the overall domestic tax burden on income, consumption and profits began to shift more heavily onto workers, consumers and middle class taxpayers, and away from large corporations and mega banks, and from rich investors. To alleviate such a taxation shift, governments were saddled with larger operating deficits and their national debtrose, even during prosperous times.

This has raised a tax fairness issue with the growing gap of income and wealth inequalities among different categories of taxpayers.

A worldwide glut of savings, a decline in real investment spending and a shifting of profits and incomes to low-tax jurisdictions

The impact of economic and financial globalization and the constant rise in income and wealth inequalities since the 1980s—the latter having been exacerbated by the Great recession of 2008, and by the current pandemic crisis—has produced a glut of global savings (supply of funds) as compared to investment spending (demand for funds).

When too much saving is withdrawn from the operating economy and is not properly recycled into productive uses, this can lead to a drop in the circulation of money, even when the supply of money increases. If the velocity of money declines during a period of expansionary monetary policy, this can offset the increase in money supply and could paradoxically lead to deflationary pressures, at least for a while, and sluggish economic growth rather than to inflation and faster economic growth.

The glut of global savings is related to the growing concentration of income and wealth in favor of owners of financial capital and of super rich individuals. The fact that many trillions of dollars of such extra savings have ended up in offshore tax havens, sometimes under the veil of secrecy of cryptocurrencies, has undoubtedly played a role. It has also been a source of demand for bonds and other securities, resulting in higher bond prices and lower interest rates.

The building up of a glut of global savings among mega corporations and super rich individuals, who own most of the stock wealth, was occurring just as another phenomenon took place. Indeed, the ‘baby boomers‘—the generation born between 1946 and 1964 in the United States, and between 1947 and 1966 in Canada—felt obliged to increase their savings rate, in order to better prepare for their imminent retirement, and also, in part, because of the economic impact of the current pandemic on their spending and the low rates of return on their financial investments.

Consequences of the half-century long rise in income and wealth inequalities

As income and wealth became more and more concentrated, the financial sector tended to grow faster than the real economy. Such a structural change, past a certain threshold, can slow down economic growth and be a factor in creating financial crises. This was demonstrated when new esoteric financial productscatering to the very rich led to the Great recession of 2008.

Some economists fear that the advanced economies of the Western world have entered into a prolonged period of “Secular Stagnation“. Indeed, in many advanced economies, the expansion of the financial sector has been such that it has become oversized relative to the real sector. A too-high rate of financial sector growth relative to GDP may be a harbinger of future financial contractions.

Conclusion

There is a link between the great disparities in income and wealth that we see today, in several industrialized countries, and the extraordinarily low interest rates that have become the curse of savers. And, as we have seen, the causal relationship goes both ways, one reinforcing the other. They both enriched an aristocracy of the super rich. How should governments go about breaking this economically and socially damaging relationship?

First, it would seem that there is a need to reorient fiscal policy toward equilibrating the tax burden and income inequality between high and low-income taxpayers, as well as re-evaluating consumption taxes. Maybe an international conference could be held to assist governments in coordinating their efforts in that direction, especially considering the growing reliance on tax havens.

Secondly, central bankers could find it appropriate to review the current policies of monetizing the public debt and the debts of other financial entities on a high scale. Besides evaluating their sustainability, they may also wish to take into consideration the high risk of creating dangerous bubbles and speculative maniasin the stock and bond markets. indeed, history shows that when such financial bubbles burst, as they inevitably do, the real economy suffers badly in production and employment losses.

As for citizens, they should be careful not to vote for clueless and corrupt politicians who are bought and sold by special interests. They should demand that big money and dark money stop dominating politics and government policies. Theirs and their children’s economic welfare depend upon it.

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

 

Please visit Dr Tremblay’s site or email to a friend here.

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Ben Nimmo, a former NATO press officer and current senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, has announced Facebook has hired him to “lead global threat intelligence strategy against influence operations” and “emerging threats.” Nimmo specifically named Russia, Iran and China as potential dangers to the platform.

His announcement was greeted with joy by several NATO officials but was not met with such enthusiasm by others. “More censorship on the way as the former NATO press officer turned Pentagon-funded ‘researcher’ who labeled real people as Russian bots and peddled disinformation to link Jeremy Corbyn to Russian active measures moves to big tech,” responded investigative journalist Max Blumenthal.

More censorship on the way as the former NATO press officer turned Pentagon-funded “researcher” who labeled real people as Russian bots and peddled disinformation to link Jeremy Corbyn to Russian active measures moves to Big Tech https://t.co/XcfGbdPJtv

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) February 7, 2021

Nimmo’s questionable past certainly raises questions over whether such an official having a substantial say in what 2.8 billion Facebook users worldwide see in their feeds is such a positive step for the free and open exchange of information.

“Disinformation agents”

For example, in 2019, U.K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn revealed secret Conservative Party documents showing negotiations the Tory government had with the U.S. over the privatization of the National Health Service (NHS). With just days to go before the U.K. general election, the scandal could have toppled the government and brought into power the most radical antiwar, anti-establishment government in the country’s history. Corporate media went into overdrive to spin the news, and Nimmo was a key part of this, immediately announcing, without evidence, that the documents “closely resemble…a known Russian operation.” His supposedly expert conjecture allowed the story to become “Corbyn’s links to Russia” rather than “Tories privatizing the NHS in secret.” Nimmo’s work helped the Conservatives to an election victory and consigned Corbyn to the scrapheap.

This was much to the relief of Nimmo’s Atlantic Council, who had branded Corbyn the “Kremlin’s Trojan Horse” — someone pushing Moscow’s agenda abroad. A British Army general was of a similar opinion, claiming that if Corbyn were to win the election, the military would respond. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also said that the U.S. government was “doing its best” to prevent a radical leftist from winning power in the U.K.

Nimmo has been extremely liberal with whom he labels Russian disinformation agents. In 2018, his research identified one Twitter user, @Ian56789, as a “Kremlin troll.” In reality, the user, Ian Shilling, was a British pensioner, as Sky News was easily able to confirm, interviewing him on air and asking him the patently absurd question if he was actually a Russian bot or not. Despite clearly being a flesh and blood human, Shilling’s account was later deleted anyway.

In the past, Nimmo has also insisted that Ruslana Boshirova was an influential Russian bot. In reality, she is an internationally known concert pianist, as one Google search would have shown. This sort of behavior does not augur well for those critical of Western foreign policy, who have faced constant harassment, suspension, or outright bans from social media.

NATO's Atlantic Council "analyst" @benimmo has called me an influential Russian bot.
Influential? You bet.
With 170 000 000 YouTube views
and 400 000 subscribers.
Russian? Oh well, Ukrainian-American🙄, but take it as a compliment. 😉
Bot? Yeah. Humans can't play like this. pic.twitter.com/pReCwBBaZ5

— Ruslana Boshirova Альянс пианистов (@ValLisitsa) March 27, 2018

Pro-war putsch

The Atlantic Council began as an offshoot of NATO itself and maintains extremely close connections to the military alliance. It continues to receive major funding from Western governments and weapons contractors, and its board of directors is filled to the brim with senior American statespersons, such as Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Henry Kissinger. Also appearing on the board are no fewer than seven former CIA directors and a number of top military generals, such as Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis, Wesley Clark, and David Petraeus.

In recent years, the council’s employees have penetrated deep into big tech and social media organizations. In 2018, it announced it had partnered with Facebook to aid in the curation of Facebook news feeds of users worldwide, giving it considerable power over what sort of views to highlight and which to demote. One year previously, Jessica Ashooh left the position of the council’s Deputy Director of Middle Eastern Strategy to take the position of Director of Policy at Reddit, the eighth-most visited website in the United States. However, as with many intelligence agencies, it is unclear whether one truly “leaves” the Atlantic Council.

It is not just Russia that is in NATO’s crosshairs. Last week, the Atlantic Council published an anonymous, 26,000-word report stating that their goal for China was regime change and advising President Biden to draw a number of “red lines” around it, beyond which the U.S. would respond militarily. Meanwhile, the head of STRATCOM, Admiral Charles A. Richard, wrote that the U.S. must prepare for a potential nuclear war with Beijing.

Greater control

The military escalation has been mirrored by an intensifying online propaganda war, where the U.S. has attempted to isolate China economically and stop advancing Chinese technologies such as Huawei’s 5G network, mobile phone, and semiconductor manufacturer Xiaomi, and video sharing app TikTok. Nimmo has played his part in ramping up suspicions of nefarious Chinese activity online, claiming the existence of a wide-ranging pro-Beijing bot network encouraging Americans to believe that China has handled the COVID-19 pandemic far better than the United States. That Americans might have come to that conclusion on their own appears not to have been considered.

There is an enormous government effort to convince its population of the existence of (foreign) government efforts to manipulate their opinions online. In a massive case of projection, Western governmental organizations point the finger at their enemies, all the while securing greater access and control over the means of communication themselves, to the point where it is now difficult to distinguish where the deep state ends and the fourth estate begins. Nimmo’s move from NATO to NATO-aligned think tank to Facebook is just another example of this phenomenon. Perhaps the reason Nimmo is not looking for any Western influence operations online is that he is part of one.

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

Featured image: George Washington University School of Media & Public Affairs | Additions and editing by MintPress News

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The UK government is considering a plan to despatch council staff to knock on the doors of those who have refused to take a coronavirus vaccine, in an effort to coerce refusniks into taking the shot, according to a report.

The London Metro reports that Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi told MPs he wanted to identify ‘at an individual level’ those who have been offered the vaccine but turned it down.

The report states that the plan is being hatched amid fears that a sizeable amount of the population are ‘sceptical’ of the vaccine.

Zahawi said that the role of the council staffers would be to determine why people are refusing the vaccine and then “see what might convince them” to change their minds.

Zahawi refused to confirm how the Government will know who has not taken the vaccine, but did admit during a radio appearance on the BBC that everyone who has taken the shot has been registered in a national immunisation vaccination system.

“We absolutely will look at how we are addressing the issue of refusal rates,” Zahawi said.

While Zahawi touted a high uptake of vaccines among British people, it emerged that around 20% of social care workers have refused to take the vaccine.

In December, a poll found that around a third of people in the UK do not want to take the vaccine.

The notion of government staff knocking at the doors of refusniks has prompted fears that the British government is keeping a database of vaccine skeptics.

A similar scheme has been implemented in Spain.

With so called ‘vaccination passports’ looming, a non-vaccinated database could enable the government to cross check who they are issuing the ‘freedom passes’ to, and ensure that only the vaccinated are allowed to integrate back into society.

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In new research published in Microbiology & Infectious Diseases, immunologist J. Bart Classen warns the mRNA technology used in the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines could create “new potential mechanisms” of adverse events that may take years to come to light.

Back in 1999, leading U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official Dr. Peter Patriarca contended that modern advances in vaccine technology were rapidly “outpacing researchers’ ability to predict potential vaccine-related adverse events.” Patriarca mused that this could lead to “a situation of unforeseen and unpredictable vaccine outcomes.”

In a new research article published in Microbiology & Infectious Diseases, veteran immunologist J. Bart Classen expresses similar concerns and writes that “RNA-based COVID vaccines have the potential to cause more disease than the epidemic of COVID-19.”

For decades, Classen has published papers exploring how vaccination can give rise to chronic conditions such as Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes — not right away, but three or four years down the road.

In this latest paper, Classen warns that the RNA-based vaccine technology could create “new potential mechanisms” of vaccine adverse events that may take years to come to light.

Classen’s study establishes the potential for the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna to activate human proteins to take on “pathologic configurations” — configurations associated with chronic degenerative neurological diseases. Although his specific interest is in prion diseases (conditions associated with misfolded versions of normal proteins), Classen also outlines a handful of other mechanisms whereby RNA-based vaccines could give rise to “multiple other potential fatal adverse events.”

Ensuring that patients clearly understand risks — including known risks as well as potential unknown risks — is an important component of the informed consent process. This is all the more true when the intervention is experimental and lacks long-term safety data, as is the case with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines against COVID-19. The FDA authorized the two vaccines for widespread emergency use based on just two months of clinical trial data.

Unfortunately, it is not unusual for researchers’ communication of risks to be perfunctory. In October, researchers at New York University and Tulane reported that the information communicated to participants in the coronavirus clinical trials about a worrisome problem known as pathogenic priming was “sufficiently obscured” as to make “adequate patient comprehension” of risks “unlikely.”

It would be interesting to know what those researchers would say about Classen’s blunt conclusion that “Approving a vaccine, utilizing novel RNA technology without extensive testing is extremely dangerous.”

Those contemplating COVID injections may be ignoring potential risks at their own peril.

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U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) acknowledged that U.S. sanctions on Venezuela have killed tens of thousands of people and harmed the country’s economy, especially by depressing its oil production.

In a new report, GAO also recalled that the sanctions imposed on the country under former Barack Obama’s and Donald Trump’s administrations are also hindering U.S.-backed humanitarian aid to Venezuela.

The report “offers more evidence that the unilateral and illegal U.S. sanctions are a punishment against the Venezuelan people and they should be ended immediately,” Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) Co-Director Mark Weisbrot said.

GAO noted that the financial sanctions imposed on Venezuela since 2015 led to a drop in oil production of 797 tons per day, which at current oil prices would represent US$16.9 billion per year in foregone oil revenues.

#Venezuela | The U.S. blockade has frozen almost all Venezuelan accounts abroad as cut relationships with banking institutions.https://t.co/4DSkb0v6kZ

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) February 3, 2021

“This drop means fewer imports, including of food, medicines, medical equipment, and other health-related necessities,” Weisbrot added.

President Joe Biden ordered a review of U.S. economic sanctions on countries such as Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba to determine their humanitarian impact.

“This is positive. However, there is not much to assess. There is no reason to allow this crime from the Trump administration to continue,” the expert recalled.

#Venezuela | The anti-governmental coalition assumed a role against democracy back in 2015. pic.twitter.com/N38XUoPVqF

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) January 6, 2021

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Featured image: A group of children on their home’s rooftop in Petare, Venezuela, Dec. 20, 2021. | Photo: EFE

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Elliot Abrams has gone missing in the last few days. He seems to have lost some of his proactivity.

Maybe the now former White House special envoy for Venezuela tired himself out in his last weeks on the job, drafting sinister decrees willy-nilly, such as blocking Venezuela’s diesel purchases and sanctioning opposition politicians and businessmen. As he wrote them, horned men attacked Washington’s sacrosanct Capitol, just a few blocks away from his office, which failed to draw comment from the diplomatic expert.

Abrams isn’t the only one who has gone AWOL. Former Vice President Mike Pence was forced to deal with other “dictators” closer to him in the final days of his term and stopped touring the globe to discuss the “serious humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.” [Florida Senator] Marco Rubio has also seemed to forget about the Latin American “tyrants,” while US Southern Command no longer has sudden “concerns” about drug trafficking in the Caribbean.

The Magazolans, as Venezuelan Trump supporters are called, especially in Florida, no longer dare to call the new president a “communist” or accuse him of “selling out to the Russians and Chinese” as they did weeks ago. The election campaign is over and they now have a new president. Many, though, are waiting for Trump to call on them to start another adventure.

Undoubtedly something is going to happen in Washington. What it is will have repercussions in Latin America, especially in Venezuela, because the US government has been telematically overseeing what has been happening in the Caribbean country for the past four years, especially among the opposition.

First, the US designed a system of economic sanctions not seen in decades, going after any company that did oil-based or other trading with Venezuela. Equally, in the military area, Abrams notoriously orchestrated the violent military coup attempt of April 30, 2019. During the attempted coup, opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, now exiled in Spain, broke his house arrest and dozens of military personnel tried to take the La Carlota airbase before marching through some Caracas avenues. As the coup attempt failed, Abrams himself admitted that the officials contacted to lead the coup had “turned off their phones.”

This was the most notorious failure of the Republican government’s Venezuela policy, but it wasn’t the only one. Others included implementing a parallel presidency and attempting a military landing called Operation Gedeon, which was orchestrated by a US military company, in which two U.S. citizens were imprisoned.

It all happened during the Trump years, in which he “green lighted” any adventure in Venezuela because “all options [were] on the table.”

Things are hardly rosy with new President Joe Biden, but the point is that Trumpism is in decline. This decline has been solidified due to the way that Trump challenged and ridiculed the transition period in a style akin to that of the Venezuelan right: throwing the toys out of the pram and failing to concede.

This shift allows a respite for the Venezuelan opposition which hasn’t fled the country and was desecrated, persecuted and even sanctioned by the US Treasury Department for betting on the electoral strategy. In fact, many of the Office of Foreign Asset Control’s recent sanctions were against opposition politicians and entrepreneurs. The opposition that remains in Venezuela can breathe a bit easier without Trump.

