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.

Featured image is from Wikipedia

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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.

Featured image is from Gateway Pundit

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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.

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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]

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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.

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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.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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

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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.

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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

Selected Articles: The Most Lethal Virus Is Not COVID. It Is War.

December 15th, 2020 by Global Research News

The Case for a Pardon of Edward Snowden by President Trump

By Glenn Greenwald, December 15 2020

In ruling the NSA’s mass surveillance program illegal, the court noted the indispensable role Snowden played in enabling the protection of Americans’ rights. It was Snowden, explained the court, who “made public the existence of NSA data collection programs.”

Biden and the JCPOA: Lessons from Arab and Iranian Public Opinion

By James J. Zogby, December 15 2020

With Joe Biden as President-elect and Donald Trump soon leaving the White House, analysts are engaging in endless speculation about what this change in administrations will mean for the future of the JCPOA, the “nuclear deal” negotiated between the P5+1 and Iran.

‘Buy It or Else’: Inside Monsanto and BASF’s Moves to Force Dicamba on Farmers

By Johnathan Hettinger, December 15 2020

Get poisoned or get on board. That’s the choice soybean farmers such as Will Glazik face. The past few summers, farmers near Glazik’s central Illinois farm have sprayed so much of the weed killer dicamba at the same time that it has polluted the air for hours and sometimes days.

Western Sahara Is the “Reward” to Morocco for Recognizing Israel

By Steven Sahiounie, December 15 2020

The US, Israel, and Morocco triangle included a quid pro quo: a US agreement to recognize Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, a disputed territory since 1975, where there has been a decades-old conflict with Morocco pitted against the Polisario Front.

Aleppo’s Liberation Three Years Ago Today: Anybody Ashamed?

By Jan Oberg, December 15 2020

December 12, 2017, marks the anniversary of the liberation – the West called it fall – of Aleppo in Syria. What happened is conveniently forgotten today by the West. Some of us can’t and won’t forget what was both world, regional and local history.

Regardless of Who Occupies the White House, The Decadent Trajectory of Neoliberalism Continues

By US Peace Council, December 15 2020

The important issues of war and peace facing humanity, especially for those of us in the belly of the beast with a special responsibility to address the actions of our own government, were non-issues in most if not all U.S. election campaigns. Regardless of who occupies the Oval Office, the decadent trajectory of neoliberalism continues.

The Most Lethal Virus Is Not COVID. It Is War.

By John Pilger, December 15 2020

John Pilger describes the invisible weapon of past and current wars, and the threat of nuclear war, under cover of the Covid pandemic. This is propaganda, aided by censorship by omission.

Amid Fears of Overwhelmed Medical Systems, Ample U.S. Hospital Capacity Nationwide

By Daniel Payne, December 15 2020

As fears persist of overwhelmed medical systems and at-capacity hospitals nationwide, data indicate that ample hospital space remains available for both COVID-19 patients and other medical needs, with one official at a major hospital network stating that the country is “managing pretty well” the latest surge of COVID-19.

“Fish Wars” and Brexit. European Fishing Vessels in British Waters

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, December 14 2020

Warring over fish in the twenty-first century might seem an unlikely proposition.  But the deployment of four Royal Navy ships to deter European fishing vessels from encroaching on British waters in the event of a no-deal Brexit has tongues wagging.

“Myopia”: A Universal Message by Morocco’s Film Director Sanaa Akroud’s Latest Screen Gem

By Barbara Nimri Aziz, December 14 2020

This film story by Sanaa Akroud is, like its title “Myopia”, just too simple to carry the power of a deeply moving universal message.


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

Providing coverage of the Asia-Pacific Region

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Notre site Web en français, mondialisation.ca

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Il piano Usa di dominio dello spazio

December 15th, 2020 by Manlio Dinucci

Cape Canaveral in Florida, da cui nel 1969 fu lanciato dalla Nasa il razzo della missione Apollo, è divenuto sede della stazione della Forza spaziale Usa insieme alla base Patrick, anch’essa in Florida. Nella cerimonia inaugurale, il 9 dicembre, il vicepresidente Mike Pence ha annunciato che «la nostra Forza spaziale si sta potenziando ogni giorno di più». La U.S. Space Force è una nuova branca delle Forze armate statunitensi, istituita nel dicembre 2019. La sua missione è «proteggere gli interessi Usa e alleati nello spazio, acquisire sistemi militari spaziali, formare professionisti militari dello spazio, sviluppare la dottrina militare per la potenza spaziale, organizzare forze spaziali a disposizione dei nostri Comandi combattenti». Quale sia il compito centrale della nuova Forza lo ha detto in modo esplicito il presidente Trump, annunciando nell’agosto 2019 la sua imminente costituzione: «Assicurare il dominio americano nello spazio, il prossimo campo di combattimento della guerra».

Sulla scia della nuova forza spaziale Usa, la Nato ha varato un programma militare spaziale, preparato dal Pentagono e da ristretti vertici militari europei insieme alle maggiori industrie aerospaziali. Quale sia l’importanza dello spazio lo dimostra il fatto che vi sono attualmente in orbita attorno alla Terra circa 2.800 satelliti artificiali operativi. Di questi, oltre 1.400 sono statunitensi. Al secondo posto è la Cina con oltre 380, al terzo la Russia con poco più di 170. La maggior parte dei satelliti, oltre 1.000, è di tipo commerciale. Vengono successivamente quelli per uso militare, governativo e civile (questi ultimi due tipi usati spesso anche per attività di carattere militare). Oltre a questi vi sono circa 6.000 satelliti non più funzionanti che continuano a orbitare attorno alla Terra, insieme a milioni di oggetti e frammenti di diverse dimensioni.

Lo spazio è sempre più affollato e sempre più conteso. Qui operano con i loro satelliti i colossi delle telecomunicazioni, le Borse valori, i grandi gruppi finanziari e commerciali. Si prevede che, entro questo decennio, il numero di satelliti si quintuplicherà, soprattutto per effetto della tecnologia 5G. La rete commerciale del 5G, realizzata da società private, potrà essere impiegata a scopi militari, in particolare per le armi ipersoniche, con una spesa molto minore. In tale quadro si capisce perché gli Stati uniti abbiano costituito la Forza spaziale. Vedendo calare il margine di vantaggio economico e tecnologico in particolare rispetto alla Cina, la potenza statunitense gioca la carta della forza militare anche nello spazio. L’obiettivo è chiaro: dominare lo spazio per mantenere non solo la superiorità militare, ma anche quella economica e tecnologica.

L’esito di tale strategia è altrettanto chiaro. Russia e Cina hanno ripetutamente proposto alle Nazioni Unite, fin dal 2008, un nuovo Trattato (dopo quello del 1967) che proibisca di dislocare armi nello spazio, ma gli Usa lo hanno sempre rifiutato. Russia e Cina si stanno quindi preparando a un confronto militare nello spazio, avendone la capacità. La costituzione della Forza spaziale Usa innesca quindi una nuova, ancora più pericolosa fase della corsa agli armamenti anche nucleari. Dall’uso di sistemi spaziali per lo spionaggio, per le telecomunicazioni militari, per la guida di missili, bombe e droni, si passa a sistemi d’arma che, collocati nello spazio, possono accecare i satelliti del nemico prima di attaccarlo e distruggere obiettivi terrestri, come intere città, direttamente dallo spazio.

Tutto questo è coperto sotto la cappa del silenzio mediatico. Dal mondo politico, scientifico, accademico, culturale non si leva alcuna voce di critica o dissenso. Allo stesso tempo aumentano i finanziamenti, da parte di governi e industrie belliche, a istituti scientifici e università per ricerche che, spesso camuffate da civili, servono allo sviluppo di sistemi militari spaziali. Le uniche voci riecheggiano quella della nuova Forza spaziale Usa, che ci spiega quanto lo spazio sia «essenziale per la nostra sicurezza e prosperità nella nostra vita quotidiana, perfino quando usiamo la carta di credito al distributore di benzina».

Manlio Dinucci

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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. 

Nevertheless, the public has more than ‘a right’ to be informed what it is that is to be injected into their bloodstream. It should be obligatory upon those doing the injecting to convey this information.

The phrase used by the constitutions of most countries –  dealing with human health concerns – is that nobody should be pressured into accepting medical treatment without their ‘informed consent’ to do so.

An informed choice ought to be pretty simple once one realises one is being used as a guinea pig in a vast experiment on human health.

The microbiologist Professor Dr Sucharit Bhakdi and leading lung specialist Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, in their paper ‘Genetic Engineering Under False Flag’, reveal the composition of the Covid vaccine to be “largely new and highly risky genetic engineering interventions in complex biological communication processes of our immune systems.”

The vaccines composition, they point out, includes fragments of different genetic information to be introduced into human cells as RNA or DNA. “Recombinant RNA, which is introduced into human cells, also alters the genetic processes and can very well be classified as genetic modification of the cells or the organism.”

Dr Bhakdi goes on to state that it is impossible to verify what processes can be triggered within the body by the vaccine, and that damage to the human germ line cannot be ruled out, also leading to changes and damage being carried through to future generations.

While campaigning against GMO in Poland, the UK and continent of Europe, it became clear that most consumers are instinctively turned-off from buying and ingesting GMO foods. They will be doubly unhappy, one surmises,  to think that they could be recipients of a GMO vaccine.

By getting this information out, many millions who have not done much thinking up till now, will think twice when realising that the hugely hyped ‘salvation via vaccination’ is to be achieved at the hands of a genetically modified product never before tested on human kind and carrying unique dangers for the stability of the DNA of the human genome itself.

So let’s take stock of where we are within this Covid madness.

The highly dubious World Health Organisation has been leading all and sundry into desperately chasing after a non existent phantom pandemic, commonly recognised as a strain of the standard winter flu and no more dangerous. The Covid army have been using testing procedures that have proved incapable of giving an accurate reading, but instead produce random ‘positive/’negative’ results based upon the test’s (PCR) sensitivity to RNA particles that arise as a natural result of the immune system’s exosomes defending against an incoming viral threat.

Now let us remind ourselves,  this bogus emergency is being used as a cover to enforce a global scale lock-down of humanity, the subsequent bankrupting of millions of businesses and the daily removal of fundamental human rights and civil liberties that are the cornerstone of a civilised society.

