Corona Mask Mandates: Science or Political Dogma?

December 20th, 2020 by Michael J. Talmo

When it comes to masks, U.S. government officials have more waffles than a pancake house. Back in March we were told not to wear masks. Then, starting in April, they do an about-face and for the past several months have been telling us to wear surgical and even cloth masks.

But they insisted that the masks won’t protect the people wearing them from COVID-19—only the people they come in contact with. “My mask protects you, your mask protects me” was the mantra. This is because respiratory droplets are supposed to be the primary mode of viral transmission which the masks supposedly block. This is mainly why surgeons wear masks in operating rooms—they prevent droplets from their nose and mouth from going into a patient’s open wound. Now, since November, we are being told that masks protect both the wearer as well as the people they come in contact with.

For years the scientific literature has demonstrated that the primary mode of transmission for respiratory viruses are fine aerosol particles that can remain suspended in the fluid air for up to 16 hours and can travel much further distances than 6 ft. Back in July, more than 200 scientists asked public-health agencies in a letter published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases to recognize these facts.

In September the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) added aerosols as a primary mode of transmission for SARS-CoV-2—the virus that supposedly causes COVID-19. Then they took it down. Why the flip-flop? Because in my opinion, claiming that droplets and close contact are the primary mode of transmission make the mask and social distancing nonsense easier to sell. But if aerosols are the primary mode of transmission, there’s no point in forcing people to wear masks or socially distance.

As explained in my previous article, “The Plain Truth About Face Masks,” the only scientific studies that matter are Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) with verified outcomes because they test the masks directly with control groups to see if they actually prevent viral diseases. In contrast, observational studies, such as statistical correlations (epidemiological) and computer modeling are based on speculation that can be tainted by bias. They are highly inaccurate and as explained in the July 31 issue of JAMA (Journal of The American Medical Association) can get in the way of doing legitimate research.

Here are three RCTs to consider:

CDC Website: a May 2020 study published in Emerging Infectious Diseases did a systematic review of 10 RCT’s on masks from 1946-2018. That’s a period of over 70 years. Results:

“In pooled analysis, we found no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks…either when worn by the infected person for source control or when worn by uninfected persons to reduce exposure…Proper use of face masks is essential because improper use might increase the risk of transmission.”

Canadian Family Physician in July 2020 published a study that conducted a “PEER umbrella systematic review” that included 11 systematic reviews and 18 RCTs involving a combined total of 26,444 participants in both clinical and community settings. Results:

Synthesis: “Overall, the use of masks in the community did not reduce the risk of influenza, confirmed viral respiratory infection, influenzalike illness, or any clinical respiratory infection.”

On November 18 2020, the Annals of Internal Medicine published an RCT study from Denmark. This is the first RCT conducted to determine if masks are effective against SARS-CoV-2. The study involved over 6,000 Danes. Three of the world’s top medical journals, JAMA, the Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine rejected it. Could the reason be because it yielded the same results as all other RCTs on masks when it comes to viral diseases? Yep! It found that the infection rate between the control group that wore masks as opposed to the group that didn’t was less than one half of one percent in favor of the masks. In other words, the benefit, if any, turned out to be insignificant.

The reason masks are useless against viral diseases is because viral particles are much smaller than the microscopic pores that are present in all masks. The rigorous 2008 U.K. study conducted by the HSE (Health Safety Executive) found that huge quantities of viruses contained in aerosol particles easily penetrate all types of medical masks. And this was in a controlled environment under optimal conditions with the masks fitted and worn properly. Numerous other studies show the same thing. This is why mechanistic studies that show the amount of droplets a mask blocks or the percentage of viral particles they might filter out are worthless. As long as some viral particles get through the mask, and they always will, you can be infected. It’s like spraying water from a garden hose at a chain link fence as opposed to a screen window. The holes in the screen are a lot smaller but plenty of water will still get through.

What especially irks me are the legions of corrupt bureaucrats and ignorant brainwashed nincompoops who cackle that wearing a mask is a small thing—a minor inconvenience. The scientific literature disagrees.

Clinical Research in Cardiology July 2020 study evaluated the effects of surgical masks and FFP2/N95 masks on 12 healthy males. Conclusion:

“Ventilation, cardiopulmonary exercise capacity and comfort are reduced by surgical masks and highly impaired by FFP2/N95 face masks in healthy individuals. These data are important for recommendations on wearing face masks at work or during physical exercise…Medical face masks have a marked negative impact on cardiopulmonary capacity that significantly impairs strenuous physical and occupational activities. In addition, medical masks significantly impair the quality of life of their wearer. These effects have to be considered versus the potential protective effects of face masks on viral transmissions. The quantitative data of this study may, therefore, inform medical recommendations and policy makers.”

If this is the effect masks have on young healthy people, imagine what they are doing to the elderly and to people who aren’t healthy.

Another problem with long-term mask wearing is what dentists are calling “mask mouth.” An August 5 2020 article in the New York Post reported that wearing a mask all the time causes a decrease in saliva which helps cleanse the teeth and prevent the growth of bad bacteria which causes bad breath. Saliva also helps neutralize the buildup of acid which helps prevent tooth decay and gum disease. Dentists quoted in the article said all of these conditions have been increasing in their practices since people have been wearing masks. They also warned that Periodontal diseases increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

More people than I can count, especially employees who have to wear masks in order to keep their jobs, have told me how much they hate them. They tell me about the headaches, and the fatigue all of which are symptoms of oxygen deprivation as well as the damage to their skin. But I’ve encountered a few people who claim that wearing a mask doesn’t bother them at all. Over the years I’ve also encountered a lot of smokers who claim that they enjoy puffing away and feel great, but admit that they know they are slowly poisoning themselves. The same applies to mask wearers who for whatever reason don’t feel any ill effects. Depriving yourselves of oxygen is damaging your brain and weakening your internal organs and immune system. Deny it all you want but remember this: the head and the tongue in it may lie, but the body doesn’t.

Masks have become a global dogma. Truth doesn’t matter. Science doesn’t matter. Compliance is all that matters. Globalists like Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation have created a cult. Masks have become our penance—the cross we must bear. It’s our fault that cases and deaths continue to rise because we’re not doing what the high priests of science are telling us to do. We’re not obedient enough, were not compliant enough. Never mind that none of the COVID tests look for an actual virus and have high false positive rates. Never mind that the CDC’s own website says that the survival rate for everyone under 70 years of age is well over 99%. Never mind that there is no excess mortality. Less people have died this year than the 2.8 million national average. Nevertheless, vaccines that would normally take years to test for safety and efficacy have been rolled out that we’re supposed to shut up and take. We need this vaccine like the Sahara Desert needs a pile of sand.

How much whackier can it get? Take China, for example, a December 2020 article in Business Insider reported that the Civil Aviation Administration of China is advising flight attendants to wear diapers on planes instead of using the bathroom in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19. But for some mysterious, unfathomable reason it’s okay for the pilot and flight crew to use the bathroom.

Honestly folks, how much longer are you going to put up with this lunacy? Do you really want to go through life with a diaper on your face? Do you really want to be afraid to hug or kiss a stranger and even members of your own family ever again? Do you really want to be dehumanized, controlled, degraded, and humiliated? Do all of you really want to walk around in masks looking like a bunch of idiots while your globalist overlords sit back and laugh at how easily they can frighten you into doing whatever they want you to do—including taking a vaccine that they will have no liability for even if it kills you? And in case you haven’t been paying attention, they intend to keep that mask on your face even now that the vaccines are here. This nonsense isn’t going away unless you make it go away.

Most people have bought into the idea that government can do something against viral diseases. Abandon this delusion people. I know it’s difficult because of all the fear mongering generated by politicians and the media. But the grim reality is that viruses have to run their course. This ultimately makes our immune systems stronger and allows us as a species to survive. We have as much if not more bacteria in our bodies than we have cells and many more times that in viruses. We infect each other with numerous microbes all the time. All of us have unknowingly killed who knows how many sickly, frail, inmmunocompromised souls with our germs. It doesn’t make you Typhoid Mary—it’s part of the human condition. All the masks, hand sanitizers, and social distancing in the world won’t change this.

One of the biggest obstacles to ending this dystopian nightmare is that human beings, like many members of the animal kingdom, have a herd mentality. They follow the leader, they are awed by the voice of authority, and can be captivated by charisma. But as I learned a long time ago, appearances can be deceiving.

Back in the early 1990s, I used to secure locations for vending machine routes. It was an easy job. I would just walk into a small business, show the owner or manager a picture of a gumball machine, and ask if we could put it there. Either the business owner or a charity would get a percentage of the profits.One day, in New Jersey, I go into this beauty salon and do my usual 15 second routine. The owner was eloquent and charismatic. He proceeded to give me a friendly but firm ten minute lecture as to why beauty salons were not the place to put them. I was mesmerized by his words and physical presence—and I don’t mesmerize easily. But what he said made so much sense that he convinced me. So I walked out of his salon and just stood there thinking to myself: “beauty salons are my best customers. What am I going to do without them?” Then, it hit me: “Hey, wait a minute, beauty salons are my best customers, they love the machines—I just placed ten today.” Then, my inner voiced literally screamed: “HE’S AN IDIOT!” Lucky for me I woke up.

The point is: Government, scientific institutions, and the medical profession are filled with idiots just like that beauty parlor owner. People who look and sound impressive but couldn’t find their way out of a single occupant toilet. And they are incapable of admitting they are wrong so if you’re expecting an apology forget it. Positions of authority are often filled with narcissists, psychopaths, and other types of power hungry fanatics. They will never own up to the carnage they have caused. So, to everyone everywhere I say, wake up before it’s too late. End this nonsense, Take your masks off, get rid of the plexiglass barriers and the hand sanitizers. Throw all of this junk away. Stop obeying. Stop complying.

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Michael J. Talmo has been a professional writer for over 40 years and is strongly committed to the protection of civil liberties. He also did two music videos on COVID-19. The Masker Mash and COVID Vaccine Man. He can be reached at [email protected]

Featured image is from howstuffworks

The Russian military and Russian-backed Syrian forces have been increasing their presence on the border with Iraq.

Less than a week ago, the Russian Military Police established a local HQ in al-Bukamal. Recently, the 5th Corps of the Syrian Army, known for its links with the Russian military, created a network of border posts in the area. The move was apparently coordinated with Iranian-backed forces and the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces that actively operate in the border area.

Al-Bukamal is locating less than 30km from the town of al-Qaim, the stronghold of the Popular Mobilization Forces on the Iraqi side of the border.

Pro-Israeli sources claim that the increasing Russian presence in southern Deir Ezzor and along the border with Iraq may be a sign of a nearing Iranian withdrawal from the region. At the same time, there are no indications that Iranian-backed forces are going to withdraw from al-Bukamal anytime soon.

The presence of the Russians on the Iraqi-Syrian border is not something new. Russian forces played an important role in the anti-ISIS operations in the province, including the liberation of Deir Ezzor, al-Mayadin and al-Bukamal itself. In fact, the increasing Russian involvement is likely linked with the ongoing anti-ISIS operations in the central Syrian desert.

Just recently, the ISIS propaganda wing, Amaq, claimed that ISIS militants repelled a large attack of the Syrian Army on its hideouts in the eastern part of Hama province. 3 soldiers were allegedly killed, 10 others were inured and a vehicle was destroyed. Pro-militant sources also confirmed the increase of Russian airstrikes on terrorist targets in the region.

The remaining ISIS threat in the central part of the country also has a negative impact on the situation in the south. Negative processes have been taking place in Quneitra and Daraa provinces, which remain under the permanent destructive influence of Israel and its special services.

Recently, Israeli media and think tanks have started promoting the idea of the Israeli intervention into the ‘unstable’ Syrian south under the pretext of restoring ‘peace and prosperity’ in this region. Therefore, it is possible to expect the resumption of active Israeli military and clandestine operations to undermine the Syrian statehood in this particular region.

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“And how are you today? Are you feeling all right?”

“Couldn’t feel better, Doc. Thanks.”

“Good. Good. But you do realise it hasn’t gone away.”

“No, I feel great.”

“Unfortunately this is one of those illnesses you can never get out of your system.”

“Look, Doctor, I feel better than I did. Even before I got it.”

“That, though, is the nature of COVID-19. It lies in wait.”

“How do you mean ‘lies in wait’?”

“What I mean is the virus lies dormant waiting to strike.”

“Waiting to strike?”

“Yes. One day it will kill you.”

“Oh, my God. How long have I got?”

“That’s something the medical world cannot predict. It could be days.”

“Days?”

“Yes, some people die within days of contracting it. Others take weeks, months or even years, we suspect. That’s not been established yet. But we do know you are going to die from it. Of that we are sure.”

“Die from it?”

“Yes. . . You look a little pale. Are you all right?”

“I’m concerned about how long I have left.”

“Don’t worry about it. Worrying won’t help. There are vaccines now to stop you getting it.”

“But, I’ve already got it.”

“Anyway, try not to worry. It could be years before you die. . . Next please.”

England – no recovery

A deserted Golden Mile at Blackpool

In mid-July this year the Spectator republished an article by Professors Yoon K Loke and Carl Heneghan entitled Why no one can ever recover from Covid-19 in England. It begins by contrasting the “relentless daily toll of more than a hundred Covid-associated deaths” and contrasts it with Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland “where there are days with no Covid-associated deaths whatsoever.”

Johns Hopkins University figures up to yesterday (17/12/2020) show that in the UK there have been 66,150 deaths from 1,954,311 positive tests (3.38%) while in Ireland there have been 2,143 deaths from 77,678 positive tests (2.75%). No great anomaly there. The anomaly comes with the recovered figure.

In Ireland 23,364 (30%) have recovered while in the UK only 4,133 (0.2%) have recovered. Bearing in mind that nobody recovers in England all those recoveries must be from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Having established that there are countries (the vast majority of them in fact) where you can recover let’s take a look at a handful.

Belarus

https://i2.wp.com/www.ctv.by/sites/default/files/inarticle/lukashenko_v_hrame_rozhdestvo_0701_13_2.jpg

Today, Vladimir Lukashenko lights a candle in the temple of St Elizabeth convent in Minsk

If you recall Belarus did not lock down, did not enforce mask-wearing, social distancing or curfews. From 970,758 positive tests there were 16,848 deaths (1.73%) and 582,457 recoveries (60%).

Count the face masks! (Above pictures courtesy of Севодня – Today in English)

Herd immunity seems to be working well in Belarus, as it always has with viruses everywhere, but the UK government does not want people to recover and live normal lives. Living normal lives does not support the agenda of control which empowers the likes of Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson.

Nicaragua

Image may contain: 1 person, standing and outdoor

Early December. Some with masks, some without. No one social-distancing. Courtesy: Bolsa De Noticias Grupoese

Nicaragua is another country that did not lock down. Its record is better than that of Belarus. Out of 5,938 who have tested positive for COVID-19 there have been 163 deaths (2.74%). Recoveries have been an impressive 4,225 (71%).

Japan

エンタメ

School vaudeville 4 December 2020. (Courtesy: Sankei Shimbun)

You might be forgiven for thinking that Japan is out on its own in controlling the “killer” virus. Like the UK it is an island and like the UK has pockets of densely populated areas. The only difference is its alternative policy on lockdowns, social distancing and other evils we in the west have to endure.

From 193,744 positive tested subjects only 2,708 have died (1.4%) and even more impressive is the recovery (which we in England do not have). 160,630 of those providing positive tests have recovered. That’s a stunning 83%. Suzuki Kasuto gives some thoughts here on why Japan has fared so well without lockdowns. But even Japan cannot compare with China’s recoveries even though it’s death-rate is not as bad as China’s.

China

The Daily Mail has many photos showing how Wuhan has got back to normal.

China, where allegedly the virus was manufactured with the help of USA experts, has the most impressive record of all. From 94,804 who tested positive, 4,762 have died (5%). A massive 88,524 have recovered (94%).

This indicates that the virus SARS-CoV-2 in China has become the ghost of Christmas past.

Back in England – where nobody recovers

In recent months daily cases of COVID-19 have gone up alarmingly – proportional to the number of tests being recorded. In the most serious stage, between March and April, hardly any tests were done. As soon as the virus had run its course our government started using the totally unreliable RT-PCR test. Figures then started to soar. Yesterday in the Austrian parliament, Michael Schnedlitz MP, performed a PCR test on a sample of Coca Cola “so you can see how worthless and misguided these mass tests are” he said. Some of us have been saying the very same thing for months.

Well done those of you who spotted that the featured image at the top of the post indeed came from the inside of a tomato and has nothing to do with COVID-19 other than the fact that it would in all probability test positive for the virus. There’s not much chance of you falling for the nonsense.

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Featured image: Public domain image from Wiki’s COVID-Protest page.

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“We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.”

– Martin Luther King Jr. (April 4, 1967) [1]

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Over the course of only two months in the past year, three men of uncommon bravery, intelligence, compassion and vision passed away.

On September 5, Fighter for Truth Kevin Zeese died unexpectedly at home, apparently of a heart attack. [2]

Then on September 22, less than three weeks later, globe trotting filmmaker, investigative journalist and philosopher André Vltchek died in a chauffeur driven car in Istanbul, Turkey. He died in his sleep. [3]

Finally, on October 30, after a career spanning nearly five decades, journalist Robert Fisk died of an apparent stroke. [4]

Three ordinary deaths for apparently extra-ordinary individuals.

Many individuals you run into in the modern western world lose hope for the welfare of the peoples who live abroad. They shrug, and resign themselves to circumstances they say are beyond their control as they knuckle down and commit themselves to the realities of day to day living.

The approach may make a certain sense. However, it also guarantees men and women who subscribe to it end up never making a difference for those far away souls.

The three individuals who will be the focus of this instalment of the Global Research News Hour followed a different calling, one that led them to fight for their voices to be heard no matter what!

I myself met all three of these individuals, all over the course of 2019. One only by email. One in a brief but memorable conversation before a talk in Winnipeg. And one in a more extensive visit to Winnipeg when I spent a half hour interviewing him in the back of a car driving him to the airport.

I was profoundly privileged to speak with all three of these men.

In this testimonial edition of the Global Research News Hour we will use past audio, recorded talks and the testimonial of friends to share more of what kind of people these great Internationalists were and how their memories can live on and possibly inspire others.

Robert Fisk was a reporter for the Independent for more than 30 years. His books include The Point of No Return (1975), In Time of War (1985), Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (1990), The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (2005),[1] and Syria: Descent Into the Abyss (2015). He has earned numerous British and international journalism awards including a seven time winner of the Press Awards Foreign Reporter of the Year award.

André Vltchek was a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Five of his latest books are “China Belt and Road Initiative”,China and Ecological Civilization”with John B. Cobb, Jr., “Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism”, the revolutionary novel Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. He was a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Kevin Zeese was an American lawyer, U.S. Senate candidate and political activist. He worked to end the war on drugs and mass incarceration, and was instrumental in organizing the 2011 Occupy encampment in Washington, D.C. at Freedom Plaza and occupying the Venezuelan Embassy in the District of Columbia in 2019. He co-founded the news site PopularResistance.org in 2011 with his partner, Margaret Flowers. The Kevin Zeese Emerging Activists Fund was set up to provide activists or small organizations each year whose work complements own life work and philosophy. Kevin Zeese was a frequent Contributor to Global Research. 

Click the links to Robert Fisk, André Vltchek and Kevin Zeese to access the archive of their articles on Global Research.

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Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, an international relations scholar, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, Distinguished Research Fellow, Orfalea Center of Global Studies, UCSB, author, co-author or editor of 60 books, and a speaker and activist on world affairs. In 2008, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) appointed Falk to two three-year terms as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.”

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. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Margaret Flowers is an American pediatrician, public health advocate, and activist. After 17 years of practicing medicine, she became an advocate for a single-payer insurance system. Flowers is an adviser to the board of Physicians for a National Health Program, serving as a Congressional Fellow during the health reform process in 2009-10 and is co-chair of the Maryland chapter. She Directs Popular Resistance, and is currently co-chair of the Green Party of the United States.

 

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

Notes:

  1. A Time to Break Silence: By Rev. Martin Luther King (informationclearinghouse.info); informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm
  2. Kevin Zeese Dies of a Sudden, Unexpected Apparent Heart … (ballot-access.org); ballot-access.org/2020/09/06/kevin-zeese-dies-of-a-sudden-unexpected-apparent-heart-attack/
  3. The Death of Andre Vltchek, a Passionate Warrior for Truth – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization; www.globalresearch.ca/death-andre-vltchek-passionate-warrior-truth/5724819
  4. Robert Fisk, veteran UK journalist, dies aged 74 – BBC News; www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-54774539
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“COVID Vaccines” and “Genetically Modified Humans”

December 19th, 2020 by Dr. Carrie Madej

The main video has been removed. This report was first published by Global Research on July 19, 2020

In the following video, Dr. Carrie Madaj questions what “it is to be human”. Why? Because the so-called “COVID” vaccines deploy recombinant DNA/RNA technology that “rewrites” the genetic code much as Monsanto, for example, rewrites the genetic code of numerous seeds (including tomatoes, corn, etc) not to mention the application of genetic bio-technology to animals:

Biotechnology can be classified as the cloning of animals with identical genetic composition or genetic engineering (via recombinant DNA technology and gene editing) to produce genetically modified animals or microorganisms. Cloning helps to conserve species and breeds, particularly those with excellent biological and economical traits. Recombinant DNA technology combines genetic materials from multiple sources into single cells to generate proteins. (Journal of Animal Science and Biotechnology)

Genetically-modified organisms can be patented and owned. Monsanto owns the GMO seeds. Once DNA vaccines are used on humans — and it has never been done before — humans could possibly be “owned”. We could in theory be “patented”.

None of this has been discussed at length, and very little about this is known publicly.

No randomized placebo-controlled trials have been conducted. Vaccine manufacturers are exempt from these and many other safeguards.

In 2010, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) admitted that this type of technology can be used to “enhance and subvert” humans at a genetic level.

Hydrogel nanotechnology is injected beneath the skin. It can interface with cell phones and Artificial Intelligence to monitor basically everything within the body, including anxieties, emotions, ovulations, vitamins etc. etc.

Once implanted, the technology spreads throughout the body. Scientists do not know how this affects our DNA.

Recombinant RNA and DNA technology will, argues Dr. Madej, cause permanent and unknown genetic changes in a person’s body.

Will it create a new species and destroy an old one?

Video (Youtube)  Dr. Carrie Madej

 

Complete video (Facebook version) Dr. Carrie Madej with introduction by Krystal Tini

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Our thanks to Mark Taliano for bringing this study to our attention.

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Dr. Carrie Madej, DO is a internal medicine specialist in McDonough, GA. Dr. Madej completed a residency at Mercer University The Med Center Of Central Ga. She currently practices at Phoenix Medical Group of Georgia, LLC and is affiliated with Piedmont Fayette Hospital.

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

Featured image is from Natural News


Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

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Special Price: $9.95 

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Coronavirus – No Vaccine Is Needed to Cure It

December 19th, 2020 by Peter Koenig

Incisive article by Peter Koenig first published by Global Research on April 1st, 2020

The New York Times reported on 30 March that President Trump retreated from his earlier statement that by 12 April the COVID-19 lock-down should be over and its “back-to-work” time. Instead he said that an extension to the end of April was necessary – and possibly even to June. This, he said, was following the guidance of his advisors, of whom Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), within the National Institute for Health (NIH), is one.

Virus COVID-19 has so far caused far less infections and death than the common flu in past years. WHO reports on 30 March worldwide 750,000 infections with a death toll of 36,000. In the US about 161,000 cases and 3,000 deaths. Yet, alarmist Fauci claims that there may be millions of US coronavirus cases and 100,000- 200,000 deaths. And, coincidentally, so does Bill Gates, using pretty much the same figures.

All with the idea of pushing a vaccine down the throat of the public.

A multibillion dollar vaccine is not necessary.

The NIAD and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are collaborating with a view to developing a COVID-19 Vaccine.

China has proven that COVID-19 could be brought under control at rather low-cost and with strict discipline and conventional medication. The same medicines and measures have been used for centuries to prevent and cure successfully all kinds of viral diseases.

First, a vaccine against COVID-19, or coronaviruses in general, is a flu vaccine. Vaccines don’t heal. In the best case, flu-vaccines may prevent the virus from affecting a patient as hard as it might without a vaccine. The effectiveness of flu vaccines is generally assessed as between 20% and 50%. Vaccines are foremost a huge money-making bonanza for Big Pharma.

Second, here are a myriad of remedies that have proven very successful. See also this and this.

COVID-19: More Hydroxychloroquine Data From France

  • French Professor Didier Raoult, who is one of the world’s top 5 scientists on communicable diseases, suggested the use of hydroxychloroquine (Chloroquine or Plaquenil), a well-known, simple, and inexpensive drug, also used to fight Malaria, and that has shown efficacy with previous coronaviruses such as SARS.  By mid-February 2020, clinical trials at his institute and in China already confirmed that the drug could reduce the viral load and bring spectacular improvement. Chinese scientists published their first trials on more than 100 patients and announced that the Chinese National Health Commission would recommend Chloroquine in their new guidelines to treat Covid-19.
  • China and Cuba are working together with the use of Interferon Alpha 2B, a highly efficient anti-viral drug developed in Cuba some 39 years, but little known to the world, because of the US imposed embargo on anything from Cuba. Interferon has also proven to be very effective in fighting COVID-19 and is now produced in a joint-venture in China.
  • There is an old natural Indian / Ayurveda medicine, Curcumin, that comes in capsules as C90. It is an anti-inflammatory, antioxidant compound that has been successfully used to treat cancer, infectious diseases and, yes, coronaviruses.
  • Other simple, but effective remedies include the use of heavy doses of Vitamin C, as well as Vitamin D3, or more generally the use of Micronutrients essential to fight infections, include vitamins A, B, C, D, and E.
  • Another remedy that has been used for thousands of years by ancient Chinese, Romans and Egyptians, are Colloidal silver products. They come in forms to be administered as a liquid by mouth, or injected, or applied to the skin. Colloidal silver products are boosting the immune system, fighting bacteria and viruses, and have been used for treating cancer, HIV/AIDS, shingles, herpes, eye ailments, prostatitis – and COVID-19.
  • A simple and inexpensive remedy, to be used in combination with others, is menthol-based “Mentholatum”. It’s used for common flu and cold symptoms. Rubbed on and around the nose, it acts as a disinfectant and prevents germs to enter the respiratory track, including corona viruses.

China Is Using Cuba's Interferon Alfa 2B Against Coronavirus ...

  • Northern Italy and New Orleans report that an unusual number of patients had to be hospitalized in Intensive Care Units (ICU) and be put 24×7 on a 90%-strength respirator, with some of the patients remaining unresponsive, going into respiratory failure. The reported death rate is about 40%. The condition is called acute respiratory distress syndrome, ARDS. That means the lungs are filled with fluid. When this description of ARDS episodes applies, Dr. Raoult and other medical colleagues recommend COVID-19 patients to “sleep sitting up” until they are cured. This helps drain the liquid out of the lungs. The method has been known to work successfully since it was first documented during the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic.
  • Finally, Chinese researchers in cooperation with Cuban and Russian scientists are also developing a vaccine which may soon be ready for testing. The vaccine would attempt to address not just one strand of coronaviruses, but the basic coronaviral RNA genome (RNA = Ribonucleic Acid), to be applied as a prevention of new coronavirus mutations. In contrast to the west, working exclusively on profit-motives, the Chinese-Cuban-Russian vaccine would be made available at low cost to the entire world.

These alternative cures may not be found on Big Pharma controlled internet. Internet references, if there are any, may advise against their use. At best, they will tell you that these products or methods have not proven effective, and at worst, that they may be harmful. Don’t believe it. None of these products or methods are harmful. Remember, some of them have been used as natural remedies for thousands of years. And remember, China has successfully come to grips with COVID-19, using some of these relatively simple and inexpensive medications.

Few doctors are aware of these practical, simple and inexpensive remedies. The media, under pressure from the pharma giants and the compliant government agencies, have been requested to censoring such valuable information. The negligence or failure, to make such easily accessible remedies public knowledge is killing people.

The Role of Bill Gates and the Lockdown

Bill Gates may have been one of Trump’s ‘advisors’, suggesting that he should extend the “back-to-work” date to at least end April, and, if Gates has his way, to at least June. That still remains to be seen. Gates is very-very powerful:

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he wants businesses to open by Easter, April 12, to soften the economic impact. … Gates acknowledged Tuesday that self isolation will be “disastrous” for the economy, but “there really is no middle ground.” He suggested a shutdown of six to 10 weeks. (CNBC, March 24, 2020)

 Screenshot, CNBC, March 24, 2020

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will drive the mass vaccination effort which is scheduled to be launched in the period after the lockdown.

The vaccination association includes, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a semi-NGO, to which NIH / NIAID outsourced oversight of the vaccination program – supported by Bill Gates; GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization – also a Bill Gates creation, supported by WHO, also amply funded by the Gates Foundation; the World Bank and UNICEF; plus a myriad of pharmaceutical partners.

 Bill Gates also strongly suggests that travelers must have in their passport a vaccination certificate before embarking on a plane, or entering a country.

 The program implementation, including a related global electronic identity-program, possibly administered with nano-chips that could be embedded in the vaccine itself, would be overseen by the little-know agency Agenda ID2020 which is also a Bill and Melinda Gates foundation initiative.

Bill Gates is also known as a strong proponent of drastic and selective population reduction. Knowing what we know, who would trust any vaccine that carries Bill Gate’s signature. Hope that this evil endeavor will not succeed is omnipresent. We must hope to the end, then the end will never come – and gradually Light will drown Darkness

For further details on Agenda ID2020, see

The Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic: The Real Danger is “Agenda ID2020”

By Peter Koenig, March 12, 2020*

***

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 an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st Century; Greanville Post; Defend Democracy Press, TeleSUR; The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

“The flu season is upon us. Which type will we worry about this year, and what kind of shots will we be told to take? Remember the swine flu scare of 1976? That was the year the U.S. government told us all that swine flu could turn out to be a killer that could spread across the nation, and Washington decided that every man, woman and child in the nation should get a shot to prevent a nation-wide outbreak, a pandemic.

Well 46 million of us obediently took the shot, and now 4,000 Americans are claiming damages from Uncle Sam amounting to three and a half billion dollars because of what happened when they took that shot. By far the greatest number of the claims – two thirds of them are for neurological damage, or even death, allegedly triggered by the flu shot. (CBS, 60 MINUTES, 1979)

This 1979 CBS 60 Minutes was shown only once.

TO VIEW CLICK HERE

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Global Research Editor’s Note

We first posted this report on July 18, 2009 at the height of the 2009 H1N1 Pandemic, at a time when the WHO and Big Pharma with the support of the mainstream media were involved in a Worldwide propaganda campaign to implement compulsory vaccination.

What this CBS report reveals is that there was “honest journalism” in 1979.

Both in 2009 during the H1N1 epidemic as well as now in relation to COVID-19, mainstream media is complicit in spreading lies and fabrications.

The H1n1 Fraud was revealed, it was the object of an investigation by the European Parliament.

Below are statements of WHO director General Margaret Chan, excerpts from press reports in 2009, followed by the transcript of the CBS 1979 Report.

Today’s mainstream media lies are unparalleled in relation to those of H1N1. Moreover, today there is a vicious campaign to suppress the truth which includes the arrest of medical doctors who have the courage to speak out.

That’s why we need an independent media.

Corruption at the WHO in 2020 far surpasses that pertaining to the H1N1 Pandemic in 2009.

Michel Chossudovsky, December 19, 2020 

***

The WHO Lies Concerning the H1N1

“On the basis of … expert assessments of the evidence, the scientific criteria for an influenza pandemic have been met. I have therefore decided to raise the level of influenza pandemic alert from Phase 5 to Phase 6. The world is now at the start of the 2009 influenza pandemic.Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organization (WHO), Press Briefing  11 June 2009)

 “As many as 2 billion people could become infected over the next two years — nearly one-third of the world population.” (World Health Organization as reported by the Western media, July 2009)

“Vaccine makers could produce 4.9 billion pandemic flu shots per year in the best-case scenario”,Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organization (WHO), quoted by Reuters, 21 July 2009)

US Government and Media Lies concerning H1N1

Swine flu could strike up to 40 percent of Americans over the next two years and as many as several hundred thousand could die if a vaccine campaign and other measures aren’t successful.” (Official Statement of the US Administration, Associated Press, 24 July 2009).

“The U.S. expects to have 160 million doses of swine flu vaccine available sometime in October”, (Associated Press, 23 July 2009)

Wealthier countries such as the U.S. and Britain will pay just under $10 per dose [of the H1N1 flu vaccine]. … Developing countries will pay a lower price.” [circa $400 billion for Big Pharma] (Business Week, July 2009)

The 1976 Swine Flu Vaccine. CBS ’60 Minutes’ Transcript

Below is the full transcript of the 1979 broadcast from the CBS investigative news program 60 Minutes on government propaganda around the 1976 swine flu scare.

The program was aired on Sunday, November 4, 1979.

***
MIKE WALLACE: The flu season is upon us [1979]. Which type will we worry about this year, and what kind of shots will we be told to take? Remember the swine flu scare of 1976? That was the year the U.S. government told us all that swine flu could turn out to be a killer that could spread across the nation, and Washington decided that every man, woman and child in the nation should get a shot to prevent a nation-wide outbreak, a pandemic.

Well 46 million of us obediently took the shot, and now 4,000 Americans are claiming damages from Uncle Sam amounting to three and a half billion dollars because of what happened when they took that shot. By far the greatest number of the claims – two thirds of them are for neurological damage, or even death, allegedly triggered by the flu shot.

We pick up the story back in 1976, when the threat posed by the swine flu virus seemed very real indeed.

PRESIDENT GERALD FORD; This virus was the cause of a pandemic in 1918 and 1919 that resulted in over half a million deaths in the United States, as well as 20 million deaths around the world.

WALLACE: Thus the U.S. government’s publicity machine was cranked into action to urge all America to protect itself against the swine flu menace. (Excerpt from TV commercial urging everyone to get a swine flu shot.) One of those who did roll up her sleeve was Judy Roberts. She was perfectly healthy, an active woman, when, in November of 1976, she took her shot. Two weeks later, she says, she began to feel a numbness starting up her legs.

JUDY ROBERTS: And I joked about it at that time. I said I’ll be numb to the knees by Friday if this keeps up. By the following week, I was totally paralyzed.

WALLACE: So completely paralyzed, in fact, that they had to operate on her to enable her to breathe. And for six months, Judy Roberts was a quadriplegic. The diagnosis: A neurological disorder called “Guillain-Barre Syndrome” – GBS for short. These neurological diseases are little understood. They affect people in different ways.

As you can see in these home movies taken by a friend, Judy Roberts’ paralysis confined her mostly to a wheelchair for over a year. But this disease can even kill. Indeed, there are 300 claims now pending from the families of GBS victims who died, allegedly as a result of the swine flu shot. In other GBS victims, the crippling effects diminish and all but disappear. But for Judy Roberts, progress back to good health has been painful and partial.

Now, I notice that your smile, Judy, is a little bit constricted.

ROBERTS: Yes, it is.

WALLACE: Is it different from what it used to be?

ROBERTS: Very different, I have a – a greatly decreased mobility in my lips. And I can’t drink through a straw on the right-band side. I can’t blow out birthday candles. I don’t whistle any more, for which my husband is grateful.

WALLACE: It may be a little difficult for you to answer this question, but have you recovered as much as you are going to recover?

ROBERTS: Yes. This – this is it.

WALLACE: So you will now have a legacy of braces on your legs for the rest of your life?

ROBERTS: Yes. The weakness in my hands will stay and the leg braces will stay.

WALLACE: So Judy Roberts and her husband have filed a claim against the U.S. government. They’re asking $12 million, though they don’t expect to get nearly that much. Judy, why did you take the flu shot?

ROBERTS: I’d never taken any other flu shots, but I felt like this was going to be a major epidemic, and the only way to prevent a major epidemic of a – a really deadly variety of flu was for every body to be immunized.

WALLACE: Where did this so called “deadly variety of flu”, where did it first hit back in 1976? It began right here at Fort Dix in New Jersey in January of that year, when a number of recruits began to complain of respiratory ailments, something like the common cold. An Army doctor here sent samples of their throat cultures to the New Jersey Public Health Lab to find our just what kind of bug was going around here. One of those samples was from a Private David Lewis, who had left his sick bed to go on a forced march. Private Lewis had collapsed on that march, and his sergeant had revived him by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But the sergeant showed no signs of illness. A few days later, Private Lewis died.

ROBERTS: If this disease is so potentially fatal that it’s going to kill a young, healthy man, a middle-aged schoolteacher doesn’t have a prayer.

WALLACE: The New Jersey lab identified most of those solders’ throat cultures as the normal kind of flu virus going around that year, but they could not make out what kind of virus was in the culture from the dead soldier, and from four others who were sick. So they sent those cultures to the Federal Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, for further study. A few days later they got the verdict: swine flu. But that much-publicized outbreak of swine flu at Fort Dix involved only Private Lewis, who died, and those four other soldiers, who recovered completely without the swine flu shot.

ROBERTS: If I had known at that time that the boy had been in a sick bed, got up, went out on a forced march and then collapsed and died, I would never have taken the shot.

DR DAVID SENCER: The rationale for our recommendation was not on the basis of the death of a – a single individual, but it was on the basis that when we do see a change in the characteristics of the influenza virus, it is a massive public-health problem in the country.

WALLACE: Dr David Sencer, then head of the CDS – the Center of Disease Control in Atlanta – is now in private industry. He devised the swine flu program and he pushed it.

WALLACE: You began to give flu shots to the American people in October of ’76?

DR SENCER: October 1st.

WALLACE: By that time, how many cases of swine flu around the world had been reported?

DR SENCER: There had been several reported, but none confirmed. There had been cases in Australia that were reported by the press, by the news media. There were cases in –

WALLACE: None confirmed? Did you ever uncover any other outbreaks of swine flu anywhere in the world?

DR SENCER: No

WALLACE: Now, nearly everyone was to receive a shot in a public health facility where a doctor might not be present, therefore it was up to the CDC to come up with some kind of official consent form giving the public all the information it needed about the swine flu shot. This form stated that the swine flu vaccine had been tested. What it didn’t say was that after those tests were completed, the scientists developed another vaccine and that it was the one given to most of the 46 million who took the shot. That vaccine was called “X-53a”. Was X-53a ever field tested?

DR SENCER: I-I can’t say. I would have to –

WALLACE: It wasn’t

DR SENCER: I don’t know

WALLACE: Well, I would think that you’re in charge of the program

DR SENCER: 1 would have to check the records. I haven’t looked at this in some time.

WALLACE: The information form the consent form was also supposed to warn people about any risk of serious complications following the shot. But did it?

ROBERTS: No, I had never heard of any reactions other than a sore arm, fever, this sort of thing.

WALLACE: Judy Roberts’ husband, Gene, also took the shot.

GENE ROBERTS: Yes, I looked at that document, I signed it. Nothing on there said I was going to have a heart attack, or I can get Guillain Barre, which I’d never heard of.

WALLACE: What if people from the government, from the Center for Disease Control, what if they had indeed, known about it, what would be your feeling?

JUDY ROBERTS: They should have told us.

WALLACE: Did anyone ever come to you and say, “You know something, fellows, there’s the possibility of neurological damage if you get into a mass immunization program?”

DR SENCER: No

WALLACE: No one ever did?

DR SENCER: No

WALLACE: Do you know Michael Hattwick?

DR SENCER: Yes, uh-hmm.

WALLACE: Dr Michael Hattwick directed the surveillance team for the swine flu program at the CDC. His job was to find out what possible complications could arise from taking the shot and to report his findings to those in charge. Did you know ahead of time, Dr Hattwick that there had been case reports of neurological disorders, neurological illness, apparently associated with the injection of influenza vaccine?

DR MICHAEL HATTWICK: Absolutely

WALLACE: You did?

DR HATIWICK: Yes

WALLACE: How did you know that?

DR Hattwick: By review of the literature.

WALLACE: So you told your superiors – the men in charge of the swine flu immunization program – about the possibility of neurological disorders?

DR RATTWICK: Absolutely

WALLACE: What would you say if I told you that your superiors say that you never told them about the possibility of neurological complications?

DR HAJTWICK: That’s nonsense. I can’t believe that they would say that they did not know that there were neurological illnesses associated with influenza vaccination. That simply is not true. We did know that.

DR SENCER: I have said that Dr Hattwick had never told me of his feelings on this subject.

WALLACE: Then he’s lying?

DR SENCER: I guess you would have to make that assumption.

WALLACE: Then why does this report from your own agency, dated July 1976, list neurological complications as a possibility?

DR SENCER: I think the consensus of the scientific community was that the evidence relating neurologic disorders to influenza immunization was such that they did not feel that this association was a real one.

WALLACE: You didn’t feel it was necessary to tell the American people that information

DR SENCER: I think that over the – the years we have tried to inform the American people as – as fully as possible.

WALLACE: As part of informing Americans about the swine flu threat, Dr Sencer’s CDC also helped create the advertising to get the public to take the shot. Let me read to your from one of your own agency’s memos planning the campaign to urge Americans to take the shot. “The swine flu vaccine has been taken by many important persons,” he wrote. “Example: President Ford, Henry Kissinger, Elton John, Muhammad Ah, Mary Tyler Moore, Rudolf Nureyev, Walter Cronkite, Ralph Nader, Edward Kennedy” -etcetera, etcetera, True?

DR SENCER: I’m not familiar with that particular piece of paper, but I do know that, at least of that group, President Ford did take the vaccination.

WALLACE: Did you talk to these people beforehand to find out if they planned to take the shot?

DR SENCER: I did not, no.

WALLACE: Did anybody?

DR SENC ER: I do not know.

WALLACE: Did you get permission to use their names in your campaign?

DR SENCER: I do not know.

WALLACE: Mary, did you take a swine flu shot?

MARY TYLER MOORE: No, I did not.

WALLACE: Did you give them permission to use your name saying that you had or were going to?

MOORE: Absolutely not. Never did.

WALLACE: Did you ask your own doctor about taking the swine flu shot?

MOORE: Yes, and at the time he thought it might be a good idea. But I resisted it, because I was leery of having the symptoms that sometimes go with that kind of inoculation.

WALLACE: So you didn’t?

MOORE: No, I didn’t.

WALLACE: Have you spoken to your doctor since?

MOORE: Yes.

WALLACE: And?

MOORE: He’s delighted that I didn’t take that shot.

WALLACE: You’re in charge. Somebody’s in charge.

DR SENCER: There are –

WALLACE: This is your advertising strategy that I have a copy of here.

DR SENCER: Who’s it signed by?

WALLACE: This one is unsigned. But you–you’ll acknowledge that it was your baby so to speak?

DR SENCER: It could have been from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. It could be from CDC. I don’t know. I’ll be happy to take responsibility for it.

WALLACE: It’s been three years now since you fell ill by GBS right?

ROBERTS: Right.

WALLACE: Has the federal government, in your estimation, played fair with you about your claim?

ROBERTS: No, I don’t think so. It seems to be dragging on and on and on, and really no end in sight that I can see at this point.

JOSEPH CALIFANO: With respect to the cases of Guillain Barre…

WALLACE: Former Secretary of HEW Joseph Caifano, too was disturbed that there was no end in sight. So a year and a half ago, he proposed that Uncle Sam would cut the bureaucratic red tape for victims suffering from GBS and would pay up quickly.