A sanctioned opposition

Without Trump, Guaido has found it increasingly difficult to legitimise his “interim administration” amongst the parties of the former National Assembly. As such, he has been forced to concede to their demand to eliminate the “government center coordinator” position, which he created to house his political mentor Leopoldo Lopez.

The monster created through the interim administration has gone on to devour its maker. The hangover after Trump’s intoxication reached the heart of the imaginary government that Washington itself built.

A chain of micro-events has equally been set off in sectors of the Venezuelan opposition which has disobeyed this radical, foreign-bred strategy that had its main support in Republican officials.

Within a few days of the US transition, opposition leader and former presidential candidate Henrique Capriles left the Republican script by calling for a change of strategy and talks with Chavismo.

The following day, Democratic Action Henry Ramos Allup, his natural contender, reported that his party is “cold-headedly” discussing its participation in the regional and local elections to be conducted this year. Democratic Action leaders, as well as Ramos Allup’s relatives, have previously been sanctioned by the US.

Both are the most important opposition leaders remaining in Venezuela and belong to the opposition’s most voted parties.

Post-Trumpism has resulted in a kind of thawing of positions that were forced to freeze when US government officials decided on an aggressive strategy against Venezuela in 2016. What is normal in any country — for opposition leaders to prepare to go to elections — is in Venezuela a real sacrilege against Washington’s current interests.

Meanwhile, the unravelling of Guaido’s international recognition continues at full speed.

Allied support for Washington starts to break down

The first international player to change its position was the European Union.

As of its 6 January communiqué, the EU no longer grants Guaido any protagonism but rather the same status as any other political actor. It includes him, but without any recognition of office.

France24 interpreted this as such:

“The words ‘interim president’ no longer describe Juan Guaido in the EU’s latest statement on Venezuela’s political situation. While recognising him as a leading opposition voice, the twenty-seven countries removed this title from Guaido after control of the National Assembly returned to President Nicolas Maduro’s government.”

The German government was also explicit. Since January 17, it ceased to recognise Guaido as “interim president” following the “recommendations of the EU State Council,” according to Christofer Burger, a spokesman for the ministry of foreign affairs.

In Latin America, winds of change are also beginning to be felt: Dominican Republic backtracked on Guaido’s recognition at the end of January, stating that if they didn’t, they would be setting a “terrible precedent.”

No policy changes have yet been seen from Biden’s government. At the moment, lowering the tone on Venezuela already seems like a major change because it gives national and international actors room to finally emerge from the Trump period that dominated the region over the past four years.

Amidst all this, it is not known whether Abrams (or any new Abrams) will be making calls to the region’s governments, as he once recognised vociferously that he did, or whether he is calling them as we speak but they are behaving as the Venezuelan officers who did not answer their phones during the 2019 coup attempt.

We’ll know soon enough, and we’ll be analysing it all in Crisis & Critique.

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Featured image: Trump’s lingering legacy prevails in Venezuela, especially in the opposition’s ranks. (Venezuelanalysis)

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On Monday, February 8, Cuban newspaper Granma published a review of US government financing for subversive programs against the Cuban government.

In the last two decades, the United States has allotted about $250 million to subversive programs targeting Cuba, reported Granma.

Those millions, distributed through agencies, companies, and organizations such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), finance activities whose purpose is to overthrow the Cuban Revolution.

US organizations that have financed subversive programs against the Cuban government (Photo: Granma)

The report by journalist Tracey Eaton, entitled “The business of democracy in Cuba is booming,” and published in Cuba Money Project, details that in 2020 alone agencies such as USAID dedicated around $2.5 million to subversive activities, among them those of the San Isidro Movement, with the aim of generating internal conflict.

The actions of various media outlets have also been financed with gringo money, as revealed by Cuban media. These include the media show of ADN Cuba blogger Nelson Julio Álvarez in front of Cuba’s Ministry of Culture on January 27, for which he received between $150 and $200, according to a video posted by Álvarez himself on the Telescopio Cubano Facebook group. The Cuba Money Project reported that the ADN website, administered from the United States, received over $400 thousand last year through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Eaton notes that since Donald Trump took office in 2017, at least 54 groups operated programs with funding from USAID or the NED in Cuba.

The data was gathered from information that North American organizations have made public on their websites. As such, it is considered a partial figure, as there are many secret programs funding unknown recipients.

The combination of these actions and the economic pressures generated by the intensification of the economic, commercial and financial blockade of Cuba, and the establishment of other unilateral coercive measures against Cuba, reflected the Trump administration’s commitment to destroying the social fabric and political stability of the Caribbean island.

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Featured image: USAID and NED dollars are behind the San Isidro Movement, among other anti-Cuban programs (Photo: José Luis, Cuban cartoonist).

A Revolução Russa em 1917 colocou em pânico a alta burguesia da Europa, já muito desacreditada e enfraquecida pela gigantesca tragédia da  Primeira Guerra Mundial, resultado de sua própria irresponsabilidade, ganância e incompetência. A crise de 1929, que levou  quase à ruína a maioria dos países industrializados capitalistas, mas que praticamente não afetou a jovem União Soviética,  fortaleceu ainda mais a alternativa colocada pela Revolução Russa. Esta burguesia tinha então que enfrentar duas dificuldades: reconstruir a ordem capitalista internacional e responder ao desafio colocado pela crítica Marxista e pela Revolução Russa. Um grupo de intelectuais hostis ao comunismo, à esquerda em geral, e mesmo ao capitalismo  do New Deal nos EUA, procurou desenvolver e impôr uma reconstrução mais autoritária e profundamente anti-democrática do capitalismo: o neoliberalismo. Como mencionado em meu texto anterior , (https://www.globalresearch.ca/o-perigoso-caminho-da-suica-para-a-extrema-direita/5736109) a Suíça foi o primeiro país a acolher e financiar estes intelectuais, exercendo um papel fundamental na construção da ordem neoliberal.

Quinn Slobodian, autor da obra Globalists, criou um termo para designar a contribuição da Suíça para o neoliberalismo : a Escola de Genebra. 

Segundo Slobodian, a Escola de Genebra inclui pensadores que ocuparam posições acadêmicas em Genebra, Suíça, entre eles Wilhelm Röpke, Ludwig von Mises, e Michael Heilperin;

“aqueles que aí prosseguiram ou apresentaram investigações chave, incluindo Hayek, Lionel Robbins, e Gottfried Haberler; e aqueles que trabalharam no Acordo Geral sobre Tarifas e Comércio (GATT), tais como Jan Tumlir, Frieder Roessler (…) os neoliberais da Escola de Genebra transpuseram a ideia ordoliberal da ‘constituição econômica’ – ou a totalidade das regras que regem a vida econômica – para a escala além da nação.”

Ainda segundo este autor, Genebra – eventualmente a sede da OMC – tornou-se a capital espiritual do grupo de pensadores que procuraram resolver o enigma da ordem pós-imperial.Esta ordem pós-imperial refere-se ao período subsequente ao fim do Império Austro-Húngaro e grande parte do ‘enigma’ mencionado se refere ao desafio colocado pela Revolução Russa. O que os neoliberais da Escola de Genebra  procuram não é uma proteção parcial, mas sim completa dos direitos do capital privado, e a capacidade dos órgãos judiciais supranacionais como o Tribunal de Justiça Europeu e a OMC de se sobreporem à legislação nacional que possa interferir com os direitos globais do capital , ou seja, uma constituição econômica para o mundo.

Para a Escola de Genebra, ainda Slobodian, os compromissos de soberania e autonomia nacional eram perigosos se levados a sério.(Os proponentes da Escola de Genebra) eram críticos firmes da soberania nacional, acreditando que, após o império, as nações devem permanecer inseridas numa ordem institucional internacional que salvaguardasse o capital e protegesse o seu direito de circular pelo mundo. O pecado capital do século XX foi a crença na independência nacional sem restrições, e a ordem mundial neoliberal exigia uma isonomia executável – ou ‘mesmas leis’, como Hayek lhe chamaria mais tarde – contra a ilusão de autonomia, ou ‘leis próprias’,

Para os neoliberais da Escola de Genebra, as leis promovendo a defesa dos ‘direitos’ do capital, devem ser sobrepor às leis nacionais referentes aos direitos dos trabalhadores ou à proteção ambiental, por exemplo.

Muitos dos participantes da Escola de Genebra  estavam entre os fundadores da Sociedade  Mont Pélerin também na Suíça, uma entidade que teve um papel fundamental na construção intelectual do neoliberalismo e na difusão internacional de suas  propostas. A Sociedade Mont Pélerin serviu de inspiração e modelo para outras organizações importantes da rede da direita internacional como a Atlas Network e o Atlantic Council.

Frente ao desafio colocado pela Revolução Russa, a burguesia Suíça colocou-se desde muito cedo ao lado do capital, abraçando mesmo os extremos mais autoritários do capitalismo como representado pelo neoliberalismo, tudo para deter a ‘ameaça’ da esquerda, sempre mais perigosa, do ponto de vista do capital, que qualquer ameaça totalitária da direita. Um testemunho importante da cruzada da burguesia da Suíça contra o comunismo e a esquerda em geral nos é dado pelos escritos de Harry Gmür, escritor e comunista suíço. Nascido em Berna em 1908, Gmür testemunhou a ascenção do fascismo na Europa e a reação neoliberal na Suíça. Ao contrário de muitos de seus contemporâneos, Gmür abraçou a esquerda e seus valores humanitários. Em um texto publicado em 1965 com o título A Guerra de Hitler e a Suíça , Gmür escreveu:

Após o início da guerra, o  governo em Berna, sob pressão alemã, mas certamente aproveitando a oportunidade com demasiada facilidade, apressou-se a proibir e a policiar todos os partidos, associações, jornais, distribuidores de livros, etc. consistentemente antifascistas.

E num outro artigo, publicado 10 anos depois, em 1975, com o título de Naquele tempo, na Suíça, Gmür voltou a este tema escrevendo:

A esquerda suíça foi sujeita a uma pressão particular durante a guerra (…). Após o início da guerra, o Conselho Federal, não menos por anti-comunismo do que por servilismo ao Terceiro Reich, tinha suprimido o “Freiheit”, órgão do Partido Comunista, e os dois jornais diários dos socialistas de esquerda de Vaud e Genebra, que se tinham separado da social-democracia. Após a catástrofe francesa, o Partido Comunista, os partidos socialistas de esquerda da Suíça Ocidental, a Oposição do Partido Socialista Alemão-Suiço (uma facção que trabalhava contra o rumo de direita da liderança do partido) e a Sociedade Suíço-Soviética  foram banidos por completo. Os seus bens – impressoras, livrarias, até inventário de escritório – foram confiscados e nunca foram restituídos.

As queixas justificadas da imprensa soviética sobre o tratamento dos prisioneiros de guerra soviéticos que tinham fugido para a Suíça foram rejeitadas pelo chefe da justiça e da polícia.

Estes dois artigos foram publicados no Weltbühne, uma publicação da ex- República Democrática da Alemanha, sob o pseudônimo de Stefan Miller, certamente para evitar a repressão da direita na Suíça.

Entretanto, o documento mais contundente sobre a burguesia  da Suíça, sua guerra incessante contra a  esquerda e sua defesa intransigente do capital acima de tudo é o Relatório Bergier.

Uma comissão independente  foi criada pelo Conselho Federal da Suíça  em dezembro de 1996 sob a direção do historiador Jean-François Bergier, com o mandato , segundo o próprio Bergier, de responder ‘ a uma série de perguntas precisas sobre os bens ‘não reclamados’, ou seja, os bens depositados antes da (segunda) guerra em bancos suíços por futuras vítimas (do nazismo ) e nunca posteriormente recuperados por elas ou pelos seus herdeiros; sobre o tratamento dos refugiados; sobre todas as relações econômicas e financeiras entre a Suíça e a Alemanha nazi – comércio, produção industrial, crédito e movimentos de capitais, seguros, tráfico de armas, mercado de obras de arte e bens saqueados ou vendidos à força, transito ferroviário, electricidade, trabalho forçado nas filiais alemãs de empresas suíças.’ 

Em sua totalidade, o Relatório Bergier se compõe de 11.000 páginas distribuídas por 28 volumes. Um trabalho imenso e de um valor inestimável.

Segundo Pietro Boschetti, autor de um livro de ampla divulgação do Relatório Bergier com o título Les Suisses et les Nazis – de onde vêm a citação anterior de Bergier –  o relatório, em geral, confirmou o que os historiadores já sabiam: sim, a política de asilo foi extremamente dura durante a guerra; sim, o Banco Nacional comprou muito ouro suspeito da Alemanha nazi, prestando assim um serviço muito apreciado.

Em seu livro, Boschetti menciona alguns poucos exemplos da cooperação do grande capital da Suíça com a Alemanha nazistas conforme revelados pelo Relatório Bergier. Dos exemplos dados por Boschetti, menciono abaixo alguns, apenas para dar uma idéia da amplitude e seriedade do Relatório Bergier:

Sobre os negócios entre a Suíça e a Alemanha nazista, Boschetti escreveu:

‘As relações entre homens de negócios eram obviamente muito próximas e duradouras. Assim, após a guerra, o presidente do (banco) SBS (Rudolf Speich) e o director do (banco) UBS (Alfred Schaefer) apoiaram o único banqueiro nazi (Karl Rasche, membro das SS, Dresdner Bank) perante o Tribunal Internacional em Nurembergue.’

Sobre a ‘arianização’ :

 ‘Os “certificados de Arianeidade” para provar a pureza racial parecem ter sido uma prática bastante comum. Para obter o direito de aterrisar em Munique, a Swissair aceita, por exemplo, que as suas tripulações provem a sua arianeidade. A Nestlé faz o mesmo, tal como as companhias de seguros.’

E ainda sobre a Nestlé:

‘De Vevey, a Nestlé permaneceu em contacto durante toda a guerra com o suíço Hans Riggenbach, que era o responsável pelas operações da multinacional alemã em Berlim. (…)

A Nestlé vende o seu Nescafé à Wehrmacht durante a campanha russa, apesar da difícil importação de grãos de café .’

Sobre os trabalhos forçados realizados por prisoneiros de guerra:

‘Atingidas, como as suas concorrentes, pela falta de trabalhadores, as empresas suíças recorrem ao trabalho forçado. (….) nas fábricas de Lonza em Waldshut, onde 150 franceses desembarcaram entre Julho de 1940 e Abril de 1942. Desde essa data até ao final do conflito, mais de 400 prisioneiros de guerra russos trabalharam no local. Georg Fischer, BBC, Maggi, Nestlé e muitos outros não hesitaram em recorrer a esta reserva de mão-de-obra.

Os maus tratos são comuns, mesmo nas filiais suíças (…).

Até Agosto de 1944, a Suíça enviou trabalhadores forçados em fuga, especialmente russos e poloneses, de volta para a Alemanha.’

Para Bergier, as autoridades e os responsávies por empresas suíças na época não deixaram de justificar cada uma das medidas que tomaram, ou a sua recusa em tomá-las, a sua hesitação. Mas as suas explicações raramente resistem ao escrutínio, como ele escreeveu na introdução ao livro de Boschetti.

No entanto, o debate com a sociedade que deveria ter acontecido após a publicação do Relatório –  o objetivo final de todo o esforço empregado – foi impedido. Nas palavras de Pietro Boschetti:

Que país curioso! Embora tenha acabado de completar um louvável trabalho de introspecção histórica reconhecido por quase todos como exemplar, enquanto investiu recursos significativos para permitir aos historiadores trabalharem com seriedade e independência, enquanto passou por uma ‘crise de identidade’ causada pelo escândalo dos fundos não reclamados que deu origem a todo o tipo de exageros e excessos, este país, justamente quando dispõe de todo o material histórico necessário para ter um debate sereno … recusa-se a realizá-lo. Que pena!

A supressão deste debate foi uma vitória importante  da burguesia e do big business da Suíça, que assim protegeram sua  imagem e puderam manter, dentro da Suíça, o espaço e a credibilidade necessárias para continuar a expansão da agenda neoliberal. Não fosse por isso, instituições tão distintas como o World Economic Forum e o World Wide Fund for Nature – WWF –  ambos sediados na Suíça e ambos herdeiros e proponentes da visão neoliberal do mundo, ou seja, do mercado como principal instrumento de organização da sociedade e mesmo ‘salvador’ do planeta, talvez não tivessem tido tanto sucesso.