A scared and confused public, accustomed to allowing ‘authorities’ to run the show, are now being told they need to be vaccinated to give them sufficient immunity to prevent the phantom virus from afflicting them.

The ‘authorities’ have chosen a GMO vaccine because the effects of such a vaccine on the human metabolism are unknown and it will therefore be a useful experiment for the pharmaceutical industry – and the governments that rely on them for rolling-out their ‘health policies’ – to monitor peoples’ reactions and see what happens next.

The effects of lock-down, masks and distancing, constitute the socio-psychological end of this experiment: Who will crack first? How effective will the fear factor prove to be? How can ‘e’ education be tailored for making its recipients prisoners in their own homes? Is the human psyche sufficiently paralysed to continue with these policies even when no further effort is made to push the pandemic button? How deeply implanted can The Great Reset become under the smoke screen of Covid?

Next comes the physical part of the experiment. Is this intended as a depopulation tool? “Depopulation” has been on the agenda of all Club of Rome and Bilderberger ‘leaders’ for decades.

A genetically modified vaccine  has the strong potential to alter human DNA, and this mutation will carry-on to be inherited by future generations. This will further enhance the control that ‘controllers’ exert over humanity, by subtly altering the body’s ability to reject new diseases, deal with existing ones and produce healthy babies, to name just a few of the predicted repercussions.

But all is not going entirely to plan. More and more doctors, scientists and health practitioners are coming forward to expose the full nature of the horror being perpetrated on humanity.

There is now a ‘World Alliance of Doctors’ and a growing number of class action court hearings being instigated against government agencies and individual ministers involved in promoting the grand lie named Covid-19.

Many millions of campaigners are involved in ‘I do not consent’ awareness raising events, stimulating the call for civil disobedience and defiance of the supposedly obligatory mask wearing and social distancing rules. The uprisings are gathering momentum all over the world – as it becomes clear that state fascism is being introduced under the veneer of Covid clamp-downs – and a totalitarian supranational authority is masterminding the activities of national governments while demonstrating its effectiveness as ‘the new ruler of the world’. The New World Order.

In a nutshell: in the past year an entire pseudo emergency world crisis has been black-magicked into existence. A world that fully reflects the stealth, deception and dark cunning of its originators. A handful of deceivers who have told us to believe a carefully prepared pack of lies and obey their instructions for how to respond to them.

Now to round-off the activities of Covid deceit, millions of eager individuals are going to get themselves vaccinated against something that has never been proven to exist and by something that has never been authentically tested or proven to be safe. Could there be a more bizarre state of affairs?

This is the greatest wake-up call we (humanity) will ever get. What we are faced by is the prospect of interminable, abject submission, or a fight back like no other, to establish a platform of uncompromising global justice and fraternity. We are in no position to hesitate.

Have no doubt, we are in charge of our destinies and collectively we are in charge of the health and welfare of this living planet.  None of us can shirk these dual responsibilities. Commit now to unifying our individual will to overcome – with our collective sense of universal sister and brotherhood.

That is the wedding which will finally catalyse the break-through we know is our absolute imperative to make manifest.

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Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, international activist, entrepreneur and holistic teacher. His latest book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ is particularly recommended reading for this time: see www.julianrose.info. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. 

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The recently imposed targeted sanctions against Turkey and the impending National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) 2021 ones mandating similar measures against it for its acquisition of Russia’s S-400 air defense systems, while illegal in terms of international law and a blatant example of unfriendly meddling in its nominal NATO ally’s affairs, will actually strengthen its target’s sovereignty by inspiring it to double down on its independent policies.

Subversive Sanctions

Mideast observers were alarmed but not necessarily surprised to hear that the US recently imposed targeted sanctions against Turkey and that its National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) 2021 mandates similar ones for its acquisition of Russia’s S-400 air defense systems. The US has long threatened to punish its nominal NATO ally under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), but now it’s finally come to pass and will become law through the NDAA. Although Trump threatened to veto it for not appealing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the Senate has a veto-proof majority so they’ll ultimately be able to override his efforts. Moreover, Monday’s targeted sanctions show that the President certainly supports this policy in principle. Although illegal in terms of international law and a blatant example of unfriendly meddling in its putative partner’s affairs, this development actually strengthens its target’s sovereignty by inspiring it to double down on its independent policies.

Turkey’s “Military Diplomacy” With Russia

The US’ intention is to pressure Turkey into reversing its fast-moving rapprochement with Russia over the past few years which was supercharged after the failed pro-American military coup attempt against President Erdogan in summer 2016. That decisive event showed Turkey the importance of diversifying its strategic partnerships, particularly in the military sphere, ergo its decision to purchase the S-400s. The US argues that these systems are redundant since Turkey has access to American options instead, yet it’s particularly because of the unprecedented distrust between those two countries that Ankara doesn’t feel comfortably relying on its so-called “ally’s” equipment, especially not after the failed military coup. Since then, “military diplomacy” — the use of military means to advance political ends — has been at the core of the emerging Russian-Turkish Strategic Partnership. This has enabled both countries to quickly improve the trust between them, as well more responsibly manage regional conflicts such as those in Syria, Libya, and Azerbaijan.

American Mistakes

American policymakers underestimated President Erdogan’s resolve to diversify Turkey’s strategic partnerships, wrongly thinking that the threat of sanctions would succeed in getting him to step back from his country’s ongoing rapprochement with Russia and possibly even manufacture an unexpected rift between them if Ankara abandoned the S-400 deal. They also failed to understand just how much he distrusts the US after the failed military coup. By arrogantly sanctioning his country, they’re counterproductively confirming his suspicions that the US treats Turkey like a “junior partner” and is still committed to undermining him personally after he invested so much of his political reputation at home into seeing the historic S-400 deal succeed. Even a simple leadership analysis by a casual observer would suggest that threats are the wrong way to deal with someone like President Erdogan since he doesn’t back down and is actually emboldened to stick with his position when pressured for principle’s sake. The US obviously knows this, yet it still sanctioned Turkey.

Three Explanations

There are three primary explanations for why they decided to go through with this policy in spite of that. The first is that the US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) are deeply divided on the issue and that the pragmatists who understand just how counterproductive this policy is have been beaten by the ideologues who want to send a strong message of displeasure by sanctioning Turkey. The second one is that the “deep state” is united on this issue, perhaps believing that the substance of the forthcoming sanctions will eventually be just as significant as their optics and thus stand a chance of succeeding with their stated goal. And thirdly, it might very well be that the US has resigned itself to the fact that the Russian-Turkish Strategic Partnership is a geopolitical reality that won’t be going anywhere anytime soon and that the best that they can do is show the world that the American-Turkish Strategic Partnership will be irreparably harmed as a result.

The US’ Dual Containment Strategy

The author predicted last month that “Russia & Turkey Stand To Lose The Most From A Biden Presidency”, arguing that the Democrat’s promise of more pragmatic relations with China and a possible return to the Iranian nuclear deal would combine to put immense pressure on those two Great Powers, though with the unintended outcome of naturally driving them even closer together into a deeper relationship of complex strategic interdependence. That likely being the case in such a scenario, the US might want to get a head start on its dual containment of those two, thus finally imposing sanctions on Turkey for its S-400 purchase in order to set the stage for the next four years, during which time its target will either double down on its independent policies or buckle under pressure. The latter scenario is unlikely though since it would amount to Turkey strategically submitting to the US’ fading unipolar hegemony, which would have drastic consequences for the country’s sovereignty, perhaps even accelerating America’s plans to carry out regime change there.

Concluding Thoughts

That’s why the last of the three explanations behind this move — that the US accepts the continued existence of the Russian-Turkish Strategic Partnership but wants to fire off a warning shot signaling its severe displeasure — is the most credible. This observation also reinforces the author’s feelings that Russia and Turkey will be Biden’s top two geopolitical targets, which will in turn lead to them moving much closer together in response. It’ll of course remain to be seen whether more such sanctions will be symbolic or substantive, but this development is still an unquestionably negative one for American-Turkish relations. President Erdogan’s domestic position won’t be weakened either, but will actually improve since the US is showing the Turkish people how responsible their leader’s “military diplomacy” was in diversifying the country’s strategic partnerships out of concern that America couldn’t be trusted. While the future is always difficult to predict, one thing is clear, and it’s that US-Turkish relations will never be the same after these sanctions were imposed.

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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 en.kremlin.ru

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In a long-ranging interview with Al-Monitor, James Jeffrey looks back on his efforts to incorporate fragments of Obama-era initiatives into a cohesive Middle East policy.

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In August 2016, former US Ambassador to Iraq and Turkey James Jeffrey signed a public letter with more than 50 other veteran national security officials warning against the election of then-candidate Donald Trump.

“We are convinced that in the Oval Office, he would be the most reckless President in American history,” read the letter.

Nonetheless, two years later the career diplomat had come out of retirement to help the Trump administration incorporate the fragments of Obama-era initiatives in Syria into a cohesive Middle East policy.

Under the authority of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, administration officials had devised a plan under which the US military’s counter-Islamic State (IS, or ISIS) force would remain in Syria at least until the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad went through with UN-backed elections. On top of their Congressionally-mandated mission of fighting IS, US forces would continue to deny Assad access to Syrian oilfields, which were located in areas controlled by Syrian Kurdish fighters backed by the United States, and to obstruct the Iranian military’s access to the Levant.

Trump didn’t like it. “The president was very uncomfortable with our presence in Syria,” Jeffrey told Al-Monitor in a two-hour interview at his home in Washington last week. “He was very uncomfortable with what he saw as endless wars.”

 

But in December 2018, the 45th president blew off his top advisers and told Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that he would withdraw more than 2,000 US military forces from Syria.

The move would inevitably launch a mad dash across a precariously balanced battlefield occupied by four major military players and lead to mass displacement among Syria’s Kurdish population. It also threatened to upend the international coalition’s sweeping gains against IS and set back the US-led pressure campaign against Assad.

“We felt very vulnerable and may have been a little bit punch drunk on fear,” Jeffrey told Al-Monitor last week. “I understand the president’s concerns about Afghanistan,” he said. “But the Syria mission is the gift that keeps on giving.”

Opposition from European allies eventually convinced the president to reverse the order, Jeffrey said. But less than a year later, as Turkish forces built up on the Syrian border in October of 2019, Jeffrey and other officials arranged yet another call between Trump and Erdogan.

