All Global Research articles including the E-Book can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
***
Boeing’s troubled 737 Max returned to US skies last month. American Airlines was the first domestic carrier to fly the Max and has since operated more than 200 flights. While other domestic and international carriers gear up for a much wider re-launch of the aircraft, a former senior manager at Boeing’s 737 Max plant in Seattle has published a new report warning that the Max is “still not fixed.”
Ed Pierson, the report’s author, retired from Boeing in August 2018 and worked at the Max factory in Renton, Washington, claims more investigations are needed into the aircraft’s electrical system and production quality problems at the factory.
Pierson alleges that the US and European regulators have primarily ignored factors that he points out in the report, which may have played a role in Lion Air flight JT610 and Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302 crashes that killed 346 people. He links both crashes back to conditions at the factory in Renton.
Pierson firmly believes Boeing’s effort to redesign Max’s flight control system, called MCAS software, ensures a single sensor failure would not happen in flight is not enough.
“The paper underscores the likely role a chaotic and dangerously unstable production environment played in the accidents. Mr. Pierson also puts forth three other plausible accident scenarios not addressed in the accident investigations. The 14-page report includes a timeline and an analysis that ties the two 737 MAX airplane crashes together in ways not previously reported. Most importantly, Mr. Pierson’s analysis raises serious doubts as to the safety of the 737 MAX. Alarmingly, the FAA’s recertification fixes do not address the problems identified in the report,” the report’s abstract reads.
In late 2019, Pierson testified during a House Transportation Committee hearing on both Max crashes where he described the Renton factory as “chaotic” and “dysfunctional.”
With the planes returning to the air, he is worried that Boeing and regulators have overlooked many of the issues he pointed out.
In the report, he believes the production defects of critical Max parts were defected when they entered service, adding that the aircraft’s complex wiring systems may have contributed to the random deployment of the MCAS system in flight.
Pierson said the MCAS sensor failures contributed to both crashes but asked why they were happening to new aircraft.
All of this suggests, Pierson explained, “point back to where these airplanes were produced, the 737 factory”.
Pierson’s report was analyzed by famed pilot Chesley Sullenberger who said the “report is very disturbing, about manufacturing issues in the Boeing factories that go well beyond just the Max, and also affect… the previous version of the 737.”
“Like electricity, Boeing and the FAA have taken the path of least resistance throughout the entire design, development, certification, production, and now recertification of the 737 MAX,” Pierson said in the report.
“The design of the 737 MAX, MCAS software and the failure to provide vital information and training to pilots did not trigger these accidents. Neither did corporate decision making made years ago, unethical behavior, deceptive marketing, or a misguided leadership culture that prioritized profits over safety. Nor did deregulation, regulatory capture, or a completely broken aircraft certification process. In fact, all of these things contributed mightily to these tragedies. Unfortunately, every MAX airplane ever manufactured shares this same wretched history. The pilots are certainly not to blame. They did everything they could to save the lives of the people who trusted them. The triggering event for these crashes was a defective AOA Sensor part, and quite possibly, a malfunctioning electrical system stemming from a dangerously unstable production environment,” he said.”
Pierson concludes: “We can either investigate these production problems and fix them, or we can wait for another disaster.”
*
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.
All Global Research articles including the E-Book can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
***
The Biden administration plans to re-open Palestinian diplomatic missions that were shuttered under former President Donald Trump and restore US aid to Palestine, the acting US ambassador to the UN has announced.
Speaking to the UN Security Council on Tuesday, Ambassador Richard Mills said the US plans to renew relations with Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian people, lamenting that those ties had “atrophied” under the Trump administration.
“President Biden has been clear in his intent to restore US assistance programmes that support economic development and humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people. And to take steps to reopen diplomatic missions that were closed by the last US administration,” Mills said.
The Trump administration cut some $200m in aid to Palestine in 2018 in an attempt to pressure leadership into accepting the administration’s controversial “deal of the century”.
The cuts did not result in further diplomacy, instead leading to a financial crisis that plunged tens of thousands of Palestinians further into poverty. Food and medical aid initiatives, as well as educational programmes suffered, among other humanitarian efforts.
In a joint statement on Tuesday, Belgium, Estonia, France, Germany and Ireland expressed “deep concern” regarding the “critical financial situation” that the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) has experienced since the Trump administration’s funding cuts began.
Meanwhile, Mills stressed that the reinstatement of US financial aid and support to the Palestinians was not a sign that the administration was set to act in favour of Palestinian leadership, but that the funding assists “millions of ordinary Palestinians and helps preserve a stable environment that benefits both Palestinians and Israelis”.
“At the same time, the US will maintain its steadfast support for Israel. Under the Biden administration, the US will continue its long-standing policy of opposing one-sided resolutions and other actions in international bodies that unfairly single out Israel,” Mills said.
“The US will work to promote Israel’s standing and participation in UN bodies and other international organisations,” he continued.
Mill’s statements echo those made by other Biden administration officials and congressional Democrats.
‘New possibilities’
Earlier this month, the new chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Representative Gregory Meeks,said he planned to back Biden’s major policy reversals, including the resumption of humanitarian aid and the return of a Palestinian diplomatic presence in Washington.
Later on Tuesday, press secretary Jen Psaki stressed that the Biden administration’s view is that “a two-state solution is the only path forward” for Palestine and Israel.
During his address, Mills also stressed the US’s intentions to support the two-state solution, which would see the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
In doing so, Mills said Washington will expect concessions from both countries, noting the need for Israel to halt its settlement expansion and annexation plans, and for the Palestinian leadership to rollback its welfare scheme for the families of those killed or imprisoned following anti-Israel attacks.
“The United States will urge Israel’s government and the Palestinian Authority to avoid unilateral steps that make a two-state solution more difficult, such as annexation of territory, settlement activity, demolitions, incitement to violence and providing compensation for individuals imprisoned for acts of terrorism,” Mill said.
The ambassador added that the Biden administration “welcomes” the normalisation deals between Israel and several Arab countries that have taken place since August – a major foreign policy point of the Trump administration. Mills said that the US will continue “to urge other countries” to follow suit in normalising relations with Israel.
“We recognise that Arab-Israeli normalisation is not a substitute for Israeli-Palestinian peace. The conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians may not be the major fault line in the Middle East, but its resolution nevertheless would significantly benefit the region as a whole,” Mills said.
“It is the hope of the US that normalisation can proceed in a way that unlocks new possibilities to advance the two-state solution.”
*
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.
All Global Research articles including the E-Book can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
***
More than 300 anti-war and humanitarian organizations across the world have signed a statement calling for an end to the Saudi war against impoverished Yemen.
The statement called for an international day of action on January 25, just days after US President Joe Biden’s inauguration and the day before Saudi Arabia’s “Davos in the Desert” Future Investment Initiative.
It pointed to the Saudi-led bombing and blockade of Yemen, which have killed tens of thousands of Yemeni people, saying despite the dire circumstances the Yemenis are in, including a devastating COVID-19 outbreak, Saudi Arabia is escalating its war and tightening its blockade.
“The war is only possible because Western countries — and the United States and Britain in particular — continue to arm Saudi Arabia and provide military, political and logistical support for the war,” it said. “The Western powers are active participants and have the power to stop the world’s most acute human crisis.”
Saudi Arabia launched its war on Yemen war in 2015 in a bid to reinstall Yemen’s former pro-Riyadh government. The military campaign has turned the poor Arab country into the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, with tens of thousands of civilians killed and many more suffering the calamities of the war.
Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement, which effectively administers most of the country, has said the Saudi-led coalition will pay dearly for its atrocities.
“Invasion of Yemen is a crime. So is the siege of the country. And continuation of these two amounts to a double crime,” Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdul-Salam wrote on Twitter on Saturday.
The signatories of the anti-war statement were organizations from Yemen, the US, Britain, Austria, Bangladesh, Canada, Chile, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, and some other countries.
They said the war on Yemen is man-made, and therefore, it can be ended.
They also demanded that their governments immediately “stop foreign aggression on Yemen; stop weapons and war support for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; lift the blockade on Yemen and open all land and sea ports; and restore and expand humanitarian aid for the people of Yemen.”
“We ask individuals and organizations everywhere to call for protests — with masks and other safety precautions — in their towns and cities on that day and make clear that the WORLD SAYS NO TO WAR ON YEMEN,” the rights groups added.
It came a day after 22 aid groups working in Yemen called on Washington to revoke a last-minute move by the administration of Donald Trump to designate Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement as a foreign terrorist organization.
“This designation comes at a time when famine is a very real threat to a country devastated by six years of conflict, and it must be revoked immediately. Any disruption to lifesaving aid operations and commercial imports of food, fuel, medicine and other essential goods will put millions of lives at risk,” the aid groups said in a statement on Sunday.
The Biden administration has already begun to review the designation, following worldwide condemnation as well as calls on the new administration to reverse it.
“As noted by Secretary-designate [Anthony] Blinken, the State Department has initiated a review of Ansarullah’s terrorist designations,” a spokesperson at the State Department said on Friday.
*
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.
All Global Research articles including the E-Book can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
***
Israel’s continued treatment of Palestinian political prisoners is unconscionable. Mohammad El Halabi, an aid worker from Gaza, has been in prison for four years while he awaits his trial; this is nothing short of cruel absurdity. He has been forced before the court over 150 times, many of those appearances secret, without word of when his trial will begin. His last court appearance was January 14, and he and his family still have no word of when his case will begin.
Israel’s case against El Halabi—whom it accuses of diverting humanitarian funds to Hamas—has been widely condemned as flimsy at best. The amount of funds it claims El Halabi diverted from his employer, the charity World Vision, is more than the organization’s entire annual operating budget; furthermore, World Vision as well as independent auditors found no financial irregularities as has been claimed. In addition, the Israeli government has refused to provide any further information or evidence regarding its claims. This case has not only led to a man’s indefinite imprisonment, but the suspension of significant humanitarian aid to Gaza, which will further impact adversely on the living conditions in the territory, which does not serve Israel’s interests in the least.
El Halabi is being imprisoned under the cruel practice of administrative detention, a holdover from British-era Mandatory Palestine which allows for an individual to be held without trial indefinitely, under the belief that they may break the law once they are released. El Halabi is not the only Palestinian to whom this legal loophole has been applied; Israel has consistently and heavily used this shameful practice against Palestinian political prisoners. Nelson Mandela adeptly put it when he said, “Prison is designed to break one’s spirit and destroy one’s resolve. To do this, the authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality—all with the idea of stamping out that spark that makes each of us human and each of us who we are.”
The irony here is that while all right-wing Israeli parties and politicians know that they have no choice but to live side-by-side the Palestinians indefinitely, they spare no efforts to alienate the Palestinians in every which way they can. Some, in fact, bask in the illusion that if they make the Palestinians’ lives miserable by incessantly abusing them, many will end up leaving their country. By doing so, these morally hollowed right-wingers will not need to deal with the demographic time bomb. Do these political parties and the politically blind operatives ever stop and think where all this will lead to?
Sadly, the incarceration of Palestinians with no trial is just one of many egregious acts that the Israeli government employs routinely against the Palestinians; other violations include, among other things, nights raid that terrify children, house demolitions, expropriation of land for any (or often no) purpose, uprooting of olive trees, and arbitrary searches and seizures—all of which are utterly uncharacteristic to a people who have gone through similar tragic experiences for centuries.
A single act of injustice against any Palestinian casts a wide shadow over all Palestinians, as they collectively feel robbed of their rights and their human dignity. Acts of mercy are remembered for a long time, but an act of horrifying injustice is remembered for much longer as it continues to painfully reverberate within the family and community.
This of course is not limited to El-Halabi. Thousands of Palestinians prisoners who have no blood on their hands are languishing in Israeli jails as incarceration without trial is used as a deterrent. I do not suggest that every Palestinian is innocent, rather that he or she must be treated as innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. This is one of the fundamentals of a true democracy, governed not only by laws but also by compassion, which Israel takes pride in proclaiming.
If Israel wants to maintain its status as a democracy—and indeed it has never missed an opportunity to assert itself as the sole democracy in the Middle East—it must treat its prisoners with dignity and respect, regardless of their race, religion, or creed. It should provide them with a full accounting of the accusations against them, and bring them to trial in a reasonable and timely manner—not leave them to languish in prison for years with no hope of seeing the light again.
It is a stain on Israel—a country that claims to be a beacon of democracy in the Middle East—to engage in such cruel, vindictive practices that go beyond the pale of humanity. It is not too late, however, to right the wrong, not only for the sake of the Palestinians but for the sake of all Israelis, because if the moral tenet of the country is forsaken it diminishes Israel’s reason for being.
*
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.
All Global Research articles including the E-Book can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
***
“The Government of Paraguay owes $360,000,000 to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The commission that was to be shared between Guaidó and the Paraguayans was $26,000,000 do you know how many vaccines could be bought with that?”, Rodríguez denounced.
The President of Venezuela’s National Assembly Jorge Rodriguez revealed on Saturday a large-scale corruption scheme led by opposition politician Juan Guaidó in compliance with Paraguayan authorities to steal Venezuela’s assets.
“The Government of Paraguay owes $360,000,000 to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The commission that was to be shared between Guaidó and the Paraguayans was $26,000,000 do you know how many vaccines could be bought with that?”, Rodríguez denounced.
@jorgerpsuv en rueda de prensa "Desde el parlamento queremos solicitarle al parlamento de Paraguay que investigue las negociaciones entre los delegados de @jguaido y el gobierno de @MaritoAbdo. También al parlamento argentino porque las negociaciones se dieron en suelo argentino" pic.twitter.com/hApwYOAGQu
“@jorgerpsuv in press conference “From the parliament we want to ask the parliament of Paraguay to investigate the negotiations between the delegates of @jguaidoand the government of @MaritoAbdo. Also to the Argentine parliament because the negotiations took place on Argentine soil.”
On Friday the Paraguayan government assured that Guaidó approved to cancel the Paraguayan debt to the state-owned Venezuelan oil company (PDVSA). During today’s press conference, Rodríguez remarked that Guaidó is responsible for the illegal sales between the Paraguayan state-owned Petrobar and PDVSA.
Jorge Rodriguez pointed out the impact of Guaidos’s corruption upon the Venezuela economy, as the recent appropriation of PDVSA’s U.S. subsidiary, CITGO ” is costing the nation more than $14 billion.”
The official accused Jorge Rodríguez, accused Juan Guaidó, Julio Borges, Carlos Vecchio, Leopoldo López, and Miguel Pizarro of appropriating the resources of the Venezuelan State and including them in their wealth.
Meanwhile, Guaidó insists on hindering the Venezuelan government from accessing its funds abroad to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. The president of Venezuela’s National Assembly explained that the Government requested that the State funds, kept in the Bank of England, be used for the purchase of doses against the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, Guaido through a recognized law firm prevented this action.
“With Venezuela’s gold deposited in Great Britain, 100% of the vaccines required by the country could be purchased,” Rodriguez said.
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.
Featured image: President of Venezuela’s National Assembly Joge Rodriguez denounced on January 23, 2021 the corruption scheme carried out by Juan Guaido. | Photo: Twitter/ @LeonelTeleSUR
With China making loud pledges about meeting strict CO2 emission standards by 2060, now the World Economic Forum is about to unveil what will transform the way we all live in what WEF head Klaus Schwab calls the Great Reset.
New York’s state lab has access to the Cycle Threshold (Ct) values from the PCR tests they process. Last July, the lab identified 872 positive tests based on a threshold of 40 cycles.If the lab has used a cutoff of 35 cycles, 43 percent of those tests would have been considered negative.
Search the scientific literature for examples of long-term vaccine randomized clinical trials that use inert placebos — you will not find them. Short-term studies are the preferred mode of vaccine manufacturers — even when there is no emergency — leaving long-term vaccine safety to be assessed after the vaccine goes to market.
The World Economic Forum (WEF), the Switzerland-based NGO of “elites” noted for political power and extreme wealth, has taken it upon itself to dictate the future of the world.
Are we at War? This has become a legitimate question over the last 12 months in the western world. And we are not talking of war by the west against Russia or China, or the east in general. It’s a war of the people against ever-more tyrannical governments around the world, that under the guise of health security against an invisible enemy, called Covid-19 – are repressing people of the entire planet.
In this annual ideological battle, those of us attempting to define Dr. King’s legacy highlight one of his statements because of its poignance and continued relevance: He said the United States is the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”
The US Congress has recently passed the so-called Tibetan Policy and Support Act (TPSA) – slipped into a COVID-19 relief package and a 1.4 trillion dollar government spending bill, US State Department-funded Voice of America reported in their article, “US Congress Passes Landmark Bill in Support of Tibet.”
Washington hopes a free trade pact with Kenya will give it a beachhead in its hot war with Al-Shabab and cold war with China—and an African dumping ground for GMOs and plastic waste. What Kenya gets in exchange is not at all clear.
As we experientially learn about the roots of social challenges, poverty, social stratification, and persistently-generational unrealized potential, we uncover shared basic features. It involves members of local communities discussing these very patterns and identifying local projects for change, livelihood, and justice.
Scientists warn of ongoing global insect abundance losses and say we lack a full understanding of invertebrate extinction causes and synergies. Action to curb extinction rates desperately needed: Studies.
When fear of covid-19 was at its peak, we were told it was killing 3.4% of those who got the disease, similar to the famous “Spanish flu” of 1918, which killed 60 million people worldwide. The New York Times editorial board said this was a world war 2 level problem that deserves an equal level of national commitment, they claimed that in the worst case scenario over 1.7 million Americans would die from the virus.
On cable news stations on the right and the left there was a constant ticker on the bottom of the screen showing how many cases and deaths there were, something we’d never seen until this pandemic. There were videos of people “panic buying” necessities at the start of the lockdowns or stay at home orders, & later videos of filled hospitals or body bags being carried out of hospitals.
First it was China locking down, then Italy, then eventually the rest of the world (no longer a handful of countries). We were told we had no other choice. Many have forgotten now, but even right wingers were down with the program this spring, 42 states including the majority of the ones with Republican governors, had “stay at home” orders. These states made up 95% of the us population. Tucker Carlson was on Fox News telling his viewers to be terrified of the new coronavirus, and apparently he even personally drove to go see President Trump and tell him how serious this was. Soon after, Trump himself was talking about how deadly the virus was and how serious of a problem it was, he also supported stay at home orders. There was non stop talk about a “new normal”.
Certain terms have become ubiquitous, like “social distancing”, and “flattening the curve”. How scared is the public? A recent vox poll showed 52% of Americans support a 1 month national lockdown. Back in April, at peak level of panic, an AP poll showed 87% of Americans supported stay at home orders, including 78% of republicans! America wasn’t so polarized then, was it? And obviously it’s not just America, the rest of the world is frightened to and has been since last February. Many people across the world think covid has already killed off a decent chunk of humanity.
A survey taken in July asked 1 thousand people in several different countries what percentage of their country they thought was killed off by covid, answers ranged from 3% in the us to 9% in Germany, this is several times the actual percentage and something you’d see in a scifi movie. Even after the public was told in some reports maybe this virus really didn’t kill 3.4%, and that we were missing a lot of asymptomatic cases, we were still told to be terrified (and most media outlets kept using the higher death rates when discussing COVID-19 anyway).
It was still considered “at least 10 times deadlier than the flu” (1 % vs .1%) and anyone who compared it to the flu was ridiculed, despite the similarity in symptoms. We were told that the experts overwhelmingly supported the stay at home orders, that anyone who was against them was akin to a climate change denier who did not respect science, or, just a psychopath.
There was also the question of the origin of the virus, while technically a mystery, it was said that the virus having come from a lab was highly unlikely. The virus was first noticed in Wuhan, China, which happens to also have a high level bio research lab, this obviously had many thinking of the possibility the virus snuck out. The most commonly accepted theory is this virus somehow jumped from a bat or some other closely related animal, but we don’t know for sure. This mysterious element of the story almost certainly added to peoples fear and paranoia. The thing is, this was all a farce, we were and are not dealing with anything comparable to the 1918 flu. We were dealing with something more like a normal bad flu season in some parts of the first world, and a very light one in most of the world.
Most experts and peer reviewed papers were not calling for mass quarantines or “stay at home” orders. Most places were not “following the science”. The most logical conclusion that can be made is that the virus has been exaggerated so big business can swallow as much of small business as possible and so the ruling class can move forward with its fourth industrial revolution or “great reset” at a rapid pace. This involves things like the increased use of automation, artificial intelligence, 3d printing, increased online shopping & working from home, the move toward ending paper money, & increased big tech censorship. This has all happened when it’s happened most likely because the super rich were going to end up needing another giant bailout, and they knew people weren’t going to accept that under normal circumstances. Here’s what Michael Parenti would call a “conspiracy analysis” of this crazy situation.
Let’s start with the lies about the lethality of the virus.
At this point it’s settled science that covid mainly kills the old and the frail (this doesn’t mean it can’t kill young people, just that it’s extremely rare). An unusually high percentage of covid deaths are in nursing homes where studies show the average person only lives 6 months after entry anyway. In the us nursing home patients make up less than 1% of the population but are 39% of covid deaths.
A recent peer reviewed study published by the WHO showed that when you look at antibody studies done worldwide, which is the best way to see who has and hasn’t been infected, the virus actually only kills about .2 to .3% of those who get it. In the third world the number was much lower, and for people under 70 worldwide it was .05%. That’s a 1 in 2000 chance of dying after catching covid if you’re under the age of 70. To put this in perspective, that’s the infection fatality rate for about 90% of the world and about 80 to 85% of the richest countries.
So, how is it that this virus I just described has scared people so much? How have they been convinced this virus kills at several times the actual rate?
Well, as already mentioned, there was mass media hysteria, the constant case/death numbers on the screen, the constant anecdotal evidence, but propaganda by omission has also been huge. Many people either aren’t aware or seem to have forgotten death is a daily thing, it’s always sad when it’s a loved one but it happens, about 150,000 people die every day on average. This is the type of context that was never given to the covid case and death numbers on local and cable news.
Reports of full hospitals in covid hot spots like NYC and cities in northern Italy weren’t given context either, those are places that constantly have full hospitals during the winter. Another big factor is the under estimation and misunderstanding of influenza or “the flu”. For starters, there isn’t just one flu, there’s a bunch strains of influenza, some more deadly than others.
According to the CDC covid would only be a level 2 out of their 5 level pandemic severity index, showing that influenza strains clearly get higher than 0.1% . The WHO says up to 650k per year die of influenza like viruses and a bad year can obviously be much worse. Another thing the average person probably doesn’t understand, because of the mainstream media, is that there are many coronaviruses too.
The “common cold” is usually either a coronavirus or a rhinovirus (usually the latter). Yet at the beginning of the pandemic and to a lesser extent now, people have referred to this virus as THE coronavirus. This is extremely deceptive and makes Covid-19 seem more unique and deadly than it is, which causes panic.
Not only is it not very unique but it’s not even the most deadly coronavirus. SARS and MERS, both of which are coronaviruses that have been dealt with in the last 20 years are far more deadly than Covid-19. Why would it be referred to as THE coronavirus if it’s not the most deadly? Of course deaths aren’t the only measure of lethality, there’s been tons of stories of people getting sick for longer periods of time with covid, but this can happen with different kinds of influenza as well, it’s called post viral syndrome. There are also things like myocarditis, and the even more rare instance where something crazy can happen like becoming paralyzed. These headlines about covid causing these things in rare instances frighten people but once again, influenza can do these things too. Since they’re rare, people don’t fear monger about them.
As far as the full hospitals, since covid is more of a nursing home problem than most influenza strains and hits kids a lot less hard, it actually has caused less hospitalizations than a normal bad winter season in several places. According to CDC numbers more people were hospitalized during the 2017 /2018 flu season in the United States than during the worst stretch of covid (an estimated 800k hospitalizations in 6 months that season), there were less hospitalizations the first 6 months of covid (hospitalization rate doesn’t equal 800k here).
Stanford professor John Ionniadis, one of the most cited infectious disease experts on earth, called this a “once in a century evidence fiasco” back in March. As I said earlier, politicians around the world were not “following the science” as we were told in the mainstream media, how do we know? Simple. As former NY Times reporter Alex Berenson has pointed out in his book unreported truths, before COVID-19, the WHO had prepared for the possibility of pandemics of airborne viruses deadlier than this. What did they recommend? Nothing close to a lockdown/stay at home order, in fact they weren’t even confident in basic things like mask wearing or hand washing. They changed their tune radically in early 2020 without scientific justification.
In the US the CDC had pandemic guidelines too, and again, they prepared for airborne viruses more deadly than this, and did not recommend lockdowns even in the worst imaginable scenario. Similar things happened in other countries, many of them first world countries with even better health care systems than the United States. It’s leaked out in the media that Norway, Denmark, Italy, Russia, all ignored their health ministers and went with lockdowns that were not recommended, in the case of Denmark, because not locking down would be “politically undesirable”. The UK downgraded the status of covid, taking it off the “high consequence infectious disease” list the day before it locked down on March 19. Who downgrades a viruses lethality while upgrading the measures taken against it? Another country with an elite health care system, Singapore, went far beyond what was recommended too. Their health ministry didn’t recommend anything close to what Europeans were doing at the very beginning of the pandemic, and even commissioned a study that ended up in the lancet medical journal that didn’t call for anything close to the harsh lockdown they ended up doing.
In late March right before most of the world shut down the WHO expert group on mass gatherings said in the lancet medical journal that there wasn’t enough evidence to shut down mass gatherings like concerts or sporting events and warned of the possible negative effects of stopping these events. Allovertheworld there are plenty of examples of political leaders not following their own rules, which is extremely shady to say the least . It’s as if they know the truth, that we aren’t really in as much danger as they tell us we are. To make matters worse, we have dealt with much more damaging airborne viruses in recent history. The ’57 and ’68 pandemics are not really known outside the medical community but both of those pandemics killed much more than what Covid-19 has on a global scale adjusted for population growth.
In the United States, which has the most total covid deaths, the number of deaths is slightly higher than in ’57. But this was a year life went on as normal, and seniors old enough to remember the year don’t discuss it as a pandemic year. Furthermore those older pandemics were much more deadly for kids and working age people which technically makes it worse for society. All these restrictions are outrageous, even if you accept their death count, which many experts don’t since you can die of other causes while having the virus.
As I mentioned earlier, the experts who are calling for lockdown are in a minority, and many prominent ones who publicly call for them have gone back and forth or are clearly politically or financially motivated. Take for example the “John snow memo” which calls for harsher restrictions and was made in response to “the great barrington declaration” which was signed by thousands of experts and calls for allowing life to continue as normal outside nursing homes. This was obviously political. Not because they responded, but because while listing examples of countries that “did it right” they listed japan, which has the least restrictions of any first world country including Sweden.
They listed it next to New Zealand which had an extremely harsh lockdown, Japan didn’t do any of the mass testing they wanted and kept almost its entire economy open. It looks like they just chose a random country with a low death count and said “hey, do it this way!”. So far the great barrington declaration has gotten more signatures than the John snow memo. The same exact mistake regarding Japan was recently made by Dr. Michael T Osterholm, an infectious disease expert from the university of Minnesota and member of Joe Biden’s new covid task force. He’s one of the top experts in the country and one of those peculiar cases I was talking about. On March 10 he went on the Joe Rogan podcast and it was viewed by millions of people. In this interview he basically said there was nothing we can do about the virus, that cloth masks were useless, and that it was going to kill 450k Americans before we know it. About 2 weeks later, he wrote an op Ed in the Washington post saying lockdowns would cause way too much damage and weren’t worth it. Months later he was calling for a lockdown himself.
The man who many say is the top infectious disease expert in the country, Dr. Anthony Fauci, is also in the same boat. In late March the New England journal of medicine published a paper by Dr. Fauci where he only recommends possible school closures, working from home *when possible*, and *voluntary isolation*. Compare this with his comments months later, where he’s praised New York’s harsh stay at home order and told people not to have a normal thanksgiving. What’s causing all these doctors to do this?
Aside from political or personal reasons, like the fact that panic sells and some people just like being on tv. There could be big conflicts of interest, for example with pharmaceutical companies. This was recently brought up by the editor in chief of the British medical journal. He said “Science is being suppressed for political and financial gain.
Covid-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health”. What kind of damage have covid restrictions done? Globally, there will be more extra deaths from other diseases being neglected than from covid itself. Many more malaria, hiv, and tuberculosis deaths. The increase in starvation deaths worldwide will also single handedly outnumber covid deaths. In the first world there will be many preventable deaths coming from things like missed cancer screenings and a huge drop in blood donations. There have already been plenty of deaths from people being too scared to seek care because of Covid-19 and dying of a stroke or a heart attack. Aside from all the death these restrictions have caused, there is also the long term effects of unprecedented economic collapse worldwide.
Quality of life is very important and there are multiple studies that have shown the huge gap in life expectancy between the top and bottom one percent in places like the United States, so many people who weren’t poor before the pandemic who lost their job because of it are almost certainly going to have years taken off their life as they stay unemployed for an extended period of time. There’s about 3 million people in the United States in that category, along with another 17 million who have become “food insecure” during the pandemic. An additional 135 million have become food insecure globally, too.
Depression is also on the rise all over the world, and also lowers quality of life as well as life expectancy, a recent CDC survey showed that 1/4th of young Americans aged 18 to 24 contemplated suicide recently. The closing of many schools and universities for a long period of time will have incalculable effects on children, young adults, and society as a whole. Elective surgeries are way down since the pandemic started as well. These aren’t surgeries which you may not need to survive but skipping them can have a terrible effect on your quality of life and maybe even keep you from working.
On rare occasions the the truth can be found about this pandemic in mainstream media but it’s outnumbered by the craziness, on top of flooding the zone, there has also been some crazy censorship (Both mentioned in event 201 here from about 9:20 to 9:55). YouTube at one point censored one of the ten most cited scientists on earth, Stanford epidemiology professor John Ioannidis, before having to put the video back up after a large amount of complaints. He was presumably censored because he said covid was similar to seasonal influenza, but who has YouTube hired that’s more qualified than him? YouTube also recently censored the former chief scientific advisor for Pfizer, again, presumably because he said covid wasn’t that deadly.
Facebook censored Dr. Carl Hennegan, a professor of evidence based medicine at Oxford university. What did he do? Say the earth is flat? No, he attempted to post his article from the website the spectator where he cites and discusses peer reviewed studies. With all this censorship of expert opinion, and cherry picking by mainstream media, most people think covid restrictions have saved lives. The truth is, if you look at deaths per capita by country on the widely used “worldometer” website, you have to go down pretty far to reach a non lockdown country. If these harsh restrictions worked, there would be some correlation between them and deaths per capita but there isn’t.
A study in the Lancet medical journal by researchers from the university of Toronto found “Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people” on a global scale, which again we could see just from looking at the worldometer site, it’s been obvious for awhile. Even in the United States, there is no correlation between restrictions and deaths. South Dakota basically did nothing and they rank 9th in deaths per capita while New York and New Jersey are 1 and 2, with a per capita death rate that is much much higher. All of this clever deception, lying, suppression of scientific debate, and over the top fear mongering has been going on for economic reasons. The biggest corporations and financial institutions were headed for another huge crash similar to ’08 before this virus arrived. People all over the world would would not have accepted another giant bailout of the biggest financial institutions and corporations again under normal circumstances, political crisis would emerge. There was likely to be a left populist backlash from this (pink tide, or Corbyn style movements).
Now, after the scam has got rolling, a total restructuring of the global economy that has been in the works for years can get fast tracked. All those stats about the economy doing terrible, people starving, they don’t tell us how the ruling class is doing. Wall Street profits are up over 80% this past year, big tech companies are doing better than ever, the biggest corporations either didn’t stop running during the pandemic or got paid as a part of a federal reserve program that gave the biggest companies in the country 500 billion dollars. They weren’t even required to preserve jobs to get this money. Similar bailouts are taking place all over the world. Furthermore, small business has been destroyed, which opens up more opportunities for the biggest companies in the world as their competition shrinks and their market share grows.
As of June, 3 million American small businesses were closed, 40% of jobs lost during the pandemic are gone for good, similar patterns can be seen in other countries. Billionaire wealth has increased this year even after a gigantic stock market crash in the end of winter/early spring. As well as the ruling class is doing now, there was a huge crisis in 2019. In order to understand how this crisis was going to go global and how there could be global coordination in the exaggeration of COVID-19 one must understand how the world is run on a macro level. For starters, there’s 3 main global powers (us and its “ally democracies”, China, Russia), each with a sphere of influence, the United States & it’s minions having by far the largest one. This is who runs the world sans a handful of places. This isn’t controversial, it’s mainstream political science. And who runs these countries? Big money, simple, the biggest companies, financial institutions and asset managers are who runs the show, and they get help from their puppet governments/national security states when ever necessary. Their number one goal? Make more money. In China, they may call themselves communist, but the reality is there are plenty billionaire in the Chinese “communist party”, and there are giant companies like alibaba with huge influence. The inequality there is now approaching us levels according to economist Thomas piketty, it’s been on the rise for the last 40 years, working conditions are terrible as well. How about Russia? Inequality there is also terrible and in the west we even ironically make fun of them for “oligarchs”. The US, the biggest global power, is also ran by big giant corporations and billionaires.
A Princeton study in 2014 came to the conclusion that the US isn’t a democracy but an oligarchy ran by a small group of rich powerful people. Senator Bernie Sanders, and even at times Donald Trump would constantly complain about the power of “political donors”. The US allies have some big multinational corporations but they’re tied at the hip with the US security state and the US elite are invested heavily in these companies too. Like Samsung, or BP. Even though these powerful countries like us and China are technically enemies, there is still plenty trade between them (especially the us and China), us/China financial systems are also intertwined in many ways. In this financialized/globalized economy if one of them crashes it could domino effect to the entire world as happened in 08. Most of the big central banks are intertwined in someway, and the federal reserve is the most powerful of them all. Now, to the crisis. Instead of public debt or “the trade war” causing a crisis, it’s once again corporate debt, private banking, and lack of regulation that caused the crisis.
There was a repo loan crisis, caused mainly by the big 6 us banks who were no longer confident in lending to each other or to other financial institutions. Once the system reaches this point in the United States, a global meltdown isn’t far off. Pam and Russ martens at Wall Street on parade have been covering this more than anyone in their ongoing series on the financial crisis. They describe in detail the conspiracy, how the mainstream media is complicit with their silence from September 2019 to February 2020 when the fed opened up emergency programs it hadn’t opened since the last crisis and spent trillions before the cares act or any covid related shut downs.
According to CNBC 2019 also set a record for most ceo departures, even more than 08 which was second, they referred to it as a ceo exodus. The repeal of glass steagall made this possible, as the biggest commercial banks are allowed to make risky investments with deposit money. The federal reserve is a private institution collectively owned by the biggest banks, and has bailed out private financial institutions with trillions of dollars the public will have to pay back in the long run. All this without a vote, before the cares act, and to make matters worse they put the biggest asset manager on earth (blackrock) in charge of choosing who gets bailed out. The federal reserve is buying corporate debt and junk bonds at their direction.
Congresswoman Katie porter has called out some of this corruption but not all of it. She referred to the fed as corrupt for their relationship with Blackrock. I don’t think she mentioned Blackrock had been overseeing 25 million of fed chairman Powell’s money & 7 trillion in assets under management overall before getting control of the feds huge corporate bailout program. They also wrote the bailout program that ended up getting rolled out before anyone knew there was even a crisis in August of last year, the people at blackrock who authored the bailout were former central bankers from some of the most powerful countries.
Much like the last crisis it looks like the big banks and the super rich kept a coming collapse secret. Blackrock is incredibly powerful owning a portion of big media companies, and now having several former employees in important positions in the new Biden administration. An analysis by political scientists from the university of Amsterdam 3 years ago showed how the big 3 asset managers, of which black rock is the biggest, own a big portion of corporate America and coordinate their investments. They’ve only grown bigger in influence since. They also look after assets from rich people not just in the us but all over the world and even have influence with some us enemies like China. The asset managers and billionaires are also the biggest shareholders of big pharma stocks and have made a killing on the vaccines.
Vaccines, that’s a topic I’ve not touched on yet, many big corporations are planning on requiring vaccinations for people to come in their place of business, odds are you’ll need to be vaccinated to do a lot of things. There’s been some talk of attempting to vaccinate everyone on earth. I don’t believe there’s some evil plot to kill billions of people or anything, but i do believe vaccine profits play a role in this. I think it’s just simply about the money, in 2010 the WHO was called out by the British medical journal and an official eu medical organization for their advisors having big pharma ties which led to overproduction of vaccines for the swine flu. Bill Gates, his foundation and other billionaires and their foundations are big investors in big pharma and are set to profit off this as well.
One of the worlds richest men Warren Buffet is also a big investor in big pharma, as is Jeff Bezos. Bezos Washington post has posted some good stuff about covid but for the most part they’ve fear mongered heavily, and he’s profiting big in multiple ways from covid panic likely including the vaccine. Even the nation magazine and the Colombia journalism review have talked about Bill Gates big influence over media/public health and his cashing in on the pandemic (not just “conspiracy theorists”). Odds are, there won’t be many deaths from the vaccine, but the thing is with something that kills only .05% of people under 70 and hospitalizes less than one percent of those who get it worldwide.
Is mass vaccination even necessary? Is it worth the risk for kids even with an extremely small chance of injury? For kids, it’s probably more likely they develop a fever from the vaccine than from covid based on trial results. The old and the weak taking it is fine but everyone taking it seems like a money grab. This constant advertising, the demonization of people worried about the safety of this rushed new vaccine as “anti vax” is meant to protect a 40 billion dollar profit for big pharma. Worrying about their safety is perfectly normal, VP Kamala Harris has worried about it, so have many medical experts like Pfizer’s former head of respiratory research Dr. Yeadon, or Dr. Sucharit Bhkadi, or Professor Caumes. All of this global coordination is possible through organizations like the world economic forum, most of the worlds elite meets and discusses the future right in front of our faces in lavish places in davos. Also through big asset management firms who are connected to the rich all over the world.
The old saying goes “never let a good crisis go to waste” and it appears that’s what the world’s richest have done. They flipped a crisis to their advantage, and now they have a good amount of public approval for their new fourth industrial revolution or “great reset” of capitalism where the 0.1% will have an even greater strangle hold on the world. This is something they’ve had in the works and have talked about publicly, but with the financial crisis the process was sped up. They make talk a good game about climate change, but some of the biggest oil companies are a part of the club. They may talk a good game about inequality, pretend to care about it, make up feel good phrases like “stakeholder capitalism instead of shareholder capitalism”, but at the end of the day the mega multi national corporations (and the puppet governments that work for them) only care about maximizing profit.
Marx’s predictions about competition and capitalism inevitably leading to monopoly have turned out to be right, even before covid in 2017 Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz was talking about the big monopoly problem in the us.
He said “There has been an increase in the market power and concentration of a few firms in industry after industry”. A Washington post article from may headlined “the end of small business” put it nicely, “Since the late 1970s, the income share of the top 1 percent of earners has risen from 11 percent to more than 20 percent of national income. Those gains have been almost exactly balanced by losses among the bottom 50 percent. There are many reasons for this trend, including corporate concentration, the private-equity boom and technology, which both displaces lower-skilled workers and enriches a highly skilled elite. But the coronavirus amplifies the importance of all of them. The pandemic could compress decades of economic change into a matter of years.”
International institutions like the IMF and World Bank will be giving out loans to both poorer and richer countries to help with the ”recovery” from the economic crash and of course there will be loans given out to help distribute the vaccine as well. This will seem friendly and benign but it will almost certainly require what’s called a structural adjustment. These international programs impose austerity on countries according to many economic experts. The EU and some other first world countries have already been known to be deficit hawks before the pandemic and this will most likely be a perfect excuse to switch to an even harsher version.
Former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn recently said he expects all these first world countries to turn to “harsh austerity” after running these deficits up, and that the third world was headed for “brutal restructuring” and should expect another attack on their public sector. (10:45 here) The President of Belarus, a country that did not lockdown, said that the IMF told them they’d only give them assistance if they locked down. The head of the IMF didn’t really deny this, he said he told them that they had to follow WHO orders, but the WHO changed to a lockdown policy in the spring. So, this is basically blackmail, in today’s globalized economy even just China alone locking down would’ve caused a recession that would require a stimulus for most countries.
Surveillance is another thing many have become paranoid over, and rightfully so, but even then this is just an ongoing process being turbo charged. This is the next step in the evolution of surveillance which the empire has been using since the beginning, historian Alfred McCoy has written a lot about this process that has been going on over one hundred years. Of course, there’s also the Snowden leaks which exposed the gigantic modern surveillance state. Liberals and leftists who usually cry all day about the “far right” don’t at all find it strange that orban in Hungary, bibi in Israel, modi in India, the Saudi and gulf dictators, and duterte in the Philippines all went along and supported harsh lockdowns in the name of public health at one point or another? Gop governors in the us who didn’t support simple Medicaid expansion in Obamacare all of a sudden care about public health and lock their residents inside because of it? This is absurd, of course they don’t, they’re just helping chase more profit for their big corporate donors and billionaire friends.
In fact Bolsonaro in Brazil was probably the only far right leader to not be pro lockdown and even in Brazil local areas were still shutting down anyways. In many places people were forced to wear masks, even though it used to be considered a debatable issue. In some East Asian countries masks were recommended during flu season, in most other places they weren’t, the WHO wasn’t recommending them for everyone during flu season either. Oxford evidenced based medicine professors said there wasn’t enough evidence to say either way and the issue had been politicized. Well, why was debating the effectiveness of masks made a kin to saying the earth is flat? Some seem to think it’s some type of psychological tactic by people in power, and maybe that’s possible. I can’t help but I think of the money though, the disposable mask market went from under 1 billion dollars to start 2020 to over 166 billion by the end of 2020, there are definitely groups of wealthy people who have cashed in on the mask mania.
Dr. Fauci and Dr. Osterholm, whom I mentioned earlier, both separately said masks were useless in March, and switched up months later.
Fauci even admitted he lied in March allegedly to stop a mask shortage.
Many other doctors around the world did similar things. Even if this virus wasn’t engineered and let out of a lab on purpose or on accident, both of which are very possible as Sam Husseini has written about in Salon, this is the mother of all of conspiracies. Even in the most benign scenario where the virus jumped into humans through nature naturally, this global scam is still a crime against humanity that makes the weapons of mass destruction scam look light in comparison. We should start calling it “the virus of mass destruction”. I can’t remember exactly where I first heard the phrase, but it’s a fitting name for this. Now the difference is instead of pretending to fight terrorism we have leaders all over the world pretending to care about public health. This is class warfare kicked up a notch, it’s gone from conventional to nuclear.
Many people have figured out they’re being lied to, the problem is they can’t put their finger on exactly why so we end up with crazy conspiracism. Everything that has happened isn’t so the most powerful people can have more power just for the sake of it, and of course most people aren’t going to accept that theory, it’s ridiculous.
The lack of economic analysis in covid conspiracy circles probably comes from the fact that in the west most people against covid restrictions are libertarians, and obviously they aren’t going to blame capitalism or even understand that’s what caused all this. That’s why you have idiots calling the covid lockdowns “communism”, because for many libertarians anything they don’t like is communist, even if it’s being done by multi billion dollar corporations.
With that being said, I think the person who believes in 5g conspiracies or is obsessed with Bill Gates (he’s obviously extremely powerful, but he did not start this craziness on his own) is more reasonable than the perfectly healthy person who’s locked themselves inside their home and is scared to death of covid. At least they can see something isn’t right, and are willing to fight for their basic rights.
To me, the saddest thing I see is Leftists taking it as axiomatic that lockdowns work even though they don’t, and that they hurt the rich when in fact they do the opposite. Or how about race obsessed people saying things like covid kills black people more often than white people, as if a respiratory virus can be racist, and as if there are only blacks and whites in the US (black Africans have been dying less per capita than white Europeans). There is more of a correlation between obesity and covid deaths than race, and globally richer countries like the US have more obesity, but at the country level its the poor American who is more likely to be obese and black Americans are disproportionately poor.
*
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.
“We didn’t give a hoot about democracy… and I don’t think it means a thing today” (Philip Agee, former CIA agent(1))
“For Washington a consistent element is that democracy and the rule of law are acceptable if and only if they serve official strategic and economic objectives.” (Noam Chomsky(2))
Many years ago the colonial powers, such as Britain and France, made sure that ordinary people in the colonies did not have much say in running their own countries. Britain and France worked with local elites to run their countries in the interests of the colonial powers, and the elites themselves.