Em 2022 celebram-se  os 20 anos da publicação do Relatório Bergier. É a ocasião  de realizar o debate  suprimido mas ainda necessário, não apenas para uma compreensão mais profunda do papel da burguesia e do big business da Suíça e de sua ideologia na época da Segunda Guerra, mas sobretudo compreender seus desdobramentos atuais. Afinal, a visão de mundo neoliberal e seus representantes ainda mantém um enorme  poder político neste país, a hostilidade contra a esquerda continua tão agressiva como nos tempos da Guerra Fria e a Suíça segue sendo um parceiro importante na construção e disseminação das narrativas fake dos EUA que dão suporte às  campanhas antidemocráticas contra Cuba e Venezuela, para citar apenas estes dois exemplos. As forças políticas e os interesses econômicos que facilitaram a colaboração das autoridades e de grandes empresas da Suíça com a Alemanha nazista, são os mesmos por trás das  propostas de reorganização do Estado em função dos interesses do capital como defendidas pela Sociedade Mont Pélerin e pelo World Economic Forum; são ainda os mesmos que impediram o debate público sobre o Relatório Bergier.

O capitalismo neoliberal continua a ser defendido na Suíça como a única solução possível para os diversos problemas que a humanidade enfrenta atualmente, da crise ecológica à crise sanitária representada pela pandemia. O papel do capitalismo neoliberal como causa desses mesmos problemas não é sequer mencionado. Quando o movimento dos jovens pelo clima ousou questionar o neoliberalismo na Suíça, a reação foi uma legislação brutal e repressora.No entanto, apesar  da Sociedade Mont Pélerin e da Escola de Genebra, do World Economic Forum e do WWF, existe uma outra tradição na Suíça, uma tradição que se encarnou em Harry Gmür, no trabalho da comissão Bergier e reaparece, hoje, no movimento dos jovens pelo clima. À esta tradição cabe, agora, reabrir o debate necessário e desafiar o neoliberalismo num de seus mais importantes e influentes centros, a Suíça.

Franklin Frederick

                                                                                                                                 

                                                                                          

A Psychological Perspective on the Role of Power and Money

By Rod Driver, February 09 2021

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Acknowledgment:

This paper is partly based on Prof. Dr. Ola Tunander’s “Securitization, Dual State and US-European Geopolitical Divide or The Use of Terrorism to Construct World Order,” a paper presented at the Fifth Pan-European International Relations Conference, The Netherlands Congress Center, The Hague, 9-11 September 2004. Its revised version now available online is entitled “Democratic State vs. Deep State (PRIO, 2008) [1]

“In any state, certain areas are ‘securitized’ and by definition removed from the democratic political process. In an emergency situation – in short of war or terrorist attacks – the security sphere ‘invades’ the sphere of democratic politics. An autocratic security force or ‘security state’ appears to act in parallel to the regular democratic state, and this duality or ‘dual state’ was described by Hans Morgenthau already in 1955. After September 11, terrorism has become an instrument to ‘securitize’ what used to be public and tilt the ‘dual state’-balance in favour of the ‘security state’. The US ‘security state’ with its intelligence hegemony enters the scene as global protector that defines the world order in terms of a Pax Americana.

Terrorism is used to construct a new world order. This development has been followed by mutual transatlantic accusations between European critiques and US neo-conservatives. According to the critiques, the Strategy of Tension, as we know it from Cold War Europe, has received a global dimension. During the Cold War, the US ‘dual security structure’ – with its specifically tasked units masquerading as ‘enemy forces’ – was developed by the US ‘security state’ in order to keep the political strength and the readiness and capability of the Western defences. Now, this structure has seemingly been made into a self-propelled mechanism that is able to transform the world order into a Pax Americana.”  — Prof. Dr. Ola Tunander [2], Abstract of “Securitization, Dual State and US-European Geopolitical Divide or The Use of Terrorism to Construct World Order” [3]

Introduction

The “deep state” is a concept that necessarily connects with the power structure of the United States of America (USA). It stands in parallel with the legitimate government of the US and whose main function is to “securitize” the democratic foundation of the government as well as the institutions that represent and strengthen that government. It is, therefore, the fundamental responsibility of the “deep state” to protect the US government from both internal and external attacks aimed to undermine and destroy its “democratic” underpinning. It is precisely the reason why the “deep state” is more technically known as the “security state”.

The world, in general, has been conditioned to believe that the legitimate US government is the leading paragon of democracy. Hence it is principally construed that any attack against the US government is tantamount to an assault on democracy. This mental programming has created a condition that weaves the fiber of democracy with that of the US government. In literary critical analysis, we call it “telescoping”. In telescoping events, the characteristics and properties unique to each event are blurred and rendered insignificant to the point of unifying such events and hence making them identical. Expressing such a situation in the formal logical propositional pattern, “There is an x such that if x then y,” yields the following substantial statement:

“If the US government is democracy, then an attack against the US government is an attack against democracy.”

And to prevent such an attack against the US government or to defend the US government from such an attack, as the case may be, the “security state” which, under normal circumstances stands at par with the “legitimate democratic state,” takes control of the present abnormal situation using its autocratic power. In other words, when circumstances are normal, power is tilted on the side of the legitimate democratic state while in an emergency situation, it is on the side of the autocratic security state.

This condition is theoretically deemed as a matter of exigency and therefore temporary. By and large, the essential dynamic that constitutes this state of affairs is drawn from the non-negotiable importance of “securitization” to defend and protect the “genuine” bearer of the ideals of democracy which is the United States of America.

Nevertheless, what we simply see at the moment is the epidermal surface that projects the finest and the best of what this “prime model” of “democracy” exudes. Yet, there is more than meets the eye. Under the superficial configuration is a more complex network of hidden infrastructure reckoned to be more crucial and paramount than any of those located overboard and visible to the naked eye. Like in the case of an iceberg, what we see is just the diminutive tip but the bulk of its solid form is deep underneath. And this is precisely comparable to how the security state operates to which we give the alternative epithet, “deep state.”

What the deep state/security state is concerned about is more than the democratic state of the US government. It is more concerned about the massive business industries comprising the multiplex cogs of US economic enterprises that dominate the globe. These are the machines that are in full control of the US government.

In other words, the latter doesn’t possess the power inherent in itself but draws its strength from these colossal industrial establishments of global magnitude. In this connection, what we see is a government beholden to big business industrial conglomerates and whose decisions and actions are incontrovertibly at the behest of such business industrial giants. These are the “omnipotent” gods that the deep state/security state defends and protects.

The whole gamut of this arrangement leads us to a confirmation of the reality that the socio-political fabric of the United States of America is just a semblance of democracy – a counterfeit democracy. Its government, contrary to the Lincoln formulation presented in the Gettysburg Address, is not “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

The US government is of the big business industries, by the big business industries, and for the big business industries. What its citizens get are just the bread crumbs that fall from the dining tables of their “all-powerful” gods – the industry tycoons who own the machines that run the US economy. These are the mighty economic dictators who walk the corridors of power and are actively defended and closely protected by the deep state/security state.

The deep state/security state’s clout goes beyond the geographical location of its protected and defended “land of the free and home of the brave.”

Its power is felt in every country where the US foreign policy reigns supreme.

It dominates the western European region through its proxy known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

In Southeast Asia, it lords over the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Its aggressive posture has been tremendously exerted in the Middle East as it creates all forms of destabilization campaigns mostly by way of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen with the able assistance of its destructive allies, Wahabbist Saudi Arabia and Zionist Israel.

To promote and protect its economic interest in the Eastern European region, it has made all possible aggressive efforts to hold Russia at bay with veneer threats of violent confrontation if Russia reacts with an air of hostility.

In South America, it has been fueling destabilization in Venezuela to topple the democratically elected government of Nicolas Maduro and take full control of the country’s petroleum industry. In the most recent developments, it has been challenging Iran into a nuclear war which, on the basis of certain honest-to-goodness assessments made by experts in the field of geopolitics, is nothing but a hot-air provocation, i.e., an empty bluff.

Focusing on what’s been happening in the Middle East, the main goal of the deep state/security state is to take full control of the entire region to effect the final success of the Greater Israel Project wherein Zionist Israel is considered to be the sole political power extension of the US dominating over all the Arab nations around its illegitimate territory stolen from the Palestinians.

This project which puts Zionist Israel at the central hegemonic position of power consistently sustains the theory that the deep state/security state is not only a league of powerful American big business industrial tycoons but also a Zionist-influenced cabal whose dual allegiance is to Zionism and the US global supremacy.

*

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Prof. Ruel F. Pepa is a Filipino philosopher based in Madrid, Spain. A retired academic (Associate Professor IV), he taught Philosophy and Social Sciences at Trinity University of Asia, an Anglican university in the Philippines. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia Pacific Research.

Notes

[1] https://es.scribd.com/document/209132312/Ola-Tunander-Democratic-State-v-Deep-State-PRIO-2008

[2] https://www.prio.org/People/Person/?x=5044

[3] https://www.prio.org/Publications/Publication/?x=3214

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Introduction

From this retired US Army Master Sergeant’s perspective, the success or failure of Mr Biden’s foreign policy will hinge entirely upon one basic but ultimate standard that was set by his predecessor.    

Whatever Trump did or did not do, or un-did, in the realm of foreign policy and international relations, he at least did not start any New Wars, nor did he  significantly expand or escalate any already proceeding Old Wars.  

Unfortunately, there is another Trumpian standard of performance that Mr Biden is already looking forward to being able to surpass:  the size of annual federal budget Deficits that add to an ever-growing at a record pace national, sovereign debt.

And to do this, he will need and get all kinds of help from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue and the folks at the Federal Reserve; which he already has.  That is the one thing that regime change in Swampland never changes.

20+ Questions.  

President Biden’s foreign policy address at the US Department of State on February 4 presents what folks in the close artillery, tactical air, and naval gunfire support business call a “target-rich environment.”  Inspectors General often use that term, as well.

That is, there are all kinds of opportunities to challenge assertions, raise questions, and demand answers.  Among them are:

1. If “America is Back” (Biden’s foreign policy stance] is to be the replacement meme for “MAGA,” to exactly What is America back? To the way things were under Obama or Clinton?How about Bush II or I?
2. If “Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy,” when has it Ever been at the center of American foreign policy? Or does “diplomacy” include our history of regime changes, including assassinations, interfering in elections, and overthrowing democratically elected governments and replacing them with compliant, lackey dictatorships?  Does it include sanctions, embargoes, and other forms of economic and financial warfare that kill, cripple, and maim just as effectively as smart bombs and drones?
3. Is the Defense Department’s “global posture review of our military footprint” the official declaration that Cold War II is all but upon us because…. . Well, because  Russia and China seem to have had the temerity to dare to even think about challenging America’s unipolar global military, economic, financial, and political hegemony that has prevailed since the end of Cold War I in 1991?

3a.  How much must the $1++ trillion global empire, national defense, intelligence, surveillance, Fatherland security budget have to be increased in order for America to successfully defend itself against and confront, combat, and ultimately defeat this new bipolar threat to that hegemony?

4. Wasn’t bringing “democracy” and all the promised joys of a Pax Americana to the Middle East our primary motivation for invading, “liberating,” and occupying Iraq [besides, of course, preventing a mushroom cloud over Peoria from one of Saddam’s WMDs], in the first place? With the ultimate result of turning that land and nation into a true and total “shit hole”? And then turning the whole Fertile Crescent into a Killing Field as an encore, in the second?
5. How does Biden’s claim that our goals are “[d]efending freedom, championing opportunity, upholding universal rights, respecting the rule of law and treating every person with dignity,” correlate to and jibe with our history of installing, maintaining, and sustaining some of the most brutal dictatorships on the planet?
6. If Russian dissident Alexei Navalny has “been targeted for exposing corruption [and] should be released immediately and without condition,” what did Assange, Snowden, and Manning do but expose corruption and a whole lot more?And why shouldn’t they be immediately released, pardoned, compensated, and awarded Presidential Medals of Freedom?
7. When Biden, in his words, “made it clear to President Putin in a manner very different from my predecessor, that the days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s’ aggressive actions, interfering with our elections, cyber attacks, poisoning its citizens are over,” what did Putin have to say in response?One can pretty well imagine what he was probably thinking, eh?  Wouldn’t you just Love to see an SNL skit on that?
8. Why do we still have troops in Germany 75 years after defeating the Nazis in World War II and 30 years after the Soviet Union disappeared? Or in Japan after doing the same thing in the Pacific just as long ago?And in Korea 67 years after the conclusion of that first of America’s many subsequent Wars-by-Presidential Fiat, as opposed to by Congressional Declaration?  And while we’re at it, why do we have 800 military bases scattered across 80 nations and 160,000 troops on them?  Or is that part of how Swampland ~ pre- or post-Trump ~ defines “Great”?
9. If “we’re ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arm sales,” how do we plan to ensure that those weapons and technology we sell or give them ~ to “support and help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty, and it’s territorial integrity and its people” ~ won’t be used in Yemen?After all, that’s where the primary “threat” to its sovereignty, territory, and people is coming from, isn’t it; at least in the Saudi mind?  Or is it Iran?  Or is it Israel?

9a.  And wasn’t “defending Saudi Arabia” from a marauding Saddam what got us into this whole goat rope in the first place?  When, after “liberating” Kuwait, we stayed put and kept a full-time, combat-ready military presence in and on Islam’s holiest Land?

10. For all the talk about Myanmar and Yemen, why was there was no mention whatsoever of Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria [or Guantanamo], and our so-called “Global” so-called “War On” so-called “Terrorism”?And what are the Biden plans for those complete and total failures of American foreign policy?   Of which he was an active participant.

See Item 16 below.

11. How many of those “80 million displaced people suffering all around the world” are displaced directly ~ or indirectly but ultimately ~ because of America’s “Forever War”?  And if “the United States’ moral leadership on refugee issues was a point of bipartisan consensus for so many decades,” hasn’t there also been an even stronger  bipartisan consensus on perpetrating and then perpetuating that War, as well?  That War created and continues to create all those refugees for these past two decades?

11a.  In other words, Who and What have caused the vast majority of those refugees to flee their homelands?  In Southwest Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, is it not that Forever War, which is no closer to being over, let alone “won” [whatever that means or ever meant] than it was on 9/12?

11b.  And is not the primary reason that people are seeking to escape Central America following the chaos and collapse left over from Ollie’s (Oliver North) Crusade there in the 80s, that built on 80+ years of US military, economic, and political invasion .[See Smedley Butler’s War Is A Racket for an overview.]

11c.  Or do they seek to escape the avenues through which major portions of America’s insatiable demand for drugs must pass on their way to market?  One can only wonder how preemptively ending America’s failed War On Drugs by legalizing everything would cut down on the number of people trying to flee where the drugs come from, and through which they pass on the way up to Gringoland, eh?

11d.  Instead of “restoring our refugee admissions program” and bringing 125,000 of these folks to America, why not stop creating refugees in the first place? 

12. What business is it of the United States as to how any other sovereign, independent nation treats its LGBTQs, or anybody else?  Is it the business of any other nation to tell the US how its Cops should treat its African Americans?  They can tell us all they want but, are we going to listen to them?  Should we?  Then why should they bother to listen to us?
13. What is “a foreign policy for the middle class”?Is that different from a foreign policy for the poor?  Or one for the rich?

13a.   How much is the “American Rescue Plan” and so forth ~ all to be paid for with borrowed money ~ going to cost future taxpayers when the bills come due, and the collection agent shows up and demands payment because our credit is no longer good?

13b.  How are the “Buy American policies” ramped up last week any different from Trumpite neo-mercantilisms?   And isn’t the idea that American business can “compete and win on the global stage, if the rules of international trade aren’t stacked against us” kind of, sort of, almost exactly what Trump proclaimed on numerous occasions?

14. Can government action end the “systemic racism and the scourge of white supremacy in our own country”? Particularly when white supremacy and racism were built directly into the American system of government and governance from the very beginning with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and precidential executive and legislative actions and judicial decisions?
15. How successful have our investments in developing countries over the past 20 years been in “creat[ing] new markets for our products and reduc[ing] the likelihood of instability, violence and mass migrations”?  Has foreign aid worked?  Did “nation building” work?  And if so, where, how, and, most importantly, for whom?  And what has been America’s return on that investment?

15a.  While it may or may not be true that “when we strengthen health systems in far regions of the world, we reduce the risk of future pandemics that could threaten our people and our economy,” how about if we focus on fixing our own totally and completely broken health care system first, and thenworry about fixing everybody else’s?