When the dust settled, hundreds of people were dead and up to 300,000 others, mostly Syrian Kurds, had fled their homes. Turkey’s military incursion has since been referred to by Kurdish leaders as an “ethnic cleansing.”

Jeffrey was left to pick up the pieces. The methods the diplomat had advocated to assuage Ankara’s aggression failed, drawing heated controversy in marathon congressional hearings.

Jeffrey says the proposals he pushed — dismantling YPG border defenses, allowing Turkey’s military into northeast Syria for joint security patrols, putting Turkish aircraft back on the Air Tasking Order out of Udeid Airbase — were rooted in his understanding of domestic Turkish politics and colonial history. Critics say they paved the way for Turkey’s assault.

Today, Jeffrey speaks of the crisis of Turkey and Syria’s Kurds as if it has largely blown over, but he offers few specifics on prospects for securing the future of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Syria. He insists the Obama administration’s decision to arm the Syrian Kurdish-led militia fed into a decades-old existential threat to Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

For the career diplomat, Ankara’s hostility toward the SDF was just one troublesome corner of a complex policy structure in which Washington sought to harness the interests of both Turkey and Israel to roll back Iran and deal the Assad regime and Russia an unwinnable hand in Syria’s civil war.

The following interview has been edited for length.

***

Al-Monitor: Deputy OIR commander UK Maj. Gen. Kevin Copsey last week said we are entering the “twilight” phase of the international coalition’s mission against IS. In July 2018, you were brought in as Special Envoy in part to help fold the D-ISIS mission back into US regional strategy, particularly vis-a-vis Iran and NATO ally Turkey. What progress has been made in that?

Jeffrey: The Syria strategy was a stepchild since the Obama administration.

The Trump administration saw one of the major flaws in the Obama administration: that it treated Iran as a nuclear weapons problem a la North Korea. They saw Iran as a threat to the regional order. So they wanted a Syria policy building on the bits and pieces of the Obama policy. So the Trump administration came up with that policy in 2017.

Secretary Pompeo and I convinced people in the administration of this: If you don’t deal with the underlying problem of Iran in Syria, you’re not going to deal in an enduring way with IS. We saw this all as one thing.

We then also had the Israeli air campaign. The US only began supporting that when I came on board. I went out there and we saw Prime Minister Netanyahu and others, and they thought that they were not being supported enough by the US military, and not by intelligence. And there was a big battle within the US government, and we won the battle.

The argument [against supporting Israel’s campaign] was, again, this obsession with the counterterrorism mission. People didn’t want to screw with it, either by worrying about Turkey or diverting resources to allow the Israelis to muck around in Syria, as maybe that will lead to some blowback to our forces. It hasn’t.

Basically, first and foremost is denial of the [Assad regime] getting military victory. But because Turkey was so important and we couldn’t do this strategy without Turkey, that brought up the problem of the Turkish gripes in northeast Syria. So my job was to coordinate all of that.

So you throw all those together — the anti-chemical weapons mission, our military presence, the Turkish military presence, and the Israeli dominance in the air — and you have a pretty effective military pillar of your military, diplomatic and isolation three pillars.

So that was how we put together an integrated Syria policy that nestled under the overall Iran policy. The result has been relative success because we — with a lot of help from the Turks in particular — have managed to stabilize the situation.

The only change on the ground to the benefit of Assad has been southern Idlib in two and a half years of attacks. They are highly unlikely to continue, given the strength of the Turkish army there and the magnitude of the defeat of the Syrian army by the Turks back in March.

And of course, we’ve ratcheted up the isolation and sanctions pressure on Assad, we’ve held the line on no reconstruction assistance, and the country’s desperate for it. You see what’s happened to the Syrian pound, you see what’s happened to the entire economy. So, it’s been a very effective strategy.

Al-Monitor: The US has been supporting the Israeli air campaign and enacting sanctions on both the Assad regime and Iran. Are we any closer to an Iranian withdrawal from Syria?

Jeffrey: Well the Iranians have withdrawn a lot of their people. One reason is they’re financially under a great deal of pressure, and Syria is very expensive for them. More and more the Iranians are divesting that back to the Syrians. And they haven’t been able to bail the Syrians out, other than some — under adventuresome conditions — shipments of oil supplies, which sometimes make it, sometimes don’t. I’ll just leave it at that.

Al-Monitor: Can you elaborate on those “adventurous conditions?”

Jeffrey: I’ve told you as much as I’m going to tell you on that. The Iranian ability to truly establish a southern Lebanon-style threat to Israel by long-range systems has also been blocked by the Israeli strikes, which are enabled, to some degree, by US diplomatic and other support, which I won’t go into in more detail, but it is significant.

We have basically blocked Iran’s longer-term goals and put its present presence under pressure. Is that enough pressure to get Iran to leave? I don’t know. Whether we can actually roll them back, I don’t know. But I do know that it is absolutely an essential part of any larger agreement. Whatever level of pain we are inflicting on the Iranians, the Russians, and the Assad regime is not going to go away until Iran leaves.

Al-Monitor: A major objective of the sanctions is to force the Assad regime to change its behavior. Have you seen any signs of change in the regime’s calculus as a result? Is there any prospect of US-Russia accommodation on Syria’s political process, or is it fair to say the Geneva process has been co-opted?

Jeffrey: Well, we saw the Rami Makhlouf thing, we saw other leaders. We don’t know, because you really have to know what’s really going on inside a police state, how much impact that’s having. But it’s having some impact. The collapse of the Lebanese banking system is another big blow. You see it in the spatting between the Russians and Assad in the recent, underreported Damascus refugee fiasco. That was a Russian idea.

We’re sure the Russians know there’s no military victory. So they have gone to, how can we get a political victory? And the way to do that is to hijack the UN-led political process, by using things like the Assad election in 2021 as a substitute for the UN-mandated elections, [and] using a Russian-led conference on refugees to take that portfolio away from the UN and international community and put a Russia and Assad stamp on it. So, we mobilized the international community to basically boycott it, very successfully.

It goes up and down but the Russians have never embraced a true implementation of 2254. We’ve made it clear that we would relieve the sanctions and that Assad would eventually be invited back into the Arab League, that the diplomatic isolation would all fall. We laid it out to Putin at Sochi in 2019, by Secretary Pompeo. They know about the offer. They don’t really make any changes to it.

Al-Monitor: Has the US explored alternative paths, such as potential engagement with members of the Syrian regime’s support base in the Alawi community?

Jeffrey: No, other than the few reported contacts on Austin Tice. And I can’t talk any more about that. I see nothing promising. Not everybody would agree with me.

Al-Monitor: Let’s move to the subject of Turkey. Secretary of State Pompeo sharply criticized Ankara during the NATO Foreign Ministers’ Meeting. In recent Al-Monitor podcasts, Stephen Cook and Philip Gordon said the US should probably not consider Turkey an ally or a “model partner.” How would you recommend the Biden administration engage with Erdogan out of the gate?

Jeffrey: First of all, you have to separate Erdogan from Turkey.

The biggest challenges for Biden will be China, Russia, North Korea, Iranian JCPOA and climate. Those are the five big ones. Number six is Turkey, because Turkey directly impacts two of the first five: Iran and Russia. And it impacts number eight or nine, terrorism.

They’re a very important NATO state. The NATO radar that is the core of the entire anti-ballistic missile system defending against Iran is in Turkey. We have tremendous military assets there. We really can’t “do” the Middle East, the Caucuses or the Black Sea without Turkey. And Turkey is a natural opponent of Russia and Iran.

Erdogan is a great power thinker. Where he sees vacuums, he moves. The other thing about Erdogan is he’s maddeningly arrogant, unpredictable and simply will not accept a win-win solution. But when pressed — and I’ve negotiated with him — he’s a rational actor.

So if Biden sees the world as many of us do now, near-peer competition, Turkey becomes extremely important. Look what [Erdogan] has just done in eight months in Idlib, Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia or Russian allies have been the loser in all three.

If we return to Obama’s end-of-office mindset that we don’t have a geopolitical problem, but we have sets of little problems — that Erdogan’s buying S-400s, [IS] cells in the desert and refugees in Lebanon, Iranian 3.25% enriched uranium, and the Khashoggi murder and the never-ending starvation drama in Yemen — all these become sui generis problems that we have to throw resources and policies and mobilizing the bureaucracy at, without trying to figure out how do they all fit together.

If the Biden administration goes back to that stupid thinking, then they’re going to lose the Middle East. You can forget about Asia.

Al-Monitor: How should the Biden administration approach Erdogan?

Jeffrey: Erdogan will not back down until you show him teeth. That’s what we did when we negotiated the cease-fire in October of 2019. We were ready to crush the economy.

That’s what Putin did after the Russian plane was shot down. The Russians have now twice sent strong signals to the Turks in Idlib. They chopped the shit out of a Turkish battalion. It didn’t work out the way the Russians wanted to.

You have to be willing, when Erdogan goes too far, to really clamp down on him and to make sure he understands this in advance. The Turkish position is never 100% correct. They have some logic and arguments on their side. Given their role as an important ally and bulwark against Iran and Russia, it behooves us to at least listen to their arguments and try to find compromise solutions.

Al-Monitor: You came into the Special Envoy position as a proponent of accelerating the Manbij roadmap model to ease Turkey’s concerns about northeast Syria. Is it safe to say that approach backfired?

Jeffrey: The Turks considered Manbij a failure. There was tremendous pushback from the SDF and from the local military council, and from McGurk’s office. Every individual who had PKK connections, there had to be intelligence adjudication both of the Turkish and American sides. Very few people were pushed out.

I basically insisted, and we eventually got a group of about 10 to leave. But that was after about a year, and the Turks thought we weren’t serious. That was the model that we tried to apply to the northeast.

The SDF, they’re clean kids. I’ve gotten to know them and their leadership very, very well. They really are phenomenal, by Middle Eastern standards. They’re a highly disciplined Marxist offshoot of the PKK. They’re also not particularly interested in pursuing the PKK agenda. They’re the squishees; they don’t have any mountains.

Meanwhile, nobody at the State Department side said hey, what about Turkey? Frankly, our local military and the State Department’s defeat-IS people were basically like, that’s somebody else’s problem.

The Turks along the border were provoked, primarily by us announcing that we were going to create a new border defense force [in 2018] that would be even larger, and the first place we’d deploy them is along the Turkish border.