CALIFANO: We shouldn’t hold them to an impossible or too difficult standard of proving that they were hurt. Even if we pay a few people a few thousand dollars that might not have deserved it, I think justice requires that we promptly pay those people who do deserve it.

WALLACE: Who’s making the decision to be so hard-nosed about settling?

CALIFANO: Well, I assume the Justice Department is.

WALLACE: Griffin Bell, before he left?

CALIFANO: Well, the Justice Department agreed to the statement I made. It was cleared word for word with the lawyers in the Justice Department by my HEW lawyers.

CALIFANO: That-that statement said that we should pay Guillain Barre claims without regard to whether the federal government was negligent, if they – if they resulted from the swine flu shot.

GENE ROBERTS: I think the government knows its wrong.

JUDY ROBERTS: If it drags out long enough, that people will just give up, let it go.

GENE ROBERTS: I—I am a little more adamant in my thoughts than my wife is, because I asked – told Judy to take the shot. She wasn’t going to take it, and she never had had shots. And I’m mad with my government because they knew the fact, but they didn’t realize those facts because they – if they had released them, the people wouldn’t have taken it. And they can come out tomorrow and tell me there’s going to be an epidemic, and they can drop off like flies to – next to me, I will not take another shot that my government tells me to take.

WALLACE: Meantime, Judy Roberts and some 4,000 others like her are still waiting for their day in court.

First posted on GR on August 23, 2019

The original article was published in the Swiss magazine Weltwoche (World Week) on June 10th. The author, Beda M Stadler is the former director of the Institute for Immunology at the University of Bern, a biologist and professor emeritus. Stadler is an important medical professional in Switzerland, he also likes to use provoking language, which should not deter you from the extremely important points he makes.

This article is about Switzerland and it does not suggest that the situation is exactly the same globally.

I am advocating for local measures according to locale situations. And I advocate for looking at real data rather than abstract models. I also suggest to read to the end, because Stadler makes crucial points about testing for Sars-CoV-2.

Back to Reason, Medium, June 2, 2020

***

This is not an accusation, but a ruthless taking stock [of the current situation]. I could slap myself, because I looked at Sars-CoV2- way too long with panic. I am also somewhat annoyed with many of my immunology colleagues who so far have left the discussion about Covid-19 to virologists and epidemiologists. I feel it is time to criticise some of the main and completely wrong public statements about this virus.

Firstly, it was wrong to claim that this virus was novel.

Secondly, It was even more wrong to claim that the population would not already have some immunity against this virus.

Thirdly, it was the crowning of stupidity to claim that someone could have Covid-19 without any symptoms at all or even to pass the disease along without showing any symptoms whatsoever.

But let’s look at this one by one.

1. A new virus?

At the end of 2019 a coronavirus, which was considered novel, was detected in China. When the gene sequence, i.e. the blueprint of this virus, was identified and was given a similar name to the 2002 identified Sars, i.e. Sars-CoV-2, we should have already asked ourselves then how far [this virus] is related to other coronaviri, which can make human beings sick. But no, instead we discussed from which animal as part of a Chinese menu the virus might have sprung. In the meantime, however, many more people believe the Chinese were so stupid as to release this virus upon themselves in their own country. Now that we’re talking about developing a vaccine against the virus, we suddenly see studies which show that this so-called novel virus is very strongly related to Sars-1 as well as other beta-coronaviri which make us suffer every year in the form of a colds. Apart from the pure homologies in the sequence between the various coronaviri which can make people sick, [scientists] currently work on identifying a number of areas on the virus in the same way as human immune cells identify them. This is no longer about the genetic relationship, but about how our immune system sees this virus, i.e. which parts of other coronaviri could potentially be used in a vaccine.

So: Sars-Cov-2 isn’t all that new, but merely a seasonal cold virus that mutated and disappears in summer, as all cold viri do — which is what we’re observing globally right now. Flu viri mutate significantly more, by the way, and nobody would ever claim that a new flu virus strain was completely novel. Many veterinary doctors where therefore annoyed by this claim of novelty, as they have been vaccinating cats, dogs, pigs, and cows for years against coronaviri.

2. The fairy tale of no immunity

From the World Health Organisation (WHO) to every Facebook-virologist, everyone claimed this virus was particularly dangerous, because there was no immunity against it, because it was a novel virus.

Even Anthony Fauci, the most important advisor to the Trump administration noted at the beginning at every public appearance that the danger of the virus lay in the fact that there was no immunity against it.

Tony [Anthony Sauci] and I often sat next to each other at immunology seminars at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda in the US, because we worked in related fields back then. So for a while I was pretty uncritical of his statements, since he was a respectable colleague of mine.

The penny dropped only when I realised that the first commercially available antibody test [for Sars-CoV-2] was put together from an old antibody test that was meant to detect Sars-1.

This kind of test evaluates if there are antibodies in someone’s blood and if they came about through an early fight against the virus. [Scientists] even extracted antibodies from a Lama that would detect Sars-1, Sars-CoV-2, and even the Mers virus. It also became known that Sars-CoV-2 had a less significant impact in areas in China where Sars-1 had previously raged. This is clear evidence urgently suggesting that our immune system considers Sars-1 and Sars-Cov-2 at least partially identical and that one virus could probably protect us from the other.

That’s when I realised that the entire world simply claimed that there was no immunity, but in reality, nobody had a test ready to prove such a statement. That wasn’t science, but pure speculation based on a gut feeling that was then parroted by everyone. To this day there isn’t a single antibody test that can describe all possible immunological situations, such as: if someone is immune, since when, what the neutralising antibodies are targeting and how many structures exist on other coronaviri that can equally lead to immunity.

In mid-April work was published by the group of Andreas Thiel at the Charité Berlin. A paper with 30 authors, amongst them the virologist Christian Drosten. It showed that in 34 % of people in Berlin who had never been in contact with the Sars-CoV-2 virus showed nonetheless T-cell immunity against it (T-cell immunity is a different kind of immune reaction, see below). This means that our T-cells, i.e. white blood cells, detect common structures appearing on Sars-CoV-2 and regular cold viri and therefore combat both of them.

A study by John P A Ioannidis of Stanford University — according to the Einstein Foundation in Berlin one of the world’s ten most cited scientists — showed that immunity against Sars-Cov-2, measured in the form of antibodies, is much higher than previously thought. Ioannidis is certainly not a conspiracy theorist who just wants to swim against the stream; nontheless he is now being criticised, because the antibody tests used were not extremely precise. With that, his critics admit that they do not have such tests yet. And besides, John P A Ioannidis is such a scientific heavy-weight that all German virologists combined area a light-weight in comparison.

3. The failure of modellers

Epidemiologist also fell for the myth that there was no immunity in the population. They also didn’t want to believe that coronaviri were seasonal cold viri that would disappear in summer. Otherwise their curve models would have looked differently. When the initial worst case scenarios didn’t come true anywhere, some now still cling to models predicting a second wave. Let’s leave them their hopes — I’ve never seen a scientific branch that manoeuvred itself so much into the offside. I have also not yet understood why epidemiologists were so much more interested in the number of deaths, rather than in the numbers that could be saved.

4. Immunology of common sense

As an immunologist I trust a biological model, namely that of the human organism, which has built a tried and tested, adaptive immune system. At the end of February, driving home from the recording of [a Swiss political TV debate show], I mentioned to Daniel Koch [former head of the Swiss federal section “Communicable Diseases” of the Federal Office of Public Health] that I suspected there was a general immunity in the population against Sars-Cov-2. He argued against my view.

I later defended him anyway, when he said that children were not a driving factor in the spread of the pandemic. He suspected that children didn’t have a receptor for the virus, which is of course nonsense. Still, we had to admit that his observations were correct. But the fact that every scientist attacked him afterwards and asked for studies to prove his point, was somewhat ironic. Nobody asked for studies to prove that people in certain at-risk groups were dying. When the first statistics from China and later worldwide data showed the same trend, that is to say that almost no children under ten years old got sick, everyone should have made the argument that children clearly have to be immune. For every other disease that doesn’t afflict a certain group of people, we would come to the conclusion that that group is immune. When people are sadly dying in a retirement home, but in the same place other pensioners with the same risk factors are left entirely unharmed, we should also conclude that they were presumably immune.

But this common sense seems to have eluded many, let’s call them “immunity deniers” just for fun. This new breed of deniers had to observe that the majority of people who tested positive for this virus, i.e. the virus was present in their throats, did not get sick. The term “silent carriers” was conjured out of a hat and it was claimed that one could be sick without having symptoms. Wouldn’t that be something! If this principle from now on gets naturalised into the realm of medicine, health insurers would really have a problem, but also teachers whose students could now claim to have whatever disease to skip school, if at the end of the day one didn’t need symptoms anymore to be sick.

The next joke that some virologists shared was the claim that those who were sick without symptoms could still spread the virus to other people. The “healthy” sick would have so much of the virus in their throats that a normal conversation between two people would be enough for the “healthy one” to infect the other healthy one. At this point we have to dissect what is happening here: If a virus is growing anywhere in the body, also in the throat, it means that human cells decease. When [human] cells decease, the immune system is alerted immediately and an infection is caused. One of five cardinal symptoms of an infection is pain. It is understandable that those afflicted by Covid-19 might not remember that initial scratchy throat and then go on to claim that they didn’t have any symptoms just a few days ago. But for doctors and virologists to twist this into a story of “healthy” sick people, which stokes panic and was often given as a reason for stricter lockdown measures, just shows how bad the joke really is. At least the WHO didn’t accept the claim of asymptomatic infections and even challenges this claim on its website.

Here a succinct and brief summary, especially for the immunity deniers, of how humans are attacked by germs and how we react to them: If there are pathogenic viri in our environment, then all humans — whether immune or not — are attacked by this virus. If someone is immune, the battle with the virus begins. First we try to prevent the virus from binding to our own cells with the help of antibodies. This normally works only partially, not all are blocked and some viri will attach to the appropriate cells. That doesn’t need to lead to symptoms, but it’s also not a disease. Because the second guard of the immune system is now called into action. That’s the above mentioned T-cells, white blood cells, which can determine from the outside in which other cells the virus is now hiding to multiply. These cells, which are now incubating the virus, are searched throughout the entire body and killed by the T-cells until the last virus is dead.

So if we do a PCR corona test on an immune person, it is not a virus that is detected, but a small shattered part of the viral genome. The test comes back positive for as long as there are tiny shattered parts of the virus left. Correct: Even if the infectious viri are long dead, a corona test can come back positive, because the PCR method multiplies even a tiny fraction of the viral genetic material enough [to be detected]. That’s exactly what happened, when there was the global news, even shared by the WHO, that 200 Koreans who already went through Covid-19 were infected a second time and that there was therefore probably no immunity against this virus. The explanation of what really happened and an apology came only later, when it was clear that the immune Koreans were perfectly healthy and only had a short battle with the virus. The crux was that the virus debris registered with the overly sensitive test and therefore came back as “positive”. It is likely that a large number of the daily reported infection numbers are purely due to viral debris.

The PCR test with its extreme sensitivity was initially perfect to find out where the virus could be. But this test can not identify whether the virus is still alive, i.e. still infectous. Unfortunately, this also led some virologists to equate the strength of a test result with viral load, i.e. the amount of virus someone can breathe out. Luckily, our day care centres stayed open nontheless. Since German virologist missed that part, because, out of principle, they do not look at what other countries are doing, even if other countries’ case numbers are falling more rapidly.

5. The problem with corona immunity

What does this all mean in real life? The extremely long incubation time of two to 14 days — and reports of 22 to 27 days — should wake up any immunologist. As well as the claim that most patients would no longer secrete the virus after five days. Both [claims] in turn actually lead to the conclusion that there is — sort of in the background — a base immunity that contorts the events, compared to an expected cycle [of a viral infection] — i.e. leads to a long incubation period and quick immunity. This immunity also seems to be the problem for patients with a sever course of the disease. Our antibody titre, i.e. the accuracy of our defence system, is reduced the older we get. But also people with a bad diet or who are malnourished may have a weakened immune system, which is why this virus does not only reveal the medical problems of a country, but also social issues.

If an infected person does not have enough antibodies, i.e. a weak immune response, the virus slowly spreads out across the entire body. Now that there are not enough antibodies, there is only the second, supporting leg of our immune response left: The T-cells beginn to attack the virus-infested cells all over the body. This can lead to an exaggerated immune response, basically to a massive slaughter; this is called a Cytokine Storm. Very rarely this can also happen in small children, in that case called Kawasaki Syndrome. This very rare occurrence in children was also used in our country to stoke panic. It’s interesting, however, that this syndrome is very easily cured. The [affected] children get antibodies from healthy blood donors, i.e. people who went through coronavirus colds. This means that the hushed-up [supposedly non-existent] immunity in the population is in fact used therapeutically.

What now?

The virus is gone for now. It will probably come back in winter, but it won’t be a second wave, but just a cold. Those young and healthy people who currently walk around with a mask on their faces would be better off wearing a helmet instead, because the risk of something falling on their head is greater than that of getting a serious case of Covid-19.

If we observe a significant rise in infections in 14 days [after the Swiss relaxed the lockdown], we’d at least know that one of the measures was useful. Other than that I recommend reading John P A Ioannidis’ latest work in which he describes the global situation based on data on May 1st 2020: People below 65 years old make up only 0.6 to 2.6 % of all fatal Covid cases. To get on top of the pandemic, we need a strategy merely concentrating on the protection of at-risk people over 65. If that’s the opinion of a top expert, a second lockdown is simply a no-go.

On our way back to normal, it would be good for us citizens if a few scaremongers apologised. Such as doctors who wanted a triage of over 80 year old Covid patients in order to stop ventilating them. Also media that kept showing alarmist videos of Italian hospitals to illustrate a situation that as such didn’t exist. All politicians calling for “testing, testing, testing” without even knowing what the test actually measures. And the federal government for an app they’ll never get to work and will warn me if someone near me is positive, even if they’re not infectious.

In winter, when the flu and other colds make the rounds again, we can then go back to kissing each other a little less, and we should wash our hands even without a virus present. And people who’ll get sick nonetheless can then don their masks to show others what they have learned from this pandemic. And if we still haven’t learned to protect our at-risk groups, we’ll have to wait for a vaccine that will hopefully also be effective in at-risk people.

The original article was published in the Swiss magazine Weltwoche (World Week) on June 10th. The author, Dr. Beda M Stadler is the former director of the Institute for Immunology at the University of Bern, a biologist and professor emeritus. 

Our thanks to Back to Reason, Medium, for having brought this important article to our attention

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Featured image is from OneWorld

Yesterday Pfizer announced to much media fanfare that it has a breakthrough in the search for a reliable COVID-19 vaccine claiming studies showed it can prevent 90% of people contracting the virus. But respected former vice-president of Pfizer, Dr. Michael Yeadon, raises serious concerns.

World stocks and shares are surging upwards after hearing the press announcement on Monday that the drugmaker has claimed a major victory in the war against a virus that allegedly killed over a million people, but has certainly battered the world’s economy.

Reuters.com are reporting:

“Pfizer and German partner BioNTech SE 22UAy.F said they had found no serious safety concerns yet and expected to seek U.S. emergency use authorization this month, raising the chance of a regulatory decision as soon as December.

If granted, the companies estimate they can roll out up to 50 million doses this year, enough to protect 25 million people, and then produce up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021.

“Today is a great day for science and humanity,” said Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla, noting the data milestone comes with “infection rates setting new records, hospitals nearing over-capacity and economies struggling to reopen.”

Experts said they wanted to see the full trial data, but the preliminary results looked encouraging.”

But Pfizer has an enormous fly in the ointment of their corporate bragadaccio: former vice-president of Pfizer, Dr. Michael Yeadon, now coming to the fore as a prominent whistleblower of the global pandemic vaccine fraud.

As reported on www.weblyf.com and other alternative media outlets, Professor Yeadon is exposing a host of junk science claims:

“As a founder and CEO of the biotech company Ziarco, now owned by Novartis, Dr. Yeadon has more than three decades of experience and expertise in the research and development, as well as in the areas of biochemistry, toxicology, including the development of new drugs and treatment. Dr. Yeadon believes that the data regarding COVID 19 that most governments rely are “fake” and mostly impossible to be validated objectively. Sad to say, despite all these debacles about a fake pandemic, many governments in various parts of the world still continue to defend this coronavirus rhetoric no matter how absurd their justifications are.”

Batting for Big Pharma is CDC and White House pandemic task force front man, Dr Anthony Fauci, who lauded Pfizer’s new claims, telling CNN:

“But the bottom line is, as a vaccine it’s more than 90% effective, which is extraordinary.”

However, Dr Anthony Fauci – along with his boss at NIH – are among many key government medical advisers who are hardly impartial observers. They are heavily invested in Big Pharma vaccine shares. There are growing calls for a full investigation of this medical elite clique. Curiously, even Fauci admitted the COVID test Has a Fatal Flaw.

Fauci knows dissent is growing and further admits it is “disturbing” that so few people want the new vaccine. As such governments like the UK are pushing through mandatory vaccine laws.

But the most compelling opposition is among independent medical professionals. Over 30,000 medical doctors and related experts have signed the Great Barrington Declaration calling out proven irregularities and expressing grave concerns.

Not only have governments and their ‘science advisers’ grossly overreacted to the pandemic, it has become very clear from the evidence that the claimed novel coronavirus has no more impact on global health than any normal flu bug.

The need to roll out a trillion-dollar mass compulsory vaccination program using ‘rushed through’ vaccines is not only reckless, it may end up killing more people than the virus itself.

Pointing to the fact evidence shows no mass winter vaccination program is warranted, Dr. Yeadon stated:

“Were it not for the test data that you get from the TV all the time, you would rightly conclude that the pandemic was over, as nothing much has happened. Of course people go to the hospital, moving into the autumn flu season…but there is no science to suggest a second wave should happen.”

So distressed by the way the UK government has pandered to the vaccine lobby on this key issue, Professor Yeadon wrote an open letter to Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care of United Kingdom, who has ordered his department to publish the proposed changes to the Human Medicine Regulations “to cover a potential roll-out of a vaccine”.

Dr Yeadon’s letter to the UK Health Minister reads:

“Dear Mr. Hancock,

I have a degree in Biochemistry & Toxicology & a research based PhD in pharmacology. I have spent 32 years working in pharmaceutical R&D, mostly in new medicines for disorders of lung & skin. I was a VP at Pfizer & CEO of a biotech I founded (Ziarco – acquired by Novartis). I’m knowledgeable about new medicine R&D.

I have read the consultation document. I’ve rarely been as shocked & upset.

All vaccines against the SARS-COV-2 virus are by definition novel. No candidate vaccine has been in development for more than a few months.

If any such vaccine is approved for use under any circumstances that are not EXPLICITLY experimental, I believe that recipients are being misled to a criminal extent.

This is because there are precisely zero human volunteers for whom there could possibly be more than a few months past-dose safety information. My concern does not arise because I have negative views about vaccines (I don’t), Instead, it’s the very principle that politicians seem ready to waive that new medical interventions at this, incomplete state of development- should not be made available to subjects on anything other than an explicitly experimental basis. That’s my concern.

And the reason for that concern is that it is not known what the safety profile will be, six months or a year or longer after dosing.

You have literally no data on this & neither does anyone else.

It isn’t that I’m saying that unacceptable adverse effects will emerge after longer intervals after dosing. No: it is that you have no idea what will happen yet, despite this, you’ll be creating the impression that you do.

Several of the vaccine candidates utilise novel technology which have not previously been used to create vaccines. There is therefore no long term safety data which can be pointed to in support of the notion that it’s reasonable to expedite development & to waive absent safety information on this occasion.

I am suspicious of the motives of those proposing expedited use in the wider human population. We now understand who is at particularly elevated risk of morbidity & mortality from acquiring this virus.

Volunteers from these groups only should be provided detailed information about risk / benefit, including the sole point I make here. Only if informed consent is given should any EXPERIMENTAL vaccine be used.

I don’t trust you. You’ve not been straightforward & have behaved appallingly throughout this crisis.

You’re still doing it now, misleading about infection risk from young children. Why should I believe you in relation to experimental vaccines?

Dr. Michael Yeadon

References: See this and this

As each week passes it becomes all too clear that the  British government cares little about what independent medical experts say and is going all in on implementing their mass compulsory vaccination plan using the military, as stated in the controversial consultation document.

In a separate Tweet about the UK’s plans Professor Yeadon lamented:

I Have Read The Consultation Document. I’ve Rarely Been As Shocked And Upset. I Believe Recipients Are Being Misled To A Criminal Extent.”

Here at Principia Scientific International we are actively building a highly-qualified team of international experts presenting robust empirical and documented evidence exposing the scam. Central to the science we present is the inescapable fact that no laboratory anywhere in the world has been proven to have isolated, refined and reproduced the virus to the accepted standard.

The COVID-19 Cart Is STILL In Front Of The Horse. We Argue That COVID19 Is Really A CDC Computer-Generated ‘Virus’ And The Shocking Admission From The United States’ Centers For Disease Control And Prevention (CDC) Which Admitted In An Official Document That:

“No Quantified Virus Isolates Of The 2019-NCoV Are Currently Available…”

Freedom of Information law (FOI) requests to several international government science agencies have revealed English-speaking nations have no such ‘gold standard’ proof of any such SARS-Cov-2 virus (the claimed cause of the pandemic). Admitting this key flaw is the UK and Ireland. Health Canada Has No Record Of ‘COVID-19 Virus’ Isolation.

While a New Zealand university has been exposed for falsely claiming it has isolated the virus.

The question we pose to the Big Pharma crony capitalists and their bought-off friends in government is: how can you remotely claim to have a successful vaccine for a virus you haven’t even properly isolated and verified?

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John O’Sullivan is CEO and co-founder (with Dr Tim Ball) of Principia Scientific International (PSI).  John is a seasoned science writer and legal analyst who assisted Dr Ball in defeating world leading climate expert, Michael ‘hockey stick’ Mann in the ‘science trial of the century‘. O’Sullivan is credited as the visionary who formed the original ‘Slayers’ group of scientists in 2010 who then collaborated in creating the world’s first full-volume debunk of the greenhouse gas theory plus their new follow-up book.

The Controversial Covid RT-PCR Test: What Do We Know?

By Mark Taliano, December 18 2020

We know that the PCR tests being used are not “fit for purpose”, that they are for Research Use Only. They are not meant to be used as diagnostic tools, and the late inventor of the RT-PCR instruments was very clear about this.

Scary ‘R’ Us: The Exaggerated Threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

By Rod Driver, December 18 2020

The mainstream media repeatedly feeds us government propaganda about other countries and their supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Much of this untrue or distorted. This post looks at how these weapons are really another exaggerated threat used to justify US and British war crimes.   

Latin America: 21st Century Popular Movements against Neocolonialism and Imperialism. The ALBA-TCP Summit

By Prof. Charles McKelvey, December 18 2020

These two hundred years of struggle are the foundation for the full attainment in the twenty-first century of an alternative world characterized by respect for the sovereignty and true independence of the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Health and Wealth in India – Farmers’ Lives Matter

By Colin Todhunter, December 18 2020

Development used to be about breaking with colonial exploitation and radically redefining power structures. Today, neoliberal dogma masquerades as economic theory and the subsequent deregulation of international capital ensures giant transnational conglomerates are able to ride roughshod over national sovereignty.

By Stephen Lendman, December 18 2020

The world’s richest country USA has one of the least healthy populations. Among developed nations, Americans have shorter lifespans, more illnesses and injuries — despite around double the per capita amount spent on healthcare.

A Return to Normalcy? Joe Biden’s Vision of Normal Raises Concerns

By Philip Giraldi, December 18 2020

That’s the bad news as it very much looks like business as usual as the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Wall Street kleptocracy is reasserting itself and will be in place for the next four years.

America’s Ongoing Imperial Scam

By Karen Kwiatkowski, December 18 2020

So-called overseas contingency operations, or little wars, have seen their funding go “off-book,” as the Pentagon budget now covers just its routine expenses — wars are paid for on top of that budget, so long as the Congress can be convinced by their Pentagon liaisons.  And they nearly always are.

By Cassandra Fairbanks, December 18 2020

The formal pardon request comes on the heels of a viral claim from a Trump ally that the president would be pardoning the publisher. While he ended up retracting his statement, claiming he had faulty sources, it was clear that it was a move that people from both sides of the political spectrum support.

This Book Turns Everything You Thought You Knew About North Korea Upside Down

By Jeremy Kuzmarov, December 18 2020

How 70 years of CIA deceit and mainstream media complicity convinced the American public that North Korea was the Bad Guy and the U.S. was the Good Guy—when it was almost always the other way around.

The Great Unraveling: The Corona 2020 Financial Crash. Devastating Consequences

By Chuck Burr, December 17 2020

The 2008 Crash was caused by collapse of mortgage-backed securities. Loans were given to non-credit worthy borrowers until the system collapsed. What is happening today that may cause a greater multi-level crash? Several trends are coming together that may create a perfect storm and a long decline.


Visit our Asia Pacific Research website at asia-pacificresearch.com

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UK Parliamentarians, the British Press and Julian Assange

December 18th, 2020 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

The number of figures extolling the merits of Britain’s Westminster system and how it supposedly embodies a glorious model of democracy are too numerous to mention.  This is despite exploits by the government of Boris Johnson, marked by the appointment of unelected advisers with enviable, unaccountable powers and a record of assault on Parliament’s scrutineering functions.  “As the government blunders from one disaster to the next,” wrote a resigned George Monbiot in June, “there seem to be no effective ways of holding it to account.”

Press freedoms supposedly axiomatic in holding government to account have been regarded with increasing suspicion by Johnson and his coterie.  When the prime minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, was found breaking the very lockdown rules that the government had imposed, a statement from Downing Street was coolly dismissive of the “stream of false allegations about Mr Cummings from campaigning newspapers.”

With the Britannic press increasingly clipped in holding power to account, it is little wonder that coverage of the most significant, contemporary threat to press freedom remains a small affair, rarely rising above yellow press murmurings.  The Julian Assange case, through the good offices of the US Department of Justice, has already laid a few bombs in the bedcovers of the Fourth Estate, but its members continue to suffer an apathetic torpor, indifferent and oblivious to the dangers his extradition trial poses.

A few fire-cracking exceptions abound, among them the consistent Peter Oborne in a slew of publications, the prickly Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday, and the ferociously reliable Patrick Cockburn in The Independent.  All have expressed constructive, detailed outrage at the treatment of Julian Assange by authorities on both sides of the Atlantic.  Organisations such as Media Lens and Bridges for Media Freedom have also done their bit to stir interest in the gravity of the case.

This month Oborne, in a co-authored piece with Millie Cooke for the British Journalism Review, urged readers to appreciate that the consequences of Assange’s extradition would be “grim” for investigative journalism.  “Any story which depends on obtaining documents from US government sources will become impossibly dangerous. No British journalists would dare to handle it, let alone publish it.”

As Media Lens found, looking at various programmes such as BBC News at Ten, “there was not a single substantive item (there may have been a passing mention on the first day).”  When BBC home affairs correspondent Daniel Sandford was asked about why his reporting on the extradition hearing was conspicuously absent, he passed the parcel and gave an insight profound in its shallowness.  “The case is being covered by our World Affairs unit.  I have been in a few hearings and it is slightly repetitive. It will return as a news story.”  A flagging attention span, perhaps.

The lamentable coverage of Assange’s trial was instructive.  The conservative Spectator refused to take of the draught, keeping references to the extradition trial to a minimum.  The pro-extradition outlet, The Economist, went one better in ignoring the trial altogether, having already decided in April 2019 that the “central charge – computer hacking – is an indefensible violation of the law.”   The Sunday Telegraph was asleep to it since April last year.  Tetchy Richard Littejohn of the Daily Mail was awake to Assange, if only because, on being evicted from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, “he stank the place to high heaven”.

When the left-leaning New Statesman, a forum for periodic Assange bashing, was asked why it did not take an interest in the trial, it responded tartly that it had, in fact, covered the trial and would continue doing so. “We are a magazine mostly of essays, long reads and cultural criticism, not a breaking new site or a newspaper.  And we don’t publish court reports.”

Oborne and Cooke pondered the thesis long advanced by Noam Chomksy that the media tycoon dominated stable of hacks are all too happy to play gatekeepers, defending corporate and state interests.  “The Assange case suggests that this analysis is plausible.  At best, the London media reported Assange dutifully.  At worst, not at all.”

While the British press remains reliably despicable for the most part in dealing with the implications of USA v Assange, UK parliamentarians have had a shot of inspiration.  Leading a pack of seventeen figures, Richard Burgon, Labour MP for East Leeds, has requested Robert Buckland, the Secretary of State for Justice, “that provision be made to hold an online video discussion between Julian Assange and a cross-party group of UK parliamentarians.”

What stands out in the letter is an acknowledgment of Assange’s “journalistic work with WikiLeaks including information exposing US war atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq” for which he risks facing prison “of up to 175 years”.  The parliamentarians also note the case’s “important implications for press and publishing freedoms in the UK, for the US-UK Extradition Treaty including its ban on extradition for political offense and for wider human rights.”

Amnesty International’s concerns that “prosecuting Julian Assange on these charges could have a chilling effect on the right to freedom of expression” and the views of Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, also feature.  Expressing deep concern “by the implications of this unprecedented extradition case,” the parliamentarians are hoping to discuss the matter with Assange prior to the January 4, 2021 extradition decision.

While this surge of sentience can only be welcomed, Buckland is not likely to wish MPs to be airing such views with the publisher.  There is a relationship – namely that of the US-UK alliance – to preserve.  Having previously refused to grant Assange compassionate release from prison for posing a flight risk (this, even during the pandemic), there is a good chance he will be stubborn again.  British injustice, when it chooses to be, can be both implacable and illogical.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

The nineteenth century was the era of the Latin American struggle against colonialism, culminating in the twentieth century in popular movements against neocolonialism and imperialism.  These two hundred years of struggle are the foundation for the full attainment in the twenty-first century of an alternative world characterized by respect for the sovereignty and true independence of the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean. So declared Nicolas Maduro, President of Venezuela, at the XVIII Summit of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America-Trade Agreement of the Peoples (ALBA-TCP for its initials in Spanish).  Maduro further declared that ALBA-TCP is in the vanguard of the struggle for the definitive independence of the Latin American and Caribbean nations.

ALBA-TCP: An Alternative Project of Integration

ALBA-TCP was initially the idea of Hugo Chávez, the late president of Venezuela.  From 1999 to 2002, in various Latin American and Caribbean forums, Chávez proposed the creation of a mechanism that would promote solutions to the various problems resulting from neocolonialism, on the basis of the principle of the unity and integration of the nations of the region, a vision formulated in the nineteenth century by Simón Bolívar and José Martí.  The idea became reality on December 14, 2004, when Fidel Castro and Chávez signed in Havana the Joint Declaration for the establishment of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), as it was then known.

The Joint Declaration of 2004 maintained that integration in Latin America historically “has served as a mechanism for deepening dependency and foreign domination.” It proposed an alternative form of integration: “Only an integration based on cooperation, solidarity, and the common will to advance together with one accord toward the highest levels of development can satisfy the needs and desires of the Latin American and Caribbean countries, and at the same preserve their independence, sovereignty, and identity.”  The Joint Declaration proclaimed that ALBA seeks social justice and popular democracy: “ALBA has as its objective the transformation of Latin American societies, making them more just, cultured, participatory, and characterized by solidarity.  It therefore is conceived as an integral process that assures the elimination of social inequalities and promotes the quality of life and an effective participation of the peoples in the shaping of their own destiny.”

The 2004 Joint Declaration maintained that just and sustainable development is one of the principles of ALBA, and this implies an active role of the state.  “Commerce and investment ought not be ends in themselves, but instruments for attaining a just and sustainable development, since the true Latin American and Caribbean integration cannot be a blind product of the market, nor simply a strategy to amplify external markets or stimulate commerce.  To attain a just and sustainable development, effective participation of the State as regulator and coordinator of economic activity is required.”

ALBA was created in the historic moment of a neoliberal onslaught, when the United States was attempting to impose on the continent the so-called Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which designed an integration favorable to the interests of U.S. corporations.  With the emergence of governments of the left in the region, on a foundation of a popular rejection of neoliberalism, the U.S. initiative was blocked.  Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay played a central role in the burial of the FTAA at the 2005 Summit of the Americas, held in Argentina.

Participants in the XVIII Summit of ABLA-TCP, conducted in a virtual form on December 14, 2020, included, in addition to Maduro: Miguel Díaz-Canel, President of Cuba; Luis Arce, President of Bolivia; Daniel Ortega, President of Nicaragua; Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines; Roosevelt Skerrit, Prime Minister of Dominica; and Gaston Browne, Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda.  The participants celebrated the return of Bolivia to ALBA-TCP following the recapturing of democracy in the South American nation, one year after the breaking of the constitutional order by a U.S.- and OAS-supported coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected president Evo Morales.

The participants stressed the importance of ALBA-TCP for the promotion of a Latin American integration that seeks sovereign complementarity and cooperation among the nations.  Recently-elected Bolivian President Arce, for example, described ALBA-TCP as an instrument for the liberation of peoples in the struggle against imperialism and neoliberalism, an alternative to the plundering of the natural resources of Latin America and the Caribbean, to persistent damage to the environment, and to the privatization of resources and services that has increased the levels of poverty and inequality.

In his commentary, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega emphasized the significance of the recent presidential and parliamentary elections in Bolivia, the parliamentary elections in Venezuela, and the elections for Prime Minister in Saint Vincent and Grenadines.  These electoral victories show that the powerful enemy does not have reason or right on its side and is only able to attain temporary victories, but the definitive victory will be won by the peoples.  He criticized the United States, the Organization of American States, and the European Parliament as accomplices in the coup d’état against Evo Morales, the democratically-elected constitutional president in Bolivia, in November 2019.  He also noted the importance of Cuba in the current stage of struggle for unity by the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean.

ALBA-TCP summit, 2017 (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, declared that the member nations of ALBA have in common such principles as resistance to colonialism and imperialism, the sovereignty and independence of the nations, and justice for the peoples.  He noted that we have just passed through a dark period, but now we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.  We must be prepared, he maintained, for the possibilities that likely will be provided by the upcoming post-pandemic and post-Trump historic moment.

The Summit agreed to the reactivation of the Economic Council of ALBA and of the Sucre as a money of interchange as well as the strengthening of PetroCaribe and the Bank of ALBA.  Many of the participants proposed the creation of a Bank of Medicines, and Cuba and Venezuela were designated to coordinate this project.  In addition, the countries voted unanimously in support of the designation of Sacha Llorenti as general secretary of the Alliance; Llorenti previously was the representative of Bolivia in the United Nations.

ALBA has suffered setbacks in recent years as a result of the fall of two self-proclaimed socialist governments that have been key members of the alliance.  In Ecuador, the Citizen Revolution led by Rafael Correa fell following the presidential elections of 2017, won by Lenin Moreno, who was a Trojan Horse, the candidate of Correa’s Nation Alliance Party who did not announce his intentions to dismantle the revolution and take the nation to the right.  In Bolivia, the socialist government of Evo Morales fell to a violent, military coup d’état in November, 2019.  In Venezuela, U.S. illegal and unilateral sanctions have weakened its capacity to play a leadership role in the alliance and to provide support for development projects in small Caribbean nations.

At the same time, there were other setbacks in the region, in which governments that were allies of ALBA fell.  The Worker’s Party in Brazil was removed from power through a parliamentary-judicial coup d’état.  And progressive governments in Argentina and Uruguay lost elections.

The right retook power from progressive and socialist governments through deceptive and/or illegal and unconstitutional means.  When it retook power, the right made evident its lack of commitment to the people and the nation and its lack of a viable political project.  Returning to the discredited neoliberal polices of the past and to the repression of the people, and implementing a project that responds to imperialist interests and not to the interests of national sovereignty nor to the needs of the people, governments of the right cannot maintain sufficient support among the people.  The right is demonstrating in practice that its restoration project is unsustainable.

Recent developments show the unsustainability of the restoration project of the right.  In Bolivia, the Movement toward Socialism has retaken the control of the government, reestablishing the democratic and constitutional order.  In Venezuela, the Chavist alliance has recaptured control of the parliament, beating back the U.S. campaign for regime change.  In Argentina, a progressive government has returned to power.  In Mexico, a progressive government has been elected, culminating years of struggle.  In Ecuador, the Citizen Revolution is organizing itself for the next elections.  In Brazil, the neofascist government is completely lacking in legitimacy.  These regional developments are supported by international developments, including the fall of the government of Trump and the development of COVID-19 vaccines by Russia, China, Cuba, the United States, and Great Britain.

ALBA-TCP and the construction of a more just and democratic world 

The complementary integrationist project of ALBA-TCP is an advanced formulation of the vision expressed in 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, where leaders of twenty-nine newly independent nations of Asia and Africa met.  Sukarno, Nehru, Nasser, and Zhou En-lai played leading roles in putting forth the strategy of Third World unity in opposition to European colonialism and Western imperialism and in formulating the principle of economic cooperation among nations.  The relations among newly independent nations was given organizational form in 1961, when twenty-one governments of Asia and Africa plus the former Yugoslavia and Cuba established the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.  In 1964, seventy-seven nations formed the G-77 as a bloc within the United Nations, which called upon Third World nations to develop new forms of mutually beneficial trade among one another in order to ameliorate the effects of imperialist exploitation.  In 1966, eighty-three governments and national liberation movements from Africa, Asia, and Latin America met in Havana for the First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, which named colonialism and imperialism as the source of Third World underdevelopment and defended nationalization as an effective strategy for attaining control over a national economy.

In 1974, the Third World brought its vision to the General Assembly of the United Nations, which approved the Non-Aligned Movement’s proposal for a New International Economic Order.  The document affirmed the principles of the right of self-determination of nations and the sovereignty of nations over their natural resources.  It advocated: the creation of raw materials producers’ associations to give raw materials exporting states control over prices; a new international monetary policy that did not punish the weaker states; increased industrialization of the Third World; the transfer of technology from the advanced industrial states to the Third World; regulation and control of the activities of transnational corporations; the promotion of cooperation among the nations of the Third World; and aid for Third World development.  In 1979, ninety-three nations at the Sixth Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Havana reaffirmed “their deep conviction that a lasting solution to the problems of countries in development can be attained only by means of a constant and fundamental restructuring of international economic relations through the establishment of a New International Economic Order.”

The world-system, however, was entering into a sustained structural crisis, as a consequence of the fact that it had reached and overextended the geographical limits of the earth.  The global elite responded to this situation with a sharp turn to the right, and the Third World project was derailed.  But in the late 1990s, the Third World project was brought to renewed life on the basis of popular social movements in opposition to neoliberalism, which found their most advanced expression in Latin America.  This time, however, not only would ideas be expressed, they also would be implemented in practice.  Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador began to develop mutually beneficial economic and cultural relations, on a basis of respect for sovereignty.  Their evolving relations with one another during the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century constituted an effort to move from dependency on trade with the global powers of the European-centered world-economy, which were economically disadvantageous, toward trade with other nations of the South, looking for win-win strategies based on mutual respect.  They took the lead in forming regional associations, seeking to provide practical support for mutually beneficial trade and to include other nations in the process.  In addition to ALBA-TCP, UNASUR (the South American Union of Nations) was established in 2008, calling for solidarity in the use of the resources of the region.  CELAC (the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) was established in 2010.  In CELAC’s Second Summit in Havana in 2016, the Declaration of Havana affirmed the commitment of the 33 governments to expand commerce within the region and to develop a form of integration based on complementariness, solidarity, and cooperation.

The revitalization of the Third World project at the beginning of the twenty-first century included the retaking by the Non-Aligned Movement of its historic principles.  The 2006 Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Havana affirmed historic principles, including the equality and sovereignty of nations, non-intervention in the affairs of other states, and “the free determination of peoples in their struggle against foreign intervention.”  The Seventeenth Summit of the Non-Aligned movement in Venezuela in 2016 called upon the peoples of the Third World to struggle against colonialism and neocolonialism and to participate in the construction of a more just world, established on a foundation of solidarity and cooperation.

The evolution of Chinese foreign policy dovetailed with the Latin American turn to South-South cooperation, inasmuch as China in recent years has followed a strategy of development through cooperation with other nations.  In 2014, Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China, met with the heads of state of the nations of CELAC, including Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia, to establish the China-CELAC Forum, and he subsequently visited Venezuela and Cuba.  In an interchange with Latin American journalists, the Chinese President maintained that China is seeking to develop its economy through trade based on cooperation and win-win relations of mutual benefit.  He advocated the promotion of South-South cooperation in order that underdeveloped nations can attain autonomous and sustainable development, and he viewed the expanding economic and social relation between China and CELAC to be an example of South-South cooperation.  He affirmed that China is committed to a more just and reasonable international economic and political order.

For its part, Russia, after a period of neoliberal disorientation following the collapse of the Soviet Union, has retaken the Leninist principle of support for oppressed nations seeking transformation of unjust global structures.  Accordingly, Russia at the present time is expanding relations with Cuba and Venezuela.

With the formulation of alternative principles to those of the capitalist world-economy and with the implementation in practice of economic and cultural interchanges, China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua are developing, step-by-step, a world-system with alternative concepts and practices, and they are pointing the way toward the construction of a just, democratic, and sustainable world-system.

The Peoples of the North also are Called 

The socialist and progressive governments and movements of the Third World are calling upon the peoples of the North to join in their global movement for a more just, democratic, and sustainable international world order.  Joined with South-South cooperation, they envision a world characterized by North-South cooperation, in which trade relations are developed with respect for the sovereignty and development needs of the South, including the transfer of technology and open access to knowledge as a possession of all humanity.  Compensation for the historic crimes of the North should be conceived as compensation for the crimes of colonialism, slavery, neocolonialism, and imperialism; and the payment of this historic debt ought to be made through a common human struggle to overcome the underdevelopment and poverty that these crimes have created.

The call of the Third World for an anti-imperialist struggle in the North is not inconsistent with the historical popular struggles of the peoples of the North.  In the United States in the late 1960s, both the black power movement and the white student anti-war movement had their anti-imperialist dimensions, stimulated by study of the historic causes of the Vietnam War, in which it was learned that U.S. military involvement in Vietnam constituted a colonialist and imperialist war of aggression and a people united to attain independence and self-determination.  In that historic moment, anti-imperialism was a dimension of a comprehensive popular movement in the United States that conceived itself as a movement against racism, poverty, and war.

The anti-imperialist struggle is necessarily a movement against poverty and war.  Because, in the first place, colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism are the root causes of poverty and underdevelopment.  And because, in the second place, the neocolonized peoples of the earth resist imperialism, which therefore provokes a militarist reaction by the imperialist powers, which maintain huge standing armies and launch ideological campaigns that fabricate pretexts for imperialist wars of aggression.  In the resulting distortion of the consciousness of the people, enemies of civilization and violators of human rights and democratic norms are found everywhere.  With an Orwellian logic, governments with advanced democratic structures are called authoritarian dictatorships, effectively preying upon the ignorance of the people concerning political dynamics in other lands.  The people become confused and divided, distracted from the necessary struggle against the trusts, the transnational corporations, and the one percent.

The popular movement of 1965 to 1972 was on the right road, but it committed historic errors, and it encountered obstacles that it could not overcome.  It was defueled by: the elimination of the military draft; the insufficient intellectual work of its activists; the emergence of stagflation and related economic problems; the distractions of Watergate; and the turn of the power elite to neoliberalism at home and abroad.  In the 1980s, Jesse Jackson tried to resurrect the movement with the concept of the Rainbow Coalition, but what was needed was the development of mass organizations on the basis of the concept, and not presidential candidacies.  By the 1990s, identity politics emerged among progressives and liberals, a tendency that today is supported by the power elite, because it facilitates the inclusion of historically marginalized groups in the American project of imperialist domination of the world.