16. In opening his address with lavish praise for the new Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, with whom Mr Biden has “worked together for over 20 years,” one is immediately led to ask:And what good, positive things did You two accomplish over the course of these last 20 years working together that the American people or anybody else on the planet have benefited from?  Anything?  According to Wiki, Blinken “advocated for the 2003 invasion of Iraq,” and “[d]uring his tenure in the Obama administration, he helped craft U.S. policy on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the nuclear program of Iran.”  All major, booming successes, almost everybody in Washington would agree, yes?
17. In response to Mr Biden’s declaration that “We want a rigorous debate that brings all perspectives and makes room for dissent. That’s how we’ll get the best possible policy outcomes,” one must ask: But what’s on the table? Overseas base closures and bringing the troops home?  Ending our economic warfare against Iran, Venezuela, and anybody else who crosses us?  Reducing ~ or at least not increasing ~ the nation’s $1++ trillion global empire, national defense, intelligence, surveillance, Fatherland security budget?  And like blasphemies?  How much dissent from the established, dominant paradigm perspective is actually welcome, and would be seriously considered?
18. In response to “the passions of Eleanor Roosevelt that declared the audacious idea of universal rights that belong to all,” this raises the two most important questions confronting America and the entire Planet today:

• What is the difference between Human Needs and Human Wants, on the one hand, and Human Rights and Human Responsibilities, on the other?
• What is the proper function of government as regards the meeting of those Needs and the satisfying of those Wants, on the one hand, and the protection of those Rights and the fulfillment of those Responsibilities, on the other?
• Which then leads to the following questions:  Is Health Care a Human Need and Want, or a Human Right and Responsibility?  What about Nutrition and Sanitation?  Education?  Or Housing, Employment, Physical and Financial Security, and Leisure?  Water? Truth?

19. How does Mr Biden’s vision for a new American foreign policy that takes America “Back” to the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset”?
20. According to Mr Biden, “There’s no longer a bright line between foreign and domestic policy.” Is that a reference to our failed War Against International Terrorism and its newly hatched  War Against Domestic Terrorism?   One can already imagine that a Congressional Authorization to Use Military Force Against Domestic Terrorists or AUMF-DT, and a domesticated version of the USA PATRIOT Act are already in Final Draft, waiting for the Deals to be cut, made, and done.  Mr Biden got a lot of experience with that sort of thing in a parallel situation and environment, having been in DC in 2001.

Concluding Remarks as outlined in the Introduction

From this retired US Army Master Sergeant’s perspective, the success or failure of Mr Biden’s foreign policy will hinge entirely upon one basic but ultimate standard that was set by his predecessor.

Whatever Trump did or did not do, or un-did, in the realm of foreign policy and international relations, he at least did not start any New Wars, nor did he measurably significantly expand or escalate any already proceeding Old Wars.

 

But the proposed, planned, and programmed “War Against Domestic Terrorism” will change Everything.

[Author’s Note:  All quotes are Biden’s and are from “Joe Biden Speech on Foreign Policy Transcript February 4: ‘America is Back’”; accessed 020421]

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Jeffrey G. Moebus is a 74-year-old retired US Army Master Sergeant who spent two years in Viet Nam in the 60s, and two years in the pre-Operation Desert Storm Middle East in the 80s.  He lives in Sitka, Alaska on the sailboat he brought up from San Francisco Bay nine years ago this summer, and is the Chronicler for Veterans Against War [Sitka Platoon].

Featured image is from OffGuardian

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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Last year an experiment was carried out on a group of adolescents to see how they would respond to being denied contact with others of the same age. The results were stark — starved of interaction with their own generation, the adolescents subsequently grew up to be more angry and fearful, drank more alcohol and found it harder to interact with others.

The adolescents in questions were “rats” (part of animal model experiment reported in The Lancet, but many of their human equivalents might wonder if a similar experiment was being carried out on them, too.

Certainly it’s not a good time to be a kid. Teenagers in previous national crises risked being bombed out of their houses, killed by polio or Spanish Flu, or being sent to fight in the trenches. What Covid is wreaking is relatively invisible, and while the disease dominating the world is vanishingly unlikely to kill anyone under 25, there is a parallel epidemic of anxiety and depression crushing its way through young minds. The Royal College of Psychiatrists is warning that the psychological damage caused by the last 12 months could last for years.

Rates of referral to child and adolescent mental health services were already alarmingly high before the pandemic; in the last year, they’ve gone up by 20%, to nearly 1 in 20 as teenagers are forced to stay home with their stressed families and live their entire lives through a screen: education, entertainment, their grandparents’ funerals and their own school-leaving prom. And, most important for teenagers, their social life.

Adolescents need their social life the way babies need food, sleep and warmth. Everything from neuroscience to centuries of human experience tells us that the process of becoming an adult happens through spending less time with parents and more time with peers. By hanging out with friends and classmates, developing our first sexual and romantic attachments, competing and admiring, going too far and having to repair social bonds, we learn to be autonomous and independent — just as our rat cousins do.

And yet, as the researchers on the animal model experiment noted, findings in rodents don’t map simply onto human teenagers. For a start, none of the rats driven to drink by their solitary confinement had access to social media.

Ever since teenagers first discovered that the smartphone in their pocket could connect them, not only to a boundless world of human knowledge and feline video action, but to their friends, rivals and potential love interest, adults have worried the damage it is doing. A January 2021 report on young people’s wellbeing and mental health is the latest to associate “heavy social media use” with worse wellbeing, especially for girls.

This association could mean that more time spent looking at digitally-enhanced depictions of impossibly beautiful people having impossibly glamorous and popular lives makes teenage girls feel worse about themselves. But it could also mean that lonely, unhappy teenagers go online more to seek support. Existing research in the pre-lockdown world shows evidence that both these things are true. Talking about “social media” in teenagers’ lives makes as little sense as debating the benefits and risks of “reading”. Scrolling passively through TikTok until a video catches your eye is very different from contacting your friends to set up a WhatsApp group, or posting your own original music on a public platform.

We have all been catapulted by Covid into a world where most of our interactions happen through technology, but that’s largely an acceleration of trends that were already happening. It’s the same with shops. Several high street retailers were dealt the fatal blow by lockdowns that forced us to shop online instead, but that shift was already happening. At the start of the pandemic, only one in ten UK adults had never shopped online. Yet nobody is now lining up to buy bankrupt chains of bricks-and-mortar shops, because nobody foresees a full bounce back to the bustling high street of 20 years ago.

For teenagers, interacting through digital channels was already taking the place of much face-to-face socialising. Almost half of American teens said they were online “almost constantly” in 2018. Online gaming was an important social activity, with 97% of boys playing, and four in five girls. Texting overtook “in-person” as teenagers’ favourite way to communicate, even before coronavirus forced their fast-typing thumbs.

Alongside this fast-forward phase in the tech takeover of our lives has come a heightening of existing debates. Campaigners who were already worried about what teenagers get up to on their phones are swift to blame the increase in mental distress among the young on cyber-bullying, doom-scrolling, and the endless pressure to present a perfect self image. Technology companies whose mission is “to connect the world” are are keen to show how their products can fill the void in everyone’s social existence.

This polarisation of pre-existing positions, says Professor Andrew Przybylski of the Oxford Internet Institute, helps nobody. The debate about whether technology “is good or bad, is so empty,” he says. The issue that he thinks we should be talking about is how our ability to structure our own social lives has been ceded, almost by accident, to software engineers, and to the profit motives of a handful of companies.

“The PTA, the Parent Teachers Association, has ceded authority to Google Classroom. Your trip to the pub has ceded structuring authority to some UX engineer at Zoom,” says Przybylski.

“And that’s not bad for your mental health. But that might be bad for your ability to make rational decisions about how you’re going to structure your life, or how you’re going to structure your child’s education.”

When our social interactions happen in real life, we have some control over how they work. A school PTA meeting, a college seminar, a pub quiz or a family get together, can be organised the way we think best, to foster the kind of human relationships we want. There is room to be spontaneous, to adapt or subvert the arrangements, just as people have done for millennia. Our social structures have evolved over time, a mix of conscious planning and organic change.

Online, these social structures are prefabricated. It’s as if you can only have parties by choosing between venues where not only the seating plans are rigidly fixed, but also how many people can talk at once, and for how long, and (in some cases) even what subjects are acceptable in conversation.

What does this mean for teenagers?

In some ways, they are already more at home in this mixed-dimensional world, where your friends can be constantly present even if you haven’t seen them in the flesh for months. Teenagers’ capacity to have intimate conversations online, to share experiences and occasions through screens, and to run parallel relationships simultaneously through many channels, should help them deal with lockdown better than many adults. Today’s young adults were already less likely to drink and take drugs than the previous generation, so they may not be missing pub life as much as their parents are.

But this is not to downplay the combined effects of pandemic and lockdown on young people. Alongside the threat of illness and death to their grandparents and sometimes parents, the interruption of their education, and the prospect of entering employment in a post-pandemic recession, they are losing out on experiences vital to their mental and emotional development.

Teenagers need to get together in person, and not just because their hormones are turning them into adults with sexual desires; though learning how, and with whom, to express those urges (and when to restrain them) is important. Human interaction can’t be codified. The subtleties of body language, the ambiguities of fleeting eye contact, the scary prospect of making a social faux pas in a situation from which you can’t just log off, don’t translate well into digital platforms.

The relative controllability, and predictability, of technologically-mediated interactions are part of their appeal for adolescents. The risk of misreading a situation, or being misread, is mitigated when you can re-read a text message before replying, or edit a selfie before posting. One of the very real dangers of a year spent growing up online is that it will be the “new normal” because it’s safer than the in-person alternative.

But we must be honest with ourselves. An existence mediated by technology we didn’t design, in which each of us interacts, individually, with a world bounded by a screen, was already the future into which most of us were sliding. We were already being seduced by the ease of pre-made platforms, of a social world packaged like content, of a perpetually-scrolling menu of experiences to consume. It’s less risky than unscripted encounters with flesh-and-blood human beings.

Teenagers need each other. They need to see and hear each other, so it’s no wonder their use of technology has expanded to meet that need, as well as their needs to learn, to shop, to laugh, and to escape reality for a little while. They also need to touch each other and (sorry, parents) sometimes the other senses too, and technology can’t really help with that, despite its best efforts. It’s vital for teenage sanity, in its broadest sense, that they regain the freedom to be together as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, it’s up to the adults to reflect on the world that we are making for them, and for ourselves. A world which made it possible to confine much of the population to home, each separately connected through social structures in software form. Structures designed, not by us, but by people we’ll never meet, who never asked us what we want, and merely measured our behaviour in the maze they built for us.

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Timandra Harkness presents the BBC Radio 4 series, FutureProofing and How To Disagree. Her book, Big Data: Does Size Matter? is published by Bloomsbury Sigma.

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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This is the second of two posts about psychology, and should ideally be read after the first, which is entitled ’20) Psychology: Pretending There is Nothing Wrong’. This post summarises more key psychological issues which have serious negative consequences for modern societies, and then discusses the implications for how we deal with these issues in future. In particular, it emphasises the need to question everything.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”(1)

Power

Recent research into the effects of power is showing how much it corrupts people. In particular, when confronted by risky situations, powerful people are more likely to expect positive outcomes. They are optimistic because they believe they have the power to overcome adversity.

Successful or powerful people tend to delude themselves into believing that they are more capable than they really are.

In other research, subjects who are primed to feel powerful are more likely to lie in order to get a reward.(2) At the same time, they actually become more hypocritical, in that they are more disapproving of other cheats. Power seems to make people more assertive whilst decreasing their ability to see something from someone else’s point of view.(3) It also seems to make people less inclined to challenge received wisdom. Many of these issues appear to have little to do with a lack of education or intelligence. If anything, the opposite is true. Intelligent people tend to be more confident that they know what they are doing. Power not only corrupts, but does so in extremely complex ways.(4)

Power is mostly ignored by the mainstream media, but it is so important in human societies that it will be discussed in a later post in much more detail.

Money

There is a growing body of evidence that money may have significant social side-effects. It appears to motivate our interest in ourselves, but at the same time makes us selfish,(5) suggesting that there may be a trade-off between financial and social motivations. If we choose to value something in a financial way, we no longer value it in a social way(6).

This was originally noted in relation to blood donations. Researchers found that paying donors makes them less willing to donate blood, and increased the chances of blood being contaminated. Rather than money simply providing an additional motivation for people to do something, it seems that money might destroy other motivations. Other research has confirmed this. People are less likely to accept contaminated waste if they are paid,(7) and parents collecting children from childcare are late more often, not less, when financial penalties are introduced.

The existing social arrangement, where people feel an obligation to do the right thing, is replaced by a financial arrangement, where people feel no social obligation. We live in societies in which mutual support and co-operation are essential, but money seems to erode these unwritten agreements. We decide that we do not need or care about others, or society in general. The unintended social consequences of money and financial incentives may be much more significant than we realise, indicating that we need to think very carefully about financial incentives. It has been argued that money is the final disincentive (after obeying orders, conforming, and other issues discussed in the previous post) for not doing the right thing and looking away. Over the years, many commentators have noted this principle:

“All that evil needs to flourish is for good people to see nothing, and get paid for it”.(8)

In particular, journalists have a financial incentive to ‘misunderstand’ the crimes of their government. As we saw in earlier posts, newspaper owners do not want their journalists to be too critical of the existing system.

Distance and Complexity

“we don’t see things that are too far away, that are too distant from our own experience, too separate from our own concerns, too complicated… or too far away in time”.(9)

One factor that made a big difference in the earlier obedience experiments (discussed in the previous post) was proximity between subjects and the people receiving electric shocks. In some experiments, if subjects were in the same room as the person receiving the shocks, the number of subjects giving strong shocks was low, whereas if the person receiving the shocks was in another room, all participants were obedient and gave the maximum shock. One subject commented “it’s funny how you begin to forget that there’s a guy out there”.(10)

As many companies and governments have realised, it is easier for the senior management or policymakers to be blind to the consequences of their actions when they do not see the results. Senior managers effectively operate in a ‘bubble of power’ that seals off bad news and hostile opinions. Many top decision-makers never have to deal with detailed day-to-day decision-making. They look only at the big picture. The combination of power and distance from actual events seems to make powerful people more certain that they are correct. They are lulled into a sense of mastery by their isolation from challenge, and from the actual evidence that would contradict their decisions.

In the UK we have what is known as the Westminster bubble, where a group of mostly wealthy politicians, advisers, bureaucrats, and journalists, surround themselves with people who are equally wealthy. They don’t work at food banks or in homeless shelters, so they have no real understanding of the challenges faced by the poorest people, and no incentive to take any interest.

Modern societies and, in particular, businesses, are becoming ever more complex. Investigations into the financial crisis of 2008 clearly showed that no one in the financial system had a complete picture of the overall risks. All risk calculations were confined to slices of financial activity.(11) This was true in both Britain and the US. The evidence suggests that this level of complexity is unmanageable. Humans do not seem able to cope with it.

There are many other psychological issues that have been noted by researchers which may be relevant to corporate settings. For example, diffusion of responsibility is where no-one takes responsibility for something because everyone else assumes that someone else is responsible. The more complex an organisation is, the easier it is to pass the buck and blame others when problems arise.

Can we do anything about these psychological issues? 

Current corporate and political arrangements ignore all of the psychological issues that have been discussed in these two posts. Groups of key decision-makers are surrounded by like-minded thinkers and therefore develop extreme views. They are over-confident, too distant from the consequences of their decisions, and oblivious to ethical issues. Employees try so hard to be obedient and to conform that they too turn a blind eye to ethical issues, and assume that if something is seriously wrong then someone else must be dealing with it.

The science of psychology, and its application to the real world, is still in its infancy. There is some discussion in business or management magazine(12) but it tends to be superficial. However, awareness of psychological issues could be used to help re-structure organisations in the future, in way that might make them work much better for people and society.

If we accept that power and/or money seriously corrupts decision-making, then we have to remove financial incentives from decisions, and ensure that no individual or organisation has too much power. If complexity is making life unmanageable, we can simplify many things, including the structure of companies. If distance affects our judgement, then we have to ensure that decision-makers are closer to outcomes, which might require us to break up the biggest companies.

Unfortunately, at the moment, lawyers and financial advisors for big companies actively do the opposite, trying to make them bigger, more complex, less transparent and less accountable, and therefore more risky, more unmanageable, and with ever more power in fewer hands.

Minimising Obedience, Conformity and Groupthink 

Overcoming the issues discussed in the previous post, such as obedience, conformity, groupthink, denial or confirmation bias is probably more difficult, as they are psychological traits that have evolved over many generations to enable us to make life more bearable. However, it might be possible to weaken their effects by changing the way that children are taught, and changing the way that workplaces operate.

During some of the experiments discussed in the previous post, researchers found that small changes in experimental set-ups often led to very different outcomes. With the groupthink research, it only took one dissenting opinion to give other people the confidence to express their doubts about a particular course of action. Similarly, in the obedience experiments, if participants witnessed other people giving shocks, obedience was much higher. However, obedience declined considerably if there was a single other person who refused to give shocks. If we encourage independent thinking, alternative opinions and dissenting voices from a young age, and throughout people’s lives, then it might make a difference to how organisations operate.