This was CENTCOM out of control. This was the classic, ‘We’re just here to fight terrorists, let the f—heads in State Department take care of Turkey, and we can say or do anything we want that pleases us and pleases our little allies, and it doesn’t matter.’ And this was the bane of our existence until we finally got it under our control, and it didn’t come fully under control until — with a few outliers — Pompeo asked me to take over the D-ISIS job.

Al-Monitor: Operation Peace Spring threw a major wrench into the US mission there and has been called an “ethnic cleansing.” You’ve said you have to show Erdogan teeth. But prior to the incursion, you led an effort to have the YPG dismantle its defenses as part of the safe zone. What was the logic behind that?

Jeffrey: It was an expansion of the Manbij roadmap: joint patrols and, in Manbij, the withdrawal of PKK-associated leadership. In the safe zone it was all SDF forces, and heavy weapons and defenses to be withdrawn. We thought, given constant Turkish pressure on the president to do something about this, that that made sense.

When Bolton and I went out [to Ankara] in January 2019, there was a lot of talk about Jeffrey running in with this map. It wasn’t Jeffrey’s map. The map had been drawn up by our military personnel with the Kurds, and it had been agreed with them.

The Kurds were supposed to dismantle their fortifications but they didn’t. That was one of Erdogan’s major complaints. Bolton didn’t want to have any Turks in there; that was one of the arguments that I’d had with him out in Ankara. We agreed that we wouldn’t show the map, but that we would deploy to the Turks the concept of the map.

We finally got an agreement in July and August. It included Turkish patrols down to the M4 highway, so the Turks got their 30 kilometers, and somewhat vaguely, [a] Turkish permanent presence, but we couldn’t determine where that would be.

It was a good compromise. It was kind of working, but the Turks were still unhappy with it because they knew the SDF was still controlling the area, and they didn’t believe the SDF was dismantling the fortifications. And that’s true. We kept on pressing the SDF to do it and we got a lot of excuses.

Al-Monitor: Why did it collapse?

Jeffrey: The president was uncomfortable with our presence in Syria. He was very uncomfortable with what he saw as endless wars. This is something he should not be criticized for. We took down the [IS] caliphate, and then we stayed on. Trump kept asking, “Why do we have troops there?” And we didn’t give him the right answer.

If somebody had said, “It’s all about the Iranians,” it might have worked. But the people whose job it was to tell why the troops are there was DOD. And they just gave the [Congressional] Authorization of Use of Military Force: “We’re there to fight terrorists.”

The reason that Trump pulled the troops out was I think because he was just tired of us having come up with all these explanations for why we’re in there. There was an implicit promise to him, ‘Hey boss, nothing’s going to go wrong, we’re working with the Turks, we’re working with the Russians.’ And then he gets these disasters.

I didn’t brief the president on it. Pompeo did, and made arguments along those lines, focused on Iran. But Trump was uncomfortable about those forces, and he trusted Erdogan. Erdogan would keep making these cases about the PKK, and the president would ask people, and they would have to be honest and ‘fess up. Of course, it’s more complicated than that. Wars are complicated.

The president was briefed, but he also listens to Erdogan. Erdogan is pretty persuasive.

We at the State Department never provided any troop numbers to the president. That’s not our job. We didn’t try to deceive him. He kept on publicly saying numbers that were way below what the actual numbers were, so in talking to the media and talking to Congress, we had to be very careful and dodge around. Furthermore, the numbers were funny. Do you count the allies that didn’t want to be identified in there? Do you count the al-Tanf garrison? Do you count the Bradley unit that was going in and out?

We were gun shy because the president had three times given the order to withdraw. It was a constant pressuring and threatening to pull the troops out of Syria. We felt very vulnerable and may have been a little bit punch drunk on fear because it made so much sense to us. I understand his concerns about Afghanistan. But the Syria mission is the gift that keeps on giving. We and the SDF are still the dominant force in [northeast] Syria.

The Kurds were always trying to get us to pretend that we would defend them against the Turkish army. They pressed CJTF, over my objections, to start putting outposts along the Turkish border. I hated the idea; it just provoked the Turks.

I wasn’t able to get those stopped, but I was able to stop additional ones [being built]. They made no sense. The US military had no authorization to shoot at the Turks, who could simply drive around them. It was simply a signal to the Turks that we couldn’t really be trusted and that we had some plan of a permanent statelet in northeast Syria run by the PKK as a pressure point, just like many Turks erroneously think we have our Greece policy and our Cyprus policy and our Armenia policy all to pressure the Turks. Because that’s how the British and French dealt with the Ottoman Empire.

It was played up in Congress and the media as if we had this policy of being a bulwark against the Turks, and then the president changed our policy on the ground in his conversation with Erdogan.

Believe me, I was with the commander in December 2018 when the Turks were about to come in, and we were trying to figure out what the US Army should do. There was no plan. There was no plan to respond to the Turks because they had no order to do that. That was not part of their mission set.

Secretary Pompeo, I and others had consistently made that point to the Turks: Even if we don’t stop you [militarily], and that’s not our policy, we will act against you politically. But more importantly, the Kurds will just invite in the Russians. The Turks just pooh-poohed this. They pooh-poohed this after the 6th of October incursion.

The president sent a message to Erdogan that if he did not stop within 24 hours, Mazlum would reach out to the Russians and invite them in, and the US would not stop them. I wound up passing that message on, and our Turkish interlocutor was incredulous. They either thought the Russians wouldn’t come in or we would stop them, just like we did to Wagner [at the Conoco gas field in Deir ez-Zor].

And the Russians came in. Suddenly it’s checkmate. Can I claim the Turkish problem has been resolved? No, I can’t. But the Turks now have a presence in the northeast. They have less to fear from the SDF.

Al-Monitor: Did they ever have anything to fear from the SDF?

Jeffrey: Of course. Sure. Look, they almost went to war with Syria in almost 1999 over the presence of [PKK leader Abdallah] Ocalan. The YPG is the PKK. Remember when they went into Raqqa? Remember the poster? That’s the problem. Erdogan does not want another statelet like Qandil in Syria that is protected by the United States or protected by Russia.

The Turks have lost 40,000 people to the PKK. It is an existential threat to Turkey. The Kurdish population of Turkey is split. Half of it is in Kurdish enclaves. The other half is integrated into Turkish society. You’re looking at a Bosnia-Rwanda type situation if the PKK could ever truly mobilize the Kurdish population to the degree that the Turkish majority decided that “the only good Kurd is a dead Kurd.” That is the existential threat of the PKK to Turkey.

What Erdogan didn’t have to fear was the idea that the United States was deliberately doing this as part of some long-term plan to keep Turkey weak.

Al-Monitor: But you never saw any evidence that the SDF funneling weapons or fighters into Turkey?

Jeffrey: Certainly not from the northeast of Syria. That was part of our agreement with them.

Al-Monitor: Do you think the US can still reach consensus with Erdogan on northeast Syria, given his insistence that the PYD/YPG is inextricable from the PKK terror group?

Jeffrey: I don’t know. Whenever you talk about northeast Syria, the most important thing is Turkish domestic politics. Erdogan’s battle buddy, [Devlet] Bahceli, can be summed up in one sentence: The only thing that matters is the Turkish national agenda, and in that there’s no place for Kurds.

That’s not the AKP’s agenda, of course. Erdogan, who has had much better policies toward Kurds and the PKK than anybody before him, is being hampered by the MHP.

If Erdogan feels that he needs a victory [to] churn up national sentiment, he might do something more. The problem is, he would have to do that in conjunction with the Russians because I don’t think he will go south of the M4. He and his people had always maintained that they were not interested in what happens south of the M4. So Kobane, for example. But that would require agreement of the Russians.

The Russians have made it clear — I have it on the highest authority — that the Russians do not want to see an expanded Turkish presence into Syria.

The SDF people keep saying the Russians are telling them the Turks are about to come in. That’s a Russian threat. It’s made out of whole-cloth to the Russians to push us out and get access to the oilfields. It’s a crude Russian pressure tactic. I don’t see it as likely.

Al-Monitor: SDF commander Mazlum Abdi has expressed doubt that an agreement with the Assad regime is likely in the near future. What is the status of PYD-KNC talks? How might this end for the SDF?

Jeffrey: Here’s Jim Jeffrey’s cynical answer to that: The answer to Dave Petraeus’ question, ‘How does this all end?’ — it’s an issue of proportionality. We don’t have a perfect roadmap. If you want to put limited resources, fine, but it’s OK because that’s the primary way our competition moves forward.

The various Kurdish groups are going to be a factor in the eventual outcome of the Syrian crisis. Politically and militarily. They hold many of the reins.

Al-Monitor: Could they ever be included in Geneva?

Who knows? We live in a world of Kashmirs and Nagorno-Karabakhs.

The point is, this [preserving the SDF] is our plan B. We have a plan A. Plan A doesn’t answer ‘how does this all end?’ Plan A’s whole purpose [is] to ensure that the Russians and Assad and the Iranians don’t have a happy answer to how this all ends, and maybe that will someday get them to accept Plan B. Meanwhile, they’re tied up in knots. They don’t see Syria as a victory.

Al-Monitor: Do you think Mazlum will be able to get the PKK cadres out of northeast Syria?

Jeffrey: We’ll see. I think he’s doing everything in his power to balance PKK, Turkish, Russian and American interests to maintain first of all the protection of his own people, the Kurdish population of the northeast, [and] secondly, of the areas that he controls, which includes a large number of Arabs. He’s doing exactly what I would be doing under these circumstances.

How much pressure on PKK cadre that policy requires or will allow may vary from time to time. It’s certainly something that we and the Turks keep raising.

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The Case for a Pardon of Edward Snowden by President Trump

December 15th, 2020 by Glenn Greenwald

A U.S. appellate court in September unanimously ruled that the NSA’s program of mass domestic surveillance was illegal, as well as likely a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” The court, and the broader public, knew about this illegal mass surveillance program created by the NSA only because Edward Snowden, while working inside that agency, discovered its existence and concluded in 2012 that the American public has the right know about what was being secretly done to them and their privacy by their own government.