The peoples of the North today are called by the peoples of the Third World to participate in a common struggle by humanity against imperialism, war, underdevelopment, and poverty.

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Charles McKelvey is Professor Emeritus, Presbyterian College, Clinton, South Carolina.  He has published three books: Beyond Ethnocentrism:  A Reconstruction of Marx’s Concept of Science (Greenwood Press, 1991); The African-American Movement:  From Pan-Africanism to the Rainbow Coalition (General Hall, 1994); and The Evolution and Significance of the Cuban Revolution: The Light in the Darkness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 

Featured image is CC BY-SA 3.0

CNN has the story. And it’s quite a story: “Why vaccinate our most frail? Odd vote out shows the dilemma”, December 4. [1]

“The vote to recommend long-term care residents be among the first to receive Covid-19 vaccinations was not unanimous.”

“Out of a panel of 14 CDC vaccine advisers, a lone doctor said no.”

“’Odd woman out, I guess,’ Dr. Helen ‘Keipp’ Talbot, of Vanderbilt University, told her colleagues. ‘I still struggle with this. This was not an easy vote’.”

“Talbot was worried about whether the vaccine would even work in such frail, vulnerable patients. Even more, she worried about how it might look if the vaccine failed in that group, or how it would affect public perception if residents died soon after getting the vaccine.”

“The Covid-19 vaccines have not been tested in the frail elderly, many of whom are residents of long-term care facilities.”

Let’s stop here for a moment. First, we learn that the clinical trials of the COVID vaccine have not used the frail and elderly as volunteers. Therefore, there is NO evidence that the vaccine is safe or effective in that very large group. If this doesn’t give the frail and elderly and their families pause for thought, nothing will.

Second, Dr. Talbot is worried about “public perception,” when the elderly die right after getting the vaccination.

Well, what would YOU think if your mother died the day after she received the COVID shot?

The CNN article gets worse. Read on. Next up is a comment from Dr. Kelly Moore, “associate director of the Immunization Action Coalition, which is supporting frontline workers who will administer Covid-19 vaccinations.”

“’Since they [the COVID vaccines] haven’t been studied in people in those [elderly] populations, we don’t know how well the vaccine will work for them. We know that most vaccines don’t work nearly as well in a frail elderly person as they would in someone who is fit and vigorous, even if they happen to be the same age,’ Moore said.”

Again—zero evidence the COVID vaccines work in elderly and frail populations. Most vaccines don’t “work nearly as well.”

CNN: “When shots begin to go into arms of [nursing home and long-term care facility] residents, Moore said Americans need to understand that deaths may occur that won’t necessarily have anything to do with the vaccine.”

“’We would not at all be surprised to see, coincidentally, vaccination happening and then having someone pass away a short time after they receive a vaccine, not because it has anything to do with the vaccination but just because that’s the place where people at the end of their lives reside,’ Moore said.”

“’One of the things we want to make sure people understand is that they should not be unnecessarily alarmed if there are reports, once we start vaccinating, of someone or multiple people dying within a day or two of their vaccination who are residents of a long-term care facility. That would be something we would expect, as a normal occurrence, because people die frequently in nursing homes’.”

Right. Don’t be alarmed.

Don’t worry if people who are doing reasonably well suddenly die right after getting the COVID shot. It’s just a coincidence.

Their long-term health conditions just happened to kick in a day or two after vaccination. Nothing to wonder about.

Don’t kick up a fuss if it’s YOUR father or mother who died. Stay calm. You can be sure the doctors will let you know if your mother died from the vaccine. Of course they will.

Even though the vaccine has never been tested on the elderly and frail, the doctors know whether a death occurred from the vaccination or from other causes. And they’ll tell the truth. They always do.

The doctors quoted in this CNN article are obviously worried about people dying as a result of the vaccine. They know it’s going to happen. They’re thinking out loud about what they can do to stem the tide of public outrage—particularly from the families of those who die.

The best idea they can come up with is: “these people die anyway.”

I remind readers that, for months, I’ve been reporting on the huge percentage of all so-called COVID deaths that have been occurring among the elderly in nursing homes, in long-term care facilities, in hospitals, in their homes. [2]

These people were already suffering from multiple long-term serious health conditions. On top of that, they had been treated for years with an array of toxic medical drugs.

And then, they’re absolutely terrified when they receive a diagnosis of COVID. Then they’re isolated, cut off from family and friends.

And they give up and die.

NO VIRUS IS REQUIRED TO EXPLAIN THESE DEATHS.

This is forced premature killing of old people. It’s murder by COVID diagnosis and isolation. [2]

And now, these people will receive an experimental RNA vaccine, whose effects include auto-immune reactions; the body basically attacks itself. [3]

More killing.

And doctors advising the CDC are telling us not to be alarmed.

The deaths are just routine.

Lots and lots of doctors who know what’s going on are thinking, “What if all this comes back on ME?”

Well, it IS coming back on you, Doctors.

You’re killers in white coats who are supposed to be saving lives.

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The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power.

Notes

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/09/pfizer-covid-vaccine-nhs-extreme-allergy-sufferers-regulators-reaction

[2] https://www.denverpost.com/2020/12/09/pfizer-covid-vaccine-allergic-reactions/

[3] https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/01/26/vaccine-for-the-china-virus-the-planet-is-the-guinea-pig-for-a-vast-experiment/

Featured image is from Viacheslav Lopatin | Credit: scaliger – stock.adobe.com

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The Controversial Covid RT-PCR Test: What Do We Know?

December 18th, 2020 by Mark Taliano

We know that the PCR tests being used are not “fit for purpose”, that they are for Research Use Only. They are not meant to be used as diagnostic tools, and the late inventor of the RT-PCR instruments was very clear about this. According to the late Dr. Kary Mullis,

“PCR detects a very small segment of the nucleic acid which is part of a virus itself. The specific fragment detected is determined by the somewhat arbitrary choice of DNA primers used which become the ends of the amplified fragment. “ (1)

We also know that Coding changes to Death Certificates have fabricated false perceptions about COVID lethality. CDC coding changes blurred the important distinction between dying OF COVID and dying WITH COVID. Consequently co-morbidities such as heart disease, cancer, etc. have been largely negated and COVID has been relegated an artificially high importance in terms of Cause of Death reporting.

Dr. Ngozi Ezike explained the “death count” in a May 2020 press conference with these words:

“I just want to be clear in terms of the definition of ‘people dying of COVID’.

So, the case definition is very simplistic. It means, at the time of death, it was a COVID positive diagnosis.

So, that means that if you were in hospice and had already been given, you know, a few weeks to live, and then you were also to have found to have COVID, that would have counted as a COVID death.

It means that if technically even if you died of a clear alternate cause, but you had COVID at the same time, it’s still listed as a COVID death.

So, everyone who is listed as a COVID death, doesn’t mean that that was the cause of death, but they had COVID at the time of death.

I hope that’s helpful.” (2)

According to H. Ealy, M. McEvoy et al in “Covid-19: Questionable Policies, Manipulated Rules of Data Collection and Reporting. Is It Safe for Students to Return to School?”:

“The 2003 guidelines for establishing death certificates had been cancelled. “Had the CDC used its industry standard, Medical Examiners’ and Coroners’ Handbook on Death Registration and Fetal Death Reporting Revision 2003, as it has for all other causes of death for the last 17 years, the COVID-19 fatality count would be approximately 90.2% lower than it currently is.” (3)

To summarize then, the tests that are widely used to test for COVID are not fit for diagnostic purposes.  Additionally, prior to the announced pandemic, coding changes were made to Death Certificates that have resulted in false and very significantly increased COVID Death Statistics.

These two factors alone create substantial misperceptions about the danger and lethality of COVID-19.

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

Notes

(1) John O’Sullivan, ” The COVID-19 PCR Test Is Key To The Pandemic Fraud.” Principia Scientific International, 8 September, 2020. (The COVID-19 PCR Test Is Key to the Pandemic Fraud | Principia Scientific Intl. (principia-scientific.com) ) Accessed 16 December, 2020.

(2) “THE DEATH COUNT EXPLAINED: Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of Illinois Department of Public Health.” 16 May, 2020. YouTube (THE DEATH COUNT EXPLAINED: Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of Illinois Department of Public Health – Mark Taliano ) Accessed 16 December, 2020.

(3) H. Ealy, M. McEvoy et al , “Covid-19: Questionable Policies, Manipulated Rules of Data Collection and Reporting. Is It Safe for Students to Return to School?/If COVID Fatalities Were 90.2% Lower, How Would You Feel About Schools Reopening?” Global Research, August 09, 2020/Children’s Health Defense, 24 July 2020. (Covid-19: Questionable Policies, Manipulated Rules of Data Collection and Reporting. Is It Safe for Students to Return to School? – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization ) Accessed 16 December, 2020.


Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

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“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” (H. L. Mencken 1880-1956)

The mainstream media repeatedly feeds us government propaganda about other countries and their supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 we were told that Iraq had chemical weapons that could be used to attack us in 45 minutes. Then we were told scare stories about Iran and North Korea posing a threat because they were developing nuclear weapons. Then we were told that the Syrian government was using chemical weapons, and this was a ‘red line’ being crossed, so the US had to attack Syria. Much of this was untrue or distorted. This post looks at how these weapons are really another exaggerated threat used to justify US and British war crimes.   

Nuclear Weapons and Double Standards 

“I would characterize current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous”  –(Robert McNamara, former US Secretary of Defence) 

“Nuclear War has no politically, militarily or morally acceptable justification” – (General Lee Butler, former commander-in-chief, US Strategic Air Command)(1)

The only country ever to have used nuclear weapons is the US. At the end of World War 2, in 1945, US bombers dropped two bombs on Japanese cities; one on Hiroshima, the other on Nagasaki. Each city was completely destroyed. Russia developed its own nuclear weapons shortly afterwards. For the next few decades, both countries developed huge arsenals of nuclear weapons, both sides claiming that they needed them to deter the other from invading. Britain, France and China created their own nuclear arsenals, and Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea have all developed them more recently. Politicians in countries that possess them claim they are for ‘security’, but the whole process increases the chances that nuclear weapons will be used again. Modern versions are much more powerful than the early ones. A single missile can now carry many warheads and is capable of killing millions of people in a large city. There are currently 13,000 warheads in the world’s nuclear arsenals. The vast majority in the US and Russia.(2) This is enough to destroy the world many times over.

The situation with nuclear weapons today is one of the most obvious examples of double standards. Countries that already have them want to keep them, but they tell everyone else not to develop their own. A large number of countries signed an agreement called the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which came into force in 1970. The whole point of the treaty was to work towards a world free of nuclear weapons. This treaty had two key parts. The first was that all countries that already had nuclear weapons would work towards complete disarmament.(3) The second was that other countries would not develop their own nuclear weapons. Western politicians and their media focus on the second part of the treaty, frequently discussing countries that might develop them, such as Iran, whilst rarely discussing their failure to eliminate their own nuclear weapons. Although the total number of warheads is less than it was, the existing nuclear weapons states have made no genuine effort to eliminate their weapons and clearly no longer intend to. We are now firmly headed in the wrong direction. The US has been developing smaller nuclear weapons called bunker-busters. These are intended to destroy bunkers that are deep underground, but the effects of these bombs would be similar to the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Large numbers of innocent people would die if they were ever used. Britain also intends to update its nuclear missiles. 

Nuclear Deterrence – To Stop the US and Britain from Attacking Others 

If powerful countries like the US and Britain persist with invading other countries to control their resources, there is little that a small, non-nuclear country can do to stop them. However, a single nuclear weapon is sufficient to deter the US from invading.(4) This is known as a nuclear deterrent. If you were running a country and a US President listed you in an ‘Axis of Evil’ and then invaded one of the other ‘evil’ countries, you would feel threatened. The US has effectively said “we can attack anyone we choose provided they are defenceless.” It has been pointed out that whilst America continues to invade countries that do not have nuclear weapons, Iranian and North Korean leaders would be mad not to develop them.(5)

A small country is not likely to fire nuclear missiles at anyone, as that country would immediately be destroyed by large numbers of nuclear missiles from other countries. As one commentator pointed out, “What possible reason would Iran have for attacking the US or Israel other than an irresistible desire for mass national suicide?”.(6) North Korea now has nuclear weapons and shows no signs of using them to attack anyone. Mainstream media discussions about Iran or North Korea’s potential nuclear capabilities are propaganda to scare us into supporting war or sanctions against countries whose leaders refuse to be manipulated by the US.

Many independent experts (that is, those who do not profit from nuclear weapons) have recognised that nuclear weapons are far too dangerous to have on a planet that still thinks in terms of war and exploitation, and are now in favour of the total elimination of nuclear weapons.(7)

Chemical and Biological Weapons 

Nuclear weapons are a recent invention, but chemical and biological warfare has been used for thousands of years. The Spartans used arsenic smoke (chemical warfare) in approximately 400bc. Poisoning the water of your enemy with dead animals is a simple form of biological warfare and was used as far back as 590bc. Poisoning wells is still used in some conflicts. The modern version of this type of warfare is when the US destroys the sanitation system or the water supply of a country that it is invading. This causes large numbers of people (mostly innocent civilians) to become ill. The most vulnerable people (children, the elderly, and people without a good diet) will die due to the spread of disease.(9) The governments of advanced nations have been responsible for the development of both biological and chemical weapons, many of which have been supplied to other countries. The US and Britain continue to research both biological and chemical weapons. The British research facility is at Porton Down. Both governments claim that they only want to understand them better, in case someone else uses them, but they will not allow independent inspectors to check their research facilities.(10) 

The US uses more chemical weapons than any other country 

There is much talk by politicians about the illegality of these weapons but this is just a smokescreen. Their lack of genuine concern can be seen in the historical record. Between the two world wars, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill supported the use of poison gas for killing enemies. The US used chemical weapons extensively throughout the Vietnam war (and there is even some evidence of their use of biological weapons.(11)) The most famous of these is napalm, a gel that sticks to the skin whilst burning for a long time at extremely high temperatures. The US also used millions of gallons of defoliants, such as agent orange, to kill the leaves on trees so that it would be easier for the US military to find their targets. They used poison gas that killed livestock and people,(12) and they used rice-killing herbicides to starve the population. Some of these herbicides contain dioxin, which has been described as the most poisonous molecule known to science. This poison caused large numbers of health problems, together with birth defects in the children of exposed victims. In a lawsuit in 1984 US soldiers were awarded compensation for exposure to some of these chemicals, but no compensation has ever been paid to the Vietnamese victims, many of whom are still suffering fifty years later.(13) More recently, the US has used white phosphorous – a chemical that burns intensely when water is thrown on it. Both the US and Britain have used depleted uranium, which is believed to have contributed to a rise in birth defects following the wars in Iraq.(14)

Bullets and Bombs are the real weapons of mass destruction

There is some inconsistency in moral arguments about chemical and biological weapons. In discussing the possible use of cyanide artillery, one observer noted that this would actually kill people with much less suffering than other weapons.(15) They are no worse than bullets, bombs and other weapons that hack off limbs, or leave people paralysed, brain-damaged or mutilated in many other ways. Ordinary bombs and missiles are capable of destroying whole cities. The weapons that cause the greatest suffering worldwide every year are small arms.

As we saw in earlier blogs, the US and Britain justified their attacks on Iraq and Syria by saying that those countries either possessed (Iraq) or were using (Syria) chemical weapons. We also discovered that both claims were lies. But we need to question these claims in another respect. The possession or use of chemical weapons by another country does not give the US or Britain the right to wage war against that country. It makes no sense to accept militaries using unlimited bombs and bullets to create carnage, but to object to chemical weapons on humanitarian grounds. This is just propaganda. 

Terrorism? 

Biological weapons have never been successfully used for large-scale terrorism, although five people were killed in the US by anthrax in 2001.(16) The reason these attacks are rare is that it is very difficult for anyone other than governments to create effective biological weapons without advanced research labs, because they are so dangerous to work with. Chemical weapons have been used for terrorism, although the scale of the injuries has so far been no worse than an ordinary bomb. Sarin gas was released on the Tokyo underground in 1995, injuring many people but only killing twelve.(17) As with nuclear weapons, western governments use our fear of chemical and biological weapons to manipulate us.(18) 

The term WMD is propaganda to exaggerate a threat 

Older readers might recall that before 2003 the terms ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and ‘WMD’ were rarely used. Since President Bush decided to invade Iraq, the terms have been used repeatedly. If a politician says someone else has WMD, most people imagine a mushroom cloud over a city destroyed by a nuclear bomb. However, the phrase is often used to refer to chemical weapons. WMD is a clever propaganda phrase to mix-up these different weapons. The Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, possessed chemical battlefield shells that were old and degraded.(19) Even in their original, working condition they are ineffective for large scale killing unless fired in their thousands, as might happen on a battlefield. By calling them WMD, members of the public, politicians and journalists were duped into believing that he had been a much greater threat than was really the case, in order to scare people into accepting a criminal invasion of Iraq. The term WMD is deliberately used to exaggerate a threat.

Key Points 

Nuclear weapons deter the US and Britain from invading other countries.

Leaders from nuclear powers are the biggest obstacle to eliminating nuclear weapons.

The threat posed by biological and chemical weapons is small.

The term WMD is propaganda to confuse chemical weapons with nuclear weapons, in order to exaggerate a threat.

Bullets and bombs are the real weapons of mass destruction

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This article was first posted at medium.com/elephantsintheroom.

Rod Driver is an academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking modern-day US and British propaganda. This is the seventh in a series entitled Elephants In The Room, which attempts to provide a beginners guide to understanding what’s really going on in relation to war, terrorism, economics and poverty, without the nonsense in the mainstream media.

Notes 

1) Robert McNamara, ‘Apocalypse Soon’, Foreign Policy magazine, May/June 2005, p.29-35. Lee Butler, ‘The false God of Nuclear Deterrence’, Global Dialogue I.2 (Autumn 1999). Both sources cited in Achin Vanaik (ed.) Selling US Wars, 2007, p.180 

2) Nuclear Weapons Stockpile Report, at https://www.ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report

3) ‘The Treaty On The Non-Proliferation Of Nuclear Weapons’, at https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/npt/text

The relevant part is section 6 where nuclear powers agree “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to… nuclear disarmament.”

4) Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, 2003, p.37

5) Martin Van Creveld, ‘Sharon On The Warpath: Is Israel Planning To Attack Iran’, Aug 21, 2004, at https://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/21/opinion/sharon-on-the-warpath-is-israel-planning-to-attack-iran.html

6) William Blum, Keynote speech, ‘Building a New World’ conference, May 23, 2008, at

https://williamblum.org/essays/read/building-a-new-world-conference-speech-radford-university 

7) George Lee Butler, ‘We Still Drift Toward Unparalleled Catastrophe’, in International Herald Tribune, Jan 23, 1997, at

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/23/opinion/IHT-we-still-drift-toward-unparalleled-catastrophe.html

Helen Caldicott, The New Nuclear Danger 

8) Ian Roberts, ‘Biological Warfare and The People of Iraq’, International Journal of Epidemiology, 2003, 32, pp.660-661, at http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/32/4/660

9) Richard Du Boff, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the biggest rogue of all’, Sep 2003, at www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Rogue_State_US/Biggest_Rogue.html 

Francis Boyle, Biowarfare and Terrorism, 2005, claims that the US government still has a large scale, active biowarfare research department.

Tim Wyatt, ’Research into deadly viruses at US army weapons lab shut down over fears they could escape’, Independent 6 Aug 2019, at

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/virus-biological-us-army-weapons-fort-detrick-leak-ebola-anthrax-smallpox-ricin-a9042641.html

10) Animesh Roul, ‘State Actors and Germ Warfare: Historical Perspective’, CBW Magazine, July-December 2010, at

https://idsa.in/cbwmagazine/StateActorsandGermWarfare_aroul

11) Mark Selden, ‘A forgotten holocaust: US bombing strategy’, 2 May 2007, at https://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/2414/article.html

12) Robert Dreyfuss, ‘Apocalypse Still’, Mother Jones, Jan/Feb 2000 issue, at www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2000/01/orange.html 

13) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium

14) Sir Lyon Playfair, cited in ‘Medical Management of Chemical Casualties Handbook’, at

https://fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/doctrine/army/mmcch/Introduc.htm

15) Stephen Lendman, ‘The Bush Administration’s Secret Biowarfare Agenda’, July 28, 2008, at

www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9685

16) K.B.Olson, ‘Aum Shinrikyo: Once and Future Threat?’, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Vol. 5, No. 4,  July/Aug 1999, pp.513-516, at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2627754/

17) M.G.Zimeta, ‘Why are we so afraid of chemical weapons?’, New Internationalist, 19 Jun 2013, at https://newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2013/06/19/syria-chemical-weapons-existential-threat 

18) ‘Scott Ritter and Seymour Hersh: Iraq Confidential’, 26 Oct 2005, The Nation, at https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/scott-ritter-and-seymour-hersh-iraq-confidential/ 

C.J. Chivers, ‘The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons’, New York Times, 14 October 2014, at

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html?smid=pl-share&mtrref=undefined&gwh=0C9D1B32A09FD2388FAC9C110E48049F&gwt=pay&assetType=REGIWALL

Featured image: U.S. Army survey team member Staff Sgt. Nicky Lam, 21st Weapons of Mass Destruction-Civil Support Team, New Jersey National Guard, inspects vials at a simulated crime scene during a training exercise at Fort Hancock and Sandy Hook Proving Ground National Historic Landmark, Sandy Hook, N.J., Sept. 25, 2018. The 21st WMD-CST support civil authorities at man-made or natural disasters by identifying chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear substances, as well as assess the consequences, advise on response measures, and assist in requesting follow-on forces. (New Jersey National Guard photo by Mark C. Olsen)

The National Post is apoplectic again.

This time, the target of the Post’s ire is an online event held in November by the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, the Canadian Peace Congress and the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War. Entitled “Free Meng,” the event was organized in anticipation of the second anniversary of the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei executive being detained in Vancouver pursuant to an extradition request of the Trump administration.

The keynote speakers for the event were planned to be Green Party of Canada MP Paul Manly and NDP MP Niki Ashton (Manly ultimately participated, but Ashton withdrew and instead provided a written statement after the NDP distanced itself from her stance on the issue).

In an op-ed published by the National Post on November 23, columnist John Ivison accused the event’s organizers of demonstrating “a reflexive contempt and loathing toward the United States that excuses any and all atrocities by other nations.”

The facts, however, tell a different story.

The background of Meng’s arrest

46 year old Wanzhou Meng resides in China. She is a Chinese citizen and does not hold citizenship in any other country. For the past 25 years, she has worked for Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., China’s largest telecommunications company, holding the position of CFO and Deputy Chairwoman of the Board.

On December 1, 2018, Meng was travelling from Hong Kong to Mexico, with a stopover in Vancouver. Before she could board her connecting flight, she was arrested at Vancouver Airport.

The arrest was based on a Provisional Arrest Warrant issued on November 30, 2018, pursuant to a request made by the United States of America under the Treaty on Extradition between the Government of Canada and the Government of the United States of America.

Three months earlier, a US District Court Judge had issued a warrant for Meng’s arrest. The warrant arose from US government allegations that, starting in 2009, Meng and others conspired to make misrepresentations to HSBC, a British bank, to induce HSBC to continue to provide banking services to Huawei while the company was allegedly doing business through a subsidiary in Iran, which was subject to US sanctions. Meng denies the allegations.

The US government’s extradition request attempts to portray HSBC as a victim of Meng’s alleged fraud, but the bank’s sordid history makes the victimhood story hard to swallow. In 2012, HSBC agreed to pay a record $1.92 billion in fines to US authorities for allowing itself to be used to launder a river of drug money flowing out of Mexico and for violating US sanctions laws by doing business with customers in Iran, Libya, Sudan, Burma and Cuba.

To this day, no Court in Canada has evaluated the evidence upon which the US charges against Meng are based.

Canada’s unjust extradition regime

The Meng case has generated a mountain of press coverage, but precious little of it—including Ivison’s National Post op-ed—exhibits a meaningful understanding of Canada’s unjust extradition regime.

Among other flaws, Canada’s Extradition Act requires no sworn evidence at all to deprive a person of liberty. An unsworn allegation by a foreign official is all that is required.

Moreover, the accused does not have the normal procedural protections of the domestic justice system—full disclosure of all relevant evidence, sworn evidence, the right to challenge through cross-examination (the foreign official who has made the allegation can’t even be questioned), and the right to present evidence showing innocence.

Even worse, the unsworn allegation of the foreign official is “presumed” to be “reliable evidence.” That presumption reverses the presumption of innocence which lies at the heart of Canada’s criminal justice system.

With complete justification, Canadian law professor Anne La Forest, who has written extensivelyon Canada’s unjust extradition law, observed that “Canada has gone further than virtually any other country in facilitating extradition.”

The infamous case of Hassan Diab

Perhaps no case exposed the flaws of Canada’s extradition regime as much as that of Canadian citizen Dr. Hassan Diab.

In November 2008, when Diab was a sociology professor living in Ottawa, the RCMP arrested him in response to a request by French authorities. They falsely accused him of involvement in a 1980 bombing near a synagogue in Paris.

Diab was eventually extradited to France, largely on the basis of handwriting evidence. The judge ordered his extradition despite finding the French handwriting report “very problematic,” “very confusing,” and with “suspect conclusions.” The judge likened handwriting analysis to “pseudo-science,” and found merit in the defense argument that the flawed methodology used in the French handwriting analysis results in manifestly unreliable conclusions. Nevertheless, he ruled that Canada’s extradition law does not permit him to apply Canadian standards of evidence admissibility to foreign evidence.

After more than three years in solitary confinement in a French prison, Diab was released in 2018, based primarily on an overwhelming body of evidence showing that he could not have been in France in 1980 when the attack was perpetrated.

The Meng case: Abuse of process?

In Canada, one of the few means by which an accused can defeat an extradition request is by persuading the Court that the request is an “abuse of process.” That is precisely the position Meng has taken.

Meng’s abuse of process argument has three branches, each alleging a separate form of abuse.

In one branch of her abuse of process argument, Meng alleges that the US government has deliberately misstated evidence and withheld it from the Canadian Court. Earlier this year, Canada’s attorney general applied for an order summarily dismissing that branch of Meng’s argument, but in October 2020, the Court dismissed the attorney general’s request after finding that Meng’s allegations had an “air of reality.”

In another branch of her abuse of process argument, Meng alleges that the Trump administration is using her as a “bargaining chip.” There is compelling evidence to support that claim. As pointed out in a press release issued by Huawei in June 2020, a new book by Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton reveals that Trump viewed the arrest and detention of Meng as a way of exerting political leverage on China. In The Room Where It Happened, Bolton writes: “At the December 7 [2018] White House Christmas dinner, Trump raised Meng’s arrest, riffing about how much pressure this put on China.”

According to Bolton, Trump viewed Meng’s freedom as a powerful bargaining chip in trade negotiations with the Chinese government.

The political character of the charges against Meng

Quite apart from Meng’s credible abuse of process arguments, there are strong grounds to believe that the US government’s allegations against the Huawei executive are political in nature.

This is important, because Article 4.1.c of the Canada-U.S. Extradition Treaty provides that “extradition shall not be granted… when the offence in respect of which extradition is requested is of a political character…” Similarly, section 46(1)(c) of the Canada Extradition Act provides that the Minister “shall refuse to make a surrender order if the Minister is satisfied that… (c) the conduct in respect of which extradition is sought is a political offence or an offence of a political character.”

Much has been made of the fact that Meng has been accused of fraud, but her alleged fraud relates to allegations that Huawei sought to circumvent US sanctions on Iran.

The principal justification advanced for those sanctions is that Iran is allegedly seeking to develop a nuclear weapon. Over a decade ago, however, the CIA confirmed that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. More recently, just before the Trump administration withdrew from the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran and re-imposed crushing sanctions on the country, the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that Iran was in compliance with the deal.

Not only is the principal justification for US sanctions on Iran demonstrably false, but both the US and its principal ally Israel—whose government fiercely opposes Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and has strongly advocated for devastating sanctions on the country—both possess abundant nuclear weapons.

Indeed, the US is flagrantly violating its disarmament obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT) by dismantling the post-WWII arms control architecture and by embarking on a $1.7 trillion ‘modernization’ of its massive nuclear arsenal.

Similarly, Israel is the only state in the Middle East that possesses nukes and the only country in the region that is not a party to the NNPT or any of the major treaties regarding non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

It ought also to be recalled that the US is the only country in history to have used these horrific weapons on civilian populations. At a moment when Japan was on the verge of surrender, the US intentionally incinerated between 129,000 and 226,000 Japanese (including tens of thousands of innocent children) by dropping atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. This surely constitutes one of the worst atrocities in the modern era, yet no US official was ever held accountable.

Efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons are entirely laudable and should in fact be strengthened, but when it comes to lecturing other states about nuclear proliferation, the US government has no moral authority whatsoever. The Iran sanctions regime not only constitutes the height of hypocrisy, but it also inflicts untold suffering on innocent Iranians and impedes Iran’s ability to control the pandemic.

Moreover, there is a powerful argument to be made that US sanctions on Iran violate international law. In other words, the sanctions regime which Meng is alleged to have circumvented is itself illegal.

Ultimately, US sanctions on Iran have nothing to do with nuclear proliferation, nor do they have anything to do with the rule of law or human rights, as is amply demonstrated by US support for Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war on Yemen and its coddling of other human rights abusers around the world.

Rather, the sanctions regime upon which Meng’s extradition request is ultimately based is plainly motivated by the US government’s objective of acquiring hegemony over a region possessing vast reserves of conventional oil. Thus, not only are the Trump administration’s allegations political in nature, but they constitute the worst kind of geopolitics.

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Dimitri Lascaris is a lawyer, journalist, activist and member of the Canadian Dimension coordinating committee. He was a candidate in the federal Greens’ leadership race, and finished second with just over 10,000 votes.

Featured image is from Canadian Dimension.

Finally, democracy is coming to the Persian Gulf.

Israel announced plans to deploy a joint missile defense system in the Persian Gulf as a part of a joint effort with US- and Israeli-allied monarchies to deter Iran.

The idea was announced at the official level by the head of the Israeli Missile Defense Organization, which is part of the Defense Ministry. Moshe Patel said that “in the future”, Israel is ready to deploy its own systems and to synchronize them with comparable systems employed by the Gulf Monarchies.

“From an engineering point of view, of course there is a lot of advantage. That information can be shared, like sensors that can be deployed in both countries because we have the same enemies,” Patel stated.

The announced plan is a logical continuation of the recent diplomatic achievements of the Trump administration, which had finally forced several US regional partners to accept a formal normalization with Israel. For years, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and others were silently cooperating with Israel in the security, intelligence and military fields. Now, when the tensions between the Iranian Axis of Resistance and the US-Israeli-led bloc are on the rise, Washington has finally forced its allies to accept existing reality and even to expand the existing cooperation under the pretext of fighting the so-called Iranian threat.

The coming months will likely lead to even more revelations of the reality of modern diplomatic and security policy in the Middle East with the Israeli leadership taking the leading place in the policy of the Gulf monarchies.

The inability, and in some cases unwillingness, of the current format of the US-led anti-Iranian alliance to achieve its main goal – to destroy the current political regime in Iran – under the Trump leadership does not mean that these plans would cease when Mr. Trump leaves office. Instead, Tel Aviv is once again taking a leading role in their implementation. It is likely that the proactive position of Israel in the current conditions will be aimed at preventing the softening of US policy on the Iranian question under the incoming Democratic administration in the White House.

Israel is interested in creating such conditions in the region that would leave no other option for the US, but to continue the existing course towards further confrontation with Iran.

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Health and Wealth in India – Farmers’ Lives Matter

December 18th, 2020 by Colin Todhunter

To appreciate what is happening to agriculture and farmers in India, we must first understand how the development paradigm has been subverted. Development used to be about breaking with colonial exploitation and radically redefining power structures. Today, neoliberal dogma masquerades as economic theory and the subsequent deregulation of international capital ensures giant transnational conglomerates are able to ride roughshod over national sovereignty.

The deregulation of international capital flows has turned the planet into a free-for-all bonanza for the world’s richest capitalists. Under the post-World-War Two Bretton Woods monetary regime, governments could to a large extent run their own macroeconomic policy without having to constantly seek market confidence or worry about capital flight. However, the deregulation of global capital movement has increased levels of dependency of nation states on capital markets and the elite interests who control them.

Globalisation

The dominant narrative calls this ‘globalisation’, a euphemism for a predatory neoliberal capitalism based on endless profit growth, crises of overproduction, overaccumulation and market saturation and a need to constantly seek out and exploit new, untapped (foreign) markets to maintain profitability.

In India, we can see the implications very clearly. Instead of pursuing a path of democratic development, India has chosen (or has been coerced) to submit to the regime of foreign finance, awaiting signals on how much it can spend, giving up any pretence of economic sovereignty and leaving the space open for private capital to move in on and capture markets.

India’s agri-food sector has indeed been flung open, making it ripe for takeover. The country has borrowed more money from the World Bank than any other country in that institution’s history. Back in the 1990s, the World Bank directed India to implement market reforms that would result in the displacement of 400 million people from the countryside. Moreover, the World Bank’s ‘Enabling the Business of Agriculture’ directives entail opening up markets to Western agribusiness and their fertilisers, pesticides, weedicides and patented seeds and compel farmers to work to supply transnational corporate global supply chains.

The aim is to let powerful corporations take control under the guise of ‘market reforms’. The very transnational corporations that receive massive taxpayer subsidies, manipulate markets, write trade agreements and institute a regime of intellectual property rights, thereby indicating that the ‘free’ market only exists in the warped delusions of those who churn out clichés about ‘price discovery’ and the sanctity of ‘the market’.

What could this mean for India? We only have to look at the business model that keeps these companies in profit in the US: an industrialised system that relies on massive taxpayer subsidies and has destroyed many small-scale farmers’ livelihoods.

The fact that US agriculture now employs a tiny fraction of the population serves as a stark reminder for what is in store for Indian farmers. Agribusiness companies’ taxpayer-subsidised business models are based on overproduction and dumping on the world market to depress prices and rob farmers elsewhere of the ability to cover the costs of production. The result is huge returns and depressed farmer incomes.

Indian agriculture is to be wholly commercialised with large-scale, mechanised (monocrop) enterprises replacing family-run farms that help sustain hundreds of millions of rural livelihoods while feeding the masses.

India’s agrarian base is being uprooted, the very foundation of the country, its (food and non-food) cultural traditions, communities and rural economy. When agri-food corporations like Bayer (and previously Monsanto) or Reliance say they need to expand the use of GMOs under the guise of feeding a burgeoning population or to ‘modernise’ the sector, they are trying to justify their real objective: displacing independent cultivators, food processors and ‘mom and pop’ retailers and capturing the entire sector to boost their bottom line.

Indian agriculture has witnessed gross underinvestment over the years, whereby it is now wrongly depicted as a basket case and underperforming and ripe for a sell off to those very interests who had a stake in its underinvestment.

Today, we hear much talk of ‘foreign direct investment’ and making India ‘business friendly’, but behind the benign-sounding jargon lies the hard-nosed approach of modern-day capitalism that is no less brutal for Indian farmers than early industrial capitalism was for English peasants whose access to their productive means was stolen and who were then compelled to work in factories.

The intention is for India’s displaced cultivators to be retrained to work as cheap labour in the West’s offshored plants, even though nowhere near the numbers of jobs necessary are being created and that under the World Economic Forum’s ‘great reset’ human labour is to be largely replaced by artificial intelligence-driven technology under the guise of a ‘4th Industrial Revolution’.

As independent cultivators are bankrupted, the aim is that land will eventually be amalgamated to facilitate large-scale industrial cultivation. Those who remain in farming will be absorbed into corporate supply chains and squeezed as they work on contracts dictated by large agribusiness and chain retailers.

Cocktail of deception

A 2016 UN report said that by 2030, Delhi’s population will be 37 million.

One of the report’s principal authors, Felix Creutzig, said:

“The emerging mega-cities will rely increasingly on industrial-scale agricultural and supermarket chains, crowding out local food chains.”

The drive is to entrench industrial agriculture, commercialise the countryside and to replace small-scale farming, the backbone of food production in India. It could mean hundreds of millions of former rural dwellers without any work. And given the trajectory the country seems to be on, it does not take much to imagine a countryside with vast swathes of chemically-drenched monocrop fields containing genetically modified plants and soils rapidly degrading to become a mere repository for a chemical cocktail of proprietary biocides.

Transnational corporate-backed front groups are also hard at work behind the scenes. According to a September 2019 report in the New York Times, ‘A Shadowy Industry Group Shapes Food Policy Around the World’, the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) has been quietly infiltrating government health and nutrition bodies. The article lays bare ILSI’s influence on the shaping of high-level food policy globally, not least in India.

ILSI helps to shape narratives and policies that sanction the roll out of processed foods containing high levels of fat, sugar and salt. In India, ILSI’s expanding influence coincides with mounting rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Accused of being little more than a front group for its 400 corporate members that provide its $17 million budget, ILSI’s members include Coca-Cola, DuPont, PepsiCo, General Mills and Danone. The report says ILSI has received more than $2 million from chemical companies, among them Monsanto. In 2016, a UN committee issued a ruling that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s weed killer Roundup, was “probably not carcinogenic,” contradicting an earlier report by the WHO’s cancer agency. The committee was led by two ILSI officials.

From India to China, whether it has involved warning labels on unhealthy packaged food or shaping anti-obesity education campaigns that stress physical activity and divert attention from the role of food corporations, prominent figures with close ties to the corridors of power have been co-opted to influence policy in order to boost the interests of agri-food corporations.

Whether through IMF-World Bank structural adjustment programmes, as occurred in Africa, trade agreements like NAFTA and its impact on Mexico, the co-option of policy bodies at national and international levels or deregulated global trade rules, the outcome has been similar across the world: poor and less diverse diets and illnesses, resulting from the displacement of traditional, indigenous agriculture by a corporatised model centred on unregulated global markets and transnational monopolies.

For all the discussion in India about loan waivers for farmers and raising their income levels – as valid as this is – the core problems affecting agriculture remain.

Financialisation

Recent developments will merely serve to accelerate what is happening. For example, the Karnataka Land Reform Act will make it easier for business to purchase agricultural land, resulting in increased landlessness and urban migration.

Eventually, as a fully incorporated ‘asset’ of global capitalism, India could see private equity funds – pools of money that use pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds and investments from governments, banks, insurance companies and high net worth individuals – being injected into the agriculture sector. A recent article on the grain.org website notes how across the world this money is being used to lease or buy up farms on the cheap and aggregate them into large-scale, US-style grain and soybean concerns.

This process of ‘financialisation’ is shifting power to remote board rooms occupied by people with no connection to farming and who are merely in it to make money. These funds tend to invest for a 10-15 year period, resulting in handsome returns for investors but can leave a trail of long-term environmental and social devastation and serve to undermine local and regional food insecurity.

This financialisation of agriculture perpetuates a model of commercialised, globalised farming that serves the interests of the agrochemical and seed giants, including one of the world’s biggest companies, Cargill, which is involved in almost every aspect of global agribusiness.

Cargill trades in purchasing and distributing various agricultural commodities, raises livestock and produces animal feed as well as food ingredients for application in processed foods and industrial use. Cargill also has a large financial services arm, which manages financial risks in the commodity markets for the company. This includes Black River Asset Management, a hedge fund with about $10 billion of assets and liabilities.

A recent article on the Unearthed website accused Cargill and its 14 billionaire owners of profiting from the use of child labour, rain forest destruction, the devastation of ancestral lands, the spread of pesticide use and pollution, contaminated food, antibiotic resistance and general health and environmental degradation.

While this model of corporate agriculture is highly financially lucrative for rich investors and billionaire owners, is this the type of ‘development’ – are these the types of companies –  that will benefit hundreds of millions involved in India’s agrifood sector or the country’s 1.3-billion-plus consumers and their health?

Farm bills and post-COVID

As we witness the undermining of the Agricultural Produce Market Committees or mandis, part of an ongoing process to dismantle India’s public distribution system and price support mechanisms for farmers, it is little wonder that massive protests by farmers have been taking place in the country.

Recent legislation based on three important farm bills are aimed at imposing the shock therapy of neoliberalism on the sector, finally clearing the way to restructure the agri-food sector for the benefit of large commodity traders and other (international) corporations: smallholder farmers will go to the wall in a landscape of ‘get big or get out’, mirroring the US model of food cultivation and retail.

This represents a final death knell for indigenous agriculture in India. The legislation will mean that mandis – state-run market locations for farmers to sell their agricultural produce via auction to traders – can be bypassed, allowing farmers to sell to private players elsewhere (physically and online), thereby undermining the regulatory role of the public sector. In trade areas open to the private sector, no fees will be levied (fees levied in mandis go to the states and, in principle, are used to enhance market infrastructure to help farmers).

This could incentivise the corporate sector operating outside of the mandis to (initially at least) offer better prices to farmers; however, as the mandi system is run down completely, these corporations will monopolise trade, capture the sector and dictate prices to farmers.

Another outcome could see the largely unregulated storage of produce and speculation, opening the farming sector to a free-for-all profiteering payday for the big players and jeopardising food security. The government will no longer regulate and make key produce available to consumers at fair prices. This policy ground has been ceded to market players – again under the pretence of ‘letting the market decide’ through ‘price discovery’.

The legislation will enable transnational agri-food corporations like Cargill and Walmart and India’s billionaire capitalists Gautam Adani (agribusiness conglomerate) and Mukesh Ambini (Reliance retail chain) to decide on what is to be cultivated at what price, how much of it is to be cultivated within India and how it is to be produced and processed.  Industrial agriculture will be the norm with all the devastating health, social and environmental costs that the model brings with it.

Of course, many millions have already been displaced from the Indian countryside and have had to seek work in the cities. And if the coronavirus-related lockdown has indicated anything, it is that many of these ‘migrant workers’ have failed to gain a secure foothold and were compelled to return ‘home’ to their villages. Their lives are defined by low pay and insecurity after 30 years of neoliberal ‘reforms’.

Today, there is talk of farmerless farms being manned by driverless machines and monitored by drones with lab-based food becoming the norm.  One may speculate what this could mean: commodity crops from patented GM seeds doused with chemicals and cultivated for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed by biotech companies and constituted into something resembling food.

Post-COVID, the World Bank talks about helping countries get back on track in return for structural reforms. Are even more smallholder Indian farmers to be displaced from their land in return for individual debt relief and universal basic income? The displacement of these farmers and the subsequent destruction of rural communities and their cultures was something the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation once called for and cynically termed “land mobility”.

It raises the question: what does the future hold for the hundreds of millions of others who will be victims of the dispossessive policies of an elite group of powerful interests?

The various lockdowns around the globe have already exposed the fragility of the global food system, dominated by long-line supply chains and global conglomerates. What we have seen underscores the need for a radical transformation of the prevailing globalised food regime which must be founded on localisation and food sovereignty and challenges dependency on global conglomerates and distant volatile commodity markets.

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Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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The world’s richest country USA has one of the least healthy populations.

Among developed nations, Americans have shorter lifespans, more illnesses and injuries — despite around double the per capita amount spent on healthcare compared to other developed countries.