Bypass Information From The Powerful – Stop Reading Mainstream Newspapers 

These psychological issues have their worst effects when powerful people are trying to manipulate us in the first place, using propaganda to justify wars, corporate crimes, or economic policies that enrich the rich. People with power don’t want these things to change. They like obedience and conformity. They like having a population that is in denial about war crimes, and the criminal nature of the corporate system. To bring about serious change will requireminimising the ability of those with power to manipulate us in the first place.

For this reason, most people will have to completely change the way they obtain and interpret information, to bypass sources that are biased towards the powerful. As we saw in earlier posts, most of the information in mainstream newspapers is government and corporate press releases, so you will never understand the world if that is all you read.

People need to learn to be more questioning of all information, whatever the source, and of their bosses, of their places of employment, and of ideas more generally. Above all we need to encourage people to keep asking questions, and to help people work out the right questions. This will require teaching people these skills when they are young, so that the default response is to question everything, rather than to believe propaganda.

It is also important to encourage people to have values, to think about what they believe in, and to encourage people to stand up for their beliefs. When we see crimes or unethical behaviour all around us, we have to be prepared to speak out.

In many of these posts I do not discuss solutions, because they are so obvious – we simply need to stop doing things like war crimes. But it will be easier to make the necessary changes if we take human psychology into account. If we fail to do so, we will be stuck with a population that does not question the most obvious lies, allowing war crimes and corporate crimes. Conformism, groupthink and obedience will continue. There will be few whistleblowers, and poor policies. We will know that we are making progress when our societies celebrate conscientious objectors more than soldiers, and when we celebrate whistleblowers instead of punishing them.

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This article was first posted at medium.com/elephantsintheroom

Rod Driver is a part-time academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking modern-day US and British propaganda. This is the twentieth in a series entitled Elephants In The Room, which attempts to provide a beginners guide to understanding what’s really going on in relation to war, terrorism, economics and poverty, without the nonsense in the mainstream media.

Notes

1) Upton Sinclair, 1934, discussed at https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/

2) Joris Lammers et al, ‘Power increases Hypocrisy: Moralizing in Reasoning, Immorality in Behaviour’, Psychological Science, 16 April 2010, at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797610368810

3) Deborah H. Gruenfeld, ‘Status, Ideology and Integrative Complexity on the Supreme Court: Rethinking the Politics of Political Decision-Making’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1995, 68(1) pp.5 – 20

4) S. Goodwin, et al, ’Power can bias impression processes: Stereotyping Subordinates by Default and by Design’,Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 2000, 3(3), 227 – 256

5) K.D.Vohs et al, ‘The Psychological Consequences of Money’, Science, 2006, 314(5802), pp.1154 – 1156

6) Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

Richard Titmuss, The Gift Relationship

7) B.S. Frey and F. Oberholzer-Ghee, ‘The Cost of Price Incentives: An Empirical Analysis of Motivation Crowding-Out’, American Economic Review, 1997, 87(4) pp. 756 – 755

U. Gneezy and A. Rustichini, ‘A Fine is a Price, Journal of Legal Studies, 2000, 29(1) pp.1 – 17

8) Margaret Heffernan, Wilful Blindness: Why we ignore the obvious at our peril, 2011, p.257, paraphrasing the philosopher Edmund Burke

9) Margaret Heffernan, Wilful Blindness: Why we ignore the obvious at our peril, 2011, p.238

10) S. Milgram, Obedience to Authority, 1974

11) John Snow, Testimony before congress, in ‘The financial crisis and the Role of federal Regulators’, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, 23 Oct 2008, at https://ia802904.us.archive.org/30/items/gov.gpo.fdsys.CHRG-110hhrg55764/CHRG-110hhrg55764.pdf

12) Ryan Smerek, ‘How to overcome conformity by “getting at the truth”’, Psychology Today, 6 July 2020 https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/learning-work/202007/how-overcome-conformity-getting-the-truth 

Peter Bregman, ‘The high cost of conformity and how to avoid it’, Harvard Business Review, 21 Oct 2015, at https://hbr.org/2015/10/the-high-cost-of-conformity-and-how-to-avoid-it

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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‘Know Thyself’

On a tombstone in an English churchyard is the following inscription “Here lies John Bailey. The fact that he died does not guarantee that he lived”. 

And that is surely the point. ‘To Live’ is the dynamic expression of existence; not being stuck in some soulless routine permanently in fear of stepping out of line with a sterile status quo.

The art of living involves the assertion of freedom, creativity and empathy with and for fellow humans and all living beings. It is our deepest self expression of an organic sense of purpose. The will to live is expressed through the flow of that warm inner feeling called ‘love of life’.

When, within the human experience, attempts are made to block this flow by forces opposed to Life, our ‘love of life’ causes us to adopt an unwavering commitment to fight for the preservation of all that is good, real and humane. In other words, to defend the basic tenets of a civilised society.

Many actively engaged individuals find themselves in this position today.

But why such a high proportion of humanity fails to respond to this ‘Life-call’, preferring instead a ‘no risk’ three dimensional sub-existence – is an unsolved conundrum – in spite of thousands of divergent explanations being put forward.

However, one thing we do know is that when some form of material wealth or power is experienced by those who have sidelined their innate spirituality, it becomes an addiction around which a fixated dependency immediately forms. From there on, such individuals only experience existence as a sterile ambition-chasing game.

In these circumstances, Life becomes reduced to a competition to build and protect material wealth and status; and all those who reject such extremity – but nevertheless remain essentially passive – serve as fuel for the ambitions of these vampires.

The present pyramid of top-down economic and political oppression is built upon this catastrophic deviation from the organic, spirit led, path of Life.

The net result of this deviation from truth is the manifestation of a compensatory expression of the suppressed life-force. The original expression, blocked from following its organic path, turns in on itself and starts to devour that which would otherwise have guided the individual to the light.

Whereas, to openly give free voice to that Divine source of which we are all descendants, is the supreme individual expression of the life force with which we have all been blessed.

We are living through a time of open manifestation of the domineering anti-life materialistic obsession, stripped of all spiritual energy. What we are seeing on a daily basis today, emanating from the top end of the ‘competition pyramid’, is a ‘pandemic’. But it has nothing to do with a virus and everything to do with a feverish grasping for ultimate power and control over others – which includes all life forms down to the very DNA of life itself.

Taken at its face value, this is an abject expression of clinical insanity. If such an extremity was expressed within a family unit, the perpetrator would be recognised as deeply disturbed and in need of serious help and quite possibly of being isolated for fear of causing serious harm to others.

But when the same symptoms are displayed by politicians, bankers, media editors, corporate directors, the police and so forth – it is not recognised as insanity or even megalomania – but as an  ‘acceptable’ type of eccentric behaviour, which is grudgingly seen as ‘par for the course’.

This should lead us all to reflect on how such a stark departure from a human path of life could ever have been engineered into existence.

How a set of values applied to leadership within a family and to political/corporate ‘leadership’ – could be so starkly different. And how such a schizophrenic state of affairs could be allowed to continue to prevail in every corner of the world?

My conclusion is that such a gross imbalance exists due to the engineered separation of primary values within the greater social community, so as to create a divide and conquer controlling agent within society. Once this is in place, schizophrenic actions are not seen for what they are, they are taken as the norm.

In reality, there is no such division between values and responsibilities we see as important within families and those we see as important within political and business affairs. They are indivisible. That which expresses truth – and guidance based upon this truth – has Divine origins. The Divine is whole.

But by the time formal education and parental ambition (for siblings) has weighed-in, a separation of the material and the spiritual/social is all too often made manifest. It is as though these two realms were innately antagonistic.

This state of affairs is the signature of a bankrupt society. An engineered split that looks distinctly like the work of “demons”; as there is no natural explanation for why antagonism should exist between material and spiritual realms.

All animate and inanimate life is built of spirit and matter – ‘spirit-matter’ – which cannot be separated into opposing elements. But that separation is exactly what the proponents of an increasingly robotic human race have set their sights on.

To reinstate the wholeness which is our natural birthright, and to ensure its continuity throughout the life cycles that proceed from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood, is the essential task all caring, humanitarian and feeling individuals cannot turn away from.

‘Living’ means bringing a better world into being. Encouraging the spark of Life to rise up out of the ashes of a dystopian wilderness. To let Life educate us rather than those who police the status quo.

The verb ‘to educate’ comes from the Latin ‘e-ducare’ meaning ‘to draw out from’. This is a direct reference to encouraging the manifestation of our innate creativity.  Not the ‘fact absorbing’ mission that has been forced on young people during decades of ‘schooling’. The real meaning of such words has been deliberately obfuscated.

The imperative for getting this new dynamic moving cannot be overstated. Much of humanity is on the brink of psychological, psychotic and schizophrenic imprisonment. A state which cannot help but deeply imbalance the very fabric of our living planet.

Faced by this dramatic challenge to create unity out of disunity, we have to draw strongly upon the well of our deeper selves. For the ‘real me’ and the ‘real you’ are the only forces that can rise-up and radiate enough light to penetrate and dissolve the false clouds hanging over this world. 

But how can one exert light, freedom and justice when all around fellow humans are covering their faces with a mask of anxiety and fear?

When every news item inflates a lie?

When the whole world seems turned up-side-down by diabolical double speak?

Yes, that is the predominant question on millions of minds right at this moment.

The answer lies in the expression “know thyself”. “Thyself” as an eternal spirit/being of cosmic origins which has – temporarily – taken on a human form and is currently resident on Planet Earth.

‘A cosmic being having an earthly experience’.

Once you and I can detach ourselves from living the lie and primarily identify ourselves with a state of ‘non-attachment’ to the material and ego-led realm, we are free.

We cannot be destroyed. We have become eternal. At one with our Creator.

This is a place completely out of reach of our oppressors – whatever form they may take. From here we can go into battle for planet Earth and planet people with not a trace of fear; knowing that when we give all for the cause of truth, Truth returns all to us – with a bonus!

This is how we are to defeat the diabolical entities which we have allowed to occupy and rule this planet. They are but mirrors of our failure to follow the call of truth. To BE our true selves. To listen and respond to the inner voice of deeper guidance.

We have the will to quite simply dump our old false existence and transform from pseudo-humans into real humans, indivisible from the divine wellspring of Life. For each one of us, that is our uniquely individual challenge. When expressed collectively, it forms the foundation of a new society.

Of such beings, when they finally pass, it will be stated “The fact that this brave soul had a human experience is here recorded. May that soul continue its great exploration of the divine infinite from whence it came.”

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Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, international activist, entrepreneur and holistic teacher. His latest book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ is particularly recommended reading for this time: see www.julianrose.info 

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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The war on Libya and Africa began 10 years ago on Feb. 15, 2011. Nine months later, the most prosperous country in Africa was devastated, masses of Libyans were killed, the Libyan leader Muammar Gadafi was brutally assassinated while US Secretary of State chortled “We came, we saw, he died.“

With a new administration but the same old faces in power in Washington, it is important to understand how that terrible crime was accomplished and what it meant for Libya and Africa but also for the countries that took part in that war, particularl, the United States, Canada, France and the UK.

The answers can be found in Maxmilian Forte’s seminal SLOUCHING TOWARDS SIRTE, NATO’s War on Libya and Africa.

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South Africa is halting its rollout of the AstraZeneca-University of Oxford Covid-19 vaccine, the country’s minister of health said Sunday, following a new analysis that suggests the shot “provides minimal protection” against mild disease caused by the new coronavirus variant circulating in South Africa.

Two top virologists advising the government said during a press conference that the pause was necessary. They said South Africa would institute a new process in which vaccines are initially studied in a research phase to try and determine that each vaccine reduces Covid hospitalizations in South Africa despite the widespread new variant there.

“The AstraZeneca vaccine rollout needs to be put on a temporary halt while we get the clinical efficacy information in,” said Salim Abdool Karim, an epidemiologist at Columbia University and part of a commission advising the South African government. “And the way that we can do that is with the new approach to rollout.”

Barry Schoub, chair of South Africa’s Ministerial Advisory Committee on vaccines, struck a similar note.

“I think we just need to maybe suspend use of AstraZeneca, but investigate it more and more fully to see, can we utilize it more effectively,” he said.

The news heightens concerns about B.1.351, the variant first seen in South Africa, and will also likely lead to discussions about the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, which is among the least expensive and most widely available of the Covid-19 vaccines that have so far been developed. In addition to AstraZeneca, the vaccine is also being made for much of the world by Serum Institute, a large Indian vaccine maker.

However, the data, which were presented in detail during the livestreamed press conference, do not give clear answers. The results involve only small numbers of patients and may not be enough to draw any conclusions. The data were also submitted as a preprint and have not yet been peer-reviewed.

Shabir Madhi, professor of vaccinology at the University of the Witwatersrand and chief investigator on the new study, said that before B.1.351 became common in South Africa, the vaccine was trending toward reducing mild cases of disease by 75%. But once B.1.351 became prevalent, that number dropped precipitously, and cases were reduced only 22% based on 42 cases of symptomatic Covid.

Those data appear unreliable, however. They were given with confidence intervals, which propose a range of plausible outcomes. For the 22% number, those ranged from -50% to 60%, meaning that more data would be needed to be collected to trust the figure.

Researchers and AstraZeneca emphasized in separate statements that the study was a small one, including only 1,765 volunteers with a median age of 31. AstraZeneca said it believes the vaccine will still protect against severe disease caused by B.1.351. The current study gives no information on whether the vaccine prevents severe disease, hospitalization, or death.

AstraZeneca also said that it and Oxford have started adapting their vaccine to B.1.351, and will advance the new vaccine through development so that it is ready for delivery in the fourth quarter of the year if it is needed.

This is the third vaccine, and the first approved vaccine, to show what appears to be reduced efficacy against B.1.351. Johnson & Johnson said that its vaccine, which was 66% effective overall against moderate-to-severe disease, was 57% effective against moderate-to-severe disease due to the variant. Novavax, another vaccine developer, said that its vaccine was 89% effective against mild-to-moderate disease, but in a separate trial in South Africa was 50% effective.

Karim pointed out that only the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been shown to reduce severe disease due to B.1.351. He said that when vaccines are rolled out, South Africa will now look at hospitalization rates in the first 100,000 to receive the vaccine in the hopes that this will provide information on whether the vaccine is proving effective.

Madhi warned that it could be “reckless” to simply let doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine expire without giving them, given the possibility that the vaccine could reduce severe disease.

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Matthew covers medical innovation — both its promise and its perils.

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North Macedonia’s EU accession talks are being halted because of Bulgaria’s insistence that the neighboring country stops appropriating history and acknowledges it speaks a Bulgarian dialect. However, the issue escalated recently when Bulgarian Defense Minister Krasimir Karakachanov said North Macedonia can only become an EU member if it became a part of Bulgaria or an Albanian province. Effectively, Karakachanov gave decisionmakers in the North Macedonian capital of Skopje a choice – Greater Albania or Greater Bulgaria.

In a separate incident, Karakachanov said in October last year to Skopje: “If you suddenly decided to create a new nationality, do us the favor of not stealing Bulgarian history and, moreover, by falsifying the history of Bulgaria by cultivating a sense of hatred towards Bulgaria, Bulgarians and anything Bulgarian.”

This is in reference to the complicated identity issue in North Macedonia, whose people once overwhelmingly identified as Bulgarian, with a smaller population identifying as Serbian. They were however propagated by the old Tito regime of Yugoslavia to adopt a Macedonian identity.

This served three purposes:

It was a part of a “strong Yugoslavia, weak Serbia” policy. The Serbian Orthodox Church wielded great influence in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia. Attachment to Serbia was weakened through the invention of a canonically unrecognized Macedonian Orthodox Church that declared autocephaly from the Serbian Orthodox Church in 1967.

To weaken pro-Bulgarian sentiment in the region as the people prior to the existence of Socialist Yugoslavia wanted to reunite with Bulgaria.

To lay claim to the major Greek port city of Thessaloniki that is confusingly situated in the Greek region of Macedonia, in which 90% of Ancient Macedonia is located (only 10% in North Macedonia).

As part of building a new Macedonian identity, Yugoslav scholars in 1945 began to make changes to the Bulgarian language and called it Macedonian. They also constructed a new historical timeline that claimed the people of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia had common history with ancient Greek figures like Alexander the Great and medieval Bulgarian figures like Tsar Samuel, whose moniker was ironically “the Bulgar.”

Since today’s North Macedonia achieved independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, it prioritized consolidating a Macedonian identity. This soured relations with neighboring Greece for decades. Although Athens and Skopje came to terms with the signing of the 2018 Prespa Agreement, in which Greece accepted the country’s name as North Macedonia in exchange for their renouncement of territorial aspirations against northern Greece and acknowledged the Ancient Macedonians were Greek, the issue with Bulgaria was left unresolved.