Upon making the decision to blow the whistle on this security state illegality, Snowden delivered the documents relating to that program and other then-unknown systems of mass online surveillance not by dumping them indiscriminately on the internet or selling them or passing them to foreign governments, but by providing them to journalists (including myself) with The Guardian, The Washington Post and other news outlets. The documents Snowden provided were accompanied by requests to report them responsibly. He thus relinquished the power entirely to make decisions about which documents would and would not be published, leaving those decisions exclusively to news outlets.

That meant that Snowden himself never made a single document publicly available; every document that was reported was the result of decisions by newsrooms around the world that their publication would be in the public interest and would not endanger innocent people. That method of whistleblowing chosen by Snowden — patterned after the one Daniel Ellsberg used in 1971 to make the public aware of years of lying to the American public by the U.S. Government about the Vietnam War, when he gave the top-secret Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and asked them to report it in the public interest — enabled journalists to inform the American citizenry about illegal and unconstitutional spying by the U.S. Government in the most responsible manner possible.

Indeed, the very first program we reported — on June 6, 2013 — was the mass domestic spying program which the appellate court just ruled was illegal and likely a violation of the constitutional rights of all Americans. That first article we published revealed a top secret court order under which “the National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers,” and required major telecommunications carriers “on an ‘ongoing, daily basis’ to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.”

The months of reporting that followed, all singularly enabled by Snowden’s courageous whistleblowing, triggered so much vital public debate about privacy and mass surveillance, and fostered so many legal and technological privacy reforms around the world, that the reporting earned virtually every award journalism has to give, including the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. For those who have not seen it, the 2014 documentary by Laura Poitras about the work Snowden did with journalists, Citizenfour, which received the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary, shows much of the Snowden story in real time and can be viewed on YouTube; the feature film “Snowden,” available on Netflix and other platforms, separately explores the trajectory which Snowden traversed from enlisted U.S. Army soldier, CIA contractor and NSA expert to one of this generation’s most consequential whistleblowers.

The recent appellate court ruling in U.S. v. Moalin, issued on September 2, emphasized the U.S. surveillance state’s sustained law-breaking. “The telephony metadata collection program exceeded the scope of Congress’s authorization” and “therefore violated that section of [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act],” the court concluded, referring to the 1978 law requiring the government to first obtain warrants before spying on the communications of U.S. citizens. Though its ruling of illegality meant it was unnecessary to rule definitively on the program’s unconstitutionality, the court nonetheless noted that “the government may have violated the Fourth Amendment” with this spying program and warned of the dangers of “the collection of millions of [] people’s telephony metadata, and the ability to aggregate and analyze it.”

In ruling the NSA’s mass surveillance program illegal, the court noted the indispensable role Snowden played in enabling the protection of Americans’ rights. It was Snowden, explained the court, who “made public the existence of NSA data collection programs.” And, the court added, “Snowden’s disclosure of the metadata program prompted significant public debate over the appropriate scope of government surveillance” and ultimately led to reform: “Congress passed the USA FREEDOM Act, which effectively ended the NSA’s bulk telephony metadata collection program” and also “prohibited further bulk collection of phone records after November 28, 2015.” Moreover, observed the court, it was “news articles in the wake of the Snowden disclosures [which] revealed that the government had been using evidence derived from foreign intelligence surveillance in criminal prosecutions without notifying the defendants of the surveillance.”

This recent ruling is by no means the first time a court or other official body has declared illegal the spying programs which Snowden exposed. In 2015, CNN similarly reported that “a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday that the telephone metadata collection program, under which the National Security Agency gathers up millions of phone records on an ongoing daily basis, is illegal under the Patriot Act.” The New York Times reported in 2014 that “an independent federal privacy watchdog has concluded that the National Security Agency’s program to collect bulk phone call records has provided only ‘minimal’ benefits in counterterrorism efforts, is illegal and should be shut down.” In 2018, The Guardian reported about the British equivalent of the NSA: “GCHQ’s methods for bulk interception of online communications violated privacy and failed to provide sufficient surveillance safeguards, the European court of human rights has ruled.”

Abuses of power by these agencies continue in full force. More recently, the Justice Department’s Inspector General found in 2019 that the FBI deceived the FISA court with false statements to obtain a warrant to spy on former Trump 2016 campaign official Carter Page. A former FBI lawyer pled guilty to doctoring emails to obtain those spying warrants. A DOJ report found more material errors from the FBI in the spying process in 2019. Late last year, the FISA court itself “issued a strong and highly unusual public rebuke to the FBI” and, the prior year, “found that the FBI may have violated the rights of potentially millions of Americans — including its own agents and informants — by improperly searching through information obtained by the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance program.”

That is precisely the abuse Snowden acted to stop. And that is why the people and institutions across the political spectrum who have devoted themselves to protecting the right to privacy, safeguarding internet freedom and combating the abuses of the security state have advocated a pardon or clemency for Snowden: the ACLU, Sen. Rand Paul, The New York Times, Congressmen Matt Gaetz, Justin Amash, and Thomas Massie, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, internet pioneer Timothy Berners-Lee, Daniel Ellsberg, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, press freedom groups, and international human rights and civil liberties groups. They have all argued that Snowden deserves clemency or a pardon.

Meanwhile, so many of the arguments against pardoning Snowden, and demanding his lifelong imprisonment or exile, come from the very security state operatives whose crimes he exposed. That includes John Brennan and James Clapper, along with their hawkish and neocon allies such as Susan Rice and Liz Cheney. And to make their case, these Deep State operatives and warmongers rely upon one demonstrable lie after the next. Indeed, it was their blatant lies in the first place that prompted Snowden to knowingly risk his liberty by revealing the existence of these mass surveillance programs.

The first contact Snowden made with a journalist about the possibility of whistleblowing was a pseudonymous email he sent to me in December, 2012. But what solidified with finality his decision to blow the whistle was watching President Obama’s senior national security official, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, commit a felony when he blatantly lied to the Senate on March 12, 2013, by falsely denying — when asked by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) — that “the NSA collect[s] any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.”

When Clapper told that lie, Snowden was holding the documents in his hand that proved that the NSA was doing exactly that which Clapper, in his public testimony, denied that it was doing. In other words, he knew for a fact that the senior national security official in the U.S. Government lied to the American people and the Senate about the mass spying they were conducting against Americans. A person in Snowden’s position acting with just and noble motives would be impelled to disclose, not conceal, the truth — and that’s exactly what Snowden did. The real criminals were security state officials like James Clapper for criminally lying to the Senate and his colleagues in the secret surveillance state who illegally spied on entire populations.

But James Clapper was never prosecuted for lying to the Senate. In fact, he did not even lose his job: he served as Director of National Intelligence for another three years, until the end of the Obama administration. And now this proven liar — like so many security state agents — works inside the corporate media, delivering the “news” for CNN. How can anyone justify wanting to see Edward Snowden rot in prison for life while the real powerful criminal whom he exposed, such as James Clapper, go free and thrive? Who besides a craven authoritarian would regard that as a just outcome?

Speaking of proven liars, those who oppose a pardon of Snowden do so by invariably lying about him and what he did. Why would they do that? It’s because the reality is that he acted honorably and for noble ends. So they have to manufacture falsehoods to justify their demands that a hero be punished.

Take, for instance, the completely fabricated accusations voiced Sunday night by Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY), daughter of the former Vice President and key ally of pro-war House Democrats in blocking Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and Germany. To justify her opposition to a Snowden pardon, she just lied outright:

That Snowden “handed over US secrets to Russian and Chinese intelligence” is every bit as much of a lie as those told by her dad in 2002 about Saddam’s nuclear weapons stockpiles and alliance with Al Qaeda. She just manufactured this accusation out of thin air. Nobody can ever prove a negative — therefore, nobody can proffer dispositive proof that Snowden (or, for that matter, Liz Cheney) did not turn over U.S. secrets to the governments in Beijing and Moscowbut the burden of proof is on those hurling accusations of this sort to produce evidence for it, and she has none. That’s because none exists.

But that does not stop Endless War advocates like Liz Cheney from saying it anyway — precisely because Liz Cheney is a compulsive liar who will say anything to manipulate the public, just like her father taught her to do. The same is true of former CIA Director and proven pathological liar John Brennan. On Monday, he echoed the same false allegation as Liz Cheney did, in order to defend James Clapper and attack Senator Paul for advocating a pardon for Snowden:

If there is any lesson we ought to have learned over the past two decades, it is that nobody should believe the claims of national security operatives without substantial evidence being presented. For anyone who wants to claim or believe that Snowden handed over secrets to Russia and/or China, you should demand evidence first. Where is it?

What makes this claim even more dishonest is that it exploits the fact that the U.S. Government forced Snowden, against his will, to stay in Russia. Snowden’s original plan, as has been amply documented, was to fly from Hong Kong after providing us with the archive and reviewing key documents, then transit through Moscow on his way to South America, where he intended to seek asylum in Ecuador or Bolivia.

But he was trapped in the Moscow International Airport because the U.S. State Department under John Kerry invalidated his passport while he was in transit, and then-Vice President Joe Biden threatened and coerced every other country considering offering him asylum or allowing him safe passage to South America (as he did with Cuba, which withdrew its offer of safe transit). A 2013 NPR headline tells part of that story: “Biden Asks Ecuador To Deny Snowden Asylum.” That was before he obtained asylum in Russia, something he was forced by Obama officials and Biden himself to do.

So U.S. officials first prevented Snowden from leaving Russia, and then, with such audacity and dishonesty, have for years exploited the fact that he’s in Russia to manipulate public opinion and smear him as a Kremlin agent. And, as is true for all such allegations that a U.S. citizen is working for Moscow, the accusation is tossed out routinely without any evidence, because there is none.

Then there’s the allegation that Snowden caused harm to national security or to innocent people, a claim that has been made against every whistleblower for decades who exposes corruption and criminality by the security state. Just as is true of the claim that Snowden sold or provided secrets to the governments of Russia and China, one should not even consider accepting the truth of this claim absent evidence to corroborate it.

Where is this evidence? Who was harmed by this NSA reporting? Not a single example or piece of evidence has ever been furnished in response to those questions, with the defenders of NSA opting to just repeat the accusation over and over in the hope that people will assume that it is true by virtue of its repetition.