Colonial powers were worried that those colonies might want their independence, as the US did in 1776. In more recent times America has become the world’s dominant power. The US has spent the last 75 years trying to make sure that countries do not pursue their own independent development strategies. One way to achieve this is to work with leaders in other countries who appear to have been chosen by their people. US and British politicians therefore proclaim that they want to pursue democracy in other countries. However, this turns out to be an excellent example of propaganda. Just as with politics in Britain and the US, what they prefer is not genuine democracy, it is the illusion of democracy, as discussed in the previous two posts. Research has shown that the US has interfered in 81 foreign elections since 1950 to get their favoured candidates into power.(3)
US and British leaders encourage this illusion of democracy so that poor people will not feel compelled to resort to violence to make their voices heard. The appearance of political progress is a cheap substitute for genuine economic progress. The voters believe that their lives will be better in the future. What these countries end up with is a leadership that has connections to US decision-makers, and that has little control of key parts of the economic system. Foreign businesses have control of trade and resources. This has been described by Matt Kennard, one of the leading experts on this system, as “tamper-proof democracy.”(4)
Manipulating democracy in poor countries is even easier than manipulating it in rich countries. Voters will tend to vote for candidates that they have heard of. If the richest candidates can pay for large amounts of promotional advertising, they have a big advantage. If these same people control most of the media then they can make sure that their own coverage is positive, whilst their opponents will be repeatedly criticised.
To convince voters to choose the ‘right’ leaders (pro-US and pro-corporate) the US interferes with politics in other countries in a number of ways. They fund groups who support their chosen candidate, and other groups who protest against other politicians and policies. They fund journalists who will write articles supportive of certain candidates, and supportive of the ‘right’ policies. They provide technical training, educational materials, conferences and overseas trips to non-government organizations (NGOs), student groups, publishers and unions.(5) The US also uses its own personnel based overseas to make economic threats, about withdrawing funds or aid, or blocking access to trade opportunities. If the electorate choose the ‘wrong’ candidate, the US will often attempt to change the result, either peacefully or violently. (Discussed in detail in earlier posts).
The National Endowment for (Undermining) Democracy
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a US organisation that spends large sums of money supporting some candidates in foreign elections. It presents itself as an organisation for helping to promote democracy. In practice it focuses on helping US clients. Some readers will have heard about the Rose revolution in Georgia (2003), the Orange revolution in the Ukraine (2005) and the Tulip revolution in Kyrgyzstan (2005).
These were presented by the mainstream media as countries discovering democracy and overthrowing their old leaders. What was not explained was that these countries already had democracy, and events were manipulated by the US government via the NED to try to get the pro-US candidate into power. It successfully manipulated elections in Nicaragua (1990), Mongolia (1996) and Slovakia (2002). Similarly, in Bulgaria (1991) and Albania (1992) US leaders were not happy with the winner of the elections, so the NED funded protests and eventually the elected politicians were forced to resign. It has a long history of corruption and failing to obey laws in many countries where it has operated, being involved in scandals in Venezuela, Iraq and Ukraine.
The NED was formed in 1983 after hearings exposed the crimes of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In 1991 the President of the NED admitted that “A lot of what we do today was done covertly [secretly] 25 years ago by the CIA.”(6) One critical US politician asked “How would people in America or Britain feel if the Chinese turned up with millions of dollars to support candidates deemed friendly to China?”.(7) This would obviously be considered inappropriate, yet when the NED manipulates politics overseas, the US and British media provide little criticism. Despite claiming to be more open than the CIA, many of the NEDs early activities were kept secret. It even tried to manipulate events in France.
If All Else Fails, Resort To Violence
The following are examples of some of the democratically-elected leaders who tried to pursue their own policies. In each case, the US overthrew them and replaced them with a brutal ruler who committed widespread atrocities.(8)
In Iran (1953), Mossadegh was replaced by the Shah (1953-1979). He set up the notorious SAVAK secret police who tortured thousands of political prisoners.
In Guatemala Jacobo Arbenz (1954) was replaced by Castillo Armas (1954-57) who arrested and killed thousands of people.
In Indonesia Sukarno (1965) was replaced by Suharto (1967-1998), who committed genocide, twice! He slaughtered at least half a million people in the 60s, and hundreds of thousands in East Timor from 1975 onwards.
In the Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba (1961) was replaced by Mobutu Sese Seku (1965-1997) who committed widespread torture and public executions.
In Chile, Salvador Allende (1973) was replaced by Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) who committed widespread murder and torture.
More recently, the US helped to overthrow the democratically-elected leader of Haiti in 2004.(9) In Venezuela the population repeatedly elected Hugo Chavez, who objected to US corporations and local elites exploiting Venezuela, so the local elites worked with US decision-makers and tried to overthrow him.(10) They are still trying to overthrow his successor, Nicolas Maduro.
Western Democracy is Overrated
US and British politicians repeatedly complain about a lack of democracy in some other countries. The US particularly complains about Cuba. However, they rarely mention that in many other South American countries which are recognised as democracies, the standard of living for the poorest people is far worse.(11) Cuba provides excellent education and healthcare to all of its citizens, however poor they are(12). In some South American democracies, the poorest people get inadequate education and no healthcare.
During the last seventy-five years, the governments of many of these other countries have murdered and tortured large numbers of citizens. Compared to them, Cuba has a much better human rights record. If Cuba were to change to a system of US-style democracy, where politics can be bought by wealthy donors, it is highly likely that life for the poorest people would get worse. The US press is repeatedly telling its readers that Cuba is a terrible place, but Cuba’s real crime is demonstrating that poor countries can develop in ways that do not allow US corporations to control the economy and exploit the poor. Western observers who have visited Cuba explain that people in Cuba have much more say about how their country is run than poor people in the US and Britain, due to much more complex networks of grassroots discussions about policy.(13)
Elections in warzones under occupation by US soldiers are also meaningless. Whoever wins the election, the country is still under US control. We can re-phrase the earlier question and ask: “Imagine the Chinese army occupying Britain or America, then holding elections between two pro-Chinese candidates. Would that be democracy?” Obviously not. The elections just add a “democratic cloak to the US’s chosen leader”.(14)
Another issue that is rarely mentioned by the mainstream media is the fact that the countries that have developed most spectacularly since 1945 were not democracies. “South Korea and Taiwan were a mix of one-party states and military dictatorships until the late 1980s.”(15) If we compare China and India, China’s sustained progress has been faster than any other nation in history, yet it is not a democracy. India is a democracy, but it has failed to lift many of its poorest people out of poverty. It may actually be the case that a US-style democracy is not the best form of government for rapid development in poor countries. This is a point of view that is almost unmentionable in polite circles in Britain and the US.
Double Standards in the Mainstream Media
The double standards of the mainstream US and British media in relation to foreign interference in elections has been particularly obvious since 2016. They repeatedly complained about alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US elections (known as Russiagate). Even after a US judge ruled in 2019 that there was no evidence of interference,(16) the media still discuss the allegations as if they are true. US foreign policy, through the CIA and the NED, involves major interference in many countries, yet the media rarely mention it.
*
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.
Rod Driver is a part-time academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking modern-day US and British propaganda. This is the nineteenth 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.
Featured image: Since the cutting off of electricity, food and water inside the embassy has not been enough to force the collective to leave, late Tuesday afternoon, the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police handed out a trespassing notice that was printed without letterhead or signature from any U.S. government official. (Photo: CodePink)
According to Biden’s secretary of state-designee Anthony Blinken, the new regime in town will keep much of its predecessor’s geopolitical agenda in place.
Former usurper-in-waiting/self-designated interim Venezuelan president Guaido — no longer a National Assembly member — will still unlawfully be recognized as Venezuelan president.
No matter that he never ran for presidency, ever received a single vote for the office, or that according to polls, he’s perhaps the most reviled Bolivarian Republic citizen with low single-digit support.
When self-declaring himself Bolivarian Republic president two years ago, at least one poll showed that 81% of Venezuelans never heard of him.
No US reset with Russia is planned, no olive branch coming in the interest of furthering world peace and stability.
US opposition to completion of Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipeline to Germany and Europe remains firm Biden/Harris policy.
The new regime will continue training Ukraine’s military and providing it with heavy weapons — on the phony pretext of enabling it to defend against a nonexistent Russian threat.
A continued tough approach to China is planned.
On all things Israel, Biden/Harris will keep the US embassy in Jerusalem — a UN recognized international city, the legal capital of no nation.
US policy toward Israel will at least largely remain unchanged going forward.
While Biden promised to rejoin the landmark JCPOA nuclear deal, Blinken and national intelligence director Avril Haines said following through on this policy isn’t imminent and may not happen ahead.
According to Win Without War director Stephen Miles:
“Joe Biden never promised to be a revolutionary or to enact radical change, so what we’ve seen so far both in terms of personnel and policy shouldn’t exactly be surprising,” adding:
“Given how broken our current foreign policy is, any transition is thus going to start far from where progressives want to be.”
To what extent Biden/Harris intend to maintain or diverge from Trump’s geopolitical agenda remains to unfold.
From what’s known — based on remarks by its nominees for high posts — little change ahead is likely in US relations with nations free from its control.
Hardline policies toward Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, and other nations on the US target list for regime change are expected to remain in place.
According to Israel’s Channel 12 on Saturday, Mossad chief Yossi Cohen will meet with Biden and other US regime officials at the White House in February.
Reportedly he’ll present Israeli preconditions for Biden to rejoin the JCPOA that may kill the deal altogether if adopted.
They reportedly include a halt to Iran’s enrichment of uranium for its legitimate nuclear program that’s known not to include a military component.
It’s in stark contrast to nuclear armed and dangerous Israel — that also maintains stockpiles of chemical, biological and other banned weapons, as does the US.
Cohen apparently will urge Biden to demand that Iran halt production of advanced centrifuges, end support for Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and cease providing Syria with military support.
All of the above are lawful Iranian policies its ruling authorities are highly likely to continue.
Cohen will also reportedly demand that Tehran give the IAEA unrestricted access to sites related to its nuclear program — to include legitimately off-limits military facilities.
Unlike Israel and the US, Iran’s legitimate nuclear program complies with its NPT obligations.
Unconfirmed reports indicated that Biden/Harris team members met with Iranian officials weeks ago to discuss prospects for the US returning to the JCPOA.
The French publication Le Figaro reported that “(d)iscussions took place in New York between Majid Takht Ravanchi, Iran’s representative to the United Nations, and a US envoy from the Biden (regime),” according to an unnamed source, adding:
“We will know very soon whether these discussions were successful or not.”
Discussion reportedly focused on “fix(ing) the framing of announcements” of a possible US return to the deal, lifting of Trump-imposed sanctions, and related issues.
Citing a nonexistent Iranian threat numerous times, Netanyahu firmly opposes the JCPOA.
He’ll no doubt push hard against Biden/Harris yielding anything to Iran that he’s against.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said talks regarding Iran and the JCPOA will be held with relevant US allies on this issue and the Islamic Republic.
On January 20, inauguration day in Washington, Netanyahu tweeted the following:
“I look forward to working with you (meaning Biden) to further strengthen the US-Israel alliance, to continue expanding peace between Israel and the Arab world, and to confront common challenges, chief among them the threat posed by Iran (sic).”
On Friday, Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif tweeted:
“The new US (regime) has a fundamental choice to make.”
“It can embrace the failed policies of its predecessor, and continue down the path of contempt for int’l cooperation & int’l law.”
“Or, it can reject failed assumptions & seek peace and comity.”
Last week, Blinken said the US will seek a broader agreement with Iran that includes its missile program, wanting unacceptable restraints imposed to weaken its self-defense capabilities.
It’s a notion Iran justifiably rejects, wanting the JCPOA, as unanimously approved by Security Council members in 2015, restored as adopted — as a starting point for further discussions about bilateral relations.
At this time, the US unlawfully abandoned the JCPOA.
E3 nations Britain, France and Germany are in breach of their obligations.
Restoration of the JCPOA requires that noncompliant nations reverse their breach by fulfilling their obligations entirely.
Unless done, the landmark agreement may unravel altogether ahead.
*
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).
The next Pentagon Red Flag exercise runs January 25 to February 12 from the Nevada Test and Training Range and Nellis Air Force Base. Manilo Dinucci reported in June [1] that the Nellis 5G network would be fully operational and an active component of this year’s exercises.
At Red Flag 2021, 5G relocatable cell towers, that can be set up and taken down in less than an hour, will be probably already operating to be tested in a real environment. Nellis base is the fifth base selected by the Pentagon to test the military use of 5G: the others are located in Utah, Georgia, California and Washington State.
5G will allow the entire command and control system of the United States armed forces to be strengthened worldwide.
5G will play a decisive role particularly in the use of hypersonic weapons which travel at speeds exceeding 10 times that of sound also equipped with nuclear warheads.
5G will also be extremely important for secret services, making control and intelligence systems much more effective than those currently used.
These exercises significantly increase the radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation (RF-EMF) emissions in the U.S. due to radar, communications, GPS jamming, EMF weapons, satellites, and other equipment. The serious health problems experienced throughout the country have included cardiac disorders, severe sleep disruption, microwave hearing, and other neurological problems. RF-EMF also impacts the immune system – at a time when Americans need a strong immune system — and is a known carcinogen and causes genetic and DNA damage. In addition, it harms wildlife including bees and other insects, especially 5G millimeter waves.[2]
Due to the environmental and public health hazards, these military exercises must be halted immediately. I urge everyone to contact the U.S. Surgeon General and other state and federal officials now.
2021 exercises at the Nevada Test and Training Range:
Red Flag 21-1: 1/25/21 to 2/12/21
Red Flag 21-2: 3/8/21 – 3/19/21
Red Flag 21-3: 7/19/21 – 8/6/21
WSINT – Weapons School Integration
21A 5/24 – 6/17/21
21B 11/22 – 12/16/21
JFEX – Joint Forcible Entry Exercise –
21A – June 12, 2021
21B Dec. 11, 2021
(Information from dreamlandresort.com/info/flags.html)
Despite the COVID19 disaster, the Pentagon is conducting Red Flag and other military exercises in conjunction with the Nevada Testing and Training Range and Nellis AFB. Red Flag 21-1 is due to begin Jan. 25 and last into February 12.
These exercises negatively affect the public health and the environment by using high levels and far-reaching patterns of EMF emissions for jamming and EMF warfare practices that cover many parts of the United States and may extend into Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean nations. The military have added progressive capabilities to these exercises, to now include their new 5G network in conjunction with satellites.
I urgently request that you halt these exercises immediately in the interest of the public health and welfare, and the security of the nation.
Medical experts and EMF research scientists have warned about the hazards of radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation for years [3]. During past Red Flag exercises, members of the public reported the sudden onset of serious health problems, only to find out that symptoms started when these military exercises began.
These harmful emissions can affect public health in a myriad of ways including heart function, cognition, and cause increased incidence of migraine or headache, seizures, heart arrhythmia, sleep disturbances, skin problems, clicking or ringing in the ears, flu-like symptoms, difficulty breathing, pain, and other health problems. RF-EMF also impacts the Immune system – the last thing the public needs right now – and exposure causes cellular stress, rouleaux formation in the blood, and DNA damage. This will also affect pets and wildlife.
Additional hazards include interference with medical devices including pacemakers, Parkinson’s deep brain implants, and hospital equipment, as well as GPS equipment .
The most vulnerable people are people who are already disabled by electromagnetic sensitivity (EMS) — a functional impairment that occurs from exposure to EMF – or have other EMF-sensitive medical conditions including nerve damage, cancer, heart disorders, amputations or susceptibilty to stroke, or those with medical implants or devices. Many of people with EMS are already extremely ill from current levels of RF-EMF, suffering excruciating pain and crippling effects. The cities of Boston and Philadelphia [4] warned in 2013 about the suffering of the EMF-disabled. Based on a 1998 prevalence survey by the California Department of Health Services [5], millions of Americans could be at serious, even life-threatening risk from these drills.
The European Academy of Environmental Medicine released their report “EUROPAEM EMF Guideline 2016 for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of EMF-related health problems and illnesses,”[6] expanding on the 2012 report by the Austrian Medical Association.[7] Have you read these reports?
However, in the 1990s, Congress defunded the EPA’s RF-EMF research and work on developing federal standards, and a recent FOIA request revealed that the last EPA review of literature was in 1984.[8] That is unconscionable and a violation of the public trust.
In 2015, the Canadian Parliament held three days of hearings on the public health hazards created by rising levels of EMF emissions and lax regulations, which the CMAJ reported.[9] And now there are the U.S. National Toxicology Program and Italian Ramazzini Institute results along with older cancer studies that show this radiation is a carcinogen.
The Naval Medical Research compiled a lengthy bibliography[10] in 1972 of studies showing biological effects. Extensive military research for decades has weaponized these effects, including the poppers used in Iraq and the Active Denial System using millimeter waves which causes intense burning sensations. These same millimeter waves are being deployed for 5G.
A COVID variant is causing additional concern for medical professionals. The DNA- and gene-damaging effects of RF-EMF radiation exposure are well known, including CTIA-Wireless Association sponsored research by Dr. Henry Lai, and a study by Belyaev in 1996 finding altered genetic structure in E. Coli bacteria at exposure levels of 0.0000000000001 microwatts per cm2, [11] far below U.S. exposure limits of 1000.0 microwatts per cm2. Increasing the public exposure to RF-EMF makes no sense to any rational person.
I request that you take leadership on this critical matter now and halt these military exercises immediately for this year and the indefinite future to protect the public, the environment, and the national security. The continuance of these exercises risks catastrophic harm and complicates an already difficult and unpredictable medical situation. These experiments are done without any public notification or advance warning, public hearings, environmental review, public input, or full informed consent from the public. The public is shut out of decision-making, despite paying the bill. This must end now.
A CE/CME-accredited virtual EMF Medical Conference (EMFMC) will be held January 28-31. It will cover RF-EMF/wireless radiation health effects. Please inform your staff and the national health officers of this critically important and timely conference. It offers 20.5 hours of CME. Please attend this conference.
Please respond at your earliest to my request.
Sincerely,
Nina Beety
For more information on Red Flag and the 2018 Red Flag drill, read this.
*
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.
Nina Beety is a researcher, writer, and educator on public policy, the environment, and wireless radiation hazards. Her reports for officials and the public on Smart/AMI utility meters are on her website www.smartmeterharm.org. She lives in California.
President Biden’s commitment to re-entering the Iran nuclear deal—formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA—is already facing backlash from a motley crew of warhawks both domestic and foreign. Right now, opponents of re-entering the deal are centering their vitriol on one of the nation’s foremost experts on both the Middle East and diplomacy: Robert Malley, who Biden might tap to be the next Iran envoy.
On January 21, conservative journalist Elli Lake penned an opinion piece in Bloomberg News arguing that President Biden should not appoint Malley because Malley ignores Iran’s human rights abuses and “regional terror”. Republican Senator Tom Cotton retweeted Lake’s piece with the heading: “Malley has a long track record of sympathy for the Iranian regime & animus towards Israel. The ayatollahs wouldn’t believe their luck if he is selected.” Pro regime-change Iranians such as Mariam Memarsadeghi, conservative American journalists like Breitbart’s Joel Pollak, and the far-right Zionist Organization of America are opposing Malley. Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed opposition to Malley getting the appointment and Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror, a close advisor to the prime minister, said that if the U.S. reenters the JCPOA, Israel may take military action against Iran. A petition opposing Malley has even started on Change.org.
What makes Malley such a threat to these opponents of talks with Iran?
Malley is the polar opposite of Trump’s Special Representative to Iran Elliot Abrams, whose only interest was squeezing the economy and whipping up conflict in the hopes of regime change. Malley, on the other hand, has called U.S. Middle East policy “a litany of failed enterprises” requiring “self-reflection” and is a true believer in diplomacy.
Under the Clinton and Obama administrations, Malley helped organize the 2000 Camp David Summit as Special Assistant to President Clinton; acted as Obama’s White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf region; and was the lead negotiator on the White House staff for the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal. When Obama left office, Malley became president of the International Crisis Group, a group formed in 1995 to prevent wars.
During the Trump years, Malley was a fierce critic of Trump’s Iran policy. In an Atlantic piece he coauthored, he denounced Trump’s plan to withdraw and refuted critiques about the sunset clauses in the deal not extending for more years. “The time-bound nature of some of the constraints [in the JCPOA] is not a flaw of the deal, it was a prerequisite for it,” he wrote. “The real choice in 2015 was between achieving a deal that constrained the size of Iran’s nuclear program for many years and ensured intrusive inspections forever, or not getting one.”
He condemned Trump’s maximum pressure campaign as a maximum failure, explaining that throughout Trump’s presidency, “Iran’s nuclear program grew, increasingly unconstrained by the JCPOA. Tehran has more accurate ballistic missiles than ever before and more of them. The regional picture grew more, not less, fraught.”
While Malley’s detractors accuse him of ignoring the regime’s grim human rights record, national security and human rights organizations supporting Malley said in a joint letter that since Trump left the nuclear deal, “Iran’s civil society is weaker and more isolated, making it harder for them to advocate for change.”
Malley and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in June 2015 (Public Domain)
Hawks have another reason for opposing Malley: his refusal to show blind support for Israel. In 2001 Malley co-wrote an article for the New York Review arguing that the failure of the Israeli-Palestinian Camp David negotiations had not been the sole fault of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat but included then-Israeli leader Ehud Barak. The U.S. pro-Israel establishment wasted no time accusing Malley of having an anti-Israel bias.
Malley has also been pilloried for meeting with members of the Palestinian political group Hamas, designated a terror organization by the U.S. In a letter to The New York Times, Malley explained that these encounters were part of his job when he was Middle East program director at the International Crisis Group, and that he was regularly asked by both American and Israeli officials to brief them on these meetings.
With the Biden administration already facing opposition from Israel about its intent to return to the JCPOA, Malley’s expertise on Israel and his willingness to talk to all sides will be an asset.
Malley understands that re-entering the JCPOA must be undertaken swiftly and will not be easy. Iranian presidential elections are scheduled for June and predictions are that a hardline candidate will win, making negotiations with the U.S. harder. He is also keenly aware that re-entering the JCPOA is not enough to calm the regional conflicts, which is why he supports a European initiative to encourage de-escalation dialogues between Iran and neighboring Gulf states. As U.S. Special Envoy to Iran, Malley could put the weight of the U.S. behind such efforts.
Malley’s Middle East foreign policy expertise and diplomatic skills make him the ideal candidate to reinvigorate the JCPOA and help calm regional tensions. Biden’s response to the far-right uproar against Malley will be a test of his fortitude in standing up to the hawks and charting a new course for U.S. policy in the Middle East. Peace-loving Americans should shore up Biden’s resolve by supporting Malley’s appointment.
*
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.
Below is a letter from Canadian doctors supporting Roman Baber MPP who penned an open letter to Premier Doug Ford asking to end the COVID-19 lockdown.
.
.
Here is Baber’s open letter.
*
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.
We thank Mark Taliano for bringing this to our attention.
New York’s state lab has access to the Cycle Threshold (Ct) values from the PCR tests they process. Last July, the lab identified 872 positive tests based on a threshold of 40 cycles.
If the lab has used a cutoff of 35 cycles, 43 percent of those tests would have been considered negative. What’s more, if the cycles had been limited to 30, 63 % of the PCR-positive patients would have been justifiably been regarded as negative.
In testing data that include cycle thresholds, officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada have found that up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus. If that data was extrapolated to nation-wide statistics, the 45,000 new “cases” reported last week perhaps only 4,500 would actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing
It is obvious that PCR tests need to be interpreted with caution as they do not reflect a true viral load, infectivity or even contagiousness. In fact, many times no viable viruses can be cultured in patients with a positive PCR test result. False positive PCR tests abound, resulting in CDC statistics that have been consistently over-estimating both the incidence rates and mortality rates related to the current epidemic, thus falsely stimulating the panic seen among the many people demanding their vaccinations NOW.
Studies in France, Canada and Singapore, as reported in the August 25, 2020 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, have tried to culture the Covid-19 virus in patients that had positive PCR test results when the number of “cycles” used in the test exceeded 30. The scientists doing the studies were unable to culture any virus in those patients. Since many PCR test kits in the United States use cycle thresholds that are actually greater than 35, there is a serious problem with the PCR test, which is considered the “gold standard” for diagnosing SARS CoV-2.
In view of the general consensus (including recent acknowledgements from both the WHO and CDC) that PCR cycle thresholds (Ct) above 30 results in increasingly large false positive test rates that approach 100%. (Note that 30 cycles represents a million replications of the RNA particles and 40 cycles represents a trillion replications.)
If it takes a trillion multiplications of a test before any viral RNA fragments (much less viable viruses) can be identified, you can be sure there are not enough viral particles to cause a disease.
Below is some information that should help people understand why mRNA vaccine hesitancy makes total sense.
PCR cycle threshold (11-37) and positive cell culture (black line, 100% to 0%). The colored bars indicate the number of positive cell cultures per Ct per week after infection (1 to 3 weeks). (Jafaar/Raoult)
The above chart is from a French research group that has recently shown that at a cycle threshold (Ct) of 25, about 70% of nasopharyngeal samples were viral culture positive (i.e. were infectious). At a Ct of 30, only 20% of the samples were culture positive. And at a Ct of 35, a miniscule 3% of samples remained culture positive. Above 35, all samples were negative.
This means that if a person gets a “positive” PCR test result at a cycle threshold of 35 or higher (as applied in most US labs and many European labs), the chance that the person is infectious is less than 3%. The chance that the person received a “false positive” result is 97% or higher.
The chart above correlates PCR test positivity (black line) with culture results for the tested-for virus (colored bars). If more than 30 cycles are required to get a PCR-positive test result, the cultures will be consistently negative/sterile, meaning that any positive PCR test that only becomes positive after 30 cycles can be called a false positive.
Many PCR test kits on the market use a PCR Ct that is actually above a useless 35! Those kits will naturally result in large numbers of false positives that have already corrupting the CDC’s and Department of Health’s Covid-19 statistics – and also the CDC’s drive to get people inoculated as rapidly as possible with the experimental – and untested for long-term safety and efficacy – the two mRNA vaccines. It is therefore imperative for patients who take a PCR test to know what test kit brands are being used (see partial list below) in your hospital or Public Health Dept laboratory.
Here is a helpful quote:
“…if a person gets a ‘positive’ PCR test result at a cycle threshold (Ct) of 35 or higher (as applied in most US labs and many European labs), the chance that the person is infectious is less than 3%. The chance that the person received a “false positive” result is 97% or higher.” – Swiss Policy Research
So, if someone has typical flu symptoms or an influenza-like-illness (ILI) and a positive PCR test that might be a false positive (ie, one that only turns positive at a cycle threshold over 30), perhaps your disease is something other than Covid-19 and shouldn’t be reported to the CDC as Covid-19. Something to think about.
And here are some examples of PCR cycle thresholds for five of the PCR test kit brands that are used in the United States:
Quest: 50 cycles
Inbios: 45 cycles
Luminex: 45 cycles
Gnomegen: 39 cycles
ThermoFisher: 37 cycles
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Dr Gary G. Kohls lives in the USA and writes a weekly column, entitled Duty to Warn, for the Duluth Reader, Duluth, Minnesota’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns deal with the dangers of American Friendly Fascism, corporatism, Oligarchy, militarism, racism, malnutrition, and Big Pharma’s over-drugging and over-vaccinating agendas as well as other movements that threaten the environment, democracy, civility, health and the sustainability and livability of the planet and the future of the children.
Dr. Kohls is a past member of Mind Freedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and is a signatory to and/or an advocate of the principles of the Great Barrington Declaration, the World Doctors Alliance and Americas Front Line Doctors. His practice of holistic medicine mainly involved helping the survivors of psychiatry that had often been mis-diagnosed, over-diagnosed and always over-medicated with un-approved and un-tested-for-safety cocktails of neurotoxic psychiatric drugs that not only had sickened them but to which they had also become addicted.
His Duty to Warn columns have been re-published around the world for the last decade. They deal frequently also deal with Big Vaccine’s over-vaccinating, Big Medicine’s over-screening, over-diagnosing and over-treating agendas
Many of Dr Kohls’ columns have been archived at a number of websites, including:
Washington hopes a free trade pact with Kenya will give it a beachhead in its hot war with Al-Shabab and cold war with China—and an African dumping ground for GMOs and plastic waste. What Kenya gets in exchange is not at all clear.
The United States and Kenya have been negotiating a bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) since March 2020, sparking concerns about further neocolonization of the East African state by Washington, whose economy is 224 times the size of Kenya’s. Given its “America First” policy, it is not surprising the Trump administration would aim to subjugate Kenya economically through this FTA, as a template for the rest of Africa.
Somewhat more puzzling is why the Kenyan government of President Uhuru Kenyatta would go along with it, and what Trump’s successors in the Biden administration will do with the negotiations now. I spoke to Kenyan and U.S. trade experts about the domestic and geo-politics behind the FTA.
“The Trump administration wanted to move away from preferential trade programs towards more ‘reciprocal’ trade in which developing countries must make new concessions to keep the trade benefits they have now,” says Karen Hansen-Kuhn, program director at the Washington-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP). “This agreement would be based on the model established under the new NAFTA [known as USMCA], which sets new limits on governments’ abilities to set rules on things like pesticides and GMOs or other public interest rules. In general, it would serve to cement these new limits on public policy in both the U.S. and Kenya against more progressive rules in the future.”
As a major participant in the U.S. Africa Command’s (AFRICOM) security operations on the continent, especially in Somalia, Kenya is already a leading U.S. client state, accepting $824 million in military and economic aid from Washington in 2018. Since 2010, Kenya has received $400 million in counterterrorism funding from the Pentagon and has become the U.S. military’s main foreign conduit for opposing Al-Shabab, the insurgent group that is fighting the U.S. in Somalia for control of the Horn of Africa. Al Shabab also carries out attacks in Kenya, including strikes last January on a U.S. military base and two schools near the Somali border.
As in Brazil, the United States sees strong military co-ordination with Kenya in combination with a preferential free trade pact—the U.S. government’s first with a sub-Saharan country—as a way to shore up Nairobi as a dependable military and economic conduit for U.S. interests on the continent.
Another major factor for Washington in seeking the FTA is countering Chinese influence in Africa, which has grown dramatically in economic terms. In fact, this may be “foremost among Washington’s concerns,” according to the U.S. establishment think-tank the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). China–Africa trade has “soared” since 2008 while trade between the continent and the U.S. has declined, notes CFR. China is also the top investor in Africa. Kenya’s imports from China were worth $3.79 billion in 2017, making Beijing its leading trade partner whereas imports from the U.S. in 2019 were $401 million and exports to the U.S. were $667 million.
*
A main objective for the U.S. in the Kenyan FTA negotiations is gaining tariff-free access for its dominant agricultural sector, which could potentially destroy Kenya’s domestic food systems. This is one reason why Public Citizen, the U.S. consumer advocacy organization, calls the FTA “a terrible idea.” Melissa Omino, research manager at the Center for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law (part of Swarthmore University in Nairobi, Kenya), agrees there would be “dire consequences” for Kenya stemming from the FTA, particularly concerning food security.
“The U.S. heavily subsidizes its own domestic producers thus allowing them to overproduce. When such goods are exported out of the U.S. at low prices together with removed tariffs, it results in the flooding of such U.S. agricultural exports leading to the destruction of the domestic market of Kenya,” says Omino. The U.S. also wants Kenya to import its GMO corn and maize, but GMO products are banned in Kenya currently.
According to Omino, the effect of the FTA would become devastating when world food prices go up, since Kenyans would neither be able to afford to buy food imports nor would they have local production to rely on.
“An example of this is the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, now USMCA), which affected Mexico such that [two million] corn farmers lost their income due to flooding of corn from the U.S.,” she tells me. “So far Kenya has been protected by the tariffs of the East African Community [EAC—a regional trade agreement Kenya is part of along with five other countries] and has been able to manage food security well. Once these are removed the case changes drastically.”
Melanie Foley, international campaigns director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, pointed out to me that in the proposed FTA, the U.S. is also targeting Kenya’s “strong laws” banning certain GMO foods, protecting consumers’ privacy online, and the country’s progressive environmental policies such as its ban on plastic bags. Kenya is a leader in the area of plastic waste bans and management, according to Omino.
Foley quotes a New York Times exposé, according to which, she says,
“the [American] petrochemical lobby is pushing the U.S. government to use these talks to challenge Kenya’s strong plastics laws and expand the plastics industry’s footprint across Kenya and the continent. If the industry has its way, Kenya’s strong plastic bag ban and proposed limits on imports of plastic garbage could be under threat.”
James Gathii, professor of law at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, tells me that the flooding of the Kenyan market with U.S. GMO corn and maize will not only devastate Kenyan agriculture but also its industry.
“Heavily subsidized farm products from the U.S. flooding the Kenyan market would enhance access to Kenya for U.S. companies in a way that would undermine Kenya’s industrialization plans, especially in agro-manufacturing.”
Gathii, a leading Kenyan academic and an expert in international trade law, says he is also concerned that Washington “is aiming for enhanced intellectual property protections” in the Kenya FTA, which could inhibit access to essential medicines and likely “undermine the fledgling health care systems in Kenya’s regional governments.” It is common United States Trade Representative practice to use trade negotiations to solidify and extend monopoly patent and other intellectual property protections for Big Pharma, Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
“Counties have made a lot of progress in bringing health care closer to the people at the grassroot level for the first time since Kenya’s independence in 1963,” continues Gathii. “That progress will be upended by the U.S.–Kenya FTA that would make it difficult if not impossible to preserve and enhance the work these counties have been able to do with provision of essential drugs and health care systems that would face higher drug and medical costs as a result of the FTA.”
*
Sharon Treat, senior attorney at IATP, emphasizes the degradation of standards Kenya faces under an FTA with the U.S. Currently Kenya has a trading relationship with the European Union and “must align its food standards to be consistent with EU standards in order to export there,” she explains.
“EU food standards in many respects are more protective of human health or the environment than U.S. standards, for example, allowable levels of pesticide residues on produce, approvals of genetically modified food for human consumption, and use of chemical additives and growth promoters such as ractopamine and hormones in livestock production.” Treat warns that a trade deal with the U.S. “could lead Kenya to adopt policies that reduce, rather than increase environmental and other protections.”
The Kenyan government argues that it needs the FTA to safeguard against possible U.S. cancellation of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which currently provides considerable U.S. market access for Kenya and other African countries and has to be renewed by the U.S. Congress in 2025. But as Foley points out, the AGOA is unlikely to be terminated in 2025 as it “is extremely popular in Congress” with both Democrats and Republicans.
“AGOA has been renewed twice with overwhelming bipartisan support,” she says. “[T]here is simply no reason to believe that Congress would not renew this popular program again before it expires in 2025.”
Given all the disadvantages of finalizing an FTA with the U.S. as opposed to staying with the AGOA, which requires no concessions from Kenya, the Kenyatta government’s devotion to the FTA talks is difficult to understand, says Omino.
“What makes it even more difficult to understand is that such negotiations take place in secrecy and the text is only released to the public after the parties have agreed and signed the same,” she adds. “This means that citizens of the affected countries…are not really in the know of motivations for and actual machinations within these negotiations.”
Gathii says it seems Kenya’s elite are “pegging their hopes on a trade and investment deal that will propel Kenya’s economy.” He adds,
“There is simply no empirical evidence that merely entering into a trade and investment agreement along the lines that the U.S. and Kenya are entering into can result in the kinds of economic gains that the Kenyan government hopes to garner.”
Incoming U.S. President Joe Biden will announce his administration’s trade policy at the end of January. On the one hand, he is widely expected to put a hold on new trade initiatives while focusing attention on domestic affairs including the still worsening COVID-19 outbreak as well as economic renewal projects, some of them tied to a climate transition.
At the same time, Biden is on record calling for “a united front of friends and partners to challenge China’s abusive behavior.” Going along with Trump’s FTA negotiations with Kenya, as Biden is expected to do with a proposed U.S.–U.K. FTA, could provide him with an easy bi-partisan win while appeasing establishment hawks, business Democrats and big business lobbyists in D.C. What is the livelihood of a million Kenyan farmers and food vendors next to that?
*
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.
“Citizen concerns over privacy ….. will require adjustments in thinking”.-Klaus Schwab, 2016
The World Economic Forum (WEF), the Switzerland-based NGO of “elites” noted for political power and extreme wealth, has taken it upon itself to dictate the future of the world. Each year, members have traditionally met in the small Swiss mountain town of Davos, hence the term “the Davos Crowd”, often used derisively because of the group’s unsolicited power. On any given day, the world should be prepared to wake up and find that the WEF’s society-changing “projects and initiatives” have been ongoing away from public scrutiny and are being realized.
One of the sessionstaking place during the Forum’s 2017 gathering included the question of whether global society is moving toward an environment in which privacy becomes a “luxury item” with stark division between the “privacy rich” and the “privacy poor”. But then, someone queried, is it really germane any more? People being raised in the digital age appear not to care about privacy as did those of past eras. Based on behavior, humanity is demonstrating a willingness to trade away privacy for the greater convenience the digital world provides, and this is leading to the prospect (horrifying for some) that privacy may eventually cease to be available no matter how desperately it’s desired.
The key question of the session, proposed by the moderator, was never adequately explored, and indeed seemed to be carefully avoided:When privacy has disappeared completely and is no longer a consideration, what exactly will have been lost?The obvious answer to the question was avoided because those present knew the inescapable consequence of the death of privacy: In such a scenario, governmental power would necessarily become absolute, so that any protest by “digital citizens” against governmental overreach, no matter how outrageous, would be quickly discovered and neutralized. For discussants of the Davos session to acknowledge openly that fact would be to delegitimize their own existence.
Governments have interests, above all the protection and extension of their own power, and this inevitably comes up against the interests of citizens. In a digital world in which privacy has been snuffed, Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a society in which each generation has the ability to bring about the kind of revolution that is periodically necessary would be laughable. Complaint would be useless. With nothing to block government’s usurpation of power over its citizenry, “democracy” and “government of, by and for the people” would be nothing but hollow lies, perhaps kept on life support through constant repetition by a throughly corrupted media, as we already have been seeing for quite awhile.
The likes of Tom Paine and Ben Franklyn wouldn’t stand a chance in the Reset’s totally digital environment. A first hint of discord would be immediately detected by algorithm. To suppress dissent, the authorities might initiallysend agentsto reeducate the heretics by “cognitive infiltration”, as proposed byHarvardlegal monsters Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule [Side note: Sunstein was recently tapped by theWorld Health Organizationto develop programs to overcome growing “vaccine hesitancy” among the public]. And if non-violent cognitive infiltration is not sufficient, how else might the authorities deal with nonconformists?
In 1968, two of the West’s greatest historians published a little tome, TheLessons of History, in which they concluded that
“… the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive redistribution.”
But scratch that bit of wisdom, because the digital world, as the saying goes, “changes everything”, and that includes historical patterns. It was, once upon a time, possible for souls defiant against corrupt power to foment rebellion away from authoritarian notice. But the digital world has become one gigantic listening device that is always being refined and extended. Leaving one’s country in an attempt to find a safer society is pointless now, because the digital world of the “Reset” is global. There is no longer any safe “away”.
You might think it will always be possible to leave “mobile devices” at home, take a walk in the country, strategize in whispers with other malcontents. But invisible walls continue to close in, and if the electronic monetary system now planned becomes one’s sole means of obtaining life’s essentials via credit card-cum-chip (Government need only cease producing physical money altogether), it will be case closed. The simple act of electronically invalidating cards andfreezing accountswould immediately render any potential dissident defenseless in the world. In such an environment — the one now being maneuvered into place by the WEF’s strategists — we, all of us, would find ourselves trapped in an invisible, digital Bastille that is absolutely storm-proof.
*
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.
One keeps hearing that former President Donald Trump will be judged well by the history books because he was the only American head of state in recent memory who did not start any new wars. Well, the claim is itself questionable as Jimmy Carter, for all his faults, managed to avoid entering into any new armed conflict, and Trump can hardly be described as a president who eschewed throwing his weight around, both literally and figuratively. He attacked Syria on two occasions based on fabricated intelligence, assassinated an Iranian general, withdrew from several arms and proliferation agreements, and has been waging economic warfare against Iran, Syria, Venezuela and Iraq. He has sanctioned individuals and organizations in both China and Russia and has declared Iranian government components and Yemeni Houthi rebels to be terrorists. He has occupied Syria’s oil producing region to “protect it from terrorists” and has generally exerted “maximum pressure” against his “enemies” in the Middle East.
So no, Donald Trump is no antiwar activist. But Trump’s most pervasive foreign policy initiatives have involved Israel, encouraging the Jewish state’s attacks on Palestinian, Iranian, Lebanese and Syrian targets with impunity, killing thousands of civilians on his watch. Trump has given Israel everything it could possibly ask for, with no consideration for what the U.S. interests might actually be. The only thing he did not do for the Jewish state was to attack and destroy Iran, and even there, reports suggest that he sought to do just that in the waning days of his administration but was talked out of it by his cabinet.
Trump’s pander to Israel started out with withdrawing from the nuclear monitoring agreement with Iran, followed by his shutting down the Palestinian offices in the United States, halting U.S. contributions for Palestinian humanitarian relief, moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights, giving a green light for Israel to do whatever it wishes on the formerly Palestinian West Bank, and, finally permitting paroled former Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard to go “home” to Israel where he received a hero’s welcome. Trump, to be sure, was aided in his disloyalty to his own country by former bankruptcy lawyer Ambassador David Friedman in place in Israel, an ardent Zionist and a cheerleader for whatever atrocities Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to commit. Couple that with a Congress that gives billions of dollars to Israel annually while bleating that the Jewish state has a “right to defend itself” and a media that self-censors all the human rights violations and war crimes that Netanyahu unleashes, and you have a perfect love fest for Israel expressed daily throughout the United States.
But even given all that, Trump the panderer clearly wanted to give one last gift to Israel, and he saved it for his last day in office, when he issued more than 140 pardons and commutations. Though other presidents have issued controversial pardons, no other head of state has so abused the clemency authority to benefit not only friends and acquaintances but also celebrity defendants including rappers, some advocated by the likes of the Kardashians, and also those promoted by monied interests. Most of the pardons went to cronies and to supplicants who were willing to pay in cash or in kind to be set free. It was suggested that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner was engaged in the selection process and money was often a key element. Some might describe that as corruption.
Those of us in the actual antiwar plus anti-surveillance-state movement had been hoping that Trump would actually do something good at no cost to himself, pardoning whistleblowers Edward Snowden, John Kiriakou, Reality Winner, and Chelsea Manning as well as journalist Julian Assange. Kiriakou has reported that when he petitioned for a pardon through one of Trump lawyer Rudi Giuliani’s aides, he was told that such an arrangement would cost $2 million.
Bribes for pardons aside, it would have cost Trump nothing to pardon the whistleblowers and it would be a vindication of those who had put themselves at risk to attack the machinations of the Deep State, which Trump had blamed for the coordinated attacks against himself. This was his relatively cost-free chance to get revenge. Admittedly, there is speculation thatSenator Mitch McConnell may have warned Trump against pardoning Julian Assange in particular, threatening to come up with enough GOP votes to convict him in his upcoming impeachment trial if he were to do so. Be that as it may, not a single whistleblower was pardoned though there was room on the ship for plenty of heinous white collar criminals. Former Dr. Salomon Melgen, for example, had his sentence commuted. Melgen, a close friend of the seriously corrupt Senator from New Jersey Robert Menendezgot into trouble in 2009 when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) discovered that he had overbilled Medicare for $8.9 million for a drug called Lucentis. Two years later Melgen’s business was hit with a $11 million lien from the IRS and four years after that he was charged and convicted over more than 76 counts of health care fraud and making false statements.
Some of those pardoned had Jewish organizations going to bat for them. Elliott Broidy, former finance chair of the Republican National Committee, had no less than five Rabbis vouching for him. Last year Broidy had pleaded guilty to acting as an “unregistered foreign agent,” part of a larger investigation into the Malaysian “1MDB Scandal” in which Prime Minister Najib Razak stole more than $700 million dollars from his country’s state-run 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). Broidy worked on behalf of Razak and was offered $75 million if he could get the U.S. Justice Department to drop its own investigation into the scandal.