The first Foreign Affairs Minister of the now North Macedonia, Denko Maleski, said last year “We are past the time when Macedonian history was protected by the powerful Yugoslav federation and could, without pressure, selectively choose the building blocks of the Macedonian nation, and could cross out the mentions of ‘Bulgarian’ and write ‘Macedonian’ instead.” Maleski is not alone in North Macedonia to reclaim Bulgarian identity, with several academics and politicians also shedding Yugoslav-era historical revisionism and propaganda. In fact, even an influential YouTuber went to his channel to say “We’ve been fed communist lies. We are not the Macedonians. We are the Bulgarians.”

Skopje’s obsession with maintaining Yugoslav-era propaganda contributes to the country’s internal collapse. The 2001 conflict saw Albanians from Kosovo storm areas of North Macedonia to continue their project for a Greater Albania, although it ultimately failed. The Greeks had always warned Skopje that prioritizing historical revisionism was distracting them from the real threat – the disintegration of their country from Albanian separatists concentrated in the northwestern part of the country. Albanians, accounting for over 25% of the population, now control the Ministry of Finance. In addition, the last 100 days of the Prime Ministers mandate will be given to an Albanian. According to a 2010 Gallup Balkan Monitor report, 53% of Albanians in North Macedonia support a Greater Albania, up from 44% in 2008 and 52% in 2009. 11 years on from the report, although there is no official data, it can be expected this number is even higher.

It is for this reason that Karakachanov has warned North Macedonia that it will become a part of Greater Albania or Greater Bulgaria, or perhaps even both. As Skopje insists on claiming their language is not a Bulgarian dialect and that historical heroes like Tsar Samuel the Bulgar were in fact Macedonian and not Bulgarian, the Albanians are increasing their political power and have shown numerous times that they are willing to use violence to achieve a Greater Albania.

Bulgarian military leaders likely acknowledge that at some point in the future a conflict will breakout in the neighboring country if the Albanians cannot achieve separation through political means. Such a conflict could justify a Bulgarian military intervention.

This is not be implausible as three years ago the North Macedonians had territorial ambitions against Greece, but now has the Greek Air Force policing its airspace under a NATO mandate. If civil war broke out in North Macedonia, it would not be impossible to imagine that Bulgaria would intervene, despite its difficult relations with Skopje like Greece once had, and thus have de facto control over the country, just as Greece now has control over its airspace.

Choosing between a Greater Albania and a Greater Bulgaria could become a difficult choice that Skopje may need to make if they persist in maintaining Yugoslav-era propaganda and historical revisionism against Bulgaria instead of facing the true threat to their territorial sovereignty – Albanian separatism.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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Colonized and controlled Ukraine is a de facto US-installed Neo-nazi dictatorship in Europe’s heartland — bordering Russia and six other countries.

Obama/Biden bear full responsibility for replacing democracy in 2014 with iron-fisted governance over the rule of law.

Nazi Ukraine Azov National Guard

Then-assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs neocon Victoria Nuland was Obama/Biden point person for the late 2013-14 made-in-the-USA coup.

To the Left of of Nuland, leader of Svoboda Oleh Tyahnybok, the far right wing Neo-Nazi Party

She’s back as Biden/Harris undersecretary of state for political affairs, one of many hawks infesting the Biden administration.

They support president Vladimir Zelensky’s war on free expression and the rule of law.

On February 2, his regime ordered eight news outlets shut down, including 112 Ukraine, NewsOne and Zik.

Representing opposition views, they were banned by presidential diktat.

More on this below.

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The scourge of censorship is the new abnormal in the US and West.

Will views conflicting with the falsified official narrative no longer be tolerated ahead?

Is what’s happening prelude to restricting or banning free expression altogether?

Was silencing Trump and others on social media a shot across the bow for much greater censorship ahead?

Will truth-tellers expressing views that conflict with the official narrative be silenced on social media and in other social discourse?

Will they be declared domestic terrorists by congressional legislation signed into law by selected, unelected, Biden?

Is police state-enforced totalitarian rule in the US and other Western countries headed for full-blown tyranny to eliminate their free and open societies — as part of planned Great Reset dystopia, a diabolical scheme to establish ruler/serf societies worldwide?

Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft is the latest controlling the message victim.

He’s permanently banned by Twitter for truth-telling about brazen US Election 2020 fraud that unlawfully elevated Biden to the nation’s highest office.

According to Twitter doublespeak, it’s for violating its “community guidelines” and “civic integrity policy” — euphemisms for censoring what diverges from the official narrative.

Who’s next to be silenced? Will truth-tellers on sensitive issues risk arrest and imprisonment ahead?

Is Big Brother mass surveillance and silencing dissent the new abnormal in the US-dominated West?

Jefferson reportedly said that “(a)ll  tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”

At a time of what Orwell reportedly called “universal deceit,” silence is self-destructive.

If the US constitutional right of free expression is banned or pushed to wither on the vine, a free and open society no longer will exist — replaced by the worst of what Orwell and Huxley imagined.

There’s nothing remotely democratic about US-installed and controlled tyrannical rule in Ukraine.

Banning independent news outlets was ordered by the ruling regime’s National Security and Defense Council, thought policing one of its duties.

A statement said the action taken was “(o)n the application of personal special economic and other restrictive measures (sanctions)” against Deputy Taras Kozak (Opposition Platform – For Life party).

He owns three of eight targeted news outlets. Now shut down, their licenses to operate were cancelled.

Speech, media and academic freedoms in Ukraine no longer exist.

Official narrative reporting alone is permitted.

Russian media, including online, its print materials, even children’s books in Russian were designated propaganda and banned earlier.

Silenced Ukrainian TV channels have large audiences.

They’re now denied news, information and analysis that diverged from the official narrative they featured.

In September 2019, Zelensky expressed support for channels now banned, adding:

“I’ve never closed a single channel in my life.”

“I don’t have the right to do so. I don’t have the powers.”

“I personally value freedom of speech.”

That was then. His above totalitarian action is now.

Like his predecessor Petro Poroshenko, Zelensky expelled foreign journalists from Ukraine, notably Russian ones.

He ordered arrests and detention of journalists who diverged from the falsified official narrative.

Head of Russia’s RIA Novosti-Ukraine Kirill Vyshinsky was arrested and detained for over a year on fabricated treason charges.

Likely state-sponsored murders of Russian journalists Andrey Stenin, Anton Voloshin, Igor Kornelyuk and Anatoly Klyan were never investigated.

Tyranny is the law of the land in Ukraine, the nation used by US dark forces as a dagger pointing at Russia’s heartland.

New media restrictions are headed toward being enacted into law.

On the phony pretext of combatting disinformation, full-blown state-sponsored censorship will be enforced.

A provision of the draft law requires anti-Russia propaganda against what it calls an “aggressor state.”

Events since the Obama/Biden regime’s late 2013-2014 coup have been systematically banning free expression, along with other repressive actions.

“Ukrainian democracy” is a euphemism for full-blown/US-supported tyranny.

In response to Zelenzky’s war on speech and media freedoms, the US embassy in Ukraine said the following:

“The United States supports Ukraine’s efforts…to counter Russia’s malign influence (sic), in line with Ukrainian law (sic), in defense of its sovereignty and territorial integrity (sic).”

“We must all work together to prevent disinformation from being deployed as a weapon in an information war against sovereign states (sic).”

Is the worst of what’s happening in Ukraine taking root in the US and other Western societies?

Are freedoms in all forms on the chopping block for elimination?

Is a diabolical plot in the West underway to replace them with dystopian rule?

Is what’s going on unjustifiably justified by protecting national security for our own good?

Are the worst of times in the US and other Western societies on the way?

A Final Comment

The US and Ukraine are the only world community nations that annually vote against the UN General Assembly resolution on “Combating the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.”

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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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Not only has leading presidential candidate Andrés Arauz emphasized that he is committed to maintaining the dollar as the national currency, he and his party have a long track record of taking strong measures to make sure that dollarization did not come under threat.

As economists, we share a general concern when economic issues are widely misunderstood in political debates that can determine policy, sometimes with lasting consequences. This appears to be a problem in Ecuador at the moment, in the heat of an election campaign.

Media reports have repeated, without any evidence, false allegations about the economic program of one of the presidential candidates. Andrés Arauz, a former minister and Director General of the Central Bank who is currently leading in most polls, has been accused of seeking to abandon the country’s current use of the dollar as its national currency. There is no evidence that he or his political party would do anything at all in this direction.

A transition from the dollar back to a national currency would be costly and involve risks that would be exacerbated by the current dire and precarious economic situation. This false allegation is clearly an attempt to scare voters, and indeed those promoting it have warned of a resulting economic collapse if the dollar is abandoned.

In fact, not only has Arauz emphasized that he is committed to maintaining the dollar as the national currency, he and his party have a long track record of taking strong measures to make sure that dollarization did not come under threat. These included reforms which kept billions of dollars within Ecuador, such as taxing capital leaving the country, financial regulation—including regulations on foreign banks within the country—increased accountability of the Central Bank; and other reforms and policies that kept the economy stable and avoided crises for the 10 years of the Rafael Correa presidency (2007 to 2017).

These policies and reforms prevented even the slightest threat to Ecuador’s commitment to the dollar, even when Ecuador was hit hard by the world recession of 2009, as well as other severe external shocks including a collapse of oil prices in 2014, and steep falls in remittances.

As a result of this prudent economic management, the economy did very well during the Correa years, and the gains were widely distributed. Income per person rose by 20 percent and poverty fell by more than 38 percent from 2006 to 2017. The Gini coefficient for net household income (which measures inequality) fell by almost 15 percent between 2006 and 2017. During these years, social spending more than doubled as a percent of GDP. Much of this went to healthcare and education, with enrollment rates in secondary education increasing 26 percent; the number of people treated in public hospitals rose by 56 percent.

Ironically, it is some of Arauz’s opponents who are proposing measures that could put Ecuador’s dollarization at risk, by doing away with the necessary financial regulation. Guillermo Lasso—Arauz’s main competitor—has called for the elimination of capital controls, which would make the country vulnerable to balance of payments crises that could threaten the dollar’s place as Ecuador’s currency.

In contrast to the previous presidency, the economy under the current government has run into serious trouble. GDP is estimated by the IMF to be over 10 percent lower in 2020 than it was in 2017. Of course, much of this was a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, but a large part of these losses were a result of bad decisions. GDP per capita fell 1.5 percent from 2017to 2019, even before the Covid-19 crisis hit. And in 2019, the government signed an IMF agreement committing to a fiscal tightening of 5 percent of GDP over the next three years.

Some of the required spending cuts provoked widespread protests, which were met with serious repression. This repression, which left at least 9 dead and over 1500 injured, was investigated by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, which called for further investigations into numerous reports of “unnecessary and disproportionate use of force” by security forces. Indigenous groups were especially affected, with Ecuador’s largest indigenous organization filing a lawsuit against the Ecuadorian government for alleged “crimes against humanity.”

Another false economic claim has been promoted in the current election cycle: that the Correa government ran up an unsustainable debt which the current government had to reduce. In fact, the Correa government left office with a debt of 45 percent of GDP. Under the current government, Ecuador’s debt increased to 69 percent of GDP.

Voters need to have accurate information about the most important issues, including economic issues, that are facing the country when they choose a government. In the United States, we have seen the dangers of misinformation multiplied to dangerous levels during the past four years. We hope that Ecuador can avoid these kinds of problems in its upcoming election.

Original signers (in alphabetical order)

(name, affiliation for identification purposes)

James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government, LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin

Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Signers (in alphabetical order)

(name, affiliation for identification purposes)

Eileen Appelbaum, Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Alan Aja, Professor & Chair, Dep. of Puerto Rican & Latino Studies, Brooklyn College (CUNY)

Michael Ash, Professor of Economics & Public Policy, UMass Amherst

Amiya Bagchi, Emeritus Professor, Institute of Development Studies Kolkata, Adjunct Professor, Monash University

Ron Baiman, Associate Professor of Economics

Dean Baker, Senior Economist, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Peter Bohmer, Faculty emeritus in Economics and Political Economy, The Evergreen State College

Korkut Boratav, Turkish Social Science Association

Manuel Branco, Professor, University of Évora, Portugal

Jim Campen, Professor of Economics, Emeritus, University of Massachusetts Boston

Anis Chowdhury, Adjunct Professor, Western Sydney University, Australia

Alan Cibils, Chair, Political Economy Departmente, Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Argentina

Nathaniel Cline, Associate Professor, University of Redlands

Andrew Cornford, Geneva Finance Observatory

Dante Dallavalle, Adjunct Lecturer of Economics, John Jay College

Peter Dorman, Professor of Economics Emeritus, Evergreen State College

Jeff Faux, Distinguished Fellow, Economic Policy Institute

Sujatha Fernandes, Professor, Department of Sociology and Social Policy, The University of Sydney

Kevin Gallagher, Director, Global Development Policy Center, Boston University

Daphne T. Greenwood, Professor of Economics, University of Colorado-Colorado Springs

Fadhel Kaboub, Denison University

Mary C. King, Professor of Economics Emerita, Portland State University

Gabriele Köhler, Independent Development Consultant

Michael A. Lebowitz, Professor Emeritus, Economics Department, Simon Fraser University

Stephan Lefebvre, Assistant Professor, Bucknell University

Arthur MacEwan, Professor of Emeritus of Economics, University of Massachusetts Boston

Ann Markusen, Professor Emerita, Humphrey School, University of Minnesota

Michael Meeropol, Professor Emeritus of Economics, Western New England University

Lara Merling, Policy Advisor, ITUC

Mritiunjoy Mohanty, Professor, Indian Institute of Managment Calcutta, Kolkata, India

Isabel Ortiz, Director, Global Social Justice Program, IPD, Columbia University

Mustafa Özer, Professor, Anadolu University

Christian Parenti, Associate Professor of Economics, John Jay College, CUNY

Mark Paul, Assistant Professor of Economics, New College of Florida

Alicia Puyans, Economics Ptoffeso Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Socialed

Philippe Quirion, Senior scientist/Directeur de recherche, CNRS (France)

Miriam Rehm, Professor, University of Duisburg-Essen

Joseph Ricciardi, Associate Professor of Economics, Babson College

C. Saratchand, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Satyawati College, University of Delhi

Saskia Sassen, The Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University

Max B. Sawicky, Senior Research Fellow, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Stephanie Seguino, Professor of Economics, University of Vermont

Tazdaït Tarik, Senior Researcher, CNRS (France)

Rolph van der Hoeven, Professor, Erasmus University, The Netherlands

Irene van Staveren, Professor of Pluralist Development Economics, International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam

Matías Vernengo, Professor, Bucknell University

Scott Weir, Economics (retired), Wake Technical Community College

John Willoughby, Professor, Department of Economics, American University

John Womack Jr., Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics, emeritus, Harvard University

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

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Economist James K. Galbraith is currently a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and at the Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of “The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too” and “Inequality: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

Jayati Ghosh is Professor of Economics and currently also Chairperson at the Center for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social Sciences, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi, India. With C.P. Chandrasekhar, she co-authored “Crisis as Conquest: Learning from East Asia.” Jayati is also a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. E-mail: [email protected]

Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), in Washington, DC. He is also president of Just Foreign Policy. His latest book is “Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong about the Global Economy” (2015). He is author of co-author, with Dean Baker, of “Social Security: The Phony Crisis” (2001). E-mail Mark: [email protected]

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The ghosts of dictators “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier still haunt Haiti. Canada seems willing to support a return of their methods in the Caribbean nation.

Sunday will be bittersweet for many Haitians. February 7 is usually a day to commemorate the defeat of the Duvalier dictatorship, but this year the date portends the revival of Duvalierism.

After a multi month popular revolt the three decade-long Duvalier dictatorship fell on February 7, 1986. “President for life” Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier, who took over from his father at 19, was chased out of the country after 15 years.

Thirty-five years to the day Baby Doc fell a Duvalierist president who should be leaving office is extending his term against the wishes of most Haitians and constitutional experts. In his time in office Jovenel Moïse has restored many aspects of the brutal regime. He suppressed popular protests and instigated a gang alliance to instill fear in the slums. He has ruled by decree and criminalized protests as “terrorism”. Shortly after parliament was disbanded because Moïse failed to hold elections, the president selected individuals to rewrite the constitution in flagrant violation of the law. In November Moïse unilaterally decreed the creation of a new National Intelligence Agency with anonymous, legally untouchable, officers who, notes Kim Ives, “have the power not just to spy and infiltrate but to arrest anybody engaged in ‘subversive’ acts (Article 29) or threatening ‘state security’ i.e. the power of President Jovenel Moïse.” The agency may become analogous to Duvalier’s feared Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale (Ton Ton Macoutes).