In cahoots with Pharma, large hospital chains, and insurers, US ruling authorities prioritize profits over human health.

America has the world’s best healthcare system — based on the ability to pay.

Proper care when most needed  is increasingly unaffordable for millions.

What should be a model system for the rest of the world community of nations to emulate is dysfunctional for most of its people.

Sickness is prioritized over good health because the latter is unprofitable.

Among 37 OECD countries, the US has one of the lowest life expectancy rates.

It has one of the highest per capita rates of infant mortality, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, strokes, respiratory illnesses and other illnesses.

The incidence of premature births in the US for lack of proper care is much like in underdeveloped countries.

In most all health categories, including chronic illnesses affecting half the population, the US ranks poorly.

A combination of processed foods and hazardous GMOs, further contaminated by pesticides, unsafe air and water, along with toxic drugs, including vaccines, benefits a sickness industry by creating an unhealthy population.

Earlier US generations were healthier than the current one.

High-cost/unaffordable US healthcare for most Americans is a leading cause of death.

So are prescription drugs, notably toxic vaccines.

A 2014 Harvard study found that nearly three million adverse prescription drug reactions happen annually.

Over 100,000 Americans die each year from prescribed drugs, including vaccines.

Low income and poverty are leading causes of poor health.

In January, the Commonwealth Fund reported the following:

“The US spends more on health care than any other high-income country but has the lowest life expectancy.”

“The US has the highest suicide rate among wealthy nations.”

“The US had worse (health) outcomes… compared to other high-income countries.”

“The US has the highest chronic disease burden and an obesity rate that is two times higher than the OECD average.”

“Compared to peer nations, the US has among the highest number of hospitalizations from preventable causes and the highest rate of avoidable deaths.”

According to a 2016 study on the relationship between income and life expectancy in the US, men in the top 1% income bracket live 15 years longer than those in the bottom 1%.

For women, the difference is about 10 years.

Millions of Americans lack health insurance, many millions more inadequately covered because of unaffordability.

According to the Urban Institute,  the US “lags behind (many other countries on healthcare), education…child poverty, and income inequality.”

Predatory capitalism, high unemployment and underemployment, along with neoliberal harshness made the US one of the most unhealthy nations among developed ones.

According to LearnTheRisk.org, “(v)accines do not create immunity.”

“They create customers. It’s the best business model in the world. It keeps people coming back for more – forever.”

Toxins in vaccines produce customers for other Pharma drugs.

The UN Human Development Report ranked life expectancy in the US 36th among the world community of nations.

In the 1950s, the US had one of the world’s highest life expectancy rates.

It also had high tax rates on the rich and less spent on militarism, endless wars, and so-called homeland security — all of the above causing harm, not good.

Today the US has the world’s highest child poverty rate among developed nations and increasing social inequality.

Both are harmful to human health in a nation of, by, and for the privileged few at the expense of most others.

Americans can have whatever they want based on the ability to pay.

Mass unemployment, underemployment, and growing poverty deny the fruits of the richest country to most of its people.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from PYMNTS.com

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The International Movement for a JUST World (JUST) has published an ebook. “Exploring the Coronavirus Crisis”, a collection of articles contributed by the President, the Vice President, some members of the Executive Committee, some individuals within the general membership and staff of JUST.

They run through the pandemic looking at the socio-economic consequences of the lockdowns and the persistence of geopolitical persecutions through unforgiving sanctions and even an invasion as if the pandemic was a convenience to be exploited for the convenience of the hegemon.

The collection tells a story of humanity quite able to abandon the moral compass and yet, some optimism lives on for a humane future.

Click here to read the e-Book.

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Askiah Adam is the Executive Director of JUST.

Featured image is a screenshot of the cover page of the e-Book

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It has already been observed that Joe Biden’s incoming cabinet looks a bit like old wine in new bottles, drawing as it does on veterans from the Barack Obama and even the Bill Clinton administrations. That’s the bad news as it very much looks like business as usual as the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Wall Street kleptocracy is reasserting itself and will be in place for the next four years. Which is not to say that the Donald Trump version thereof was a whole lot different, but Trump was erratic enough to make the power brokers in America nervous, which was presumably enough reason to possibly rig the election and get rid of him.

The four key appointees to the new administration in terms of how the United States confronts the world are the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the National Security Advisor. All of Biden’s picks are, if not completely hawkish, at least dedicated to the notion that the U.S. should be actively pre-emptively engaged in democracy promotion and liberal interventionism. If a little regime change is needed here and there, so be it. General Lloyd Austin, who may have trouble in getting confirmed by the Senate as Secretary of Defense, Tony Blinken, Secretary of State presumptive, and DNI Avril Haines have all been involved in making money out of the defense/national security establishment since they have been out of office. There is an assumption among ex-officials in the United States government that lobbying one’s former colleagues to buy products or services that are not needed is a perfectly legitimate semi-retirement avocation. Some, however, do not see it that way and General Austin’s service on the board of major defense contractor Raytheon may have crossed the red line, even for those who are accustomed to looking the other way when corruption looms.

It is assumed that the former torture-prison chief and currently Director of CIA Gina Haspel will be fired either by Donald Trump or by Biden, meaning that that position will also be vacant, likely to be filled by another friend of Clinton/Obama. David Cohen, a former analyst has been spoken of as the likely candidate. He previously served as a widely acknowledged utterly incompetent and out of place Director of Operations, appointed by Barack Obama in 2015 even though he had no real experience in intelligence operations, much less in running the Agency’s Clandestine Service. Unfortunately, incompetence and irrelevancy have never stopped anyone from moving onward and upward in the U.S. government. Quite the contrary.

Some see a silver lining in the clouds, namely a “return to diplomacy” after the debacle of the belligerent dispensationalist Mike Pompeo. Alas Pompeo for all his bluster has not actually started any new wars, while Blinken was the main man behind the bid to overthrow the Syrian government even though it posed no threat to the United States. He has never apologized for the wars he was involved in under Obama and has only regretted that they were not more successful, so we can safely assume that he will continue to do what he can in support of the globalist agenda as well as for the country that he loves best, which is Israel.

And there are also the somewhat more elusive aspects of Democratic Party leadership thinking that will shape the course of the new Administration. Still simmering hatred for Russia over the phony narrative that the Kremlin was behind the 2016 defeat of the execrable Hillary Clinton means that relations with that country will if anything get worse, particularly if the Clintons continue to be a major driving force behind the Democratic National Committee. And then there is China. There is every indication that the Democrats have bought into the China-bashing initiated by Donald Trump and sustained by the conspiracy theory that Beijing both weaponized a virus to destroy Western democracy and threatens “freedom.” Pentagon plans to build up the U.S. Navy to confront China in its own coastal waters while also reshaping the Marine Corps to equip it with breakthrough guided battlefield weapons to confront the “Yellow Menace” will not be reversed by Biden and company.

It can be taken as a given that the Biden/Harris regime will continue America’s Israel-centric foreign policy but it will be interesting to see if they persevere in the Trump program of bribing fringe Arab states to “recognize” Israel. Up until now, Washington’s buying of desperate regimes has included F-35s for the UAE’s Mohammed bin Zayed, canceling of the inclusion on the economy-brutalizing “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list for the military junta of starving Sudan, and now, uniquely, endorsing Morocco’s 45-year-old sovereignty claim over the Western Sahara, a region that has its own government and has become a member state of the African Union. It has also been diplomatically recognized by 84 other governments represented at the U.N. The U.S. is in addition the only state to recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights while also giving the green light to the Jewish state’s stated intention to declare formal sovereignty claim over most of the occupied State of Palestine. It is unlikely that Biden will seek to reverse those sell-outs and he will not move the U.S. Embassy from Jerusalem back to Tel Aviv.

The Israelis have already warned Biden not to re-enter any U.N. human rights organizations or fund the agency that provides relief to Palestinian refugees. They have also advised him against trying to cut any kind of deal with the Iranians, sending the signal that when it comes to Iran, including assassinations, Israel is in charge. And also, the Biden “plan,” if one can dignify it by using that word, to reengage with Iran is a non-starter. American and Israeli belligerency over the past four years has soured the Iranian people on any kind of rapprochement, with conservatives now politically dominant. They will likely sweep the elections scheduled to be held next year. Biden’s intention to get the Iranians to abandon their sophisticated missile weapons program and their support for Syria in addition to reopening their nuclear sites to U.S. inspectors will also go nowhere. Iran will continue to be enemy number one for the Democrats just as it has been for Trump and his principal financial backer Israel-firster casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

Joe Biden will certainly have to work hard to equal the interventionist policies entertained by his predecessors in office, but he, of course, has had experience both in Congress and as Vice President in shaping those policies and promoting American “exceptionalism” as we have come to know it. And he will be helped along the way by Tony Blinken, Avril Haines, Jake Sullivan and General Lloyd Austin lest he stray from the established path. The fact is that elections change nothing in Washington but the name plates on the doors.

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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]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Vice President Joe Biden, Austin, and Command Sergeant Major Earl Rice, at an event marking the award of the Iraq Commitment Medal in December 2011 (Source: Flickr)

The Covid Scare Campaign Relentlessly Continues

December 18th, 2020 by Prof. Ruel F. Pepa

This headline on a leading online news site stares me in the face: Coronavirus infection is on the rise in Spain. Here’s another “scare campaign” news in the time when people are catching the flu. Besides, there are those who have been tested “positive” using the inaccurate and unreliable PCR test. They feel well and have no symptoms at all yet declared “infected”. As long as the vaccine hasn’t yet been fully made ready for the public, scaremongering will continue to flood media outlets. In fact, the Spanish Health Ministry has already warned the public that the country is already entering the “third wave” of this BULLSHIT.  At least, here in Madrid, we see a growing number of people who have already woken up to reality and can no longer be fooled by these scaremongers who have been the mouthpiece of the criminals behind this FALSE PANDEMIC.

Through and through, from the “first wave” to the ensuing waves thereafter, it was, is, and will be nothing but the flu. The promoters of this PLAndemic called “Covid-19” have deceived the whole world through scaremongering. There is no pandemic and the so-called “Covid-19” is nothing but HF-20 (Hyped Flu in the year 2020). It will continue until the vaccine is made available for the public. But why vaccinate when HF-20 can be treated by over-the-counter medicines like Fluimucil Forte 600 mg and  Paracetamol 500 mg? Even the home-remedy steam inhalation has been proven effective in declogging the lungs to makes the “infected” person feel better instead of subjecting them to the lethal risk of intubation in the hospital. 

Three months ago, a woman surfer was arrested in San Sebastian north of Spain after someone reported to authorities that she was tested “positive” for coronavirus infection. It seems like the “dirty pieces” are falling into their proper places and the canards about the so-called virus infection are only meant to scare people and condition their minds to effect global economic disruption. The scare tactics have paid off and fostered extreme paranoia in people’s minds. The aftermath is the severe destruction of a country’s economy. The PLANdemic has been very successful in Spain and the criminals behind it are rejoicing. The world’s been single-mindedly caught up and terrorized by the PLANdemic unaware that we’re heading toward a global economic disaster. Everybody’s been positive about the “new normal” but nobody sees the evil of the “Great Reset”. That’s the power of brainwashing. 

Take that woman as a case in point: Tested “positive” but didn’t feel sick at all. “Asymptomatic” as the term applied to her. But she could get into surfing which is one heck of a strenuous sport. You think a really sick person could do surfing? And now you say that the danger she posed to the general public was the real issue. Whatever the real issue was, I’d like to think that the woman was taking care of herself well and careful enough not to be in close contact with the others. In fact, when she was arrested, she was all alone on the beach isolated from her colleagues and from the general public. But she fell victim to this whole “scare network” to advance the programme of economic disempowerment globally perpetrated by the criminals behind the coronavirus PLANdemic.

The news item carrying the story on an online news site has a photo and a short video clip projecting the impact of a nasty drama intended to strike heightened terror and trepidation in the minds of people who have been conditioned by media propaganda to believe that the coronavirus PLANdemic is out there to get them. When the lies are no longer sustainable and defiance is not only looming but has already become overwhelming, this is the kind of news they come up with.

The Covid-19 that’s proliferating all over the world could actually be “PSYCHOLOGICAL COVID”! [1]. Now that practically all of us have already been caught within this nasty loop, there’s no way to get out unless there’s a radical change of mind. The global propaganda has imprisoned us in what could be likened to Plato’s cave. In this condition, the most difficult thing to do is to shatter the chimera and free ourselves from enslavement.

Media outlets subservient to the “scare narratives” imposed by the criminals behind the spread of this virus have regularly been coming up with reports condemning people defiant of prescriptions laid down by the powers that take advantage of the situation. Because of the on-going regimen imposed to control the spread of the virus, there will not only be a “second wave” but a “third wave” and a “fourth wave” and so on and so forth even in the next two or three decades. Simply put, this event, misnomered as a “pandemic” will go on and on and on. And this is what the criminal economic dictators have designed it to be. In the final analysis, they will certainly be in absolute control of the global economy.

In countries where hundreds of thousands of people have been heavily infected by Covid-19, the massive number of deaths was not due to the virus itself but because of killer drugs (anti-Malaria, anti-HIV, anti-Ebola, etc.) administered to severely ill patients in hospitals. And all along, my theory stands: “Covid-19” which in reality is HF-20 (hyped flu in 2020) is not a joke but it is not as deadly as it has been peddled by its creators. Patients don’t have to be hospitalized even in severe cases because treatment may be administered at home: (1) To declog the lungs of thick phlegm/mucus that could lead to infection resulting in pneumonia, Fluimucil Forte 600 mg is the solution; (2) To ease breathing, intubation is not necessary (in fact, it could even cause lethal consequences); steam inhalation is the solution; (3) There’s fever? Nothing beats Paracetamol 500 mg.

In conclusion, one thing is certain: We’ve been deceived – and immensely deceived – by the creators of this virus (1) to take total control over global economies and (2) to sell to us the vaccine they have been developing and fast-tracking with no serious consideration of all the clear and present risks it can possibly cause to the detriment of human lives.

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Prof. Ruel F. Pepa is a Filipino philosopher based in Madrid, Spain. A retired academic (Associate Professor IV), he taught Philosophy and Social Sciences for more than fifteen years at Trinity University of Asia, an Anglican university in the Philippines.

Note

[1] “How many people have ‘psychological COVID?” by John Rappoport  

https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/09/03/how-many-people-have-psychological-covid/

Featured image is from dreamstime

America’s Ongoing Imperial Scam

December 18th, 2020 by Karen Kwiatkowski

One week after the most attention-demanding election of our lifetimes, another Veteran’s Day came and went.  For the occasion, presumed President-elect Joe Biden laid a wreath at the Korean War Memorial in Philadelphia; whilst yet-to-conceded incumbent President Donald Trump held a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. 

Both channeled and invoked the great reverence Americans still hold for veterans of the bygone Second World War and more complicated Korean conflagration.  Only some 300,000 of the men, and women, who fought in the former are still living.  No doubt we will continue to hear how many succumbed to Covid-19 in the past year, and whose fault that is.

Yet, in his official statement, Biden added a personal touch — his son Beau’s service in Iraq — and a “personal commitment:” “I will never treat you or your families with anything less than the honor you deserve.”  If he really means it, rebalancing U.S. war-making authority and ditching the dated Second World War analogies would be a good start.

World War II remains the go-to conflict for commemoration almost 80 years after America entered the fray.  It marks the last time the U.S. Congress did its constitutional duty and actually declared war before sending America’s young men off to kill and die on foreign fields.

All subsequent wars,from Korea and Vietnam, to the Iraqs (1991, 2003, 2014), Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and a host of military deployments on every continent around the world were waged at the pleasure of the sitting president, amply funded by the Congress, yet conveniently never rose to the level of a declared war.

Little Wars & Presidencies 

We should consider these wars linked to the presidents themselves, or — perhaps more accurately — to their executive staffs, and the Department of Defense.  War policy-making power has almost completely shifted from the peoples representatives (House and Senate) to unelected appointees often recruited from think tanks — these funded by an array of organizations interested not in peace, but in accessing tax dollars, and gaining revenues at home and abroad. 

Biden’s incoming national security team is chock-full of them.  War spending, even in the absence of any notable war, is so compelling that for years, a Congress often unable to come up with a budget ensured the flow stayed strong to the Pentagon — and its cousin, the CIA — through continuing resolutions. 

So-called overseas contingency operations, or little wars, have seen their funding go “off-book,” as the Pentagon budget now covers just its routine expenses — wars are paid for on top of that budget, so long as the Congress can be convinced by their Pentagon liaisons.  And they nearly always are.

This obscene spending for military weapons, training, gifts to allies, technology enhancement — for everything from cyberwar, surveillance, data collection, AI, robotics — as well as for standard “pocketbook” weapons systems like the F-35 fighter and aircraft carriers, represent the Military Industrial Complex’s (MIC) mainstay. 

Consider a disturbingly accurate recent diagnosis of the current situation:

“…the U.S. Presidents and their aides are quite aware of the current state of the US military: it is a military which simply cannot win even simple conflicts…a military whose Air Force spent absolutely obscene amounts of money to create a supposedly 5th generationfighter which in many ways is inferior to US 4th generation aircraft!”

It is against this larded and incompetent backdrop — of economic dependencies for a war machine directed by men and women who’ve never fought a declared war, and scant understanding of what defending the nation ought look like — that Americans await an inbound president who now feels obliged to add the patriotic tick “May God protect our troops” at the tail end of speeches.

Empty Gestures

Veterans, Memorial, Independence, or even just Tuesdays — replete with military flyovers at football games amidst an age of pandemic — have become empty gestures.  VA hospitals across the country had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, and it is there today that many of our Vietnam veterans — of another little war mainly designed to entertain Pentagon fantasies at their expense — rot, for lack of a better word. 

Ultimately, these sacrifices, all part of a larger Washingtonian game, hardy matter to anyone but Vietnam alumni’s wives, kids — and this generation’s numbers now also dwindle.

What purpose then, does obligatory national celebration — in prose or pageantry — of veterans actually serve in year 20 of intractable and hopeless wars?  Clearly, veterans and their families are the only ones who truly sacrificed anything.  Those negotiating massive defense contracts — including built-in clauses covering delays, flaws, and implicit corruption — won’t even sacrifice surplus profits for the good of the country. 

Money isn’t blood, and stock prices can’t compensate limbs (to the tune of 1,645 single or multiple amputee veterans between 9/11 and 2015). 

The war machine is largely about money (for select elites) and creating new and expanding markets (benefitting the same) — the modern veteran’s primary function is simply that of “patriotic” bait for the public.  In fact, trotting out idealized veterans rationalizes and justifies MIC-corruption — trading on the good will that most American have for those who served (even if the government they served was lying about why) is increasingly unworkable.

Military recruitment has long been a challenge, partly because Americans increasingly see through the systemic scam, and are left wondering whether it’s such a great deal after all.  Despite the Pentagon’s massive data collection efforts and widespread access to high school and college students, recruitment is becoming more and more difficult. 

The latest army and air force recruiting approach involves convincing economically-insecure parents to encourage their kids to get out of their basements, and pursue dreams of playing soldier in the woods or flying video game-like drones.  In an era where more young people live at home for longer, this approach may appeal to parents, but it’s also a tell. 

Despite repeated and routine public deference to veterans, the truth is out.  There are just too many truth bombs available from potential recruits’ family and friends; too much outrage at the increasingly exposed police militarization in America’s streets — many of their new hires practicing what they learned patrolling Baghdad or Kandahar, policing Baltimore and Kansas City.

There’s scant solace in knowing top defense contractors rake in untold billions, whilst too many American families slip further through the cracks, unsure of whence their next thousand will come.  And here’s a truth uncomfortable for far too many privileged and polite liberals so ready for a quiet return to a Biden-induced normalcy: both Trumpism and left-leaning progressivism was partly fueled by that shared realization.

Our veterans, too, have a solid sense of this truth — a truth that’s often painful, embarrassing and sometimes shameful. The Pentagon has little intrinsic interest in helping veterans, except to the extent that veterans, individually or collectively, can both execute and justify profitable business-as-usual foreign policies — which are increasingly crass, contradictory, and unconstitutional affairs.

To truly honor our troops and veterans, Biden’s bunch should be brutally honest about what Washingtonian war” is, and should respect the very real sacrifices of the “other 1 percent” who actually serve—by demanding a more honorable and restrained foreign policy.  That’s going to require more action than obligatory utterance, and admission of a final hard truth: 

The imperial scam we’ve kept calling a republic these past 70 years is collapsing, and it will take all of us — veteran and civilian alike — to ensure a soft landing.

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Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D, is a farmer, teacher, and retired USAF lieutenant colonel, who spent years working in the Pentagon.  She was a notable critic and whistleblower in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion.  Karen was featured in the acclaimed documentary, “Why We Fight” (2005), writes regularly for Lewrockwell.com, and has had her work published in Salon, The American Conservative, and the Huffington Post, among others.  She is a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of independent veteran military and national security experts.

Featured image: On Memorial Day, Joe Biden, accompanied by his wife Jill Biden, at Veterans Memorial Park, Wilmington, Delaware, May 25, 2020. (Adam Schultz, Biden for President, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

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People from across the political spectrum have called on President Trump to pardon the WikiLeaks founder, citing the importance of the freedom to publish.

Assange’s fiancé Stella Morris, the mother of his two young children, has previously called for a pardon — but a formal request was not filed with the White House until this week.

Assange is imprisoned in the United Kingdom pending a decision about his extradition to the United States where he faces charges under the Espionage Act for his publication of the Iraq and Afghan War Logs. If convicted he could face a maximum sentence of 175 years for the “crime” of publishing material that the US government did not want the population to know.

In 2018, President Trump’s attorneys quietly made a case in defense of WikiLeaks throughout legal filings responding to a lawsuit filed by Democrat Party donors who alleged that the campaign and former advisor Roger Stone conspired with Russians to publish the leaked Democratic National Committee emails.

Buried within hundreds of pages of case filings, in a motion filed in October 2018, Trump lawyer Michael A. Carvin argued that under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (47 U.S.C. § 230), “a website that provides a forum where ‘third parties can post information’ is not liable for the third party’s posted information.”

“That is so even when even when the website performs ‘editorial functions’ ‘such as deciding whether to publish,’” the filing contends. “Since WikiLeaks provided a forum for a third party (the unnamed ‘Russian actors’) to publish content developed by that third party (the hacked emails), it cannot be held liable for the publication.”

This defense holds true for the war log releases that Assange has been charged for publishing.

“In addition, the First Amendment generally denies the government power to punish truthful speech,” Carvin wrote. He added that privacy cannot justify these violations of core First Amendment norms. The filing then refers to the 1989 case of Florida Star v. B.J.F., in which it was determined that “punishing truthful publication in the name of privacy” is an “extraordinary measure.”

The formal pardon request comes on the heels of a viral claim from a Trump ally that the president would be pardoning the publisher. While he ended up retracting his statement, claiming he had faulty sources, it was clear that it was a move that people from both sides of the political spectrum support. The tweet gained over 75,000 “likes” on Twitter in about an hour, before being retracted.

National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden weighed in on the news saying that “I very much hope this is true. The case against Assange is based on a legal theory that would criminalize the work of every journalist, both at home and abroad.”

Snowden has previously lobbied for a pardon for Assange, even before one for himself.

“Mr. President, if you grant only one act of clemency during your time in office, please: free Julian Assange. You alone can save his life,” Snowden tweeted earlier this month.

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Cassandra Fairbanks is a former leftist who came out in support of Donald Trump in 2016. She has been published in the International Business Times, RT, Sputnik, The Independent and countless other publications.

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Prefácio

A campanha de medo tem servido como instrumento de desinformação.

No decorrer dos últimos onze meses, desde o princípio de Janeiro, tenho analisado quase diariamente a evolução da crise do Covid. Desde o próprio anúncio em Janeiro de 2020, as pessoas foram levadas a acreditar e aceitar a existência de uma epidemia em progressão rápida e perigosa.

Media mentirosos apregoaram a imagem de um vírus mortal , o que inicialmente contribuiu para desestabilizar o comércio EUA-China e interromper viagens aéreas. E a seguir, em Fevereiro, “V- o Vírus” (o qual aliás é semelhante à gripe sazonal) foi considerado responsável por disparar a mais grave crise financeira da história mundial.

Então, em 11 de Março, foi imposto um confinamento sobre os 193 estados das Nações Unidas, levando ao “encerramento” de economias nacionais à escala mundial.

A partir de Outubro, foi anunciada uma “segunda onda”. “A pandemia não está acabada”.

A campanha de medo prevalece. E as pessoas são agora levadas a acreditar que a vacina corona patrocinada pelos seus governos é a “solução”. E que a “normalidade” será restaurada uma vez vacinada toda a população do planeta.

Uma palavra sobre a vacina SARS-CoV-2

Como é que uma vacina para o vírus SARS-CoV-2, a qual sob condições normais levaria anos para ser desenvolvida, foi prontamente lançada no início de Novembro de 2020. A vacina anunciada pela Pfizer é baseada numa edição experimental de genes mRNA que têm influência no genoma humano .

Foram realizados os testes padrão de laboratório em animais utilizando ratos ou furões?

Ou será que a Pfizer “foi directamente para cobaias humanas” ? Os testes em humanos começaram em finais de Julho e princípios de Agosto. “Nunca se ouviu falar de três meses para testar uma nova vacina”. “Vários anos é a norma” .

Pouco divulgado pelos media:   ” Seis pessoas morreram na fase final do ensaio da vacina COVID-19 da Pfizer , revelou a FDA apenas horas depois de a Grã-Bretanha se ter tornado o primeiro país do mundo a aplicar a vacina”.

“Fique tranquilo”, a vacina é “segura”. De acordo com a FDA : diz-se que as mortes não levantam novas questões de segurança ou questões sobre a eficácia da vacina”.

E porque precisamos de uma vacina para a Covid-19 quando tanto a OMS como o Centro de Controlo e Prevenção de Doenças (CDC) dos EUA confirmaram inequivocamente que a Covid-19 é “semelhante à gripe sazonal” ?

O plano para desenvolver uma vacina é conduzido pelo lucro. Ele é apoiado por governos corruptos ao serviço dos interesses da Big Pharma. O governo dos EUA já encomendou 100 milhões de doses já em Julho em a UE está para comprar 300 milhões de doses. É o Big Money para a Big Pharma, generosos subornos para corromper políticos, a expensas dos contribuintes.

Nos capítulos seguintes, definimos o vírus SARS-CoV-2 e o controverso teste RT-PCR que está a ser usado para “identificar o vírus” bem como para estabelecer as “estimativas” dos assim chamados “casos positivos” (Capítulo II).

No Capítulo III, examinamos em pormenor a cronologia dos eventos desde Outubro de 2020 que levou ao histórico confinamento de 11 de Março de 2020.

Avaliamos as vastas consequências económicas e sociais desta crise incluindo o processo de empobrecimento e redistribuição de riqueza à escala mundial em favor dos multimilionários Super Ricos (Capítulos IV e V).

O programa de vacinação da Big Pharma, o qual está destinado a ser imposto sobre milhões de pessoas em todo o mundo é revisto no Capítulo VII.

O Capítulo IX conclui com uma análise da “Grande Reinicialização” (“Great Reset”) proposta pelo World Economic Forum, a qual, se adoptada, consistiria em sucatear o Estado de bem-estar social (Welfare State) e impor medidas maciças de austeridade sobre uma população empobrecida.

Este E-Book é preliminar. Há um sentido de urgência. Os povos à escala mundial estão a ser enganados pelos seus governos.

Uma palavra acerca da metodologia: o nosso objectivo é refutar a “Grande Mentira” através de análise cuidadosa consistente de:

  • Uma visão histórica geral da crise do Covid,
  • Análise científica e revisão pormenorizada de dados “oficiais”, estimativas e definições,
  • Análise dos impactos das “linhas orientadoras” da OMC e de políticas governamentais sobre variáveis económicas, sociais e de saúde pública.

Nosso objectivo é informar os povos à escala mundial e refutar a narrativa oficial que tem sido usada como pretexto e justificação para desestabilizar o tecido económico e social de países inteiros.

A crise afecta a humanidade na sua totalidade:   7,8 mil milhões de pessoas. Posicionamo-nos em solidariedade com nossos companheiros seres humanos em todo o mundo. A verdade é um instrumento poderoso.

Estou em dívida para com os nossos leitores e a equipe do Global Research.

Michel Chossudovsky

O original encontra-se em www.globalresearch.ca/…

The 2020 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset” 15 de Dezembro de 2020

Tradução por o site Resistir.info

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Abstract

Background: Up-to-date, there is no recognized effective treatment or vaccine for the treatment of COVID-19 that emphasize urgency around distinctive effective therapies. This study aims to evaluate the anti-parasitic medication efficacy “Ivermectin” plus standard care (azithromycin, vitamin C, Zinc, Lactoferrin & Acetylcystein & prophylactic or therapeutic anticoagulation if D-dimer > 1000) in the treatment of mild/moderate and severely ill cases with COVID 19 infection, as well as prophylaxis of health care and/ or household contacts in comparison to the Hydroxychloroquine plus standard treatment.

Subject and methods: 600 subjects; 400 symptomatic confirmed COVID-19 patients and 200 health care and household contacts distributed over 6 groups; Group I: 100 patients with Mild/Moderate COVID-19 infection received a 4-days course of Ivermectin plus standard of care; Group II: 100 patients with mild/moderate COVID-19 infection received hydroxyxholorquine plus standard of care; Group III: 100 patients with severe COVID-19 infection received Ivermectin plus standard of care; Group IV: 100 patients with Severe COVID-19 infection received hydroxyxholorquine plus standard of care. Routine laboratory investigations and RT-PCR were reported before and after initiation of treatment. Group V stick to personal protective equipment (PPE) plus Ivermectin 400mcg / kg to be repeated after one week, and Group VI stick to PPE only and both groups V&VI were followed for two weeks.

Results: Patients received ivermectin reported substantial recovery of laboratory investigations; and significant reduction in RT-PCR conversion days. A substantial improvement and reduction in mortality rate in Ivermectin treated groups; group I (mild/moderate cases), (99%, and 0.0%, respectively) and group III (severe cases), (94%, and 2.0%, respectively) versus hydroxychloroquine plus standard care treated groups; group II (mild/moderate cases), (74% and 4%, respectively) and group IV (severe cases) (50% and 20%, respectively). Ivermectin had significantly reduced the incidence of infection in health care and household contacts up to 2% compared to 10% in non ivermectin group

Conclusion: Addition of Ivermectin to standard care is very effective drug for treatment of COVID-19 patients with significant reduction in mortality compared to Hydroxychloroquine plus standard treatment only. Early use of Ivermectin is very useful for controlling COVID 19 infections, prophylaxis and improving cytokines storm.

Read full article here.

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Authored by: Ahmed Elgazzar, Basma Hany, Shaimaa Abo Youssef, Mohy Hafez, Hany Moussa

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No Flu this Year? Or Is Flu the Second Wave of Covid?

December 17th, 2020 by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Is there no flu this year or is flu “the second wave of Covid?”  

Don’t expect any honest answer from health authorities.  They have the fear running strong, so strong that people are submitting to needless lockdowns that are causing economic havoc to their lives and to mask mandates that do more harm than good.  

What is it all about?

Is it simply about vaccine profits for Big Pharma?

Or is it about getting people accustomed to arbitrary orders unsupported by legislation?  Isn’t what we are experiencing a takeover of our lives by the executive part of government?

Or is it about reducing human fertility?  Experts report that the American vaccine contains anti-fertility elements that will make a percentage of the female population infertile.  Why is there no public discussion of this?  There are also expert concerns about the novelty of the way the vaccine is supposed to work.  It is an approach never before used and has not had sufficient trials to know the consequences.

Why the rush for a vaccine with so many issues when there are two known inexpensive cures for Covid?  HCQ and ivermectin are inexpensive proven cures with far fewer side effects than the vaccine (see this). Yet “health authorities” in league with Big Pharma prevent their use.

Why?

British health authorities claim that a new more highly contagious strain of Covid has broken out. This frightens people, but no claim has been made that the new strain—perhaps only the seasonal flu—has a higher death rate.

The media keeps the fear pressure on.  300,000 dead Americans are claimed.  But the CDC’s own data shows that almost all the deaths ascribed to Covid corresponded to the presence of 2.6 comorbidities.  In other words, if a person dies, the death is blamed on Covid regardless of the cause.  Why does the media hide this information from the public?

Keep in mind that the RT-PCR Covid test is known to produce a high percentage of false positives and that the high number of infections are the result of false positives.

You can tell that this crisis is being manufactured, because these issues are prevented from being publically examined.

Instead, social media and print, TV, and NPR “presstitutes” ban all mention of the many experts who take issue with the controlled explanation.

Notice that the media are not Covid experts but they claim to have the only correct explanation.

How is that possible?

How can media possibly know when expert opinion is suppressed? The presstitutes are simply reading a story line handed to them.

The Covid hype has all the hallmarks of a conspiracy.

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

The 2008 Crash was caused by collapse of mortgage-backed securities. Loans were given to non-credit worthy borrowers until the system collapsed.

What is happening today that may cause a greater multi-level crash?

Several trends are coming together that may create a perfect storm and a long decline.

  1. The Pandemic is collapsing small businesses and wages. A significant segment of the economy that once supported jobs and living-wages is gone. Even if the economy comes back in 2022-23, many small business will not. Business’s owner equity will be wiped out, commercial real estate values will fall. Access to unique, essential, or cultural things will be lost. Even before the pandemic, Ashland, Oregon lost its music store, outdoor recreation store, and yes our costume store. Now with the pandemic, our hospitality economy, and once great Shakespeare Festival is in question. You don’t appreciate a local business until it’s gone.
  2. New online minimum-wage warehouse jobs do not replace lost living-wage jobs. Amazon has recently added 430,000 mostly distribution jobs, but these are not living-wage jobs. This is just a dent in the face of almost 1 million jobless claims each month.
  3. Mortgage and rent as a percent of income is skyrocketing. As wages drop, rent and mortgage payments are becoming untenable for millions of families. This is similar to the cause of the 2008 mortgage-backed security crash. Enough families could not pay the mortgages they were given, and the system collapsed. Tens of millions of Americans face eviction. Where will they go? How much will it cost to feed and house 20 million Americans?
  4. Signaling a coming market bubble collapse, historic earnings per share and stock prices have diverged significantly. The stock market has been pumped up by the Federal Reserve printing trillions of dollars, and corporate tax cuts used for stock buybacks instead of infrastructure investment or higher wages.
  5. Inequity continues to grow. While tens of millions lose their jobs, billionaires have made trillions of unearned income. The ultra-wealthy will pickup assets for pennies on the dollar when times get tough. But, a billionaire wants a 10,000 acre ranch, not a home in suburbia.
  6. Rugged individualism, buying a gun, and hunkering down does not create jobs, nor generate income. It drains savings and divides communities.
  7. Population growth is irreversibly eroding the economy. There is less to go around per person every year. Support systems are collapsing: ecosystems, biodiversity, topsoil, forests, oceans, rivers, and climate change. These problems will eventually reverse economic growth over the long-term. Reminder, human population expansion is the foundation of civilization.
  8. Government issued fiat money is beginning to flow to cryptocurrencies which are more difficult to tax. I know, I developed a cryptocurrencies capital gains tax calculation platform but found that almost none of the millions of people buying Bitcoin wanted to pay their taxes. Bitcoin his an all time high this week. Why would a system of money that is designed protect personal sovereignty, and to hedge against fiat money devaluation be trending?
  9. As long as government is an arm of corporations and the wealthy, reforms needed to benefit the people and protect the environment will never happen. Citizens United was the straw that broke camel’s back by giving corporations personhood and access to unlimited campaign contributions from the wealthy.
  10. Social media is making nations ungovernable. People turn up their echo chamber volume so loud, that they cannot think. This is a circular reference. Because the government cannot govern, it cannot reign in fake news and lying politicians. Church was separated from the State to prevent faith from replacing reason. Mark my words: The day will come when a functional version of Trump arrises and we may have the first American dictator, and the end of the Republic. In 2020, A faction of Republicans showed that power is more important to them than Democracy. The greatest threat of a future Trump is not dictatorship, but disorder.
  11. Governments are broke. There is no way they can pay back the debt they have now incurred. They will never have the political will to tax wealth itself, the wealthy’s income, and externalized costs like pollution or deforestation. When future aid is needed, it may not arrive. Governments cannot govern without money.
  12. Like nobility of the past, feudalism of the billionaires may be our future. Can you imagine our government taxing away 70 percent of Bill Gates’s wealth? Never. Governments and banks are designed to protect the wealth, and to keep the rest pacified. We only have the civil rights we do today because abundant cheap energy has expanded the economy. As fossil fuels recede, so will the economy. What that means for the future civil rights is uncertain.
  13. Pandemics have risen their ugly head as we increasingly crowd together in ever larger populations. What if the next pandemic is 30 percent fatal like SARS or MERS is? If Covid-19 was, by now we would have 3 millions American deaths and rural American’s would finally being wearing masks. What if Covid-19 mutates and the vaccine is no longer effective?
  14. Our noble leadership lacks enough skills to cope with a multi-dimensional contrarian crises. We almost need super-druids to get us out of the jam our forefathers put us into. The solutions required are not hard but they are unimaginable by civilized society. The brewing storm is: economic, environmental, demographic, empathic, historic, and much more. Everything we view as inevitable historic progress has been a colossal mistake. Columbus’s invasion of the American’s prevented 500 indigenous tribes from protecting the continent’s ecosystems. Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul (France) 58-56 B.C. prevented independent European tribes from developing independently. Gunpowder, enough said. We are taught that infinite growth, large static populations, wealth, and hierarchy must continue at any cost. We ignore that civilization is fatal to Earth. We cannot think our way out of a problem using the same belief system that created it.

We are facing a web of interconnected challenges that began many generations ago. Unlike the 2008 crash, recoveries from more complex future downturns may no longer return to prior levels.

We may also see a long-term rocky descent.

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Chuck Burr is author of Culturequake: The Restoration Revolution. Revised Fourth Edition. 10th Anniversary.

Featured image: http://www.urbanghostsmedia.com. Detroit.

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Vaccine Passports and Health Passes: Is Showing Your “Papers” the “New Normal?”

By Robert Wheeler, December 17 2020

In case you have been living under a rock for the past several weeks, here are several instances where the “public discussion” has centered around the idea of a “vaccine passport” or “immunity passport” or the general blockade and sanctioning of anyone not willing to take the jab.

Vaccines: Did Big Pharma Purchase California’s Legislative Machinery?

By Dr. Meryl Nass, December 17 2020

While everyone is familiar with Big Pharma’s lobby and campaign contributions to politicians in Washington, few understood that Pharma gave more than twice as much money to politicians and party committees at the state level as they gave at the federal level.

Twitter Says It Will Remove All Posts Claiming Vaccines Can Harm People

By Steve Watson, December 17 2020

Twitter has declared that it will remove all posts that suggest there are any “adverse impacts or effects of receiving vaccinations,” despite reports already emerging of health workers getting sick from taking Pfizer’s coronavirus shot.

First Glitches Emerge in COVID-Vax Rollout; Alaska Health Worker Suffers ‘Serious Allergic Reaction’

By Zero Hedge, December 17 2020

A healthcare worker in Alaska was hospitalized on Tuesday with a ‘serious allergic reaction’ after receiving Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, according to the New York Times. The person, who had no known drug allergies, was still in the hospital on Wednesday morning under observation, according to the report.

The US Plan to Dominate Space

By Manlio Dinucci, December 17 2020

In the wake of the new U.S. Space Force, NATO launched a military space program, prepared by the Pentagon and by a restricted European military summit together with the major Aerospace Industries. The importance of space is demonstrated by the fact that there are currently about 2,800 operational artificial satellites in orbit around the Earth. Over 1,400 of them are American.

US Embassy Caught Scrubbing Tweets Urging Venezuelans Not to Vote

By Alan MacLeod, December 17 2020

The United States embassy for Venezuela has been caught deleting tweets undermining the integrity of the December 6 National Assembly elections in the country and calling on Venezuelans not to participate in them.

By Shane Quinn, December 17 2020

When in February 1918, the German politician Prince Max of Baden asked his country’s military dictator, Erich Ludendorff, what would happen if the latter’s spring offensive failed, he replied, “Then Germany will just have to suffer annihilation”.

The Strategic Role of Western Sahara. Trump’s Unilateral Recognition of Morocco’s Claims

By Andrew Korybko, December 17 2020

Trump’s unilateral recognition of Morocco’s claims to the disputed Maghreb region of Western Sahara in exchange for Rabat formalizing its long-held and not-so-secret ties with Tel Aviv caught many observers by surprise who previously weren’t familiar with this unresolved conflict.

“The Planet’s Problem from Hell”: Will Joe Biden Appoint Samantha Power to Head USAID?

By Ann Garrison, December 17 2020

Just when it seemed that Joe Biden’s coming administration couldn’t be more of ahorror show, Axios reported that he’s likely to appoint another monster from the deep, violent know-it-all Samantha Power, to head the US Agency for International Development.

Trump Administration Finalizes Rule Limiting Habitat Protections for Endangered Species

By Center For Biological Diversity, December 17 2020

The Trump administration finalized a rule today that severely limits the government’s ability to protect habitat that imperiled animals and plants like grizzly bears and whooping cranes will need to survive and recover.


Visit our Asia Pacific Research website at asia-pacificresearch.com

Providing coverage of the Asia-Pacific Region

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Just when it seemed that Joe Biden’s coming administration couldn’t be more of ahorror show, Axios reported that he’s likely to appoint another monster from the deep, violent know-it-all Samantha Power, to head the US Agency for International Development (USAID). I rescheduled my piece on contact tracing’s potential to further empower the surveillance state for next year’s first Black Agenda Report and instead updated my 2015 piece “Samantha Power: Africa’s Problem from Hell.”

As I said then, when Power was serving the second of her four years as President Obama’s US Ambassador to the UN, she was on a mission to save Africans from African savagery, but her largesse extends to all those who need American bombs to calm ethnic strife. She wants you to call 1-800-GENOCIDE, so she can alert the president to send in the Marines or other US Special Forces. As head of USAID, she’ll be in perfect position to wield foreign aid as a cudgel for beating foreign heads of state till they line up behind US empire, which she understands as a never-ending campaign to stop genocide and defend human rights.

Indeed, Power actually seems to believe this, unlike those who shamelessly invoke human rights but know full well that US foreign policy is about economic exploitation and/or domination of any non-NATO nation that dares to raise an independent head. In “The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir,” published in 2019, she writes of how she all but immolated in her own burning self-righteousness while reporting from Bosnia in the 1990s:

I had never been without opinions, but my certitude previously had to do with seemingly trivial issues like an umpire’s bad call in a baseball game. Now, as I researched and reflected on real‐world events, I seemed unable to contain my emotions or modulate my judgments. If the subject of Bosnia came up and someone innocently described the conflict as a civil war, I would erupt: It is genocide!”

Antiwar activist and writer David Swanson wrote one of my favorite headlines of 2017: Samantha Power Can See Russia from Her Padded Cell. In the Counterpunch piece, he shared highlights of Power’s overwrought performance at the Atlantic Council where she railed at Russia for aggression threatening the US and the global rule of law, in Ukraine, Syria, France, Germany, Montenegro and beyond, and demanded that NATO be on hair-trigger alert.