Another clemency beneficiary who exploited his Jewish links was Philip Esformes, a former nursing home executive who executed one of the biggest Medicare frauds in U.S. history. Just days after being released after serving four years of his 20-year sentence, Esformes celebrated his daughter’s wedding in a lavish party held at his multi-million dollar Florida home. He benefited from a lobbying campaign by the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch Aleph Institute, a group advised by the ubiquitous former Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz. The movement reportedly has connections to Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Another person pardoned by Trump was Sholam Weiss, a Hasidic businessman from New York who was sentenced to more than 800 years in prison in 2000 for racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering connected to a huge fraud scheme that stole $125 million from the National Heritage Life Insurance Company, leading to its bankruptcy. He fled the country but was subsequently arrested in Austria and extradited to the United States. Weiss had reportedly received the endorsement of from Dershowitz, who also recently has been involved in the Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell espionage case.
And, of course, there was also the Israel factor. For no plausible reason whatsoever and contrary to actual American interests, Trump gave a full pardon to Aviem Sella, a seventy-five year old former Israeli Air Force officer, who was indicted in the U.S. in 1987 for espionage in relation to the Jonathan Pollard spy case. Sella fled to Israel days before Pollard was arrested outside the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. and the Israeli government refused to extradite him. Sella, at the time doing a degree course at New York University, was Pollard’s initial contact. He had started working part-time for the Mossad intelligence agency in the early 1980s and received some of the classified top-secret documents provided by Pollard in exchange for money and jewelry.
Sella had passed on the Pollard contact to Mossad’s agent handler Rafi Eitan, who continued to “run” Pollard until he was arrested. Sella’s indictment was essentially meaningless theater, as is generally true of nearly all Israeli spy cases in the U.S., as Tel Aviv refused to extradite him to the United States and the Justice Department made no attempt to arrest him when he was traveling outside Israel. Trump’s pardon for Sella as a favor to Netanyahu sends yet another signal that Israel can spy against the U.S. with impunity. The request to Trump for clemency came from the Israeli government itself and was reportedly endorsed by Netanyahu, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer, the United States Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, and Miriam Adelson. According to the White House statement on the pardon, “The state of Israel has issued what a full and unequivocal apology, and has requested the pardon in order to close this unfortunate chapter in U.S.-Israel relations.”
Was it a gift or merely a pander? Note particularly the inclusion of David Friedman, who as U.S. Ambassador to Israel is supposed to defend the interests of the United States but never does so. Once upon a time it was considered a potential conflict of interest to send a Jewish Ambassador to Israel. Now it seems to be a requirement and the Ambassador is apparently supposed to be an advocate for Israel as part of his or her mission. Friedman will no doubt be replaced by a Democratic version to deliver more of the same. And then there is Miriam Adelson. Good old Sheldon is hardly cold on the ground and his wife has taken up the mantle of manipulating players in Washington on behalf of the Jewish state.
Money talks and so the drama in Washington continues to play out. Trump manages to make himself look even worse with his last round of pardons and commutations on his ultimate day in office. No one who deserved clemency got it and a lot of well-connected rogues who were willing to fork over money in exchange for mercy benefited. Business as usual delivered by the so-called Leader of the Free World.
*
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.
This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]
Social scientists across their different disciplines have shared an enduring observation. They have found that the people who apply methods in real settings to understand social life find more elucidation of the inquiry process than those who seriously analyze the same but without adequate field application.
We learn best by engaging people in the locations that embody our questions – communities on the ground – to not only glean information from our subjects but also to address people’s needs. Learning by doing provides the context to achieve our educational potential as well as humanity’s growth.
Recognizing this also means that there are defeating practices, commonly rooted in stunted expectations for the outcomes of research, skewed designs resulting in vacuous experiences. This can lead to superficial or misleading explanations of social phenomena’s causes, and even worse, detached remedies.
Unfortunately, this limitation informs the mainstream structure of research and higher education and is also fixed in learning’s infrastructure. After all, interactive engagement with local communities to gain awareness through experience is a pedagogical orientation that is antithetical to classrooms with bolted down chairs facing one direction, positioning participants to not sufficiently interface and engage.
Way beyond a credible doubt, evidence also shows that our ability to integrate knowledge based on experience is basically always there with us and literally has no minimum age. Academic disciplines, considered in the aggregate, have incrementally reformed toward what was realized again during the West’s Enlightenment: students need to co-inquire with communities, with a seamlessness between data gathering and actions to enhance well-being. We see growing appreciation at universities and education centers for all ages – with their commensurate and increasingly dedicated administrations and resources – of providing students with a practical approach to meaningfully internalize the range of life’s insights by honing professional and citizenship abilities.
As we experientially learn about the roots of social challenges, poverty, social stratification, and persistently-generational unrealized potential, we uncover shared basic features. It involves members of local communities discussing these very patterns and identifying local projects for change, livelihood, and justice. It involves investigation, and rolling responses and reactions, which with persistence penetrate the intertwined forces that lead to socio-economic and environmental struggles and solutions. It involves someone assisting the communication among the many and diverse who express themselves, and whose information needs to be retained, organized, and acted upon as the primary basis for decision-making. And, it also involves the reconciliation of past pain, with apologies and regrets conveyed, and the determination to achieve consensus and create the personal and common benefits that are collectively sought by the people.
We know progress, large and small, never seems to be linear. Every context is its own. Global stratifications in unbearable forms find their way into school rooms. And all of this, this ride through the frailties and hope, ignites a lifelong pursuit among the learning youth to help implement community initiatives that seem so right, so fair, needed, and inexplicably long-delayed. This experience in young people can be so compelling that their life’s trajectory becomes new, unanticipated, and invigorated.
I consider myself lucky to have had this kind of essential education in my mid-twenties as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco, followed by action-study, and now leading the High Atlas Foundation in Marrakech 27 years later. I am struck when young student-interns have visited and are immersed in their analyses, observation, participation, and support of the practice of people’s movements for development. These gap-year, late-teen students are astute to the work’s difficult contradictions and transformative potential of what happens when community members work through what can be uneasy discussions toward finding consensus and advancing ahead.
As we celebrate 2021 International Education Day this week, I express a wish, which I suppose is customary for anniversaries: that classrooms are designed as community centers where middle and high schoolers, elementary students, and toddlers, draw their community maps for participatory planning, including in gender groups to reveal outlooks, depicting their visions, places they like and feel to enhance, and ideas for their future. It is a hope we extend for youth and pre-teens to weigh together their priorities they would like to see unfold in their surroundings, localities, and classrooms. It is that old dream when education becomes ever more about the awakening heart, of one’s feelings for others’ feelings, of the communities’ data filled with relativity that guides to sustainability, and the pursuit of not just understanding but to intently improve every day the days of living.
If, indeed, we can know and affect more by doing more in communities than we would by conceptualizing about it, as revered social scientists have so said, then it begins at the onset of education – or even before – when those bolts for the chairs are thrown away.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir is president of the High Atlas Foundation in Morocco.
Featured image: Youth in northern Morocco participating in a community meeting (2020 by the High Atlas Foundation).
Search the scientific literature for examples of long-term vaccine randomized clinical trials that use inert placebos — you will not find them. Short-term studies are the preferred mode of vaccine manufacturers — even when there is no emergency — leaving long-term vaccine safety to be assessed after the vaccine goes to market.
The public is never afforded the opportunity to opt out of human subject trials in spite of federal regulations that provide protections against experimentation — with special protections for children and pregnant women.
Moderna’s mRNA vaccine is touted as having great promise for use against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes coronavirus. As a new technology, it has features that make it competitive.
First, the design allows rapid updates of the vaccine to match new circulating types of virus. This is a stark contrast to, say, Merck’s MMR vaccine, which is showing signs of waning usefulness, not at all unexpected — in fact predicted to be obsolete in 2022 — unless updated to match the wild measles virus every two years or so.
Merck has not updated the MMR vaccine since it was created in 1960 — and the vaccine type and wild type measles lineages have evolved away from each other. Vaccine failure is now evident in that a majority of measles cases in the U.S. are in the vaccinated population (see Poland and Jacobson, 2012 and Hammond, 2020).
Given that Moderna’s mRNA vaccine utilizes only a single protein, it may be expected to induce less autoimmunity than vaccines that utilize more than one SARS-CoV-2 protein. Still, Moderna did not screen out unsafe epitopes to reduce autoimmunity due to homology between parts of the viral protein and the human proteome. Thus, concern over vaccine-induced pathogenic priming is not zero, but it may be less than COVID-19 vaccines that use more than one SARS-CoV-2 protein.
However, the hyper-focused IgG response to the fewer antigens could cause hyperimmunization, a condition considered ripe for off-target autoimmunity attacks. Neither Moderna’s nor Pfizer’s studies leading to filing for the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) have addressed long-term safety.
In contrast to what Moderna reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the early months of COVID-19, its mRNA vaccine is not an established technology. It is new. As a new, experimental vaccine, it deserves close and objective scrutiny.
Moderna reports 94.5% efficacy. The “efficacy” of vaccines is understood to be a measure of the effectiveness of the vaccine on an ideal population, and differs from “effectiveness,” which is how well a vaccine manages to induce evidence of immunity in the real population upon which it is being used.
Moderna reported to the FDA (Zhang, 2020) efficacy as the ratio of the rate of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the vaccinated (16 infected out of 28,068 vaccinated) to the rate of infection in the placebo group (275 infected out of 27,956 given placebo).
Close inspection of Moderna’s data made public ahead of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBAC) meeting that was scheduled for Dec. 17, 2020, however, reveals that among the vaccinated, an additional 81 participants and 118 among the placebo participants developed a COVID-19 diagnosis between the first and second shots. These participants were determined to be ineligible for the second dose and removed from the study.
By my calculations, these additional cases shift the vaccine efficacy from 94.5% to 75.4%.
If a chemotherapy agent is being tested against another cancer treatment, the deaths that occur between scheduled treatment rounds must be counted. It is misleading not to count these additional cases of COVID-19 in the Moderna vaccine trial — the 94.5% efficacy is not based in clinical reality even for an ideal population.
Death rates reflect non-representativeness
Another problem with Moderna’s FDA report is its data on safety. First, during data clean-up, Moderna changed one “death” in the vaccine group to a “serious adverse event” (SAE) — somehow resurrecting a patient? In mirror fashion, one “SAE” was changed to a “death” in the placebo group. Not to worry, though, because there were 13 deaths overall in the entire study — six in the vaccinated, and seven in the unvaccinated.
Note that some of the deaths occurred after the first dose — highlighting the need for consideration of SAEs after the first dose during consideration of efficacy. Given the full number of patients on the two reporting dates, the number of deaths per day per 100K population would be:
0.39 deaths per 100K per day (whole trial)
0.36 deaths per 100K per day (vaccine)
0.42 deaths per 100K per day (placebo)
Of the 13 deaths that occurred in the trial, the clinicians running the trial determined (to their own, and evidently to the FDA’s satisfaction) that the deaths could not have been due to the vaccine, or to the placebo, even though two of the deaths — one in the vaccinated group, and one in the placebo group — had “Death NOS” as the description “NOS” stands for “not otherwise specified.”
The other deaths listed as vaccinated included: cardio-respiratory arrest (1), myocardial infarction (1), multisystem organ failure (1), head injury (1) and suicide (1). In the unvaccinated group: cardio-respiratory arrest (1), myocardial infarction (2), systemic inflammatory response (1), COVID-19 (1), and abdominal injury (1).
How the physicians were able to determine that the two instances of “death NOS” were not due to the vaccine — i.e., how they derived absolute knowledge of causality in individual cases — is a mystery.
In the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, by contrast, such causality determinations in individual cases can take decades. Plausible mechanisms of pathophysiology are key in such determinations. For example, myocardial infarction can involve autoimmunity. The key indicator sometimes used is the type of infiltrating cells (although this is not a black-and-white characteristic), and certainly myocardial infarction has been seen in post-vaccination deaths before.
Multisystem organ failure is consistent with autoimmunity against ubiquitously expressed proteins as a result of vaccination. Given available data, the vaccine cannot easily be ruled out.
The suicide cannot be ruled out as not due the vaccine, either, as the possibility of psychological distress over pressure not to let down society, if the person developed COVID-19, or suspected she did, or might not want to disappoint the world by contributing to the failure of the study, could trigger depression. Or, less dramatically, autoimmunity against oxytocin or serotonin receptors could lead to devastating depression.
There are no past studies of this type of vaccine or any Beta-coronavirus vaccine, or any vaccine using this technology to which the physicians could refer to rule out causality in these cases.
In comparing death rates reported in the vaccine arms between Moderna and Pfizer, six people in the Moderna trial died in 56 days on the vaccine arm, whereas only two people died in the Pfizer study on the vaccine arm over 199 days. The Moderna vaccine arm death rate of 0.36 deaths/100K/day) is 5.14 times higher than Pfizer’s (0.07 deaths/100K/day). This large discrepancy deserves notice and requires explanation.
If Moderna’s on-vaccine death rate is so far below the national death rate and also simultaneously more than five times greater than Pfizer’s on-vaccine death rate, then Pfizer’s study sample appears even less representative of the entire population. This, too, requires due consideration.
Moderna and Pfizer both made promises for complete transparency. It is essential that Moderna provide sufficient explanation on the determination of lack of causality for the deaths in the vaccination arm.
The process by which Moderna managed to achieve 0.5% SAEs also requires full disclosure and given such serious discrepancies, closer inspection.
Also, when comparing the study-wide number of deaths per day per 100K for the study to that of the entire U.S. population from 2019, I was shocked: the national number of deaths per day per 100K is 2.44. Moderna’s screening process and exclusion criteria in the trial led to evidence that the general population is dying at a rate 6.3 times greater than the death rate in the Moderna trial — which means the Moderna study, including its estimated efficacy rate and the vaccine’s alleged safety profile — cannot possibly be relevant to most of the U.S. population. The super-healthy cohorts studied by Moderna are in no way representative of the U.S. population. Most deaths from COVID-19 involve pre-existing health conditions of the types excluded from both Pfizer and Moderna trials.
Translational failure is the failure of the findings of earlier clinical research to generalize to later phases — or to hold up when a product comes to market (Prasad, 2016). This can occur due to use of a pharmaceutical or medical procedure on a group for which safety and efficacy has not been determined.
The public should know that the Moderna trial excluded patients that had evidence of atopy — specifically, urticaria or past incidence of anaphylaxis. To avoid translational failure, these people should be excluded from vaccination on roll-out. Those enrolling in the post-market surveillance studies deserve to know the abject absence of any relevant information on efficacy and risk for them. In their zeal to help humanity, or to help themselves, these people may very well be walking into a situation that will cause autoimmunity due to pathogenic priming (Lyons-Weiler, 2020), potentially leading to disease enhancement should they become infected following vaccination.
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.
Are we at War? This has become a legitimate question over the last 12 months in the western world.
And we are not talking of war by the west against Russia or China, or the east in general. It’s a war of the people against ever-more tyrannical governments around the world, that under the guise of health security against an invisible enemy, called Covid-19 – are repressing people of the entire planet.
When I mention the West, that includes every country that follows the neoliberal economic concept of the west, still led to this date by the United States of America and her subservient allied governments in Europe and Latin America and even in Asia and Oceania. Yes, that also includes Japan, Australia, New Zealand – and to some extent also South Korea.
It’s a people’s war against a nefarious and rapidly all destructive ideology – an ideology that has nothing to do with humanity, that in fact has so far – and way before covid – economically destroyed and debt-enslaved many countries of the Global South by internationally imposed trade policies (by the western created World Trade Organization – WTO) and fiscal policies that serve the western dollar-based fiat economy – imposed out by the IMF and the World Bank.
Now, this Covid-19 “pandemic”, in fact a Plandemic – because it has been planned for decades – has destroyed much more. It destroyed the livelihoods of billions of people, has killed more people from famine, misery, extreme poverty despair and suicide. Yes, there is a rapidly rising curve of suicides, worldwide. And this is only the beginning. – Because there is a different much more gigantic agenda behind covid: It is a crime of epic proportions that is being implemented in front of our eyes.
March 11, 2020
On March 11, 2020, WHO declared covid-19 a pandemic. And that when worldwide cases were only 5095 and deaths 293 (WHO statistics). That is hardly a case for a pandemic. Its rather a Plandemic – a purposefully planned pandemic that subsequently is to justify global lockdowns and the devastating destruction of the world economy, with disastrous human and social consequences – uncountable bankruptcies, hundreds of millions of unemployed – no income, famine, despair – and hopelessness, a vision of no future.
In fact, on or around March 16, 2020, less than a week after WHO’s infamous declaration of Covid-19 as a pandemic, the entire world, all 193 UN member countries plus 3 territories went into total lockdown. There is nowhere to escape.
A coincidence? – Hardly. It is absolutely impossible that a virus strikes the entire world at the same time.
This already indicates that the virus is man-made, most-likely in a US bio-war lab. Other possibilities of the virus’s origins mentioned are the UK and France. There are patents registered for this and other viruses preceding SARS-CoV-2, alias Covid-19.
This is a manufactured crisis that a world authority on health – like the World Health Organization (WHO) has been ordered to help implement, by declaring Covid-19, or SARS-CoV-2, as a pandemic, upon which all country governments have the right to take precautionary measures. The strange thing is that literally every government in the world, except for Sweden and Belarus, and perhaps one or two others have followed strictly the “official narrative”.
Why is that so? – Were they under pressure? – What kind of pressure?
Who are the masters behind WHO, behind the Plandemic?
Are they a few super-rich multi-billionaires – no names shall be mentioned – who have spun a network of collaborators throughout the world’s nations’ governments to make them obedient servants, and if they are not obedient, these governments, there are means to make them obedient?
China
China is also an exception, a different type of exception. China was struck first – not that the virus originated in China – no, in the most likelihood not – but the west may have been interested in observing with what efficiency China will master this maliciously manufactured crisis.
Well, the west had plenty of opportunities to learn from China on how to master this virus with a minimum of casualties and a minimum of economic losses.
But the west didn’t learn anything; or did not want to learn how to deal with this false epidemic efficiently and effectively? – Possibly, because there was and still is a different agenda behind this virus? – Instead of approaching the “crisis” with China-style efficiency, the west predominantly Europe and the US, create wanton confusion, chaos, issue non-sensical rules that change almost by the day – lockdowns, half-lockdowns, curfews – and all the time, or most of the times mask-wearing, always socials distancing, different rules for people’s assemblies – and lots of exceptions.
Then there are allegedly ever-so-often new strains discovered, like in the UK, some say they are highly infectious and deadlier than the original version of covid-19 – and the origin is South Africa – or maybe not. In any case, this new-type corona virus gives good reason for countries to continue locking down and closing borders, to keep their people ever more on a tight rope, ever less freedom – and ever more frustration.
And this, when scientist know and some have revealed, that since the beginning of the covid-19 Plandemic, there have been at least between 10 and 15 mutations. The corona virus mutates as does the flu virus. But these mutations are all more or less equally infectious, or dangerous, the same as with the flu virus.
The Big Picture
Let’s backtrack a bit to understand what was in the making for more than a decade – possibly several decades. But it may be sufficient to go back to 2010 to get a view of the Big Picture – on the basis of which we will understand the diabolical plan that has thrown the world into a chaos, never seen in the current civilization, vastly worse than the 1928 / 29 – 1933 world crisis.
It is important to understand the background and the plan behind this invisible enemy. It breaks every human right, every civil right – and nobody dares to object – because of FEAR, FEAR and FEAR. Fear has become weaponized. Fear is an instrument of war.
FEAR is also the instrument to subdue the world to the begging of a small elite – let’s call them, this commanding elite, the Globalist Cabal, those who aim at creating a One World Order (OWO) – and eventually to control every inch of Mother Earth and of humankind, by total digitization of everything – including the human brain…
That’s why the question: Are we at war? We should be, because we cannot let this happen. We have to resist this monster enslavement of the human population for the benefit of a few inhuman elitists.
Here is a brief summary of key precursors to Covid-19. In 2010 the Rockefeller Foundation issued a Report, simply called the “2010 Rockefeller Report” – May 2010 (until recently this report was available on internet). This report outlines in remarkable details what is happening today and has been happening since the beginning of 2020. It includes several scenarios that are supposed to follow each other.
The first one is called the “Lockstep Scenario”. Exactly. That’s what is happening now. A hapless and clueless world population is thrown from one day to another into a pandemic from which there is no escaping – as all 193 UN members have subscribed to it, or were coerced or bribed into it.
And this shocked world population is behaving in lockstep as they are told to do – by their government masters – isolate, wear masks, separate, live in quarantine – a series of well-thought out anti-social conditions, meant to break society, families and friends apart, and to condition the brain that this will be the new normal. Remember, a society in fear can be easier manipulated.
These measures have nothing to do with protecting peoples’ health. Their purpose is entirely different, as we will see. In fact, science – real science – not bought science – has proven in multiple ways that these measures are more destructive, more harmful than the virus Covid-19 itself – which has a mortality rate similar to that of the annual influenza. See Anthony S. Fauci, Director the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID / NIH – USA), in “Covid-19 – Navigating the Uncharted”, New England Journal of Medicine – NEJM (28 February, 2020).
If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%)…
All of this is happening, I can only repeat – while the world economy is practically coming to a stand still. With uncountable losses – worst off are the people living in the Global South, where up to 70% of labor is informal – no contract, no social safety nets, no social health services – no shelter no food – no hope – and no education for children – no future.
This is the kind of misery this Globalist Cabal has planned and planted upon the world. And, mind you, we are only at the beginning. The Lockstep is just the first of four mind-dumbing scenarios to be implemented over the coming ten years. – If we, the People, humankind – do not stop it. NOW!
The 2010 Rockefeller Report is not all. There were numerous intermediary reports prepared by WHO’s Control Board.
But just a couple of months before the outbreak of the PLANDEMIC, on 18 October 2020, Event 201 took place in NYC. This event was sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (funded by the Rockefeller Foundation), by the World Economic Forum (WEF), and by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
What is the WEF? The WEF was created in 1971 by the German economics Professor Klaus Schwab, as a simple NGO in a suburb of Geneva, Switzerland, to develop rapidly into an international forum for the crème of the crop of Big Busines, Big Finance and Big Fame. Ever since then – with one exception – the WEF’s elite membership met usually in the last week of January in Davos Switzerland – to decide over the “fate of the globe – and over humanity”.
The 2021 WEF meeting, is however, planned for May 2021 in Singapore. – They claim Covid is the reason for the change of venue.
There is an intimidating arrogance with which the WEF make decisions behind closed doors. And the world population never knows what is planned for them – and as we – the people – have been programmed to obey authorities, we go along. Only few of us are questioning ever more grotesque events and occurrences. All of them infringing on our human and civil rights.
When the day comes that we discover that the salami is completely sliced off – I mean, sliced off of human and civil rights – that there is nothing left – it is too late. And that moment is now visible. In other words, it is High Noon to act.
Event 201
Back to Event 201. The key purpose of Event 201 was to computer simulate a pandemic patterned according to the 2002 / 2004 SARS outbreak. They called the new virus SARS-CoV-2. According to computer simulations this pandemic produced 65 million deaths in 18 months, created worldwide economic and social chaos, leaving behind uncountable bankruptcies, billions of people without work, and creating a deadly famine, a massive shortfall of goods and services, including food – and social misery beyond control.
On this website you may find several videos depicting Event 201, as well as some of the discussions that took place during the event.
The Event 201 Conference was attended by everybody who has a name in international public health – FDA, CDC, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID / NIH); in international finance, led by the IMF and the World Bank, key Wall Street bankers, as well as in Big Pharma, for example pharma-industry interest groups, and of course WHO, also UNICEF and other UN agencies – and more.
The original SARS (meaning – Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) broke out also in China, in 2002, in the Guangzhou, Province, from where it spread to 26 other countries and according to WHO (2004) produced worldwide 8,096 cases and 774 deaths, more than 90% of which in China. It is speculated that the first SARS outbreak was a trial for what was to follow 20 years later. There were also other, what we may call, dry-runs for covid-19, not least the “failed” H1N1 Swine Flu which failed to break out as was expected by the organizers.
Isn’t it amazing that just a few weeks after Event 201 the first SARS-CoV-2 case was discovered and reported from Wuhan, China, in late 2019, and in early January 2020? China, prepared and alarmed, recalling the 2002 SARS outbreak, reacted fast, and with systematically organized severe lockdowns mastered the disease within a few months.
After WHO’s declaration of Covid-19 as a pandemic – the entire world went into a lockdown, every country destroying its own socioeconomy, creating economic chaos, bankruptcies, unemployment, poverty and misery – deadly famine, especially in the Global South. How can that happen? What powers must be in play – what rewards or threats issued, so that every country of the planet basically self-destructs in lockstep?
The economic cost of this destruction – destruction of the real economy, can hardly be estimated. The devastation gets worse with every new lockdown, with every new measure of human segregation from society, from the workplace – with new and repeated closings of vital businesses – possible recovery of the economy is ever more difficult. Most small businesses will be gone forever. According to some estimates up to a third of the World’s GDP has already been wiped out.
And a good portion of these losses has been monetized and syphoned off and up into the pockets of a few billionaires, wo increased their riches in the 3 months from March to May 2020 by 20%. Imagine! Wile at the same time the International Labor Office estimates unemployment reaching close to 50% of the worlds ’entire labor force, most of it in the Global South.
When one sees the precursors to this covid-19 – which has in the meantime many strains, several mutations – one cannot but understand that there are “superior forces” behind it. There is an agenda way beyond Covid-19. This virus, invisible enemy, is just a convenient – and a truly clever – instrument to carry out worldwide restructuring of society, of our civilization of values that we have created over the years – good ones and bad ones.
Here is when the Great Reset sets in. That’s what the WEF calls it. The IMF, working in unison with the WEF, calls it the Great Restructuring.
“Covid-19 – The Great Reset” (July 2020), was written by Klaus Schwab, founder and CEO of the WEF, and his associate Thierry Malleret. Schwab calls the pandemic “a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.” – at the outset, it sounds like a good idea – bringing more equality, justice, a cleaner environment and finally peace to our world. Sounds like a dream.
But when you read the book, and read between the lines, it shows that the Reset means more power to the elite – a GLOBALIST and ever richer elite, that is steering the world’s nations – still to some extent sovereign nations – towards a global One World Order (OWO), to be managed through one gigantic global government.
Capitalism, now with a “black” economy – because of our primordial use of hydrocarbons (90+% of all energy), is to be turned into a Green capitalism. Meaning: The capitalist model will be maintained, even enhanced; hydrocarbons will be used to make so-called “green” energy – wind, solar, tidal power. These machineries and mechanisms are created with hydrocarbons.
As an example, we have today electric cars. Where do you think Tesla and consortia get their electric energy from? – It is at least 80% hydrocarbon or nuclear-generated electricity.
So, when you compare energy efficiency of an electric car and a conventional car, on average, the electric car is about 35% energy efficient, while the conventional car about 75%. This does not even account for the environmental and social damage that takes place to mine lithium, the base raw material for the batteries, as well as the rare earths metals used for the cars sophisticated electronics – and being mined largely in Central Africa under the most inhuman work conditions, including with massive child labor. This socio-environmental cost is simply shoved off as an economic “externality”.
That’s what Green Capitalism is all about. Pushing the so-called New Green Deal – basically painting capitalism green – is an important objective of the Great Reset – and, by the way, of the new Globalist Jo Biden US Administration.
An alternative would be for countries joining together, investing massively into research for new renewable energies, for example, more efficient solar energy – i.e., through photo synthesis.
Another objective of the Great Reset is outright digitization of everything. Algorithms and robots will control our lives. Money – cash – as we know it, will disappear – is already in the process of disappearing. By digitizing the money that we earn and hold in (bank) accounts, we are vulnerable. Depending on our “behavior” – whether we are obedient and submissive to the going dictatorial narrative – we may be allowed to use our earned monetary resources – or not.
It gets better. – In October 2020, the WEF issued a so-called White Paper entitled “Resetting the Future of Work Agenda – in a Post-Covid World”.
This 31-page document reads like a blueprint on how to “execute” – or implement – “The Great Reset”. The “White Paper” means it’s a draft, like a trial balloon to measure people’s reactions.
It reads indeed like an executioner’s tale. Many people may not read it – have no awareness of its existence. If they did, they would go up in arms and fight this latest totalitarian blueprint, offered to the world by the WEF.
Itpromises a horrifying future to some 80%-plus of the (surviving) population.
The Great Reset is to be executed according to the UN Agenda 21-30, meaning in ten years. The WEF outlines some 8 basic predictions, most of them linked to digitization and global control. But the last one is hilarious – “You own nothing and are happy.”
Now, contrary to what Klaus Schwab pretends – namely that the pandemic is a window of opportunity for the Great Reset – it is the other way around – the covid epidemic had to be invented, planned and implanted to allow The Great Reset to become a plan. We can only hope and act against it – hopefully not to come to fruition.
In addition to robotizing and electronically enslaving humanity, without most of humanity noticing, the Plandemic is also stealing our health, making it one of the most profitable commodities this civilization has ever known.
Just imagine – the idea is to vaccinate the world’s 7 billion-plus people within less than ten years. Only then can we move “freely” again. That’s the idea, already being floated around by many governments, especially in the west.
That’s the kind of policies the Global Cabal orders government leaders to implement, pretending that only when we are all vaccinated, freedom will return. Except that by then we are totally controlled and freedom is just a lame word from a defunct dictionary. In the meantime, Big Pharma makes trillions and trillions of dollars with Our Health – by stealing and commoditizing it.
Who would have thought, less than 12 months ago, that less than a year later we are literally living in a world tyranny? – And that we seem to be subdued and powerless against these also invisible Global Cabalists?
Will we let it happen?
Do we want to live in a New Technological World, a technocracy – to be terrorized, tyrannized and digitized?
Earlier I said – no names shall be mentioned. Yet, I would like to mention one name: Bill Gates.
Beware!
Why is BILL GATES Buying ALL the Farmland?
Our war is about:
Are we letting ourselves be pulled into this subversive World of Tyranny or do we opt for an open and transparent World of Freedom?
*
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.
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).
Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Multiple local, state and federal agencies are investigating the Jan. 21 death of a California man several hours after receiving the COVID vaccine.
Placer County Sheriff’s office said in a Jan. 23 Facebook post that agencies are “actively investigating this case.” They also mentioned that the man had tested positive for COVID in December. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that individuals who have already had COVID and fully recovered should still get vaccinated.
As of Jan. 15, 181 deaths have been reported to the U.S.government’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System as possibly being related to COVID vaccines. A 2010 study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services concluded that “fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries” are reported to VAERS and experts say the government’s reporting system is “broken.”
Earlier this month, The Defender reported on the death of a 56-year-old doctor 15 days after receiving the Pfizer vaccine, and on numerous deaths among the elderly in Norway and Germany.
Meanwhile reports of injuries continue to surface in the media, including an article in the Jerusalem Post about a 17-year-old who was hospitalized in the intensive care unit after receiving the second dose of a COVID vaccine. Hospital officials told the Post they did not believe the boy’s illness was related to the vaccine.
Dr. Anthony Fauci told reporters last week that he was “knocked out” after receiving the second dose of the vaccine, but says he feels fine now. Fauci received the first dose of the Moderna vaccine in December on live television to boost the public’s confidence in the vaccine.
The CDC reported 21 cases of anaphylaxis in people who received the COVID vaccine between Dec. 14 – 23, and another 10 between Dec. 23 – Jan. 10. Anaphylaxis is a life-threatening allergic reaction.
Last week, The Defender reported that allergic reactions had caused California health officials to hit pause on a large batch of Moderna vaccines. A few days later, Moderna said it was okay to resume using that batch.
Today, multiple news outlets reported that Merck has ended its COVID-19 vaccine program after early trial data showed the vaccine maker’s two experimental vaccines failed to generate immune responses comparable to a natural infection or existing vaccines. Bloomberg reported:
“The U.S. drug giant, which has a history of successfully developing vaccines, had adopted a different strategy from rivals Pfizer Inc., Moderna Inc. and Johnson & Johnson, using a more traditional approach of focusing on shots based on weakened viruses.”
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.
Wearing ‘the mask’ is for those who suffer feelings of fear and/or guilt. Think about it.
One might reject such a notion “No, no, I’m just worried about being fined, that’s why I wear it”. Or “I don’t want to take any risks, the health authorities wouldn’t tell us to wear masks unless there was some protection benefit.”
Are these valid responses? Both are based primarily on fear. Fear of what an authority might do if one was to disobey the rules, and fear of sickness should one not follow the authorities’ instructions.
But who are ‘the authorities?’ And are their demands backed by empirical evidence that the wearing of a mask is a proven defence against infection by Covid? Will our mask wearer ask these questions? And if not – why not?
“Well, I do wonder what it’s all about – but there doesn’t seem to be much point in questioning it, does there.”
Right, in effect this is an admission of intellectual laziness coupled with an egregious obedience to the commands of ‘the authority’. This is the state of mind of those unwilling to think for themselves.
Allowing one’s self to be herded because one does not want to question the command, is a psychological sickness which presents an open book for the unchecked spread of fascistic authoritarianism.
I wonder how the same person would react if told to crawl to the shops on hands and knees, because ‘the authority’ said that these particularly pathogens only travel at head height?
Let us go back a few steps and imagine, for a moment, that this person has just enough suspicion concerning the motives of ‘the authority’ to check the medical records for evidence that the mask actually works.
Let’s see what the reaction is upon discovering that there is no evidence existing which confirms health protection is achieved – and that includes for the vaccine – but that there is evidence of health risks associated with extensive mask wearing.
What does our fellow human being do then?
“Yes, I saw that, but everyone else is wearing them – and, well, I don’t want to upset others by not wearing it..”
So now we must add ‘deference to other herded humans’ to the growing list of reasons for not taking control of one’s destiny, but instead, lowering one’s head and running with the crowd.
Being led and not knowing where one is being led, but ‘trusting’ that it is somehow going to be OK. Better not rock the boat. Everyone else is masking-up, why be ‘different’?
Why not be different?
“I don’t want to draw attention to myself, you know, and then it’s being responsible to wear the mask, to show you wouldn’t want to infect anyone else.”
Yes, the contradictions implicit in this false logic are blatant. You know the masks don’t work; are likely to make you sick; cost money; are supposed to be frequently changed; washed, dried, disinfected – and so on – but nevertheless you feel you must wear one – because ‘that’s the only responsible thing to do’ and everyone else is doing it..
Is this the final curtain-call for a significant number of the supposedly sentient cognitive species known as homo sapiens?
I don’t know about you, but I feel a pit in my stomach seeing so many fellow humans behaving like lemmings.
I like to see the human face. Not all are pretty, but each is different and expresses character. So what to feel when confronted by herds of bank robbers marching towards one with more than half their faces masked-over?
I look at their eyes, because that’s the only animated bit left visible. What do I see in these eyes? Predominately I see fear and surrender.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s guilt, maybe shame. Maybe in some cases, a certain sick kind of pleasure – like with some young people “Why do I wear it? It’s cool, something different, you can get some funky designer masks – quite distinctive. Yea, nice.”
Do you believe it works?
“Sure, it works if you feel it works; kind of protection against others isn’t it..”
Sure it is, youthful narcissist. Protection against others – sure – sick people everywhere, got to protect yourself; survival of the fittest – let’s not take risks.
But mostly I see fear and guilt in the eyes of masked men and women. I see a coward, peering out into the world and trying to look and be ‘normal’. That infamous word ‘normal’. Yes, the ‘New Normal’ as announced by Klaus Shwab of the World Economic Forum. Mein Herr ‘Great Reset’, totalitarian pseudo-visionary of a fascist nightmare.
He must be pleased, so many people behaving ‘properly’, getting adapted to fitting into his New Normal. Silent cyborgs, lost and anxious, but still managing to keep up the appearance of ‘normality’.
So determined not to think, not stand-out from the crowd. Cannon fodder for the Zero Carbon Smart City, Green New Deal, New World Order prison camps of tomorrow.
A future specially constructed for the walking dead, minds gone to waste from lack of use, plugged into a state of the art computer so the act of thinking can be done for them by the master programmer.
A sub-human race sold out to the machines it made to relieve it of the need to think. Is that the future I see in the introverted eyes of the masochistic mask wearer? Do people subconsciously want to suffer? Is this a remnant of the Christian doctrine that one must suffer atonement for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ?
Whatever the cause, it is for those who have meekly detoured from walking the path of life in favour of stepping onto the conveyor belt of a cyborgian slave cult.
In the midst of these most virulent and dark deceptions pulled on humanity, there is but one recourse that will bring back the light: having the courage to totally reject this state of mindless obedience – which has got a large segment of humanity into an unprecedented and abject state of spiritual poverty.
Finding a sufficiency of ‘fire within’ to burn-off the dead corpuscles of self afflicted conformity – that is the call. To bravely reject ‘the great lie’ currently running riot in all corners of the world.
Save yourselves. De-mask – return to humanity – and stand firm for truth, good people of Planet Earth!
*
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.
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
Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov held his annual press conference last week reviewing his country’s foreign policy over the preceding year, the top two dozen highlights of which are touched upon in this analysis for those who don’t have the time to read the full transcript from this lengthy event.
***
Keeping with tradition, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov held his annual press conference last week reviewing his country’s foreign policy over the preceding year. The transcript from this extended event was shared on his Ministry’s official website, but it’s extremely long so it’s understandable why many people might not have read it. For that reason, the present article touches upon the top two dozen highlights by presenting a paraphrased summary of the most important points followed by the actual words that he said. This will hopefully enlighten the largest number of people possible about how Russia’s top diplomat views some of the most pressing issues of the day.
Russia Is Ready To Cooperate With The Whole World On Vaccines:
“We reiterate what President of Russia Vladimir Putin said in August 2020 when announcing the registration of the world’s first coronavirus vaccine: we are wide open to cooperation in these matters. We had a positive response to the proposals that the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) had made to its foreign partners with regard to organising licensed production. This topic is being discussed with our colleagues in Asia, the Arab East, Africa and Latin America.”
Some Countries Tried To Exploit The Pandemic For Political Purposes:
“Some of our Western colleagues, primarily the United States and its closest allies, tried to take advantage of the situation and to ratchet up pressure, blackmail, ultimatums and illegitimate actions while introducing unilateral restrictions and other forms of interference in the internal affairs of many countries, including our closest neighbour Belarus.”
The West’s Insistence On Continuing Unilateral Sanctions Made Life Worse For So Many People:
“The West unanimously ignored the calls by the UN Secretary General and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to suspend, at least for the duration of the pandemic, unilateral and illegitimate sanctions regarding the supply of medications, food and equipment needed to fight the virus while Russia was ready to back up this approach.”
The EU Wants To Monopolize, and Consequently Weaponize, The Concept Of Multilateralism:
“One of the manifestations of these rules on which the West would like to establish a new international order is the concept of multilateralism, which our German and French colleagues have started promoting in the past two years. The descriptions of this concept in the public statements of the German and French foreign ministers make it very clear that the EU wants to present itself and everything it does as a foreign policy ideal. The EU views the establishment of specific rules as its exclusive right in the belief that all others must follow these standards. Examples are many.”
Russia Is Deeply Concerned About The Emergence Of “Technological Empires” Run By “Half A Dozen People”:
“There are situations where half a dozen people that have created their own technological empires do not even want to know what rights they have in their own states. They determine their rights themselves proceeding from so-called corporate standards and completely ignore the constitutions of their states. We have seen this clearly in the US and this is a source of deep concern. Much has been said about this recently in television reports and special analytical materials.”
Russia Is Ready To Clarify All Conspiracy Theories That It’s Accused Of:
“Russia strives to act as constructively as possible in the international arena. We are convinced that we must sit down and discuss all existing grievances rather than wrangle with each other. We have always been ready to do so: back when Russia was accused of “interference” in the US elections, in Barcelona, during Brexit, the Skripal case, the Malaysian Boeing, which was shot down over Ukraine in July 2014, and with regard to Alexey Navalny.”
The Greater Eurasian Partnership Remains One Of President Putin’s Foreign Policy Priorities:
“President Putin’s initiative, which we are promoting, is to form the Greater Eurasian Partnership that is open to all Eurasian countries without exception by way of an equal collective dialogue. This covers the EU countries along with the EAEU, the SCO and ASEAN members. Generally speaking, it covers countries that are not part of any regional organisations, but are located in Eurasia.”
Russia’s Relations With Italy Are Among The Best That It Has In Europe:
“Relations between Russia and Italy are good. Italy is one of those EU countries that follow the discipline and principles of solidarity in the EU, but that still do not consider it appropriate to take an aggressive position against the Russian Federation. Conscientiously, in joining the consensus on certain sanctions, Italy does not consider them to be effective tools for influencing anyone, in this case the Russian Federation. Not without objections from Brussels, Italy insists on its right to develop bilateral relations with Russia and does so sincerely.”
The Lack Of Press Freedom In The Baltics Is Unacceptable:
“Whenever we have incontestable and hard facts that freedom of the media has been flagrantly violated coupled with threats to bring criminal charges, the mechanisms existing in the UN human rights formats – and there are plenty of speakers there reporting on various aspects of human rights violations; they have the Commissioner for Human Rights at the Council of Europe and the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media – cannot justify what they are doing to you. Quite a few incidents like this happen now and then in the neighbouring Baltic States.”
Big Tech’s Censorship Spree “Tramples” On The US’ International Information-Related Obligations:
“Access to information is provided for by the numerous decisions of the OSCE. It is guaranteed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This principle of access to information was recently trampled underfoot in the United States to the accompaniment of perplexed silence or indistinct comments by US allies. Now attempts are being made to hush it all up by saying that Donald Trump’s Facebook account has been restored (but not his Tweeter account). But this is not about Trump but about the big failure of the state to comply with its commitments to ensure access to information.”
The US’ New Foreign Policy Team Won’t Really Change Much Of Anything:
“In brief – we do not expect any radical changes. However, the methods of promoting US “leadership” will be somewhat different.”
There’s A Possibility, However Faint, Of A Thaw In Russian-American Relations:
“When Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Joe Biden on his victory in the presidential election, he reaffirmed our commitment to cooperation with the United States on all issues of mutual interest and importance for the world. This can be interpreted as invitation to dialogue. The most important thing is that our proposals on cybersecurity and on investigations into our alleged interference in US affairs, as well as on space projects and arms control, are on the table. As recently as in September 2020, President Putin publicly invited the United States – not President Trump or anyone else, but the United States as a power which, we hope, has retained at least a degree of respect for continuity and compliance with foreign policy agreements – to reboot our relations in the sphere of cybersecurity and non-intervention into internal affairs of each other.”
Russian-Chinese Relations Soar To New Heights As The Eurasian Union & BRI Continue To Align:
“We are cooperating within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and BRICS. The People’s Republic of China and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) have signed a cooperation agreement. We are aligning integration within the EAEU and China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Last December, we signed a protocol on extending the agreement on notification of the launch of ballistic missiles and space carrier rockets for another 10 years. Also in December 2020, the Chinese Air Force and the Russian Aerospace Forces conducted the second joint patrol mission over the Sea of Japan and East China Sea. This is evidence of the trust-based and forward-looking nature of Russian-Chinese relations and our mutual commitment to maintaining stability in the Asia-Pacific region.”
The US Has An International Legal Responsibility To Rein In Big Tech:
“The Helsinki Final Act and an entire series of OSCE documents (the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, the Charter for European Security adopted in Istanbul in 1999) say that every person has the right to freely express their opinion. This right includes the freedom to search, receive and distribute various kinds of information and ideas regardless of state borders, by mouth, in writing, using the press, creative forms of expression or other means. ‘Other means’ meant the visionary prediction that social networks would appear. There is no exception to this. It is said that each person has the right to access information. The state signed under it. So, claiming that Google, Facebook, YouTube and other corporations have no responsibilities is childish nonsense. The state has to assume responsibly for them, and if they misbehave, the state must bring them to order and to its legal obligations.”
The US Believes That Neo-Nazis Have The Right To Freedom Of Speech Under The First Amendment:
“Speaking of the freedom of speech. Every year, the UN General Assembly at our initiative adopts a resolution on inadmissibility of glorification of Nazism and other forms of racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia, and the US votes against it saying that the voting for prohibiting neo-Nazi movements is a violation of the First Amendment. They state this openly.”