Moïse is the hand-picked successor of Michel Martelly. A supporter of the 1991 and 2004 coups against elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Martelly was a member of the Ton Ton Macoutes. As president, Martelly surrounded himself with former Duvalierists and death squad leaders who’d been arrested for rape, murder, kidnapping and drug trafficking. When Jean-Claude Duvalier returned to Haiti after 25 years, Martelly told the New York Times no one wanted him prosecuted except for “certain institutions and governments” abroad.

In fact Martelly was put in put in place by Washington and Ottawa not long after the deadly 2010 earthquake. In the 2010 election Ottawa intervened to bring far-right president Martelly to power (with about 16 per cent of the votes, since the election was largely boycotted). Canada put up $6 million for elections that excluded Fanmi Lavalas from participating. After the first round, Canadian representatives on an Organization of American States mission helped force the candidate the electoral council had in second place, Jude Celestin, out of the runoff.

Ottawa backed Martelly diplomatically and financially throughout his presidency, including when he sought to ensure arelatively obscure businessman replaced him. Since then, Canada has provided almost unquestioned support for Moïse. Canada has ploughed tens of millions of dollars into the Haitian police and prison system in recent years. They promoted a police force that violently repressed anti-Moïse protests.

It may be hard to imagine that Ottawa would promote the revival of such a notorious dictatorship. But it shouldn’t. Ottawa enabled a young Jean-Claude to take over after François Duvalier died. Canada was among the leading financial contributors to Haiti throughout Baby Doc’s 15-year rule. The aid supported the dictatorship. In “Canadian Development Assistance to Haiti: An Independent Study”, a 1984 report by the semi-official North South Institute, Edward Philip English writes: “It would be naive to pretend that this aid does not contribute to the support of the existing regime, at least in the short-run. It helps to legitimize the regime in the eyes of Haitians by demonstrating international approval and it generates projects and jobs, which the regime is careful to associate with itself as much as possible.”

English adds, “CIDA has placed Canadian advisors as ‘experts’ in several Haitian ministries.” In Spy Wars David Stafford and Jack Granatstein describe one of the individuals leading the CIDA program: “[Hugh] Hambleton lived in true grandeur in the capital, Port-au-Prince, working closely with officials of the notoriously corrupt and brutal government of its dictator, ‘Baby Doc’ Jean-Claude Duvalier.” Canadian officials even influenced who Baby Doc appointed finance minister. Three days before Baby Doc fled, Québec Premier Robert Bourassa refused to comment on whether Prime Minister Brian Mulroney should seek the dictator for life’s exclusion from an upcoming summit of the Francophonie.

Ottawa was even more openly supportive of maintaining ‘Duvalierism without Duvalier’ after the young dictator fell. In the four years after Duvalier fled Canada provided significant assistance to a series of military lead regimes. In November 1986 External Minister Monique Landry visited Haiti to meet government head General Henri Namphy. Canada announced $80 million in assistance over five years and Landry also invited Namphy to the Summit of la Francophonie in Quebec City the next year. As the violent, anti-democratic, nature of the military regime became undeniable Ottawa resisted shifting gears. In the face of significant criticism from the Haitian community and Québec left, Ottawa largely maintained its various forms of support to the military regimes.

Thirty-five years later not much has changed. After forcing Jean-Claude out Haitians struggling for a more just and democratic society face a similar predicament. They not only have to contend with the power of their own ruling elite but are also up against Canada and the US.

Canadians of conscience should support those mobilizing in Haiti today against creeping Duvalierism. It is the least we can do to make up for the shameful role this country has played in that impoverished nation.

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Have you ever wondered how a herd of sheep is driven to their “slaughterhouse”?

Manipulation of minds is a well-studied science, has been applied already for centuries, but is getting ever more sophisticated. For example, the many poignant assertions, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda (1933 to 1945), included,

“if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth”; or

“if you make people believe in the threat of an enemy, they’ll do your bidding”- and

“divide and polarize them, destroy their solidarity, and they follow your command”.

Today we have become more sophisticated. While fear is still the weapon of choice – imagine an invisible enemy that everybody is scared of – we have digitally observant media, algorithms and robots that focus on your thinking, how you react and deal with social media, or what websites you consult, and where and what you shop.

This is just to mention a few points of information. Today there are on average about 200 such data to be electronically computed, so as  to sway your opinion and to make you believe the most flagrant lies.

You may recognize what the covid crisis is doing to you and at what state of manipulation we are – how close to the slaughterhouse are we?

The seven stages below synthesize the book ‘Influence, The Power of Persuasion’, by Robert Cialdini: 

“Influence”, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say “yes” – and how to apply these understandings. Dr. Robert Cialdini is the seminal expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion. His thirty-five years of rigorous, evidence-based research along with a three-year program of study on what moves people to change behavior has resulted in this highly acclaimed book. You’ll learn the six universal principles, how to use them to become a skilled persuader – and how to defend yourself against them. Perfect for people in all walks of life, the principles of “Influence” will move you toward profound personal change and act as a driving force for your success.:”

Hypnotherapists have been noticing blatant hypnosis and Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) techniques being used by the government and state-controlled media. NPL is a psychological approach that involves analyzing strategies used by successful individuals and applying them to reach a personal goal. It relates thoughts, language, and patterns of behavior learned through experience to specific outcomes.

Listen to this:

Fractionation:

You get them to do something not once, but again and again, increasing the level of intensity each time. Usually, you do it 3 times. (At the first lockdown I said – watch out, there’ll be a 2nd and a 3rd) This increases compliance – you’re much more likely to get them to do whatever you want.

A ‘Yes’ set:

Get them to say ‘Yes’ to something small at first (just two weeks to “flatten the curve”) then gradually increase (months of lockdown, Christmas cancelled, socially/economically coerced into vaccines). In this way they’re much more likely to keep saying yes. (There would’ve been riots if they’d said in March lockdowns will carry on through Christmas.)

Confusion:

Keep them in a constant state of uncertainty. The conscious mind responds to this by ‘going offline’ as it searches for the appropriate response for something it has no precedent for. Then it’s much easier for the manipulator to gain access to the unconscious mind and change belief systems. For example, lockdown rules are changing on practically a day-to-day basis; we’re living in a world we’ve never lived in before, everyone’s stumbling about with no idea how to behave. We’ve no energy left to fight our oppressors.

Repetition:

Repeat the same information over and over (see any newspaper / TV news for evidence of this!)

Illusion of Choice

Make them believe they’re in control by giving them 2 choices, both of which lead to the same result. For example, ‘Do you want the Pfizer or the Oxford?’ or ‘You can choose to be good or bad. Bad = more lockdown. Good = more lockdown.’

“Social Proof”

“Look, all these great celebrities are backing it!”

“Scarcity”

“You’ll have to wait your turn for the vaccine… we might be running out”

And so many more… All classic psychological control techniques. Once you see it, you can’t un-see it.

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Check out the book ‘Influence’, The Power of Persuasion’ by Robert Cialdini – all the methods he talks about are being used daily in the news and other media.

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If we realize in time that this is what is happening to us, that this theory applied is behind covid, and that using covid for a much more freedom encroaching ulterior goal – total control of humanity, of people’s behavior, of food, of resources – over whether people live or die – and of the world’s riches – then we might have a chance to break out from the herd that storms towards the abyss – or the slaughterhouse.

Waking up – protesting – disobeying – and reconnecting with each other. NOW.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

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

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).

***

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).

***

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).

***

Ben Norton traveled to Ecuador to report on the historic February 7 election, which pits a wealthy US-backed right-wing banker against a left-wing economist who pledges to continue the socialist Citizens’ Revolution launched by former President Rafael Correa.

In this dispatch, working-class Ecuadorians explain why they support leftist candidate Andrés Arauz and oppose the repressive Washington-allied government of Lenín Moreno.

The South American nation of Ecuador is currently suffering through its worst economic crisis in decades. Poverty is skyrocketing, corruption is rampant, and the US-backed government has shown itself to be deeply undemocratic.

On February 7, Ecuador will hold a historic election that could fundamentally change its direction, moving the nation away from its current neoliberal policies and reliance on Washington, and restoring the socialist-oriented program of former President Rafael Correa, who launched a progressive movement called the Citizens’ Revolution.

Today, Ecuador’s sitting President Lenín Moreno has a mere 8 percent approval rating, with staggering 91 percent disapproval, making him the most unpopular leader in the country’s modern history.

Under Moreno’s rule, the government has imprisoned and exiled many left-wing political leaders, banned pro-Correa electoral candidates, gutted social programs, destabilized Latin American regional institutions, and heavily indebted Ecuador with billions of dollars in loans.

And in a historic act of betrayal, Moreno renounced the asylum that Correa had given to WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, allowing British authorities to enter Ecuador’s sovereign embassy in London and arrest the Australian journalist.

Under Moreno’s reign, unemployment, inequality, and hardship have reached peak levels, with more than 58 percent of Ecuadorians living in poverty and nearly 39 percent in extreme poverty, according to a United Nations University study.

Meanwhile Ecuadorians have endured a catastrophic response to the Covid-19 pandemic, with one of the highest per capita death rates in the entire world.

In 2020, Ecuador’s GDP shrunk by an estimated 11 percent. Everywhere you walk in the capital city Quito, you see “for sale” and “for rent” signs.

US-backed banker vs. grassroots socialist economist

Ecuador’s February 7 election has boiled down to two main choices, and the difference could not be any starker: On one side is the right-wing candidate Guillermo Lasso, a banker who served as economic minister when Ecuador suffered through a financial meltdown in 1999 that bankrupted millions of citizens and destroyed their life savings.

Lasso, who has long been credibly accused of corruption and the use of off-shore tax shelters, has the staunch support of Ecuador’s wealthy economic elites and the United States.

On the other side is left-wing candidate Andres Arauz, a young economist who follows in the footsteps of former President Correa and his movement, known as Correismo, and wants to bring back his socialist policies.

Arauz has built a huge grassroots following in a presidential campaign based on his promises to tax the rich, to give $1000 checks to a million poor and working-class families, and to abandon suffocating and extremely unpopular economic agreements that Ecuador’s current Moreno government signed with the International Monetary Fund, or IMF.

Arauz also plans to revive regional institutions to integrate Ecuador’s economy with other Latin American countries, and he wants to return to closer business ties with China, just as his mentor Correa had done.

Virtually all polls show Arauz leading and likely to win the presidential election, if the vote is free and fair.

The fact that the leading presidential candidate wants to reject the IMF and seek deeper economic relations with Beijing has angered Washington, which has meddled in Ecuador’s internal affairs and thrown its weight behind the banker Lasso.

Lenín Moreno’s war on Ecuador’s left

Under the US-backed Lenín Moreno administration, Ecuador has attacked regional institutions, withdrawing from the Bolivarian Alliance, or ALBA, a trade bloc of left-wing Latin American countries, and taking Ecuador out of the Union of South American Nations, or UNASUR, kicking out the international body’s Quito-based headquarters.

While overseeing widespread corruption and looting of public money, the Moreno government also ensnared Ecuador with billions of dollars in loans from the IMF.

As part of an austerity package demanded by the IMF, Moreno announced in 2019 a series of aggressive neoliberal reforms, which included cutting 23,000 state sector jobs and ending longtime fuel subsidies, which nearly doubled the price of gasoline.

The proposed austerity package kicked off a massive uprising in October 2019. Labor unions organized strikes, while Indigenous groups and students held massive protests that brought the country to a halt.

The Moreno government responded with brutal violence. Police shot protesters, killing several, injuring more than 1,000, and detaining another thousand.

The Correista movement decided to close its electoral campaign this February 4 at a park in the heart of the capital Quito, known as the parque del arbolito. This location was deeply symbolic, because it was here that the uprising against Moreno’s neoliberal reforms started in October 2019.

Correismo and the Citizens’ Revolution

Rafael Correa remains the most popular politician in Ecuador. In his 10 years as president, from 2007 to 2017, Ecuador’s poverty rate plummeted, the minimum wage increased rapidly, and the government invested billions of dollars in universal healthcare, education, and advanced infrastructure.

While Ecuador is still a developing, formerly colonized nation, it has significant natural resources that could make the country rich. These include substantial oil and mineral reserves, such as gold, silver, and copper.

For decades, these resources were monopolized by a small handful of Ecuadorian oligarchs. Correa was the first leader to use the country’s plentiful natural resources to instead fund popular social programs.

Correa also pursued an independent foreign policy, strengthening relations with China and Russia, collaborating closely with other socialist governments in Latin America, and committing Ecuador to political and economic integration with its neighbors.

Correa spoke with The Grayzone editor-in-chief Max Blumenthal in December about the stakes of the election:

In Ecuador the rule of law has been permanently broken. They seized the state with a completely fraudulent, manipulated consultation in the absence of constitutional control. Using the same methods, they took control of the council that appoints all the supervisory authorities…

The government of Ecuador is totally submitted to the interests of the government in the United States, above all to try to persecute progressive leaders and try to threaten the stability of Venezuela. That is evident…

So they are really desperate. They are capable of anything, because for them the worst thing that can happen is that we win. Because they know that they will have to face justice.We are not vengeful people, but justice must be done. Without hatred, but with memory…

I ask the world to be very attentive to what is happening in Ecuador in these elections.

Under Correa’s leadership, Ecuador launched the progressive Citizens’ Revolution, which fundamentally transformed the country and is still a powerful force today. At the rallies in the country’s two biggest cities, Quito and Guayaquil, working-class Ecuadorians showed their undying support for this revolution.

From Correa’s vice president to his anti-democratic persecutor

Lenín Moreno once served as Rafael Correa’s vice president. He won the 2017 presidential election precisely by claiming to follow in the footsteps of Correa and feigning fidelity to the Citizens’ Revolution, but quickly did a political 180, betraying Correismo and turning hard to the right.

With backing from the United States, Moreno formed alliances with corrupt oligarchs and bankers in Ecuador, implementing aggressive neoliberal economic policies, privatizing large parts of the economy, and gutting social programs.

The publication of leaked documents known as the INA papers offered insight into the Moreno government’s extreme corruption, showing how the leader has used off-shore bank accounts in Panama to siphon millions of dollars out of public coffers.

While overseeing this looting of the state, the Moreno administration ironically accused Correa of corruption, slapping the leftist leader with dozens of politically motivated, unsubstantiated charges.

Moreno even imprisoned Correa’s other former vice president, Jorge Glas, on spurious accusations. Glas has remained incarcerated in Ecuador’s notorious Latacunga prison, even after a 52-day hunger strike that landed him in the hospital, nearly killing him.

Throughout the 2021 electoral process, the Moreno government has placed obstacle after obstacle to try to prevent the leftist Correistas from returning to power.

The Moreno administration blocked Correa from running a vice presidential candidate. It also banned Andrés Arauz’s political party from participating, forcing the Correista movement to instead register with a little-known party.

The National Electoral Council (CNE), which was politicized by the Moreno government and is controlled by the country’s right-wing, even declared that left-wing candidates were not allowed to use images of Correa in their ads and political campaign materials.

At the same time, Ecuadorians living abroad, who are overwhelmingly supporters of Correismo, have faced obstacles in the election as well. The CNE has made it difficult for expats to vote.

Mere days before the vote, the CNE similarly sought to revoke the electoral observer credentials for a Spanish member of European Parliament and a Spanish political scientist, because of their left-wing political ties.

Right-wing media outlets in Latin America have also played a key role in the anti-democratic crackdown. Colombian and Argentine newspapers owned by wealthy conservative oligarchs kicked off a disinformation campaign, spreading fake news accusing Arauz of taking money from Colombia’s socialist guerrilla group the ELN.

These unsubstantiated stories were near carbon copies of a propaganda drive from several years before that was weaponized against Correa, falsely accusing him of taking money from Colombia’s socialist guerrilla group FARC.

While his government was busy clamping down on the left in Ecuador, Lenín Moreno himself was in the United States. Just two weeks before the election, he visited DC for several days.

El Primer Mandatario, @Lenin Moreno, junto a la delegación oficial, mantuvieron un encuentro con el Secretario General @Almagro_OEA2015 y demás autoridades de la @OEA_oficial, para revisar temas de interés nacional y regional. #EcuadorEnEEUU🇪🇨🇺🇸#SembramosFuturo🌱 pic.twitter.com/LsNoxdaPx2

— Presidencia ECU (@Presidencia_Ec) January 27, 2021

Moreno had a series of meetings with powerful figures, including the following:

• the director for the Western Hemisphere of the US National Security Council, Juan Sebastian Gonzalez, a special assistant to President Joe Biden;
• the secretary general of the Organization of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, who helped oversee a coup against Bolivia’s democratically elected socialist government in 2019;
• the director of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva;
• hawkish US Senators Bob Menendez and Ben Cardin;
• and the president of the Inter-American Development Bank, Mauricio Claver-Carone.