Padded cell indeed. On December 14, CNN Pentagon correspondent reported that a Russian missile drill had just triggered a false alarm at a US military base in Germany, and I can only assume that Samantha Power was reassured that they’re locked and loaded with all the latest world-ending nuclear weapons. If anyone knows of a psychological professional’s analysis of Power’s mind as publicly manifest, please send it to me at the e-address in my bio tag at the bottom of this article.

David Swanson also cited William Blum’s list of US attempts to overthrow governments (asterisks where successful), none of which soften Power’s missionary zeal:

  • China 1949 to early 1960s
  • Albania 1949-53
  • East Germany 1950s
  • Iran 1953 *
  • Guatemala 1954 *
  • Costa Rica mid-1950s
  • Syria 1956-57
  • Egypt 1957
  • Indonesia 1957-58
  • British Guiana 1953-64 *
  • Iraq 1963 *
  • North Vietnam 1945-73
  • Cambodia 1955-70 *
  • Laos 1958 *, 1959 *, 1960 *
  • Ecuador 1960-63 *
  • Congo 1960 *
  • France 1965
  • Brazil 1962-64 *
  • Dominican Republic 1963 *
  • Cuba 1959 to present
  • Bolivia 1964 *
  • Indonesia 1965 *
  • Ghana 1966 *
  • Chile 1964-73 *
  • Greece 1967 *
  • Costa Rica 1970-71
  • Bolivia 1971 *
  • Australia 1973-75 *
  • Angola 1975, 1980s
  • Zaire 1975
  • Portugal 1974-76 *
  • Jamaica 1976-80 *
  • Seychelles 1979-81
  • Chad 1981-82 *
  • Grenada 1983 *
  • South Yemen 1982-84
  • Suriname 1982-84
  • Fiji 1987 *
  • Libya 1980s
  • Nicaragua 1981-90 *
  • Panama 1989 *
  • Bulgaria 1990 *
  • Albania 1991 *
  • Iraq 1991
  • Afghanistan 1980s *
  • Somalia 1993
  • Yugoslavia 1999-2000 *
  • Ecuador 2000 *
  • Afghanistan 2001 *
  • Venezuela 2002 *
  • Iraq 2003 *
  • Haiti 2004 *
  • Somalia 2007 to present
  • Honduras 2009
  • Libya 2011 *
  • Syria 2012
  • Ukraine 2014 *

Africa’s Problem from Hell

In my 2015 piece on Samantha Power, I focused on her human rights rage in Africa. Having successfully advocated for US-led NATO wars in Libya and Syria “to stop the next Rwanda,” she then had her sights set on the tiny, impoverished East African nation of Burundi, which had dared to contract with a majority Russian firm to mine its nickel and form strategic alliances with Russia and China. Wikileaks’ diplomatic cables reveal that Western interests had had their eyes on Burundi’s nickel for decades before its government, under the late President Pierre Nkurunziza, signed with the Russian firm, which they said had offered better terms.

Burundi shares the Hutu-Tutsi-Twa ethnic divisions with neighboring Rwanda and a highly geostrategic border with the resource rich Democratic Republic of Congo. Power, along with Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth, was stridently warning that Burundian President Nkurunziza and his political party were plotting Tutsi genocide.

Power shrieked for regime change, but Russia and China had Burundi’s back on the UN Security Council (UNSC), and it survived to celebrate its removal from the UNSC’s “agenda” this month, which means that its sovereignty is now relatively secure, and there was no new genocide.

Much of Power’s career is based on her historically inaccurate, decontextualized and grossly oversimplified account of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, during which, she alleges, the US “stood by.” From that point on, she moralizes, US citizens must be “upstanders,” not bystanders. “Never again” can we fail in our moral duty to stop the world’s backward peoples from massacring one another over ethnic difference. She wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide,” in which she expands on her Atlantic article on Rwanda, “Bystanders to Genocide,” and calls America to arms.

Power fails to note that the US stood by intentionally, not indifferently, in Rwanda, until US ally Gen. Paul Kagame won a war of aggression begun four years earlier. The Rwandan death toll was many hundreds of thousands higher than the Pentagon had projected, but otherwise, everything went according to plan. Two years later, the Congo Wars began, and the US and UK unseated France as the dominant power in the African Great Lakes Region.

US troops now appear only as “advisors” south of the Sahara, although “Mass Atrocities Prevention, a Military Planning Handbook” describes the swift, surgical deployment of US Special Forces as a blueprint at the ready. For now there are plenty of African troops serving under US military command and grateful to receive the salaries that boost their class status in Africa, though they’d be considered poverty wages here. In 2011, President Obama appointed Power to head his Mass Atrocities Review Board.

All but a few African nations now have soldiers serving within AFRICOM, the US Africa Command, and Burundi’s belligerent neighbor Rwanda is one of the greatest troop contributors. One complication of the Burundian situation is that Burundian troops serve in AMISON, the Pentagon-led African Union Mission to Somalia.

Fighting and casualties had already taken place on Burundi’s tense border with Rwanda in 2015, and five of Burundi’s ruling party leaders, including the Burundian security and intelligence chief, were assassinated. This made it clear that President Nkurunziza, who was hugely popular with the country’s rural Hutu peasant majority, could be the next target.

That greatly alarmed all those who remember that the assassination of three Hutu presidents within two years, 1993-1994, precipitated the Rwandan and Burundian bloodbaths of the 1990s. Samantha Power decried the assassinations on both sides in Burundi and threatened sanctions, but she laid all the blame for the Burundian crisis on President Nkurunziza. Why? Because he had claimed the constitutional right to be elected twice by universal suffrage, then won by 69 percent.

However, she spoke not a word of protest in 2010, when Rwandan President Paul Kagame claimed the same right and won by a thoroughly implausible 93 percent majority. Or in 2011, when President Kabila claimed the same right, then claimed a victory that “delegitimized all Congolese institutions,” according to the Carter Center’s election observer mission.

The regional and ethnic tensions, which were then most fiercely focused on Burundi, are real and the mass violence often horrifying, but the world’s industrial and military power elites are always in play behind the news and Samantha Power’s latest African anxieties, however righteously and rabidly she conceives them.

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This article was originally published on Black Agenda Report.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for promoting peace through her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes Region. Please help support her work on Patreon. She can be reached on Twitter @AnnGarrison and at ann(at)anngarrison(dot)com. 

Featured image is from the author

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Israeli propaganda about the “expulsion” of Arab Jews from Arab countries in the late 1940s and early 1950s continues without respite. Earlier this month, Israel’s UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan, informed UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that he “intends to submit a draft resolution requiring the international body to hold an annual commemoration for the hundreds of thousands of Jews exiled from Arab countries due to the creation of the State of Israel”, according to a report in Ynet. 

Israel’s fabrications about the immigration of Arab Jews to Israel are so outrageous that the country holds a commemoration on 30 November each year. This date just happens to coincide with the ethnic cleansing by Zionist gangs of Palestine, which began on 30 November 1947, a day after the UN General Assembly adopted the Partition Plan. The choice of date seeks to implicate Arab Jews in the conquest of Palestine, when most had no role in it.

Erdan alleges that after the establishment of the Israeli settler-colony, Arab countries “launched a widespread attack against the State of Israel and the thriving Jewish communities that lived within [the Arab world]”. Israeli fabrications, with which Israel always hoped to force Arab countries into paying Israel billions of dollars, have a second important goal: to exonerate Israel from its original sin of expelling Palestinians in 1948 and stealing their land and property.

Ideological pitfalls

In December 1948, the UN General Assembly mandated that Palestinian refugees be allowed to return home and that they be compensated for the destruction and theft of their property by Israel. Israel not only wants to hold on to all of those lands, but to extort Arab countries to pay out billions more.

There is a further irony to the Israeli ploy: Israel has always insisted that Palestine, and later Israel, is the homeland of world Jewry, while simultaneously claiming that Arab Jews who immigrated to Israel are “refugees”. The legal and internationally accepted definition of a refugee, however, is of a person who was expelled or fled their homeland, not one who “returns” to their homeland.

These ideological pitfalls aside, the history of Arab Jewish emigration to Israel is not one of expulsion by Arab regimes, but rather one of Israeli criminal actions that forced Jews in Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Egypt and other countries to leave for Israel.

In 1949, the Israeli government was working assiduously with British colonial authorities in Aden and with Yemeni officials to airlift Yemeni Jews to Israel. While the League of Arab States had resolved to ban the emigration of Arab Jews to Israel, Yemen’s imam allowed Jews to leave as early as February 1949, with the help of Zionist emissaries and Israeli bribes to provincial Yemeni rulers, according to prominent Israeli historian Tom Segev’s book: 1949: The First Israelis.

Some provincial rulers asked that at least 2,000 Jews remain, as it was the religious duty of Muslims to protect them, but the Zionist emissary insisted that it was a Jewish religious “commandment” for them to go to the “Land of Israel”. The fact that Israel’s prime minister at the time, was David Ben Gurion, also suggested to many that Israel “was the kingdom of David”, according to Segev and other sources. Tens of thousands of Jews were urged to leave their homes and travel to Israel.

Institutionalised discrimination

As for the Jews who opted to stay, the Jewish emissary in Aden, Shlomo Schmidt, asked permission to propose that Yemeni authorities expel them, but Yemeni authorities did not.

Some of the luggage of the departing Jews, including ancient Torah scrolls, jewellery and embroidered garments, which they were encouraged to bring with them, disappeared en route and mysteriously “made their way to antique and souvenir shops in Israel”, according to Segev and other sources.

Image on the right: Immigrants from Yemen at a transit camp in central Israel, 1950.Credit: Seymour Katcoff, GPO

About 50,000 Yemeni Jews were essentially removed from Yemen by the Israelis in 1949 and 1950 to face institutionalised Ashkenazi discrimination in Israel. This included the abduction of hundreds of Yemeni children from their parents, who were told the children died; the children were then allegedly handed over for adoption to Ashkenazi couples.

Zionists were also active in bringing about the emigration of Morocco’s Jews to Israel. Morocco was under French colonial occupation at the time, so the Jewish Agency had to strike an agreement with the French governor of Morocco to bring about the emigration of Moroccan Jews, who had to face horrific conditions on Israeli ships, according to Segev and other sources. Some of the 100,000 Jews who left, according to the Jewish Agency emissary, had to be virtually “taken aboard the ships by force”.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi government of Nuri al-Said, Britain’s strongman in the Arab east, was maligned by Israeli propaganda that it was persecuting Jews, when in fact these were Israeli fabrications. Zionist agents had been active in Iraq, smuggling Jews through Iran to Israel, which led to the prosecution of a handful of Zionists.

Then, attacks on Iraqi Jews began, including at the Masuda Shemtov synagogue in Baghdad, killing four Jews and wounding around a dozen more. Some Iraqi Jews believed that this was the work of Mossad agents, aiming to scare Jews into leaving the country. Iraqi authorities accused and executed two activists from the Zionist underground.

Amid Israel’s global campaign to pressure Iraq into allowing Jews to leave – which led to Israeli attempts to block a World Bank loan to Iraq, accompanied by American and British pressure – the Iraqi parliament relented and issued a law permitting Jews to leave. Zionist agents in Iraq telegraphed their handler in Tel Aviv: “We are carrying on our usual activity in order to push the law through faster.” Iraq’s 120,000 Jews were thus soon transferred to Israel.

Targeting western interests

Among Egypt’s relatively small Jewish community, an even smaller number were Ashkenazi (mostly from Alsace and Russia) who arrived since the 1880s. The larger community consisted of Sephardi Jews who arrived during the same period from Turkey, Iraq and Syria, in addition to the tiny community of Karaite Jews. All in all, they numbered fewer than 70,000 people, half of whom did not hold Egyptian nationality.

Zionist activism among the small community of Ashkenazi Jews in Egypt led some to go to Palestine before 1948, however, it was after the establishment of Israel that many of Egypt’s upper class Jews began to leave to France, not Israel. Nonetheless, the community remained essentially intact until Israel intervened in 1954, recruiting Egyptian Jews for an Israeli terrorist cell that placed bombs in Egyptian cinemas, the Cairo train station as well as American and British educational institutions and libraries.

The Israelis hoped that by targeting western interests in Egypt, they could sour the then-friendly relations between Egypt’s president and the Americans.

Egyptian intelligence uncovered the Israeli terrorist ring and tried the accused in open court. The Israelis mounted an international campaign against Egypt and President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was dubbed “Hitler on the Nile” by the Israeli and western press, while Israeli agents shot at the Egyptian consulate in New York, according to David Hirst’s book: The Gun and the Olive Branch and other sources.

Combined with the new socialist and nationalist campaign of Egyptianising investments in the country, many rich businessmen began to sell their businesses and leave.

By the time nationalisation began in the late 1950s and early 1960s, most of the nationalised businesses were in fact owned by Egyptian Muslims and Christians, not Jews. It was in this context, and in the context of public rage against Israel, that many Egyptian Jews got scared and left after 1954 to the US and France, while the poor ended up in Israel [as recounted in Joel Beinin’s Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry].

When Israel joined the British-French conspiracy to invade Egypt in 1956, and after its military occupation of the Sinai Peninsula, public rage ensued against the settler-colony. The Egyptian government detained about 1,000 Jews, half of whom were Egyptian citizens, according to Beinin, and Egypt’s small Jewish community began to leave in droves. On the eve of Israel’s second invasion of Egypt in 1967, only 7,000 Jews remained in the country.

Formal invitations

Despite Israeli culpability in bringing about the exodus of Arab Jews from their countries, the Israeli government continues  to blame it on Arab governments. As for the property of Arab Jews, indeed, they should be fully entitled to it and/or to compensation – not on account of some fabricated expulsion narrative that serves the interests of the Israeli state, but on account of their actual ownership.

Contrary to Israeli propaganda that there was a population swap, it is notable that  while European and Arab Jews who emigrated to Israel were given the stolen land and properties of expelled Palestinians free of charge, according to Israeli historian Benny Morris and other sources, the Palestinians did not receive the property of the Arab Jews who migrated to Israel.

Indeed, the Palestine Liberation Organization, which in 1974 received recognition by the Arab League and the UN as “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”, was very aware of this Israeli strategy. Understanding that the emigration of Arab Jews to Israel was a boon to the Israeli settler-colony, the PLO demanded, in a much-publicised 1975 memorandum to the Arab governments whose Jewish populations had left to Israel, that they issue formal and public invitations for Arab Jews to return home.

Notably, none of the governments and regimes in power in 1975 were in office when the Jews left between 1949 and 1967. Public and open invitations were duly issued by the governments of Morocco, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, Iraq and Egypt for Arab Jews to return home, especially in light of the institutionalised Ashkenazi racist discrimination to which they had been subjected in Israel. Neither Israel nor its Arab Jewish communities heeded the calls.

Rewarding crimes

All this aside, there is the matter of Israel’s unceasing attempts to equate the financial losses of Arab Jews with those of Palestinian refugees. A conservative official Israeli estimate comparing Palestinian property losses to Arab Jewish property losses gave a ratio of 22 to one in favour of Palestinians – despite Israel’s gross overestimation of Arab Jewish losses and even grosser underestimation of Palestinian losses.

Researchers’ conservative estimates of Palestinian refugee losses amount to more than $300bn in 2008 prices, excluding damages for psychological pain and suffering, which would raise the total substantially. This excludes the losses in confiscated land and property for Palestinian citizens of Israel since 1948, and the losses incurred by Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem since 1967.

Whereas none of the Arab regimes in power when Arab Jews emigrated to Israel exists today, the same Israeli colonial-settler regime that expelled the Palestinian people and engineered the exodus of Arab Jews from their countries remains in power.

Yet, in his letter, Erdan complains that “it is infuriating to see the UN mark a special day and devote a lot of resources for the issue of ‘Palestinian refugees’, while abandoning and ignoring hundreds of thousands of Jewish families deported from Arab countries and Iran”. The irony of Erdan’s letter is that it demands that the Israeli regime be financially and morally rewarded for the crimes it has committed over the last seven decades.

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Most folks never heard about Western Sahara until Trump unilaterally recognized Morocco’s claims to this disputed region of the Maghreb last week in exchange for it agreeing to a peace deal with “Israel”, but it’s actually extremely important for the anti-imperialist cause since its standing is similar to Palestine and Kashmir’s in the eyes of international law.

Trump’s unilateral recognition of Morocco’s claims to the disputed Maghreb region of Western Sahara in exchange for Rabat formalizing its long-held and not-so-secret ties with Tel Aviv caught many observers by surprise who previously weren’t familiar with this unresolved conflict. Palestine and Kashmir are much more globally prominent because of the involvement of nuclear powers and the efforts of some to focus more on the inter-religious optics of these conflicts than their international legal origins. Western Sahara satisfies neither of those two “exciting” criteria, hence why it’s largely been forgotten about by most of the world since the issue first came to the fore of international politics in the mid-1970s.

Franco’s Spain’s “decolonization” process saw the totalitarian country refuse to grant independence to the Western Sahara, instead dividing it between neighboring Morocco and Mauritania against the wishes of the indigenous Sahrawi people as represented by the Polisario Front. This group in turn proclaimed the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic with the support of neighboring Algeria, which has an historic rivalry with Morocco and was also sympathetic to socialist causes such as this one during the Old Cold War. Mauritania eventually abandoned its claims to the disputed region, and after over a decades’ worth of fighting, Morocco and the Western Sahara reached a UN-backed agreement in 1991 to hold a referendum on the region’s political status.

The vote never took place since the two warring sides couldn’t agree on who’s eligible to vote, with the primary problem being Morocco’s insistence on letting settlers participate. Western Sahara is also de-facto divided by a sand wall that the occupying army built to solidify its control over approximately 80% of the territory. With Trump’s unilateral recognition of Rabat’s claim to the entire region (which might eventually be followed by others such as “Israel”), as well as his government’s subsequent decision to move forward with a $1 billion arms deal, it’s extremely unlikely that last month’s end of the 29-year ceasefire will result in any serious gains being made by the Polisario Front.

Russia denounced the US’ political decision as illegal under international law, which is an entirely accurate assessment, but this isn’t expected to have any tangible effect on altering the conflict’s dynamics. Only Algeria could potentially have an impact, but its ongoing domestic political problems over nearly the past two years have forced it to suddenly look inward instead of continue with its traditional policy of presenting itself as a regional leader. Moreover, the US’ planned arms deal might ultimately shift the regional balance of power in a decisive way, especially if “Israel” gets involved too, or at the very least spark a new arms race between Morocco and Algeria as the latter looks to Russia and China for more military support in response.

Amidst all of this, anti-imperialists shouldn’t ever forget the international legal importance of the Western Saharan cause. However one feels about the legitimacy of either side’s claims in the conflict, it’s nevertheless a UNSC-recognized dispute that’s supposed to be resolved by a referendum. The precedent of the US unilaterally abandoning its international legal obligations is disturbing and arguably also destabilizing, though it’s obviously doing this in pursuit of its own national interests as it subjectively understands them. The problem, however, is that this might embolden other claimants over different UNSC-recognized disputed territories across the world to double down on their maximalist positions, thus making it much more difficult to resolve those issues.

Another important point is that international law exists not solely for “moral” reasons like its most passionate supporters claim (since it’s obviously imperfect), but for practical ones related to the necessity of having predictable means to resolve international disputes in order to avoid unintentional escalations that could quickly evolve into larger and more uncontrollable conflicts. Unilateral maximalist claims by one party are troublesome, but they become even worse when they’re supported by self-interested external actors who might also have an ulterior motive to divide and rule the region in question like the US clearly does in the Maghreb, Mideast, and South Asia regarding Western Sahara, Palestine, and Kashmir.

The Western Saharan cause is therefore inextricable from the Palestinian and Kashmiri ones in the eyes of international law, which is why supporters of those two should stand in solidarity with their Sahrawi counterparts. The issue can only legally be settled by a referendum according to the UNSC regardless of one’s personal views towards the conflict, but since that has yet to happen and might very well never occur after Trump’s combined diplomatic-military support for Morocco’s claims gives Rabat no incentive to comply, observers can’t help but be concerned. The only way to remain consistent with supporting Palestine and Kashmir is to support Western Sahara’s UNSC-recognized right to a referendum.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from OneWorld

Hoarding the Jabs: The Inequalities of Vaccine Distribution

December 17th, 2020 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

Public health is no excuse to keep business and patriotism at bay.  Not a very humanitarian sentiment, but then again, healing the sick and preserving the healthy can become parochial, nationalist objectives.  The least convincing language of the pandemic has been this baffling and trite notion that “we” and “all this” and “together” are somehow linked in blood sealed harmony, binding Homo sapiens in a bond of preservation that urges us to suffer together in order to survive.

The rhetoric of the vaccine market has been enlisted to promote a broader human goal, even if it serves to prop up a very distinct elite: the social media and technological kleptocrats; the pharmacological behemoths; the corrupt incompetents in government.  And now, the pieces are moving into their standard places.  Privileges are being asserted; priorities are being pushed, despite the summit proclaiming language of the politics of generosity.

Dr John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, is of the view that an entire continent has been diddled in the COVID-19 vaccine stakes.  Wealthy countries, he insists, had purchased “in excess of their needs while we in Africa are still struggling with the Covax facility.”  The Covax facility, run by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, is the health equivalent of a charity, subsidising vaccines for 92 lower-income countries.  It promises to be imperfect, supplying assistance to acquire vaccines for a modest 20% of populations, on the proviso that recipient states also fork out for a percentage of the doses. The initiative has worked towards securing 700 million doses of vaccine for distribution while the Oxford-AstraZeneca combine has pledged to supply 64% of its doses to those in developing countries.

Charities are also warning that the wealthier states are on a hoarding drive leaving poorer states to catch their breath. The People’s Vaccine Alliance comprising such groups as Global Justice Now, Oxfam and Amnesty International trembles with indignation, claiming that 90% of people across 70 poorer countries will not be able to be vaccinated in 2021. Canada is singled out in Oxfam International’s press release with special reproach, having “enough vaccines to vaccinate each Canadian five times” (8.9 doses per head).  The United States is a runner-up with 7.3 doses per head.  Data gathered by the alliance reveals that “rich nations representing just 14 per cent of the world’s population have bought up to 53 per cent of all the most promising vaccines so far.”

The People’s Vaccine Alliance has taken the baton for a collectively available vaccine that renounces the profit motive.  “Our best chance of all staying safe is to ensure a COVID-19 vaccine is available for all as a global common good.”  The organisations demand a “transformation in how vaccines are produced and distributed,” urging pharmaceutical companies to be as generously wide as possible in production lines, “sharing their knowledge free from patents.”  Admirable, if optimistic objectives are stated: the prevention of vaccine monopolies; the selling of vaccines at affordable prices; the purchase of vaccines at true cost prices and provided gratis to the populace.

Support for the equitable distribution of vaccines has also come from quarters keen to see stuttering capitalism return to its fit and improper state.  A report from the RAND Corporation, an outfit rarely disposed to shedding tears for the poor, encourages mass, equitable immunisation, as not doing so could lead to losses of $1.2 trillion per annum in GPD terms.  Prolonged physical distancing measures “will continue to affect key sectors of the global economy negatively, especially those that rely on close physical proximity between people.”

The authors might well accept that “nationalist behaviour is inevitable,” but also point to the merits of providing vaccines across the globe.  High-income countries stood to lose $119 billion a year “if the poorest countries are denied a supply. If these high-income countries paid for the supply of vaccines, there could be a benefit-to-cost ratio of 4.8 to 1.”  Paying the impoverished to stay healthy can keep you wealthy.

In such an untidy, desperate scramble, the opportunities for striking bargains are also emerging.  From China come promises that vaccines at discounted prices will be offered to Africa, lubricated by loans as a form of vaccine diplomacy.  Indonesia has also received 1.2 million vaccine doses from the Chinese pharmaceutical firm Sinovac, a move which prompted a surly Weibo user to remark that Indonesians “should thank us Chinese people; even we are yet to be vaccinated”.

China’s rambunctious state paper, the Global Times, contrasts this with the politics of US vaccine policy, suggesting that the term “vaccine diplomacy” was “a trite headline conceived of by the West’s own mentality.”  In the vaccine wars, the true culprit was Washington, intent on hogging the show.  “Compared with China’s generosity, the US has made no secret of its selfishness.  The White House has made it clear it seeks to prioritize Americans for coronavirus vaccine shipments, and then it would take care of its main allies.”

Other countries prefer placing their bets with the Covax facility on the assurance that vaccines, once made available, will have been certified by the World Health Organisation.  Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen summed up the cautionary sentiment.  “Cambodia is not a dustbin… and not a place for a vaccine trial.”

Whether it is vaccine nationalism or vaccine diplomacy, both forms stem from the same source of inspiration.  Self-interest comes before the demands of a common humanity.  The weak and vulnerable, as ever, remain spectators to their own fate.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.  Email: [email protected]

Featured image is from Shutterstock

California has some of the most stringent vaccine mandate laws in the United States.  Why is that?  At first, it seemed that draconian vaccination laws were introduced in response to a measles outbreak that began in Disneyland in 2014.  But then later, long after the measles threat had evaporated, California’s vaccine mandate was made even stricter.  It came as a shock. California’s mandate-imposing Senator Pan, himself a pediatrician, had promised this would never occur.

While everyone is familiar with Big Pharma’s lobby and campaign contributions to politicians in Washington, few understood that Pharma gave more than twice as much money to politicians and party committees at the state level as they gave at the federal level. Perhaps it should have come as no surprise; after all, the practice of medicine is regulated at the state level.  For example, fraud committed by Big Pharma opioid companies is being litigated at the state level. Vaccine mandates are voted in or out at the state level.  Some healthcare price controls are too.

How much money are we talking about?  During the twenty years from January 1, 1999 through December 31, 2018, the pharmaceutical and health products industry spent $877 million dollars on contributions to state candidates and party committees.

Of this amount, $399 Million, or 45.5% went to candidates and committees in California.  The other 54.5% went to the other 49 states and the District of Columbia.

Candidates for state office face legal limits on what they can accept from each donor.  But in many states, California and Ohio included, ballot measure committees are not subject to contribution limits.  A whopping 75.4% of the money Pharma spent on state candidates and committees nationwide went to ballot measure committees.

Only two states received contributions of over $50 million dollars in total during the entire twenty-year period:  California and Ohio.  Ohio received $74 million total, and California $399 million.

Now I am rethinking the California legislature’s votes to impose extremely strict vaccine mandates on its citizens.  Had Big Pharma already purchased California’s government machinery?  Was the industry just wringing more profit from its investment in the Golden State?

This data in this article come from “Lobbying Expenditures and Campaign Contributions by the Pharmaceutical and Health Product Industry in the United States, 1999-2018” published in JAMA Internal Medicine on March 3, 2020. It was written by researcher Olivier J Wouters of the London School of Economics.  The facts cited here were derived by him from data obtained by the National Institute on Money in Politics.

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The United States embassy for Venezuela has been caught deleting tweets undermining the integrity of the December 6 National Assembly elections in the country and calling on Venezuelans not to participate in them.

“Tomorrow in Venezuela there will be no elections but rather a fraud carried out by the illegitimate Maduro regime. The world is watching. And Venezuelans are organizing to report it. Are you ready to defend democracy? I don’t vote on December 6,” one tweet read, linking to a website purporting to track election irregularities.

The concept of “defending democracy” has been one commonly employed by the opposition during their many coup attempts on the government, dating back to 2002.

The deletion was spotted by Adrienne Pine, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the American University in Washington D.C. and one of 300 foreign election observers who oversaw the contest earlier this month.

It is not clear why the U.S. embassy decided to go back and delete its posting history, especially as that continues to be the official line of the United States government. Accusing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro of “brazenly rigging these elections,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described the contest as “a political farce intended to look like legislative elections.” “The United States, along with numerous other democracies around the world, condemns this charade which failed to meet any minimum standard of credibility,” he added.

But the American position is disputed by the international observers, including Pine herself, who was impressed by the level of election security. “It was really amazing to see it firsthand. There are so many fail safe measures in the system to ensure that there can’t be fraud that I was just blown away,” she said on the latest edition of the MintCast, MintPress’ video podcast. “COVID security measures were completely integrated into the electoral process itself,” she added.

The Council of Latin American Electoral Experts, who also oversaw the vote, verified the results, noting the “increased citizen confidence in political organizations and candidates.” A number of former heads of state, including those of Ecuador, Spain, Honduras, and Bolivia also attested to the process’s veracity.

The election saw the ruling socialist coalition sweep up 253 of the 277 seats on offer in the National Assembly (comparable to the U.S. House of Representatives), amid a partial opposition boycott of the process encouraged by the U.S. government. Calling for mass abstention, many opposition parties essentially ensured that the government would win big, but were hoping to delegitimize the process altogether through a painfully low turnout. Turnout was 31 percent, low, but not low enough to prevent the socialists from declaring a decisive victory. Thus, without control of any branch of government, the opposition’s only hope of coming to power in the near future remains through directly ousting the current government.

The embassy, like the government in Washington, continues to support the self-declared president of Venezuela Juan Guaidó, despite his lack of office. Guaidó held his own “people’s vote” at the same time as the election, promoting voting in person, online, or by phone in his referendum. The U.S. endorsed the results, despite non-Venezuelans outside the country showing they could bypass safety features and vote online themselves.

Despite unwavering American support, others in the opposition, such as two-time opposition coalition presidential candidate Henrique Capriles, are calling on the U.S. to rethink their backing of a figure with such low public support inside the country. “The new administration has to understand that this plan has run its course and it cannot keep the status quo: the [Guaido] ‘interim presidency,’” he told the BBC.

The embassy calls itself “virtual” because it is not physically located in Venezuela, but in neighboring Colombia, a close U.S.-ally. The U.S. had no ambassador to Venezuela from 2010 until November this year, and no representatives inside the country at all of late, amid worsening relations and multiple attempts to overthrow the Maduro administration led to the expulsion of U.S. diplomats. Last week, President Ivan Duque of Colombia admitted that he had a hand in helping opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, kept under house arrest for his role in a 2014 coup attempt, escape to Colombia. The U.S. also faced scrutiny after supporting the now-infamous “Bay of Piglets” attempt by ex-Green Berets to carry out an amphibious landing from Colombia and shoot their way into the presidential palace. If a low level mercenary invasion proved ineffectual, a few tweets will likely not work in removing Maduro from power.

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Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent. He has also contributed to Fairness and Accuracy in ReportingThe GuardianSalonThe GrayzoneJacobin MagazineCommon Dreams the American Herald Tribune and The Canary.

Featured image is from Embassy Protection Collective

Over the past weeks, the Syrian Army and its allies have intensified their operations against ISIS cells hiding in the Homs-Deir Ezzor desert.

According to pro-government sources, during the past few days, Syrian government forces and Iranian-backed militias carried out a series of raids to the south of the Palmyra-Deir Ezzor highway and southeast of al-Mayadin. Pro-militant media outlets clam that over 10 Syrian soldiers and 15 ISIS members died in these clashes.

The Russian Aerospace Forces also resumed their strikes on ISIS targets in the desert region. Pro-opposition sources say that the Russians delivered over 100 airstrikes. Indeed, the intensity of this campaign demonstrates that the regularly resurfacing ISIS cells, which actively exploit the state of chaos on the Syrian-Iraqi border, pose a notable security threat.

Just a few days ago, the Russian Military Police established a local HQ and several positions in the Syrian town of al-Bukamal, which lies on the border with Iraq. Local sources link the increased Russian presence on the border with the recently resumed anti-ISIS operation there.

Given the de-facto collapse of security in the area on the Iraqi side of the border, the Syrian, Iraqi and Iranian-backed forces deployed near al-Bukamal and al-Qaim are now the major factor deterring the terrorists operating there. At the same time, Israel and mainstream Western propaganda argue that al-Bukamal is just the base of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and thus must be destroyed.

While the presence of Iranian-backed forces there is an open secret, attacks on them and their allies, which were repeatedly conducted by Israel and even the US-led coalition, have in fact supported the ISIS agenda.

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When in February 1918, the German politician Prince Max of Baden asked his country’s military dictator, Erich Ludendorff, what would happen if the latter’s spring offensive failed, he replied, “Then Germany will just have to suffer annihilation”.

General Ludendorff’s response, which offended Prince Max’s sensitive liberal tastes, would be repeated almost verbatim by Hitler a generation later, and it reveals the all-or-nothing nature of the Ludendorff autocracy. Yet the general knew that Germany’s enemies, all imperialist states themselves (France, Britain and America), were never going to grant the Germans a reasonable peace, as was borne out in stark fashion at Versailles.

By the early winter of 1914, Ludendorff was already one of the most powerful men in Germany. As the months advanced, he would increasingly become the sole centre of real influence in the country, and also across the vast occupied territories where his dictatorship extended. Ludendorff’s war aims consisted of establishing what would be a Greater Germania, the pre-eminent force on the European mainland, and in that scenario second only to the United States in global power terms. Britain, previously the earth’s dominant nation, has been in decline since about 1871. She was overtaken that year as the world’s largest economy by America, with the gap widening as time wore on. (1)

Come the turn of the 20th century, German industrial growth including steel and pig iron production had likewise surpassed Britain. The German Empire’s industrial capacity was, by 1905, the second most advanced on earth, though still appreciably behind America. France was trailing badly – French regression can be traced to the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century (2), which bled France white, culminating in the 1815 exile of Napoleon Bonaparte.

French woes deepened in the early 1870s, when Prussia decisively defeated her in the Franco-Prussian War. France was thereby stripped of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which the new German Empire annexed, the ultimate humiliation for France. The burning French desire, to recover Alsace-Lorraine, was a central factor in the eruption of hostilities in the late summer of 1914.

Depiction of Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff at the battle of Tannenberg (painting by Hugo Vogel). (Public Domain)

Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg shared his partner General Ludendorff’s expansionist dreams. The two men agreed firmly on the extension of Germany’s frontiers as far as conceivably possible, with their gaze fixed mainly to the East. They intended to Germanise and colonise large areas of central and eastern Europe, such as Poland along with the Baltic countries of Lithuania and Latvia. On 19 December 1917, Hindenburg said that he wanted the Baltic regions for strategic purposes in the next war.

As the fighting continued from its opening months, Germany’s eastern divisions were capturing significant chunks of territory from the Russians, who still fought well. By the end of September 1915, however, the Imperial Russian Army had lost almost two million men in less than 14 months of fighting. As the Germans marched further eastwards, in late October 1915 Ludendorff and Hindenburg, in order to be closer to the front, moved from their previous headquarters at Lötzen (north-eastern Poland) and relocated to Kovno (central Lithuania).

During breaks in the fighting, Ludendorff could occasionally be seen by the locals in Kovno walking around the town, in his military attire and Pickelhaube, the spiked helmet – while the few German armoured vehicles patrolling Kovno’s streets would honk their horns at Ludendorff, as they drove past him, and he would wave back at them. Hindenburg was more likely to be spotted in the forests of Augustovo or Bialoviesa, hunting for game with his rifle, but he complained that “The wolves seemed to have a preference for slipping away beyond the range of my gun”.

Ludendorff in particular wanted to annex the ancient province of Courland – in western Latvia – a low-lying, fertile land, of great strategic relevance and resting on the Baltic Sea, with Scandinavia slightly further on. A German merchant service in the Baltic waters astride Courland was, as Ludendorff wrote, “of paramount importance to us, on account of the importation of iron ore from Sweden”. (3)

Courland had a history of Germanic rule dating to the 13th century, and was home to tens of thousands of Baltic Germans. It gave Ludendorff considerable satisfaction when, in the late summer of 1915, forces under his command captured Courland from the Russian Empire.

Image on the right: Erich von Falkenhayn (Public Domain)

Erich von Falkenhayn.jpg

On 27 August 1916 Romania, a country of considerable importance, unexpectedly declared war on the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary, causing something close to panic in Berlin. Just the day before, Kaiser Wilhelm II had been assured by General Erich von Falkenhayn that Romania would stay neutral. Romania’s declaration of war was a sure indication that neutral nations, whose interests were at stake, believed Germany was heading for defeat. Furthermore, Romania contained huge quantities of oil and wheat.

Two years into the war Romania’s decision to join the Entente, of Russia, France and Britain, was also an act of betrayal, for Romania had signed a defensive alliance on 30 October 1883 with Germany and Austria-Hungary. This pact, which had been at Romania’s behest because of her bitterness against Russia for taking Bessarabia, was renewed as late as 1913. Encouraged by Western diplomats, the Romanians wanted to take the famous province of Transylvania from Hungary.

On the night of 27 August 1916, around 750,000 Romanian troops began marching on Transylvania through the high Carpathian mountain passes. A paltry six German-led divisions initially opposed the Romanian Army, but within a week, due to efficient staff work and logistical operations, Ludendorff bolstered this force to 16 divisions. The Romanians soon proved no match for the Germans. By mid-November 1916, remnants of Romania’s divisions were driven northwards into the hilly region of Moldavia, but they escaped outright destruction to fight another day. On 6 December 1916 the German Field Marshal, August von Mackensen, rode in triumph through the streets of Bucharest on his white horse.

The Romanian campaign raised morale in Germany, improved the country’s standing in Europe; and most critically of all for Ludendorff and Hindenburg, allowed them to resume exploiting Romania’s raw materials; without which the Germans could not continue the war.

By December 1917, the Ludendorff dictatorship was in control of all of central Europe and most of eastern Europe; while Belgium was long under German military occupation, and the Germans had a firm foothold in eastern France (4). Since the conflict’s outset, Berlin had poured millions of marks into trying to foment revolution in Tsarist Russia, a nation which had been under Romanov dynasty rule for over 300 years. In October 1917, Vladimir Lenin’s taking of power in Russia signalled the end of the Kremlin’s involvement in World War One.

Soviet Russia concluded an armistice with the German Empire on 15 December 1917, and Ludendorff wrote how, “I felt as though a weight had been removed from my chest” (5). He could finally begin directing his military resources towards one principal front, a grand luxury which the Allies were much accustomed to.

For three years, Germany had survived fighting on two broad fronts against the might of Russia, France and Britain because, as the Canadian historian Lt. Col. Donald J. Goodspeed outlined, “All through the war, the Germans – and Ludendorff especially – placed a far higher premium on brains than did the Allies” (6). Moreover, Lt. Col. Goodspeed recognised “the excellence of the German Army, which was a very serious and professional organisation. It was not by any means the largest army on the continent, but it was by all odds the best”. (7)

The truth is often unpopular, and it should be acknowledged too that Ludendorff himself was quite clearly the most formidable commander of World War One. In the end, only the combined strength of the British, French and American armies would leave him checkmated. Ludendorff’s offensive and defensive doctrines demonstrated more imagination and military talent in comparison to his rivals – such as the inflexible British commander Douglas Haig, perhaps unfairly nicknamed “Butcher Haig”. Yet he needlessly sent hundreds of thousands of British soldiers into death traps, where they were mowed down by German machine-gun and rifle fire.

By contrast Ludendorff had no issue in altering his tactics if required, or to recognise ability in others and to reward it. He had an eye for talent, and designated greater responsibilities to first class officers, like Max Hoffmann and Georg Bruchmüller. Unlike his British counterparts, Ludendorff regularly visited the front line to view conditions with his own eyes, and to interview officers involved in the fighting (8). Ludendorff’s position was strengthened by having Hindenburg at his side throughout the war; Hindenburg’s role may have been much less pronounced but, unlike Ludendorff, he was hardly ever ruffled and had nerves of steel. In difficult moments, he always calmed and reassured the more easily agitated Ludendorff.

Hindenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Ludendorff, January 1917 (Public Domain)

In their colonial territories, British and French generals were long used to beating badly equipped and unprepared forces, often consisting of once peace-loving indigenous groups. The Allied command structure placed too much emphasis on rank and correct age, ignoring ability due to engrained military protocol and short-sightedness.

It was not until 3 March 1918, that the Bolsheviks were compelled to surrender to Germany in writing, through a peace treaty signed at Brest-Litovsk. Two weeks before on 18 February 1918, Ludendorff ordered a German invasion all along the Eastern front, so as to press home his point to Lenin.

The one commander of the First World War who had been threatening to match Ludendorff, came not from the West, but from the East. He was the 57-year-old Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, a popular and respected Russian general, six feet six inches tall, broad-shouldered, and who had devoted his life to the Tsar’s Army (9). In August 1914 the Grand Duke was appointed to the Supreme Command of all Russian forces. In this position he proved to be “a ruthless, iron-willed opponent who had held his armies together admirably, and whose strategic ideas had often been daring and brilliant”. (10)

Tsar Nicholas II committed a grave blunder the following year by firing the Grand Duke, on 5 September 1915, and then compounded the error by appointing himself to the Supreme Command. When news of the Grand Duke’s dismissal reached German Ober Ost headquarters at Lötzen, it was welcomed heartily by Ludendorff, Hindenburg and Hoffmann (11). With the Grand Duke’s exit, the Russian Empire was not only stripped of its most able commander but, subsequently, every defeat suffered by Russia could be blamed on the Tsar. As would be the case. The Grand Duke’s sacking was a factor in the Tsarist regime’s fall 18 months later.

In the early 20th century, there were very significant numbers of Jewish citizens resident across central and eastern Europe (12) (13) – such as in Warsaw (Polish capital), Kovno (central Lithuania), Vilnius (Lithuanian capital) and Grodno (western Belarus); cities which all fell to the Germans in the early autumn of 1915. These cities’ populaces comprised of 25% Jewish people or more, and were occupied by the Germans for three years. Ludendorff may have been anti-Semitic but, as opposed to the Nazis, he did not order the mass persecution or killings of Jewish or indeed Slavic people, which lays bare how much more extreme the Hitler dictatorship was.

Ludendorff and Hindenburg were concerned primarily with extracting the livestock and natural resources from the conquered territories. The German authors, Jens Thiel and Christian Westerhoff, observed how a main priority for Germany’s warlords in the occupied regions, such as the Baltics, “was the exploitation of the extensive agricultural and forestry resources for the German war effort”. (14)

In September 1916, Ludendorff issued a compulsory labour law. For the remainder of the war every German male, aged between 15 and 60, was employed in the service of the state. He ensured that a sizeable percentage of women were sent to the munitions factories to work. The labour law eased Germany’s manpower crisis, while female munitions workers performed a role in the increased output of ammunition and guns for the German war machine. Ludendorff was bringing home the concept of total war to Germany. In addition, the general implemented plans to raise the birth rate, he improved housing standards, reduced the rate of venereal diseases, encouraged rural resettlement, and counteracted the effective Allied propaganda.

On 13 September 1916 and again on 3 October, Ludendorff ordered the governor-generals of Warsaw and Belgium to institute forced labour, so as to further assist in alleviating manpower shortages. Germany’s utilisation of, what was effectively slave labour, pre-dated Ludendorff’s rise to supreme power by about a year; but he increased it as the conflict entered its latter stages.

The slave labourers consisted mostly of prisoners of war, along with Polish and Belgian “help workers”, including some thousands of Jewish males from those countries. In fact “Jews were over-represented in forced labour”, but the evidence is lacking whether this was because of prejudice, or due to high levels of unemployment among Jewish men at the time (15). Conditions were substandard in the labour camps, with severe illness and mortality rates. Other colonial powers like Britain, France and Belgium had long exploited slave labour on a larger scale than Germany, such as in their African colonies, while during the war Tsarist Russia inflicted slave labour upon civilians in occupied Galicia.