The Navalny Incident Is Artificially Being Exploited In The Foreign Policy Domain:
“A foreign policy aspect has been added to the Navalny case artificially and without any justification. Everything associated with his return and detainment is the competence of the law enforcement authorities. There is a detailed statement by the Federal Penitentiary Service, which provides facts and violations and explains why the complaints have been put forth. This is not something that can be placed on the Foreign Ministry’s doorstep. The matter concerns compliance with Russian laws.”
The Final Political Status Of Nagorno-Karabakh Will Be Decided Later:
“Exactly because the problem of the status of Nagorno-Karabakh is controversial, if we take the positions of Yerevan and Baku, the three leaders decided to leave it be for future consideration.”
Russia Is Optimistic That Ties With Greece & Cyprus Will Survive American Pressure:
“I have recently visited Greece and Cyprus. Moreover, I have recently talked with Foreign Minister of Cyprus Nikos Christodoulides by telephone. I can see no reason why these countries should be persuaded that Russia is an enemy of theirs or has carried out an unfriendly policy towards them. Someone is trying to convince them, but politicians with common sense can see the whole truth: that they are only trying to make an enemy out of the Russian Federation and saying that our presence in the Balkans prevents these countries from moving into NATO, hinders their Euro-Atlantic integration. There is no diplomacy here, only crude public leverage. Not everyone in such countries as Cyprus and Greece can publicly respond to such battle cries because they are scared to offend “Big Brother.” There is no underlying enmity between anyone in Russia, Greece and Cyprus.”
Moscow Is Confident That New Delhi’s Indo-Pacific Policy Will Remain Positive And Constructive:
“I know that in India this issue is very actively discussed. And I know that India is not going to move this Indo-Pacific cooperation in a way that would be not positive and not constructive. I say so in much detail because some of my previous statements on this issue have been widely discussed in the Indian media which I believe is not very friendly towards the Indian government, but we don’t want any misunderstanding with our friends, the Indian people: we are friends with India. We are doing our utmost to make sure that India and China, our two great friends and brothers, live in peace with one another.”
Russian-Chinese Military Cooperation Isn’t “Spearheaded” At Japan:
“Touching upon the military situation in the region, it is true that Russia and China are working together, including in the form of military exercises. Russian-Chinese military exercises are nothing new at all. We have held several army exercises within the framework of the SCO and at the bilateral level. We have held joint exercises of our aerospace forces. They are not spearheaded at Japan but are held to check the combat readiness of our air forces, which are guarding the safety of Russian and Chinese borders. What is threatening them? There are quite a few threats, including the one you have mentioned, the US plans to deploy ballistic missile defence systems and ground-launched medium and shorter-range missiles, which were prohibited by a treaty from which Washington has withdrawn, in Japan and South Korea.”
Russia Is Disappointed With The UK’s Double Standards Towards The Malvinas/Falklands & Crimea:
“The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland insisted very sternly that the residents of the Islas Malvinas (that London calls the Falkland Islands) have a right to self-determination. We reminded the UK’s representatives about this when they became overexcited about the March 2014 referendum in Crimea. We asked them whether the Islas Malvinas, located 10,000 miles away from the UK, had the right to self-determination, and whether the people of Crimea who have been part of this country all their life were denied this right. The answer was very simple; they replied that these were two different matters. Let this rest with their conscience.”
Implementing The Minsk Accords Is The Only Solution To The Ukrainian Civil War:
“In our opinion, the only way out is to implement the Minsk agreements.”
Russia Can’t Militarily Expel The US From Syria, All That It Can Do Is Promote De-Confliction:
“Yes, we maintain contacts between the military with the United States but we are not doing this because we recognise the legitimacy of their presence there but simply because the United States must act within certain boundaries. We cannot expel it, and we will not clash with US forces. Now that US forces are deployed there, we are conducting a dialogue with US representatives on so-called deconfliction.”
Russia Will Swiftly Neutralize All Security Threats To “Israel” Coming From Syria Upon Tel Aviv’s Request:
“To our Israeli colleagues: please notify us immediately of any facts that a threat to your state emanates from some part of Syrian territory. We will act to neutralise this threat. So far, we have received no specific reply to this appeal, but we continue to press the point.”
MAGA Is Facing Persecution In Biden’s America:
“We have already spoken, in part, about this subject. As for whether this is reminiscent of anything to me, I will not answer this question, because this may be reminiscent of different things to different people. There have been different periods and forms of persecution in different periods of human history. I don’t think people can easily forget this. Although people tend to have a short memory, we have history textbooks and we must teach historical truth to our young people. Otherwise, future generations may decide that there has never been anything apart from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other platforms, which have a monopoly on the truth. Like all other normal people, I take no pleasure in watching problems come to a head in the United States.”
Uncontrollable Big Tech Liberals Are Meddling More Abroad Than The American Government Is:
“During the past few years President Donald Trump has been saying that there would be no wars during his term. No new wars have been launched indeed. But US interference in the internal affairs of others went on very energetically. The physical methods of interference are giving way to interference through social media. Reliance on NGOs and the nursing of opposition forces loyal to the West are complemented with a dramatic increase in the power of social media and their capabilities. The American state is now facing the issue of whether they should be taken under control or left with regulation “standards” based on the liberal ideology and world outlook.”
America’s Massive Mail-In Voting Was Plagued With Serious Problems:
“Many people are talking now about the things that were obvious from the very beginning but have been glossed over. Two months before the actual election day, ballot papers were mailed to voters in several states for casting postal votes. They mailed 95 million ballots. Two-thirds of them turned out to be filled in prior to the election day. One-third of the ballots were not completed despite aggressive encouragement. This campaign of forcing people to cast their ballots by postal vote did not fit in with the US election standards. When both candidates got more than 40 percent of the vote, postal voting became a serious problem.”
*
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.
This article was originally published on OneWorld.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
A nursing home run by Rock County is receiving significant pushback after mandating its employees receive the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine regimen or face layoff.
Officials at Rock Haven issued a memo on December 23 informing workers that reception of the vaccine was “a requirement for all staff” and those who did not comply would be laid off for failing to “perform the essential functions of the job.”
The memo went on to explain a laid-off employee “will not be allowed to return to work until they have completed the COVID-19 vaccine series.”
The initial session scheduled by the nursing home to conduct the first of a two-shot regimen was January 5. After declining to show up for the injection, registered nurse Terra Anderson was let go from her job.
In short order, she received a letter dated January 6 that informed her she had been laid off for her “inability to meet the essential functions of your job; failure to complete the Covid-19 vaccine as scheduled.”
A report from local Channel3000 indicated that “nearly a dozen” employees have been forced out of their jobs because of this policy.
Speaking to The Gazette under the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation, one employee said that though he or she is scheduled to receive the first dose of the Moderna regimen in February, they would like to refuse it. The employee also explained that 27 other workers at the nursing home this month had sent the county’s Health Services Committee letters explaining their objections to the vaccination mandate.
The concerns included how this biological agent, which was rushed through development and testing, may have dangerous, unknown long-term effects.
Others expressed worries about it effecting their pregnancy or fertility.
Michelle Lynch, a secretary at Rock Haven, reported that staff “are having side effects” from the first injection, “and they’re being told, ‘Too bad,’” she said.
Letters to Rock County supervisors revealed that two employees reported suffering “high fevers and other side effects from getting the vaccine on Jan. 5.” In one case, “the side effects were so bad” the employee “had to go to the doctor and was advised not to get the second shot of the vaccine.”
According to reports, officials from Walgreens and CVS, the two main pharmacy chains conducting vaccinations, long-term care employees have been “much more reluctant than residents to get the vaccine.”
Estimates from the American Health Care Association (AHCA) is that around 50 percent of long-term care staff are declining the injections.
“We’re having a real challenge with staff,” said Mark Parkinson, president and CEO of AHCA. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there. There are rampant rumors spreading on social media that the vaccine can cause fertility problems, which has caused concerns among many of the young women that work in our facilities.”
Contrary to Parkinson’s characterization, the UK government issued a 10-page report late last year that warned these biological agents should not be used by pregnant or breast-feeding mothers. With regard to their impact on fertility, the report simply states it is “unknown whether COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 has an impact on fertility.”
Therefore, according to the UK government, mandating young women receive these injections requires them to gamble with their fertility in order to keep their job.
Safety concerns with these biological agents also include “allergic” and “potentially fatal reactions,” that they may actually cause an increased vulnerability to the virus, and that, indeed, worries over long-term effects remain legitimate as these chemicals lack proper testing.
In addition, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration also drew up a document this fall listing the possible side-effects from a COVID-19 vaccine, including strokes, encephalitis, auto-immune disease, birth defects, Kawasaki disease, and death.
Current reports reveal that hundreds of individuals injected with these chemicals have been admitted to the hospital, and the shots have so far been linked to at least 55 deaths in the United States.
With regard to the elderly, a report on one nursing home in Auburn, New York, asserts that they had no coronavirus deaths at the facility at all until seven days after they began administering the vaccine. In a period of less than two weeks, beginning December 29, the “24 coronavirus-infected residents at the 300-bed nursing home” had died.
Earlier this month, the Norwegian Medicines Agency reported that 23 people died within days of receiving the first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, 13 of whom were nursing home patients.
As a result, health experts from China called for Norway and other countries to suspend the use of mRNA vaccines, as currently produced by Moderna and Pfizer, especially among the elderly.
In response to the outcry from Rock Haven employees, several county board members indicated they plan to challenge the policy during their board meeting on January 28.
“I think we’re going to have to look at this real hard at the next county board meeting,” said Supervisor Brian Knudson, who also chairs Rock County’s Human Services Board. “I don’t think it’s fair to proceed laying off people. That’s not right.”
County Chairman Rich Bostwick said if the rule is challenged, a new rule could be passed in its place with a simple majority agreement from county supervisors.
In anticipation of this moral question, Dr. Joseph Meaney, president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, affirmed in July that informed consent is not even possible for the new biological agents since long-term effects remain unknown due to the lack of extended testing. Thus, any use of coercion of persons to take such a vaccine, including making it a requirement for employment, remains “ethically unacceptable.”
*
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.
Tortilla con Sal: What is your perception of the seriousness of the problem of the intrusion of outsiders into indigenous lands, in your case of the Mayangna people?
Arisio Genaro Celso: We need to go back a bit to the past, to remember some negative actions generated by past governments. To explain this simple situation. Bearing in mind, for example, this problem of the invasion of mestizo settlers from the Pacific, towards our lands in the Caribbean, indigenous lands, above all land of the Mayangna and Miskito, but especially the Mayangna, because the Bosawas Reserve is located inside, the Bosawas Reserve is within Mayangna territories because these have been our ancestral lands.
TcS: Does that include Miskito or Afro-descendant land?
Arisio: More Miskito, we have… there are, for example, the limits of the Mayangna territory border with the Miskito territory, but the problem of invasion is not between indigenous people, it is not between Miskitos and Mayangnas. It is more to do with mestizos coming from the Pacific. Why do I want to mention this? in order to go back to the 90’s, to the government of Arnoldo Alemán. Arnoldo Alemán at the time was the one who promoted most, started and promoted the issue of what we call colonization by mestizos of the Caribbean, with the purpose of destabilizing the whole Autonomy project, which was being developed at that time. The Liberals then, led by Arnoldo Alemán, wanted a strategy, and the only way to disappear the Autonomy project in the Caribbean was to invade the Caribbean Coast with a mestizo population. And via that mestizo population take over indigenous lands so as to have control, most especially at election time, so that they would be favored with the votes of the mestizo settlers they were locating in those indigenous territories. I remember at the time the Nicaraguan army once detained about eight or ten trucks belonging to Liberal municipal authorities, full of mestizo people whom the Alemán government was sending to take over the lands on the Caribbean Coast.
Because the problem was also that back then, they made an interpretation and decided that the Caribbean Coast lands were national lands. There in itself was the question of recognition of the culture of the original peoples, we the Mayangna, for example, and the Miskitos too, traditionally ordered the territories into hunting areas, reproduction areas, artisanal mining areas, production areas, fishing areas, that is the way they have been ordered. So for example…
TcS: As part of the autonomy process?
Arisio: Before that. Before that. That has been the way the territories have been organized. With the Autonomy process, this was reinforced. The issue of ordering the territories well was reinforced. Prior to this, also talking about the years of 1979 after the Revolution, the indigenous peoples also knew their limits, where they could go hunting, where they could not go to cut down trees, because there were already large wooded areas or areas for the reproduction of bird species. So that area was taken care of. So for the mestizo culture of the Pacific, at that time, the people who arrived there said “There are 1200 manzanas of land but nobody lives there”. For them, it was understood that they were national lands, because nobody lived there, however those were areas, territories belonging to the indigenous peoples where they went to hunt, they went to….
TcS: And they were also protected areas…?
Arisio: Correct. Those are protected areas, reserves, historically they are preserved. If you notice, the great Natural Reserve in Nicaragua is in the indigenous territories. For example, the Bosawas Reserve is in our Mayangna territories, which our ancestors, our forebears, our grandparents have been taking care of for generations. Because conservation is also part of the culture. For example, in our culture before, if a boy came and cut down a tree and left it lying down and did not use it, the community was punished. This is a rule designed to protect. In this way, values of protection and conservation of the environment and natural resources were instilled in our communities. Then, from that time on, the issue of the invasion of indigenous lands towards the Caribbean Coast began, that process started in the ’90s, in the time of Arnoldo Alemán when he was in the government.
TcS: Not with Violeta?
Arisio: No, with Arnoldo Alemán. Although in Doña Violeta’s time, they also set up kind of land banks to locate some of the Nicaraguan Resistance.
Eloy Frank Gomez: Permit me to say, first, we, the Mayangna People, are organized at the communal level, at the territorial level and the structure of the Mayangna Nation of which the compañero is President, and myself as Secretary. We represent nine territories, of which four territories are located within the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve, and five are outside the area of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve.
What I want to say is that before 1990, we lived in our communities. We did not need to have documents. But with time from ’90 around the time of the government of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, we, the Mayangna vision is to live in nature, to live with the relationship between nature and living beings. Life was in the land, rivers and forests. But for them, their interest was power.
They made commitments with their people and at that time in the ’90s, they began to organize what they called development poles, without thinking about where, they had no lands there but they sent people on to our lands. On seeing that situation, we the Mayangna Nation organized to seek the title of communal property of the nine territories. Today, after 2007 with the arrival to power of our Commander Daniel, we have achieved the titling of our lands, an area of 8,101 square kilometers, titled and the title handed over by our Comandante Daniel to the communities.
So what happened earlier? As our president just explained, in that period of 15 years, the time of Violeta, the time of Arnoldo Alemán, the time of Enrique Bolaños, there they began promoting the invasion of our lands. But nowadays, we are able to enjoy this space, where we always historically lived with the land, today we have problems because as I was saying we have artisanal mining areas. But those areas, we, as our people use to survive for example at Christmas time, people work there but in an artisanal way, it was not on the scale of large exports but rather to solve basic needs.
Now, when they realize that, then other people, other peoples, in this case the mestizos, are now trying to take over. They go there because there are rivers, there is forest, there is gold, there is wood. We do not live off the export of wood, our life has been agriculture to feed our families, or hunting, fishing.
But now invasion is everywhere, the rivers are drying up, the rivers are drying up adn our anxiety if for our government to sustain its interest in maintaining the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve, we all have to unite here at the level of the municipal and regional authorities.
On the other hand, we accuse the invaders, because these people are not poor people. They are individuals who have money and they send their people. They are not being sent by the government because there they not only clear land for pasture but rather they are like traffickers, land traffickers. They come in, they sell.
We don’t have resources ourselves because those resources are there, we live with nature. But these people set out boundaries, and then they sell….
TcS: How can they sell if they don’t have title? You have the title. So how can you sell it?
Eloy: That is why I said traffickers, mafia, because sometimes they go armed. For example, there some documents came to light claiming in such and such an area, but they are not in that area, rather they are inside Bosawas, with a rubric that might say Kukalaya, for example, with an area of such and such, but it is not in Kukalaya, instead it’s in Bosawas. So there are various documents. There are forged documents, with forged signatures of the authorities.
We don’t believe our government is doing that, because we have seen at various times how, rather, it has restored our right to property with title deeds. What happens is that people manipulate things and go out in the media to blame the government. We are convinced that it is not like that, rather it’s the other way around and they want to take advantage of this situation for their political aspirations.
Arisio: It’s worth highlighting some elements, elements of judgment on this issue, as the Secretary says…. It is necessary to see the situation of land trafficking from different perspectives as well. For example, the vision of our people and our communities, is one of respect, of coexistence, of harmonious relationship between the indigenous Mayangna and nature. Someone said to me, “Where do you Mayangnas have your pharmacy? Our pharmacies are the large natural reserves in the mountains, those are our pharmacies. However, in today’s situation, with the large clearings that settlers are causing in the indigenous territories, they are also exterminating that material, those resources that we have, that natural pharmacy our communities have, that we have, that we have lived historically from traditional medicine, from the knowledge, from the wisdom of our culture. So, the culture of conservation, as I was saying, has been with us over time, for many generations.
However, another perspective on the issue means looking at several elements. One is organized crime, because organized crime is fully involved in this issue of usurpation of indigenous property, trafficking of indigenous lands, even the sale of the wealth of indigenous lands. Apart from that, there are also armed groups, armed delinquents who come to harass, threaten the community members and dispossess the communities of their lands. We have this situation too.
Then again, there are political operators. For example, there have been episodes of incidents in some Mayangna and Miskito indigenous territories and there were also deaths in our indigenous territories because of the land issue. The settlers invading the lands, killing indigenous people.
But when we did some work on that and we realized that those who were behind this were regional councilors of Yatama, Yatama mayors, and even some of them, we could even say weredeputies of Yatama, also involved in the sale of indigenous lands. The community members didn’tt know, the mestizos came in big numbers, families after families entering indigenous territories, for example in the area of the Rio Coco.
In certain areas of our communities in the Bosawas Reserve, which borders with Miskito land, many mestizo settlers came to enter our Mayangna lands. But how? Through these sales authorized by politicians from Yatama.
And another issue that is precisely well known, it’s no secret is that the Liberal mayors and municipalities with mayors opposed to the government also promoted land trafficking, even financed organized groups, armed groups to invade indigenous lands and to dispossess the indigenous people of their lands. There is evidence of that.
We have spent years following this situation. And we know for example that in El Cuá and in San José de Bocay, the mayor in San José de Bocay, where there is a Mayangna territory, which was invaded and financed by the mayor who was at that time a Liberal. He financed the groups, that mayor. And what did he do? He recruited peasants and told them: get organized, go there, take the land. We will support you. And he gave them weapons and that is not a secret.
The indigenous people, we have been used to it, the Mayangnas if you look at the history of Nicaragua, the Mayangnas are one of the most peaceful people. For example, during the time of the war of the ’80s, perhaps some communities got involved in the war in an involuntary and forced way as well. It was not their wish to go to Honduras there with the Nicaraguan Resistance. Many were kidnapped.
They have been a peaceful people, a peaceful culture. We do not go around inciting violence in these types of situations. So, from the political point of view, these political operators came to impose a war on us, that is, there was a personal interest, invading indigenous lands but the effect was unfortunate, because many families were displaced, both Miskito and Mayangna families.
TcS: Do you produce cattle on the lands of your people in Bosawas?
Arisio: In the lands that correspond to the area of the Reserve where our territories are located, there is very little cattle ranching, or only recently, one might say. But it is on a minimal scale. In the Caribbean Coast there is cattle ranching, but more in areas that are not indigenous territories, but there is ranching on the Caribbean Coast on private properties, where people from the Pacific have come to buy private property and what they have done is perhaps double the rate of cattle ranching… Look, the issue of the invasions is this, what we are seeing is that the invasion of indigenous lands by mestizos is for two reasons.
Many are dedicated to large-scale production. Indigenous farmers work the land only to sustain their families, for subsistence self-consumption. On the other hand, the mestizo farmer produces more, works the land more because he trades the product. They are dedicated to selling their produce. The indigenous are not. The indigenous Mayangna work, they keep their produce but for their own consumption, their self-consumption. So, yes, work and production have increased, but in the buffer zones which are protected, because as you know indigenous lands are inside the Reserve, but inside the Reserve too is the core zone, so not in the core zone, which has the main concentration of forestry reserves and biodiversity, so we also have the core area near the heart of the Reserve.
But these cases get a different treatment. For example, with the settlers in the buffer zone in the indigenous territories, an agreement has been made, for example, you can stay on those lands but with the agreement that at the same time you are going to remain and produce there, but you are going to protect them so that no more families enter, so that they do not continue causing damage, causing a lot of deforestation.
We should explain that we, for example, the government of the Mayangna Nation, we are an indigenous institution with a national character that covers six territories nationallyl with 75 communities and we also participate in government decision making. We are members of the National Commission for the Defense of Mother Earth where there is alsothe Army, the Police, the Attorney General’s Office, the Supreme Court, the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Regional Government, the Secretariat of the Caribbean Coast, the entire government structure, also MARENA, we are part of it.
Now, what happens? This allows us to do advocacy work, to be able to dialogue, to make proposals to the government, and also to participate in decision making. Before, we did not have that possibility. Before, we were not mentioned. What was the political reality of the indigenous peoples in the Caribbean from the ’90s until 2006, for example? That was the period where we lived with racism and discrimination practiced on a large scale. So we can say, there was a situation of terrible discrimination against the indigenous people by the neoliberal governments. And that is not a lie. That is a reality with facts that people lived.
There was a period in the ’90s when that situation was very difficult. Why? Because all the functionaries came from Managua, they came to govern here in the Caribbean Coast. Here the indigenous peoples had no opportunities, they had no right to express their opinion, to participate in the decision making process over policies that were made at the whim of the government. So, look now, for example, as of 2006, or before even, from ’79 in the first stage of the Revolution, this issue was changed. It was already improving so as to recognize the rights of indigenous peoples.
For example, there are many important elements. The issue of education in the languages of the indigenous peoples, the issue of the restitution of their rights to indigenous territories. This issue was being worked on during the first stage of the Revolution. For example, talking about a health model that gathers the knowledge and experience and the wisdom of the indigenous peoples’ traditional medicine. Examples of this type.
Now, since 2006, the hold up of the Autonomy project has been reversed and it has become more concrete. How? In fact, take the example of the existence of regional government structures. This has allowed the region to manage all its political, social and cultural issues. Everything.
That is what is happening. For example, since 2006, the autonomous institutions have been strengthened. For example, here we have what you mentioned, there is a Regional Secretariat of Natural Resources, SERENA, so here everything is coordinated with Managua, Managua coordinates with these institutions, for example we have here a Regional Secretariat of Education that is working and administering the whole model of Intercultural Bilingual Education, to strengthen the issue of indigenous languages and to rescue the literary culture of our peoples. We have a regional health model, a regional and intercultural health model that also incorporates the knowledge and wisdom of the indigenous peoples in this health model. And in this way, Western knowledge and the knowledge of the native peoples work together. These are some of the experiences, right?
So we have been working on how all this has been restored, how this strengthening of Autonomy has been worked out, and another element that must be highlighted, for example. Before, we can say that indigenous peoples were relegated, there was no recognition by previous governments. Today, since the creation of the Territorial Governments, their territories have been restored. The government is making a broad recognition to all these peoples, to these territorial governments.
As regards what you were saying, about how are they financed, the government is funding the strengthening of these indigenous institutions, the indigenous territorial governments because they have an economic allocation from the government’s national budget from the Ministry of Finance. What for? To strengthen capacity and develop capacity in such a way that these structures of the indigenous governments, which are the indigenous institutions, do support some social things but also pay attention to all the organizational matters within their communities. So they also have an economic allocation like other institutions.
Eloy: For example, every 2 or 3 months the regional government convenes the territories, the territorial governments of the whole region. There, the communities participate and present their proposals to the government. This is a way, a new way for the Mayangna people to participate in this system of government.
Arisio: Something else that is important, we have talked about the issue of the Reserve. During those three neoliberal governments, there was a large project financed by GTZ, the Germans at the time. It was a large project in the Bosawás Reserve. We are often asked this question and I remember that at the time they called a consultation meeting with all the leaders of the territorial governments of the indigenous territories within the Reserve.
It was understood that it was also for the indigenous peoples to make proposals for development programs within their territories and that they were going to be financed by that project for the Bosawas of the GTZ, of the Germans. The question is that the project ended without taking note of various irregularities. And what happened with that project? Instead of stopping, for example, the issue of the invasion of the colonists, it got worse, expanded, increased the invasion.
So what are we trying to say? It’s that there are organizations, NGOs that use the name of the indigenous peoples and indigenous organizations to make accusations against the government, to denigrate the government, to try to destroy the government’s image and that of the work it does within the protected areas, for example, in the case of the Río San Juan, for example, or in the case of the Indio Maíz Reserve, and here in the case of the Bosawas Reserve.
However, at the time, when their side had power, there was no decision for indigenous people to participate in decisions so that the decisions would have some real effect. At no time was this the case. For example, right now there is an issue that is very topical now that is under discussion, which is the issue of the Bioclimate, the Green Fund, a project. This is an issue that at least…. What was done? A consultation process was carried out with the territories within the Reserve.
TcS: Someone told me that they held 400 assemblies
Arisio: That is why I am telling you, there were consultations, at least with the Mayangna territories, they were part of the consultation team as well. With a national team sent by the government, the Mayangna Nation provided a team of personnel to participate in the consultation, so that they could also participate in the design of the project, what they want to do, how it is going to be done, why it is going to be done, where it is going to be implemented and how it is going to be implemented. The point is that now anyway it is possible for indigenous peoples to participate in the decision making process.
For example, there is much mention of the issue of prior, free and informed consultation, where the indigenous peoples also have the right to participate, to be consulted when a program or project is to be implemented and executed in their territories, and this process has been complied with. The indigenous people are taken into account for consultation, for example this project was all about the deforested areas due to the self-same effect of the invasions of the settlers, how they were going to work on the natural regeneration of trees for example, or they are going to work on reforestation projects in all those areas to give life back to those affected areas and this has been coordinated with the territorial governments, with the indigenous institutions.
And it wasn’t before. Before, there was this great project for Bosawas, it was worse, there was no consultation, the decisions weren’t taken by the indigenous communities. However now things are different, so this is an opportunity for the indigenous peoples, this recognition, this respect of the government towards indigenous institutions, towards indigenous peoples and this also allows indigenous peoples to participate directly and broadly in the decisions that are being taken.
On the issue of artisanal mining in the Mayangna territories, for example, in the Mayangna territories and in the Reserve we don’t have problems with mining companies, with the large mining companies that are in the indigenous territories. No. We do not have that problem. The problem is with groups of settlers, because it is known that we have large mining reserves in our territories. So, people, as the compañero said, settlers enter for two reasons. One is to take advantage of the mining reserves that we have, and the other is to try and take over land for production.
TcS: But they do it illegally, right? Because in order to do it legally, they have to have a document that allows them to do that work.
Eloy: There is a management plan in the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve where the use of this resource by the community members is outlined. That is why I mentioned earlier that our people do not work permanently in the reserve – for example, maybe in December, September, a few people go and work for a week like this ….. That is why nature is virgin in the Reserve and that is why we do not want other people to go there, because other people have other cultures, as I was saying, they make large land clearings and they want to bring in machinery and we do not agree with this….
Arisio: With the large extractive mining companies we do not have that problem but yes, for example, over the long term, many of the settlers that are invading come and establish themselves in a violent way, not with the consent of the communities. That is the problem we have had there but we are also working on it and that is another point….
As a result of this whole situation of invasion, an experience is being developed and in the case of the Mayangna territories our territorial governments and the national instance which is us, the government of the Mayangna Nation, we are making an articulated effort with the Army and the Police and also with some groups of indigenous forest rangers in which there is recognition for example from the police to these forest rangers. Even… How is this coordinated?
The rangers do their patrols, the Mayangna indigenous rangers do their patrols of the boundaries and if there are settlers and they are there without authorization or without permission or something like that, they detain them and bring them and hand them over to the police. But there are also joint patrols with the National Police and the Army, the Ecological Battalion. So what exactly are we doing?
So far we have consolidated this working relationship, this inter-institutional coordination on this matter between the Mayangna Nation, the territorial governments, the National Police, MARENA and the Nicaraguan Army. So that is how patrols are carried out, that is how surveillance and protection are carried out. But of course, this requires more effort, an effort between all the parties concerned because it implies resources in order to happen.
Because, for example, the police cannot be there, let’s say, for a month. When they go, to set boundaries, to clean up the boundaries or to make patrols. So these are quick interventions, maybe four or five days to see how the area is, if there is more invasion, or if there is more encroachment, if there is more settlement, if there is, for example…. MARENA accompanies these visits, these patrols, to identify the damage that has been caused, and if they identify the people that are going around with chainsaws, these invaders, then on the order from MARENA these people are captured and brought to court, where they are prosecuted and MARENA, for example, accuses them of environmental damage, the indigenous territorial governments accuse them of usurpation of indigenous property. What we feel is that we have made progress in consolidating this working relationship with these institutions.
We have good communication with the National Police in the Mining Triangle, for example here where we have four or five Mayangna territories, which are also within the reserve, and with the Army. So, we work on a plan, we present a joint plan, we have meetings with the police and the Army, with BECO, the Ecological Battalion, with MARENA. A plan is made, the plan is shared, the necessary resources are negotiated and the patrolling plan is made. Now we don’t have many problems with that.
We have overcome that, because before it was difficult, very difficult for the Army to get involved, or for the police to get involved in these issues of indigenous land ownership. But not now. Now they are participating and accompanying the indigenous peoples and the relationship between the police and the Army and the indigenous peoples in our case here, we have a good experience. We always get advised, for example if there is a change of authorities in the Army or the police, they share with us, they invite us, we are always working with them.
TcS: Is it fair to say that there has also been an improvement in terms of your relationship with the Attorney General’s Office?
Arisio: Of course. Look, in this particular, the good things must be highlighted, must be mentioned. That is why I was telling you, during this period of the second stage of the Revolution, as we call it, on the issue of the restitution of rights of the indigenous peoples, in our case the Mayangnas, we feel that there is greater recognition, greater respect, greater opportunity. On that score, for example, we have had some situations.
For example, if the forest rangers or the police brought and captured the settlers and brought them to the courts, it used to happen that after three, four days, they would release them immediately and let them go. Why? So there were some anomalous situations within the system and then we started to raise with the government institutions, with the same government authorities, in the National Commission that we needed more support from the Court, for example, from the Supreme Court of Justice, from the Public Prosecutor’s Office, from the Public Defender’s Office, even from the PGR itself, and there has been progress on this issue.
Progress has been made. Why? Because the government authorized the creation of a body within the courts, namely the figure of Defenders of Indigenous Peoples was created, wherever there is the presence of indigenous population. What is the function of these Defenders? It is the direct accompaniment these Defenders provide to the indigenous organizations for the judicial process of settlers, those who are destroying the environment, all these types of cases. So there is greater accompaniment.
And the other thing, the other important element is that we have also achieved is that, within the judiciary, our indigenous officials also hold positions in the courts. So now the recent appointments of the Defenders of Indigenous and Afro-descendant Peoples are also indigenous people who speak the indigenous languages, because that is the other element, which for us is vital, this is important, that there is an indigenous official in the judiciary for example in the courts, because a Mayangna or Miskito indigenous person may arrive who does not speak Spanish so he has communication problems as well as all the problem of procedural delays, perhaps to do with the charges that have to be made or whatever other legal procedures that may need to be carried out?
So now this is an issue that the government has guaranteed, that in all the municipalities where indigenous peoples are present there will also be functionaries who speak indigenous languages. And this is something important because now these Defenders of Indigenous Peoples are accompanying the organizations to file the complaint because sometimes due to technical issues, perhaps the sisters and brothers of the indigenous organizations cannot lodge an accusation correctly, with the relevant technical criteria, so these Defenders of Indigenous Peoples accompany them to make or place the accusation and prepare all the corresponding process so that the case is formalized, that the accusation is duly filed and that those guilty of the damage being caused in the territories are punished.
TcS: How do you view the work of NGOs led by people like Lottie Cunningham?
Arisio: Look at CEJUDHCAN, CEJUDHCAN for Lottie Cunningham is like her piggy bank. Maybe you knows the term piggy bank, right? That’s CEJUDHCAN because CEJUDHCAN is not the institution she claims or as it projects itself at the international level, as an organization or institution defending indigenous rights. Why doesn’t she ever consult us? Why doesn’t she come to the communities to consult us? Why not our national leadership which is who we are, leading the national government of the Mayangna Nation, or else to the presidents in our territorial governments…? She is not present. She speaks from afar.
She uses the indigenous name. She uses it without having been there, when the events are taking place. For example, when the Alal case occurred, up there in the Reserve, she said that the government was not defending the indigenous people. But there are also other elements we should also mention, so there is the potential of all efforts that have made progress, in which we have advanced together with the government institutions for the defense of Mother Earth, but there are also some weaknesses that we have for example. And what does Lottie do? Lottie works with opposition activists practically. They are people who live as we Nicaraguans say, making accusations against the government, talking badly about the government. So she takes that and exploits it to say that the government does such and such, but really if it were the organization she says it is, she should be open to consultation. But she is not. She just turns up for a short while. And sometimes she exaggerates things. And she makes use of the indigenous peoples. And that is why, as we have always said, that is why Autonomy gave us the right for each native indigenous people to have its own voice.
No one can represent them ever. We were clear and categorical. Brooklyn Rivera said: I am the leader of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean Coast. We have to say that this is not true, this is a lie. Brooklyn Rivera does not represent the Mayangnas. The Mayangnas have our own indigenous institutions, they have their own government of their Nation that is of a national character and at the same time they have their territorial governments in the municipalities.
So each one has its own voice. They give their opinion. They contribute. They can say and decide on the model of government, the governance that is being developed there in the communities, but it isn’t that Brooklyn or Yatama can come and say: I represent the indigenous people of Nicaragua. Because that is not true. Because here each people is sovereign. Each people has its autonomy. We have a regime of self-determination so that each people can decide for itself.
TcS: In the case of Alal, what is your appreciation of that terrible incident? How do you perceive it?
Eloy: At root, there was a problem of settlers who attacked the community, but afterwards the government, its institutions immediately attended to the community, rebuilt the houses, provided care, ensured the presence of the police and the Army to guarantee the security of the families. So, the government has looked after and continues to look after the families of Alal.
TcS: Was it a criminal gang of the type of organized crime? What was it?
Eloy: Yes, they were practically organized settlers, criminal gangs. But the police and the army did their job, and that situation has calmed down.
Arisio: I think that, as I was saying at the beginning, cattle ranching in the Caribbean has grown, has increased, there’s a boom, but as I was saying, for example, the boom in cattle raising is on private properties. Because here, for example, where we are in the Mining Triangle, there have been many people who had private properties with large extensions of land, but they did not make much use of them. The landowner maybe had few animals but they had large amounts of land, then the farmers from the Pacific came and since they are private properties, then they buy and start to put in a lot of cattle.
Of course, after a year there is an valuable production of these cattle and there are many people who will remark how many cattle trucks are leaving the Caribbean Coast for the slaughterhouses because this cattle ranching has really grown. But as I was saying, for example, in our area in the Reserve, we have seen very little extensive cattle ranching. There we have seen more agricultural production, and the artisanal mining activities. Yes, but in fact these things have to be regulated.
TcS: In relation to deforestation, are you optimistic that there is slowly a process that will reverse this? Or is it going to be a problem that will become even more acute?
Arisio: We consider that this issue is going to improve. Improve because government institutions are paying attention to the issue. An effort is also being made to make large investments in these affected areas, and in fact there are also some local initiatives on the part of the territorial governments in conjunction with some environmental institutions, MARENA, INAFOR. For example, there is a youth group called Guardabarranco and in the municipalities they coordinate with INAFOR, which has large tree nurseries, and they deliver the plants so that they can work fr example in some watersheds where they are quite degraded and reforestation work is being done.
So this is important, for example, in all the boundaries, the boundaries marking Mayangna territories, they are planting fruit trees or other types of trees for timber, in order to recover from the deforestation in our Reserve in some cases where there was damage and there are plans for the future to continue working on this.
TcS: There are people who criticize the indigenous peoples and say that they themselves or people within the indigenous populations break the rules. How true is this phenomenon in your experience?
Eloy: According to our assessment of the matter, yes there are some irresponsible people who commit these types of crimes. But maybe they don’t involve the large extensions that get mentioned, because the settlers also have the strategy of using that, those people, to traffic large extensions of land. But we have already proved that there are Mayangnas who are also involved in this illegal business.
TcS: Yes, because I imagine that they offer bribes…
Arisio: Yes, because there are good children and bad children anywhere, so unfortunately we have cases, for example, of some situations of violence that have occurred in some territories and so on, practically for that very reason. Although within the norms, within the statutes that we have of the constitution of the national organization, it mentions and is categorical in that sense, and it states that any Mayangna, be it an authority or someone from the community that incurs in the crime of buying and selling or trafficking of lands, has to be tried according to the laws of the State of Nicaragua.
And in that particular there are also brother mayangnas who are serving jail time for the sale of land, they are convicted and also there is this other issue that must be mentioned. Namely there are groups, there are mafia, criminal groups that are dedicated to land trafficking, recruiting peasants and putting them on indigenous lands, and then when that’s done, it is not the peasants who are the owners of the land but other people who have money.
We were surprised recently when a helicopter arrived in a community and landed near a farm that is near an indigenous community, so everybody was startled, what was going on? Everybody was abuzz, could it be narcos or who could it be? Even the police arrived. The police arrived and they found out that it was a cattle rancher who has many farms here in the Caribbean zone, and he flew over because he had a friend who is also a cattle rancher with land there and he came to visit him on his birthday.
The peasants do what they are told. Someone tells them to take 200,000 pesos, go, get in there, do this, buy, and when the tensions calm down and there is no longer a problem, there he comes with th fancy SUVs, or some fancy thing like that helicopter. So, as often as not there are different situations. They use the peasants, they swindle them too, and there are also cases of indigenous brothers who have dedicated themselves to this. And as I was saying, they have been prosecuted by the law. They are serving jail time.
TcS: In general, do you think that the situation is getting better or worse in terms of invasions?
Arisio: Well, the situation is quite moderate, there is nothing massive like it was at some point. Maybe there are four or five families, in some sectors, but there are other sectors where they continue to enter from other parts because we have to take into account, for example, the territory of Siquita, this Maynagna territory of ours here in Siuna, but there is a part of this territory that borders with the department of Jinotega with the area of San José de Bocay, so they are border territories one could say, because it borders with Siuna, it borders with Jinotega, it borders with Bonanza, so settlers enter there from all sides and sometimes it is uncontrollable. While in another territory, for example one that is in the center between Rosita and Bonanza, but it does not have much border with other departments with a mestizo population, so there is less of an invasion issue.
TcS: And how is your relationship with your fellow Miskitos?
Eloy: As Mayangnas, we each have our limits there and we have no problems with them, as people there is good communication. Besides that, I mentioned the Mayangna territories and the Miskito territories through the regional government meet every so often and there they share the situations of their territories. So I consider that there are no problems between Mayangnas and Miskitos.
Arisio: Maybe we have to reinforce what the compañero says in the case of the relationship between the Miskitos and the Mayangnas. I think it can be said that the experience of life has marked a direction, a guideline, a route to follow. I believe that the experience that both the Maynagnas and the Miskitos have lived through because of this issue of the invasion of property, has made them more aware of the unity between indigenous peoples in Nicaragua. Because now it’s being pointed out that we cannot be divided. It doesn’t matter if you are Krioll, Miskito or Mayangna, but here the problem is the same, and we all have to be united to face this situation. If we are more united we are stronger, better able to sit down, to make proposals to the government.
And the government itself sees that we are united. And I think that on that score many achievements have been reached, and it has been because that culture of internal conflicts that there may have been perhaps before…because during the ’80s the ethnic war in the Caribbean Coast was also not only against the government, but also between the Miskitos and the Mayangnas there were conflicts, and before of course there has been an history of antagonism. The Miskitos and Mayangnas never got along well because the Miskitos kidnapped Mayangna women and children, stole their property, burned their communities. So the elders as I told you at the beginning, remember we lived like this, we suffered like this because the Mayangna communities in Nicaragua, if you check the map of Nicaragua, the location of the Mayangna communities mostly, maybe ninety percent of the communities, are in the rural areas, in the big mountains.
So many elders say that we are here because they persecuted us, they wanted to exterminate us, and it was a way to defend ourselves, to protect ourselves in the mountains, to protect ourselves in the mountains from the Miskitos so that they would not exterminate us. So there were stories of that kind, but I think we are now living another reality, we are living another situation. Both we and the Miskito sisters and brothers have realized that this is a thing of the past and that the reality is different now and we have to be united as peoples, and that has strengthened us, and has brought us progress and has allowed us to do many things. So we have come a long way and we have overcome the past.
Eloy: It might be worth saying that I was talking in a personal sense, because the Miskitos have their organizations and we have to see that. As for the Yatama structure, not all Miskitos are from Yatama.
Arisio: And there are internal situations as well. Don’t think for a moment that internally they don’t have their conflicts and here there is another element that is important. Before there was a feeling… there was a mistrust perhaps on the part of the Mayangnas towards the Miskitos, one might say. The Miskitos were in power during the Liberal governments. Sixteen years they had control of the Regional Council governing body. And during that period the Mayangnas were forgotten, they kept everything for themselves. And it was not all their Miskito people that received those benefits, it was just a group of them. It was a Yatama elite that benefited from that.
But thanks to the second stage of the Revolution, there was recognition and institutionalization of the territorial governments, and the allocation of a budget to each one. This also allowed for greater autonomy and better governance for the territorial governments to administer their own territories.
TcS: When did this reorganization of the territorial governments take place, in what year?
Eloy: From two thousand nine onwards…
TcS: There is a topic that I had completely forgotten about… What do you understand by the phrase “remediation” and what does that mean?
Eloy: For example, according to Law 445 there are five stages. Law 445 has five stages for the property titling process. So, we complied with all of them. The last stage is remediation. And that is a legal term. For us at the moment we think that there is another way of dealing with it that can be a reordering of property. For example, in the zone mentioned by our colleague, perhaps people are currently entering there without knowing that this area is a conservation area. Well, neither we nor the indigenous peoples can live there.
So, one way of managing that could be to place them in another part of a buffer zone of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve. We think that this is the term “reordering”, to bring order to our property. If someone came here, and we don’t want them to be there, we want them to be in another part. But that has to come about through the opinion of the majority of our population through a communal assembly, a territorial assembly of the people themselves. That is to say, there in the assembly they can approve if those people can be there or not.
Arisio: We have to understand that the concept of remediation does not directly imply eviction. In other words, it is not only eviction. The issue of remediation also has different concepts from the point of view that remediation also has to do with the way in which we establish the mechanisms for coexistence. We cannot enter a situation where there is already conflict, and go and stoke that conflict even more, but it has to be a strategy proposed by the indigenous peoples.
For example, let’s be clear, when the situation of Alal occurred, we Mayangnas did not go to shout to the four winds, nor make riots or demonstrations against the government, because we have a direct communication channel from the Mayangna Nation to central government. We who speaking to you now are the spokespersons for the problems, the situations in the territorial governments, and we make the national government aware of what is going on. What happened? We said we need to sit down to review this situation of Alal. What was the next step after this situation? Immediately, the government ordered that the police must be there, the army must be there, the PGR must be there, all the structures of the responsible institutions must be there to look for a way out of this problem. To make an analysis of why, what generated, what provoked, that conflict, those deaths. What response we give to that situation. And we directly drew up a balance, an analysis, and we realized that also in certain sectors of Mayangna territory, in the areas of Musawas, Alal, all that area there and also another part, for example, the Betlel River, Suliwas, people had entered in an uncontrolled way, they had taken lands, some even went as far as to fence off part of the properties of the indigenous people, so that cannot be…
In these cases of extreme situations, where indigenous people are no longer allowed freedom of movement, freedom to produce, and feel under siege, we cannot allow it. We have to evict. And so we coordinated with the government institutions and the evictions of the 140-odd families in the area of the Reserve were carried out in coordination with our government institutions. That is why I was telling you that we have no problems with the relationship between the police and the Army and the government and the indigenous communities. And this was an example, a demonstration that yes, we work, we coordinate, we articulate with government institutions. The eviction of these families that had invaded that territory, that area, those 140-odd families, was carried out.