But even if such harm could be established, the argument depends upon a complete distortion of the process used by Snowden to blow the whistle on Deep State criminality. Again, there is not one document from the NSA archive that was published because Snowden chose for it to be published. He used the opposite method for whistleblowing: recognizing that he should not have the power as a single individual to make choices about which documents should and should not be published, he instead gave the archive to journalists and asked that we make those decisions editorially, in as responsible a manner possible, guided by the standard journalistic public interest assessment.

That means that if there were documents that people believe should not have been disclosed, the choice to publish those documents rested with the top editors at leading media outlets — The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, NBC News and other outlets around the world — not with Snowden, who was never even consulted on these choices. Once Snowden realized the magnitude of criminality, deceit and corruption inside the security state, he concluded that the most just course was to turn over to journalists a massive archive regarding these programs, so that it was not up to him to curate in advance which documents should be seen by the public, but instead leave it to experienced journalists to make those determinations.

Then there’s the claim — based on a substantial set of falsehoods — that Snowden somehow acted improperly by fleeing the U.S. to seek refuge in Russia rather than submitting himself to the U.S. justice system in order to “make his case”, a falsehood-drenched allegation voiced most memorably by Obama national security adviser Susan Rice to Charlie Rose in 2014:

The claim that Snowden should have or could have come back to the U.S. to convince a jury that what he did was justified is nothing short of a lie. Under the archaic statute which the Obama administration aggressively used to prosecute more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined — the Espionage Act of 1917 — someone is automatically guilty if they provide classified information to a person who is unauthorized to receive it (including a journalist), and they are absolutely barred even from raising a “justification” defense in court.

In other words, as Susan Rice well knows, Snowden would not be able to return to the U.S. and try to convince a jury of his peers that what he did was justified because the law under which they chose to prosecute him does not allow a defendant even to raise that as a defense. Instead, this old statute ensures a rigged process where a guilty verdict is all but inevitable. That’s precisely why Obama officials and security state operatives use this 103-year-old law — originally designed by Woodrow Wilson to criminalize dissent from U.S. participation in World War I — against whistleblowers who expose their crimes not by acting with foreign governments but with journalists.

Then there’s the reality that — as Daniel Ellsberg argued in a Washington Post op-ed about Snowden’s leaving the U.S., headlined “NSA leaker Snowden made the right call” — those who are now accused of endangering national security have essentially no chance of obtaining a fair trial in the U.S. “The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago,” Ellsberg wrote, adding:

I hope Snowden’s revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Chelsea Manning, incommunicado.

He would almost certainly be confined in total isolation, even longer than the more than eight months Manning suffered during her three years of imprisonment before her trial began recently. . . .

Snowden believes that he has done nothing wrong. I agree wholeheartedly. More than 40 years after my unauthorized disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, such leaks remain the lifeblood of a free press and our republic. One lesson of the Pentagon Papers and Snowden’s leaks is simple: secrecy corrupts, just as power corrupts….

But Snowden’s contribution to the noble cause of restoring the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution is in his documents. It depends in no way on his reputation or estimates of his character or motives — still less, on his presence in a courtroom arguing the current charges, or his living the rest of his life in prison. Nothing worthwhile would be served, in my opinion, by Snowden voluntarily surrendering to U.S. authorities given the current state of the law.

The idea that you must meekly submit to the world’s most aggressive Prison State, where the rules are made by the very high officials whose crimes you exposed, is authoritarian dreck.

Snowden well knew, when he decided to inform his fellow citizens of these systems of mass surveillance, that there was a very high probability that he would end up in a maximum security U.S prison for decades if not the rest of his life. That’s precisely what made Snowden’s actions so courageous: how many people would be willing to make that sacrifice? But that does not mean Snowden has some moral obligation to help an unjust state keep him in a cage for life out of vindictive vengeance because he exposed their crimes.

President Trump has, on two occasions, indicated that he was considering the possibility of pardoning Snowden. A pardon is not only just on its own terms but would also be an expression of exactly the reason the U.S. Constitution vests the unilateral pardon power in the U.S. President: to prevent the abuse of the justice system for vindictive ends or to shied abuses of official power by those who operate in the dark (my arguments for why the ongoing attempted extradition and prosecution of Julian Assange is also a massive abuse of power have been set forth in prior articles as well as in a show I produced on the topic).

Even if you’re someone who believes that Snowden ought to be punished in some way — and I am not — he has been. Seven years in exile, separated from your friends, family and fellow citizens, in a country in which you never chose to live and to which you have no connections, is a serious deprivation. That is particularly true now that Snowden’s long-time partner, his American wife Lindsay Mills, announced that the couple is expecting their first child in January, a son who will automatically be a U.S. citizen and who should have the right to live with both of his parents in his country of citizenship.

For decades, it was a staple of left-wing politics that the CIA and the secret security state, long referred to by scholars as the Deep State, pose a grave threat to core democratic values and constitutional rights. Over the last five years, beginning with the 2016 election, the Trump movement and Trump himself has seen up close and personal how easily and casually those powers are abused, and how destructive are the results, as the president himself said when he told The New York Post why he was considering this pardon.

A pardon of Edward Snowden would be one of the greatest blows against Deep State abuse of secrecy and spying power in decades: probably the most significant act since President Eisenhower’s 1961 warnings in his Farewell Address about the growing anti-democratic dangers of the “military industrial complex” or, at the very least, the mid-1970s reforms of the intelligence community.

A pardon of Snowden by Trump would prompt bipartisan cheering across the U.S. and would engender support globally across the ideological spectrum. The only ones angered by it would be exactly those people — John Brennan, James Clapper, Jim Comey, Susan Rice — whose ongoing ability to abuse their spying power against the U.S. population depends upon their vindictive use of the justice system to destroy the lives of those who reveal their crimes.

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With Joe Biden as President-elect and Donald Trump soon leaving the White House, analysts are engaging in endless speculation about what this change in administrations will mean for the future of the JCPOA, the “nuclear deal” negotiated between the P5+1 and Iran.

I’m well aware of the difficulties involved in attempting a simple US return to the agreement and of additional complications because of actions taken by Trump and the Israeli government that served to strengthen Iranian hardliners. My intention, therefore, is not to add to the already excessive speculation/commentary on “What Joe Biden should do?” Instead, I thought it might be useful to insert into the discussion of the past and possible future of the JCPOA, the views of both Iranian and Arab public opinions compiled from our extensive polling across the Middle East.

I want to begin by confessing, with apologies to former Secretary of State John Kerry, that I was against the deal before I was for it. Just looking back at our pre-JCPOA polling data, I noted that although Arabs believed that Iran was pursuing its nuclear programme with the goal of developing a nuclear warhead, they were more concerned with the Islamic Republic’s meddlesome interventions across the region. In fact, it was Iran’s involvement first in Lebanon, then in Iraq, and finally in Syria that caused the deepest concern in Arab public opinion. I found that Iran’s favourable ratings among Arabs in most countries plummeted from the 80 per cent range in 2006 to less than 30 per cent in 2012 and then to less than 20 per cent in our most recent polls. I noted, at the time, that it was Iran’s role in Syria that acted as “the nail in the coffin of Iran’s standing in Arab opinion”.

With these numbers in mind, I remember asking members of the Obama Administration’s National Security staff, “Why are you expending so much of our political capital and whatever leverage we might have gained from sanctions on trying to stop a bomb that Iran does not have, and even if they did, they could not use it anyway, when we ought to be focusing on the very real and immediate danger posed by Iran’s direct engagements in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen?”

After the deal was announced, I supported it, for three reasons. In the first place, a negotiated solution to any problem reached through multilateral diplomacy is always preferable to conflict. And then there was the hope, as expressed by British Foreign Secretary Catherine Ashton, that the framework created by the P5+1 could be extended in due course to negotiations dealing with Iran’s ballistic missile programme and its involvement in regional conflicts.

My third reason for supporting the JCPOA came after I reviewed our polling results from Iran and Arab countries in the years after the “deal” was in place and then after President Trump unilaterally pulled the US out of the agreement and instituted new sanctions on Iran.

When the framework for the nuclear deal was announced in 2015, majorities in most Arab countries were opposed to it. But in the intervening years, support for the P5+1 agreement grew with increasing confidence that it would serve to limit Iran’s capacity to develop a nuclear bomb. By 2018, majorities in these same countries supported the deal. But, because there was growing concern with Iran’s regional behavior, in that same year, strong majorities in every Arab country, including Iraq and Lebanon, supported the Trump Administration’s decision to scuttle the deal, expressing the hope that it would be replaced by a new arrangement that would address Iran’s “role in the region’s conflicts.”

Equally telling were the results of our Iran polling, where we saw dramatic shifts in public opinion between 2014 and 2015, after the announcement of the framework agreement with the P5+1, and finally in 2018, following the Trump Administration’s decision to pull out of the agreement. These shifts occurred in three areas.

In 2014, almost one-half of Iranians felt their country “should have the right to a nuclear weapon because it is a major nation.” After the framework agreement was announced in 2015 support for that proposition dropped to 20 per cent. Following Trump’s decision to withdraw from the deal, the percentage of Iranians who felt they had a right to a nuclear weapon because they are a major nation rose again to 40 per cent.

In 2015, 80 per cent of Iranians supported the P5+1 agreement and expressed the view that their country’s interests had been well served by the deal. After the US pullout positive responses to both questions, dropped to 60.

Also in 2014, substantial majorities of Iranians (between 90 per cent and 60 per cent) expressed support for their government’s involvement in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. In 2015, after the framework agreement was announced, that percentage began to drop and by 2016 support for these foreign entanglements had plummeted to below 50 per cent in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, and just 20 per cent in Yemen. By 2017, after the US pullout and the introduction of new sanctions on Iran, the Iranian public’s support for these foreign involvements had risen to over 60 per cent.

And finally, when we asked Iranians their attitudes towards their government’s performance and policy priorities, we found a significant shift from 2014 to 2015 and 2018. After the P5+1 framework was announced, Iranians turned inward, not only did they express significantly less support for a nuclear weapons programme and for involvement in foreign conflicts, they also said they wanted their government to focus more resources on job creation and give more emphasis to protecting personal rights. Once again, after the US pullout and the imposition of new sanctions, Iranian opinion shifted to support for their government and its policies. It appears that when their government is threatened, Iranians turn to it and not against it.