The punishing British naval embargo against Germany and its ally Austria-Hungary, was imposed from August 1914 until eight months after the war, when it was finally lifted in July 1919. This blockade was implemented with the intention to derail Germany’s war economy, and to harm non-combatants. Directly due to the embargo’s effects, hundreds of thousands of German civilians slowly starved to death, most of them women, children and the elderly (death toll figures range from 424,000 to 763,000). The British blockade also killed an estimated 467,000 civilians in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (16). Those suffering the least were the German and Austro-Hungarian troops, who were relatively well fed in the occupied zones.

On 19 December 1917 at a Crown Council conference in Kreuznach, western Germany, Ludendorff expounded at length on his final peace terms to the new Bolshevik Russia. The Russian Army was now finished as a proper fighting force, their troops returning home in droves. Listening to Ludendorff hammer out his demands against Russia were the Kaiser, Hindenburg, Foreign Secretary Richard von Kühlmann, and the 74-year-old Chancellor Georg von Hertling.

Ludendorff was implacably set on taking a massive chunk out of the former Russian Empire’s western flank, which he was in the process of absorbing into the Reich. It included regions stretching from the Baltics a thousand miles southward to the Black Sea. The German military leadership coveted the oil, timber, mineral deposits and grain from these regions, which would guarantee that Germany could easily withstand a British blockade in a future conflict.

While Ludendorff was speaking, Foreign Secretary von Kühlmann interrupted him, protesting against the severity of his terms against Russia. Ludendorff had little time for the cultured von Kühlmann, brusquely rejecting his arguments for “a peaceful conciliation with Russia”. Von Kühlmann turned to the 70-year-old Hindenburg, who had fallen sound asleep in an armchair by the fire, as had Chancellor von Hertling. Von Kühlmann shook the Field Marshal awake but Hindenburg, slowly stirring himself, staunchly backed Ludendorff’s views.

Less than a fortnight later on New Year’s Day 1918, after being very reluctantly persuaded, Ludendorff’s former deputy Max Hoffmann expressed his views to the Kaiser on “the Polish question”, i.e., the extent of Germany’s imperialist policies regarding Poland. Hoffmann, a more moderate figure than Ludendorff, proposed a German-Polish border not that dissimilar to today’s frontier. He could see no point in coercing millions of discontented Poles into the Fatherland, and the Kaiser agreed enthusiastically with Hoffmann’s ideas. (17)

The following morning of 2 January 1918, at another Crown Council meeting – where Ludendorff, Hindenburg and Hoffmann were in attendance – the Kaiser strode gaily into the room, and outlined precisely on his map where the German border with Poland should fall, swiftly attributing the proposal to Hoffmann. Ludendorff could scarcely believe what he was hearing, and he then became very angry. His face turned pink, purple, his neck began to swell and the veins were enlarged on his forehead. Hoffmann was watching Ludendorff with quiet fascination.

Ludendorff vehemently protested against the Kaiser receiving advice through separate channels, declaring that it undermined all military discipline. He criticised Hoffmann’s suggestions root and branch, and insisted that they be rejected immediately. Ludendorff said that he now wanted to make representations of his own, relating to German intentions via Poland, which were expansionist and the opposite to Hoffmann’s views. Hindenburg then nodded his giant head approvingly to reinforce Ludendorff’s position, and the Kaiser, completely taken aback, hastily reassessed things and accepted the warlords’ demands. Ludendorff never forgave Hoffmann for going behind his back, and thereafter he would communicate with him only through his Chief of Operations Max Bauer.

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

Notes

1 Caleb Silver, “The top 20 Economies in the World”, Investopedia, 18 March 2020

2 Donald J. Goodspeed, The German Wars (Random House Value Publishing, 2nd edition, 3 Apr. 1985) p. 5

3 Erich Ludendorff, Ludendorff’s Own Story, August 1914-November 1918, The Great War (Pickle Partners Publishing, 12 Apr. 2012) Chapter 6, The Headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief on the Eastern front in Kovno

HistoryofWar.org, “First World War – Dec 1917 Russia Out”

5 Ludendorff, Ludendorff’s Own Story, Chapter 1, the Entente Offensive in the first half of 1917

6 Donald J. Goodspeed, Ludendorff: Soldier: Dictator: Revolutionary (Hart-Davis; 1st edition, 1 Jan. 1966) p. 195

7 Goodspeed, The German Wars, p. 36

8 Goodspeed, Ludendorff, p. 184

9 Charles T. Evans, “Notes on Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich (1856-1929)”, Northern Virginia Community College, 5 July 2012

10 Goodspeed, Ludendorff, p. 136

11 Ibid.

12 Jewish Population Density – in Europe about 1900

13 JewishGen.org, “World Jewish Population”

14 Jens Thiel, Christian Westerhoff, “Forced Labour”, International Encyclopedia of the First World War, 8 October 2014

15 Ibid.

16 Alexander B. Downes, Targeting Civilians in War (Cornell University Press, 20 Mar. 2008) p. 87

17 Goodspeed, Ludendorff, p. 188

Featured image: Ludendorff in his study at the General Headquarters (CC BY-SA 3.0 de)

An article by Children’s Health Defense on how the pandemic facilitated a financial, tech, biopharmaceutical and military-intelligence push for centralized, technocratic control has been accepted by the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice and Research. 

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“Planned Surveillance and Control by Global Technocrats: A Big-Picture Look at the Current Pandemic Beneficiaries,” a peer-reviewed article by Children’s Health Defense, has been accepted for publication in the journal, International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice and Research. The journal was launched in 2020 by John W. Oller, Jr., Ph.D. (editor-in-chief) and Christopher A. Shaw, Ph.D. (senior editor) “to make independent research, free from constraints of monetary, political, or any other undisclosed influence, about vaccine theory and practice freely accessible.”

The Children’s Health Defense article, which will appear in the journal by year’s end, assesses how the pandemic has facilitated a financial, tech, biopharmaceutical and military-intelligence push for centralized, technocratic control.

Here’s the article.

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Abstract

Global financial patterns and pronouncements point to a seismic overhaul of governance and financial systems that is playing out beneath the surface of the Covid-19 pandemic, reaching far beyond the health domain. Increased centralized control has the potential to create an unbridgeable chasm between a tiny handful of winners and a majority of losers. To foster an integrated analysis of the technocratic and financial forces and agendas at play, this rapid review identifies some of the pandemic’s principal beneficiaries across the interwoven financial, tech, biopharmaceutical, and military-intelligence sectors, assessing developments in the context of the accelerating global push for technocratic consolidation and control.

The evidence suggests that Trojan horse coronavirus vaccines may challenge bodily integrity and informed consent in entirely new ways, transporting invasive technologies into people’s brains and bodies. Technologies such as brain-machine interfaces, digital identity tracking devices, and cryptocurrency-compatible chips would contribute to the central banking goal of replacing currencies with digital transaction and identification systems and creating a global control grid that connects the world population to the military-pharma-intelligence cloud of the global technocrats. Moreover, using vaccines as a delivery vehicle for surveillance technologies cancels any legal liability.

Keywords: Biopharmaceuticals; central banks; Covid-19 pandemic; digital identity; Operation Warp Speed; technocracy; vaccines

Introduction

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) upgraded a reportedly novel coronavirus from a global health emergency (as of January 30) to a global pandemic, having given the name “Covid-19” to the newly minted disease associated with the virus (Forster, 2020; World Health Organization, 2020a). If one examines actions taken both before and since the WHO’s March decree, it seems evident that many highly placed individuals and sectors were able to strategically position themselves to benefit from the declared crisis (Children’s Health Defense, 2020b). At the same time, with a “new form of economic shock” being imposed worldwide under cover of Covid-19 (Lagarde, 2020), it has become apparent that old-fashioned corporate profiteering is far from the whole story.

In fact, global financial patterns and pronouncements point to a seismic overhaul of governance and financial systems that is playing out beneath the surface of the pandemic, reaching far beyond the health domain. These developments highlight a disturbing push for global technocracy — a form of centralized, expert-led control over resource production and consumption that the Wall Street Journal has characterized as “anti-democratic rule by elites who think they know better” (Wood, 2018, 2020; Fitts, 2020a; Schinder, 2020; Schumacher, 2020; White, 2020). In the U.S., many of the actions unfolding behind the scenes are also benefiting from a climate of institutionalized secrecy enabled by the October 2018 adoption of a game-changing policy statement (FASAB Statement 56), which turned financial disclosure rules upside-down to allow the U.S. government and its contractors to maintain secret books (Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board, 2018; Ferri & Lurie, 2018).

As 2020’s rapid-fire events suggest, substantially increased centralized control and secrecy have the potential to create an unbridgeable chasm between a tiny handful of elite winners and a majority of upper and lower middle class losers. In early June, CNBC’s Wall Street analyst Jim Cramer heatedly pointed out the fact that the pandemic had already produced “one of the greatest wealth transfers in history” (Clifford, 2020). Others have echoed these observations, describing the “monumental transfer of wealth from the bottom of the economic ladder to the top” (Barnett, 2020; Kampf-Lassin, 2020). In comparison to the benefits flowing to large corporations and billionaires, Cramer bluntly observed that pandemic-related restrictions have had a “horrible effect” on America’s small-business economy, with a similar pattern on display outside the U.S. (Clifford, 2020). Even the World Economic Forum — which has promoted many of the structural changes now underway at its annual Davos meetings — acknowledges the “asymmetric nature” of Covid-19-related hardships and the “greater ferocity and velocity” of the pandemic’s impact on populations already under stress before 2020 (World Economic Forum, 2020).

By early fall, fifty million Americans (many with already high burdens of debt) had lost jobs; financial forecasters were issuing warnings about further layoffs; and millions of the still-employed were earning less than pre-pandemic (Andriotis, 2020). In addition, the bulk of the trillions in federal stimulus (which by early May exceeded the gross domestic product of all but six nations worldwide) had made its way to large corporations; Forbes reported that roughly 70 percent of the initial $350 billion intended for struggling small businesses went to large companies (Simon, 2020). Observers suggest that by channeling taxpayer bailouts to the companies that already had the greatest ability to withstand the shutdowns, the largest players have been able to gain even more of a “stranglehold” over the economy (Kampf-Lassin, 2020).

As U.S. billionaires’ wealth increased by almost a trillion dollars (a weekly average of $42 billion), weekly jobless claims, requests for food bank assistance, and reports of addiction, overdoses, depression, and suicide began “shatter[ing] all historical records” (Feeding America, n.d.; Alcorn, 2020; Americans for Tax Fairness, 2020; Baldor & Burns, 2020; Community FoodBank of New Jersey, 2020; Dubey et al., 2020; Ettman et al., 2020; Hollyfield, 2020; Lerma, 2020; Prestigiacomo, 2020; Schwarz, 2020; Sergent et al., 2020; Thorbecke, 2020; Wan & Long, 2020). Outside the U.S., the situation is similar (Bueno-Notivol et al., 2020). As a marker of the global surge in hunger, the Nobel Committee awarded its 2020 Peace Prize to the World Food Programme, prompting the agency’s head to warn that the world is “on the brink of a hunger pandemic” that could result in “famines of biblical proportions” in the coming year (Lederer, 2020).

In November, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released data identifying over 100,000 excess U.S. deaths “indirectly” associated with the pandemic (Rossen et al., 2020), including a “stunning 26.5% jump” in excess deaths in young adults in their mid-twenties through mid-forties (Prestigiacomo, 2020). Commenting on these mortality data — which reflect “a death count well beyond what [researchers] would normally expect” (Preidt, 2020) — the former U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb voiced his suspicion that “a good portion of the deaths in that younger cohort were deaths due to despair,” including drug overdoses (Squawk Box, 2020). University researchers writing about mortality in JAMA concurred that “Excess deaths attributed to causes other than COVID-19 could reflect deaths . . . resulting from disruptions produced by the pandemic” (Woolf et al., 2020), including “spillover effects . . . such as delayed medical care, economic hardship or emotional distress” (Preidt, 2020). Multilateral entities like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) emphasize that it will be essential to assess the long-term impact of “confinement and deteriorating financial conditions” on mortality and warn that the social and economic fallout is likely to be “significant” (Morgan et al., 2020).

As an ideology, technocracy is recognized for exalting knowledge and expertise as the principal sources of legitimate power and authority and for asserting that there is “one best way” that only “the experts” (e.g., engineers, scientists, and doctors) can determine (Burris, 1989). However, critics of technocracy have long pointed out that, particularly in crisis situations, the know-how, “discretionary interventions” and seemingly “elastic” power claimed by technocrats can end up blurring the line between useful expertise and “arbitrary rule” (White, 2020). Moreover, technocrats typically resist attempts to make explicit “the non-rational attributes of technocratic decision-making” (Burris, 1989).

With the noticeable absence of any cost-benefit analysis and the increasingly “non-rational” justifications being put forth for Covid-19 restrictions (Handley, 2020; Kristen, 2020; Kulldorff et al., 2020; The Reaction Team, 2020) — as well as the economic, political, social, and cultural changes rolling out at dizzying speed — it is important to try to understand the technocratic and financial agendas at play. Three increasingly interwoven sectors (Big Finance, Big Tech, and Big Pharma) are reaping rewards from Covid-19, benefiting from close relationships with the military-intelligence apparatus (Glaser, 2020; Usdin, 2020). This rapid review seeks to (1) identify some of the pandemic’s principal beneficiaries (financial and otherwise) across these sectors, and (2) assess these parties’ actions in the context of the accelerating global push for technocratic consolidation and control through invasive surveillance.

Methods

Rapid reviews are used to synthesize evidence in a streamlined manner, abbreviating the timeline and requirements of more involved systematic reviews (Ganann et al., 2010). A rapid review is particularly well suited to emerging current event sequences, and the dynamic Covid-19-related situation certainly qualifies. Though not exhaustive, rapid reviews make it possible to quickly summarize available evidence across multiple disciplines, whether for the purpose of informing policy-making and decision-making or to identify patterns and take stock of the bigger picture.

For the purposes of this broad overview of current events, we relied primarily on the so-called grey literature as well as media accounts (from both the legacy media and independent journalists) and various online sources. We also consulted relevant peer-reviewed literature. Notably, while the peer-review process is ordinarily slow-moving, Covid-19-related studies have been making their way through the pipeline at breakneck speed (Packer, 2020).

Examples of sources consulted for this review include conventional and alternative financial commentary; webpages and communications from public health agencies, international organizations, and universities; individual blogs and commentary; and peer-reviewed studies cataloguing the impact of Covid-19 restrictions.

Big Finance

Assisted by the media, commentators have had an easy time framing the events of 2020 principally as a health crisis. With each passing month, however, those claims wear thinner (Barnett, 2020). In a comprehensive analysis titled The State of Our Currencies, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Housing Catherine Austin Fitts (2020a) offers a broader and more instructive interpretation. Informed by close attention to financial patterns, Fitts asserts that the “shock doctrine” measures being imposed under cover of Covid-19 are helping lay the train tracks for a new global central banking machine and a technocratic “regulatory and economic model that permits far greater central control.”

Fitts calls attention to G7 central bankers’ August 2019 approval in Jackson Hole, Wyoming of a plan called “Going Direct” (Bartsch et al., 2019) that makes the case for a novel “blurring [of] the lines between government fiscal policy and central bank monetary policy” (Martens & Martens, 2020). Drafted months before Covid-19, the plan — co-branded by the World Economic Forum (n.d.) as “the Great Reset” — evokes the prospect of a serious economic downturn and “unusual circumstances” that could be used to justify “unprecedented” global measures (Bartsch et al., 2019).

Fitts (2020a) postulates that central bankers have both a short-term aim (to extend the existing dollar-based reserve currency system) and an ambitious longer-term goal: to implement a “new global governance and financial transaction system, and gather the power necessary to herd all parties into the new system”. Characterizing these aspirations as nothing short of ending currency as we know it, Fitts suggests that the top-down digital-currency-based model being promoted as a replacement could end up sidelining traditional intermediaries and instead directly furnish populations with something akin to a “credit at the company store”. Spelling out the implications of such a model, Fitts notes that with the help of digital surveillance and a social credit system, the central-bank-controlled “credit” could easily be “adjusted or turned off on an individual basis”. General Manager Agustín Carstens of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) — the central bank of central banks — recently acknowledged as much, stating that in stark contrast to cash, a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) would give central banks “absolute control” over CBDC use “and the technology to enforce” CBDC rules and regulations (International Monetary Fund, 2020). With a vaccine-injected digital surveillance program in individuals, the CBDC would have dictatorial power at the level of individual buying and selling.

Fitts’ analysis suggests that central bankers began laying the groundwork for the desired global transition well in advance of the coronavirus mayhem. In 2019 alone, G7 finance ministers endorsed a cryptocurrency action plan in July; in August, the G7 central bankers approved “Going Direct”; in September, the U.S. Federal Reserve (“the Fed”) started making hundreds of billions of dollars in loans “direct” to Wall Street trading houses; and in October, the BIS issued a major report on global cryptocurrencies (Bank for International Settlements, 2019; Helms, 2019; Fitts, 2020a; Martens & Martens, 2020). In the middle of the frenzy of central bank activity in October, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (along with the World Economic Forum and Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security) held the well-publicized “pandemic tabletop exercise” called Event 201, which played out a global coronavirus outbreak scenario strikingly similar to 2020’s actual events (Center for Health Security, n.d.).

In January 2020, U.S. corporations witnessed a record number of CEO departures (Ausick, 2020; Marinova, 2020) — a mass exodus that strategically allowed over 200 departing executives to sell their stock at or near the market high (see Table 1). Other wealthy and influential insiders also engaged in surprisingly well-timed stock market transactions. For example, following a late-January, behind-closed-doors briefing about the virus (which had yet to affect a single American), certain U.S. senators sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock, “unloading shares that plummeted in value a month later” (Lane, 2020). The world’s wealthiest person, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, sold nearly $4.1 billion over an 11-day period in early February after having also sold $2.8 billion in shares in August 2019 (Palmer, 2020).

Table 1. U.S. CEO Departures in January 2020

Sources: Ausick, 2020; ChallengerGray, 2020

As the U.S. government turned on the stimulus spigot in March, the Fed sustained its irregular intervention in the U.S. economy. By the summer of 2020, the Fed had expanded its balance sheet by $2.9 trillion — much of it unaccounted for, according to Fed-watcher John Titus (2020) — and financial observers were warning that “the market is no longer the biggest factor in selecting [economic] winners and losers” (Whalen, 2020). Titus (2020) concurs with this assessment, baldly characterizing 2020’s events as a Fed-led “coup d’état”. Titus (2014) has been chronicling major financial forces and legal changes since the 2008 financial crisis, describing how central banks are not only able to “loot” the American people “in broad daylight” but can do so without fear of prosecution — probably because, as Titus and Fitts (2020a) both point out, the Department of Justice depends on Fed member banks for its financial operations.

The coronavirus stimulus has provided abundant financial opportunities advantageous to Fed member banks. Over a two-week period in April, for example, large banks earned $10 billion in fees (ranging from 1 to 5 percent) simply for processing the government’s loans to businesses (Sullivan et al., 2020). Class-action lawsuits subsequently alleged that the banks prioritized larger loans (and larger companies) in order to garner the largest fees, while shutting out “tens of thousands” of eligible but smaller businesses (Sullivan et al., 2020). Serving as lender to the parent company of a national restaurant chain, Fed member bank JPMorgan Chase (the largest and most profitable bank in the U.S.) earned a $100,000 fee for a single “one-time transaction for which it assumed no risk and could pass through with fewer requirements than for a regular loan” (Sullivan et al., 2020).

In September, Senator Marco Rubio (Chairman of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship) wrote to the JPMorgan Chase CEO expressing “alarm” about allegations that JPMorgan employees “may have been involved in potentially illegal conduct” in the distribution of Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loan funds (Rubio, 2020). Bloomberg later confirmed the possibility of Covid-19-related banking abuse on a wide scale (David, 2020). Importantly, this is not a new pattern of behavior for the U.S. banking behemoth. Since 2002 (and primarily since the 2008 financial crisis), JPMorgan Chase has paid out at least $42 billion in settlements for questionable, unethical, or illegal behavior (Fitts, 2019); its public-facing Wikipedia page lists involvement in 22 different “controversies,” including the economically shattering Enron and Madoff scandals (“JPMorgan Chase”, n.d.). Nevertheless, JPMorgan continues to earn glowing accolades from the financial community. In June 2020, Forbes urged investors to “bank on the best” in the uncertain Covid-19 environment (Trainer, 2020), citing JPMorgan’s post-2009 “industry-leading profitability” and asserting that the bank is exceptionally well positioned to expand its market share both during and post-pandemic. In October, JPMorgan rolled out a new smartphone credit card reader designed to compete with Square and PayPal (Son, 2020).

Big Tech

By July 2020, global billionaires’ wealth had surged to an all-time high of $10.2 trillion — an increase of 27.5 percent since April, and a 41.3 percent increase for tech billionaires (Phillipps, 2020). U.S. billionaires accrued a significant share of this pandemic wealth bonus, increasing their worth by $845 billion from mid-March to mid-September and prompting the observation that “for American billionaires specifically, things have never looked better” (Lerma, 2020). As a whole, U.S. billionaires’ wealth reached the equivalent of almost one-fifth of the U.S. gross domestic product, with four tech billionaires (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg) plus Warren Buffett seeing their total wealth climb by 59 percent (da Costa, 2020). Calling attention to Bezos, in particular, the Institute for Policy Studies described his surge in wealth as “unprecedented in modern financial history”, requiring “a real-time hour-by-hour tracker” to keep up (Collins et al., 2020).

The companies with which top-tier billionaires are affiliated include Amazon and Amazon Web Services (Bezos), Apple (Tim Cook), Facebook (Zuckerberg), Google/Alphabet (Larry Page and Sergey Brin), Microsoft (Steve Ballmer and Gates), Oracle (Larry Ellison), Zoom (Eric Yuan), and the variety of companies (including Neuralink, SpaceX, and Tesla) spearheaded by Musk (Alcorn, 2020; Collins et al., 2020; Toh, 2020). In July, as Bloomberg described these companies’ “outsized influence on U.S. markets”, it noted that they are as well-situated to profit from the U.S. shutdown as they are to take advantage of a recovering Europe and Asia — a “one-two punch” that has already increased FAANG companies’ market (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google, plus Microsoft) by 62 percent (Ritholtz, 2020). Suggesting that Silicon Valley will go down in history as “the standout sector” (Divine, 2020a), a U.S. News analyst unabashedly recommended Facebook as a 2020 “best buy” because “it’s gobbling up the world, and reasonable people could argue that if privacy is dying, individual investors may as well profit alongside Silicon Valley” (Divine, 2020b).

Covid-19 has provided Big Tech (and Big Telecom) with an opportunity to bring a range of controversial technologies further out into the open, despite many unresolved concerns about safety and ethics (Boteler, 2017; Gohd, 2017; Ross, 2018; Boyle, 2019; Feiner, 2019; Markman, 2019; Plautz, 2019; Zhang et al., 2019; Bajpai, 2020; Goodwin, 2020; Gyarmathy, 2020; McGovern, 2020; Novet, 2020; Reuters, 2020; Tucker, 2020; U.S. Department of Defense, 2020). Singly and in combination, the technologies (some of which are listed in Table 2) have the potential to usher in unprecedented societal changes, strengthening technocrats’ ability to control many facets of daily life. Artificial intelligence (AI), 5G, “smart” utility meters, and the Internet of Things (IoT), for example, are rapidly and fundamentally changing the nature of cities, businesses, and homes — what Fitts (2020a) calls the “final mile” — forming an essential part of the strategy to convert the economic model to a technocratic model that uses AI and software to achieve centrally controlled resource allocation.

Table 2. Covid-19 and the Rollout of Control Technologies

In October 2020, the World Economic Forum — the Great Reset’s front-row marketer — released a report on the future of jobs, describing the significant displacement of workers resulting from the pandemic and the related global restructuring that the organization has been taking the opportunity to promote (Petzinger, 2020). With automation and Covid-19 causing a “double-disruption” that is not only accelerating job destruction in the short term but “shrinking opportunities” in the longer term, the report solemnly pronounced a “new division of labour between humans, machines and algorithms” (World Economic Forum, 2020). Well before the pandemic, Amazon had established a robot-centric system at its fulfillment centers, with a process focused on “limit[ing] movement of people [and] let[ting] robots move everything” (Masud, 2019). This downsizing of humans has apparently served Amazon well; by May 2020, Amazon’s e-commerce business had shot up by 93 percent compared to the previous May (Klebnikov, 2020).

A September 2020 survey showed that many other companies plan to substantially boost their spending on AI and machine learning, citing Covid-19 as their rationale for prioritizing “the adoption of new technologies that enhance and enable automation” (Shein, 2020). Observers also predict, however, that the AI gold rush will lead to even more market consolidation and control by Amazon and three other big Covid-19 winners — Alphabet, Facebook, and Microsoft. These four companies, according to Forbes, have the “scale to push the envelope”, the “talent and the technology to perfect [AI]”, and the computing power to dominate the field (Markman, 2019). Amazon already controls nearly 46 percent of the worldwide public cloud-computing infrastructure that is a key backstop for AI functions such as parallel processing and the digestion of Big Data (Atlantic.Net, 2018; Nix, 2019).

Before Covid-19, consumer rejection of 5G wireless technology had been growing (Castor, 2020). However, the imposition of social distancing measures, remote learning, and online work requirements has provided the telecommunications industry with a ready-made pretext to fast-forward 5G’s deployment while attempting to burnish the industry’s unfavorable public image. Taking advantage of virus fears, Big Tech and Big Telecom are claiming that 5G can help enable “a future in which business, health care and human interaction must be at more than an arm’s length” (Wasserman, 2020). Forbes has praised communication service providers for responding to the coronavirus lockdowns “with a sense of urgency, purpose and empathy” (Wilson, 2020). Describing areas requiring more “advanced connectivity”, a technology expert at Deloitte Consulting cited the example of “cameralytics” (video surveillance) “to help worker safety and social distancing” (Howell, 2020). Whatever the rationale, the reality on the ground has been a massive increase in U.S. telecom companies’ capital spending on 5G and a “full steam ahead” rollout of spectrum and infrastructure that has placed the U.S. “ahead of schedule” (Knight, 2020; Ludlum, 2020). The European Commission is now attempting to follow the U.S.’s lead by pushing for the removal of “regulatory hurdles” and making the case that 5G will aid the region’s post-coronavirus economic recovery (McCaskill, 2020).

Covid-19 has also brought another of Big Tech’s interests into sharper focus: food. Billionaires such as Bill Gates and Peter Thiel have, for some time, been investing in biotech start-ups that aim to produce, in a lab, stem-cell-based “meat”, “fish”, “dairy”, and “breastmilk” (Kerr, 2016; Kosoff, 2017; Beres, 2020; Wuench, 2020). These start-ups and their investors have been only too happy to position the burgeoning industry as a partial solution to pandemic-related food insecurity and supply chain interruptions (Galanakis, 2020; Pereira & Oliveira, 2020; Yeung, 2020), welcoming Covid-19 as an “accelerator” as well as an opportunity to overcome consumer skepticism (Siegner, 2019; Morrison, 2020). In addition, as the coronavirus breathes new life into the term “sustainability” — long used by technocrats as a cover term for more centralized control (Wood, 2018) — global partners like the United Nations and the World Economic Forum are making the improbable claim that the complex, high-dollar, lab-created food substitutes (which require genetically stable cell lines, bioreactors, “edible scaffolds”, and cell culture media) are a “sustainable” option (Whiting, 2020). The biopharma giant Merck is also getting in on the “cultured meat” action, offering to make its “extensive knowledge of the relevant science and biotechnology” available to companies seeking to overcome “critical technological challenges” (Whiting, 2020). Merck frequently collaborates with the Gates Foundation, including in the development of Covid-19 vaccines (Lardieri, 2020).

Big Pharma

In September 2019, an annual Gallup poll reported that the restaurant industry was America’s top-ranked and most-liked among the 25 industries regularly assessed by the polling group (McCarthy, 2019). Sadly, less than a year later the Independent Restaurant Coalition predicted the permanent demise of up to 85 percent of independent restaurants (Jiang, 2020). In contrast, the pharmaceutical industry came in “dead last” in the 2019 poll, despite $9.6 billion spent annually on direct-to-consumer advertising and another $20 billion on marketing to health professionals (McCarthy, 2019; Schwartz & Woloshin, 2019). The U.S. is one of only two countries in the world that allows drug companies to market directly to consumers and, in non-election years, roughly 70 percent of news outlets’ advertising revenues come from pharma (Solis, 2019).

The pharmaceutical industry’s history of “fraud, bribery, lawsuits and scandals” is well known (Compton, n.d.), and no less a figure than Bill Gates has suggested that the public perceives Big Pharma as “kind of selfish and uncooperative”; however, Mr. Gates and Fortune magazine propose that Covid-19 may offer the industry an opportunity for “redemption” (Leaf, 2020). The stage may have been set for Big Pharma’s year of opportunity in January, when JPMorgan Chase held its 38th annual invitation-only health care conference. The business press describes the yearly conference as “one of the biggest biotech dealmaking events, often setting the tone for funding rounds, partnerships and mergers and acquisitions” (Leuty, 2020). Thus, just when the coronavirus ball was getting rolling, the conference brought an estimated 20,000 venture capitalists, investment bankers, and drug development executives and entrepreneurs to San Francisco to hear keynote addresses by JPMorgan’s and GlaxoSmithKline’s CEOs and to stoke expectations of a strong year for the biotech-plus-pharma chimera known as “biopharma” (JPMorgan, n.d.; Leuty, 2020; Lipschultz, 2020). In 2014, McKinsey & Company described the investment opportunities in biopharmaceuticals as “big and growing too rapidly to ignore”, with an annual growth rate more than double that of conventional pharma and a 20 percent share of global pharmaceutical revenues (Otto et al., 2014).

A few weeks after the JPMorgan conference — and well before any Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. — the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) helped ensure that significant pandemic benefits would flow into the biopharma and medical space. HHS did so by issuing a declaration (on February 4) making vaccines and all Covid-19-related medical countermeasures immune from legal liability (HHS, 2020a). On March 6, roughly a week after the first reported coronavirus death, President Trump sweetened the pot by signing into law the first in a series of emergency stimulus packages, earmarking 40 percent of the $8.3-billion bill for vaccines and drugs under terms the pharmaceutical industry openly dictated (Karlin-Smith, 2020).

Following the February 4 HHS declaration eliminating legal liability, Bill and Melinda Gates instantly pledged $100 million in funding for coronavirus vaccine research and treatments, followed by another $150 million in mid-April (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2020; Voytko, 2020). When Operation Warp Speed followed, making untold billions available for research and development of therapeutics and vaccines at taxpayer expense (see Table 3), dozens of biopharma companies jumped into the fray (HHS, n.d.). Catherine Austin Fitts notes that a system that exempts from liability anything labeled as a “vaccine” amounts to “an open invitation to make billions . . . particularly where government regulations and laws can be used to create a guaranteed market through mandates” (Fitts, 2020b). Moreover, each time the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) adds a given vaccine to the CDC schedule, it is not only the equivalent of a “golden ticket” for the vaccine manufacturer but also directly benefits the CDC, which owns dozens of vaccine-related patents and routinely shares licensing agreements with manufacturers (Taylor, 2017; Children’s Health Defense, 2019).

Currently, there is one injury for every 39 vaccinations administered (2.6%), often resulting in a “disastrous outcome of life-altering iatrogenic illnesses” (Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, n.d.; Kennedy Jr., 2019; Kristen, 2019). A CDC study published in JAMA in 2016 reported that one in five young children (19.5%) under age five who were admitted to emergency rooms for drug reactions were suffering from vaccine injuries (Shehab et al., 2016). Early clinical trial results and Covid-19 vaccines’ use of an array of experimental, never-before-approved technologies suggest that comparable (or worse) levels of injury could follow the rollout of coronavirus vaccines (Children’s Health Defense, 2020a, 2020c, 2020d, 2020e). The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, for example, feature mRNA molecules that are known to be “intrinsically unstable and prone to degradation”, with an inflammatory component that risks dangerous immune reactions (Feuerstein, Garde, & Joseph, 2020; Jackson et al., 2020; Wadhwa et al., 2020). Assuming the same vaccine injury rate of 2.6 percent, Operation Warp Speed’s projected vaccination of roughly 25 million Americans per month (Owermohle, 2020b) could conceivably result in 3.9 million injuries over just the first six months. (Given that the leading vaccines will require two initial doses and probable boosters thereafter, this figure could even be an underestimate.) If Bill Gates and other technocrats succeed in their declared aspiration to manufacture billions of doses of coronavirus vaccine and “get them out to every part of the world” (Gates, 2020), the scale of injury would not only be unprecedented but could open a lucrative, long-term gateway to the wider drug market to manage the injuries (Kristen, 2019).

Table 3. U.S. Taxpayer Monies Awarded to Pharmaceutical and Other Companies via Operation Warp Speed* (March–October, 2020), in Millions (M) or Billions (B)

*HHS note on Operation Warp Speed funding: “Congress has directed almost $10 billion to this effort through supplemental funding, including the CARES Act. Congress has also appropriated other flexible funding. The almost $10 billion specifically directed includes more than $6.5 billion designated for countermeasure development through BARDA and $3 billion for NIH research.”

By mid-October, 44 candidate vaccines were in clinical evaluation worldwide, with another two hundred or so in the pipeline (Agrawal et al., 2020; World Health Organization, 2020b). Furnishing predictably uncritical coverage ensured by the pharmaceutical industry’s strategic entanglements with the media, scientists, and medical journals, the press has been telling the public that the vaccines will play “an important role in most response scenarios”, including “‘sav[ing] the world’ in worse scenarios” and serving as an “insurance policy against continued health and economic shocks” (Agrawal et al., 2020). Only a handful of journalists have called attention to Big Pharma’s pandemic profiteering, pointing out that “insiders at companies developing experimental vaccines and treatments . . . aren’t waiting until they finish the job to collect their reward” (Wallack, 2020).

An October piece in the Boston Globe cited the example of Moderna (Wallack, 2020). It took Moderna a mere three weeks after Bill Gates’ initial funding installment to send its first batch of experimental vaccine to research and patent partner, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), leading to an immediate surge in share price of 28 percent (Lee, 2020; Loftus, 2020). By early April, Moderna’s CEO had become an overnight billionaire; by October, he had sold nearly $58 million in stock, followed by another $2 million in mid-November, just ahead of the company’s intended filing for vaccine Emergency Use Authorization (Nagarajan, 2020; Tognini, 2020; Wallack, 2020). Meanwhile, Moderna’s chief medical officer has been “systematically liquidating all of his company stock” — about $70 million — “in a series of pre-planned trades that have made him roughly $1 million richer each week” (Wallack, 2020). Thus far this year, company insiders have sold $309 million in stock versus under $2 million in 2019, fueling suspicion that they may be “downplaying possible obstacles to goose stock prices — and increase their personal profits” (Wallack, 2020). Also among those selling Moderna stock options is Moncef Slaoui, the former Moderna board member and former GlaxoSmithKline executive who now heads up Operation Warp Speed (Rozsa & Spencer, 2020).

From Moderna’s perspective, the Covid-19 vaccine represents a lifeline, rescuing the company from a shaky bottom line due to its prior inability to bring any products to market (Garde, 2017; Nathan-Kazis, 2020). Other biopharma companies formerly on the skids are likewise poised to make record profits from the coronavirus (Webb & Diego, 2020). Characterizing the business model for Covid-19 (and other) vaccines as a “great scheme” — particularly given the HHS-guaranteed, risk-free environment — a watchdog group spokesman told the Boston Globe, “Taxpayers cover the upfront investment costs and shoulder any downside, while their [biopharma’s] executives and shareholders can capture the upside if their drugs pan out and are shoveling obscene amounts of money into their pockets throughout the process” (Wallack, 2020). In the words of a business school professor, “You announce a sliver of positive hope about a product and your stock price goes up,” even though “the chances of that product panning out might be relatively low” (Wallack, 2020). In 2020, the company Vaxart saw its per-share stock price rise from 27 cents to a high of $17.49 (Wallack, 2020).

Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi (2020) describes Covid-19 as “the ultimate cash cow,” a “subsidy-laden scam,” and a legal opportunity for “giant-scale gouging”, quoting a legislator who admits that while the public is paying for the research and manufacturing, “the profits will be privatized”. Writing in August about how the government-subsidized business model played out for Gilead’s drug remdesivir, Taibbi (2020) recounted: “Gilead, a company with a market capitalization of more than $90 billion, making it bigger than Goldman Sachs, develops an antiviral drug with the help of $99 million in American government grant money. Though the drug may cost as little as $10 per dose to make, and is being produced generically in Bangladesh at about a fifth of the list price, and costs about a third less in Europe than it does in the U.S., Gilead ended up selling hundreds of thousands of doses at the maximum conceivable level, i.e., the American private-insurance price — which, incidentally, might be about 10 times what it’s worth, given its actual medical impact.”

Always a major lobbying presence on Capitol Hill, the pharmaceutical industry has been more lavish than usual with its political spending in 2020, donating over $11 million to individual candidates involved with health care policy and related political action committees (Facher, 2020a). Although the overall amounts represent a pittance for companies earning tens of billions a year, pharma and its lobbying groups recognize that “small chunks of corporate change”, when strategically allocated, “can have a significant impact” (Facher, 2020b). Coronavirus vaccine frontrunner Pfizer, the second-largest drug and biotech company in the world and the fourth-highest earner of vaccine revenues (Statista, n.d.; Hansen, 2020), has been the top political spender, likely laying the groundwork for its November 20 filing for Emergency Use Authorization for its coronavirus vaccine (Chander, 2020; Children’s Health Defense, 2020d). Pfizer has also benefited from repeated endorsements from the financial community and self-proclaimed spokesmen like Bill Gates (Speights, 2020a, 2020b).

The Military-Intelligence Complex

Traditional vaccines have their fair share of safety problems, but coronavirus and other 21st-century vaccines promise to challenge bodily integrity and informed consent in entirely new ways, particularly given their strong reliance on various forms of nanotechnology (Health and Environment Alliance, 2008; Li et al., 2009; Chauhan et al., 2020; Children’s Health Defense, 2020a). Many of the technologies being rolled into Covid-19 vaccines and their delivery systems originated in the military sphere or benefited from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funding. DARPA has had a Biological Technologies Office since 2014 and, since the emergence of Covid-19, has specifically directed many of its pandemic-related efforts toward coronavirus therapeutics and vaccines (Gallo, 2020). Far from being suspect, the military’s role has been celebrated. A BioCentury report optimistically suggested in March that as an agency “that specializes in turning science fantasies into realities”, DARPA might offer the “best hopes” for Covid-19 biotech solutions due to its willingness to pursue “high-risk, high-reward technologies”, set goals “that defy conventional wisdom”, and go after its goals with a “laser” focus (Usdin, 2020).

One of the principal DARPA-incubated vaccine technologies to gain prominence in the Covid-19 era are the nucleic acid (mRNA and DNA) vaccines that turn the human body into its own “bioreactor” (Ghose, 2015; Usdin, 2020). Vaccines using mRNA (such as Moderna’s and Pfizer’s) — which developers compare to “software” (Garde, 2017) and praise for their “programmability” (Al-Wassiti, 2019) — target the cell’s cytoplasm and rely on delivery technologies such as lipid nanoparticles to “ensure stabilization of mRNA under physiological conditions” (Wadhwa et al., 2020). DNA vaccines (such as Inovio’s) are intended to penetrate all the way into a cell’s nucleus and come with the risk of “integration of exogenous DNA into the host genome, which may cause severe mutagenesis and induced new diseases” (Zhang, Maruggi, Shan, & Li, 2019). Describing the scientific community’s early doubts about nucleic acid vaccines — arising from the potential for “many things” to go wrong — a DARPA program manager recently noted, “It was something that was much too risky for groups like the NIH to fund” (Usdin, 2020).

Risks aside, DARPA and vaccine manufacturers are attracted to one chief benefit of nucleic acid vaccines: They can be developed much more quickly and cheaply. Other military-initiated technologies are also coming into view with Covid-19 vaccines. These include electroporation, which applies a high-voltage electrical pulse to make cell membranes permeable to a vaccine’s foreign DNA (Inovio Pharmaceuticals, 2020); syringe-injected biosensors that enable continuous wireless monitoring of vital signs and body chemistry (Peer, n.d.; Profusa, n.d.; Diego, 2020b; Tucker, 2020); and the quantum-dot-based infrared detectors that are under discussion as a tool for tracking vaccination status (Johnson, 2011; Trafton, 2019). DARPA has also played a leading role in developing and funding technologies that “blur the lines between computers and biology”, including brain-machine interfaces and neuromonitoring and mind-reading devices (CB Insights, 2019; Gent, 2019; Tullis, 2019).

Some of Moderna’s earliest funding came from DARPA, which awarded the company $25 million in 2013 to develop the mRNA platform that has become a key feature of its coronavirus vaccine (Usdin, 2020). Other DARPA beneficiaries now involved in efforts to develop Covid-19 vaccines or therapeutics include AbCellera Biologics, CureVac, Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, and Vir Biotechnology; some of AbCellera’s partners include major players like Pfizer and Gilead (Usdin, 2020).

The Pentagon’s involvement in coronavirus-related efforts goes well beyond DARPA-funded research. Four-star General Gustave Perna is serving as chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed alongside chief advisor Moncef Slaoui. General Perna, in charge of U.S. Army Materiel Command, oversees the global supply chain for over 190,000 U.S. Army employees (HHS, 2020b). For the first time ever, the distribution of the eventual coronavirus vaccines is being planned as a “joint venture” between the CDC and the Pentagon, with the latter overseeing “all the logistics of getting the vaccines to the right place, at the right time, in the right condition” (Owermohle, 2020a). In a CBS “60 Minutes” appearance in early November, General Perna indicated that Operation Warp Speed already had doses of (currently unapproved) vaccine and syringes stockpiled and protected by armed guards, and intends to get them out the door “within 24 hours” of vaccine approval and delivered “to every zip code in this country” (Martin, 2020).

The Pentagon has indicated that private-sector involvement could be a key feature of the distribution strategy, and the private sector is positioning itself to participate. Merck, for example, is testing drone delivery of vaccines in partnership with Volansi, Inc., a company that provides “on-demand” drone services for the military (Landi, 2020; Simmie, 2020). In July, Merck’s CEO set the stage for its logistics involvement by describing vaccine distribution as “even a harder problem” than the “scientific conundrum of coming forward with a vaccine that works” (Murray & Griffin, 2020).

Outside the pharmaceutical arena, technological transformations that are speeding the world toward more centralized control also reveal the influence of the military-intelligence sector. For example, Amazon Web Services has held cloud-computing contracts with the CIA since 2013, with the original $600 million contract extending to all 17 intelligence agencies (Konkel, 2014). In October of 2019, the Department of Defense awarded the $10 billion JEDI cloud computing contract to Microsoft, a decision that Amazon has unsuccessfully disputed in court (Sandler, 2020). In early 2020, the U.S. Navy awarded a cloud computing contract to Leidos (Leidos, 2020).

5G, too, relies in part on the high-range millimeter-wave spectrum previously used almost entirely by the military for “non-lethal” crowd dispersal weapons (Joint Intermediate Force Capabilities Office, n.d.). In October, the Department of Defense announced it would spend $600 million to test “dual-use” applications of 5G to enhance the U.S. military’s “leap-ahead capabilities”, including applications such as 5G-enabled augmented/virtual reality, 5G-enabled “smart” warehouses, and 5G technologies “to aid in Air, Space, and Cyberspace lethality” (U.S. Department of Defense, 2020).