And then, what did we do? Then, their representatives arrived to say yes, we recognize that these are your lands, we respect that, but we want to live there, we want to return, we want to go back. But what was the basic idea? Really to give indigenous peoples the opportunity to decide what they want, how they want to administer their territory. And on that score the government has never denied that. On the contrary, it has said, well, you are free, decide what you want, if you want to, are you going to lease your territory or do you want eviction? An example, right?
And what was done? Immediately the territorial assembly was summoned to know what the decision was. A consultation was made to know the consent of the communities, what they thought about this case. Immediately, 23 communities gathered from that territory. And the communities said well, we want our territory to be cleaned up, but more in the complex zones, where I mentioned, where they no longer allow free circulation because there are zones in the buffer zone, which are being treated differently and there is a different spirit and type of dialogue with the peasants as well. As I was saying… they remain, but under an agreement with the owners of the territories. Some can stay, some cannot, but always maintaining that balance of dialogue, peace and tranquility because what everyone wants is to avoid the type of violent situation that happened in Alal.
These are the strategies that are being used. So, remediation is not only ordering evictions, dialogue is also part of it. And it also has to do with the process of reviewing indigenous properties. For example, there are rural families who once went and bought indigenous lands and went to register them in the property registry of the region, but they cannot, the law says no, it is not allowed, it is illegal. So remediation is also part of that, reviewing all the documentation and if people went and register it when it was indigenous land, well, a revocation is made.
This is also part of the remediation, it is part of the reordering of the territories. So maybe the position of someone like Lottie who goes around saying that the remediation is not being done or that such and such is being done, is not correct. Each person manages their discourse as they please, according to their interests. And we and our people say what we are seeing, what we are living, what we are experiencing, what we are living in the communities. Our vision is different because we are living the experience ourselves. So one can go around with a legal document and it can be made out to mean anything… really…
*
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.
Almost immediately after his inauguration, President Joe Biden began creating new government dictates via executive orders. Many of these executive orders concern coronavirus, fulfilling Biden’s promise to make ramping up a coronavirus-inspired attack on liberty a focus of his first 100 days.
One of Biden’s executive orders imposes mask and social distancing mandates on anyone in a federal building or on federal land. The mandates also apply to federal employees when they are “on-duty” anywhere. Members of the military are included in the definition of federal employees. Will citizens of Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries where US troops are or will be “spreading democracy” be happy to learn the troops shooting up their towns are wearing masks and practicing social distancing?
Another one of Biden’s executive orders forces passengers on airplanes, trains, and other public transportation to wear masks.
Biden’s mask mandates contradict his pledge to follow the science. Studies have not established that masks are effective at preventing the spread of coronavirus. Regularly wearing a mask, though, can cause health problems.
Biden’s mask mandates are also an unconstitutional power grab. Some say these mandates are an exercise of the federal government’s constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce. However, the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to regulate interstate commerce. The president does not have the authority to issue executive orders regulating interstate commerce absent authorization by a valid law passed by Congress. The Founders gave Congress sole law-making authority, and they would be horrified by the modern practice of presidents creating law with a “stroke of a pen.”
Just as important, the Commerce Clause was not intended to give the federal government vast regulatory power. Far from giving the US government powers such as the power to require people to wear masks, the Commerce Clause was simply intended to ensure Congress could protect free trade among the states.
Biden also signed an executive order supporting using the Defense Production Act to increase the supply of vaccines, testing supplies, and other items deemed essential to respond to coronavirus. The Defense Production Act is a Cold War relic that gives the president what can fairly be called dictatorial authority to order private businesses to alter their production plans, and violate existing contracts with private customers, in order to produce goods for the government.
Mask and social distancing mandates, government control of private industry, and some of Biden’s other executive actions, such as one creating a new “Public Health Jobs Corps” with responsibilities including performing “contact tracing” on American citizens, are the type of actions one would expect from a fascist government, not a constitutional republic.
Joe Biden, who is heralded by many of his supporters as saving democracy from fascist Trump, could not even wait one day before beginning to implement fascistic measures that are completely unnecessary to protect public health. Biden will no doubt use other manufactured crises, including “climate change” and “domestic terrorism,” to expand government power and further restrict our liberty. Under Biden, fascism will not just carry an American flag. It will also wear a mask.
*
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.
“Pioneering” American entrepreneurs have waded into the “murky” oil business in Syria, according to a report by the Financial Times which investigated the US oil firm Delta Crescent Energy (DCE). The company was founded by a member of a former member of the US Delta Force who knew the Kurdish leadership — the Syrian Democratic Forces — through the security company he founded, TigerSwan.
In April last year, the US Treasury granted a rare license allowing DCE to sidestep American sanctions on Syria’s oil sector. Question marks have been raised over how this has happened. The founders of DCE are said to have donated to Republican candidates but they have denied using political influence to secure the license. Speaking about DCE’s work in the Kurdish controlled north-east region, Joel Rayburn, US special envoy to Syria said that US officials endorsed the project “because we support trying to get the economy of north-east Syria up and running.”
The FT article raised speculations over why former US president Donald Trump reversed his decision to keep US troops in the region having threatened twice to pull them out of the north-east Syria. Trump’s threat was met with criticism after which he admitted that that troops would remain “only for the oil”.
Pentagon spokesperson Jessica L McNulty was also forced to comment on speculations that US soldiers remained to guard the US oil firm, insisting that the Department of Defence had not been tasked with protecting “DCE or any other private company . . . seeking to develop oil resources in north-east Syria”.
DCE is said to be unlike other major oil firms that have long been involved in pumping crude from the Middle East, including neighbouring Iraq. This unknown outfit’s mission is to explore, refine and export oil from a corner of war-torn Syria controlled by a US-backed Kurdish-dominated militia. “It’s too pioneering; too adventuresome . . . some might say too risky,” the former US ambassador to Denmark told the FT, speaking about DCE’s operations.
Even with the US’ approval, DCE is said to be operating in a murky market. There are question marks over who controls the oil fields and who profits from them. The oil is prized by smugglers, who transport the crude within Syria and to northern Iraq and Damascus, which has awarded development contracts for this oil to Russian companies as a reward for its military ally Moscow. However, the Kurdish administration does not allow either the Russians or the regime direct access to the fields.
The Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which controls the region, has “no other choices” but to sell to regime brokers or shadowy traders from northern Iraq, said Abdullah Al-Ghadawi, a journalist originally from north-east Syria. The US is said to have turned a blind eye to the $3 million a day oil that’s sold on the black market.
*
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.
Featured image: A view of an oil field in Syria, 19 July 2018 [Adnan Alhusen/Anadolu Agency]
Scientists warn of ongoing global insect abundance losses and say we lack a full understanding of invertebrate extinction causes and synergies. Action to curb extinction rates desperately needed: Studies.
***
Chances are, the works of the world’s insects touch your lips every day. The coffee or tea you savor, both are insect pollinated. Apples, oranges, cabbages, cashews, cherries, carrots, broccoli, watermelon, garlic, cinnamon, basil, sunflower seeds, almonds, canola oil — all are insect pollinated. Honey, dyes, even some vaccines require insects to come to fruition.
Vital to the world’s food web, nested in nutrient cycling, and embedded in industries — the closer we look, the more we see insects as vital to maintaining life’s frameworks. Referring to this fact, famed biologist E.O. Wilson wrote in 1987, “[I]f invertebrates were to disappear, I doubt the human species could last more than a few months.”
Insect populations are being reduced at varying rates across space and time, but on average, the decline in their abundance is thought to be around 1-2% per year, or 10-20% per decade.
“Think of a landowner with a million-dollar house on a river that’s a little bit wild. And they’re losing 10% to 20% of their land every decade, and it’s horrifying. It means that after even a century, you really don’t have anything left,” David Wagner, an entomologist with the University of Connecticut told Mongabay in an interview. That, he says of this comparison, is the danger we now face.
Wagner has just edited a newly released in-depth feature in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Global Decline of Insects in the Anthropocene, in which 56 researchers present scientific studies, opinions and news on insect declines. The journal offers perspectives on the ecological, taxonomic, geographical and sociological dimensions of insect declines, along with suggestions on how we move forward to study and reverse this drain on global biodiversity.
Insect “death by a thousand cuts”
In a perspective piece that leads off the special issue, Wagner and his co-authors address the likely causes of insect decline. The main stressors to insects, they write, are changes in land use (particularly deforestation), agriculture, climate change, nitrification, pollution and introduced species. However, the importance of each stressor and how they interact still puzzles scientists.
“There’s so many good scientists that can’t figure out what the cause is,” Wagner said. He poses the well known honeybee as an example. “I mean, this thing is worth billions upon billions of dollars and we don’t know why it’s having such a hard time. And I think the reason is, it’s death by a thousand cuts… most of these things are hit by four or five pretty important stressors, and they’re acting synergistically.”
“Stressors from 10 o’clock to 3 o’clock anchor to climate change. Featured insects: Regal fritillary (Speyeria idalia) (Center), rusty patched bumble bee (Bombus affinis) (Center Right), and Puritan tiger beetle (Cicindela puritana) (Bottom). Each is an imperiled insect that represents a larger lineage that includes many International Union for Conservation of Nature ‘red list’ species (i.e., globally extinct, endangered, and threatened species).” Illustration by Virginia R. Wagner (artist) from Wagner et al 2020.
The articles that follow that opening essay zero in on the key causes for some of the biggest known losses:
A study by Wagner and Peter Raven, president emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden, concludes that declines in insect biodiversity and biomass are linked to the intensification of agriculture over the past 50 years.
Research by Dan Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs — both biologists from the University of Pennsylvania who describe themselves as “intense observers of caterpillars, their parasites, and their associates” — focuses on climate change as a stressor. Since the late 1970’s, they write, they’ve watched as insect declines came to the dry forests, cloud forests, and rainforests of Costa Rica’s Guanacaste Conservation Area, as the region was plagued by rising temperatures, increasingly erratic seasons and inconsistent rainfall.
The top figure shows a normal 1980s assembly of moths at the Cliff Top light trap in dry forests of Costa Rica’s Guanacaste Conservation Area. The bottom figure is in the same location in 2019, during the same time in the moon cycle. “This dramatic change in moth density and species richness has now come to represent light trap catches in the dry forest at the beginning of the rains,” the authors say. Images from Janzen and Hallwachs 2020.
Another study in the special feature, titled, Insects and recent climate change, argues that climate may be playing even more of a role in declines than land use change — which is massive around the planet mostly due to agribusiness expansion. The authors base their climate findings on a Northern California butterflies case study, where declines were severe even in areas suffering little habitat loss. Similar losses within well-protected areas have been detected in Germany and Puerto Rico.
Likewise, butterfly populations in Europe face challenges. In the UK, butterfly numbers have declined by around 50% over the past 50 years, with 8% of known resident species considered extinct. In the Netherlands, upwards of 20% of species have been lost and in Belgium 29%. Researchers suggest habitat loss, habitat degradation and chemical pollution as the primary causes. The authors offer conservation solutions and recommend policy changes to conserve butterflies and other insects — but so far political will has been lacking.
Moving from the winged creatures of the day to night fliers, Wagner and colleagues give an overview of the global state of moth declines. Moths are extremely diverse and cosmopolitan. “For every butterfly that Mongabay readers see during the daytime, there’s 19 species of moths flying around at night,” Wagner revealed.
Although moth numbers have declined in some areas, such as in parts of Europe and Central America, in other, mostly temperate areas, many moth taxa are increasing in abundance. Another study found that the overall abundance of arthropods in the Arctic has increased in recent years. Researchers attribute these increases in insect abundance to climate change, which scientists say has both its species winners and losers. As warmer temperatures march northward, new suitable habitats open up for insects. The consequences of this range expansion — and the conflicts which may occur with plant and insect species already occupying those ranges — have yet to be analyzed.
The oak jewel beetle (Eurythyrea quercus) is one of the most endangered beetle species in Europe and requires old, dry oaks to develop, which are seldom left in the landscape. Photo by Frank Vassen via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Insect declines are emblematic of a larger problem: the earth is in the midst of what some call the “sixth mass extinction.” Birds, amphibians, freshwater mussels, large mammals, all have seen dwindling numbers. The question for entomologists, Wagner said, is whether or not the decline of insects is actually occurring faster than for some other groups, especially because insects are often the direct target of destruction by human, due to pesticide and herbicide use.
Sarah Cornell, a scientist at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC), raises a insect-related question relevant to our time: “There might have been many more mass extinctions. It’s just that we only see extinctions with the things that leave a record… things with skeletons… When people [say], ‘we’re entering the sixth mass extinction.’ Okay, well, how do we know that? We might be entering the 17th?…We might make ourselves extinct before we even reach these hallowed glories of the sixth.”
Overshooting planetary boundaries
Clearly, the loss of insect abundance — depending on where and how fast it occurs — could have far more dire, unforeseen impacts than the loss of coffee or cashews. Wholesale transformation of global ecosystems, triggering mass insect declines, could be pushing the Earth past what scientists have dubbed as a “planetary boundary.”
The planetary boundaries framework, postulated by a group of international scientists in 2009, attempts to set the environmental limits within which life can safely function, and asks the question: how much human-caused disturbance can the planet take without shifting into a new and/or riskier state?
According to a 2016 analysis, humanity has passed the “safe” planetary boundary threshold for “biotic intactness” a measure of functional and genetic diversity (biodiversity). Biotic intactness has declined across at least 65% of the Earth’s terrestrial surface, the authors say, especially in grasslands and biodiversity hotspots.
“The way that people (that’s us…) are using land is changing the capacity of ecosystems to continue doing their normal functions,” said Cornell, an SRC global change researcher who worked on a 2015 update to the planetary boundaries framework. “This pattern of lost biodiversity is undermining our own longer-term well-being.”
A conehead mantis (Empusa pennata) in Portugal. Because of its low-density distribution, this species is rarely found in the wild. Photo by Frank Vassen via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Insect declines will very likely get worse before they get better, Wagner warns, as climate change — a critical planetary boundary — worsens rapidly, and as both human population and human consumption skyrocket, resulting in greater land use change and increasing pollution — two other planetary boundaries.
Importantly, the Global Decline of Insects in the Anthropocene special feature identifies critical gaps in our knowledge. For starters, we have only scratched the surface of identifying and describing the planet’s existing insect biodiversity. Entomologists are working aggressively to advance our understanding via deep learning and computer vision — using a variety of cameras and sensors — and ambitious initiatives such as a plan to inventory and DNA barcode the entire biota of Costa Rica over the next ten years.
You can help save the world’s insects
The new feature doesn’t only sound the insect alarm, it also offers many suggestions about how to conserve and protect these tiny invertebrates. International, national and corporate policymaking needs to happen, and quickly.
Monarch nectaring on swamp milkweed (A. incarnata) in Idaho. Monarch populations have declined dramatically and the species is now qualified for listing under the US. Federal Endangered Species Act. Photo courtesy of Stephanie McKnight / Xerces Society.
The paper recommends growing native plants; using less herbicides and pesticides; limiting the use of exterior lighting; lessening runoff created when washing vehicles and buildings; working to counter negative perceptions of insects; educating others about insects; and getting involved in local politics, supporting science, and voting.
“I think if we all did it together… it would make a very big difference,” Akito Kawahara, lead author of the eight simple actions paper told Mongabay. “Even just the lawn thing… taking a little tiny piece of your lawn and converting it to a natural habitat… the impact that a small piece of space can have on the grand scale is enormous.” Butterfly gardens and other such spaces also enrich our lives and offer educational opportunities for awakening natural wonder in children.
“These insect papers, the focus on the small things, is a really delightful return to thinking ecologically,” Cornell told Mongabay. “It’s not all about counting stuff. How many insects? How many extinctions? But rather we need to ask, how is this world changing?”
In a world with unchecked insects declines, the answer may be: more than we dare to imagine.
*
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.
Liz Kimbroughis a staff writer for Mongabay. Find her on Twitter @lizkimbrough
Source
Wagner, D. L., Grames, E. M., Forister, M. L., Berenbaum, M. R., & Stopak, D. (2021). Insect decline in the Anthropocene: Death by a thousand cuts. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(2). doi: 10.1073/pnas.2023989118
Featured image: The rusty patched bumble bee (Bombus affinis) is endangered throughout its range in North America. Photo by Jill Utrup/USFWS (CC BY 2.0)
The US Congress has recently passed the so-called Tibetan Policy and Support Act (TPSA) – slipped into a COVID-19 relief package and a 1.4 trillion dollar government spending bill, US State Department-funded Voice of America reported in their article, “US Congress Passes Landmark Bill in Support of Tibet.”
The article would claim:
The US Congress on Monday passed a bill that is expected to upgrade US support for Tibetans in key areas, including sanctioning Chinese officials if they try to appoint the next Dalai Lama.
VOA would also report that:
It will pave the way for the US government to issue economic and visa sanctions against any Chinese officials who interfere with the succession of the Dalai Lama, and will require China to allow Washington to establish a consulate in Lhasa — the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region – before Beijing can open any more consulates in the US.
VOA quoted the exiled “Central Tibetan Administration” (CTA) – who commended the US move. Little was mentioned about how problematic this US support was for an exiled political movement that cannot and does not represent the actual people living inside China’s Tibet Autonomous Region.
The bill is a blatant act of US interference in China’s internal affairs – and the continuation of over half a century of such interference by the US in Tibet in particular.
Washington’s Long History of Meddling in Tibet
This most recent move by Washington adds to a long and sordid history of meddling in Tibet, China.
The US State Department’s own Office of the Historian includes in its online collection a 1968 document titled, “Memorandum for the 303 Committee,” with the subject noted as, “Status Report on Tibetan Operations.”
It discusses “the CIA Tibetan program, parts of which were initiated in 1956,” which includes, “political action, propaganda, paramilitary and intelligence operations.” The document mentions the Dalai Lama and commitments made to him by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
It also discusses a “nucleus of new young leaders” as well as “widespread sympathy for the Tibetan cause,” all deliberately engineered results of the US government’s deep investment in Tibetan separatism.
The document also admits to – even then – a full spectrum propaganda campaign pushing for Tibetan independence.
It claims:
In the political action and propaganda field, Tibetan program objectives are aimed toward lessening the influence and capabilities of the Chinese regime through support, among Tibetans and among foreign nations, of the concept of an autonomous Tibet under the leadership of the Dalai Lama; toward the creation of a capability for resistance against possible political developments inside Tibet; and the containment of Chinese Communist expansion—in pursuance of US policy objectives stated initially in NSC 5913/1.2 [6 lines of source text not declassified].
And that is precisely what the US government has been doing ever since – for decades – manifesting itself most recently in the form of the “Tibetan Policy and Support Act.”
The US National Endowment for Democracy – created by the US government in the 1980s, funded annually by US Congress, and overseen jointly by the US Congress and the US State Department – lists at least 17 programs it is funding regarding Tibet.
They include groups like the “International Tibet Independence Movement” and “Students for a Free Tibet” – two organizations openly promoting separatism regarding China’s Tibet Autonomous Region.
Other programs – like “Empowering a New Generation of Tibetan Leaders” and “Campaigning and Leadership Training” – are direct continuations of programs described in documents archived by the US State Department’s Office of the Historian, carried out by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s.
The fact that the US NED is now carrying out the work previously and admittedly carried out by the CIA regarding Tibet lends further credibility to claims by critics of the US government’s foreign policy like William Blum who noted that the whole purpose of the NED was to “do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities.”
US interference in Tibet is just one part of a much wider strategy by Washington of containment, provocation, encirclement, and the undermining of China both within Chinese territory and surrounding it.
Washington’s propaganda campaign against China regarding its western region of Xinjiang continues, as does attempts to place pressure on China regarding its successful attempts to restore order in Hong Kong.
Various US-sponsored color revolutions continue to brew within the borders of close allies of China – including across Southeast Asia – and in nations like Thailand in particular. “Pro-democracy” protesters in Bangkok’s streets had in recent weeks become increasingly anti-Chinese in nature – openly linking themselves to opposition groups in Hong Kong and regularly flying the separatist flags of both Tibet and Xinjiang’s Uyghur extremists.
The US Senate had passed a resolution openly siding with the anti-government protesters in Thailand who are also backed by US NED-funded organizations – some of which make up the anti-government movement’s core leadership.
Tying it all together is the US State Department’s meddling all along South East Asia’s Mekong River which actually originates in Tibet. VOA’s article even mentions this, stating:
…the TPSA addresses Tibetan human rights, environmental rights, religious freedoms and the democratic Tibetan government in exile. It also calls for a regional framework to water-security issues, following years of concerns from environmental activists and neighboring countries that ambitious Chinese hydropower projects are diverting water, threatening regional ecosystems.
The scale and interwoven nature of Washington’s anti-Chinese campaign – thus – is not confined to a sole point of pressure in Tibet. Tibet is just one of many interconnected pressure points the US is using against China. As China reacts – the US and its still large and capable media network portrays this reaction as “aggression” and even “expansion” – omitting any mention of Washington’s initial and continuous provocations.
China’s control over Tibet – a region that has been under Chinese control on-and-off for centuries – has never been as strong as it is now. Its drive to develop the region in unprecedented socioeconomic ways almost entirely ensures that the notion of an “independent” Tibet is but a fading fiction clung to in the halls of Washington and in the offices of separatist Tibetan organizations based in Washington DC.
Washington’s insistence in continuing to chase a failed foreign policy – regardless of its massive scale -will only further undermine its credibility upon the global stage, isolate it politically and perhaps even economically as it attempts to enforce a new round of “sanctions” against China regarding Tibet, and even risks escalating the threat of conflict with China itself.
The question remains whether Washington’s hard and soft political power can truly compete with China’s brand of international relations focused instead on economic trade, infrastructure projects, and the sale of military hardware minus the entangling political subordination required by Washington in order to do business.
And if the answer is that Washington’s foreign policies cannot compete – what steps will it take next as its power continues to fade globally, and China’s power continues to fill the voids it leaves behind?
*
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.
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published.
The rate at which ice is disappearing across the planet is speeding up, according to new research.
And the findings also reveal that the Earth lost 28 trillion tonnes of ice between 1994 and 2017 – equivalent to a sheet of ice 100 metres thick covering the whole of the UK.
The research is the first of its kind to carry out a survey of global ice loss using satellite data.
Scientists led by the University found that the rate of ice loss from the Earth has increased markedly within the past three decades, from 0.8 trillion tonnes per year in the 1990s to 1.3 trillion tonnes per year by 2017.
Ice melt across the globe raises sea levels, increases the risk of flooding to coastal communities, and threatens to wipe out natural habitats which wildlife depend on.
“The ice sheets are now following the worst-case climate warming scenarios.”
The findings of the research team, which includes the University of Edinburgh, University College London and data science specialists Earthwave, are published in European Geosciences Union’s journal The Cryosphere.
Funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council, the research shows that overall, there has been a 65% increase in the rate of ice loss over the 23-year survey. This has been mainly driven by steep rises in losses from the polar ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland.
Lead author Dr Thomas Slater, a Research Fellow at Leeds’ Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, said: “Although every region we studied lost ice, losses from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have accelerated the most.
“The ice sheets are now following the worst-case climate warming scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Sea-level rise on this scale will have very serious impacts on coastal communities this century.”
Dr Slater said the study was the first of its kind to examine all the ice that is disappearing on Earth, using satellite observations .
He added: “Over the past three decades there’s been a huge international effort to understand what’s happening to individual components in Earth’s ice system, revolutionised by satellites which allow us to routinely monitor the vast and inhospitable regions where ice can be found.
“Our study is the first to combine these efforts and look at all the ice that is being lost from the entire planet.”
The survey covers 215,000 mountain glaciers spread around the planet, the polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, the ice shelves floating around Antarctica, and sea ice drifting in the Arctic and Southern Oceans.
Rising atmospheric temperatures have been the main driver of the decline in Arctic sea ice and mountain glaciers across the globe, while rising ocean temperatures have increased the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet. For the Greenland ice sheet and Antarctic ice shelves, ice losses have been triggered by a combination of rising ocean and atmospheric temperatures.
During the survey period, every category lost ice, but the biggest losses were from Arctic Sea ice (7.6 trillion tonnes) and Antarctic ice shelves (6.5 trillion tonnes), both of which float on the polar oceans.
Dr Isobel Lawrence, a Research Fellow at Leeds’ Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, said:
“Sea ice loss doesn’t contribute directly to sea level rise but it does have an indirect influence. One of the key roles of Arctic sea ice is to reflect solar radiation back into space which helps keep the Arctic cool.
“As the sea ice shrinks, more solar energy is being absorbed by the oceans and atmosphere, causing the Arctic to warm faster than anywhere else on the planet.
“Not only is this speeding up sea ice melt, it’s also exacerbating the melting of glaciers and ice sheets which causes sea levels to rise.”
Half of all losses were from ice on land – including 6.1 trillion tonnes from mountain glaciers, 3.8 trillion tonnes from the Greenland ice sheet, and 2.5 trillion tonnes from the Antarctic ice sheet. These losses have raised global sea levels by 35 millimetres.
It is estimated that for every centimetre of sea level rise, approximately a million people are in danger of being displaced from low-lying homelands.
Despite storing only 1% of the Earth’s total ice volume, glaciers have contributed to almost a quarter of the global ice losses over the study period, with all glacier regions around the world losing ice.
Report co-author and PhD researcher Inès Otosaka, also from Leeds’ Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, said:
“As well as contributing to global mean sea level rise, mountain glaciers are also critical as a freshwater resource for local communities.
“The retreat of glaciers around the world is therefore of crucial importance at both local and global scales.”
Just over half (58%) of the ice loss was from the northern hemisphere, and the remainder (42%) was from the southern hemisphere.
*
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.
Featured image: Ian Joughin – channel created by the flow of melted ice in Greenland; Greenland glacier.
Every year, we fight a battle on the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
On one side is the U.S. state. Forced to offer a concession to the middle-class elements of the Black civil-rights movement in the form of a birthday observance for Dr. King, the state has suspended Dr. King from the movement that produced him and reduces his legacy to banal statements made by Black misleaders like Barack Obama, which only reinforce the fantasy of U.S. exceptionalism.
On the other side is the Black resistance movement. We counter with a Dr. King in transition, one who was being influenced by the analysis and politics of the radical Black Liberation Movement that was grounded in the realities of the urban and rural working classes and poor.
In this annual ideological battle, those of us attempting to define Dr. King’s legacy highlight one of his statements because of its poignance and continued relevance: He said the United States is the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”
After elements of the Black Liberation Movement (the real BLM) spent years opposing the Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism in general, Dr. King finally broke with the pro-war Democrats, embraced an economic-justice program with the Poor People’s Campaign, and openly questioned the viability and ethical legitimacy of capitalism.
And in making that declaration during a Democratic Party administration, liberal Democrats, members of the civil-rights community, the press and almost every major institution in U.S. society—including most faith-based organizations—turned against Dr. King. This pivot in Dr. King’s politics likely cost him his life. When he was murdered, polls showed Dr. King was one of the most unpopular people in the country.
Liberals hated Dr. King then—as they likely would have hated him today if he was still alive—because he exposed their hypocrisy and collaboration with state violence. Today, they probably would condemn or most likely attempt to ignore Dr. King, who we can imagine would point out how in less than 48 hours after the Biden administration assumed power, 1) more U.S. troops were deployed to Syria, 2) NATO announced plans to expand its presence in Iraq, and 3) the violent U.S. campaign to undermine the right of the Venezuelan people to determine their political leadership, free from external interference, is being continued.
We speculate Dr. King would have to ask the question about how one can claim to be opposed to something one calls “fascism” in the United States, while supporting fascist political movements in Bolivia, Honduras, the right-wing opposition in Venezuela, the Saudi attack on Yemen, and the brutal occupation of Palestinians—just to name a few.
King likely would raise those questions today. But, in reality, he also supplied the answer close to 54 years ago:
“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
That radical revolution of values did not happen. The spiritual rot at the center of U.S. culture only worsened with the politics and policies of the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations. We are compelled to act because we are certain these policies will continue with the Biden administration.
The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) is adamant we will not allow the U.S. peace and anti-imperialist movement to disarm and demobilize ever again. We are not confused. We know the legitimation crisis of neoliberal capitalism will deepen and the reliance on force and repression—including ideological repression—will increase.
We are preparing and urge you to do so, too. Peace and human rights are threats to the rulers. But they are our only means for survival, and so, we must be prepared to fight for them.
Please join us to discuss this contradiction during our next webinar, “The Challenge of Radical Black Movement Building In the Context of Crisis: An Intergenerational Discussion,” to be held January 26. Register here.
*
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.
Shutting down an economy flatly contradicts a founding principle of the WHO: “Economic development and public health are inseparable and complementary… the social, cultural and economic development of a community, and its state of health, are interdependent.”
Eurostar, the company that operates the cross-Channel train service that connects the UK with France, Belgium and the Netherlands, is on the brink of collapse, the company’s management warned this week.
Propagandists are smart people. They begin their devious machinations with the premise that people need to believe in something rather than remaining suspended in doubt or forced to accept the existential courage of despair that leaves them temporarily lost and without answers or masters, suffering from free-floating anxiety.
Does civilized man create wilderness? When does the split between man and beast divide us from the goddesses of the earth and from the wildness of our own heart? Are we then doomed to be alienated “strangers in a strange land?”
The instinct among parts of the left to cheerlead the right’s war crimes, so long as they are dressed up as liberal “humanitarianism”, is alive and kicking, as Owen Jones revealed in a column last week on the plight of the Uighurs at China’s hands.
US President Joseph Biden, a relic from Washington’s old political establishment will continue the same imperialist policies in Latin America as did his predecessors including that of Donald Trump. There is a clear indication that Washington’s hostilities towards Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro will continue under a Biden administration.
Among so many otherwise progressive or liberal Americans, core convictions about the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state, now ensconced comfortably on all of the Palestinian homeland, allows them to repudiate Palestinian movements for justice and place their energies, instead, into digging for “coded” anti-Semitism in anti-Zionist speech.
A German court in a landmark ruling has declared that COVID-19 lockdowns imposed by the government are unconstitutional. Thuringia’s spring lockdown was a “catastrophically wrong political decision with dramatic consequences for almost all areas of people’s lives,” the court said, justifying its decision.
Today, January 22, 2021, is the day that can go down in history as the turning point to free humanity from those weapons that, for the first time, have the ability to erase the human species and almost every other form of life. In fact, the UN Treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons enters into force today.
Joe Biden‘s inauguration as US president was unprecedented in modern times. The US capital resembled a war zone as 25,000 National Guardsmen plus thousands of police enforced severe restrictions over civilian movement on the streets.
The Global Research News Hour this week endeavours to explore the issue with three individuals all with somewhat different views and vantage points about the harm caused by these Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna potions.
Dutch-Jewish historian Jacques Presser remarked as early as 1947: “Fascism, should it ever return, will undoubtedly present itself in the guise of anti-fascism.” Having watched the surreal inauguration, the Green Zone in Baghdad popped up. The occupation in Washington was called Red Zone.
n 1984, President Ronald Reagan noted the nuclear emperor had no clothes: “The only value in our two nations (the United States and Soviet Union) possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” Indeed it would. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) tries to do so through a new normative settling point on the ethics, legality, and legitimacy of the bomb.
“My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging.”—Hank Aaron
Global Research is a small team that believes in the power of information and analysis to bring about far-reaching societal change. Do you value the reporting and in-depth analysis we provide, free of charge, on a daily basis? Do you think this resource should be maintained and preserved as a research tool for future generations? Bringing you 24/7 updates from all over the globe has real costs associated with it. Please give what you can to help us meet these costs!
We need a steady flow of contributions from our readers in order to cover the day to day operations of GlobalResearch.ca. We recognize that times are tough for everyone and we are extremely grateful for every donation and membership subscription we receive, your support can make all the difference! Please click below to make a contribution:
We understand that times are tough for everyone. If a financial contribution is not something you can currently envision, but you would like to help out, please see below for details on becoming a Global Research Volunteer.
With measures being put in place to reduce our reach (such as tacit online censorship of independent media) there are a number of ways you can help us make sure that the questions we ask continue to be heard:
Establish an email list of some fifty friends and family and forward the Global Research Newsletter and/or your favourite Global Research articles to this list on a daily basis.
Use the various instruments of online posting and social media creatively to “spread the word”. Click the “like” and “share” buttons on our article pages for starters.
Post one or more Global Research articles to internet discussion groups and blogs to build a dialogue around the subject matters we cover.
Do you have friends who would benefit from our articles? Consider signing them up for our daily newsletter.
Are you part of a community group or organized discussion group? Submit a topic we have covered or a specific article from our website for discussion at your next meeting.
Dutch-Jewish historian Jacques Presser remarked as early as 1947: “Fascism, should it ever return, will undoubtedly present itself in the guise of anti-fascism.” Having watched the surreal inauguration, the Green Zone in Baghdad popped up. The occupation in Washington was called Red Zone.
Almost 30.000 troops occupied the city, protecting the ruling class from their own people. The “most popular President,” who can’t simulate mental acuity, was inaugurated behind a huge electric fence without any real people present, except some hundred handpicked members of the political class.
This flagged event has been reinterpreted by one of the propagandists from CNN, Don Lemon; he twisted the truth like CNN always does, saying,
“The reason President-elect Biden has to do this is that he’s just so incredibly popular. He has so many rabid fans that they might try to rush the stage as they’re overcome with enthusiasm and love for Biden, who is by far the most beloved candidate who has ever run for President.”
Kim Jong-un would love having such a guy in his propaganda crew.
Much lesser troops are still occupying Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria! The “crowd” was “represented” by 200.000 mini US flags along the Mall. Biden phraseology sounded like Obama’s only amateurishly and less eloquently. Obama finally got his third term.
Most of the so-called new people served under Obama. Susan Rice, who controls Biden’s domestic policy, will execute Obama’s divisive and identity policy, which contributed partly to the US’s dire situation.
Source: Ludwig Watzal
The Harris/Biden administration will wage a domestic war against 75 million “political-incorrect people” (Trump voters), together with the CIA, FBI, the big tech, the billionaire class, Wall Street, and the propaganda mainstream media as moral enforcers.
Biden used divisive language disguised in “unity” rhetoric such as “White Supremacists,” “Terrorists,” “Nationalists,” et cetera, who violated our “values.” Did he mean the “values” of the 1 percent and their political puppets?
The new regime uses the outburst of People Power on Capitol Hill, where many bozos broke some windows, as a pretext for a purge and a crackdown of 75 million Trump voters. Inciters from Black Lives Matter, such as John Early Sullivan and other agents provocateurs, whooped the protesters. It didn’t look like a “coup,” which the Obama administration organized in Ukraine or other places worldwide.
According to Democrats and their media instigators, Trump incited an “insurrection,” calling on people to make the protest “peacefully” and “patriotically” heard! Not a single word in his common rhetoric was inflammatory.
The Democratic Party political establishment in Washington even wants to “impeach” Trump, though he is now a private citizen. That quite a few Republicans rise to the bait demonstrates their needlessness.
Democrats and Republicans are afraid of Trump that they will bend the law to make “impeachment” happen. The new inquisition plans big. All Trump voters have to undergo reeducation training to be deprogrammed and brainwashed with their political-correct ideology.
The Obama 3.0 administration will topsy-turvy the US with their racist and discriminatory identity policy. Now women have to compete with male freaks who pretend they feel female! This insanity is a spit into the face of all women.
Besides this lunacy, Tribalism will return to America. In the future, everything will depend on who you look (black, brown, yellow, or colored, what sexual orientation one prefers, whether one feels discriminated, which bathroom one wants to use, and the rest of the ridiculous traits that are on display by the Harris/Biden people. The US looks like a nuthouse filled with ideological fanatics for an outsider.
The protest of people power on 6 January will serve as a pretext to establish a fascist system, which has been long in the pipeline. It started in summer 2020, when media oligarchs, a bunch of billionaires, and political operatives from the Democratic Party simulated war games against Trump’s “misbehavior.” Mainstream media was complicit and pushed these ideas.
The Harris/Biden administration, together with Pelosi’s and Schumer’s control
Congress will ram a new “Patriot Act” down the lawmakers’ throat. This “law” will allow the US government to fight “domestic terrorism,” whatever that means. Harris/Biden can now switch between the so-called “Global War on Terror” and “domestic terrorism.” The left big tech and opinion oligopolies replaced class struggle and replaced “anti-fascist” technocratic terrorism. “Antifascism” justifies everything after all!
In fact, the people Biden/Harris hired are the old Obama administration with some new faces, such as the black Secretary of Defense.
They are obsessed with Russia, but not so much with China.
Isn’t the Biden family deeply involved in financial favors from Chinese intelligence? Instead of impeaching the private citizen Donald Trump, Congress should think about impeaching Joe Biden.
There won’t be any “normal,” neither for the American people nor for the peoples around the world. Plans for a “Great Reset” and total control by Big Tech, which plays the role of a “Global Pravda,” are in the pipeline.
Perhaps this American-style Fascism will be more palatable than older versions. But Fascism will remain Fascism, even when it appears as the shining city on the Hill.
*
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.
It did not take long for the Lie Machine, aka American media, to create the false news and fake narrative of the “storming of the US Capitol” on January 6 by a “white supremacist insurrection.”
Here is an example from Bloomberg Weekend Reading on January 23, 2021:
“The scenes from the first day of Joe Biden’s presidency unfolded against the backdrop of a devastated U.S. economy, continuing fallout from a white supremacist insurrection, and a coronavirus death toll surpassing 400,000.”[1]
The fake narrative is accepted everywhere.It is endemic in the world press.Even news sources such as RT and Sputnik which endeavor to give us real news instead of presstitute lies have repeated the insurrection story.
President Trump was impeached by the House on the sole basis of this fake news story, and now stands to be tried in the Senate on the same fake news charges.
On the basis of the same fake news story, two Florida banks in which Trump had multi-million dollar deposits closed Trump’s accounts.
Signature Bank in New York also closed Trump’s account.
As did Germany’s Deutsche Bank.
New York mayor Bill de Blasio, who permitted Antifa and BLM to loot and burn Manhattan, has terminated the city’s contracts with Trump businesses that run ice skating rinks and a carousel in Central Park and a golf course in the Bronx.
The PGA of America voted to take the PGA Championship away from Trump’s New Jersey Golf course.
Other sources report that conventions are avoiding his hotels and that creditors will not renew loans.
That fake news can have such real world consequences should scare every American to death.
Notice also how the fake news story worsens with each repeat. On January 6, the alleged insurrection was by “Trump supporters.” By January 23 Trump supporters had been morphed into “White supremacist insurrectionists.”
The entire world now believes in something that does not exist.
This is an example of what it means to live in The Matrix.Everyone lives in a false world created by lies repeated endlessly by pressitutes.
The ruling lies are lies that enable Establishment agendas by getting rid of non-establishment explanations and shutting down non-establishment leaders.Trump had to go because he was in the way of Establishment agendas.An example is being made of Trump as a lesson to others who value service to the people higher than service to the Establishment.
There is no doubt whatsoever that Trump won reelection.The accumulated evidence of electoral fraud is overwhelming.Yet the Lie Machine was able to prevent the evidence being presented and examined.All the presstitutes ever said was that “there is no evidence of fraud,” followed by “all who support examining the evidence are enemies of democracy.”
In other words, democracy is a stolen election.If you protest the theft, you are an enemy of democracy.
On December 29, 2020, almost two months after the November presidential election and after almost two months of demonization of Trump for saying the election was stolen, the Gallup Poll reported that its survey found that Donald Trump had displaced Obama as the man most admired by Americans. See this. Yet the most admired man lost the election.
The fact that a presidential election could be stolen in plain view, attested to by numerous experts and a thousand signed affidavits, could go unexamined by the media, state and federal attorneys general, courts, and Congress, shows the power of the Establishment and the impotence of the media which, far from free, is in total service to the Establishment. The public never heard about the evidence from TV, newspapers, or NPR.
Clearly, in America there is no such thing as democracy.An election was stolen and nothing was done about it.The Establishment was able to eliminate a president who did not serve its purposes and nothing was done about it.
The people learned that their vote means nothing and, therefore, there is no democracy. A government controlled by the Establishment is unaccountable to the people.
Perhaps there is a silver lining. It has been a long time since government policy served the public.The public accepted the situation, because most people believed it was in some way a democratic outcome.Now they know that “American democracy” was nothing but a mask for Establishment self-interests.Perhaps the stolen election will serve as a wake-up call to bring the population out of its insouciance.There are signs that the Establishment is concerned that it will, thus the new domestic terrorism bill which will be used to criminalize dissent as terrorism.
For those who are indoctrinated by media repetition that “there is no evidence of electoral fraud,” let’s assume this lie is correct.The fact remains that the system has failed the people.Whether the election was stolen or not, 74 million Americans according to the official vote count and 94 million Americans according to expert estimates of Trump’s true vote count believe that the election was stolen.Yet, the concerns of these millions of Americans were dismissed out of hand as fraudulent claims.The presstitutes claimed repeatedly that the only fraud was the claim of fraud.
The Democrats, the media, and the institutions put in place to ensure a free society failed totally in their responsibility to address the sincere concerns of half or more of the voting population.This in itself is a failure of democracy, a failure of the Establishment.
Those who expressed their concerns were not only dismissed but also demonized, threatened and punished as “enemies of democracy.”
The lesson cannot be more clear:An enemy of democracy is all who challenge the controlled explanation.
The US enters the year 2021 as a country that has moved from the list of democracies to the list of authoritarian governments and is rapidly becoming a totalitarian country in which freedom of speech, freedom of association, and due process are dead letter Constitutional protections.The Gestapo knock at the door, the NKVD knock at the door have come to America.
*
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.
[1] Notice that this is a two for one sentence.Bloomberg got in the fake news of 400,000 US Covid deaths.This figure comes from counting everyone who dies regardless if from Covid, as a Covid death.The Covid test produces a very high rate of false positives, thus greatly exaggerating the number of infections.Many experts have pointed this out as did the inventor of the PCR test, but presstitutes have kept a lid on the news.Now the World Health Organization has finally admitted that the Covid-19 PCR test has a problem. https://www.globalresearch.ca/who-finally-admits-covid-19-pcr-test-problem/5735107
The Asian flu of 1957-58 was a deadly pandemic with a broader reach for severe outcomes than Covid-19 of 2020. It killed between 1 and 4 million people worldwide, and 116,000 in the US in a time with half the population. It was a leading contributor to a year in which the US saw 62,000 excess deaths.
Globally, it might have been five times as deadly as Covid-19, as measured by deaths per capita. It was unusually lethal for younger people: 40 percent of deaths had occurred among people younger than 65, whereas the average age of death Covid-19 is 80 with only 10-20% of deaths under the age of 65.
What’s striking is how public health officials handled the pandemic. It had a diametrically opposite response than policymakers pursued in 2020. One might assume that this was due to negligence and a lack of sophistication in understanding the need to lockdown. Surely they didn’t know 65 years ago what we know today!
Actually, this is completely false. Public health experts did in fact consider school closures, business closures, and a ban of public events but the entire ethos of the profession rejected them. There were two grounds for this rejection: lockdowns would be too disruptive, disabling the capacity of medical professionals to deal competently with the crisis, and also because such policies would be futile because the virus was already here and spreading.
Whereas lockdowns in the Covid-19 case might have contributed to a lengthening of the crisis by delaying herd immunity, the period in which the Asian flu had the most severe consequences was only three months. Newspapers barely covered it and most people did not notice it. Histories of the period hardly mention it whereas the early history of 2020 will talk primarily about the virus and the lockdowns. This is due not to the pandemic but to the brutal pandemic policy response.
The best single article on the 1957-58 Asian flu policy response is “Public Health and Medical Responses to the 1957-58 Influenza Pandemic” by the great epidemiologist Donald A. Henderson and others among his colleagues at Johns Hopkins. It appeared in 2009 in the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science. It is embedded at the end of this article.
The article is crucially important because it proves that not locking down was a deliberate decision, not some kind of failure. The refusal to disrupt society and constrain freedom in the presence of a pathogen was an achievement of modern ideas of public health. From the ancient world through the 19th century, the typical response to disease was to attribute it to corrupt air and to run away while demonizing and excluding the sick. Modern medical advances – with the discovery of viruses and bacteria, antibiotics, antiviral therapeutics, and the workings of the human immune system – counseled community calm and doctor-patient relationships.