Given this survey of both Arab and Iranian opinion, it seems that the incoming Biden Administration may be on the right track. They seek engagement with Iran and not conflict. And they plan to reenter the nuclear agreement, but with the added component of firmly addressing Iran’s involvement in regional conflicts. Such an approach may be difficult to achieve for several reasons.

Iranian opinion has hardened. The new sanctions imposed by the Trump Administration have taken a toll and with elections in Iran coming in June 2021, the country’s hardliners are on the ascent. Attitudes towards Iran have also hardened here in the US, especially among Republicans, where any move to ease sanctions or reenter the JCPOA may be met with strong opposition in Congress. Opinion towards Iran among Arabs has also hardened in light of Iran’s continuing aggressive role in the region.

Nevertheless, despite these very real difficulties, engagement remains the better course. Efforts to negotiate a reentry in the JCPOA, while at the same time addressing Iran’s regional involvement, may provide a key to shifting public opinion in Iran and the Arab World, both of which need to be considered. It won’t be an easy lift. But anything is better than the current path which leads to the dead end of continued or, God forbid, an expanded conflict that no one can win.

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Get poisoned or get on board.

That’s the choice soybean farmers such as Will Glazik face. The past few summers, farmers near Glazik’s central Illinois farm have sprayed so much of the weed killer dicamba at the same time that it has polluted the air for hours and sometimes days. 

As Glazik puts it, there are two types of soybeans: Monsanto’s, which are genetically engineered to withstand dicamba, and everyone else’s. 

Glazik’s soybeans have been the damaged ones. His soybean leaves will curl up, then the plants will become smaller and weaker. He’s lost as much as 40 bushels an acre in some fields, a huge loss when organic soybeans are $20 a bushel. He has to hold his breath every year to see if the damage will cause him to lose his organic certification.

His neighbors who spray dicamba are frustrated with him, he said. There’s an easy solution to avoid damage, they tell him: Buy Monsanto’s seeds.

This reality is what Monsanto was counting on when it launched dicamba-tolerant crops, an investigation by the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting found.

Monsanto’s new system was supposed to be the future of farming, providing farmers with a suite of seeds and chemicals that could combat more and more weeds that were becoming harder to kill.

Instead, the system’s rollout has led to millions of acres of crop damage across the Midwest and South; widespread tree death in many rural communities, state parks and nature preserves; and an unprecedented level of strife in the farming world.

Executives from Monsanto and BASF, a German chemical company that worked with Monsanto to launch the system, knew their dicamba weed killers would cause large-scale damage to fields across the United States but decided to push them on unsuspecting farmers anyway, in a bid to corner the soybean and cotton markets.

Monsanto and BASF have denied for years that dicamba is responsible for damage, blaming farmers making illegal applications, weather events and disease. The companies insist that when applied according to the label, dicamba stays on target and is an effective tool for farmers.

Over the past year, the Midwest Center reviewed thousands of pages of government and internal company documents released through lawsuits, sat in the courtroom for weeks of deliberation, interviewed farmers affected by dicamba and weed scientists dealing with the issue up close. This story provides the most comprehensive picture of what Monsanto and BASF knew about dicamba’s propensity to harm farmers’ livelihoods and the environment before releasing the weed killer.

The investigation found:

  • Monsanto and BASF released their products knowing that dicamba would cause widespread damage to soybean and cotton crops that weren’t resistant to dicamba. They used “protection from your neighbors” as a way to sell more of their products. In doing so, the companies ignored years of warnings from independent academics, specialty crop growers and their own employees.
  • Monsanto limited testing that could potentially delay or deny regulatory approval of dicamba. For years, Monsanto struggled to keep dicamba from drifting in its own tests. In regulatory tests submitted to the EPA, the company sprayed the product in locations and under weather conditions that did not mirror how farmers would actually spray it. Midway through the approval process, with the EPA paying close attention, the company decided to stop its researchers from conducting tests.
  • Even after submitting data that the EPA used to approve dicamba in 2016, Monsanto scientists knew that many questions remained. The company’s own research showed dicamba mixed with other herbicides was more likely to cause damage. The company also prevented independent scientists from conducting their own tests and declined to pay for studies that would potentially give them more information about dicamba’s real-world impact.
  • Although advertised as helping out customers, the companies’ investigations of drift incidents were designed to limit their liability, find other reasons for the damage and never end with payouts to farmers. For example, BASF told pesticide applicators that sometimes it is not safe to spray even if following the label to the letter, placing liability squarely on the applicators.
  • The two companies were in lockstep for years. Executives from Monsanto and BASF met at least 19 times from 2010 on to focus on the dicamba-tolerant cropping system, including working together on the development of the technology, achieving regulatory approval for the crops and herbicides and the commercialization of crops.
  • Monsanto released seeds resistant to dicamba in 2015 and 2016 without an accompanying weed killer, knowing that off-label spraying of dicamba, which is illegal, would be “rampant.” At the same time, BASF ramped up production of older versions of dicamba that were illegal to apply to the crops and made tens of millions of dollars selling the older versions, which were more likely to cause move off of where they were applied.

Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, refused to grant an interview with the Midwest Center. Company officials did not respond to requests for comment, instead issuing a statement.

Spokesman Kyel Richard said the company “has seen an outpouring of support from grower organizations and our customers.”

“We continue to stand with the thousands of farmers who rely on this technology as part of their integrated weed management program,” Richard said.

BASF also did not respond to requests for comment, instead issuing a statement.

BASF spokeswoman Odessa Patricia Hines said that the company’s version of dicamba has “different physical properties and compositions” than Monsanto’s. Hines said the company is continuing to improve its dicamba technology.

A federal court banned the herbicide earlier this year, but the EPA reinstated dicambafor five more years in October.

Earlier this year, a federal jury sided with a Missouri peach farmer who sued the companies for driving his orchard out of business. The jury awarded Bill Bader $15 million for his losses and $250 million in punitive damages designed to punish Bayer. Bayer and BASF are appealing the verdict. The punitive damages were later reduced to $60 million.

Hines of BASF pointed out that in the Missouri trial: “The jury’s verdict found that only Monsanto’s conduct warranted punitive damages.”

Following the trial, Bayer announced a $400 million settlement with farmers harmed by dicamba, including $300 million to soybean farmers. Bayer said they expect BASF to pay for part of the settlement.

An attorney for Bader called the companies’ conduct “a conspiracy to create an ecological disaster in order to increase their profits” in court filings. The case largely revolved around showing the companies knew dicamba would harm thousands of farmers.

According to court exhibits, in October 2015, Monsanto projected it would receive nearly 2,800 complaints from farmers during the 2017 growing season, a figure based on one-in-10 farmers having a complaint.

However, even one Monsanto executive knew these projections might be low, according to court records. In late August 2016, Boyd Carey, a Ph.D. crop scientist overseeing the claims process for Monsanto, realized it might be more like one-in-five and asked for a budget increase from $2.4 million to $6.5 million to investigate claims. Carey testified that he was awarded the increase.

The projected number of complaints rose to more than 3,200 for 2018, before going down. After 2018, Monsanto figured that fewer farmers would be harmed because more farmers would switch to Monsanto’s crops to avoid being damaged, Carey testified in the Bader trial.

Dicamba affects all parts of Glazik’s operation. He grows organic soybeans to avoid exposure to toxic pesticides. He also likes the higher premiums and the improved soil quality. But with dicamba in the air, he’s less likely to be successful.

He now has to plant his soybeans later each year. Soybeans are less likely to be severely damaged when they’re small, and planting them later than usual means they’ll be smaller when the inevitable cloud of weed killer envelops his crops. Later planting typically means a bit of yield loss. It also means a later harvest, which limits planting of cover crops Glazik uses to improve his soil.

“All crop damage aside,” he said, the weed killer is everywhere. Oaks, hickories and other trees are damaged near his farm, both in the country and in town, he said. “The fact is that the chemical can volatilize and move with the wind and in the air. We’re breathing it.”

A ‘potential disaster’

For two decades, Monsanto made billions of dollars with Roundup Ready crops, which had been genetically engineered to withstand being sprayed by the weed killer and adopted by nearly every American soybean farmer. But by the mid-to-late 2000s, Roundup was starting to fail. Farmer’s fields were overwhelmed with “superweeds” that had developed resistance to Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate.

In response, Monsanto developed new soybean and cotton seeds that were genetically engineered to withstand being sprayed by both glyphosate and dicamba, a very effective weed killer used since the 1960s. It was also touted as the company’s largest biotechnology rollout in company history. In just three years, Monsanto’s dicamba-tolerant system was able to capture up to three-fourths of total soybean acreage, an area the size of Michigan.

Dicamba was not widely used during the growing season because of its propensity to move off-target and harm other plants. Because of its limited use, fewer weeds were resistant to it, making it an effective replacement for Roundup. Monsanto even dubbed the crops as its money-maker’s next generation, calling them Roundup Ready 2 Xtend.

But the company faced a problem with dicamba: The weed killer drifted onto non-resistant plants, some as far as miles away. In its own testing over the years, Monsanto had accidentally harmed its own crops dozens of times.

As far back as 2009, Monsanto and BASF received warnings about dicamba from several sources — one company called it a “potential disaster,” according to court records — but they decided to plow ahead anyway.

“DON’T DO IT; expect lawsuits,” wrote one Monsanto employee, summarizing academic surveys the company commissioned about dicamba’s use.

In order to commercialize dicamba, both Monsanto and BASF worked to develop new formulations with low volatility.

Off-target movement from dicamba can happen in two main ways: drift and volatilization. Drift is when the chemical’s particles move off the field when they are sprayed, generally by wind in the seconds or minutes after it is applied. Volatilization is when dicamba particles turn from a liquid to a gas in the hours or days after the herbicide is applied.

Damage from volatilization frequently occurs through a process called “atmospheric loading,” which is when so much dicamba is sprayed at the same time that it is unable to dissipate and persists in the air for hours or days poisoning whatever it comes into contact with.

Volatilization is particularly concerning because dicamba can move for miles and harm non-target crops, especially soybeans, and even lawns and gardens. Tomatoes, grapes and other specialty crops are also at-risk of being damaged.

Despite being touted as less volatile, the new versions — Monsanto’s XtendiMax with VaporGrip Technology and BASF’s Engenia — were unable to stop the movement entirely.

During its 2012-2014 testing of an older version of XtendiMax, Monsanto had at least 73 off-target incidents, according to court documents.