El Primer Mandatario, @Lenin Moreno, y su comitiva se reunieron con el senador del Comité de Relaciones Exteriores del Senado, @SenatorMenendez y con el presidente del Subcomité para el Hemisferio Occidental del Senado, @SenatorCardin.#EcuadorEnEEUU🇪🇨🇺🇸#SembramosFuturo🌱 pic.twitter.com/tQFEEu18x1

— Presidencia ECU (@Presidencia_Ec) January 28, 2021

During his junket, the Ecuadorian presidential office produced several slick videos lavishing praise on the United States and showing Moreno smiling with his political and economic sponsors in Washington.

Observers have warned that Moreno’s meetings may have been aimed at rigging the election, or at least making more anti-democratic obstacles to prevent a Correista victory.

🇺🇸 CONFIDENCIAL 🇺🇸

Fuentes amigas en Washington me hacen llegar información sobre una reunión secreta el 27 de enero en la Embajada de Ecuador entre @Lenin y funcionarios estadounidenses.

Objetivo: impedir la llegada de @ecuarauz y el correísmo al gobierno 🇪🇨

Abro hilo 🧵 pic.twitter.com/8s4CWoaW79

— Katu Arkonada (@KatuArkonada) February 4, 2021

Nearly all polls show leftist candidate Andrés Arauz easily winning Ecuador’s February 7 election. Yet the Ecuadorian media’s reliance on a corrupt firm funded by right-wing candidate Guillermo Lasso to produce exit polls after the vote is one of many signs of potential irregularities.

The Ecuadorian people however seem ready to fight. The massive turnouts for the Correista movement’s demonstrations in the major cities, with tens of thousands of working-class flooding the streets and parks, reflects a popular outrage in the country, and a widespread yearning to return to the Citizens’ Revolution.

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Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.

Featured image: The Grayzone’s Ben Norton reports from the base of Ecuador’s Citizens’ Revolution on the February 7, 2021 election

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Oh, what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive – Sir Walter Scott

Once again, Haiti is bracing for social unrest as a constitutional crisis unfolds; and this time, the dispute is over the end of the current president’s term in office. Jovenel Moise, who was sworn in on February 7, 2017, vows to stay in office until February 7, 2022, the day he argues his term legally ends. Opposition leaders and several political activists, on the other hand, demand that he steps down on February 7, 2021 and will refuse to recognize him as president past that date. The issue seems to be divisive even among power players in Washington, D.C.

In a February 5^th press conference, the U.S. State Department’s spokesperson reiterated the need for a democratic transfer of power in Haiti and voiced that “a new president should succeed President Moise when his term ends in 2022.” A few hours later, in a departure from the Biden administration’s position, U.S. senator, Patrick Leahy, and seven congressional representatives called for a “Haitian-led democratic transition” and rejected “any attempt by President Moise to retain power” past February 7, 2021.

Indeed, the issue is not as black and white as often portrayed. For some, it comes down to a simple arithmetic exercise; for others — including many legal scholars — there are strong arguments supporting the end of the president’s term a few months earlier than he anticipated. This predicament did not arise out of thin air; it is the result of past failures to reinforce democratic institutions, repeated violations of the constitution, and adoption of band-aid agreements culminating into a domino structure of complications. This article attempts to summarize the series of events that led to this crisis and calls for a sincere dialogue among all political actors as the only way out of this tangled web of digressions.

It all started in February 2004, after a bloody rebellion forced democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to flee into exile three years into his 5-year term, set to expire on February 7, 2006.

Following Aristide’s departure, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Boniface Alexandre, was sworn in as interim president with a clear constitutional mandate: the organization of new elections within 120 days for a newly elected president to finish the previous president’s term. The Alexandre administration did not organize elections as mandated by the constitution but instead served the rest of President Aristide’s term; an unconstitutional arrangement made with the international community’s blessing. General elections were scheduled for October 2005, but due to technical delays, Haitians did not go to the polls until February 7, 2006, the day that a new president was supposed to be sworn in. The results were announced a few weeks later, and President Rene Préval took office on May 14, 2006, under the general expectation that he would serve until February 7, 2011.

During his presidency, President Préval, along with some legislators, introduced constitutional amendments that would eventually be adopted by parliament at the end of his term. Drawing from the abnormalities of the 2005-2006 election cycle, one of these amendments modified article 134-2 re-establishing the official swear-in date and introducing a special clause to account for unplanned delays in presidential elections. This special clause would preserve constitutional order and synchronize presidential terms. The modified article 134-2 stipulates:

The president-elect assumes his functions on the 7^th of February following the date of his election. In the event that the election cannot take place before the 7^th of February, the president-elect assumes his functions immediately after the ballot validation and his term is considered to have commenced on the 7^th of February of the year of the election.

In October 2010, a few months after the devastating earthquake that killed more than 300,000 people, President Préval was due to organize elections for his successor. These elections were to be concluded in the fall of 2010 so that a new president could take office on February 7, 2011. Unfortunately, fraud allegations and widespread unrest following the first round triggered an OAS [1] recount, and a second round was scheduled after February 7, 2011. Michel Martelly, who won the second round, was sworn in as the new president of Haiti on May 14, 2011. He promised to leave office on Feb 7, 2016, pursuant to the new amended article 134-2.

Four years later, in 2015, it was President Martelly’s turn to organize elections. As in 2010, the first round of presidential elections failed to yield a winner as no one received more than 50% of the vote. Thus, a run-off was scheduled for January 2016. The opposition claimed massive voter fraud and successfully prevented a second round between Jovenel Moise, Martelly’s hand-picked candidate, and Jude Celestin, the opposition’s most popular candidate. President Martelly left office on February 7, 2016 without an elected successor, but an unconventional deal was struck before his departure. The deal called for an interim president to be selected by the senate. His mission was to organize the second round and transfer power on May 14, 2016 to a new president whose term would end on February 7, 2021. The interim president, Jocelerme Privert, established a new electoral council that called for the cancellation of the 2015 presidential elections after an independent council found serious cases of voter fraud and massive irregularities; a fresh first round was scheduled for October 2016 with the same candidates[2]. In the do-over, Jovenel Moise was declared winner with 55% of the vote and was sworn in on February 7, 2017.

Today, President Moise argues that since he was sworn in on February 7 in the year following the new elections, the second clause of article 134-2 does not apply to him, so he should serve until February 7, 2022, marking a five-year term. The opposition argues that since the elections took place after February 2016, his term should be considered as having commenced in February 2016, “the February of the year of the election”, and should therefore leave office on February 7, 2021, according to the 2^nd clause of article 134-2. The opposition has also accused President Moise of hypocrisy and operating on a double-standard. There exists a constitutional amendment like the amended article 134-2 for elected officials of the legislative branch. In 2020, ten senators only served 4 years out of their six-year terms pursuant to this amendment. These senators were supposed to join the senate in 2014 but did not do so until 2016 since President Martelly failed to organize mid-term parliamentary elections in 2013. Likewise, President Moise failed to organize mid-term parliamentary elections in 2019. Consequently, the senate was reduced to only 10 senators from 30 and was rendered inoperative. In a tweet dated January 13, 2020, President Moise announced that he noted that parliament was officially prorogued.  Since then, he has been ruling by decree.

Given the absence of a constitutional court to settle these disputes, this crisis is expected to prolong with serious consequences for the country’s economic development, thus creating additional challenges for an already vulnerable population. A slew of poor choices that prioritized short-term solutions over long-term structural changes have left the country trapped in a web of complications. To return to constitutional normalcy, the first step will be a sincere dialogue among all actors which would require everyone to make necessary sacrifices for the country’s benefit.

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Notes

[1] Organization of American States

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Denunciations of human rights violations against Cuba have become routine in the West. For decades, governments, NGOs and activists have denounced the Cuban government for various attitudes of abuse of universal rights, but the sources of such reports and evidence of crimes remain weak and vague. Once again, the NGO Human Rights Watch issued a report warning of an alleged “abusive” situation with regard to human rights on the island – and again the evidence is weak and reveals an ideologized action.

Every year, Human Rights Watch releases its global reports, covering all regions of the planet and warning against alleged human rights violations worldwide. In its 2021 edition, published on January 13, in the topic dedicated to Cuba, several crimes were reported, including alleged arbitrary arrests on the island, lack of freedom of expression, presence of political prisoners in Cuban penitentiaries, travel restrictions and several others acts that are presented to international society as frequent and structural in Cuba.

There are explanations for Human Rights Watch’s frontal opposition to Cuba, which are little publicized in the international media. In the past, the Cuban government has accused the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) of funding more than 20 organizations to promote complaints and defamations against the Latin country, including HRW. NED’s ties to the CIA prompted the Cuban government to veto agents from organizations linked to the NED into the country. In fact, regardless of whether or not there is a plot against the island organized by the NED and the CIA, it is clear that HRW’s annual reports are focused on denouncing and criticizing emerging countries, especially non-aligned nations, anticipating coercive measures taken by the US and other Western powers. This led Havana to endorse the narrative that HRW creates justifications for subsequent coercive measures with its allegations of human rights violations.

The central problem for the credibility of HRW reports is the authenticity of the organization’s sources. The reports are based on data provided by anti-government activists who are ideologically committed to the end of communism and the triumph of American interests on the island. To this end, such activists, who work inside and outside Cuba, adulterate, exaggerate or even create data that does not correspond to the reality of the country, as has been reported several times by Havana. The speech of anonymous activists follows a model predefined by American agencies interested in the fall of the Cuban government. This speech is disseminated by human rights NGOs and finally justifies coercive measures by the American government. For this reason, Havana sees HRW as a threat to its national security and this will not change, even if Washington strengthens its sanctions even further, as there is a central ideological incompatibility between these countries that cannot be overcome with mere coercive maneuvers.

Exaggeration is certainly the greatest weapon of these agents. Surely, there are human rights violations in Cuba – just as there are in any nation. There is no country that has been successful in completely abolishing acts contrary to human rights. Many nations may have officially abolished such practices, but they certainly still exist unofficially and, equally, deserve investigation and criticisms. However, this persecution against “human rights violators” is generally applied when the charged state is an emerging nation geopolitically opposed to Washington, like Cuba. In this way, NGOs like HRW observe cases of violation and exaggerate them, claiming that there is a state policy to confront universal rights, when, in fact, they are only marginal practices that exist in any country.

Just as mistakes are exaggerated, merits are ignored. Cuba has some of the best social indicators on the American continent, being a global reference in education and with some of the most qualified medical professionals in the world. Havana is responsible for several humanitarian missions sending doctors and equipment to nations in need of medical care, including not only poor countries, but developed states in emergencies, such as Italy during the pandemic. Furthermore, Cuba seems to be advanced in many agendas exalted in the West. For example, women occupy 51% of the deputies in the National Assembly and are 62% of the country’s scientists – which are remarkably high numbers by Western standards. These indices show that, with or without structural disrespect, there is undeniable progress in terms of human rights, and this cannot be ignored.

However, Havana is right to think that HRW’s reports are not by chance. What we should expect for the future is the resurgence of a focus of tensions between Washington and Havana. Trump, in his last days in government, reversed a process of rapprochement between the countries when he considered Cuba again as a terrorist financing nation – a totally unreasonable accusation and without any material evidence, which Trump certainly did not believe, but made this decision as a strategic maneuver to harm Biden and transfer power to his successor with more international tensions. Biden promised to review Trump’s policy against Cuba but gave no details of exactly what points he will reform. However, a peaceful policy for Havana was never expected from the new American president. Biden’s reforms are likely to occur, more likely, to facilitate the flow of migration and to include “humanitarian” issues in relations, shifting the focus of tensions from a security and defense perspective to one of respect for human rights and democracy.

In practice, this means that Biden must try to harm Cubans even more by imposing international sanctions in order to force Havana to comply with humanitarian standards that are already respected but whose compliance will never be recognized by NGOs committed to the American government.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

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While many states are mandating vaccines for children and laws are being introduced to mandate vaccines for adults too, a new Zogby Strategies nationwide online poll of 1,000 U.S. adults reveals that a plurality of Americans, 32%, believe “no government should ever mandate medical procedures/vaccines” and 27% believe COVID vaccines are unsafe.

Conversely, 61% percent of U.S. adults believe the vaccine is safe, and 31% agree “the federal government should pass legislation making it mandatory.”

This comes after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Pfizer and Moderna spent $250 million on a “vaccine confidence” campaign.

“If HHS, Pfizer and Moderna want to persuade people to take vaccines, they should spend $250 million on a transparent vaccine injury surveillance system that actually works, where people can assess the risks and benefits of each vaccine,” said Children’s Health Defense Board Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“The dysfunctional Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System [VAERS] is a catastrophically insufficient program that, according to HHS, only captures 1% of vaccine injuries.” Still, as of Jan. 29, the VAERS program has reported 11,249 adverse events and 501 deaths.

Signed by the U.S. in 1947, the Nuremberg Code states that explicit voluntary consent from patients is required for human experimentation and that no one should be forced to undergo an unwanted medical procedure. The possibility of a future mandate of this experimental vaccine, including more than 70 million U.S. children under the age of 18, (who have almost zero risk of sickness, hospitalization or death from COVID- 19), exposes millions of vulnerable people to potential vaccine injuries.

On a question regarding vaccine mandates, those people who chose that “each state should be left to decide what is best for its residents” or “no government should ever mandate medical procedures/vaccines” (a total of 55%) were asked which groups should be exempt from a vaccine mandate:

• 51% said “people who say no” should be granted exemption.
• 44% said “individuals with a history of allergic reactions”
• 40% said “pregnant women”
• 35% said “individuals who seek medical/philosophical/religious exemptions”

Another critical question raised among those who have not yet taken the vaccine (83% of the sample) was whether or not they will take it when available. They respnoded:

• 39% agreed they “will take it as soon as it is available to them.”
• 33% said they’d “prefer to wait and see if it negatively affects others.”
• 18% reported, “I don’t want to get the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.”
• Among those who don’t want to get the experimental vaccine, 43% said, “I am afraid of vaccine side effects” and 25% said “they never take a vaccine.”

The overall margin of sampling error is +/- 3.2 percentage points. Subsets of the data have a larger margin of error than the whole.

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The Senate trial for now twice-impeached former President Donald Trump is set to begin this week, with little doubt over the outcome. A procedural vote in the Senate on the constitutionality of “removing from office” someone who is not in office revealed that nowhere near enough Republicans were willing to join their Democrat counterparts in voting to convict.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who is required by the Constitution to preside, has by refusing to participate made it clear that he does not consider the upcoming action in the Senate to be a legitimate impeachment trial.

So if it is not a legitimate trial, what is it, then? Judging from the House impeachment resolution, it looks more like a banana republic “show trial” than a careful case detailing Trump’s “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Trump was impeached by the Democrat-controlled US House for “incitement of insurrection” over the January 6th melee at the US Capitol. Telling his supporters they must fight or they’re “not going to have a country any more” was cited in the impeachment resolution as evidence that Trump “gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of Government” and has “demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office.”

Trump also told them to march to the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically” to encourage Congress to consider his claims of election fraud, but Democrats in the House say that he didn’t really mean it.

Why the snap impeachment? Why not, as Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley has written, hold hearings and call witnesses to explore whether the former president actually had insurrection on his mind? Did he call off or delay the National Guard troops from protecting the Capitol, for example?

Or was he simply using heated political rhetoric that his accusers in Congress have also used plenty of times?

Weeks of hearings in the House with dozens of witnesses could have helped make the case for the Senate that Trump was guilty of inciting insurrection. Such hearings could have turned the tide against Trump in the Senate, where he is certainly not universally supported within his own party.

But the House had no interest in such hearings. They wanted a snap impeachment. They wanted no witnesses. They wanted to benefit from the universal mainstream media narrative that the mob who entered the Capitol building was not just unruly Americans angry over what they believed was a rigged election, but was actually trying to overthrow the government to keep Trump in power.

The House Democrats knew that the “insurrection” narrative would not stand the test of time – anyone familiar with “color revolutions” or coups overseas would easily recognize that this was not one. So they rushed through the impeachment not because they wanted to remove him from an office he no longer occupied, but because they wanted to bar him from ever running for office again.

It does raise the question: what are they afraid of? They called their impeachment a victory for democracy, but isn’t preventing Trump from running again a subversion of democracy?

Trump would do well to ignore the Senate proceedings. There is no reason to participate in a show trial. The media has reported that he intends to focus on the “stolen” election in his defense before the Senate. That would be counterproductive. The right question to ask is, “what if they held a show trial and nobody came”?

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