The most influential public health body at the time was the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers (ASTHO). They met on August 27, 1957. They concluded that they should recommend home care as much as possible to keep the hospitals from overcrowding. They would instruct people to seek medical attention if symptoms become severe.
Otherwise, ASTHO concluded as follows:
‘‘there is no practical advantage in the closing of schools or the curtailment of public gatherings as it relates to the spread of this disease.’’
In particular, schools were not closed because public health experts observed that the children would just pick up the virus elsewhere. “The Nassau County Health Commissioner in New York,” observes Henderson, “stated that ‘public schools should stay open even in an epidemic’ and that ‘children would get sick just as easily out of school.’”
We’ve heard incessantly that Covid-19 necessitated lockdowns because it is a new strain for which there was not a vaccine. Well, the Asian flu was already new and there was no vaccine either. By the time one came along, it was only 60% effective and not widely used. Henderson comments: “it is apparent that vaccine had no appreciable effect on the trend of the pandemic.”
Perhaps we had to lock down due to asymptomatic cases? Not true. Henderson notes of the Asian flu: “Attack rates in the schools ranged from 40% to 60%. Serological surveys revealed that half of those reporting no influenza illness showed serological evidence of infection.”
To be sure there were disruptions. They happened not by force but by necessity due to absenteeism. They were short-lived. The millions of people exposed to the virus developed antibodies and moved on. This was true of schoolchildren in particular:
“School absenteeism reached its maximum with 280,000 absences on October 7. This amounted to 29% of all school attendees. The highest rate was registered for Manhattan schools, which had an overall 43% absentee rate. That day, 4,642 teachers (11%) did not report to work due to being sick. Business establishments, however, reported no significant increase in absenteeism. Within 2 weeks after the peak, school absentee rates were almost back to normal—around 7%.”
Newspaper reports at the time offer no record of widespread public event cancellations much less forced closures. Sometimes college and high school football games were postponed due to illness absences. Some conventions were cancelled by organizers. But that is all.
The New York Times’s single editorial on the Asian flu reflected public health wisdom: “Let us all keep a cool head about Asian influenza as the statistics on the spread and the virulence of the disease begin to accumulate.”
Henderson concludes as follows:
The 1957-58 pandemic was such a rapidly spreading disease that it became quickly apparent to U.S. health officials that efforts to stop or slow its spread were futile. Thus, no efforts were made to quarantine individuals or groups, and a deliberate decision was made not to cancel or postpone large meetings such as conferences, church gatherings, or athletic events for the purpose of reducing transmission.
No attempt was made to limit travel or to otherwise screen travelers. Emphasis was placed on providing medical care to those who were afflicted and on sustaining the continued functioning of community and health services. The febrile, respiratory illness brought large numbers of patients to clinics, doctors’ offices, and emergency rooms, but a relatively small percentage of those infected required hospitalization.
School absenteeism due to influenza was high, but schools were not closed unless the number of students or teachers fell to sufficiently low numbers to warrant closure. However, the course of the outbreak in schools was relatively brief, and many could readily return to activities within 3 to 5 days. A significant number of healthcare workers were said to have been afflicted with influenza, but reports indicate that hospitals were able to adjust appropriately to cope with the patient loads.
Available data on industrial absenteeism indicate that the rates were low and that there was no interruption of essential services or production. The overall impact on GDP was negligible and likely within the range of normal economic variation.
Health officers had hopes that significant supplies of vaccine might become available in due time, and special efforts were made to speed the production of vaccine, but the quantities that became available were too late to affect the impact of the epidemic. The national spread of the disease was so rapid that within 3 months it had swept throughout the country and had largely disappeared.
One reads this detailed account of how public health responded then compared to now and the response is to weep. How could this have happened to us? We knew for sure that lockdowns were terrible public health. We’ve known it for 100 years.
Shutting down an economy flatly contradicts a founding principle of the World Health Organization:“Economic development and public health are inseparable and complementary… the social, cultural and economic development of a community, and its state of health, are interdependent.”
In 1957-58, public health officials took that observation seriously. This very serious flu came and went with minimal social and economic disruption. Immune systems in the US and around the world adapted to the new strain of the flu.
Then ten years later, a new mutation of this flu arrived. Public health responded the same way, with wisdom, calm, and no interventions in people’s rights and liberties. Social and economic functioning were rightly seen as crucial to a comprehensive view of public health.
Lockdowns were ruled out in the past precisely so that the damage of a pandemic would be minimized and we could get through it more quickly. This was the science. This was the science all the way through the spring of 2020, when everything changed. Suddenly the “science” favored forgetting everything we’ve learned from the past and replacing it with brutal policies that wrecked the economy and people’s lives, while achieving nothing in terms of minimizing pandemic damage.
We had foisted on us an entirely new vocabulary designed to disguise what was being done to us. We weren’t under house arrest, our businesses smashed, the schools shuttered, live arts and sports abolished, our travel plans wrecked, and forcibly separated from loved ones. No, we were merely experiencing “disease mitigation” through “targeted layered containment,” “nonpharmaceutical interventions,” and “social distancing.”
This is all Owellian with traditional public health wisdom having been tossed down the memory hole. The actual science did not change. Traditional public health implores us to consider not just one pathogen but all variables that impact health, not just in the short run but in the long run too. So it was and so it is today.
*
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.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research.
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray; Along the cool sequester’d vale of life They kept the noiseless tenor of their way. — Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay: Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade; A breath can make them, as a breath has made; But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride, When once destroyed, can never be supplied. — Oliver Goldsmith, Deserted Village
Lay the proud usurpers low, Tyrants fall in every foe, Liberty’s in every blow! – Let us do or dee. — Robert Burns,Scots Wha Hae
Wilderness Inside And Out
I was born in the heart, not of darkness, but of London in the penultimate year of WWII. During air raids my mother carried me, as a babe-in-arms, to the ground floor–there being no basement–of the Ministry of Information. The self-same edifice Eric Blair characterized as the Ministry of Truth.(1) As a child, eagerly anticipating our voyage across the Atlantic, I surreptitiously gloated over the map of North America under my grammar-school desk, visions of Jack London’s Call of the Wild dancing in my head.
Does civilized man create wilderness? When does the split between man and beast divide us from the goddesses of the earth and from the wildness of our own heart?
Are we then doomed to be alienated “strangers in a strange land?”(2) Aliens landed, not as traditional gentry or peasantry, rooted in the soil, tied to the earth, but as space travellers seeking, like E.T., to “go home?”(3)
Or are we merely domesticated cattle, the wildness bred out of us, tamed, trained to the enclosure, the milking barn, and the yoke?
Perhaps domesticated man is envious of indigenous people who live on and by the fruits of the land, still connected to a way of life we can only imagine. Perhaps that is one reason they have been systematically, often brutally, cleared off the land they have occupied for millennia.
This is being done, ostensibly, to create “sustainability”(4)–a term cooked up, not over a bubbling cauldron presided over by the cackling crones of “the Scottish Play,”(5) but by sly and slippery word-smiths spinning verbal dross with which to enchant the sedated somnambulists of the common people, the hoi poloi.
One could even suspect a conscious agenda driving the push to create “Wildways,”(6)(7)(8)(9) wide swaths of conserved, bottled and jarred countryside, corridors where no man, woman or child may set foot without permission of the overlords. To be preserved, not in aspic like cold cooked salmon, but for the use, and at their discretion even abuse, of the drafters of grand plans encompassing the entire globe, and every fish that swims, bird that flies, and creature that crawls. Could Agenda 21(10) be such a plan? What are the “sustainabilty goals” of the UN sustaining?
Surely African Bushmen have now even more reason to believe that The Gods Must Be Crazy.(11) Like other indigenous tribes throughout the world, stripped of their traditional lands, forced off by force of arms, they now have no means of livelihood, and may only weep as they gaze from the margins at game-preserves for the wealthy, tree-farms for the greedy.
This ongoing program, more and more vigorously pursued, may be of only marginal interest to the average denizen of the cities or ‘burbs, but it is of more than passing interest to small ranchers and farmers. They, too, are being marginalized, hemmed in, pushed off their own land, as a result of a deliberate scheme, a scenario of a future which precludes their traditional way of life.(12)
Three centuries ago, the Enclosure Acts(13) fenced off village greens throughout England, beginning the destruction of a way of life, if not Far From the Madding Crowd, (14) then mostly self-sufficient, a life that would have seemed destined to continue, essentially unchanged, for centuries to come. The Highland Clearances,(15) followed a similar pattern. Now we face–are having shoved in our masked and muffled faces–a series of enclosures: fences walling us in, cutting us off from each other, destroying our livelihoods, splitting us from our connection to the natural world, to the earth, the real source of our strength as humans having their being on this planet we were born on. To be borne, one fears, to the bourne from which none of us return unless perhaps reincarnated in another day and night of Brahma.
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.
S.M. Smyth was a founding member of the 2006 World Peace Forum in Vancouver, and organized a debate about TILMA at the Maple Ridge City Council chambers between Ellen Gould and a representative of the Fraser Institute.
The instinct among parts of the left to cheerlead the right’s war crimes, so long as they are dressed up as liberal “humanitarianism”, is alive and kicking, as Owen Jones revealed in a column last week on the plight of the Uighurs at China’s hands.
The “humanitarian war” instinct persists even after two decades of the horror shows that followed the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US and UK; the western-sponsored butchering of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi that unleashed a new regional trade in slaves and arms; and the west’s covert backing of Islamic jihadists who proceeded to tear Syria apart.
In fact, those weren’t really separate horror shows: they were instalments of one long horror show.
The vacuum left in Iraq by the west – the execution of Saddam Hussein and the destruction of his armed forces – sucked in Islamic extremists from every corner of the Middle East. The US and UK occupations of Iraq served both as fuel to rationalise new, more nihilistic Islamic doctrines that culminated in the emergence of Islamic State, and as a training ground for jihadists to develop better methods of militarised resistance.
That process accelerated in post-Gaddafi Libya, where Islamic extremists were handed an even more lawless country than post-invasion Iraq in which to recruit followers and train them, and trade arms. All of that know-how and weaponry ended up flooding into Syria where the same Islamic extremists hoped to establish the seat of their new caliphate.
Many millions of Arabs across the region were either slaughtered or forced to flee their homes, becoming permanent refugees, because of the supposedly “humanitarian” impulse unleashed by George W Bush and Tony Blair.
No lesson learnt
One might imagine that by this stage liberal humanitarianism was entirely discredited, at least on the left. But you would be wrong. There are still those who have learnt no lessons at all – like the Guardian’s Owen Jones. In a new column he picks up and runs with the latest pretext for global warmongering by the right: the Uighurs, a Muslim minority that has long been oppressed by China.
Those of us who oppose Western militarism and atrocities committed by Western allies must also stand in solidarity with China's Uighur Muslims.https://t.co/DarOxemAHN
After acknowledging the bad faith arguments and general unreliability of the right, Jones sallies forth to argue – as if Iraq, Libya and Syria never happened – that the left must not avoid good causes just because bad people support them. We must not, he writes,
“sacrifice oppressed Muslims on the altar of geopolitics: and indeed, it is possible to walk and to chew gum; to oppose western militarism and to stand with victims of state violence. It would be perverse to cede a defence of China’s Muslims – however disingenuous – to reactionaries and warmongers.”
But this is to entirely miss the point of the anti-war and anti-imperialist politics that are the bedrock of any progressive leftwing movement.
Jones does at least note, even if very cursorily, the bad-faith reasoning of the right when it accuses the left of being all too ready to protest outside a US or Israeli embassy but not a Chinese or Russian one:
“Citizens [in the west] have at least some potential leverage over their own governments: whether it be to stop participation in foreign action, or encourage them to confront human rights abusing allies.”
But he then ignores this important observation about power and responsibility and repurposes it as stick to beat the left with:
“But that doesn’t mean abandoning a commitment to defending the oppressed, whoever their oppressor might be. To speak out against Islamophobia in western societies but to remain silent about the Uighurs is to declare that the security of Muslims only matters in some countries. We need genuine universalists.”
That is not only a facile argument, it’s a deeply dangerous one. There are two important additional reasons why the left needs to avoid cheerleading the right’s favoured warmongering causes, based on both its anti-imperialist and anti-war priorities.
Virtue-signalling
Jones misunderstands the goal of the left’s anti-imperialist politics. It is not, as the right so often claims, about leftwing “virtue-signalling”. It is the very opposite of that. It is about carefully selecting our political priorities – priorities necessarily antithetical to the dominant narratives promoted by the west’s warmongering political and media establishments. Our primary goal is to undermine imperialist causes that have led to such great violence and suffering around the world.
Jones forgets that the purpose of the anti-war left is not to back the west’s warmongering establishment for picking a ‘humanitarian’ cause for its wars. It is to discredit the establishment, expose its warmongering and stop its wars.
The best measure – practical and ethical – for the western left to use to determine which causes to expend its limited resources and energies on are those that can help others to wake up to the continuing destructive behaviours of the west’s political establishment, even when that warmongering establishment presents itself in two guises: whether the Republicans and the Democrats in the United States, or the Conservatives and the (non-Corbyn) Labour party in the UK.
We on the left cannot influence China or Russia. But we can try to influence debates in our own societies that discredit the western elite headquartered in the US – the world’s sole military superpower.
Our job is not just to weigh the scales of injustice – in any case, the thumb of the west’s power-elite is far heavier than any of its rivals. It is to highlight the bad faith nature of western foreign policy, and underscore to the wider public that the real aim of the west’s foreign policy elite is either to attack or to intimidate those who refuse to submit to its power or hand over their resources.
Do no harm
That is what modern imperialism looks like. We play with fire, and betray anti-imperialist politics, when we echo the bad faith arguments of a Pompeo, a Blair, an Obama, a Bush or a Trump – even if they briefly adopt a good cause for ignoble reasons. To use a medical analogy, we join them in fixating on one symptom of global injustice while refusing to diagnose the actual disease so that it can be treated.
Requiring, as Jones does, that we prioritise the Uighurs – especially when they are the momentary pet project of the west’s warmongering, anti-China right – does not advance our anti-imperialist goals, it actively harms them. Because the left offers its own credibility, its own stamp of approval, to the right’s warmongering lies.
When the left is weak – when, unlike the right, it has no corporate media to dominate the airwaves with its political concerns and priorities, when it has almost no politicians articulating its worldview – it cannot control how its support for humanitarian causes is presented to the general public. Instead it always finds itself coopted into the drumbeat for war.
That is a lesson Jones should have learnt personally – in fact, a lesson he promised he had learnt – after his cooption by the corporate Guardian to damage the political fortunes of Jeremy Corbyn, the only anti-war, anti-imperialist politician Britain has ever had who was in sight of power.
Anti-imperialist politics is not about good intentions; it’s about beneficial outcomes. To employ another medical analogy, our credo must to be to do no harm – or, if that is not possible, at least to minimise harm.
The ‘defence’ industry
Which is why the flaw in Jones’ argument runs deeper still.
The anti-war left is not just against acts of wars, though of course it is against those too. It is against the global war economy: the weapons manufacturers that fund our politicians; the arms trade lobbies that now sit in our governments; our leaders, of the right and so-called left, who divide the world into a Manichean struggle between the good guys and bad guys to justify their warmongering and weapons purchases; the arms traders that profit from violence and human suffering; the stock-piling of nuclear weapons that threaten our future as a species.
The War Industry has proved very lucrative for the UK. Two-thirds of all armies line up to train on British soil each year, including armies the UK itself lists as human rights abusers. Here I explain how war still lies at the heart of the western mission https://t.co/SL2MA1jhUJ
The anti-war left is against the globe’s dominant, western war economy, one that deceives us into believing it is really a “defence industry”. That “defence industry” needs villains, like China and Russia, that it must extravagantly arm itself against. And that means fixating on the crimes of China and Russia, while largely ignoring our own crimes, so that those “defence industries” can prosper.
Yes, Russia and China have armies too. But no one in the west can credibly believe Moscow or Beijing are going to disarm when the far superior military might of the west – of NATO – flexes its muscles daily in their faces, when it surrounds them with military bases that encroach ever nearer their territory, when it points its missiles menacingly in their direction.
REVEALED — The UK military’s overseas base network involves 145 sites in 42 countries.
Jones and George Monbiot, the other token leftist at the Guardian with no understanding of how global politics works, can always be relied on to cheerlead the western establishment’s humanitarian claims – and demand that we do too. That is also doubtless the reason they are allowed their solitary slots in the liberal corporate media.
When called out, the pair argue that, even though they loudly trumpet their detestation of Saddam Hussein or Bashar Assad, that does not implicate them in the wars that are subsequently waged against Iraq or Syria.
This is obviously infantile logic, which assumes that the left can echo the misleading rhetoric of the west’s warmongering power-elite without taking any responsibility for the wars that result from that warmongering.
But Jones’ logic is even more grossly flawed than that. It pretends that the left can echo the rhetoric of the warmongers and not take responsibility for the war industries that constantly thrive and expand, whether or not actual wars are being waged at any one time.
The western foreign policy elite is concerned about the Uighurs not because it wishes to save them from Chinese persecution or even because it necessarily intends to use them as a pretext to attack China. Rather, its professed concerns serve to underpin claims that are essential to the success of its war industries: that the west is the global good guy; that China is a potential nemesis, the Joker to our Batman; and that the west therefore needs an even bigger arsenal, paid by us as taxpayers, to protect itself.
Belligerent superpower
The Uighurs’ cause is being instrumentalised by the west’s foreign policy establishment to further enhance its power and make the world even less safe for us all, the Uighurs included. Whatever Jones claims, there should be no obligation on the left to give succour to the west’s war industries.
Vilifying “official enemies” while safely ensconced inside the “defence” umbrella of a belligerent global superpower and hegemon is a crime against peace, against justice, against survival. Jones is free to flaunt his humanitarian credentials, but so are we to reject political demands dictated to us by the west’s war machine.
The anti-war left has its own struggles, its own priorities. It does not need to be gaslit by Mike Pompeo or Tony Blair – or, for that matter, by Owen Jones.
*
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.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
“Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.” – Albert Camus, The Fall
Propagandists are smart people. They begin their devious machinations with the premise that people need to believe in something rather than remaining suspended in doubt or forced to accept the existential courage of despair that leaves them temporarily lost and without answers or masters, suffering from free-floating anxiety.
Propagandists are like Mr. Death. They know people are afraid of death and aloneness and so use that fear to manipulate them into believing their cover stories for comfort.
Propagandists are like the Candy Man, handing out fictive life savers to the shipwrecked desperadoes willing to grasp on to anything even if it has a big hole in its center.
Propagandists take this need for belief and use it to create different scenarios that they develop into full-scale social theater pieces that will give the public various options to believe, all of which are meant to satisfy the public’s yearning for something rather than nothing but which conceal the truth.
Facts don’t matter with these offerings since they are completely illusory narratives.
These staged plays usually contain their opposites; one can choose what has already been chosen for one, even seemingly contradictory scripts with opposing roles. Seemingly is the relevant word, for the opposites are not opposites but counterparts, flip sides of the same coin. But each choice is a choice of belief that satisfies the need to believe no matter how unbelievable. It’s the coin that’s counterfeit.
For the propagandists, facts are fictions used to entice the audience into double-binds so entrancing that there is no exit. Or so they hope.
The French sociologist Jacques Ellul put it this way in his classic book Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes:
For no citizen will believe he is unable to have opinions. Public opinion surveys always reveal that people have opinions even on the most complicated questions, except for a small minority (usually the most informed and those who have reflected most). The majority prefers expressing stupidities to not expressing any opinion: this gives them the feeling of participation. For they need simple thoughts, elementary explanations, a ‘key’ that will permit them to take a position, and even ready-made opinions. As most people have the desire and at the same time the incapacity to participate [except to vote for and support pre-selected candidates], they are ready to accept a propaganda that will permit them to participate, and which hides their incapacity beneath explanations, judgments, and news, enabling them to satisfy their desire without eliminating their incompetence….He realizes that he depends on decisions over which he has no control, and that realization drives him to despair. Man cannot stay in this situation too long. He needs an ideological veil to cover the harsh reality, some consolation, a raison d’être, a sense of values. And only propaganda offers him a remedy for a basically intolerable situation.
Thus the need to choose a master, a prefabricated demigod. It is why the American presidents are presented and accepted by their followers as minor divinities. Yes, it is a civil religion, and yes, people will vehemently deny that they revere these figureheads. But those denials ring false, as recent history and the pageantry associated with the installation of these demigods will attest.
Take the last three presidents, for example.
Barack Obama was considered by his followers and many others like a prayer come true, a black messiah come to redeem the country from its racist past and evil war-making deeds of his Muslim-hating, war-mongering predecessor George W. Bush. That Obama then waged war on seven Muslim countries didn’t matter to his congregation. Not in the slightest. They revered him as strongly as they had denounced Bush, the black-hatted white demon to their white-hatted black god, for the western movie template underlies these political theater pieces. Obama was a dream come true and the dream factory went into overdrive. As the priestess Madonna prophesied with Like A Prayer in 1989:
Just like a dream
You are not what you seem
Just like a prayer, no choice
Your voice can take me there
Then the orange-halo-headed Trump was paraded in. To his followers he was the savior who would re-redeem the country from the devilish divinity Obama, the false prophet. He would drain the swamp. Desperate middle-Americans revered this NYC real-estate tycoon and reality TV star who for years was nothing but a running joke among those who actually knew who he was. It didn’t matter to his congregation. Not in the slightest. That he gave to the rich and screwed the middle-class and the poor, increased the military budget, waged secretive wars via drones and private mercenaries didn’t matter a bit. He was a religious figure. To Hillary Clinton’s and Obama’s acolytes, he was Satan himself, and for four years the anti-pageant play was presented by the corporate mainstream media to exorbitant box office receipts and ratings. God and Satan fought in the ring for the ultimate fighting championship.
Now Joseph Biden – just as Ronald Reagan, another acting president, had the coffee brewing for “Morning in America” – is greeted by the same media filmmakers as the latest savior, an aging but still virile demi-god who will usher in “a new day” in America.
The pageantry surrounding his recent virtual inaugural, like all inaugurals, was a religious ceremony choreographed within an ironic circle of 20,000-armed palace guards and barbed wire fencing protecting the erection of the new king, one who, like Oedipus in Sophocles’ tragedy, is presented as the savior who will defeat the viral plague attacking the new Thebes. Unlike Oedipus, however, one can be assured that Biden will not seek to discover the murderer of Laius (JFK), the former king, whose assassination resulted in the plague devastating the country. Oedipus’s search for the truth didn’t end well, and Biden’s long insider career bodes well for no truth-seeking. And like his predecessors’ inaugural ceremonies, this one featured cultural idols such as Hunger Games Lady Gaga, Madonna 2.0, promoting herself as befits idols, and Bruce Springsteen offering his evenings “small prayer for our country” – Land of Hopes and Dreams:
Grab your ticket and your suitcase
Thunder’s rollin’ down this track
Well, you don’t know where you’re goin’ now
But you know you won’t be back….
I said this train…
Dreams will not be thwarted
This train…
Faith will be rewarded
No, we won’t be back, unless you think Biden’s slogan – “Build Back Better” – which is also the slogan of the world’s rulings elites, means what it says. Perhaps then your faith will be rewarded.
I’ll go with George Carlin when he said that to believe in the American Dream you have to be asleep.
My faith is that the corporate mass media hypnotists who work for the owners of the country will continue to pump out their religious spectacles and that the various congregations will support their masters as always. The will to believe runs very deep and hand-in-glove with the propaganda. Life’s hard and it’s tough to be without a master. “Men don’t become slaves out of mere calculating self-interest,” writes Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death, “the slavishness is in the soul, as Gorky complained.”
Propagandists’ ability to mesmerize the faithful has increase exponentially as the technological life has increased and been promoted as de rigueur. This on-line life is propagated as a new religion whose embrace is said to be inevitable and whose faith one must accept as the missionaries for its miraculous nature spread the word far and wide.
Propagandists are smart people.
They hate freedom.
*
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.
This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Behind the Curtain.
In September 2013, at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit, the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, presented his vision and plan for the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) – an ambitious vast complex trade and commercial network for China with the wider world, with a greater mutual flow of, goods, services, capital and people.
Arguably, BRI aims to revive and roll out the ancient Silk Road in the twenty-first century, redraw trade routes for Chinese products, secure access to natural resources from energy rich nations – and radically transform those nations with mega infrastructure projects and investments worth billions of dollars. Although comparable to some degree with the American Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Western Europe after the Second World War, BRI surpasses it in scale and imagination. Some argue the scope of the initiative is unmatched in history. Recent reports claim the BRI impacts over 90 countries and 4 billion people.
The BRI flagship project of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) – a 3000-kilometer corridor that runs from China’s Kashgar to Pakistan’s deep-water port of Gwadar – provides Pakistan over $60 billion in grants and soft loans worth of investment and on completion will allow China to have access to the Indian Ocean. It will not only open the remote western region of China, Xinjiang, bordering Pakistan, to the rest of the world, it will connect China with the rest of Asia and Europe – by sea to Europe, Africa and other Asian regions and reduce its dependence on shipping via Singapore and the Melaka Straits.
Arguably, Pakistan is integral to the overall success of China’s BRI – and if CPEC fails the full potential of BRI may not materialise. In his brilliant and insightful study, ‘The China-Pakistan Axis’, Andrew Small argues further, “Pakistan is a central part of China’s transition from a regional power to a global one.”
The long-term commitment of both sides from inception to future plans for CPEC is embedded in the strong foundation on which the China and Pakistan relationship already stands.
In 1950, Pakistan was one of the very first countries to recognise the People’s Republic of China. From facilitating US President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, in turn, re-establishing formal ties between China and the West – to acting as the main conduit to the Islamic world, Pakistan is regarded by China not only as a key strategic partner, but an ‘Iron Brother’. This friendship is cemented by the construction of the grand Karakoram Highway (started in 1959 and completed in 1979) – also known as the ‘China-Pakistan Friendship Highway’ connecting Pakistan with China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
Since 1950, Pakistan has collaborated with China in extensive military and economic projects – and CPEC is viewed as the latest of these projects. China has offered Pakistan materials to develop its nuclear arsenal – and today, Pakistan stands as the only Muslim country with nuclear missiles. CPEC has implications for India-Pakistan relations. India perceives CPEC as a direct challenge and threat – an economic initiative disguising the real intentions, which amounts to military co-operation for a potential two front military offensive against India over Kashmir region. It allows China to have easy land access to Pakistan – and that it is less about economic development and more about larger political and strategic goals.
In December 2020, ‘The Hindu’, reported that when the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson was asked at a press conference whether the recent joint air force exercises between China and Pakistan were intended to send a “message to New Delhi”, he told the reporters the drills were part of “routine arrangement” between the two nations. Holding these exercises during a military standoff between Chinese and Indian troops in Ladakh, the concerns are understandable. This recent “routine” joint exercise lasted for 20 days – and according to the Chinese daily newspaper, ‘Global Times’, “air forces from both sides focused on large scale confrontation, including large scale aerial battles and use of forces in mass and close-quarters.”
Some observers argue CPEC is forcing India to rewire its foreign policy objectives, security strategies and trade policies. India’s phenomenal rise as a regional and global economic competitor to China – and with its policies relating to Kashmir – India may have brought China and Pakistan even closer together.
There is a perception held by both China and Pakistan that serious attempts are being made to undermine and derail the CPEC project. Terrorist attacks inside Pakistan have decimated thousands of lives and created instability. In November 2020 the Pakistani newspaper, ‘The Express Tribune’, reported that Pakistani officials had, “unveiled a dossier, containing irrefutable evidence of India’s sponsorship of terrorism in Pakistan” and “India was trying to sabotage CPEC.” India accuses Pakistan of harbouring and supporting terrorists and militants who are responsible for stirring unrest inside Indian controlled Kashmir.
Ongoing accusations and counter-accusations keep the Pakistan-India relations strained and volatile – and China continues to support Pakistan at the highest level. “We are all-weather strategic cooperative partners. In the past 69 years, this relationship has stood the test of the changing international landscape, and has remained firm as a rock,” said China’s Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, as reported in the Indian newspaper, ‘The Economic Times’, in May 2020.
India may wish CPEC fails – and many news media outlets in India report fall-outs and disagreements between Pakistan and China over CPEC. China maintains relations with Pakistan are going from strength to strength. The new Chinese Ambassador to Pakistan, Nong Rong, stated recently, “CPEC is a product of vision of two brotherly countries that goes beyond traditional business dealings reflecting decade’s old strong bonds of bilateral cooperation and shared goals with a win-win situation for all.”
The issue of Kashmir is at the heart of most problems between Pakistan and India – and between China and India. The region is divided and controlled by the three nations and Pakistan and India have already engaged in three wars over Kashmir.
Despite the continuous threat of war looming over the Kashmir region – a potential military flashpoint between three nuclear powers – according to many observers CPEC is swiftly moving forward in 2021.
*
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.
Shahbazz Afzal is an independent writer and political activist.
US President Joseph Biden, a relic from Washington’s old political establishment will continue the same imperialist policies in Latin America as did his predecessors including that of Donald Trump. There is a clear indication that Washington’s hostilities towards Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro will continue under a Biden administration.
The day before Biden’s inauguration, Reuters’ had published a report on what we can expect from the new administration when it comes to Venezuela, ‘Biden will recognize Guaido as Venezuela’s leader, top diplomat says.’ which means that Washington will continue to support the opposition leader, Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s “legitimate” president. According to the report, Anthony Blinken said “U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s administration will continue to recognize Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido as the South American country’s president.” Not only Washington would recognize a political figure who was selected by Washington, it would continue to use targeted sanctions on the Latin American country coinciding with humanitarian aid:
Blinken told members of the U.S. Senate that Biden would seek to “more effectively target” sanctions on the country, which aim to oust President Nicolas Maduro – who retains control of the country. Blinken said the new administration would look at more humanitarian assistance to the country
US hostilities towards Venezuela did not start with Trump, there were tensions between Washington and Caracas with the Obama and Bush regimes. An article from the Associated Press (AP) in 2015 ‘Venezuela’s President Accuses Vice President Biden of Plotting to Overthrow Him’ said that Washington had imposed “new visa restrictions on Venezuelan officials and their families.”
The former White House Communications Director under Obama, Jen Psaki who is now on Biden’s team as the White House Press Secretary said that “the U.S. was showing clearly that human rights violators and their families “are not welcome in the United States.”
Washington’s actions earned condemnation from Maduro who said that “he would write a letter to Obama over what he called an attempt to violate Venezuela’s national sovereignty” and that Washington’s long-time policies which are basically strong-arm tactics used on Venezuela and its close allies in the region will lead to failure “U.S. policy toward Venezuela has been kidnapped by “irresponsible, imperial forces that are putting the United States on a dead-end.” Maduro’s response towards Washington’s sanctions at the time was on a televised national address which he criticized Obama’s Vice-President, Joe Biden:
In a televised address over the weekend, Maduro claimed that Biden sought to foment the overthrow of his socialist government during a Caribbean energy summit Biden hosted last month in Washington. According to Maduro, Biden told Caribbean heads of state that the Venezuelan government’s days were numbered and it was time they abandon their support. “What Vice President Joseph Biden did is unspeakable,” Maduro said
And of course, Washington dismissed Maduro’s claims as “ludicrous.” With Joe Biden in charge, expect more of the same bi-partisanship actions including more sanctions, regime change operations and even the possibility of an assassination attempt on Maduro’s life. With a number of war hawks appointed under this new administration including humanitarian interventionist, Samantha Power who will lead the United States Agency for InternationalDevelopment (USAID) tweeted “What’s happening in Venezuela is flying under the radar in the US, but it is incredibly serious” shows what direction Washington will move towards. “In the past week, the opposition banned from competing in April presidential elections, UNICEF warns of child malnutrition crisis, IMF predicts 13,000% inflation in 2018” meaning that Power will push for a humanitarian intervention in some form or another.Power has supported military interventions in Syria and was a cheerleader for the war in Afghanistan and Libya. There will be bi-partisan support from both the democrats and republicans for regime change in Venezuela. But a war against Venezuela under Biden is also quite possible since they have the world’s largest oil reserves on the planet. Tensions between Washington and Caracas will only escalate in the upcoming months.
Nicaragua will be also on Washington’s radar as they are scheduled to have Presidential elections in November. Expect some sort of election interference to oust long-time enemy of Washington, Nicaraguan President, Daniel Ortega. In a September 5th tweet, Biden said
“Nicaraguan asylum seekers fleeing oppression deserve to have their cases heard. Instead, they’re being deported back into the tyrannical grip of Daniel Ortega without a chance to pursue their claims. President Trump’s cruelty truly knows no bounds.”
Venezuela and Nicaragua will experience hostilities from the Biden team, a continuation of policies from previous US regimes is assured.
Obama’s 2009 Coup in Honduras is a Warning to Anti-Imperialists in Latin America
Joe Biden’s history with Latin America as vice-President to Obama should be considered a warning sign of things to come. As soon as Obama was selected for office, they went to work on their backyard with a shovel in hand and set their sights on the small nation of Honduras. Before, the US approved the coup against its Democratic leader, Manuel Zelaya because he wanted to rewrite the constitution. Zelaya administered an opinion poll for a referendum so that a constitutional assembly can legally reform the constitution that would allow Honduran citizens to have a legitimate voice in the political process. Honduran officials, members of the Supreme Court and even members of his own party who are under Washington’s control declared Zelaya’s plans as unconstitutional. Officials from the Obama regime including Hillary Clinton who was the Secretary of State at the time, all agreed Zelaya had to be removed from power.
Zelaya was also too friendly with Washington’s enemies in the region including Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Zelaya had also helped people in need as he raised the hourly minimum-wage, funded scholarships for students, authorized the distribution of milk and basic food necessities for children and even helped distribute energy-saving light bulbs among others for the Honduran people. Washington also considered Zelaya a threat to its interests concerning the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and its US troops stationed at the Palmerola military base if Zelaya decided to cancel the CAFTA deal or stop US troops from entering Honduras. For decades, Washington has trained soldiers and officers in the Honduran military through the former U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) which is now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).
On June 28th, 2009, with permission from the Supreme Court of Honduras issued an order for the military to arrest and detain President Zelaya who was taken to the Hernan Acosta Mejia Air Base located in Tegucigalpa, Honduras and was exiled to Costa Rica. The aftermath of the coup resulted in Honduras becoming one of the most dangerous countries on the planet with one of the highest murder-rates in Central America. Roberto Micheletti became the interim-president following the coup. Under his leadership, the Honduras government became a repressive force that lead to an increase of Hondurans deciding to immigrate to the US. Human rights groups and activists lives were threatened. In 2016, one of the death threats became a reality for a well-known Indigenous rights and environmental activist by the name of Bertha Caceres who was assassinated in her home.
Caceres was known for preventing one of the world’s largest corporations that builds dams from completing the Agua Zarca Dam at the Río Gualcarque. Life in Honduras became worst after Washington’s intervention to oust a democratically elected leader who wanted to make things a little better for his people which constitutes a criminal act under Washington’s political establishment.
What Does An Imperialist Power Under Joseph Biden Mean for Latin America?
The gloves will come off. Joe Biden wants to get the job done for the Military-Industrial Complex. The Biden regime will be more aggressive and dangerous to left-wing Latin American leaders who have disobeyed Washington’s political establishment. That’s why they are all on the hit-list to be removed from power so that Washington’s preferred candidates can regain control to benefit their corporate and military interests that has plunged Latin America into a cycle of civil wars, debt and poverty since the end of the Spanish-American war. Biden and the Democrats will try to prove to the Republicans who can be more “tough” on Latin American leaders and others around the world who defy Washington’s policies. Biden’s presidency might prove that his administration will be more hawkish than the Republicans on Venezuela and the rest of Latin America’s anti-imperialist governments.
*
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.
Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Many are noting happily that Joe Biden’s flurry of executive orders are “surprisingly” progressive … and decent. In an essay in Jacobin titled ‘If Joe Biden Moves Left, You Can Thank the Left’, Lisa Featherstone acknowledges that, though “deeply implicated in much of what is wrong with America and the world today,” Biden nevertheless appears to be doing the right thing. She assigns credit for Biden’s decisive departures from the old to: “the organized left, which has helped transform US politics.”
No such transformation appears to be on the horizon for Palestine and the “Middle East” in general. And, as far as I am concerned, you can blame the left for that.
The new Israeli envoy to Washington Gilad Erdan, whose appointment coincided with Biden’s inauguration, is certainly not “turning the page on Trump era” as a headline in The Hill stated, belying the content of the article:
Israel’s opposition to the U.S. engaging with Iran will be bolstered by key ties in Washington with Yousef Al Otaiba, the United Arab Emirates’s envoy in the U.S., and Bahrain’s ambassador to the U.S. Abdullah Bin Mohammad Bin Rashed Al Khalifa — relationships formally brokered by the Trump administration under the agreement known as the Abraham Accords.
… Antony Blinken, Biden’s nominee for secretary of State, said during his Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday that he and the president are “resolutely opposed” to the [BDS] movement and that it “unfairly and inappropriately singles out Israel, it promotes a double standard and a standard we do not apply to other countries.
Why do I blame the left? In her book The Israeli Radical Left: An Ethics of Complicity, Fiona Wright gives us a complete picture about “the ambivalences” that attend anti-occupation, anti-colonial activism in Israel and participation in state violence against Palestinians.
Similarly, these complexities are entrenched in the organized left in the United States.
Take, for example, the account in The Atlantic describing the controversy over anti-Israel statements in the Movement for Black Lives 2016 political platform:
Jewish groups have been most upset about its use of the words “genocide” and “apartheid” to describe Israel’s actions against the Palestinians, describing the terms as “offensive and odious.” Some progressive, social-justice-oriented organizations have condemned the statements in part; others have condemned the movement in full. Church groups have repudiated it. Jews of color have struggled with it. In the wake of what should have been a powerful moment, black activists have found themselves at odds with the one group [American Jews] that may have been most ready to support them as allies.
Emma Green, the writer of The Atlantic article, goes on to describe the conflict between Jews and blacks in America as “largely one of language, but this is also a conflict of history…a sign of how thoroughly elements of these groups have become alienated from one another — hoping for justice, but hearing different things when they try to speak its language.”
In 2016, commenting on the conflict that erupted over Black support of Palestinians, Janaé Bonsu, co-director of the Chicago-based activist group Black Youth Project 100, had this to say: “We remain unequivocally supportive of Palestine and critical of Israel, but I don’t think that precludes Jewish people who are pro-Israel from supporting other aspects of the platform.”
Among so many otherwise progressive or liberal Americans, core convictions about the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state, now ensconced comfortably on all of the Palestinian homeland, allows them to repudiate Palestinian movements for justice and place their energies, instead, into digging for “coded” anti-Semitism in anti-Zionist speech.
When Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi speak the language of Martin Luther King and call for “accountability, truth and justice,” as we have heard them do recently, they are still conditioning their solidarity with Black Lives Matter and commitment to universal justice on the repudiation of Palestinian human rights.
The same image below, which is used by the Zionist so-called Foundation for the Defense of Democracy to portray the Palestinian-led boycott movement (BDS) as an “economic warfare campaign targeting Israel” and to present “policy recommendations for the U.S. government to consider,” in fact represents the history of Palestine’s cry for justice from 1948 to the present.
They are hearing different things from us Palestinians about justice and fairness when they try to speak the language of justice. They are hearing (and balking at) “de-legitimize Israel as a Jewish state in Palestine” rather than hearing “Justice for Palestine.”
President Biden is doing a lot of feel-good things by setting right some of Trump’s more egregious doings. We are a little giddy with relief, making affectionate fun of Sanders’ mittens, and not thinking about what it means to us as a nation that there is no room for Sanders (remember how feverish with hope he made us feel for a moment during the primaries?) as secretary of labor at Biden’s table. We are not thinking what it means that AOC’s fellow Democrats froze her out (in a secret ballot) of a position on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Collage used by Zionist organization to portray the BDS movement as “war” (Source: Rima Najjar)
Speaking “as a member of the left,” Chris Hedges had this to say in an interview on New Economic Thinking, Jan 19, 2021:
I speak as a member of the left … we must build real relationships with the oppressed. I think the danger is that the oppressed become an abstraction… one of the things I’ve liked about the George Floyd protests is that, number one it skews young, it has been led by people of color, by people who have come out of the experience of urban oppression and police terror and know what they are talking about. I think there has been a political sophistication on the part of many people in the streets … because I worked in Gaza, because I worked in central America, because I teach in a prison and have taught in a prison for ten years … I have close relationships with people who have suffered the brunt of that oppression and I think that keeps you honest. I can’t walk out of that prison knowing that but for Clinton and Biden half of my students wouldn’t be in prison and then vote for Biden; I can’t spend months of my life in Gaza and then, as I did in 2016, listen to Barack Obama give a speech to AIPAC, which might as well have been written and was probably by AIPAC, and then betray the Palestinians … the only thing that will save us is standing unequivocally with the people who have been crushed and demonized and oppressed by this system … in the short term, it may seem counter-productive but in the long term it gives us a kind of credibility, which I see slipping away by essentially selling ourselves out. That’s what worries me, that’s what’s dangerous because … if you don’t stand up for these values … you have a population or a significant portion of that population, not only turn on that feckless, spineless liberal class, but eventually turn on the same purported values they support, which I do support and I think are important.
The fact remains, I am afraid, that Pelosi and Schumer, no less than McConnell, are both under the thumb of the billionaire class. That’s who they ultimately serve, which is why the left must step up its act on all issues of social justice and fairness.
*
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.
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.
Featured image is from Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Mark Twain is credited with the saying ‘History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.’ The echoes of history resonate as the new US administration prioritises the Afghan problem for policy review.
The highlight of the White House readout following a phone call by the new National Security Advisor Jack Sullivan to his Afghan counterpart Hamdullah Mohib on January 22 is Washington’s intention to review the February 2020 US-Taliban agreement. The White House sidestepped Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to convey this important message and the readout avoided any expression of support for the Ghani government.
History seems to be repeating. Exactly ten years ago, then Vice-President Joe Biden was witness to a similar agonising Afghan policy review at the Barack Obama White House. Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars recounts how Obama’s “war cabinet” was split down the middle with the security establishment and top White House political strategists locked in bitter infighting.
While the security establishment led by the generals and military chiefs – David Petraeus, McChrystal and Mike Mullen, and Obama’s defence secretary, Robert Gates – argued for a surge and a commitment to keep the deployment to Afghanistan for as long as it took to contain Taliban, facing them down was Biden, who wanted the US to minimise its involvement and get out as soon as possible and invoked the lessons of Vietnam war.
But eventually, the army men proved to be adept at public relations with Gen. Petraeus defying a White House gag and prompting newspaper stories that Obama was going to lose them the war. And Obama played safe and Biden’s warnings went unheeded.
But history is not even rhyming this time around. President Biden has thoughtfully picked a national security team whose loyalty to him is never in doubt. Biden will have his way on troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Biden has been an early advocate of ending the war. Secretary of State Antony Blinken broadly outlined Biden’s thinking during his confirmation hearing at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 19 when he said,
“We want to end this so-called forever war. We want to bring our forces home. We want to retain some capacity to deal with any resurgence of terrorism, which is what brought us there in the first place.”
But, he added, “We have to look carefully at what has actually been negotiated. I haven’t been privy to it yet.” Blinken was referring to the annexes to the Doha pact that have remained classified. Clearly, the forthcoming White House review of the Doha pact will examine the secret understandings reached between the US special representative Zalmay Khalilzad and the Taliban interlocutors at Doha with Pakistan as the sole witness-cum-facilitator.
Conceivably, there could be an understanding regarding an interim government in Kabul replacing President Ashraf Ghani, which is linked to a ceasefire. At any rate, Ghani shows signs of nervousness. He’s warned of “severe” consequences in the event of an interim setup replacing his government in Kabul. Ghani indignantly asked, “Based on what authority are they talking about an interim government?”
Ghani is unnerved probably over an Al Jazeera interview on Thursday by Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi who expressed hopes for greater engagement with the new US government and urged Biden to follow up on the Afghan peace process and US troop withdrawal.