Both 5G and cloud computing are critical components of the Big Data and IoT build-out that is enabling the conversion of individual data into the “new oil” (Fitts, 2020a), and both have exploded in 2020 (Howell, 2020; Klebnikov, 2020). The technologies are essential to the “centrally controlled digital financial transaction systems” envisioned by central bankers, who plan to rely on seamless data flows to and from “every smartphone, community, and home without exception” (Fitts, 2020a).

Discussion

As more individuals and organizations connect the technocratic dots and look beneath the coronavirus pandemic’s seductively simple surface, it should become increasingly apparent that the pandemic profiteers do not have people’s best interests at heart. In The State of Our Currencies and other pandemic-related writings, Catherine Austin Fitts (2020a, 2020b) strongly emphasizes the importance of accepting that what is transpiring in the financial, tech, biopharmaceutical, and military-intelligence sectors is interconnected. Part of this involves recognizing that the coronavirus vaccines currently dominating the headlines represent something likely to go far beyond the simple health intervention being held out by scientists and officials as a panacea. Instead, the evidence suggests that Covid-19 vaccines are intended to serve as a Trojan horse to transport invasive technologies into people’s brains and bodies. These technologies could include brain-machine interface nanotechnology, digital identity tracking devices, technology that can be turned on and off remotely, and cryptocurrency-compatible chips (Fitts, 2020b).

In Fitts’ (2020a, 2020b) view, this type of intimate access — achieved “without notice, disclosure, or compensation” — represents the “final inch” of interest to technocrats. Together with external technologies to control behavior (Max, 2020), such access could permit the achievement of several goals: (1) replacing currencies with a digital transaction system, digital identification, and tracking (an “embedded credit card system”); (2) creating a global control grid that connects the population to the military-intelligence clouds; and (3) obtaining continuous access to valuable individual data on a 24/7 basis (Fitts, 2020b). Countries in West Africa are already piloting a venture by the Gates Foundation, the Gates-funded GAVI vaccine alliance, and Mastercard that “marks a novel approach towards linking a biometric digital identity system, vaccination records, and a payment system into a single cohesive platform” (Diego, 2020a). As Fitts (2020b) summarizes, “Just as Gates installed an operating system in our computers, now the vision is to install an operating system in our bodies and use ‘viruses’ to mandate an initial installation followed by regular updates”. The “neat trick”, as Fitts sees it, is that the use of vaccines as the delivery vehicle cancels out legal liability.

It is noteworthy that Bill Gates announced that he was stepping down from the Microsoft board of directors on March 13 — the same day that President Trump declared the pandemic a national emergency (Haselton & Novet, 2020). That same month, the Pentagon reaffirmed its intention for the JEDI cloud-computing contract to go to Microsoft (Rash, 2020; Sun, 2020). By distancing himself from the appearance of conflicts of interest with Microsoft’s Defense Department commitments and the Pentagon’s subsequent role in Operation Warp Speed, Mr. Gates had more freedom to make the rounds and begin promoting worldwide vaccination and digital certificates (Haggith, 2020). Gates has been less successful in distracting attention from other potential conflicts of interest. An exposé by The Nation (ironically also published in March) showed that the Gates Foundation gives billions to corporations in which the foundation holds stocks and bonds — including all of the major pharmaceutical companies — creating a “welter of conflicts of interest” (Schwab, 2020). A dozen years ago, around the time of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the Los Angeles Times outlined the Gates Foundation’s numerous holdings in a number of notoriously “destructive or unethical” companies (Piller et al., 2007).

Mr. Gates is not the only party strenuously promoting digital IDs and “no-escape” financial tracking (marketed under the benevolent guise of “financial inclusion”). In October, Kristalina Georgieva, the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) Managing Director, evoked “a world in which digital is the way in which financial transactions take place” and made it clear that she views universal digital IDs as a non-negotiable requirement for moving in the “right direction” (International Monetary Fund, 2020). Georgieva has, not unhappily, described Covid-19 as a “once in a lifetime pandemic” (Bello, 2020).

Georgieva’s remarks should be examined in the context of a proposal by the U.S. House of Representatives to bestow the IMF with $3 trillion “no-strings-attached” U.S. dollars as “coronavirus relief aid” (Huessy, 2020; Roberts, 2020). A U.S. taxpayer-funded gift of this magnitude would be unprecedented and would increase the IMF’s lending resources (called Special Drawing Rights or SDRs) by as much as 10-fold (Roberts, 2020). 2020’s events (including global debt entrapment and actual or potential food shortages) and the IMF’s bullying track record (Bello, 2020) suggest that the IMF could then wield the $3 trillion as a weapon, strong-arming countries into accepting an array of unwanted measures such as digital identities, forced vaccination, and eventually (as the World Economic Forum predicts), the relinquishment of private property (World Economic Forum, 2016). As a step in this general direction, the IMF has strongly praised India’s leadership in biometric identification systems. It celebrates the “delivery of social benefits through direct electronic payments to eligible bank account holders”, but glosses over the systems’ vulnerability to “unauthorized access” and the data breaches that are already rampant (Jha, 2018).

While current prospects for ordinary citizens certainly appear challenging, nothing is a foregone conclusion. Large-scale protests against the curtailment of civil rights have occurred and continue to occur in many countries, most notably in Germany (Depuydt, 2020). The Great Barrington Declaration — a statement crafted by public health scientists from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford — has garnered signatures from over 12,000 scientists, over 35,000 medical practitioners, and nearly 639,000 citizens from around the world, all concerned about “the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies” (Kulldorff et al., 2020). Similarly, an Appeal authored in May by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, gathered 40,000 signatures within a few days, with the signatories (religious leaders, doctors, journalists, lawyers, and other professionals) all seeking to draw attention to the threats to sovereignty and freedom that pandemic-related mandates have unleashed (Tosatti, 2020). Archbishop Viganò has also penned severe critiques of the Great Reset, describing its architects as “a global elite that wants to subdue all of humanity, imposing coercive measures [and a health dictatorship] with which to drastically limit individual freedoms and those of entire populations” (Viganò, 2020).

One of the signatories of Archbishop Viganò’s Appeal is attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., founder and chief legal counsel of Children’s Health Defense, an organization dedicated to ending childhood epidemics by working to eliminate harmful exposures, holding those responsible accountable, and establishing stronger safeguards. In late October, Kennedy recorded a 19-minute video message to people around the world, describing the “coup d’état by big data, by big telecom, by big tech, by the big oil and chemical companies and by the global public health cartel” (Kennedy Jr., 2020). In his closing remarks, Kennedy also indicated that citizens who wish to maintain their freedoms cannot afford to remain complacent: “You are on the front lines of the most important battle in history, and it is the battle to save democracy, and freedom, and human liberty, and human dignity from this totalitarian cartel that is trying to rob us simultaneously, in every nation in the world, of the rights that every human being is born with.”

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The Trump administration finalized a rule today that severely limits the government’s ability to protect habitat that imperiled animals and plants like grizzly bears and whooping cranes will need to survive and recover.

Today’s rule myopically defines “habitat” for the purposes of designating “critical habitat” for threatened and endangered species. Under the rule protections are limited to areas that could currently support the species — but not areas that were previously occupied and could be restored, or to areas that will provide additional habitat for future recovery as climate change shifts where species can live.

“President Trump has cemented his legacy as the most anti-wildlife president in history,” said Stephanie Kurose, a senior policy specialist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “Today’s rule will have devastating consequences for some of America’s most iconic species, including the grizzly bear, whooping cranes and Pacific salmon.”

The definition finalized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today limits habitat to the “abiotic and biotic setting that currently or periodically contains the resources and conditions necessary to support one or more life processes of a species,” likely limiting it to only those places that could support a species now. Most endangered species, however, have lost extensive areas of their historic range to habitat loss and fragmentation, and thus need habitat restoration to recover.

“Our most vulnerable species are barely clinging to survival after being forced from their homes into smaller and smaller spaces,” said Kurose. “We can’t expect them to ever recover if we don’t protect the areas they once lived.”

In September a bipartisan group of more than 100 members of Congress sent a letter to the Trump administration opposing the regulation.

Today’s rule is one of many actions the administration has taken to weaken habitat protections for endangered species. In 2019 the administration finalized sweeping changes to the rules implementing the Endangered Species Act that, among other things, specified that species would not get protected critical habitat unless habitat destruction was the primary threat. In September the administration proposed new regulations that radically alter the existing process for deciding when to exclude a particular area from a critical habitat designation.

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Early on December 10, Jean-Bernard Fourtillan was taken from his home by a team of French law enforcement officers and forcibly placed in solitary confinement at the psychiatric hospital of Uzès.

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Early on December 10, Jean-Bernard Fourtillan, a French retired university professor known for his strong opposition to COVID-19 vaccines such as those presently being distributed in the U.K., was taken from his temporary home in the south of France by a team of “gendarmes” — French law enforcement officers under military command — and forcibly placed in solitary confinement at the psychiatric hospital of Uzès. His mobile phones were taken from him, and at the time of writing, he had not been allowed to communicate with the outside world. The order for his internment appears to have been issued by the local “préfet,” the official representative of the French executive.

The systematic use of psychiatric hospitals in order to silence or punish political opponents became widespread under communism, having started shortly after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917. The method developed under Stalin and then expanded as opposition to the “socialist paradise” came to be considered a sign of mental illness. Under the 1966 penal code of the USSR, repression of dissidents openly targeted those who “spread false propaganda defaming the Soviet State and its social system.”

Fourtillan, a longtime critic of vaccines that use dangerous adjuvants such as aluminum (the 11 compulsory vaccines for newborns in France contain 17 times the maximum dose of aluminum defined as toxic by the World Health Organization), has been vocal during the COVID-19 crisis. He offers “alternative” explanations and warnings regarding the apparition of the SARS-COV-2 virus and the ARN vaccines that work by injecting pieces of virus message ARN with nanolipids with the aim of causing human cells to start fabricating viral particles and to thus trigger an immunological reaction.

In particular, Fourtillan has accused the French Institut Pasteur, a private non-profit foundation that specializes in biology, micro-organisms, contagious diseases, and vaccination, of having “fabricated” the SARS-COV-2 virus over several decades and been a party to its “escape” from the Wuhan P4 lab — unbeknownst to the lab’s Chinese authorities — which was built following an agreement between France and China signed in 2004.

Relations between France and China regarding the project cooled over the years as China put its own interests first, but in 2017, France’s then–Interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, joined the official opening ceremony of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s P4 lab, together with Yves Lévy, co-president of the steering committee. Lévy is the husband of Agnès Buzyn, who was France’s health minister when the COVID-19 crisis erupted. She was also responsible for signing the decree that banned over-the-counter sales of hydroxychloroquine in France in January 2020.

Is Jean-Bernard Fourtillan’s accusation true? While the Institut Pasteur has verbally announced that it would sue Fourtillan over the accusation, no judiciary action has been forthcoming on that front, and indeed, Fourtillan himself has since lodged a complaint against a spokesman of the Institute for “libel and lies that are prejudicial to the peoples of the world.”

Fourtillan himself has said he hopes legal proceedings will allow him to produce evidence he has built up: he is in fact anxious to debate the issues at stake. Now that he is in a psychiatric hospital, the possibility of this happening — in the interest of discovering the truth — is becoming more remote.

Among the public documents Fourtillan has analyzed and made public are patents for SARS-COV-1, which contains parts of the malaria virus, dating back to 2003. The patents were used by various labs to develop vaccines. Two thousand eleven saw the Institut Pasteur filing a further patent application for “SARS-COV-2,” which was identical to the previous one, according to Fourtillan, who says this was done because commercial exploitation of the first patent started in 2003 and would expire 20 years later, in 2023. According to Fourtillan, four sequences of the HIV virus — responsible for AIDS — were added to the virus, in view of creating further vaccines.

This point was also raised in France last April by Prof. Luc Montagnier, who won the 2008 Nobel Prize for medicine for having discovered HIV in 1983 together with another French scientist, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi. Last April, Montagnier stated that the SARS-COV-2 virus was the result of a human manipulation. He was ridiculed by the mainstream media, but in August, an Italian microbiologist reached the same conclusion: Prof. Joseph Tritto published a book calling the Wuhan virus a “chimera.”

Montagnier, who had worked with a mathematician, described his findings through an analogy. Imagine the coronavirus as a “puzzle” with 30,000 pieces, and then consider several other 9,000-piece puzzles representing HIV-1, HIV-2, and SIV (another retrovirus close to the AIDS virus but targeting monkeys). If three pieces coming from each one of these smaller puzzles were to be found next to each other in the 30,000-piece puzzle, the probability of this having happened naturally would be nil. This is analogous to the presence of parts of the HIV sequence in SARS-COV-2, according to Montagnier.

According to Fourtillan, the present virus causing COVID-19 is this artificial virus. Fourtillan — as well as other researchers of the present crisis — considers this indisputable evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic was planned. He believes that on October 13, 2015, a patent application was filed for a COVID-19 test; this was followed by commercialization in the whole world in 2017 for a whopping 10 billion dollars.

These claims are disputed on the grounds that the reference to the 2015 patent is only part of the later May 2020 patent, also filed by one Richard A. Rothschild, but was quoted as related to the remote diagnosis of COVID-19, enhancing the original patent as it were for the particular case of COVID-19.

Who is right? A sincere, public assessment and debate would lift any confusion or error, voluntary or not, but Fourtillan is now being treated as if he were both dangerous and insane.

Fourtillan gained widespread publicity when a recent film by Pierre Barnérias, giving a voice to critics of the official narrative, became viral in France. In Hold-Up, Fourtillan spoke of his concern that the COVID-19 crisis was fabricated and is being used to impose a dangerous vaccine on the world population.

Fourtillan is himself familiar with patenting procedures, as his résumé shows, having personally filed some 400 patents in the medical field. The French internet medium France Soir described him as follows: “Jean-Bernard FOURTILLAN, Ph.D., Chemical Engineer, Pharmacist, Hospital Pharmacist, Professor of Therapeutic Chemistry and Pharmacokinetics at the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacology of the University of Poitiers, Expert Pharmacologist Toxicologist, specialized in Pharmacokinetics.”

Fourtillan’s forced internment made no mention of the COVID-19 controversy, which to date has led to no judicial proceedings, instead being officially linked to a lawsuit that has been opened against him for illegal practice of medicine because of his work on a hormonal patch against neuro-degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, and others affecting motricity, balance, and memory, as well as sleep disorders.

His theory is that pollution, adjuvants such as aluminum in vaccines, and electro-magnetic interference destroy dark matter in the brain through lack of hormones, and he has — successfully, he claims — tested the administration of a hormone patch of valentonin and 6-Méthoxy-Harmalan (sleep and waking hormones), to compensate the damage, on 402 adults, himself included, who accepted the procedure under their sole responsibility and who were warned that the patch was not a drug, but a “technical sample, not for human use.” The procedure costs only a fraction of the price of newly developed drugs for these conditions.

Fourtillan had had a good rapport with the judge charged with the preliminary investigation of the case, Brigitte Jolivet of Poitiers. During his first interrogations at the end of 2019, she appeared to be convinced by his arguments, and the case was proceeding normally.

Last month, Fourtillan, who was staying in the south of France with his wife, was visited by four gendarmes coming from Marseille, who entered his rented cottage and asked for his computers. Although they had no search warrant, Fourtillan handed them over, saying he had nothing to hide, and that on the contrary, he was anxious to have his documents and methods assessed.

He saw the gendarmes leave and hand over his computers to a man in plain clothes in a car nearby.

Days later, his bank accounts and credit cards were suddenly blocked by an authority whose identity was not revealed to him. His pensions were also blocked.

Fourtillan had been summoned to a hearing in the lawsuit concerning his valentonin “treatment” on December 4 in Paris. He did not go, invoking the fact that he now had no way of paying for a train ticket to the French capital.

This information was given to LifeSite by a person who works with Fourtillan on the website http://verite-covid19.com/ and who knows him well — well enough to state that he “is certainly not insane,” having spent time with him recently.

Six days later, on Thursday morning, gendarmes once more came to Fourtillan’s home and asked him to accompany them in order to answer questions about his refusal to join the December 4 hearing in Paris.

Fourtillan agreed readily.

However, from the moment he left his home with the law enforcement officers, he was not able to communicate with his family. One of his lawyers, Marc Fribourg — who has since gone on record saying that Fourtillan is a “conspiracy theorist” — revealed that he was taken to the Uzès psychiatric hospital of Le Mas Careiron, where he has been held since. His other lawyer, who previously commended Fourtillan for the efficiency of his hormonal patches, was not reachable today.

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Featured image: Uzès, home of the psychiatric hospital where Jean-Bernard Fourtillan is being held against his will. (Source: Begir / Shutterstock.com)

The US Plan to Dominate Space

December 17th, 2020 by Manlio Dinucci

Cape Canaveral (Florida), from where the Apollo mission rocket was launched by NASA in 1969, became the headquarters of the U.S. Space Force Station together with Patrick Base, also in Florida. At the inaugural ceremony on December 9, Vice President Mike Pence announced: “Our Space Force is getting stronger every day.” 

U.S. Space Force, a new branch of the U.S. Armed Forces, was established in December 2019. Its mission is “protecting U.S. and allied interests in space, acquiring military space systems, developing space military professionals, maturing the military doctrine for space power, organizing space forces to present to our Combatant  Commands”.

The central task of this new Force was explicitly stated by President Trump, announcing its imminent constitution in August 2019: “Ensuring American domination in space, the next war battlefield.” 

In the wake of the new U.S. Space Force, NATO launched a military space program, prepared by the Pentagon and by a restricted European military summit together with the major Aerospace Industries. The importance of space is demonstrated by the fact that there are currently about 2,800 operational artificial satellites in orbit around the Earth. Over 1,400 of them are American. China is in second place with over 380 satellites, Russia comes third with just over 170. Most satellites, over 1,000, are commercial. Then come those for military, government, and civil use (the latter two types are often used also for military activities).

In addition, there are about 6,000 inactive satellites that continue to orbit the Earth, along with millions of objects and fragments of different sizes. Space is more and more crowded and more and more disputed. The giants of telecommunications, stock exchanges, large financial and commercial groups operate in space with their satellites. The number of satellites is predicted to increase five times within this decade, mainly 5G technology operated. The 5G commercial network, created by private companies, can be used for military purposes, hypersonic weapons particularly, at a much lower expense. In this context, it is understandable why the United States formed its Space Force. The U.S. power played the card of military strength also in space, seeing the economic and technological margin of advantage decrease, especially with respect to China. The goal is clear: to dominate space and maintain not only military but also economic and technological superiority.

The outcome of this strategy is equally clear. Since 2008, Russia and China have repeatedly proposed to the United Nations a new treaty (after the 1967 treaty) that prohibits weapons’ deployment in space, but the U.S.  always rejected it. Russia and China are therefore preparing for a military confrontation in space having the ability. The constitution of the U.S. Space Force, therefore, triggers a new even more dangerous phase of the arms race, including nuclear weapons. From the use of space systems for espionage, military telecommunications, missiles, bombs and drones guidance, we move on to weapon systems that, placed in space, can blind the enemy’s satellites before an attack and destroy ground targets, such as entire cities, directly from space.

All this is covered under the hood of media silence. No voices of criticism or dissent arise from the political, scientific, academic, and cultural worlds. At the same time, financing from governments and arms industries to scientific institutes and universities for researches, which are often disguised as civilian, increases, and serves the development of military space systems. The only voices echo that of the new U.S. Space Force, which explains how space is “essential to our security and prosperity in our daily lives, even when we use our credit card at the gas pumps.”

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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.

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

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A healthcare worker in Alaska was hospitalized on Tuesday with a ‘serious allergic reaction’ after receiving Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, according to the New York Times

The person, who had no known drug allergies, was still in the hospital on Wednesday morning under observation, according to the report. It is unknown whether they suffer from any other types of allergies. The Alaska resident’s reaction was reportedly similar to anaphylactic reactions two heal workers in Britain experience after receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine last week – both of whom have recovered. Of note, they both had a history of severe allergies. One, a 49-year-old woman, is allergic to eggs (which Pfizer says are not in their vaccine). The other, a 40-year-old woman is allergic to several different medications. Both routinely carry EpiPenn-like devices in case of reactions.

After the workers in Britain fell ill, authorities there initially warned against giving the vaccines to anyone with a history of severe allergic reactions. They later clarified their concerns, changing the wording from “severe allergic reactions” to specify that the vaccine should not be given to anyone who has ever had an anaphylactic reaction to a food, medicine or vaccine. That type of reaction to a vaccine is “very rare,” they said. –NYT

No serious adverse effects were reported during Pfizer’s US trial involving over 40,000 participants, aside from aches, fevers and other ‘minor’ side effects.

Headaches all around

As Bloomberg notes, the first hiccups in the distribution of Pfizer’s vaccine are just beginning – including a holdup on the delivery of 3,900 shots to two states, and the announcement that roughly 900,000 fewer doses would be delivered next week than were shipped this week.

Four delivery trays of the Pfizer-BioNTech SE vaccine were pulled back from delivery to California and Alabama this week and sent back to the company because they were colder than anticipated, according to Gustave Perna, the army general who serves as Operation Warp Speed’s chief operations officer.

Each of the trays can likely be used to vaccinate 975 people. Pfizer has said its formula needs to be stored at 70 degrees below zero Celsius, the equivalent of negative 94 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. These trays were found to be much colder, according to Perna. –Bloomberg

“We were taking no chances,” said Perna during a Wednesday news briefing.

The Pfizer doses are shipped in temperature-controlled containers developed by company engineers, each of which are equipped with GPS tracking “for continuous, real-time location and temperature monitoring,” per the company.

Meanwhile, roughly 2 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine will ship next week in the US, which is 900K less than the 2.9 million doses available this week. Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar acknowledge the production hiccups, saying “As you know, they ended up coming short by half of what they thought they’d be able to produce and what they’d announced they’d be able to produce” in 2020.

“They’re right now producing at their maximum capacity to deliver on the 100 million that is in the first tranche of the contract with us, and we’re providing manufacturing support,” Azar added.

And on Tuesday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that shipments of hundreds of thousands of doses were held up due to “a production issue with Pfizer.”

The company pushed back, with spokeswoman Amy Rose saying that the company “has not had any production issues with our COVID-19 vaccine, and no shipments containing the vaccine are on hold or delayed,” adding “We are continuing to dispatch our orders to the locations specified by the U.S. government.”

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Twitter has declared that it will remove all posts that suggest there are any “adverse impacts or effects of receiving vaccinations,” despite reports already emerging of health workers getting sick from taking Pfizer’s coronavirus shot.

Twitter announced that beginning next week it will memory-hole any posts that “invoke a deliberate conspiracy” or “advance harmful, false, or misleading narratives” about vaccines.

“Using a combination of technology and human review, we will begin enforcing this updated policy on December 21, and expanding our actions during the following weeks,” the company proclaimed.

Twitter added that it will be monitoring posts about vaccinations “in close consultation with local, national, and global public health authorities around the world.”

The tech company will also wipe any posts that suggest vaccines “are used to intentionally cause harm,” or “control populations,” or are “unnecessary.”

The statement also notes that posts will be scrubbed if they contain “false claims which have been widely debunked about the adverse impacts or effects of receiving vaccinations.”

Exactly what “debunked” means was not clarified. Presumably it means any claims about vaccines that Twitter disagrees with.

The New York Times and others reported Wednesday that healthcare workers in Alaska have been hospitalized with a serious allergic reaction after taking Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine.

The development follows reports last week from Britain where some healthcare workers reported serious allergic reactions to the vaccine, prompting Britain’s medical regulator to issue a warning people with a history of allergies not to take the shot.

There is a mountain of documented evidence that some vaccines can cause harm and have adverse effects, and compared to previous vaccines, the coronavirus shot is relatively untested, indeed six people even DIED during the rush to develop it.

Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulators also revealed that some people who got Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine during its trial have since developed Bell’s palsy, a form of facial paralysis.

Both the US and UK governments have rolled out technology specifically to monitor adverse effects of the vaccine, because they know there will be many, many cases.

Yet Twitter appears to be decreeing that any suggestion the shot could cause damage will be met with strict censorship.

Where it cannot prove something has been “debunked” and remove the post entirely, Twitter says it intends to attach “warning” labels to tweets that “advance unsubstantiated rumours, disputed claims, as well as incomplete or out-of-context information about vaccines.”

Last month, Twitter declared that it will send warnings to everyone who likes a post the company deems to contain “misleading information”.

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Pardon Julian Assange, under Article II, Section 2 of US Constitution

By Stephen Lendman, December 16 2020

The US Constitution gave presidents “power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment (Article II, Section 2).”  Throughout US history, sitting presidents used this power thousands of times.

China’s Economy of Peace. The End of Dollar Hegemony?

By Peter Koenig, December 16 2020

Transcript of Peter Koenig’s presentation to webinar Conference (14 December 2020), on “China’s New Development Paradigm and High-Quality Belt and Road Cooperation”,  China Center for Contemporary World Studies, and the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China.

COVID’s Covert Reengineering of Humanity. “Genetically Modified” Vaccines?

By Julian Rose, December 15 2020

The first Covid vaccines now being rushed onto the market are genetically modified products. However, they are not publicly referred to as such, because that would likely scare off a high percentage of would be recipients. 

US Unemployed Rising, Evictions, Mortgages Crisis Brewing, Small Business Collapsing: Economic Consequences of a 2nd ‘Mitigation’ Bill

By Dr. Jack Rasmus, December 16 2020

As of mid-December 2020 the US economy has begun showing increasing signs of an exceptionally weak 4th quarter, October-December, growth. After having collapsed -10.5% in the March-June 2020 period, followed by a partial ‘rebound’ (not sustained recovery) in the 3rd quarter, July-September 2020, the economy is now slowing rapidly once again.

Health Impacts of “Social Distancing” and Isolation: Scientists Show a Sort of Signature in the Brains of Lonely People

By McGill University, December 16 2020

A new study shows a sort of signature in the brains of lonely people that make them distinct in fundamental ways, based on variations in the volume of different brain regions as well as based on how those regions communicate with one another across brain networks.

Big Brother in Disguise: The Rise of a New, Technological World Order

By John W. Whitehead, December 16 2020

We are living the prequel to The Matrix with each passing day, falling further under the spell of technologically-driven virtual communities, virtual realities and virtual conveniences managed by artificially intelligent machines that are on a fast track to replacing human beings and eventually dominating every aspect of our lives. Science fiction has become fact.

Local Sheriffs Are Pushing Back on Some of the Lockdown’s Harsher Measures

By Gideon Bradshaw, December 16 2020

 The limits of the government’s power to follow through with some of its public-health orders are being tested as states impose new restrictions on private gatherings because of COVID-19. “You have due process,” said Sheriff Richard Giardino, of Fulton County, N.Y. “We can’t just go into someone’s home without a search warrant, their consent or an emergency.”

US Wants to Increase Special Agents in Latin America Under Anti-drug Speech

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, December 16 2020

Washington’s “war on drugs” is advancing in Latin America. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) recently asked the US Congress for a new budget, valued at more than 3 billion dollars, to improve its operations abroad and help to prevent narcotics from entering American territory. As expected, the main countries mentioned in the Agency’s plans are Latin American nations.

Iran’s Rouhani to Biden: We Will Fulfill Our Nuclear Obligations on Day One if You Return to 2015 Deal

By Prof. Juan Cole, December 16 2020

Iranian president Hassan Rouhani was asked Tuesday in an interview with a state-owned news outlet under what conditions Iran would return to the 2015 nuclear deal with the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council (P5), including the U.S., plus Germany (+1) He replied, “A thing we are saying today is that if tomorrow morning the P5 + 1 fulfills all its undertakings, we will without delay fulfill all of our undertakings.”

America

The Pandemic’s Christmas Gift. “Ten Dollars in His Pocket”

By Philip A Farruggio, December 16 2020

The moratorium on his rent was just about ending, and his unemployment was about to run out as well. The old lady living in the next apartment was too nice, with her free meals for him and his son. How long could that last, with her in a similar boat?


Visit our Asia Pacific Research website at asia-pacificresearch.com

Providing coverage of the Asia-Pacific Region

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Video: Biden’s Pyrrhic Election Victory

December 16th, 2020 by South Front

As predicted, the election turned out to be considerably closer than most pundits and polls predicted. In spite of polling that suggested Biden leading Trump by a margin of 5%-15%, in actuality the popular vote margin of victory turned out to be more in the vicinity of modest 3%, a remarkably lackluster showing on the part of a veteran political operative like Biden running against an incumbent whose tenure in office was characterized by a mishandled pandemic and a crashing economy. Granted, much of the blame for that ought to be shouldered by the Congress, state governors, and their legislatures. No institution of US governance is coming out of this crisis with an enhanced but, to quote Harry Truman, “the buck stops” in the Oval Office.

The weak margin of victory is nevertheless solid enough to survive legal challenges from Team Trump, which moreover lacks serious heavyweight operatives at the helm.

The 2000 election hinged on the outcome in a single state—Florida—which in turn hinged on a recount in a single county. That was not an insurmountable challenge to the likes of James Baker, a long-time Bush family retainer, and it was likewise not overly unpalatable to the courts.

This time, however, the situation is far more complex. It is no longer a matter of mis-counted ballots. In order to give victory to Trump, the courts would have to in effect invalidate tens of thousands of ballots in several states, on the grounds that they were counted as valid votes in violation of existing laws and regulations. Barring an extreme case of malfeasance by election officials in several states, something that is yet to be demonstrated, it is unlikely in the extreme that the US court system will be willing to set a precedent that in the long term could fatally undermine the entire US system of elections.

Having said that, even senior GOP officials are happy to go along with the argument that Trump was robbed of victory through electoral fraud, in the form of abuse of mail-in ballots. There is literally no political penalty to pay for that, and moreover casting lasting doubt on the legitimacy of Biden’s victory represents payback for the last four years of Democrats casting doubt on the legitimacy of Trump’s victory through the RussiaGate scandal.

RussiaGate 2.0

One has to wonder whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s echoing of Trump’s allegations of voter fraud were at least in part motivated by him having to put up with being commonly referred to as “Moscow Mitch” on social media.  Spending the next four years investigating Biden family finances, and particularly Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine, China, and other regions whose politicians have an interest in being in Joe Biden’s good graces, is vastly preferable to four more years of RussiaGate.

Nevertheless, the GOP machine will hardly much expend political capital on behalf of Donald Trump, in support of his quest to emerge as the winner of the 2020 election. While Trump proved to be a remarkably effective party base motivator, far better at the task than literally any GOP politician of note, he nevertheless poses a long-term threat to the stability of the two-party system.

Worse, Trump’s victory in 2020 would have doomed the GOP to major losses in US Congress, governorships, and state legislature in 2022 and 2024, with Trump himself being almost inevitably followed into the White House by a Democrat in 2024, and possibly a very leftist Democrat at that. That is a scenario that neither party wants to see, but to the GOP it would represent a close brush with death.

With Biden and Harris in the White House, both of them relatively unpopular politicians in their own right lacking even the fake charisma of Barack Obama, GOP is likely to rebound very quickly from losing the White House.

Even now it looks like a Pyrrhic victory for Biden, whose party will not retake the US Senate barring the unlikely victory in both of Georgia’s runoff races that will take place in January—by which time Biden’s gradual walking away from campaign promises and shifting ever further to the right will have demoralized the base of the Democratic Party—and will have actually suffered losses in the House of Representatives.

Biden’s victory also has not translated into any gains at all in state races. So instead of having the Democrats control all three branches of the Federal government by 2024 and at the same time enjoy expanded influence in State governments, it appears rather likely the GOP will return to that level of political dominance in only four short years. Sacrificing Trump is a price well worth paying for it. While it is too early to say who will be the GOP’s champion in the 2024 presidential elections, Donald Trump created an original blueprint for running an effective presidential campaign championing a conservative version of national greatness with a strong element of insular nationalism, as opposed to the aggressive nationalism of globalization that the Democrats embrace. Almost regardless of who the Republican nominee is, they will run a modified version of Trump’s campaign, and they will do so with a high likelihood of success.

Biden’s own likely legacy as a one-term president will be the product of the combination of pandemic and associated economic crisis, and the Obama Alumni Association that will be running his administration. One should not forget Joe Biden won his first election to the US Senate by running a “law and order” campaign in 1972, the year of Richard Nixon’s spectacular re-election landslide that resulted from his application of the so-called “Southern Strategy” of exploiting the backlash to civil rights among the White population of not only the Southern states.

Over the decades, Biden himself rode that backlash to successive re-elections to US Senate by running campaigns with only thinly disguised racist themes. That record all but vanished from public memory as soon as Biden was chosen as Obama’s running mate. The fact that Biden, an architect of many crime bills whose effect has been to disproportionately incarcerate Blacks, chose someone like Kamala Harris who enthusiastically applied the provisions of Biden’s crime bills, indicates Biden has not moved past his 1972 persona.

While paying lip service to “Black Lives Matter” and other slogans of the day, Biden’s campaign worked really hard to attract suburban White GOP voters and made hardly an effort to woo the growing Hispanic constituency.

Biden also has no use for such hot-button issues as Defund the Police, Green New Deal, Medicare for All, that are sacrosanct to the most enthusiastic left wing of the Democratic Party. It is already evident that the individuals Biden is appointing to his transition team and vetting for administration positions, including the just-announced Chief of Staff Ronald Klain, represent a return to the discredited policies of the Democratic Leadership Council.

Likewise when it comes to foreign policy, we are likely to see all manner of retreads from the Obama Administration and a continuation of the aggressive foreign policy from those years. Biden has already made it clear there will be no reduction in defense spending, no withdrawal from “US leadership”, and a return to an emphasis on “human rights” which collectively suggest redoubled regime change efforts around the globe.

There is even talk of Hillary Clinton becoming the US Ambassador to the United Nations, where she would presumably continue to ply her brand of American Exceptionalism. All in all, Biden’s ascent to the presidency feels like the post-Napoleonic Bourbon Restoration. Alas, just as the Bourbons “learned nothing and forgot nothing”, everything points to the Democrats making a very similar mistake for which they, and the country, will pay for dearly.

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Goldman Sachs analysts have updated and expanded their popular research detailing the outlook for vaccine rollout in both the US and internationally. As the FDA prepares to grant the virtually inevitable approval of the Moderna mRNA COVID vaccine later this week, the investment bank has expanded its monthly forecasting vaccination model by including the major emerging markets and the ten leading global vaccine candidates.

Looking further down the road, more analysts have been discussing the prospect that we might actually see a glut of vaccine doses sooner than many had expected (at least, in the wealthy countries that have managed to strike distribution deals with the vaccinemakers, and aren’t relying on Bill Gates and the WHO to bail them out).

Should the “top 10” developers achieve their production targets (note: Pfizer has already cut its 2020 year-end deliver target in the US by 50%) enough doses could be delivered to vaccinate 85% of the world’s population by the end of next year.

Speaking of the Pfizer target cuts, one of the most important differences in Goldman’s latest update is that the bank and its analysts have tweaked their models to account for the stage of a company’s trial, as well as – and this is important – the company’s experience in mass production.

These “tweaks” are an attempt to “account for potential production misses,” according to the authors of the research.

Additionally, the bank’s analysts have taken the liberty of “allocating” all the non-committed doses to account for likely future contracts between developers and nations (presumably these are based on media reports and other chatter/speculation).

But assuming all the vaccinemakers meet their various development targets (which, if the past is any guide, probably won’t happen) Goldman believes it’s “realistic” to expect 50% of the developed world population to be vaccinated by April, including for the US and the UK, May for Canada, June for the EU and Australia, and July for Japan.

Most larger EM countries can expect to meet the 50% threshold sometime during the second half of 2021. While Goldman expects its DM projections to be more “resilient”, EM production targets, due to various vagaries surrounding their capacity for storage and distribution, are more “vulnerable” to being thwarted.

Whatever ultimately happens, Goldman expects that no matter what, supplies in the emerging world will always trail the developing world, and – more importantly – the developing world won’t see its vaccination rate really begin to rise until after the developed world has ensured its citizens get all the first helpings.

In one of the more interesting charts breaking down obstacles to official vaccination targets in various DM and EM countries, Goldman points out, ever so diplomatically, that “demand issues” are the biggest issue in the US, while “supply issues” are the biggest problem in EM.

And by “demand issue”, the bank means that not enough people will voluntarily go get vaccinated, for whatever reason – whether it’s a lack of “confidence” in safety and efficacy, or perhaps a financial reason (even though lawmakers and the president have repeatedly promised that all that would be ‘free to all’).

Finally, the bank’s analysts apparently felt obliged to highlight one risk that could seriously delay the global rollout, both in the developed world, but – more seriously – in the developing world: and that would be if the three leading adenovirus-vector vaccines – AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, CanSino – don’t succeed in meeting their efficacy targets.

After all, AZ did everything it could to mask the surprisingly low headline efficacy number (under 70%) from its Phase 3 trials, which were plagued by halts and suspicions about serious side effects in a small number of subjects (though so far there has been nothing to affirm that the vaccine was directly involved). And while Russia has boasted about high efficacy figures for “Sputnik 5”, the adenovirus vaccine developed by the Gamaleya institute, we imagine most American bankers are taking those numbers with a grain of salt.

Still, Goldman says its outlook for the vaccine rollout undergirds its call for a strong rebound in economic growth next year. And they’re not alone: according to the latest BofA fund managers’ survey, virtually all the professional money managers surveyed expect the positive impact from the vaccines to be felt next year, with more than 40% believing that a “positive impact” will begin during Q1.

The question is: should they feel the same way about AstraZeneca’s results?

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The US Constitution gave presidents “power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment (Article II, Section 2).” 

Throughout US history, sitting presidents used this power thousands of times.

Jack Kennedy pardoned, commuted, or rescinded the convictions of 575 people.

Included were first time offenders  of crimes under the 1956 Narcotics Control Act.

Richard Nixon commuted Jimmy Hoffa’s sentence. Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon.

Jimmy Carter pardoned Vietnam war draft resisters.

Ronald Reagan pardoned, commuted, or rescinded the convictions of 406 people.

GHW Bush did the same for 77 people, including convicted felon (unindicted war criminal) Elliott Abrams.

Bill Clinton commuted sentences of 16 Puerto Rican FALN freedom fighters for the island’s independence.

GW Bush commuted convicted perjurer Lewis (Scooter) Libby’s sentence.

Obama commuted political prisoner Chelsea Manning’s sentence.

He also commuted FALN activist Oscar Lopez Rivera’s unjust imprisonment.

He failed to release wrongfully convicted human rights lawyer Lynne Stewart.

On December 31, 2013, she was judicially granted a compassionate release and freed.

Trump pardoned, commuted, or rescinded the convictions of 45 individuals — including the politicized conviction of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.

Thousands of political prisoners languish in US prison confinement, including Mumia Abu-Jamal, Latin American activist Ramsey Muniz, the Cuban 5, Aafia Siddiqui, and Leonard Peltier, among many others.

With little more than a month left in office, will Trump pardon Julian Assange or commute his politicized indictment and UK imprisonment at the behest of his regime?

Charges against Assange were and remain spurious.

They’re all about waging war on truth-telling investigative journalism the way it should be conducted, providing vital information on issues related to the rule of law, fundamental rights, and the public welfare.

Everyone in the US has the same right, what the First Amendment is all about, affirming speech, press, and academic freedoms.

It’s the most fundamental of democratic rights, what bipartisan hardliners in Washington want compromised and eliminated.

Arresting and detaining Assange by UK authorities for extradition to the US for prosecution is all about wanting truth-telling on vital issues suppressed.

He’s bogusly charged in the US under the long ago outdated 1917 Espionage Act.

Enacted during WW I, it should have been rescinded at war’s end.

In April 2019, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) issued the following statement:

“Mr. Assange’s arrest (in Britain) and possible extradition (to the US) to face charges related to an alleged conspiracy with Chelsea Manning to publish documents that exposed corruption and criminality by numerous private businesses, tyrants, and countries worldwide is ultimately an attack on press freedom.”

“The arrest sets a dangerous precedent that could extend to other media organizations…particularly under a vindictive and reckless (regime) that regularly attacks journalistic enterprises that, just like WikiLeaks, publish leaked materials that expose government corruption and wrongdoing.”

“This is a worrying step on the slippery slope to punishing any journalist the Trump (regime) chooses to (falsely) deride as ‘fake news.’ ”

“It comes in the backdrop of even further cruelty toward and imprisonment of Chelsea Manning, who continues to defend the integrity of her heroic decision to act as a whistleblower and expose US government atrocities it committed in Iraq.

“The United States should finally seek to come to terms with the war crimes in Iraq that it has committed rather than attack and imprison those who sought to expose the truth of it.”

In March 2020, Chelsea Manning was released from politicized confinement.

The judicial ruling came after being unjustly imprisoned for invoking her constitutional right of silence.

She refused to be part of grand jury proceedings that aimed to crucify Julian Assange unjustly.

For now at least, she’s free. He’s not. Will Trump reverse injustice against him?

Before leaving office on January 20, will he order him freed from illegal UK prison confinement (at his regime’s request) for the “crime” of truth-telling journalism?

On December 12, UK Sky News reported on what it called a “high-level push” for his release in the waning days of Trump’s tenure.

UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment Nils Melzer once again called for his release, saying the following:

“Mr. Assange is not a criminal convict and poses no threat to anyone, so his prolonged solitary confinement in a high security prison is neither necessary nor proportionate and clearly lacks any legal basis.”

Will Trump do the right thing and set him free at last, ending his long and unjust ordeal?

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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The U.S. FDA has given emergency use authorization (EUA) to the experimental Pfizer COVID mRNA vaccine, a type of vaccine that has never before been authorized for use in humans.

The FDA’s EUA for the Pfizer COVID vaccine follows an emergency use authorization in the U.K. about 10 days ago.

Both governments have issued guidelines for the new vaccines, one set of guidelines for doctors and healthcare providers who will administer the vaccine, and a shorter set of guidelines for “recipients” who plan on taking the vaccine.

Even though these guidelines cover the same vaccine from the same company (Pfizer), there are notable differences.

The UK guidelines, issued by the UK Department of Health and Social Care and the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, give strict warnings to doctors NOT to give the vaccine to women who are pregnant or nursing, or to women planning on becoming pregnant, with a warning about potential infertility issues.

4.6 Fertility, pregnancy and lactation

Pregnancy
There are no or limited amount of data from the use of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2. Animal reproductive toxicity studies have not been completed. COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 is not recommended during pregnancy. For women of childbearing age, pregnancy should be excluded before vaccination. In addition, women of childbearing age should be advised to avoid pregnancy for at least 2 months after their second dose.

Breast-feeding
It is unknown whether COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 is excreted in human milk. A risk to the newborns/infants cannot be excluded. COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 should not be used during breast-feeding.

Fertility
It is unknown whether COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 has an impact on fertility. (Source.)

Unfortunately, the U.S. FDA’s guidelines for doctors (at the time of this writing) contain no such warning to not give the Pfizer experimental COVID vaccine to pregnant, lactating, or women trying to become pregnant.

11.1 Pregnancy

Risk Summary

All pregnancies have a risk of birth defect, loss, or other adverse outcomes. In the US general population, the estimated background risk of major birth defects and miscarriage in clinically recognized pregnancies is 2% to 4% and 15% to 20%, respectively. Available data on Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine administered to pregnant women are insufficient to inform vaccine-associated risks in pregnancy.

11.2 Lactation

Risk Summary

Data are not available to assess the effects of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine on the breastfed infant or on milk production/excretion. (Source.)