“I think they [Biden administration] should realise there is an opportunity in Afghanistan and they should persevere with what was initiated and not reverse things. Push them forward, because, after a long time, we have started moving in the right direction,” Qureshi said.
Qureshi added,
“Pakistan has done a lot, we have really bent backwards to create an environment to facilitate the peace process… They [White House] should be supportive of what, I feel, is a convergence of interests. Our approach, thinking, objectives and shared visions are very much in line with the priorities of the new [US] administration. And that convergence can be built further.”
Biden has enjoyed a warm relationship with the Pakistani leadership, civilian and military. The friendly references to US-Pakistan relations by Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin at his US Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday testify to it.
Austin said,
“Pakistan is an essential partner in any peace process in Afghanistan. Pakistan will play an important role in any political settlement in Afghanistan.”Austin added, “I certainly would like to see this conflict end with a negotiated settlement. And I think we are going to make every effort to ensure that happens. We need to see an agreement reached in accordance with what the president-elect wants to see. I think we want to see an Afghanistan that doesn’t present a threat to America. So, focusing on some counterterrorism issues, I think in the future would be helpful.”
“If confirmed, I will encourage a regional approach that garners support from… Pakistan, while also deterring regional actors from serving as spoilers to the Afghanistan peace process… Pakistan has taken constructive steps to meet US requests in support of the Afghanistan peace process. Pakistan has also taken steps against anti-Indian groups, such as Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Muhammed, although this progress is incomplete… many factors in addition to the security assistance suspension may impact Pakistan’s cooperation, including Afghanistan negotiations and the dangerous escalation following the Pulwama attack.”
Austin assured the senate that he would continue to build relationships with the Pakistani military to “provide openings for the United States and Pakistan to cooperate on key issues.”
Austin’s effusive statements on the senate floor underscored the high importance Biden attaches to rebooting the US-Pakistan relationship. The CNN has reported that Khalilzad is continuing in his position as special representative. Khalilzad enjoys excellent equations with the Taliban representatives at Doha and the Pakistani military leadership. (Ghani refused to meet him during a recent visit to Kabul.)
Indeed, US-Pakistan relations are poised to touch a qualitatively new level under the Biden administration. Last week, visualising this upward trajectory, at a talk at the Washington-based think tank Wilson Centre and in a media interview, the Special Assistant to Pakistan Prime Minister on National Security, Dr Moeed Yusuf said Pakistan can work as a bridge between the US and China in the evolving global order.
With Pakistani help, the US hopes to preserve the Doha pact and try to finesse it further to its advantage. Biden no doubt expects a big helping hand from Islamabad to persuade Taliban to agree to a reduction in violence. Biden will also seek an orderly withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, which would entail an extension of the May timeline in the Doha pact by, say, another six months.
Again, Biden plans to keep some forces in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future in the post-settlement period. Pakistan’s help will be crucial to persuade the Taliban to stomach the idea. Finally, the issue of the interim government remains to be addressed at some point as well as iron-clad guarantees that Afghan soil will not be used against the US or its western allies by terrorist groups.
Ghani is adamant he won’t step down. Maybe, an extension by a few more months will placate him. Ghani and his circle hope to dig in by rallying anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan and securing help from certain regional states. But in the final analysis, Ghani’s minuscule power base restricts his influence. Ghani’s mandate in the 2019 controversial presidential election rests on roughly five lakh votes from the 15-million Afghan electorate.
*
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.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has removed a headline from its website claiming that “vaccines do not cause autism” following a legal challenge questioning that assertion.
The change was quietly made last August, with no announcement, following a lengthy legal battle with the group Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) that began in 2017.
Instead of walking away after the CDC effectively admitted it did not have the studies ICAN sought, ICAN sued the CDCin federal court. The suit focused on the CDC’s claim that “Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism” on the basis that the CDC had not specifically listed the precise studies that it asserts support that claim. This lawsuit also quoted from the deposition of Dr. StanleyPlotkin, the godfather of vaccinology, who admitted under oath that he was “okay with telling the parent that DTaP/Tdap does not cause autism even though the science isn’t there yet to support that claim.”
This resulted in the CDC, under court order, presenting 20 studies supporting the claim that vaccines don’t cause autism, which the Institute of Medicine (IOM) found did not hold muster.
The IOM concluded that it could not identify a single study to support that DTaP does not cause autism. Instead, the only relevant study the IOM could identify found an association between DTaP and autism.
*
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.
Eurostar, the company that operates the cross-Channel train service that connects the UK with France, Belgium and the Netherlands, is on the brink of collapse, the company’s management warned this week. With passenger numbers down 95% in the final quarter of 2020 and revenues down over 80% over the course of 2020, it is now “on a drip” and in desperate need of extra cash, says Christophe Fanichet, a senior executive of France’s state SNCF railways, which is the majority shareholder of Eurostar. “I’m very worried about Eurostar. The company is in a critical state, I’d even say very critical,” he said.
In 2019, Eurostar shuttled 11 million passengers back and forth between the UK and Continental Europe — London St Pancras on one side, and Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam on the other. While generally more expensive than budget air fares, it is quicker, more comfortable, and drops off passengers in the center of their chosen city of destination.
But like the airlines, its whole business model has been upended by the virus crisis. At present, the company is operating only two services a day, a far cry from the two trains an hour it used to operate during peak times before the pandemic. And most of those trains are less than a quarter full. More than 90% of its workers have been furloughed.
It’s a similar story across Europe’s railway sector. Passenger numbers have plunged between 70%-90% as lockdowns, social-distancing rules, and concerns about the risks of using public transport have taken their toll. The industry is estimated to have racked up losses of €22 billion in 2020, according to CER, a Brussels-based commerce group representing passenger and freight prepare operators. That’s similar to the total losses accrued so far by Europe’s airlines. Thousands of workers are on government-subsidized furloughs.
“It’s a totally extraordinary situation,” saidLibor Lochman, CER’s executive director. “There is no comparison for it, and it can and will lead to the bankruptcy of a number of companies, unless there is the political will to prevent it”.
Just as happened last Spring, travel restrictions are tightening across Europe and borders are closing as countries try to counter the spread of new strains of the Covid-19 virus. France announced on Thursday that visitors from the UK, which is no longer part of the EU, will need to observe a seven-day quarantine and undertake a PCR test on their arrival. The UK already has a quarantine system in place for travelers from the EU.
These latest travel restrictions have compounded Eurostar’s woes. It could run out of money by April, according to industry sources. To stave off that fate, the company is asking for government support of the kind already doled out to many airlines. Eurostar has already tapped shareholders for €200 million and is apparently loath to do so again, particularly given the recent tightening of travel restrictions. So it is looking further afield for help.
“We have to see how we manage to help this company in the way that airlines have been helped,” saidJean-Pierre Farandou, the CEO of SNCF, which owns 55% of Eurostar. “It would not be unusual for Eurostar to receive aid to get through this bad patch.”
The company is requesting assistance from both the French and the UK governments. But there are a couple of problems:
The UK government already sold its 40% stake in the business in 2015, at a loss of £757 million (€850 million), to Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec (CDPQ), Canada’s second largest pension fund, a Crown Corporation, owned by the government, and the UK’s Hermes Infrastructure. Of the remaining 60% of Eurostar’s shares, 55% are owned by SNCF, which is wholly owned by the French State and has itself received emergency assistance from the government. The other 5% belongs to the Belgian State.
Eurostar is also a hot potato issue in France, where it is widely regarded as delivering far more benefit to the UK economy and tourism.
Unsurprisingly, the suggestion that London should help rescue a company it sold five years ago has raised hackles on the British side of the tunnel. The Financial Times said on Tuesday that while the UK government has already shelled out billions supporting UK rail concessions, “it would be eccentric for British taxpayers to bolster the equity that French counterparts hold in Eurostar via France’s national railway company.”
The Daily Telegraph put it even more bluntly: “The Channel Tunnel is not going anywhere. It is the operating company that runs the train services between Paris and London that is in trouble, a point worth remembering as the Government is pressured to spearhead a bailout. If it goes bust, another operator will step in.”
There are some important caveats to this argument, as even The Telegraphitself concedes:
Given the current backdrop, there is not exactly a queue forming of potential suitors to replace Eurostar.
Eurostar’s current troubles are through no fault of its own and are a direct result of UK and French government policy.
The company is also estimated to contribute close to €1 billion a year to the British economy, when the economy is functioning at normal capacity. It also provides a vital travel link between the UK and the rest of Europe that benefits UK tourism and the City of London.
The UK is already struggling with the logistical nightmare left behind by Brexit.
The UK might still offer to contribute to a bailout. One possible support measure would be reduce the amount it pays out in track charges. Another option under consideration would be for the Bank of England to provide funds from its Covid loan facility. Non-UK firms qualify as long as they’re deemed to provide “a material contribution to the UK economy.” As such, Eurostar would make the grade. But it should only be on the proviso that Eurostar’s actual shareholders — the government of France with its 55% stake, the governments of Belgium and Quebec, and the UK fund — dig much deeper into their own pockets.
*
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.
A German court in a landmark ruling has declared that COVID-19 lockdowns imposed by the government are unconstitutional. Thuringia’s spring lockdown was a “catastrophically wrong political decision with dramatic consequences for almost all areas of people’s lives,” the court said, justifying its decision.
A German district court has declared that strict lockdown imposed by the government of the central state of Thuringia last spring are unconstitutional, as it acquitted a person accused of violating it.
The case was regarding a man violating strict German lockdown rules by celebrating a birthday with his friends.
Source: GreatGameIndia
The district court in the city of Weimar did not just acquit the defendant but also stated that the authorities themselves breached Germany’s basic law.
Thuringia’s spring lockdown was a “catastrophically wrong political decision with dramatic consequences for almost all areas of people’s lives,” the court said, justifying its decision.
It was this regulation that a local man violated by hosting a party attended by his seven friends.
However, the judge said that the regional government itself violated the “inviolably guaranteed human dignity” secured by Article 1 of the German basic law in the first place by imposing such restrictions.
According to the court, the government lacked sufficient legal grounds to impose the restrictions since there was no “epidemic situation of national importance” at that time and the health system was at no risk of collapsing as the Robert Koch Institute reported that the Covid-19 reproduction number had fallen below 1.
The judge also ruled that the regional government had no right to introduce such far-reaching measures at all since it was up to lawmakers to do so.
The lockdown imposed in Thuringia represented “the most comprehensive and far-reaching restrictions on fundamental rights in the history of the Federal Republic,” the court said while calling the measures an attack on the “foundations of our society” that was “disproportionate.”
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf’s pandemic restrictions that required people to stay at home, placed size limits on gatherings and ordered “non-life-sustaining” businesses to shut down are unconstitutional, U.S. District Judge William Stickman IV ruled.
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.
In the first official contact between the new US administration and the Israeli government, President Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan vowed to his Israeli counterpart that Washington will “closely consult with Israel on all matters of regional security”.
In a statement released early on Sunday, the US National Security Council (NSC) said Sullivan had also welcomed normalisation agreements between Israel and Arab states on Saturday’s call with Israel’s Meir Ben Shabbat.
“Mr Sullivan reaffirmed President Biden’s unwavering commitment to Israel’s security and expressed appreciation for Ben Shabbat’s contributions to our bilateral partnership,” the NSC statement said.
“They discussed opportunities to enhance the partnership over the coming months, including by building on the success of Israel’s normalisation arrangements with UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.”
Biden has previously promised to continue unconditional US military aid to Israel and voiced support for the normalisation deals.
But the pledge to “consult” with Israel on regional issues comes amid calls for an early return to the Iran nuclear agreement, which the Israeli government vehemently opposes.
“Mr Sullivan confirmed the United States will closely consult with Israel on all matters of regional security,” the NSC said.
“He also extended an invitation to begin a strategic dialogue in the near term to continue substantive discussions.”
Biden has said he would return to the pact then use it as a starting point for broader negotiations with Tehran, but a few days into his tenure there has not been any public move towards reviving the nuclear accord.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been publicly lobbying against the deal.
On Saturday, Israel’s Channel 12 news reported that Netanyahu would be sending Mossad head Yossi Cohen to meet with Biden in Washington next month to discuss the deal and Israel’s expectations for any overhaul of the treaty.
Reviving the JCPOA
The 2015 multilateral agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), saw Iran scale back its nuclear programme in exchange for lifting sanctions against its economy.
Former US president Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018 and embarked on a “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions against Iran.
In turn, Iran has loosened some of its commitment to the pact, increasing its uranium enrichment and threatening to restrict UN inspectors’ access to its nuclear facilities.
On Friday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif called on Biden to “unconditionally” lift sanctions against the Islamic Republic.
“US President Joe Biden can choose a better path by ending Trump’s failed policy of ‘maximum pressure’ and returning to the deal his predecessor abandoned,” Zarif wrote in a column published by Foreign Affairs magazine.
“If he does, Iran will likewise return to full implementation of our commitments under the nuclear deal. But if Washington instead insists on extracting concessions, then this opportunity will be lost.”
‘Longer and stronger agreement’
Incoming US Secretary of State Tony Blinken told lawmakers earlier this week that Biden would revive the deal and use it as a “platform – with our allies and partners, who would once again be on the same side with us – to seek a longer and stronger agreement”.
But pro-Israel voices, including within the Democratic Party, have been urging the new administration to use sanctions as leverage against Iran to open negotiations over Tehran’s regional activities and ballistic missile programme.
Iran, however, maintains that it will not hold talks over subjects outside of the scope of the JCPOA before sanctions are lifted.
Biden has staffed his administration with many Obama-era diplomats who helped negotiate the pact, including Sullivan, who played a leading role in establishing early talks with the Iranian government in 2013.
*
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.
The Biden administration is pressing ahead with extending New START for the full five years allowed in the treaty:
President Biden proposed Thursday that a centerpiece U.S.-Russia nuclear arms treaty be extended for five years, a decision that marks the first major foreign policy action of his administration as he seeks to confront national security challenges while grappling with the coronavirus pandemic and economic distress at home.
Full extension of New START is the right decision, and it was really the only one that made any sense under the circumstances. The alternatives were either to let the treaty lapse or extend it for a shorter period of time, and neither of those was desirable or in the interests of the U.S. There was no time to negotiate anything beyond the extension. Russia has repeatedly said that it would commit to a five-year extension without preconditions. Keeping New START alive is a win-win for the U.S. and Russia, and it helps to stave off a new nuclear arms race for at least a few more years. The next step will be to engage Russia in further arms control negotiations to lay the groundwork for a successor treaty to take New START’s place. The full five-year extension gives the Biden administration time and breathing space to do this in a responsible way instead of the last-minute shenanigans that we saw from outgoing arms control envoy Marshall Billingslea.
For the last four years, the previous administration dragged its feet and tried running out the clock on the treaty in a vain attempt to use the treaty’s expiration as leverage. U.S. officials wrongly believed that they could compel Russia into making additional concessions in return for extending the treaty, but the Russians were not as desperate as these hard-liners imagined. Even now, former Trump administration officials keep boasting about the supposed leverage they had over Moscow, but this is just excuse-making for their failure to achieve anything on arms control for four years. Had the election gone the other way, New START would have ended this year and arms control as we have known it for half a century would have collapsed. The U.S., our allies, and Russia are all more secure because the treaty is going to survive.
The Russian government has responded to the U.S. offer favorably, and it appears that Moscow is just waiting on the formal proposal to arrive. Extending New START is an early, easy win for the Biden administration and the United States, and it is another reminder that elections can have very important foreign policy consequences.
*
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.
Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC, where he also keeps a solo blog. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan noted the nuclear emperor had no clothes: “The only value in our two nations (the United States and Soviet Union) possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” Indeed it would. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) tries to do so through a new normative settling point on the ethics, legality, and legitimacy of the bomb.
The TPNW enters into force on January 22, 90 days after the 50th ratification by Honduras and three-and-a-half years after adoption by the United Nations General Assembly. Shortly before the 50th ratification—which triggered the countdown to entry into force of the first legally binding treaty to comprehensively prohibit possession, use, deployment, and testing of nuclear weapons—the Associated Press obtained a copy of a US letter to treaty states parties. Washington described the treaty as “dangerous” for the continued viability of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as the cornerstone of global non-proliferation efforts, said signatories had made “a strategic error,” and called on them to rescind their ratification.
The letter recognized “the sovereign right” of the countries that were party to the NPT to accede to the nuclear ban treaty. In my view it’s also their sovereign responsibility. According to Article 6 of the NPT, nuclear disarmament is the responsibility of every state party, not just the five nuclear weapon states that belong to the treaty: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” In the famous Advisory Opinion delivered on July 8, 1996, the World Court unanimously strengthened the nature of disarmament obligations under Article 6 from a commitment to pursue negotiations, into an obligation “to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion” such negotiations.
In the 50 years that the NPT has been in operation since entry into force in 1970, the countries with nuclear weapons have in practice brought about a redefinition of Article 6. The five nuclear weapons countries quietly transitioned from claiming that the NPT permitted them to possess and deploy nuclear weapons, to behaving as though the NPT entitled them to possess the bomb in perpetuity, thereby legitimizing their monopoly status indefinitely. A good example of this “nuclear weapons states with attitude” syndrome is the derision on open display when, in a speech in London on February 11, the Trump administration’s top arms control official Chris Ford belittled the arms control community as naive virtue-signallers.
Given this reality, what’s a responsible sovereign NPT state party to do? One option is to exit the NPT, as indeed has been suggested by political scientists Tom Doyle, Joelien Pretorius, and Tom Sauer. Any such mass movement by non-nuclear weapon states would certainly kill off the NPT. Instead those countries have chosen to make one last stand to complete the NPT Article 6 agenda on nuclear disarmament by means of a supplementary and reinforcing treaty.
To grasp the argument for the ban treaty as an expression of sovereign responsibility by parties to the NPT, it’s helpful to refer to the Responsibility to Protect principle adopted unanimously at the World Summit at UN headquarters in 2005. This was the largest gathering of world leaders until then. The Responsibility to Protect was formulated and adopted as a replacement for the widely criticized “humanitarian intervention” construct used to justify the Kosovo war in 1999.
Some of the key distinctions between the old humanitarian intervention and the new Responsibility to Protect are relevant to the NPT-TPNW differences.
With humanitarian intervention, the major powers asserted a right to intervene inside the sovereign borders of other states alleged to be engaged in committing humanitarian atrocities, but without any corresponding obligations or restrictions with respect to who made the decision to intervene, the extent and types of force that could be employed, the duration of the intervention, and what they could and could not do as intervening powers. By contrast the Responsibility to Protect requires Security Council authorization for any international intervention for human protection and imposes the new normative framework on all states.
With the NPT, the nuclear-weapons countries have similarly asserted their right, as the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (P5), to enforce non-proliferation obligations on all non-nuclear-weapons states. In 1998 they even levied sanctions on India and Pakistan, which had never signed the NPT, because they had allegedly violated the global norm against nuclear proliferation with their nuclear tests. But the P5 countries have steadfastly rejected any binding obligations under Article 6 to begin and complete their own nuclear disarmament. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapon moves beyond the Non-Proliferation Treaty in imposing legally binding requirements to disarm and cease and desist from all nuclear-weapon-related activities on all states parties.
Again, the reasoning behind the TPNW is remarkably analogous to the Responsibility to Protect rationale. Every state party has a legal duty and all states have a moral responsibility to promote nuclear disarmament. After 50 years of NPT operation, the nuclear weapons states have manifestly failed to acquit their responsibility to disarm. Their insistence that nuclear disarmament is a matter solely for them in negotiations with one another, and that others have neither voice nor vote on it, is akin to the major powers asserting a right to unilateral intervention with no regulatory role for the UN. Moreover, a nuclear war would be an atrocity on an unimaginable mass scale. No state individually, nor the international system collectively, has the capacity to cope with the humanitarian consequences of such a catastrophic event.
Consequently, as part of its responsibility to protect all life and lives, the international community, acting through the UN, is fully justified in adopting a new treaty to ban nuclear weapons and associated activities. In the language of the humanitarian consequences initiative that led to the TPNW, it is in the interests of the very survival of humanity that nuclear weapons are never used again, and the only guarantee of non-use is no possession—by anyone. Of course, the Ban Treaty cannot impose legal obligations on non-parties, including all nine bomb-possessing states and their allies sheltering under the nuclear umbrella. But it will reorder the envelope of humanitarian laws, norms, practices, and discourse on nuclear weapons.
The ban treaty could have one other unintended but significant consequence. While the P5-controlled Security Council is the geopolitical cockpit of world order, the General Assembly is the normative centre of gravity, owing to universal membership. In practice this translates into a norm and standard-setting division of responsibility for the General Assembly and enforcement role for the Security Council. Once the international community has successfully stigmatized nuclear-weapon possessors, how can the P5 continue to function as the enforcement authority on nuclear issues? As there is no other body that can lawfully and legitimately substitute for the Security Council on this function, what will fill the enforcement gap with regards to nuclear threats to international peace and security?
*
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.
Ramesh Thakur is emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University; Senior Research Fellow, Toda Peace Institute; and Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. He was an R2P commissioner and one of three authors of its report. His most recent book is Reviewing the Responsibility to Protect: Origins, Implementation and Controversies(Routledge, 2019).
Featured image: The book of signatures at the signing ceremony for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, September 20, 2017. UN Photo/Kim Haughton.
California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) promised months ago that the state’s COVID-19 policy decisions would be driven by transparent data that would be shared with the public.
Now, his administration is refusing to disclose key information used to determine when lockdown orders are implemented or rescinded – and has denied a public records request filed with the California Health and Human Services (CHHS) Agency on May 28 by the Center for American Liberty (CAL) seeking both the data and science behind the state’s lockdown decisions, according to Fox News.
State health officials now say they rely on a ‘very complex set of measurements that would confuse and potentially mislead the public,’ AP reports.
In short, California says you’re too stupid to understand their rationale for mandating thousands of businesses into financial ruin through what appear to be arbitrary and unscientific decisions. To wit, at least two California judges have struck down the state’s draconian mandates over lack of scientific evidence to support lockdowns and restaurant restrictions.
Not only that, according to SFGATE, there’s growing speculation that California’s ban on outdoor dining may have contributed to the state’s COVID-19 surge. Not the best of optics as as a GOP effort to recall Newsom continues to gain momentum.
According to CAL executive director Mark Trammel, the Golden State won’t answer why, for example, they won’t answer why indoor religious services are strictly forbidden while other venues where people gather are just fine.
“If it’s safe enough to go to a marijuana dispensary or Macy’s or Costco that same standard should apply to parishioners in our congregation they should be able to sep in pews and wear a mask,” Trammel told Fox News in a recent interview.
Dr. Lee Riley, chairman of UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health infectious disease division thinks the state’s lack of transparency is troubling.
“There is more uncertainty created by NOT releasing the data that only the state has access to,” he told the Associated Press in an email.
Newsom, a Democrat, imposed the nation’s first statewide shutdown in March. His administration developed reopening plans that included benchmarks for virus data such as per capita infection rates that counties needed to meet to relax restrictions.
It released data models state officials use to project whether infections, hospitalizations and deaths are likely to rise or fall.
As cases surged after Thanksgiving, Newsom tore up his playbook. Rather than a county-by-county approach, he created five regions and established a single measurement — ICU capacity — as the determination for whether a region was placed under a stay-at-home order.
In short order, four regions — about 98% of the state’s population — were under the restrictions after their capacity fell below the 15% threshold. A map updated daily tracks each region’s capacity.
At the start of last week, no regions appeared likely to have the stay-at-home order lifted soon because their capacity was well below 15%. But within a day, the state announced it was lifting the order for the 13-county Greater Sacramento area.
Suddenly, outdoor dining and worship services were OK again, hair and nail salons and other businesses could reopen, and retailers were allowed more shoppers inside.
Local officials and businesses were caught off guard. State officials did not describe their reasoning other than to say it was based on a projection for ICU capacity.
State health officials relied on a complex formula to project that while the Sacramento region’s intensive care capacity was below 10%, it would climb above 15% within four weeks. On Friday, it was 9%, roughly the same as when the order was lifted.
“What happened to the 15%? What was that all about?” asked Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist and infectious-diseases control expert at University of California, San Francisco. “I was surprised. I assume they know something I don’t know.”
Trying to explain the quagmire, CA Health and Human Services Agency spokeswoman Kate Folmar said (with a straight face?) that officials are committed to transparency – and that projected ICU capacity is based on several variables – including available beds and staffing that can change regularly.
“These fluid, on-the-ground conditions cannot be boiled down to a single data point — and to do so would mislead and create greater uncertainty for Californians,” she said.
According to First Amendment Coalition Executive Director David Snyder, the state’s lack of disclosure is disturbing.
“The state is wielding extraordinary power these days — power to close businesses, to directly impact people’s livelihoods and even lives — and so it owes it to Californians to disclose how and why it makes those decisions,” he said, adding that secrecy “is exactly the wrong approach here and will only breed further mistrust, confusion and contempt for the crucial role of government in bringing us out of this crisis.”
*
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.
British MPs within his own party are demanding that Prime Minister Boris Johnson outline some sort of exit strategy for the nationwide lockdown in the country, with one senior minister warning that if he doesn’t people will begin to “rise up and bring it down”.
Speaking to Talk Radio, Sir Desmond Swayne, the MP for New Forest West, warned that the “goalposts keep moving” on the lockdown timeframe, and “We have to focus on hospital admissions and keep that focus rigorous…[or] at some stage people have got to rise up and bring it down.”
"People have to got to rise up and bring it down!"
Tory MP Sir Desmond Swayne says the idea people will accept endless lockdown restrictions and "go on living like troglodytes is absurd."
Swayne’s comments echo those of West Midlands Police commissioner David Jamieson, who warned back in October at the start of the second lockdown that “We’re sitting on a time bomb here.”
“We’re getting very near the stage where you could see a considerable explosion of frustration and energy,” Jamieson noted, adding “Things are very on the edge in a lot of communities and it wouldn’t take very much to spark off unrest, riots, damage.”
Boris Johnson has repeatedly said that it is ‘too early’ to say when restrictions will be lifted, while suggestions for easing the lockdown by other government figures keep moving to later and later in the year, with the Summer or beyond now being touted as a possible timeframe.
Seventy Conservative MPs have formed a coalition urging the government to start lifting the lockdown no later than early March.
MP Mark Harper, who is leading the coalition dubbed the ‘Covid Recovery Group’ said “People must see light at the end of the tunnel and feel hope for the future and businesses need to be able to plan our recovery.”
“Generally, with this whole pandemic, we’ve had to take some quite extraordinary steps, very draconian steps, that are a big infringement on people’s liberty,” Eustice said.
“And yes, that does mean that we have to intervene in quite a draconian way and issue penalties, and we make no apology for doing that,” he continued, adding the further measures are “under review.”
While all of this is going on, medical experts, scientists and researchers all over the globe are urging that lockdowns do not work in halting the spread of the virus, and will have long lasting consequences that far outstrip the damage being done by the disease itself.
*
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.
Today, January 22, 2021, is the day that can go down in history as the turning point to free humanity from those weapons that, for the first time, have the ability to erase the human species and almost every other form of life. In fact, the UN Treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons enters into force today. However, it can also be the day on which a treaty enters into force and, like many previous ones, will remain on paper. The possibility of eliminating nuclear weapons depends on all of us.
What is the situation in Italy and what should we do to contribute to the goal of a world free from nuclear weapons? Italy, a formally non-nuclear country, has for decades granted its territory for the deployment of US nuclear weapons: currently, B61 bombs, which will soon be replaced by the more deadly B61-12. It is also one of the countries that – NATO documents – “provide the Alliance with aircraft equipped to carry nuclear bombs, the United States maintains absolute control on it, and personnel trained for this purpose.” Furthermore, there is the possibility that intermediate-range nuclear missiles (similar to the 1980s Euromissiles) – the US are building these missiles after tearing up the INF Treaty that prohibited them – will be installed in our territory.
In this way, Italy is violating the Nuclear Weapons Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratified in 1975, which states: “Each of the militarily non-nuclear States, party to the Treaty undertakes neither to receive nuclear weapons from anyone, nor control over such weapons, directly or indirectly .” At the same time Italy refused in 2017 the UN Treaty on the abolition of nuclear weapons – boycotted by all thirty NATO countries and by the 27 of the European Union – which establishes: “Each State party that has on its territory nuclear weapons, owned or controlled by another State, must ensure the rapid removal of such weapons.”
In the wake of the US and NATO, Italy has opposed the Treaty since the opening of negotiations decided by the General Assembly in 2016. The United States and the other two NATO nuclear powers (France and Great Britain), the other Alliance countries and their main partners – Israel (the only nuclear power in the Middle East), Japan, Australia, Ukraine – voted against. The other nuclear powers – Russia, India, Pakistan and North Korea also expressed their opposition opinion, and China abstained. Echoing Washington, Gentiloni’s Italian government called the future Treaty “a highly divisive element that risked compromising our efforts in favor of nuclear disarmament.”
The Italian Government and Parliament are therefore jointly responsible for the fact that the Treaty on the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons – approved by a large majority of the United Nations General Assembly in 2017 and entering into force having reached 50 ratifications – was ratified in Europe so far only by Austria, Ireland, the Holy See, Malta, and San Marino: a worthy act but not sufficient to give force to the Treaty.
In 2017, while Italy rejected the UN Treaty on the abolition of nuclear weapons, over 240 parliamentarians – mostly from the Democratic Party and M5S, the current Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio was in the front row – solemnly committing to sign the ICAN appeal and promote Italy’s accession to the UN Treaty. They haven’t moved a finger in that direction in three years. Behind demagogic covers or openly, the UN Treaty on the abolition of nuclear weapons was boycotted in Parliament with some rare exceptions by the entire political spectrum, agreeing to link Italy to the increasingly dangerous NATO policy, officially called “Nuclear Alliance.”
All this must be remembered today, on the Global Day of Action called for the entry into force of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, celebrated by ICAN activists and other anti-nuclear movements with 160 events mostly in Europe and North America. We need to transform the Day into a permanent and growing mobilization of a broad front capable, in each country and at international level, of imposing the political choices necessary to achieve the vital objective of the Treaty.
*
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.
This article was originally published on Il Manifesto.
Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
In the span of just one stint in the presidency, Donald Trump, with some assistance from MSM and a good part of the Washington establishment, has faced two impeachments. Finally, he has managed to lose the Presidency, the House of Representatives and Congress. “Make America Great Again” has become the slogan of dissidents.
The Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol building were dubbed “domestic terrorists”. The US President – Donald Trump – was permanently banned from mainstream social media, accused of inciting violence and of having revealed himself as a “complete tool of Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
He was in his last days of office, and still the Democratic Party, headed by Nancy Pelosi, wished to impeach him in order to send a message to those who disagree with the rule of neo-liberalism that’s being imposed.
Resistance, evidently, is futile. The new authority has already begun to implement its own rules of the game, imposing a new “normality” and erasing any “red lines”. Democracy in the traditional understanding of this term has publicly ceased to be a political reality in the United States.
The U.S. military is removing any “potentially offensive” unit emblems, as well as its motto.
U.S. citizens are giving away the identities of their loved ones, because they are Trump supporters or took part in the Capitol storming.
Now we see only the beginning of the creation of a new type of dictatorship. Further fierce witch-hunts hidden behind claims of fighting against oppression and hate are to be expected. The Republican Party has all but capitulated to the Democrats and the new Presidential administration. Big Tech has also gained unprecedented power, resulting in a previously unthinkable censorship and the total control of public opinion. In spite of the fact that the mainstream propaganda engine is heavy and corrupt, the huge and direct support it is getting from Big Tech and government allows it to dominate the media space, especially when alternative sources of information can be simply cut off.
Amid a major split between Americans after the presidential elections, the main theme of the inauguration of Joe Biden will be “United America”, which should reflect his commitment to unify the country.
Meanwhile in the current political conditions any real consolidation of national unity can only be achieved if a significant external threat appears. Thus, the United States desperately needs an enemy. Customarily this would remain China and Russia and indeed this is unlikely to change – they need to be made to appear as ever worsening adversaries.
After all, Trump, a “tool of Putin” incited supporters to attempt the destruction of American democracy. There is no choice but to fight against this powerful enemy in the guise of Moscow.
Currently, the situation with COVID-19 lockdowns and a deepening global economic crisis is such that the new US administration can take advantage of it. In addition, the increased support of global corporations and quantitative easing is likely to follow close behind. The Trump administration’s focus on developing the national economy is forfeit.
In the advent of a further standoff in the struggle for global dominance, global elites will require more and more resources to promote their agenda. They also need to overcome the current crisis and return the West to some kind of sustainable development. The obvious measures to take are the capturing of new markets and gaining control over new territories, which should be rich in natural resources. As such Russia and the other post-Soviet states, with their vast territories, which are both quite rich in resources and relatively low in population, seem to be worthwhile targets from various points of view.
This process has already begun. The year 2020 revealed the globalists’ commitment to profit from the political destabilization in Kyrgyzstan, Belorussia, Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia. Their main target however seems to be Russia. In the short term, Russia could be fully suppressed either through stunning preventive nuclear strikes, or through a color revolution that would lead to its division into several small states.
Today, a more or less prolonged war with conventional weapons would lead to catastrophic consequences for Russia as well as for Western countries due to internal socio-economic and political factors. Such a crisis might well lead to the collapse of the current regimes and bring about a change of the established socio-political system.
At the same time, the very same internal factors force the Western elites to maintain their escalation course towards Russia. Moscow has been painted as an enemy of Western civilization for years. This easily understood and tangible image is intended to unite all the conservative and traditionally contradictory heritage of Western civilization.
The victory of Joe Biden equals the victory of the neo-liberals and globalists over the national-oriented part of the American elites. Thus, it is logical to expect a drastic increase of pressure on Russia via “soft power” methods, including economic sanctions, the expansion of specific propaganda and psychological operations to destabilize Russia and its system of governance. The strategic goal of such a campaign would be to weaken the Russian leadership and create conditions for carrying out a devastating preventive strike or to destroy its statehood and disrupt the country by non-military means.
If this approach does not succeed before 2024, the administration of the US neo-liberals, in order to remain in power, could raise the stakes and consider a nuclear conflict.
*
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.
In 2003, millions of people protested against the invasion of Iraq. If Britain and the US had genuine democracies, where the views of ordinary people matter, the invasion, slaughter and torture in Iraq would not have happened. Our governments ignored the protests.(1) The decision-makers tend only to take notice of what ordinary people want if it does not interfere with their plans.
Too Much Power Concentrated In The Hands Of A Few Sociopaths
It has been widely recognised for many years that people can be corrupted by power. For this reason, genuine democracy requires a system of checks and balances so that no person or group has too much power. In theory, both the US and Britain have such a system. Law-makers in the US Congress and the British Parliament, together with the judges in the law courts, are supposed to be independent of top decision-makers (known as the executive). In practice these systems do not work very well. The executive appoints senior people in the judiciary, the police and the prosecution service, so these people are not really independent. The party system in both countries also makes it very difficult for politicians to operate independently from the executive.
Leaders in both countries surround themselves with a small group of advisers, leaving them isolated from the views of the mainstream population. In the UK this is sometimes called the Westminster bubble. Only a small number of people get direct access to information about what are called ‘security’ issues. In both the US and Britain we have small groups of people, such as presidents, prime ministers, their inner circles, together with senior bureaucrats in various government departments, with too much power and only limited ways of reining in that power. The US Congress is now little more than a rubber-stamp, and Parliament in Britain has been described as “God’s Gift To Dictatorship”.(2)
In the US, former President Bush introduced the Patriot and Homeland Security Acts. These created new laws that gave the President almost unlimited powers should he declare an emergency.(3) Presidents Obama and Trump have been no better. Obama’s early record was summarised in 2009 as follows:
“Obama continued with war in Afghanistan, built military bases there, and increased the scale of attacks in Pakistan…He excused torture… and demanded more secret government. He has kept at least 17,000 prisoners beyond the reach of justice. His lawyers won an appeal that ruled Guantanamo Bay prisoners were not ‘persons’, and therefore had no right not to be tortured…The nation’s economy is still being run by the same fraudsters who destroyed it.”(4)
Gradual changes in the UK have given more power to ministers (among the most senior decision-makers) whilst by-passing Parliament, with new laws in 2004(5) and 2006, one of which was nicknamed the ‘abolition of parliament’ bill.(6) When he was Prime Minister, Tony Blair made decisions on invading Iraq, buying more nuclear weapons (Trident), and stealthily privatising parts of the health service without taking any account of public opinion. The recent coronavirus pandemic has given the British and US governments an excuse to introduce even more extreme laws, with the human rights organization Liberty describing them as “the biggest restriction on our freedom in a generation.”(7)
The Political System Rewards the Most Insane People
Tony Blair, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have all been described as pathological liars or confidence tricksters. They have also been described by psychologists as showing signs of extreme personality disorders, such as psychopathy and narcissism.(8) If a psychologist were to examine our foreign policies, they would conclude that the people who make key foreign policy decisions in the Britain and the US are, literally, insane. Not in the sense of being illogical, but in the sense of being sociopaths – making decisions that lead to the deaths of huge numbers of people overseas, so they can control resources and trade. This is not an exaggeration. If our leaders worked in any other job and they wanted to destroy multiple countries and kill people, they would be sent to a psychiatrist. If the psychiatrist believed they might act upon their beliefs, they would be locked up in order to protect others. We have psychological screening for some jobs, such as the police, but there is no screening of that type for world leaders.
Lack of Accountability
Governments pretend to take accountability seriously by holding occasional inquiries into government conduct, but the important inquiries in both Britain and the US in recent years have been smokescreens to protect important people. The US commission report into the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, and the Hutton inquiry in Britain regarding topics related to the Iraq war both deliberately ignored some of the key issues that should have been investigated.(9) A 2019 inquiry into the counter-terrorism strategy known as ‘Prevent’ was labeled a whitewash after the man appointed to lead it described it as “completely unnecessary”.(10) When the UK Serious Fraud Office tried to investigate corruption during weapons sales from British Aerospace (BAe) to Saudi Arabia, the British government stopped the investigation as it did not want its former crimes to come to light.(11) It also turned out that the Labour party held shares in BAe, which is a clear conflict of interest, as their wealth would be affected by an enquiry into BAe.(12)
Advanced societies have created complex systems for dealing with the most trivial crimes, yet if governments commit mass murder in other countries, they are currently able to evade the law. The top decision-makers are almost unaccountable. It is widely accepted that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair carried out an illegal war that destroyed Iraq, but they have never been charged with those crimes. President Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron destroyed Libya,(13) but the media do not even discuss that as a crime. The police, the judiciary, and the prosecutors have made no effort to hold these people to account.
The Deep State
In 2014, a former US government insider named Mike Lofgren wrote an article entitled ‘Anatomy of the Deep State’.(14) He explained that a great deal of political decision-making does not take place within the visible political system (by visible I mean Congress in the US and Parliament in the UK). A network of senior bureaucrats in the most important government departments, together with lobbyists, intelligence agencies, think tanks, the military, and big companies (particularly banking, IT, energy, food, and Private Military Contractors) is actively influencing political decisions behind the scenes, with no scrutiny or oversight. We have discussed some aspects of this in previous posts, but the combined effects of these activities creates what some people describe as ‘a state within a state’. Politicians come and go, but the senior bureaucrats who run departments are there for much of their careers. Various people who have experience within the British government have commented about the existing bureaucracy blocking attempts at reform.(15)
Lofgren summarises the two main purposes of the deep state as national security and corporate dominance. Politicians inevitably know less about many issues (such as the oil industry or foreign wars) than the specialists in government departments, or their corporate advisors. As Lofgren points out, if you say the word ‘terrorism’, most politicians quickly fall in line to support whatever policy the intelligence agencies or police are demanding. This appears to be just as true in Britain as it is in the US.(16)
Secrets and Lies
The US and British Governments have a long history of being very secretive. Both governments have Freedom of Information laws (known as FOIA) that should enable ordinary people to find out what governments are doing. In practice, exemptions allow senior politicians and other decision-makers to continue to act in secret.(17) In the US, the Bush government (2001–2009) introduced new categories of ‘sensitive’ information, which do not have to be disclosed; it had a $50 billion ‘black’ budget that was not discussed by Congress; and it undertook a huge amount of spying under supposed anti-terrorism laws known as the Patriot Act.(18)
Until recently, Britain had laws that allowed the government to keep things secret for 30 years. This is gradually decreasing to 20 years. However, the British government has always tried to keep some things secret for much longer. A good example of this was ‘Operation Legacy’,(19) where the government tried to hide the documentation describing their worst crimes during the colonial era. An immense collection of files from various colonies was flown back to the UK to be hidden indefinitely. Even when information was legally required during court cases, the authorities illegally tried to claim the data did not exist. Eventually when some documents were discovered, the government was forced to admit the existence of the rest.
We have seen many examples recently where later evidence has shown that senior politicians deliberately lied about war and torture. There are countless examples of US Presidents saying “We want peace” as they ordered their bombers to drop thousands of tons of bombs on other countries.(20) Clearly these are not people who believe in ideas such as truth, honesty or transparency in government.
Official Secrets and National Security are (mostly) propaganda
The quantity of secret information published by Wikileaks shows that far too much government activity is still kept hidden from scrutiny. This information, revealing widespread crimes by our governments, would still be secret if it had not been exposed by whistleblowers. Edward Snowden revealed that the US NSA (National Security Agency) was carrying out an illegal global spying program, where they are able to store all electronic communication from most computers and phones, even when the phone is turned off. This was done in collaboration with the British spy agency GCHQ. It is now accepted that GCHQ’s activities are illegal, but they are continuing to spy on everyone anyway.(21)
The idea that governments should be able to keep lots of information secret almost indefinitely is not supportable in a genuine democracy. Examinations of the declassified files relating to wars and other foreign policies have shown that ‘official secrets’ and ‘national security’ are often used to hide the crimes and unethical activities of officials.(22) In the US, one senior insider admitted that:
“there is massive over-classification… the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another…There may be some basis for short-term classification while plans are being made, or negotiations are going on, but apart from details of weapons systems, there is very rarely any real risk to current national security from the publication of facts relating to transactions in the past, even the fairly recent past.“(23)
In a genuine democracy, the default position should be for complete transparency and accountability. Governments should not keep secrets from the public, and should not have any reason to want to.(24) Governments should exist solely as tools for the people. Everything should be available to the public so that it can be scrutinised, questioned and challenged. Only in very limited circumstances should anything be kept secret.
*
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.
Rod Driver is a part-time academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking modern-day US and British propaganda. This is the eighteenth 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.
13) Geir UlfStein and Hege Fosund Christiansen, ‘The Legality of the NATO Bombing in Libya’, The International and Comparative Law Quarterly, Vol.62, No.1, pp.159-171, Jan 2013, at https://www.jstor.org/stable/43302692?seq=1
23) Erwin Griswold, former US solicitor general under President Nixon, ‘Secrets Not Worth Keeping: The Courts and Classified Information’, 15 Feb 1989, Washington Post, cited in The National Security Archive, ‘The Pentagon Papers: Secrets, Lies and Audiotapes’, at https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB48/supreme.html
Joe Biden‘s inauguration as US president was unprecedented in modern times. The US capital resembled a war zone as 25,000 National Guardsmen plus thousands of police enforced severe restrictions over civilian movement on the streets. Roadblocks policed by soldiers and armoured cars were everywhere as the city was divided into red and green zones.
Such scenes are very familiar to Western viewers from cities such as war torn Baghdad. However, they are a shocking sight in the capital of the US Empire which is supposed to be a bastion of peace and stability, exemplifying American exceptionalism.
The corporate media in America is heralding the Biden presidency with a great deal of sycophantic fanfare. The 46th President of the United States will allegedly bring peace, stability and lay the ground for a return of prosperity; so that all can once again share in the American Dream.
Does this perspective for the Biden presidency have any prospect of being realised?
Domestic problems will take precedence
To assess the prospects for the Biden presidency we need to examine the domestic and geo-political challenges facing the new administration measured against the programme of the 46th President and the composition of his cabinet.
At the outset, it is fairly safe to say that the focus of the Biden presidency during its first year will be the compelling domestic issues that pose a threat to the stability of the American Empire in its heartland.
The influential journal Foreign Policy has commented that the US first has to deal with pressing problems at home before it can take ‘on challengers like China’.