The FDA’s Recipient Guidelines simply tells pregnant and lactating women to discuss it with their healthcare provider.

WHAT IF I AM PREGNANT OR BREASTFEEDING?

If you are pregnant or breastfeeding, discuss your options with your healthcare provider. (Source.)

Nothing is discussed or recommended for women planning to become pregnant, unlike the UK guidelines that tell women not to become pregnant for two months following the second dose, and informing doctors that the future effect on fertility is “unknown.”

FDA Warnings on the Pfizer COVID Vaccine: Acute Anaphylactic Reactions Expected

While there are no warnings in the FDA’s guidelines for the experimental Pfizer COVID vaccine for pregnant and nursing women, there are plenty of other warnings.

First, they make it very clear that this is an “unapproved” vaccine. From the FDA’s Recipient Guidelines:

The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine is an unapproved vaccine that may prevent COVID-19. There is no FDA-approved vaccine to prevent COVID-19.

HAS THE PFIZER-BIONTECH COVID-19 VACCINE BEEN USED BEFORE?

The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine is an unapproved vaccine. In clinical trials, approximately 20,000 individuals 16 years of age and older have received at least 1 dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF THE PFIZER-BIONTECH COVID-19 VACCINE?

In an ongoing clinical trial, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine has been shown to prevent COVID-19 following 2 doses given 3 weeks apart. The duration of protection against COVID-19 is currently unknown. (Source.)

In short, the FDA is allowing Pfizer to use the American public as lab rats to further study this vaccine.

Warnings in the FDA’s guidelines for doctors:

Contraindications

Do not administer Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine to individuals with known history of a severe allergic reaction (e.g., anaphylaxis) to any component of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine (see Full EUA Prescribing Information).

Warnings

Appropriate medical treatment used to manage immediate allergic reactions must be immediately available in the event an acute anaphylactic reaction occurs following administration of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine.

Immunocompromised persons, including individuals receiving immunosuppressant therapy, may have a diminished immune response to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine.

Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine may not protect all vaccine recipients.

Adverse Reactions

Adverse reactions following the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine that have been reported in clinical trials include injection site pain, fatigue, headache, muscle pain, chills, joint pain, fever, injection site swelling, injection site redness, nausea, malaise, and lymphadenopathy (see Full EUA Prescribing Information).

Severe allergic reactions have been reported following the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine during mass vaccination outside of clinical trials.

Additional adverse reactions, some of which may be serious, may become apparent with more widespread use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine.

Serious adverse events are defined as:

• Death;
• A life-threatening adverse event;
• Inpatient hospitalization or prolongation of existing hospitalization;
• A persistent or significant incapacity or substantial disruption of the ability to conduct normal life functions;
• A congenital anomaly/birth defect;
• An important medical event that based on appropriate medical judgement may jeopardize the individual and may require medical or surgical intervention to prevent one of the outcomes listed above. (Source.)

Since the Pfizer COVID vaccine is supposed to be distributed through the nation’s Walgreens and CVS retail stores, will all of these stores have physicians and paramedics standing by to treat the patients who go into anaphylactic shock?

Or is the military going to be at all of these stores providing medics to handle that?

To get the latest version of these guidelines, visit the FDA website here.

Everyone should contact their federal representatives in the Senate and the House and demand that the FDA include the same warnings for pregnant and nursing women as the UK guidelines to the same vaccine contain!

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“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984

It had the potential for disaster.

Early in the morning of Monday, December 15, 2020, Google suffered a major worldwide outage in which all of its internet-connected services crashed, including Nest, Google Calendar, Gmail, Docs, Hangouts, Maps, Meet and YouTube.

The outage only lasted an hour, but it was a chilling reminder of how reliant the world has become on internet-connected technologies to do everything from unlocking doors and turning up the heat to accessing work files, sending emails and making phone calls.

A year earlier, a Google outage resulted in Nest users being unable to access their Nest thermostats, Nest smart locks, and Nest cameras. As Fast Company reports, “This essentially meant that because of a cloud storage outage, people were prevented from getting inside their homes, using their AC, and monitoring their babies.”

Welcome to the Matrix.

Twenty-some years after the Wachowskis’ iconic film, The Matrix, introduced us to a futuristic world in which humans exist in a computer-simulated non-reality powered by authoritarian machines—a world where the choice between existing in a denial-ridden virtual dream-state or facing up to the harsh, difficult realities of life comes down to a blue pill or a red pill—we stand at the precipice of a technologically-dominated matrix of our own making.

We are living the prequel to The Matrix with each passing day, falling further under the spell of technologically-driven virtual communities, virtual realities and virtual conveniences managed by artificially intelligent machines that are on a fast track to replacing human beings and eventually dominating every aspect of our lives.

Science fiction has become fact.

In The Matrix, computer programmer Thomas Anderson a.k.a. hacker Neo is wakened from a virtual slumber by Morpheus, a freedom fighter seeking to liberate humanity from a lifelong hibernation state imposed by hyper-advanced artificial intelligence machines that rely on humans as an organic power source. With their minds plugged into a perfectly crafted virtual reality, few humans ever realize they are living in an artificial dream world.

Neo is given a choice: to take the red pill, wake up and join the resistance, or take the blue pill, remain asleep and serve as fodder for the powers-that-be.

Most people opt for the blue pill.

In our case, the blue pill—a one-way ticket to a life sentence in an electronic concentration camp—has been honey-coated to hide the bitter aftertaste, sold to us in the name of expediency and delivered by way of blazingly fast Internet, cell phone signals that never drop a call, thermostats that keep us at the perfect temperature without our having to raise a finger, and entertainment that can be simultaneously streamed to our TVs, tablets and cell phones.

Yet we are not merely in thrall with these technologies that were intended to make our lives easier. We have become enslaved by them.

Look around you. Everywhere you turn, people are so addicted to their internet-connected screen devices—smart phones, tablets, computers, televisions—that they can go for hours at a time submerged in a virtual world where human interaction is filtered through the medium of technology.

This is not freedom.

This is not even progress.

This is technological tyranny and iron-fisted control delivered by way of the surveillance state, corporate giants such as Google and Facebook, and government spy agencies such as the National Security Agency.

So consumed are we with availing ourselves of all the latest technologies that we have spared barely a thought for the ramifications of our heedless, headlong stumble towards a world in which our abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos is grooming us for a future in which freedom is an illusion.

Yet it’s not just freedom that hangs in the balance. Humanity itself is on the line.

If ever Americans find themselves in bondage to technological tyrants, we will have only ourselves to blame for having forged the chains through our own lassitude, laziness and abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos that render us wholly irrelevant.

Indeed, we’re fast approaching Philip K. Dick’s vision of the future as depicted in the film Minority Report. There, police agencies apprehend criminals before they can commit a crime, driverless cars populate the highways, and a person’s biometrics are constantly scanned and used to track their movements, target them for advertising, and keep them under perpetual surveillance.

Cue the dawning of the Age of the Internet of Things (IoT), in which internet-connected “things” monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free.

The key word here, however, is control.

In the not-too-distant future, “just about every device you have — and even products like chairs, that you don’t normally expect to see technology in — will be connected and talking to each other.”

By the end of 2018, “there were an estimated 22 billion internet of things connected devices in use around the world… Forecasts suggest that by 2030 around 50 billion of these IoT devices will be in use around the world, creating a massive web of interconnected devices spanning everything from smartphones to kitchen appliances.”

As the technologies powering these devices have become increasingly sophisticated, they have also become increasingly widespread, encompassing everything from toothbrushes and lightbulbs to cars, smart meters and medical equipment.

It is estimated that 127 new IoT devices are connected to the web every second.

This “connected” industry has become the next big societal transformation, right up there with the Industrial Revolution, a watershed moment in technology and culture.

Between driverless cars that completely lacking a steering wheel, accelerator, or brake pedal, and smart pills embedded with computer chips, sensors, cameras and robots, we are poised to outpace the imaginations of science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov. (By the way, there is no such thing as a driverless car. Someone or something will be driving, but it won’t be you.)

These Internet-connected techno gadgets include smart light bulbs that discourage burglars by making your house look occupied, smart thermostats that regulate the temperature of your home based on your activities, and smart doorbells that let you see who is at your front door without leaving the comfort of your couch.

Nest, Google’s suite of smart home products, has been at the forefront of the “connected” industry, with such technologically savvy conveniences as a smart lock that tells your thermostat who is home, what temperatures they like, and when your home is unoccupied; a home phone service system that interacts with your connected devices to “learn when you come and go” and alert you if your kids don’t come home; and a sleep system that will monitor when you fall asleep, when you wake up, and keep the house noises and temperature in a sleep-conducive state.

The aim of these internet-connected devices, as Nest proclaims, is to make “your house a more thoughtful and conscious home.” For example, your car can signal ahead that you’re on your way home, while Hue lights can flash on and off to get your attention if Nest Protect senses something’s wrong. Your coffeemaker, relying on data from fitness and sleep sensors, will brew a stronger pot of coffee for you if you’ve had a restless night.

Yet given the speed and trajectory at which these technologies are developing, it won’t be long before these devices are operating entirely independent of their human creators, which poses a whole new set of worries. As technology expert Nicholas Carr notes, “As soon as you allow robots, or software programs, to act freely in the world, they’re going to run up against ethically fraught situations and face hard choices that can’t be resolved through statistical models. That will be true of self-driving cars, self-flying drones, and battlefield robots, just as it’s already true, on a lesser scale, with automated vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers.”

For instance, just as the robotic vacuum, Roomba, “makes no distinction between a dust bunny and an insect,” weaponized drones—poised to take to the skies en masse this year—will be incapable of distinguishing between a fleeing criminal and someone merely jogging down a street. For that matter, how do you defend yourself against a robotic cop—such as the Atlas android being developed by the Pentagon—that has been programmed to respond to any perceived threat with violence?

Moreover, it’s not just our homes and personal devices that are being reordered and reimagined in this connected age: it’s our workplaces, our health systems, our government, our bodies and our innermost thoughts that are being plugged into a matrix over which we have no real control.

Indeed, it is expected that by 2030, we will all experience The Internet of Senses (IoS), enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), 5G, and automation. The Internet of Senses relies on connected technology interacting with our senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch by way of the brain as the user interface. As journalist Susan Fourtane explains:

Many predict that by 2030, the lines between thinking and doing will blur. Fifty-nine percent of consumers believe that we will be able to see map routes on VR glasses by simply thinking of a destination… By 2030, technology is set to respond to our thoughts, and even share them with others… Using the brain as an interface could mean the end of keyboards, mice, game controllers, and ultimately user interfaces for any digital device. The user needs to only think about the commands, and they will just happen. Smartphones could even function without touch screens.

In other words, the IoS will rely on technology being able to access and act on your thoughts.

Fourtane outlines several trends related to the IoS that are expected to become a reality by 2030:

1: Thoughts become action: using the brain as the interface, for example, users will be able to see map routes on VR glasses by simply thinking of a destination.

2: Sounds will become an extension of the devised virtual reality: users could mimic anyone’s voice realistically enough to fool even family members.

3: Real food will become secondary to imagined tastes. A sensory device for your mouth could digitally enhance anything you eat, so that any food can taste like your favorite treat.

4: Smells will become a projection of this virtual reality so that virtual visits, to forests or the countryside for instance, would include experiencing all the natural smells of those places.

5: Total touch: Smartphones with screens will convey the shape and texture of the digital icons and buttons they are pressing.

6: Merged reality: VR game worlds will become indistinguishable from physical reality by 2030.

Unfortunately, in our race to the future, we have failed to consider what such dependence on technology might mean for our humanity, not to mention our freedoms.

Ingestible or implantable chips are a good example of how unprepared we are, morally and otherwise, to navigate this uncharted terrain. Hailed as revolutionary for their ability to access, analyze and manipulate your body from the inside, these smart pills can remind you to take your medication, search for cancer, and even send an alert to your doctor warning of an impending heart attack.

Sure, the technology could save lives, but is that all we need to know?

Have we done our due diligence in asking all the questions that need to be asked before unleashing such awesome technology on an unsuspecting populace?

For example, asks Washington Post reporter Ariana Eunjung Cha:

What kind of warnings should users receive about the risks of implanting chip technology inside a body, for instance? How will patients be assured that the technology won’t be used to compel them to take medications they don’t really want to take? Could law enforcement obtain data that would reveal which individuals abuse drugs or sell them on the black market? Could what started as a voluntary experiment be turned into a compulsory government identification program that could erode civil liberties?

Let me put it another way.

If you were shocked by Edward Snowden’s revelations about how NSA agents have used surveillance to spy on Americans’ phone calls, emails and text messages, can you imagine what unscrupulous government agents could do with access to your internet-connected car, home and medications? Imagine what a SWAT team could do with the ability to access, monitor and control your internet-connected home—locking you in, turning off the lights, activating alarms, etc.

While President Trump signed the Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act into law on Dec. 4, 2020, in order to establish a baseline for security protection for the billions of IoT devices flooding homes and businesses, the law does little to protect the American people against corporate and governmental surveillance.

In fact, the public response to concerns about government surveillance has amounted to a collective shrug.

After all, who cares if the government can track your whereabouts on your GPS-enabled device so long as it helps you find the fastest route from Point A to Point B? Who cares if the NSA is listening in on your phone calls and downloading your emails so long as you can get your phone calls and emails on the go and get lightning fast Internet on the fly? Who cares if the government can monitor your activities in your home by tapping into your internet-connected devices—thermostat, water, lights—so long as you can control those things with the flick of a finger, whether you’re across the house or across the country?

Control is the key here.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, total control over every aspect of our lives, right down to our inner thoughts, is the objective of any totalitarian regime.

George Orwell understood this.

Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984, portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. And people are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother, who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

Make no mistake: the Internet of Things and its twin, the Internet of Senses, is just Big Brother in disguise.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

This holiday season will be a lonely one for many people as social distancing due to COVID-19 continues, and it is important to understand how isolation affects our health. A new study shows a sort of signature in the brains of lonely people that make them distinct in fundamental ways, based on variations in the volume of different brain regions as well as based on how those regions communicate with one another across brain networks.

A team of researchers examined the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data, genetics and psychological self-assessments of approximately 40,000 middle-aged and older adults who volunteered to have their information included in the UK Biobank: an open-access database available to health scientists around the world. They then compared the MRI data of participants who reported often feeling lonely with those who did not.

The researchers found several differences in the brains of lonely people. These brain manifestations were centered on what is called the default network: a set of brain regions involved in inner thoughts such as reminiscing, future planning, imagining and thinking about others. Researchers found the default networks of lonely people were more strongly wired together and surprisingly, their grey matter volume in regions of the default network was greater. Loneliness also correlated with differences in the fornix: a bundle of nerve fibers that carries signals from the hippocampus to the default network. In lonely people, the structure of this fiber tract was better preserved.

We use the default network when remembering the past, envisioning the future or thinking about a hypothetical present. The fact the structure and function of this network is positively associated with loneliness may be because lonely people are more likely to use imagination, memories of the past or hopes for the future to overcome their social isolation.

In the absence of desired social experiences, lonely individuals may be biased towards internally-directed thoughts such as reminiscing or imagining social experiences. We know these cognitive abilities are mediated by the default network brain regions. So this heightened focus on self-reflection, and possibly imagined social experiences, would naturally engage the memory-based functions of the default network.”

Nathan Spreng, The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital), McGill University

Loneliness is increasingly being recognized as a major health problem, and previous studies have shown older people who experience loneliness have a higher risk of cognitive decline and dementia. Understanding how loneliness manifests itself in the brain could be key to preventing neurological disease and developing better treatments.

“We are just beginning to understand the impact of loneliness on the brain. Expanding our knowledge in this area will help us to better appreciate the urgency of reducing loneliness in today’s society,” says Danilo Bzdok, a researcher at The Neuro and the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, and the study’s senior author.

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The Pandemic’s Christmas Gift. “Ten Dollars in His Pocket”

December 16th, 2020 by Philip A Farruggio

Bleak was something he could easily relate to, especially now. He didn’t know which bothered him more, the bitter Detroit December cold, or his jobless situation. When he was going strong, along with the economy, being a massage therapist was great. He made really good bucks and the hours were fine. Working in the mornings and again at night gave him the time he needed for his son. He could pick the kid up at school, walk him home and play a few video games until the boy needed to begin his homework. Now with the pandemic and the school closed, he had to help his son do the required remote learning. The boy’s mother was nowhere to be found, except with some new addicted boyfriend living who knows where. Yes, things did look bleak.

The moratorium on his rent was just about ending, and his unemployment was about to run out as well. The old lady living in the next apartment was too nice, with her free meals for him and his son. How long could that last, with her in a similar boat? He did the best he could, going back and forth to the local food bank, with longer and longer lines and less and less free groceries. Whew! was all he could summon up as he walked along the avenue. Christmas was a week away, and he still had not bought the boy a nice present. Any present at this juncture would suffice. He had maybe $10 in his pocket, and he still had to get some lunch for himself. The groceries from the food bank were already saved for their dinner and tomorrow’s breakfast. As the passersby left his circle of vision he could not help himself- he began to cry… just a tickle, but enough to feel a tear or two slowly slide down his cheek.

The Mercedes parked outside the jewelry store was empty. He could see something laying on the front passenger seat, a gift wrapped tiny box. As he got closer to the driver’s side door he could not help but try the handle. It was unlocked. The door was unlocked! His head wheeled around to the front of the jewelry store. He noticed shoppers busy in their usual buying modes inside. No one seemed to be exiting the front door. Before he could take more than a few breaths he was already turning the corner… with that tiny box in hand. He walked real fast, but not too fast to attract attention. The first restaurant he came to seemed to engulf him. Now he was inside. He rushed to the Men’s Room, secured himself into a stall, and quickly ripped open the box. It was a watch… a nice Timex. He was glad it wasn’t a Rolex or something really too expensive. He hid it inside his coat pocket and hurried out. HIs son would have a better Christmas than expected… and he felt absolutely no guilt about it at all.

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Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, Countercurrents.org, and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 400 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].

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Iranian president Hassan Rouhani was asked Tuesday in an interview with a state-owned news outlet under what conditions Iran would return to the 2015 nuclear deal with the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council (P5), including the U.S., plus Germany (+1)

He replied, “A thing we are saying today is that if tomorrow morning the P5 + 1 fulfills all its undertakings, we will without delay fulfill all of our undertakings.”

What Rouhani means is that if Joe Biden, on becoming president, lifts the US financial and trade blockade on Iran, Tehran will immediately return to scrupulously observing the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Asked if he thought the new Biden administration would introduce changes into the belligerent Trump policies toward Iran, Rouhani replied,

“”We believe that the situation in the new US administration will change and the old conditions will not remain the same.””

The centrists in Iran are clearly eagerly looking forward to the change of administrations. Rouhani said, though, that he thought that even if Trump had remained in office, things would have had to change.

Rouhani added,

    “”We are interested in expanding relations with European and Western countries and with our neighbors, and on this basis we are engaged in this quest. In my view, in order to arrive at this outcome, if the other side, i.e., the P5 + 1 is ready and returns to 2017, we are also ready and we will return to it in a short span of time.”

Rouhani was asked if he would seek reparations for the harm to the Iranian economy inflicted by the U.S. as a precondition for rejoining the JCPOA.

Iran’s centrist president rejected the notion of such preconditions. He said that this approach could keep Iran in the vise of the current US sanctions for another five years. He wants them immediately lifted, though he hinted darkly that the hard liners would be perfectly happy to see US “maximum pressure” sanctions continue for another half decade.

Iran’s hard liners whip up Iranians’ resentments against the way the US has treated the country going back to the 1953 CIA coup against its government, and also play on religious sentiments. They benefit from an Iran that is isolated from the world economy and global culture. Rouhani is implicitly charging them with wanting to keep Iranians in poverty for their own political advancement.

Rouhani agreed that Iran has a claim on the US for reparations, given the damage Washington has inflicted on his country. He simply wants to uncouple such bilateral grievances from the nuclear deal. He pointed out that Europe had also stiffed Iran by not actually trading with or investing in it. He said it is unrealistic to refuse to talk to the Europeans unless they agree to pay reparations first. Such a stance, he said, would put Iran in the position of going to war with the whole world.

In the 2015 JCPOA signed between the UNSC and Iran, the world was supposed to end economic sanctions, boycotts and blockades on Iran. Because the US balked and then Trump threatened the rest of the world with massive third party fines if anyone so much as traded with Iran, Iran never received any real sanctions relief. This, even though the UNSC did revoke the sanctions it had imposed in 2007. The US is such a 900 pound gorilla in the world economy, and the Treasury Department is so willing to use extortionate means to impose Washington’s will, that no big corporations with US investments and trade will dare buck it.

So Trump effectively destroyed Iran’s economy, casting the country down to fourth world status.

In return for sanctions relief, Iran accepted a wide range of constraints on its civilian nuclear energy program. These included limiting centrifuges to only 6,000, agreeing to use unsophisticated centrifuges, bricking in its planned heavy water reactor at Arak, accepting spot inspections from the UN International Atomic Energy Agency, and casting its stock of low-enriched uranium up to 19.5% in a form that made it impossible ever to enrich further. Iran faithfully did all that 2015-2018, as attested by the UN inspectors.

In the past year, as Trump crippled the Iranian economy and the Iranians were deprived of any reward for their compliance (they mothballed 80% of their civilian nuclear enrichment program), the Iranians have acted out in small ways. They weren’t supposed to enrich higher than 3.5% for fuel for their Bushehr reactor. They began enriching to 4.5%. You can’t really do anything with 4.5% enriched uranium. It has to go up to 95% and lots of other scientific advances have to be made to weaponize it. There is no evidence since 2003 that Iran has sought to weaponize or has diverted any material to a weapons program. In short, Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program. So enriching to 4.5% is just a symbolic protest. Likewise, Iran has started using more centrifuges and better ones, violating the terms of the JCPOA. Again, that move would shorten the time it would take them to make a bomb if they wanted to make a bomb, but no intelligence service assesses that they have made that decision.

What Rouhani is signalling to Biden and to Europe is that if they want Iran to go back to observing the stringent stipulations of the JCPOA, they can have that, but they have to turn on the money spigots.

A lot of Washington interests want to squeeze Iran, over issues like its presence in Syria, or its ballistic missile program, or human rights, by tying them to a resumption of the nuclear deal. These are very bad ideas, since denuclearizing the Middle East should come first. Biden is said to agree, and this is the most promising news on the horizon. Iran can be more successfully pressed on those other issues if it depends on income from a Renault car factory and exports to the US, etc. Isolated states find it easier to be rogue states.

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Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

Featured image is from Informed Comment

Last month, my wife, Nicole, requested a lawn sign from NoMoreLockDowns.org. A local representative dropped it off.

Only problem: We don’t have a lawn. We live in a three-storey apartment building.

Undaunted, I emailed my landlords, offering to “rent” some lawn space in front of the building. $10 per month. Three-month down payment.

They wrote back: “I’m sorry, we must decline.”

So I did the next best thing: I took out the duct tape, and fastened the sign to the railing of our balcony:

A few people told me they wanted to do the same (except on their lawn, not their balcony); but were worried they would upset their neighbours.

So far, here’s what my neighbours have said: Nothing. Two have been a little curt with me (“Hi, John.”) And one (who likes to complain about those “stupid anti-maskers”) seems to be avoiding me like I have Ebola or something.

But even if they swore up and down, I wouldn’t really care. As journalist James Corbett said in his recent video, What NO ONE is Saying About The Lockdowns:

“If you are advocating for lockdowns, you are complicit in tearing families apart. You are complicit in inflicting untold suffering on millions of people around the world. You are complicit in casting the poorest and most vulnerable in our societies into even further grinding poverty. You are complicit in murder.”

Therefore, putting up a “No More Lockdowns”is like saying: No more suicides. No more destroying small businesses. No more growing food bank lines. No more phoney science. No more tyranny. No more exploding deficit. No more manslaughter through economical destruction and social isolation.

If any of my neighbours have a problem with such a message, that’s sad; but it’s not going to stop me. Don’t be surprised, when the economical suffering catches up with society, the same people will be saying, “Yeah, I never agreed with those lockdowns, either.”

As Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

Canadians can request a “No More Lock Down” sign here. The rest of you might have to make your own.

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John C. A. Manley has spent over a decade ghostwriting for medical doctors, naturopaths and chiropractors. He currently writes articles that question and expose the contradictions in the COVID-19 narrative and control measures. He is also completing a novel, Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story. You can visit his website at MuchAdoAboutCorona.ca. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author

China’s Economy of Peace. The End of Dollar Hegemony?

December 16th, 2020 by Peter Koenig

Transcript of Peter Koenig’s presentation to webinar Conference (14 December 2020), on “China’s New Development Paradigm and High-Quality Belt and Road Cooperation”,  China Center for Contemporary World Studies, and the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China, my presentation was on China’s Economy of Peace.

China, about a decade ago, has deliberately embarked on an Economy of Peace. A strategy that China pursues, unimpressed by constant aggressions from the west, which are mostly led by the United States.

Is it perhaps this Chinese steadfast, non-aggressive way of constant forward-creation and embracing more and more allies on her way – that has made China such a success story? Overcoming violence by non-violence is engrained in 5000 years of Chinese history.

Despite relentlessly repeated assertions by the West, China’s objective is not to conquer the world or to “replace” the United States as the new empire. Quite to the contrary. The alliance China-Russia and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is seeking a multipolar world, with more justice for all – i. e. fairer trade in the sense of “win-win”, where all parties are benefitting equally.

This is also a policy pursued by the recently signed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP, the 15-country trade agreement signed at the 37th ASEAN Summit – 11 November 2020, in Vietnam, as well as by President Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in 2013 by the President himself.

China does not coerce cooperation – but offers peaceful cooperation. In 2014, President Xi Jingping traveled to Germany to offer Madame Merkel for Germany to become – at that time – the westernmost link to the BRI, or the New Silk Road. This would have been an opening for all of Europe. However, Madame Merkel, having to follow Washington’s mandates – did not respond positively. President Xi Jinping returned to Beijing, no hard feelings. And China continued her persistent course of connecting the countries of our Mother Earth with transport infrastructure, inter-country industrial ventures, education and research projects, as well as cultural exchanges to enrich the world – all the while respecting individual countries’ monetary and political sovereignty.

Many country leaders from Africa and the Global South in general express openly their contentment and satisfaction to have China as a partner and for dealing with China on the basis of equals. With the west, especially the US, there is bullying and coercion, unequal contracts, and often total disrespect for legally signed contracts.

Meanwhile, the west lives in a permanent state of hypocrisy. It bashes China – actually without any reason, other than that the dying Anglo-Saxon-American empire mandates it to its partners, especially the European NATO allies – under threats of sanctions. Unfortunately, spineless Europe mostly complies.

Yet, having outsourced – for economic and profit reasons – most production processes to reliable, efficient and cheaper-labor in China, the west depends very much on China for its supply chains. The covid-crisis, first wave, has clearly shown how dependent the west is on goods produced in China from sophisticated electronic equipment to pharmaceuticals.

As an example: About 90% or more of antibiotics or ingredients for antibiotics are Made in China. Similar percentages apply to other vital western imports. – But China does not “punish” or sanction. China creates and moves forward offering her alliance to the rest of the world.

China has also developed a new digital international Renminbi (RMB) or Yuan that may soon be rolled out for use of monetary transactions – of all kinds, including transfers, trade and even as a reserve currency. The yuan is already an ever-stronger reserve currency. This trend will be further enhanced through the RCEP and BRI.

Of course, the US is afraid that their dollar-hegemony they have built up since WWII with Fiat money backed by nothing, may suffer as international trading currency which the Anglo-American banking cartel practically imposed on the world, will come to an end; and the US-dollar’s standing as a reserve currency may rapidly decline.

And yes, the yuan could gradually replace the US dollar as reserve currency – and this – because countries’ treasurers realize that the yuan is a stable, gold-backed currency, also supported by a solid economy – the only economy of any importance in the world that will grow in the covid-year 2020, by perhaps as much as 3.5%, while western economies will falter badly. Predictions are dire for the US and Europe, between 12% (EU predictions) and up to 30% / 35% (US FED prediction).

The US dollar and its dominion over the international transfer system through SWIFT – has been used massively for sanctioning non-compliant countries, including totally illegal confiscation of assets – even countries reserve assets – case in point is Venezuela.

Escaping this coercive dollar dominion is the dream of many countries. Therefore, trading, investing and dealing with the Chinese currency, will be a welcome opportunity for many sovereign nations.

China’s economic achievements and forward-looking perspectives may be summarized in two major events or global programs,

  • the just signed free trade agreement with 14 countries – the 10 ASEAN countries, plus Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, altogether, including China 15 countries.
  • The so-called Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP, was in negotiations during eight years – and achieved to pull together a group of countries for free trade, of some 2.2 billion people, commanding about 30% of the world’s GDP. This is a never before reached agreement in size, value and tenor.

In addition to the largest such trade agreement in human history, it also links to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), or One Belt, One Road (OBOR), which in itself comprises already more than 130 countries and more than 30 international organizations. Also, China and Russia have a longstanding strategic partnership, containing bilateral agreements that too enter into this new trade fold – plus the countries of the Central Asia Economic Union (CAEU), consisting mostly of former Soviet Republics, are also integrated into this eastern trade block.

The myriad of agreements and sub-agreements between Asian-Pacific countries that will cooperate with RCEP, is bound together by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), founded on 15 June 2001 in Shanghai as an intergovernmental organization, composed of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The SCO is little known and little talked-about in the west.

The purpose of the SCO is to ensure security and maintain stability across the vast Eurasian region, join forces to counteract emerging challenges and threats, and enhance trade, as well as cultural and humanitarian cooperation.

Much of the funding for RCEP and BRI projects may come in the form of low-interest loans from China’s Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB) and other Chinese and participating countries’ national funding sources. In the hard times emerging from the covid crisis, many countries may need grant assistance to be able to recover as quickly as possible from their huge socioeconomic losses, created by the pandemic. In this sense, it is likely that the new Silk Road may support a special “Health Road” across the Asian Continent.

The RCEP may, as “byproduct”, integrate the huge Continent of Eurasia that spans all the way from western Europe to what is called Asia and covering the Middle East as well as North Africa, of some 55 million square kilometers (km2), and a population of about 5.4 billion people, close to 70% of the world population – See map (Wikipedia).

The crux of the RCEP agreement’s trade deals is that they will be carried out in local currencies and in yuan – no US-dollars. The RCEP is a massive instrument for dedollarizing, primarily the Asia-Pacific Region, and gradually the rest of the world.

Much of the BRI infrastructure investments, or New Silk Road, may be funded by other currencies than the US-dollar. China’s new digital Renminbi (RMB) or yuan may soon become legal tender for international payments and transfers, and will drastically reduce the use of the US-dollar.

The US-dollar is already in massive decline. When some 20-25 years ago about 90% of all worldwide held reserve-assets were denominated in US-dollars, this proportion has shrunk by today to below 60% – and keeps declining. The emerging international RMB / yuan, together with a RCEP- and BRI-strengthened Chinese economy, may further contribute to a dedollarization, as well as dehegemonization of the United States in the world. And as said before, the international digital RMB / yuan may progressively also be replacing the US-dollar, as well as euro reserves in countries’ coffers around the globe. The US-dollar may eventually return to be just a local US-currency, as it should be.

Under China’s philosophy, the unilateral world may transform into a multi-polar world. The RCEP and New Silk Road combination are rapidly pursuing this noble objective, a goal that will bring much more equilibrium into the world.

Maybe for a few years more to come, the west, led by the US – and always backed by the Pentagon and NATO, may not shy away from threatening countries participating in China’s projects, but to no avail. Under Tao philosophy, China will move forward with her partners, like steadily flowing water, constantly creating, avoiding obstacles, in pursuit of her honorable goal – a world in Peace with a bright common future.

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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020). He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image: China’s Belt and Road Initiative will be given new momentum with new RCEP trade pact. Photo: iStock

First published by Global Research on March 27, 2020 two weeks after the March 11, 2020 Lockdown

The following is from a medical forum. The writer, who is a widely respected professional scientist in the US, prefers to stay anonymous, because presenting any narrative different than the official one can cause you a lot of stress in the toxic environment caused by the scam which surrounds COVID-19 these days. – Julian Rose

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I work in the healthcare field. Here’s the problem, we are testing people for any strain of a Coronavirus. Not specifically for COVID-19. There are no reliable tests for a specific COVID-19 virus. There are no reliable agencies or media outlets for reporting numbers of actual COVID-19 virus cases. This needs to be addressed first and foremost. Every action and reaction to COVID-19 is based on totally flawed data and we simply can not make accurate assessments.

This is why you’re hearing that most people with COVID-19 are showing nothing more than cold/flu like symptoms. That’s because most Coronavirus strains are nothing more than cold/flu like symptoms. The few actual novel Coronavirus cases do have some worse respiratory responses, but still have a very promising recovery rate, especially for those without prior issues.

The ‘gold standard’ in testing for COVID-19 is laboratory isolated/purified coronavirus particles free from any contaminants and particles that look like viruses but are not, that have been proven to be the cause of the syndrome known as COVID-19 and obtained by using proper viral isolation methods and controls (not the PCR that is currently being used or Serology /antibody tests which do not detect virus as such). PCR basically takes a sample of your cells and amplifies any DNA to look for ‘viral sequences’, i.e. bits of non-human DNA that seem to match parts of a known viral genome.

The problem is the test is known not to work.

It uses ‘amplification’ which means taking a very very tiny amount of DNA and growing it exponentially until it can be analyzed. Obviously any minute contaminations in the sample will also be amplified leading to potentially gross errors of discovery.

Additionally, it’s only looking for partial viral sequences, not whole genomes, so identifying a single pathogen is next to impossible even if you ignore the other issues.

The Mickey Mouse test kits being sent out to hospitals, at best, tell analysts you have some viral DNA in your cells. Which most of us do, most of the time. It may tell you the viral sequence is related to a specific type of virus – say the huge family of coronavirus. But that’s all. The idea these kits can isolate a specific virus like COVID-19 is nonsense.

And that’s not even getting into the other issue – viral load.

If you remember the PCR works by amplifying minute amounts of DNA. It therefore is useless at telling you how much virus you may have. And that’s the only question that really matters when it comes to diagnosing illness. Everyone will have a few virus kicking round in their system at any time, and most will not cause illness because their quantities are too small. For a virus to sicken you you need a lot of it, a massive amount of it. But PCR does not test viral load and therefore can’t determine if it is present in sufficient quantities to sicken you.

If you feel sick and get a PCR test any random virus DNA might be identified even if they aren’t at all involved in your sickness which leads to false diagnosis.

And coronavirus are incredibly common. A large percentage of the world human population will have covi DNA in them in small quantities even if they are perfectly well or sick with some other pathogen.

Do you see where this is going yet? If you want to create a totally false panic about a totally false pandemic – pick a coronavirus.

They are incredibly common and there’s tons of them. A very high percentage of people who have become sick by other means (flu, bacterial pneumonia, anything) will have a positive

PCR test for covi even if you’re doing them properly and ruling out contamination, simply because covis are so common.

There are hundreds of thousands of flu and pneumonia victims in hospitals throughout the world at any one time.

All you need to do is select the sickest of these in a single location – say Wuhan – administer PCR tests to them and claim anyone showing viral sequences similar to a coronavirus (which will inevitably be quite a few) is suffering from a ‘new’ disease.

Since you already selected the sickest flu cases a fairly high proportion of your sample will go on to die.

You can then say this ‘new’ virus has a CFR higher than the flu and use this to infuse more concern and do more tests which will of course produce more ‘cases’, which expands the testing, which produces yet more ‘cases’ and so on and so on.

Before long you have your ‘pandemic’, and all you have done is use a simple test kit trick to convert the worst flu and pneumonia cases into something new that doesn’t actually exist.

Now just run the same scam in other countries. Making sure to keep the fear message running high so that people will feel panicky and less able to think critically.

Your only problem is going to be that – due to the fact there is no actual new deadly pathogen but just regular sick people, you are mislabeling your case numbers, and especially your deaths, are going to be way too low for a real new deadly virus pandemic.

But you can stop people pointing this out in several ways.

1. You can claim this is just the beginning and more deaths are imminent. Use this as an excuse to quarantine everyone and then claim the quarantine prevented the expected millions of dead.

2. You can tell people that ‘minimizing’ the dangers is irresponsible and bully them into not talking about numbers.

3. You can talk crap about made up numbers hoping to blind people with pseudoscience.

4. You can start testing well people (who, of course, will also likely have shreds of coronavirus DNA in them) and thus inflate your ‘case figures’ with ‘asymptomatic carriers’ (you will of course have to spin that to sound deadly even though any virologist knows the more symptom-less cases you have the less deadly is your pathogen.

Take these 4 simple steps and you can have your own entirely manufactured pandemic up and running in weeks.

They can not “confirm” something for which there is no accurate test.

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The limits of the government’s power to follow through with some of its public-health orders are being tested as states impose new restrictions on private gatherings because of COVID-19.

“You have due process,” said Sheriff Richard Giardino, of Fulton County, N.Y. “We can’t just go into someone’s home without a search warrant, their consent or an emergency.”

Giardino, a Republican and former county judge, drew national attention when he spearheaded a group of several elected upstate sheriffs who publicly refused to enforce restrictions that Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo imposed on private gatherings ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday.

Along with their counterparts in California who oppose aspects of a recent order from Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, the sheriffs forced state officials to ask how much authority they have to compel individual citizens to follow public-health guidelines.

“I took [the position] that an executive order in New York without a sanction or a punishment to go into somebody’s house or count how many people is unenforceable because it is not a law,” Giardino said of Cuomo’s order, which set a 10-person limit on gatherings in people’s homes.

He also pointed to the widespread protests and debate about the role of police that occurred over the summer.

“There’s been a message preached by many elected officials that police officers get up in the morning to shoot somebody, that police officers are all bad,” said Giardino, “and then they turn around and they want police officers to enforce these ordinances in your home.”

Cuomo initially called Giardino and the other sheriffs arrogant. “You have to enforce the law or don’t call yourself a law enforcement official,” a dispatch from Albany quoted him as saying.

By the end of the month, however, the governor had changed his tone, per an AP report.

“Government is not capable of enforcing what you do in your home,” Cuomo said. “It’s about people being smart.”

On Tuesday, a senior Israeli official expressed his country’s readiness to cooperate in the future in the field of missile defense with Gulf states that share their concerns about Iran.

Moshe Patil, head of the Israeli Defense Ministry’s Missile Defense Organization, said that the time is not yet ripe to move forward with any of these agreements, and that Washington’s approval will be required as long as the development or financing of Israeli systems is done with American technology.

In response to a question during a conference call with journalists whether any of the systems might be introduced to Israel’s new partners in the Gulf, Patil said:

“These are things that could happen, perhaps in the future,” according to Reuters.

“From an engineering point of view, of course there are many advantages, information that can be shared like sensors that can be deployed in both countries because we have the same enemies,” he said.

This came during a press conference to announce what Patil said is a successful test of a multi-level missile defense system that can hit targets flying at different altitudes such as cruise missiles or ballistic missiles.

Last September, the UAE and Bahrain signed two agreements to normalize relations with Israel, and weeks later Sudan, and then Morocco, announced the normalization of relations with Israel. All efforts were mediated by the U.S.

Israel has developed various air defense systems with U.S. assistance in recent years, according to reports that excluded cooperation with the Gulf countries in the field of missile defense.

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Washington’s “war on drugs” is advancing in Latin America. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) recently asked the US Congress for a new budget, valued at more than 3 billion dollars, to improve its operations abroad and help to prevent narcotics from entering American territory. As expected, the main countries mentioned in the Agency’s plans are Latin American nations.

The DEA application is being evaluated for the coming year. If approved, it will represent an increase of more than 15% over the 2020 budget – a truly bold move that indicates that the U.S. Department of Justice is willing to act more vigorously against drug trafficking. At first, the amount would be used to establish new judicial interception programs in regions such as Honduras and the Bahamas, which are on the international trafficking route. But what is most surprising is the proposal to buy a King Air 350 plane, valued at almost 50 million dollars, for explicit espionage purposes in regions considered strategic.

Although it is the focus of operations, Latin America is not the only region where the US intends to operate. Countries like Afghanistan appear on the DEA’s blacklist alongside Mexico and Colombia. In order to cover the entire trafficking route, the DEA suggests in its project the creation of hundreds of new posts. More than thirty of these posts would be intended for special agents only. Other thirteen posts would be created just to improve the quality of the current DEA programs and offices that are specialized in attacking, intercepting, and dismantling international criminal organizations that supply drugs to American distributors and users ­- among these, three posts are aimed at Mexico and other Latin countries, which would cost 1.5 million dollars.

Obviously, every sovereign national state must use all its available means to combat trafficking and prevent the entry of illegal substances into its territory. At first, the DEA project has merit and deserves approval because it requires resources to fight a major threat to the existence of any nation, which is international trafficking. But are these resources really used to fight drug trafficking?

A few months ago, the Venezuelan National Guard captured a plane that carried drugs in its airspace. The plane probably did the transport linking Colombia to some other region of the trafficking route. Most impressive, however, is that the aircraft contained official American identification. Although it is a curious event – especially considering that the US has started a crusade against Venezuela accusing the Maduro government of being involved in trafficking – it is far from an isolated case. This is just one example of the countless times the US has been accused of being officially involved in drug trafficking activities.

Police departments, the CIA and the American Armed Forces have often been accused of having been involved in criminal activities since at least the 1970s. In addition to the episodes in Latin America, Afghanistan, a country cited by the DEA in its new project, is known to be a territory rich in opium poppy fields and, coincidentally or not, had an exponential increase in its drug production after the arrival of the Americans in 2001.

For any attentive expert, this is not a secret: several world powers have implicit or explicit involvement in drug trafficking. This is part of the network of interests that feed the “deep state” of each country. Authorities who should fight organized crime get involved with such organizations and create networks of connection between the state and crime. When they grow, these networks start to dispute their interests in a more incisive way, deeply interfering in the direction of institutional politics. Thus, the so-called “Narco States” are created around the world.

Colombia, for example, a historical ally of the US, is an example of an explicit Narco State, where criminal networks dominated the public sphere and institutional politics. Colombian President Ivan Duque Marquez has been seen several times with members of criminal organizations involved in drug trafficking. Washington supports Ivan despite his explicit involvement in trafficking, because it sees him as an ally against Venezuela – a problem that for American interests is worse than trafficking. In the same way, this happens in the performance of the intelligence departments against the traffickers. In order to obtain information and form strategies against some cartels, the agents involved in the operations form alliances with organizations that are enemies of those being investigated – because they consider them a “lesser evil”. After a while, such alliances become deep and can no longer be broken.

So, if American interests do not exactly coincide with the end of drug trafficking and if Washington has allies involved in trafficking and some of its authorities are closely linked to criminal organizations around the world, especially in Latin America, what would be the intention of expanding the human and material resources of the anti-drug departments so widely? The reason is simples: to increase control of strategically selected regions.

From the moment that we have a discourse on combating drugs and a broad material apparatus, we can do anything with such an apparatus and justify it under this discourse. Sending US special agents to several countries equipped with war weaponry, spy aircraft and several other resources is extremely advantageous for Washington. And when it has the discourse on fighting drugs, everything is allowed.

In many regions of the planet, especially in Latin America, the “war on drugs” works as a minor version of the “global war on terror” (in its American way): a legalistic and humanitarian discourse created to guarantee the interests of the American Hegemony.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Featured image is from InfoBrics