It has also observed that America’s moral claims and exhortations against China and Russia will be undermined unless it deals with civil rights issues and abuses of human rights at home. The summer of 2020 witnessed mass civil rights protests against police brutality and institutional racism that involved millions of people on a scale not seen since the early 1960s.
In its recent analysis Foreign Policy noted that:
“The United States cannot point to foreign adversaries at the expense of recognizing the systemic failures and problems at home. America’s own house must be set in order first, through policies that centre upon promoting the resilience of its system and society.’’
On the foreign policy front Biden will want to rebuild multilateral alliances aimed at isolating Russia and China and maintaining the squeeze on ‘pariah’ nations such as Venezuela and Iran. These alliances were undermined to some degree by Trump’s belligerent isolationist approach.
Having said this, it is unlikely that Biden will make any significant changes in US foreign policy until he has stabilized the domestic situation. Then again the global economic/health crisis has created a situation where volatility will be ever present in international relations and the US may get embroiled in conflicts not of its making.
The Domestic Situation
After being sworn in as President Joe Biden faces an unenviable situation. American capitalism faces an unprecedented socio-economic, political and health crises which will require a huge amount of resources and considerable time to rectify.
It could be argued that the severity of the various crises afflicting American capitalism are such that Biden’s administration will struggle to do little more than apply a large sticking plaster to temporarily patch up its many problems.
Close scrutiny of Biden’s policies suggest that they will do little to address the many structural problems facing American capitalism.
These range from a highly fragmented for-profit health system that has presided over one of the highest Covid-19 death rates in the world to a decaying infrastructure that requires trillions of investment. Meanwhile, millions of workers jobs have disappeared as corporations offshore the work to factories in China which is linked to the massive trade deficits of the US that illustrate the continuing decline of American manufacturing.
Another problem for Biden is managing domestic expectations of his administration. His election has raised hopes amongst sections of the population that the simultaneous economic, political and health crises will be resolved over the next few years.
Wealth Transfer
The Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has exposed the complete bankruptcy of corporate politicians and the medical/ scientific/ industrial establishment who have presided over massive suffering, death and economic devastation.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic we have witnessed yet another massive wealth transfer to the billionaire oligarchs who preside over American capitalism.
Billions of public money have poured into the coffers of private companies to provided PPE gear and vaccine/drug development.
Meanwhile, massive money printing by the US Federal Reserve, (its balance sheet has doubled during 2020 from $3.4 trillion to over $7.3 trillion) has fuelled a speculative frenzy in financial markets where the S&P 500, Dow Jones and others have reached all time highs when the real economy is in dire straits.
This has led to a gigantic wealth transfer. This is illustrated by the massive growth in the wealth of America’s 664 billionaires. Their collective wealth has grown by over $1 trillion during 2020.
Debt Mountain
Biden’s programme promises to massively swell the federal government’s astronomical budget deficit. By the end of fiscal year 2021 it will amount to $21.9 trillion which is equivalent to 104.4% of GDP. After all the Empire’s gigantic war machine has to be paid for. The Pentagon’s $750 billion dollar budget will not face any reduction quite the opposite.
The Congressional Budget Office projects that the federal government’s budget deficit will balloon to an astounding $33.5 trillion by 2030. Biden, oblivious to the US government’s fiscal bankruptcy, has no proposals to deal with this issue.
Meanwhile, there is nothing in Biden’s programme that will address the massive increase in wealth inequality which has been a persistent trend since the late 1970s. Workers, whose wages have been stagnating for the last 4 decades, have been forced to take on ever larger amounts of debt to maintain their living standards.
In Q2 of 2020 consumer debt stood at a higher level than at the peak of the 2008-9 financial crisis at $14.27 trillion. This figure has undoubtedly increased as the severity of the economic crisis has intensified since then.
This eye watering debt pile which will never be paid back breaks down as follows:
Auto loan debt stood at $1.34 trillion – Q2 of 2020,
Mortgage debt stood at $9.78 trillion – Q2 of 2020
Student loan debt stood at $1.54 trillion – Q2 of 2020
Credit card debt stood at $820 billion – Q2 of 2020
There is nothing in Biden’s programme that even hints at a debt jubilee to deal with this crushing debt burden on the working/middle classes.
Meanwhile, successive administrations of both Democrat and Republican have presided over an ever harsher environment for unions in which to operate leading to lower wages and worse conditions of service for millions.
$15 Minimum Wage
Biden’s promise of a $15 minimum wage is welcome to millions of workers. It follows pressure from a nationwide campaign on this issue. Since Seattle became the first major city in 2015 to approve the $15 minimum wage, thanks to a massive campaign led by unions and socialist councilwoman Kshama Sawant, seven other large states have approved this measure.
Biden is aware of how universally popular the $15 minimum wage is with both Republican and Democrat voters. In the November election Trump won the state of Florida yet at the same time voters approved the $15 minimum wage for the state.
The under paid and underemployed workers of America can take comfort from Biden’s appointment of Marty Walsh as Labour Secretary. Walsh is notorious for covering up police corruption and the systematic harassment of black Bostonians during his term of office when mayor of Boston.
Eat the rich: wealth inequality
Biden may well reverse some of the Trump tax cuts but will do nothing to prevent US corporations holding profits in offshore accounts. This money could of course be used to improve cash starved public services.
In 2015 an academic study estimated that US based multi-national corporations held over $2.1 trillion offshore to avoid taxes.
The FinCEN files revealed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2020 illustrate how New York banks have facilitated hundreds of billions of dollars worth of money laundering over many years.
Much lauded new anti-money laundering legislation leaves open a multitude of loopholes for Wall Street to continue with this criminal activity. Never mind the fact that financial regulators have failed to carry out any criminal prosecutions against any Wall Street bank since 2008. Instead they get fines, which are part of the cost of doing business, and deferred prosecution agreements.
Wall Street and the rest of corporate America can sleep safe in their beds at night knowing that the Biden administration will do nothing to seriously address complex financial crime.
Nor will it take any measures that fundamentally address the ever widening social-economic equality that threatens the stability of the Empire in its heartland.
Biden’s Backers
Back in June 2020 Biden told a gathering of rich donors that the super rich were not to blame for wealth inequality. Ignoring the incredible damaging crime spree that Wall Street has engaged upon since the 2008 financial crisis. This is well documented in the work of former financial regulator and criminologist William Black, as well as corporate crime journalist Matt Taibi.
Biden reassured his rich donors in comforting tones:
“I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money. The truth of the matter is, you all, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done. We can disagree in the margins but the truth of the matter is it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change. …I hope if I win this nomination, I won’t let you down. I promise you. … I need you very badly.”
His appointment of Janet Yellen as Treasury Secretary, a former Chair of the Federal Reserve, signals to the billionaire oligarchs that it is business as usual. Yellen is committed to maintaining the record low interest rates and monetary methadone (i.e. money printing/trillion dollar federal deficits) demanded by Wall Street.
Her record as Chair of the Federal Reserve shows that preserving the wealth of the 1% will be her top priority.
We shouldn’t forget that Yellen in June 2017 famously said that there will never another economic crisis in her lifetime. Yet here we are in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s.
As Fed Chair Janet Yellen also dismissed claims that financial markets were overvalued and in bubble territory. In the autumn of 2018 a 20% collapse of overvalued financial markets led to the Fed retreating hastily from reducing its $3.4 trillion balance sheet while it started cutting rates as demanded by Wall Street.
In the 2 years after leaving the Fed in 2018 Janet Yellen amassed $7 million in speaking fees from banks such as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Barclays, who committed criminal acts while she was at the Fed. Will this wild eyed radical take on the speculators of Wall Street or take action to reverse the massive and growing income inequality in America?
Action to address unemployment and hunger
Biden says dealing with unemployment will be a top priority yet his proposed measures fall far short of the alphabet agencies that Roosevelt created to give work to millions in the 1930s. They don’t seem to appreciate the magnitude of the problem facing American capitalism.
In the week that Biden took office new unemployment claims totalled 900,000 far higher than any week during the peak of the 2008-9 financial crisis.
During 2020 over 38 million Americans claimed some kind of unemployment benefit. As of 19 December over 17 million Americans were claiming either state or federal unemployment relief. That figure is expected to rise during the first quarter of 2021. Over 100,000 small businesses have permanently closed while big corporations ranging from Amazon to Apple have made record profits.
Will he force US based multinational corporations to bring the millions of outsourced jobs back home? That seems unlikely. Let’s face it Apple and other companies are making too much money out of the workers paid low wages at their Chinese factories.
Meanwhile, over 50 million Americans are food insecure, including 17 million children. They are reliant on food banks and the government’s food stamp programme.
The new stimulus bill expected to be passed soon by the Democrat controlled Congress includes a $13 billion provision for expanded food stamp benefits but is still seen by many as insufficient for dealing with a level of hunger not seen the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Healthcare under Biden
This situation described above is compounded by the fact that during a global pandemic over 29% of Americans lost their health care cover so far. This has created the situation where 50 million Americans don’t have any health insurance. Between 50 to 100 million are under insured.
This situation is accentuating the devastating health crisis in the United States which has the highest number of deaths from Covid-19 in the world.
Biden’s programme will not introduce Medicare-for-all as apparently that it is ‘too expensive’ in the richest country on the planet. Yet the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Medicare For All could actually save the US up to $650 billionannually.
Nor will he eliminate the rapacious private health insurance industry. Instead, Biden is giving the private health insurance companies, who contributed handsomely to his election campaign, the opportunity to make even greater profits. The Daily Poster carried an article recently that notes that Biden’s health care plan will not expand government sponsored health coverage:
“Instead, it adopts proposals from health insurance lobbying groups’ recent letter to lawmakers demanding lucrative new subsidies for insurance companies, at a moment when those corporations have recorded record profits as millions lose coverage and many face claims denials.
Biden’s plan would shovel billions of dollars to private health insurers by providing subsidiesfor Americans to buy coverage through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplaces, which are far more expensive than government health care programs and have at times been plagued by high rates of claim denials.’’
Biden’s healthcare plans won’t give comprehensive protection to Americans in the middle of a deadly pandemic. The Daily Poster has pointed out that:
“Biden is now proposing some of the most costly and inefficient ways to expand health insurance coverage. The moves could still leave people exposed to substantial out-of-pocket costs — from deductibles, copays, and coinsurance — that act as barriers to care.’’
Many people cannot even afford to get medical treatment due to the outrageous medical bills generated by the private health industry.
According to Fair Health, “The total average charge per COVID-19 patient requiring an inpatient stay is estimated at $73,300 and the total average estimated in-network amount per commercially insured patient at $38,221.’’
Biden’s health measures are unlikely to deal with the massive problem of medical debts. A 2019 study‘Medical Bankruptcy: Still Common Despite the Affordable Care Act’ produced by the American Public Health Journal, noted that, ‘that despite the Affordable Care Act, middle-class Americans have been targeted with increasing co payments and deductibles’. This leads to half a million Americans each year declaringbankruptcy due to medical debts.
Back in 2019 the author of the above study, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, who is a Lecturer in Medicine at Harvard stated;
“The ACA was a step forward, but 29 million remain uncovered, and the epidemic of under-insurance is out of control. We need to move ahead from the ACA to a single-payer, Medicare for All system that assures first-dollar coverage for everyone.’’
Biden’s pick for Health Secretary is former attorney general of California, Xavier Becerra. His tenure as Attorney General of the Golden State doesn’t inspire optimism that he will take on the private health industry and protect the millions without health cover or facing huge medical debts.
This individual faced numerous lawsuits during 2020 for gerrymandering the ballot. According to the LA Times back in August 2020: “Becerra is facing a slew of lawsuits this election season from groups that accuse his office of writing titles and 100-word summaries for ballot measures that aim to tip the scales in favor of his political allies’’ in the Democratic Party.
In 2019 Becerra threatened legal action against journalists who had obtained records of the criminal offences committed by thousands of police officers many of whom were still serving in California.
David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition rejected Becerra’s demand that the journalist involved destroy the records, “It’s disheartening and ominous that the highest law enforcement officer in the state is threatening legal action over something the First Amendment makes clear can’t give rise to criminal action against a reporter”.
Prospects for the future
We should be under no illusions who really won the November presidential election. Corporate America won the November election hands down. The billionaire oligarch class that dominates American society has nothing to fear from a Biden administration. Wealth inequality and all of its attendant evils will continue to rise despite any tinkering reforms that are introduced.
However, the more far sighted oligarchs such as billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio are quite rightly concerned by the destabilising effect of this wealth inequality on American capitalism. Will Biden heed Dalio’s call to reform capitalism to save it from revolution from below? It seems unlikely.
Then again Biden may be forced to take more radical measures than he originally planned if the economic situation doesn’t improve this year and/or he faces pressure from an angry populace.
Over 2,000 years ago the Greek philosopher and historian Plutarch warned prophetically, ‘An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics’.
Time will tell how this imbalance in American society plays out over the next few years. Biden and his fellow managers of the Empire ignore this at their peril.
*
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.
Featured image is by Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons
A deadly double suicide bombing ripped through a second-hand clothing market in Tayaran Square, located in Bab Al-Sharqi commercial district of Baghdad on Thursday. Hassan Mohammed Al-Tamimi, Iraq’s Health Minister, said at least 32 people were killed and 110 others were wounded. Those at the scene report the bombers were able to move freely through the area after easing restrictions due to the Covid-19 virus, which has hit Iraq very hard.
A clothing vendor told reporters at the scene that the first bomber pretended to have a stomach ache, fell to the ground complaining, and then detonated his bomb.
The second bomber, working in collusion with the first, waited until people rushed to the scene, and then he detonated his bomb, with some witnesses saying he posed as an injured person.
This same market was targeted in January 2018, when at least 27 people died, which marked the last major attack.
Early on Friday, the Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility via the group’s Telegram communications channel.
However, some locals and experts alike are questioning whether IS was behind the attack.
Islamic State
Suicide attacks had previously been a routine event in Baghdad, but since IS was defeated in 2017 they had stopped. Security improvement had brought a near-normal life back to Baghdad.
Since 2017, some IS fighters managed to find a safe-haven in the Hamrin mountains of northeastern Iraq. From this remote, rural landscape, IS has waged a low-level insurgency against Iraqi forces, relying mainly on improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and small-arms fire in its attacks. They did not use suicide bombs, and their target was not civilians, with most attacks recorded in the northern provinces of Diyala, Salahuddin, Kirkuk, and Nineveh, and in the western province of Anbar.
The military defeat of IS was accomplished through the efforts of many groups, some who coordinated their efforts, and others who did not, but all were working toward the same goal. The US led a multinational coalition to defeat IS, while the local Iraqi security forces were part of the coalition; however, Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), which are officially sanctioned by the Iraqi government, are backed by Iran. In this case, the US, Arab Gulf, Iraq, and Iran were all fighting to defeat the same enemy, on the same battlefield, in what should have been a coordinated military effort, but US politics prevented a collaboration.
IS once controlled 88,000 sq km (34,000 sq miles) of territory stretching from eastern Iraq to western Syria and imposed its brutal rule on almost eight million people.
The US occupation forces
Suicide attacks against civilian targets were a near-daily tactic of mainly Sunni Muslim insurgents during the US occupation of Iraq after the US invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.
The Iraqi government had requested the US military to enter Iraq to fight IS. However, once IS was defeated, the Americans never went home, and became an occupation force. The Iraqi people protested the US troops’ presence, and the Iraqi parliament voted to demand the full withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq.
Last year, former US President Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of half the American troops deployed in Iraq, saying he had confidence in the ability of local forces to prevent a resurgence of IS. The US presence was cut from 5,200 to 3,000 in September and was due to fall to 2,500 this month.
Popular Mobilization Units
The Chairman of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), also known as Hashd al-Sha’abi anti-terror force, Falih al-Fayyadh, condemned the suicide blasts in Baghdad and added that such “desperate terrorist attempts” cannot cause the Iraqi people and security forces to falter.
The Head of Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq Movement, included in the PMU, Qais Khazali, blamed the Iraqi government.
Khazali said in a tweet “ISIS is not strong, but security negligence and the government’s lack of interest are the reason for the recent terrorist attacks in Diyala, Saladin, Anbar, Jurf al-Sakhar, and recently in Tayaran Square in Baghdad.”
He urged the Iraqi intelligence services to investigate the double suicide bombing, and to spend as much effort as they do in cases of targeting US interests.
The Iraqi government and parliament
The attacks come days after Iraq’s government said an early general election would be postponed from June until October to give electoral authorities more time to register voters and new parties, and amid a severe economic crisis.
Iraqi President Barham Salih strongly condemned the attack, saying that “we stand firmly against the rogue attempts aimed at destabilizing the country.” Salih tweeted blame for the explosions at ‘dark groups’.
Ali al-Bayati, a member of the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights, tweeted that the bombings were an “indicator of the return of terrorism” and “the weakness of security institutions”.
Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi held an urgent meeting with top security commanders on Thursday, and then sacked key security and police commanders, deputy interior minister for intelligence affairs, director of counter-terrorism and intelligence in the interior ministry, and commander of federal police forces.
Regional countries statements
Saudi Arabia condemned the attack and added their support for the Iraqi people. At one time, Iraqis had blamed Wahhabi terrorists supported by Saudi Arabia for frequent terrorist attacks. However, during the Trump administration, Saudi Arabia has said they no longer support Radical Islam and the terrorism associated with the political ideology.
The Gulf Cooperation Council also condemned the attack with Secretary-General Nayef Al-Hajraf saying, the GCC has adopted “steadfast stances toward terrorism and extremism and its rejection of all its forms and manifestations, motives and justifications,” as well as sources that fund and support it. During the Syrian crisis which began in 2011, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other oil-rich Gulf states had funded and supported the terrorists following Radical Islam, in their US-NATO role to bring about ‘regime change’, which has since failed.
The foreign ministries of the UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain also condemned the attack, with other Arab nations, including Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Tunisia, issuing similar statements.
Iran’s Embassy in Baghdad has also condemned the attacks.
Conclusions: differing motives by various players, and what next for Iraq
Regardless of what group was behind the double suicide attack in Baghdad, the violence and terrorism are aimed at destabilizing security in Iraq. One PMU group, Hezbollah Brigades, blamed the US-Israeli-Saudi so-called “Triad of Evil”.
IS is usually in rural areas, and against security forces. This was a very different city-center target in the capital and targeted civilians of the poorest area of the city. The differences have raised red-flags among Iraqi security experts.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Saeed Khatibzadeh expressed a possible motive for the blast, that the Baghdad bombing was aimed at prolonging foreign forces present in Iraq. Khatibzadeh added that IS terrorism has been resuscitated in Iraq and is planning to disrupt the country’s peace and stability and provide foreign forces with an excuse to continue their presence in the Arab country.
It will be up to the Iraqi leadership to ensure a peaceful exit of foreign troops from Iraq while improving domestic security forces’ capability to face IS. The stronger a country is, the better it can combat terrorism. The terrorists utilize division, chaos, and fractured social values to operate. In the current situation that the US faces domestically, the terrorists may be watching and planning for their chance to enter the stage.
*
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.
On January 22, legendary baseball Hall of Fame home run king Hank Aaron reportedly died in his sleep — no cause of death given so far.
More below on the loss of a figure Sports Illustrated said “transcended baseball like few ever did or will.”
***
He was bigger than life on and off the field as a giant of the game and humble human being.
Mohammad Ali called him “(t)he only man (he) idolized more than” himself.
He was a sports giant I remember well from his playing days.
Growing up in Boston, I missed seeing him in person with the Braves that moved from the city to Milwaukee in 1953, before Aaron joined the team a year later.
His storied career began in the Negro Leagues around five years after Jackie Robinson became the first Black major league baseball player with the then-Brooklyn Dodgers.
I recall seeing him play against the Boston Braves in the late 1940s and be booed by fans in the stands — not for being an opposition player, for the color of his skin.
Boston like countless other US cities remain racist to this day — but not in ballparks of all sports any longer where Black athletes are the biggest stars and main attractions.
Aaron transcended stardom to the measure of what he was as a man.
He began playing baseball as a shortstop.
The Milwaukee Braves called on him to play in his first major league game because of an injury to regular outfielder Bobby Thompson.
As baseball’s highest-paid player in 1972, Aaron was paid $200,000. In 1976, got $240,000 — small fractions of what star players earn today.
He played in more baseball all-star games (21) than any other player to this day.
He overcame racial hatred and rose to stardom through great skill as a player — combined with humility and grace as a man.
Though Bobby Bonds broke his career home run record and Babe Ruth — the first player to hit 60 homers in one season — was know as the Sultan of Swat, Henry/Hammerin Hank Aaron will be baseball’s home run king for time immemorial.
From Mobile, Alabama sand lots to the Negro Leagues, then minors to the Majors in Milwaukee, then Atlanta, Aaron will always be one of the national pastime’s most iconic figures.
A gifted player offensively and defensively, impressive statistics alone don’t capture his importance to the teams he played on and communities where he lived — most prominently the Atlanta Braves in the peach state.
Calling him bigger than baseball, Sports Illustrated said he was “a beacon for civil rights, of humility and of honest work ethic, all qualities we associate with America at its best, not just in some sporting venture.”
He was part of major league baseball for nearly a generation as an active player from 1954 – 1976.
I defer everything about what he accomplished on the field to sports analysts now recounting them at length.
He’s remembered as the most transcendent player since Jackie Robinson broke the color line two years after WW II ended.
When Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record — a historic sports moment I saw live on television and remember vividly as he circled the bases and was greeted joyously at home plate while fans were cheering — announcer Vin Skully reported the moment as follows:
“What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia.”
“What a marvelous moment for the country and the world.”
“A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the deep south for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol.”
“And it is a great moment for all of us, and particularly for Henry Aaron.”
“You wanted to add an ‘amen.’ ”
After achieving the moment at age-40, he addressed the crowd by microphone, saying:
“Thank God it’s over.”
After retiring on the field, he remained with the Braves organization as an executive involved in building its minor league system.
“He established Chasing the Dream, a foundation that provides grants to children age nine to 12 to seek advance study in arts, music, dance and sports,” Sports Illustrated reported, adding:
“Graciousness always was an Aaron hallmark, as much as” what he accomplished” as a player.
A giant on the field of dreams and throughout his life now belongs to the ages.
Aaron was vaxxed for seasonal flu/renamed covid with Moderna’s hazardous vaccine on January 5.
After his Friday death, no explanation of cause was reported.
After being vaxxed, he told AP News that he felt “wonderful,” adding:
“I don’t have any qualms about it at all.”
All vaccines are hazardous to health and should be avoided — especially experimental, unapproved, fast-tracked, DNA altering covid ones.
Since mass-vaxxing began in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, thousands of adverse events were reported, including serious ones, along with scores of known deaths.
Was Hank Aaron’s life cut short because he rolled up his sleeve to do what he thought was the right thing?
Noted anti-vax advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the following in response to Aaron’s death:
His “tragic death is part of a wave of suspicious deaths among elderly closely following administration of COVID vaccines.”
“Studies show that self-interested pharmaceutical company researchers, physicians, nursing homes and health officials seldom report vaccine injuries.”
“Instead, they dismiss injuries and deaths as ‘unrelated’ to vaccination.”
“Public health advocates worry that the vast majority of injuries and deaths will go unreported to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), the notoriously broken voluntary surveillance system run by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).”
A 2001 HHS study concluded that “fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries” are reported to VAERS.”
Aaron’s family should order an autopsy to determine the cause of his passing — to be performed by trusted experts who’ll explain accurately what took is life.
While at this time it’s unknown, it’s well known that elders aged-80 or older are especially vulnerable to ill effects from vaxxing because of their weakened immune systems.
Vaxxing may well be responsible for taking Aaron’s life.
Everyone vaxxed for covid is playing Russian roulette with their health and lives — especially the elderly like Aaron.
I mourn his loss like many others.
*
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).
There is an agenda. A huge agenda. It is a Globalist agenda that is in the process of inflicting gigantic harm to humanity. It is called Covid-19 – The Great Reset, issued by the World Economic Forum (WEF), authored by its founder, Klaus Schwab. If left undisturbed, The Great Reset’s plan is a crime of epic dimensions, never seen before in our civilization. Mr. Trump did not want to be part of this agenda.
Donald Trump, for better or for worse, is not a Globalist. He calls himself a patriot. He wanted to Make America Great Again (MAGA). Sounds silly? Perhaps. But it’s not globalist. Therefore, Mr. Trump was not the guy of the Globalist Cabal, currently calling the shots on world events – way above Presidents like Donald Trump and those of the other 192 UN member countries.
This Globalist Cabal has enormous power. Jo Biden and his gang respond to this power.
What is behind Donald Trump’s “silly” idea of MAGA, the western globalist-brainwashed world cannot understand.
It was supposed to bringing the United States back to again becoming a sovereign, independent, economically autonomous nation. On more occasion than one Mr. Trump said, he wishes the same for every nation in the world. He also insinuated that NATO’s purpose was passé.
And he said before his 2016 election, under his Presidency the US would no longer be the policeman of the world. He may have tried on all of these scores, but the Powers That Be (PTB) had other ideas.
In foreign policy – interfering in other countries’ affairs – he certainly didn’t act according to his pre-election promises (or was not allowed to by the PTB); not in Syria, not in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea – not in Europe, not anywhere in the world where “American interests” are at stake – as they euphemistically call “interference” in other sovereign nations’ affairs.
Especially not in Russia and China. Quarreling with these sovereign nations, and menacing them, was a lost cause. He knew it, but it was good for cosmetics. It presents well as an international show of upmanship, for maintaining the image of a super-power and an emperor. Both of which are long gone. But perception is always limping behind facts.
However, you have to give him this: Against the wishes and pressure of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC), Donald Trump did not start any new wars. He maintained those started under his predecessors – six active ones – give or take a conflict here and there. Thereby keeping the MIC at bay.
Donald Trump obviously did not fit the Globalist agenda. It was not his plan. Contrary to what many may think, he had no ambitions for a One World Order (OWO), which is clearly the Globalist’s goal. This is the plan behind the Great Reset (see this The World Economic Forum (WEF) Knows Best – The Post-Covid “Great Global Reset”). To achieve completion of the Great Reset, millions of people may have to die.
The Globalist Cabal doesn’t care. Jo Biden doesn’t care. Because Jo Biden is a Globalist, as well as his crew, inherited mostly from the Obama era – and so is Hillary (on her “demolish Libya” initiative, cynically laughing and referring to Muammar Gadhafi: “We came, we saw, he died”), still an important figure of this – let me call it what it is – a criminal clan.
The political career of Jo Biden was born in the swamp of Washington – and the way it looks today, it will end in the swamp of Washington, either with him as President – or without him as President. At this age, despite all the noble words spoken at his inauguration, Jo Biden will not reform his conscience. “I will be President not only for those who voted for me, I will be President also for those who didn’t vote for me; I will be President for all Americans.” This slogan-style wishy-washy palaver has no meaning.
There is not one US President who hasn’t used such words, at least during the inauguration – and most of them much earlier during their campaigns. “I will work to unite our badly divided America again.” When in the last 70 Years were the United States united? Never. Will Jo Biden meet the challenge?
During his inauguration speech, as well as in several previous occasions, including the pre-election Presidential Debates, Jo Biden referred to the coming “Dark Winter” – hoping that America will get through it without harm.
What is the “Dark Winter”? – Why the mystery, instead of transparency? Why talk in code-language, when the American people are, as Biden implied, his number one priority?
Did his remark refer to Operation Dark Winterwhich was a code name for a senior-level bio-terrorist attack simulation conducted on June 22–23, 2001, at Andrews Air Force Base Maryland? The simulation was designed to carry out a mock version of a covert and widespread smallpox attack on the United States. The simulation was sponsored and carried out by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (CCBS) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Note – the Johns Hopkins research and teaching complex is strongly supported by the Rockefeller Foundation.
Does this mean that there is or may be a plan for a biowarfare attack – in the form of Ebola, smallpox or a stronger strand of coronavirus? Or any other highly infectious and deadly disease? – If so, Mr. Biden, and all the others who mentioned a Dark Winter ahead, including Barack Obama, must know what’s behind it. And they hide it from the people.
The insinuation that such a catastrophe may be in the making, without openly warning the people, or better, preventing the Dark Winter – is certainly not a sign of caring for the people. To the contrary, it shows disdain for the people – the lower casts. Sounds like Hillary Clinton’s “Basket of Deplorables” in a 2016 Presidential campaign speech. Seems, the core of the Dems, as they pan out with Jo Bidens election, have a particular flair to feel above the rest of the people.
People, and unity within the United States seem clearly not to be a priority preoccupation of Jo Biden’s. Much more important, how can he – or rather the team behind him – be a driver in the implementation of the globalist agenda, the Great Reset. Because, he, Jo Biden, and the swamp behind him are committed to this cause. The Globalist Cabal, chose him over a continuation of Donald Trump’s Presidency.
Never mind that there was massive – but massive, proven voter fraud, possibly in the hundreds of thousands, maybe over a million votes were added to Biden or electronically switched from Trump to Biden. But Mr. Trump’s legal team was not successful in bringing forward and defending their evidence before any court, including the US Supreme Court. Imagine the Immense power behind this Global Cabal!
Mr. Trump, like him or not, for his country he had another agenda. He wanted to rebuild the US economy again. Bringing back outsourced labor, create jobs. His approach may have been inadequate, and at times he sounded awkward addressing economic issues, as well as the people. But he was not a Globalist, he did not strive for an OWO. That’s why 80 million Americans voted for him. They do not want an OWO. Most of the world – 99.99% – do not want an OWO.
Those who voted for Trump also sensed that the so-called Dems had not the least interest of the people in mind. Never had, at least not since JFK.
So, Donald Trump did not fit the agenda of the Global Cabal – also called “Deep State”. Those, who are way above the President of the US – and the leaders (sic) of the world. They are dead-set on implementing the Great Reset – grabbing more power for themselves, more wealth – and a technified, digitized, robotized world, a totally electronic plutocracy – a technocracy cum tyranny, under which the Epsilon-people (lowest cast in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World) will behave and obey as they are digitally ordered – modern slaves – own nothing and be happy – the Great Omen of the Great Reset.
And if their eugenist wish comes through, they, the Globalist Cabal, will reign over a massively reduced population. That’s where the current western inoculation campaign comes in – all three of the most used vaccines, or rather toxic injections – Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, AstraSeneca – contain mRNA, thus, DNA-altering substances – and have so far not proven effective as vaccines. To the contrary, dangerous side effects and death rates exceed by far the common measures of traditional vaccines. They also contain sterilization and infertility components which fits the eugenics agenda well.
Unfortunately, Russian and Chinese traditional live-attenuatedvaccines (a weakened form of the virus) that creates a strong and long-lasting immune response, are not freely available in the west. Such vaccines do not affect the human DNA. However, the methodology is based on decades of experience.
The imminent question is – why suddenly a new type, never tested before vaccine? What is the agenda behind these new types of jabs? Do they have to do with the implementation of the Great Reset?
Why are scientists not allowed to talk openly about the effects and possibly long-term negative impacts of these new-type injections?
Why do governments around the globe keep any true science about them under wraps – prohibited – censored in the media – even forbidden under fine and in extremis arrest in psychiatric wards?
Why this immense drive to vaccinate everyone as fast as possible – under menace “if you are not vaccinated, you cannot move”? – And that for a virus – covid-19 – that has a mortality rate approximately comparable to, or in some years even less, than the common flu? – See Anthony S. Fauci, Director the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID / NIH – USA), in “Covid-19 – Navigating the Uncharted”, New England Journal of Medicine – NEJM (28 February, 2020):
If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%)…
Among Jo Biden’s first decisions during his few days as President is an increased effort of vaccination – with the mRNA-type vaccines, as well as massive testing by the also proven ineffective and an totally inappropriate PCR test – in the US.
He vows to vaccinate 100 million Americans in the first 100 days if his Presidency. This is spot-on with the Great Reset and the Globalist Cabal’s agenda. He has already been warning about the spread of a new more infectious covid-mutation – which would require more of the unpopular repressive measures – also further infringing on the already hard-hit economy. And if Washington decides to “tighten the screws” on the population (Mme. Merkel’s expression), Europe will soon follow suit – and so will all the other western world’s vassals.
Following the agenda of the Globalist Cabal is Mr. Biden’s number one priority. On his first “work day”, actually on his Inauguration Day, he has not hesitated to sign 17 Executive Orders, of which the New York Times says:
“Despite an inaugural address that called for unity and compromise, Mr. Biden’s first actions as president are sharply aimed at sweeping aside former President Donald J. Trump’s pandemic response, reversing his environmental agenda, tearing down his anti-immigration policies, bolstering the teetering economic recovery and restoring federal efforts to promote diversity.”
Among these measures are returning the US to WHO, making Anthony Fauci, Director NIAID / NIH, the head of the U.S. delegation to the organization’s Executive Board. “He will jump into the role with a meeting this week”, says the NYT. Mr. Fauci has long been known for his conflict of interest with the vaccine pharma-companies, and for working hand-in-hand with Bill Gates, who funds up to one third of WHO’s budget, and calls the shots on WHO’s vaccination policy. What does that say for Jo Biden, other than he plays already on his first day into the hands of the Globalist Cabal.
President Biden also signed a National Mask Mandate – or “the 100 days masking challenge”, when every serious scientist says how dangerous wearing masks is. However, this is a step towards the Globalist Cabal’s crackdown on humanity, that and social distancing, and isolation by quarantining – leading to lockdowns after lockdowns – all within a massive fear campaign. This is supposed to bring the populace at large to its knees, so that the implementation of the horrible steps within the Great Reset will encounter less resistance.
Mr. Trump never saw lockdowns or mask wearing as the solution to the covid-19 crisis – an opinion shared by many high-ranking scientists and professors the world over. He wanted the already covid-destroyed economy to get back running again, as quickly and as closely as possible to “normal” – thereby also improving the desperate employment situation of the people.
You may see the details of Mr. Biden’s 17 first-day Executive Orders here.
So, because Mr. Trump didn’t see eye to eye with the Globalist Cabal, he had to go. His quest for justice from the High Courts with regard to voter fraud was denied.
The Great Reset agenda, dictated by the Globalist Cabal, is to be implemented in its cruelest details under the supervision of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Institute for Medicine (funded by the Rockefeller Foundation), WHO, the IMF, World Bank — and the entire UN apparatus. It is an integral part of the UN Agenda 21-30, which depicts to the world the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) as the agenda’s glorious “raison d’être”.
In fact, the Great Reset is the key driver of the UN Agenda 21-30. The SDGs are but a noble gesture to tell the Global South how interested the West, or Global North is in the wellbeing of the poor and marginalized people of the nations of the Global South, also called Third World or “developing countries”.
The caveat for the implementation of the SDGs is that the “developing” countries are expecting massive funding from the IMF, World Bank and regional development banks, as well as western bilateral aid organizations, to implement these goals. But, as we know, these development assisting funds come with tight strings attached.
In the case of the SDGs, countries receiving foreign funding from the financial gods mentioned before, have to commit to following the rules and dictates of the Globalist agenda. i.e., the rules and narrative of the Great Reset. Plus, most of the funding comes in the form of loans. That means further debt-enslavement, further dependence on the west, the Global North, for trade and exploitation of their natural resources.
One may wonder, who needs more development the West / Global North or the Global South? – It depends on the criteria of development. It could be – the more digitized and uniformly controlled the world population is, the more developed it is. Or – alternatively, the more sovereign nations collaborate peacefully as independent nations, each with their own culture, their own money, their own fiscal policies and social coherence – the more developed, equal, just and peaceful the world will become.
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.
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.
A censorship mania going far beyond the necessary social media banning of Trump’s fascist coup incitement is appearing in U.S. Democratic party leadership circles leading to the necessity to warn of the possibility that socialist and progressive social media presence and websites may be heavily censored or banned, and to urge that as a precaution multiple versions of progressive websites or at least of their databases should be located in multiple countries.
Congressional Representatives Anna Eshoo and Tom Malinowski have now written letters demanding that the CEO’s of Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube (which is owned by Google) censor content which reinforces “existing political biases, especially those rooted in anger, anxiety, and fear.” They have also refereed to uncensored social media as allowing the ‘pollution of Americans minds’.
Note that ‘existing political biases’ and “those rooted in anger, anxiety, and fear” and the notion that we must not permit the ‘polluting of Americans minds’ is a ‘blankcheck’ formula allowing any political website to be targeted and censored.”
Even more sinister is the fact that the right-wing website Parler was targeted for removal and denied online space by Amazon cloud and shut-down.
I believe it would be a serious political mistake not to to prepare for the possibility of censorship or shutdown of independent and progressive online systems. The Democratic party shares one thing with Trump: a fear of socialism. The U.S. political elites who feel no compunction in ordering wars of aggression that slaughter hundreds of thousands in other countries are quite capable of trampling over the right of free speech and press.
The Secretive Plan to Shut Down the Internet
The U.S. state has, in fact, already a secretive plan in place to shut down the internet and mobile phone systems, or portions thereof. This plan, known as SOP 303, enables the shutdown and restoration process for use by commercial and private wireless networks during a self-defined ‘national crisis’.
In 2016 the U.S. Supreme court declined to hear a petition from the Electronic Privacy information center which would have required release of the SOP 303 details
What is known is that the plan gives officials of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security the power to shut down the internet with no consultation or input from either the U.S. Congress or the public. Determining what constitutes an ’emergency’ is left solely up to the Homeland officials. China, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria are just some of the countries where all or a local or regional portion of the internet have been previously shut down due to a supposed, emergency’, which was usually mass protests against government policies or social conditions.
Serious resistance by American workers to the ever-growing wars of aggression and deterioration of their living and working conditions has long been an inevitable.development. Amid the current depression-level economic conditions and other dislocations of life in the U.S., SOP 303 may well be implemented to shut down vital communication by workers – the vast majority of American people – as legitimate resistance grows ever stronger.
Implementation of the SOP 303 plan would not be technically difficult. It’s true that no individual organization or government agency directly controls the entire internet. But the major social media platforms – including Facebook, Youtube, and Google – as well as mobile phone networks such as Verizon, are already closely integrated with the U.S. state.
They have collaborated in the NSA (U.S. National Security Agency) program of mass surveillance of online emails, social media, and phone calls by the American people and internationally They are also part of the new U.S. government program to have the online media giants censor the internet by downgrading or blocking access to socialist, ant-war, and progressive websites and systems – such as Counterpunch or World Socialist Website on the spurious grounds of blocking ‘fake news.
Google, to cite just one instance,, recently established a censorship algorithm and censorship staff group. Google censorship now effectively blocks access to at least 20 progressive websites. It does so by ensuring that users searching for information will not find those progressive sites because their links are placed very far down the search result on a second, third, or even fifth search page. Progressive sites have thereby lost 30, 40, even75% of their previous important traffic flow from Google.
It would therefore not take much for Homeland Security officials to end most online or phone communication. A few phone calls ordering the giant social media platforms and Google to shut down; a few more calls to the giant phone companies; and an order, enforced if necessary by police, for all or selected ISP’s (internet service providers) to shut down the websites they host, is all it would take to end most online or phone communication.
It should also be emphasized that the major social media systems, and mobile phone apps such as What’s app and Line, serve a large part of the world’s population. Facebook, for example, has two billion registered users from across the planet. It recently setup a censorship group of five hundred Facebook employees in Germany to monitor its content for information not to the liking of the German government.
To defend the basic democratic right of free communication, American and international workers -including IT workers – must organize to end all government surveillance, censorship, and use of the internet by governments to control the people of America and the world.
*
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.
Eric Sommer is an international journalist living in China.
In February last year, Trump was tried and acquitted by the Senate on the following two phony charges:
“Article I: Abuse of power, falsely claiming Trump sought foreign interference from Ukraine in the US 2020 presidential election.
Article II: Obstruction of Congress, falsely claiming he “directed the unprecedented, categorical, and indiscriminate defiance of subpoenas issued by the House of Representatives pursuant to its sole Power of Impeachment,”
adding:
“(W)ithout lawful cause or excuse, President Trump directed Executive Branch agencies, offices, and officials not to comply with those subpoenas. President Trump thus interposed the powers of the Presidency against the lawful subpoenas of the House…”
Trump’s unwillingness to participate in the sham process did not rise to the level of obstructing Congress.
Nor did urging current and former regime members not to cooperate with Dems because proceedings lacked legitimacy.
Charges against him were politicized, justifiable wrongdoing to hold him accountable were ignored because most congressional members and bureaucrats share guilt.
On January 13, Trump was impeached again.
The second time around was on the phony charge of “engag(ing) on high crimes and misdemeanors by inciting violence against the government of the United States (sic),” adding:
He “gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of government (sic).”
“He threatened the integrity of the democratic system (sic), interfered with the peaceful transition of power (sic), and imperiled a coequal branch of government (sic).”
“He thereby betrayed his trust as president, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States (sic).”
Cold, hard facts refute all of the above politicized rubbish.
January 6 events on Capitol Hill had clear earmarks of an orchestrated anti-Trump false flag — staged by elements wanting him blamed for what he had nothing to do with.
He urged supporters to protest against certification of rigged Election 2020 results nonviolently, not the other way around.
Public assembly and free expression are constitutionally guaranteed.
Perhaps not much longer based on recent events and if undemocratic Dems controlling Congress and the White House enact the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act Dem Senator Richard Durbin said he’ll introduce.
If it becomes the law of the land, it may equate dissent with domestic terrorism, along with hardening totalitarian rule.
In US history, three presidents faced trials by Senate members on politicized charges — Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump.
Beginning on February 9 — unless changed to an alternate date — Trump will be tried again on the phony charge of inciting insurrection he had nothing to do with — this time as a former president.
While exoneration is likely because of a required two-thirds Senate super-majority needed to convict, orchestrated events of January 6 could result in proceedings against him concluding the other way around.
For the first time in US history, a current or former president could be convicted by Senate trial — in private citizen Trump’s case, by a phony charge against him.
If a sitting or former US president can be wrongfully charged and convicted, what chance for justice in America for anyone will ever exist henceforth.
What remains of the practically nonexistent rule of law in America will be in dock when Senate proceedings against Trump begin.
Wrongful conviction by a Senate super-majority for what he had nothing to do with will be a de facto obituary for rule of law in America that no longer exists.
One sham article of impeachment will be presented to the Senate on Monday.
They’ll be nothing fair about a trial on a phony charge — presided over by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
If convicted, Trump could be barred from holding public office again by a separate vote.
He could be denied benefits afforded former US presidents under the 1958 Former Presidents Act.
He could lose them by removal pursuant to Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution — including his pension and Secret Service protection.
However, the law states that presidents “whose service in such office shall have terminated other than by” removal from office office are entitled to benefits.
As a former president, Trump cannot be removed from an office he no longer holds.
Mostly likely, he’ll retain pension and Secret Service protection no matter the results of trial.
According to the Constitution’s Article ll, Section 2:
“The president…shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.”
Trump cannot be pardoned after conclusion of politicized proceedings against him.
He or counsel representing him may or may not participate in what’s forthcoming.
No one should be above the law and that includes sitting and former presidents.
Of equal importance, no one should be falsely charged and held accountable when innocent.
Trump is guilty of high crimes of war and against humanity by hot and other means.
He’s guilty of enormous harm to most Americans so privileged ones could benefit at their expense.
He wasn’t impeached twice for these offenses. Nor did he earlier and will in February face Senate trial for them that would be justified and warrant conviction.
Instead, he faced two phony articles of impeachment earlier and a third one that’s the politicized basis for his upcoming sham Senate trial.
While unsympathetic toward him for high crimes I believe demand accountability, a nation of laws — not the whim of its ruling authorities to do what they please extrajudicially — is far more important.
It’s the difference between the rule of international, constitutional and statute laws v. rule of the jungle.
The latter standard defines how US governance operates.
Framing Trump on bogus charges while ignoring legitimate offenses against him and countless other current and former US ruling class members is one of many examples of a nation off the rails.
Governing by its own rules is what tyranny is all about.
That’s the disturbing state of things in the US on a path toward making it full-blown ahead if not challenged nonviolently in the streets to stop what no one yearning to breathe free should tolerate.
Edmund Burke long ago explained that “(t)he only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men (and women) to do nothing.”
*
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).
Donald Trump obviously did not fit the Globalist agenda. It was not his plan. Contrary to what many may think, he had no ambitions for a One World Order (OWO), which is clearly the Globalist’s goal. This is the plan behind the Great Reset (see this 