In 2014, Monsanto had significant dicamba damage at a training facility in Portageville, Missouri. Even in its own promotional videos, Monsanto couldn’t prevent non-dicamba tolerant soybeans from showing symptoms of damage.

The EPA took note of an incident where, through volatilization, dicamba turned into a gas and apparently floated more than 2 miles away, much farther than it was supposed to. During that incident, no one had measured how badly the crops had been damaged and the EPA was unable to definitively determine the symptoms were caused by dicamba. The EPA decided that was an “uncertainty” and approved the use of the weed killer with a 110-foot buffer zone.

In 2015, knowing the EPA was keeping an eye on off-target movement, Monsanto decided to halt all testing of XtendiMax with VaporGrip Technology. According to court records, it kept its own employees who were interested in developing recommendations for farmers from testing, and it limited trials by independent academics in order to maintain a “clean slate.” It asked BASF to halt its dicamba testing as well.

When a weed science professor at the University of Arkansas asked Monsanto for a little bit of Xtendimax to test its volatility, the company told him it would have difficulty producing enough dicamba for both him and its independent tests.

A Monsanto employee, who worked at the company for 35 years, didn’t think much of that explanation when he forwarded the email to a colleague.

“Hahaha difficulty in producing enough product for field testing,” he wrote. “Hahaha bullshit.”

Illegal spraying a ‘ticking time bomb’

Weeds cut into farmers’ profits. With low profit margins, farmers will use any tool they can to control weeds.

Monsanto recognized this in 2015 and 2016 when they released dicamba-tolerant crops without their new versions of dicamba. An internal Monsanto slide shows the company knew that many farmers would likely illegally spray older, more volatile versions and harm other farmers’ crops.

But the company decided the benefits of establishing a market share outweighed the risks and launched the cotton crops in 2015. The EPA allowed farmers to spray other weed killers on the crops, and Monsanto decided to launch the seeds with “a robust communication plan that dicamba cannot be used.”

When the seeds were sold, Monsanto put a pink sticker on each bag to indicate it was illegal to spray dicamba on the crops in 2015. The company also sent letters to all growers and retailers, among other tactics, to limit illegal applications of dicamba.

However, in internal communications in April 2015, members of Monsanto’s cotton team joked about this risky strategy.

“One sticker is going to keep us out of jail,” one wrote.

Dicamba-resistant soybeans in rural McLean County on August 7. 2017. The Roundup Ready 2 Xtend soybeans were touted as the next generation of glyphosate-resistant soybeans. Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting file photo.

In Oct. 2015, a BASF employee reported hearing that growers sprayed older versions of dicamba on the cotton that year.

Monsanto doubled down on this risky strategy in 2016, releasing dicamba-tolerant soybean crops without a weed killer, too. Meanwhile, Monsanto also declined to investigate drift incidents in 2015 and 2016.

At a February 2016 meeting in Puerto Rico, a BASF executive expressed concerns to Monsanto that the “widespread” illegal spraying would likely become “rampant” due to the decision.

BASF also benefited from Monsanto’s decision. The company’s sales of older versions of dicamba spiked in 2016. Retailers sold $100 million worth of its older versions of the weed killer, compared to about $60 million annually in 2014 and 2015, according to internal documents. BASF documents indicated the sales increased because of dicamba-tolerant seeds.

In the summer of 2016, BASF sales representatives in the field were reporting older versions of dicamba causing damage, hinting the problem was predictable.

“The one thing most acres of beans have in common is dicamba damage. There must be a huge cloud of dicamba blanketing the Missouri Bootheel,” a BASF employee wrote in a July 4, 2016, report. “That ticking time bomb finally exploded.”

Drift expected to drive sales

Dicamba drift led to widespread news coverage. Monsanto and BASF expected to turn it all into more money.

In an internal document, Monsanto told its sales teams to target growers that weren’t interested in dicamba and dicamba-resistant crops. The sales pitch? Purchasing Monsanto’s products would protect them from their neighbors.

In April 2017, a market research document prepared by Bank of America found many farmers were doing just that.

“Interesting assessment that much of the Xtend acreage was planted to protect themselves from neighbors who might be using dicamba? Gotta admit I would not have expected this in a market research document,” a Monsanto executive wrote.

In internal slides from a September 2016 meeting, BASF identified “defensive planting” as a potential market opportunity. BASF also had a market research document that found defensive planting was driving sales.

However, a “tough questions” memo distributed to BASF employees in November 2017 told employees the opposite: “We have not considered ‘defensive planting’ in our sales projections.”

Even as thousands of farms across millions of acres of cropland were being damaged, Monsanto officials were touting the damage as a sales opportunity.

“I think we can significantly grow business and have a positive effect on the outcome of 2017 if we reach out to all the driftee people,” another Monsanto sales employee wrote in an email that year.

One of those customers was Bill Bader, the peach farmer who sued Monsanto for destroying his orchard. Bader testified that while he could not protect his peach trees, in 2019 he planted dicamba-tolerant soybeans to help protect his soybean crops from getting damaged.

“This is the first product in American history that literally destroys the competition,” Bader’s attorney, Billy Randles, said. “You buy it or else.”

Research designed to downplay harm

For years, the EPA told Monsanto it needed to address volatility in its dicamba studies when applying for regulatory approval. But the tests Monsanto conducted did not reflect real-world conditions.

Dicamba would primarily be sprayed on soybeans, but 2015 studies submitted to the EPA were conducted at a cotton field in Texas and a dirt field in Georgia. Neither state has a large amount of soybeans. This guidance followed directives from Monsanto lobbyists that incorporated earlier Monsanto research showing that higher volatility was detected on fields with soybeans.

In addition, Monsanto did not follow the rules that would eventually be codified on the label.

During the testing in Texas, wind speeds were 1.9 to 4.9 miles per hour. In Georgia, wind speeds were 1.5 to 3 miles per hour. According to the label the EPA approved, dicamba can only be sprayed with wind speeds between 3 and 10 miles per hour. Spraying at low wind speeds is more likely to lead to volatilization because there is increased risk of a temperature inversion, which is when cooler air is caught beneath a layer of warmer air making gases more likely to persist near the ground.

After Monsanto submitted the tests to the EPA, the company still had a lot of unknowns about its product’s volatility, according to internal emails.

A Monsanto researcher wrote an email in February 2016 to his coworkers that underscored how little the company knew about the propensity of dicamba to damage crops.

“We don’t know how long a sensitive plant needs in a natural setting to show volatility damage. We don’t know what concentration in the air causes a response, either,” he wrote. “There is a big difference for plants exposed to dicamba vapor for 24 vs. 48 hours. Be careful using this externally.”

Despite the design of the studies, and the EPA’s own studies that showed dicamba posed a risk to 322 protected species of animals and plants, the agency conditionally approved the herbicide in 2016. The agency determined that mitigation measures — such as not spraying near specialty crops and endangered species habitats, wind speed restrictions, and a ban on aerial applications — would keep spray droplets on target.

It was only approved for two years, when the agency would review its approval again.

After the conditional approval, BASF knew dicamba still posed risks. While BASF told farmers dicamba drift wouldn’t hurt their bottom lines, the company privately told pesticide applicators that any drift they caused could decrease farmers’ harvests, according to internal BASF documents. A BASF executive said “from a practical standpoint” Engenia was not different from older dicamba versions.

Even Monsanto’s sales teams were having problems with dicamba’s reputation after the EPA approved the weed killer.

In an internal email, a Monsanto salesman took issue with BASF changing how it publicly discussed its dicamba product: It used to say volatility was not a problem, but now it said it was. Another chemical company saying volatility was bad could hurt Monsanto’s sales.

“We need to get on this right now!” the salesman emailed his colleagues. “Deny! Deny! DENY!”

‘Never admit guilt’

In 2017, the first season that the new versions of dicamba were approved, damage reached unprecedented levels. Around 3.6 million acres of soybeans were damaged, according to an estimate from the University of Missouri.

In July of that year, Monsanto executives scheduled a meeting to discuss how to combat coverage of complaints.

“We need REAL scientific support for our product to counteract the supposition happening in the market today,” a Monsanto executive wrote in an email. “To be frank, dealers and growers are losing confidence in Xtendimax.”

Estimates of dicamba-injured soybean acreage as reported by state extension weed scientists as of October 15, 2017. This map was created by Prof. Kevin Bradley at the University of Missouri.

In late summer 2017, Monsanto had started to blame damage on a BASF weed killer, which is used on the main competitor to Monsanto’s own soybeans. In December 2017, Monsanto agreed to drop that argument as part of a defense strategy with BASF against farmers.

Both Monsanto and BASF took steps to shield themselves from lawsuits.

The form Monsanto told its investigators to use when examining farmer complaints was “developed to gather data that could defend Monsanto,” according to an internal company presentation. Later, Monsanto said that 91% of applicators using the form self-reported errors in spraying dicamba.

A BASF executive also edited his company’s drift investigation Q&A.

“I was always told to never admit guilt,” he said.

On top of the investigations, the label left pesticide applicators liable for damage because it was nearly impossible to follow. A 2017 survey of applicators found that most trained sprayers had issues with dicamba even when spraying in good conditions and while following the label.

With damage being reported in 2017, Monsanto also declined to pursue a study that would have given the company more information about how dicamba caused damage on real farms. A Monsanto off-target movement researcher sent a request for a project proposal to Exponent, which helped analyze the data Monsanto submitted to the EPA. The study could be done in less than two weeks and cost $6,000.

The researcher forwarded the proposal to two Monsanto executives.

The company never acted on it, one testified in the trial.

‘The problems have not gone away’

In order to combat the damage, the EPA developed new restrictions on dicamba. In doing so, the EPA dropped an idea that Monsanto opposed, and Monsanto dictated the new restrictions that were adopted.

State officials warned the EPA the changes wouldn’t work. They were right. In 2018, at least 4.1 million acres were damaged, according to EPA documents.

Still, the EPA re-approved dicamba for the 2019 and 2020 growing seasons with new restrictions, some of which ignored agency scientists’ recommendations. 

States also increasingly took measures into their own hands, implementing spraying cut-off dates and temperature restrictions.

The damage continued. Illinois, the nation’s largest soybean producing state, had more complaints than ever in 2019. Iowa had “landscape level” damage in 2020.

Aaron Hager, an associate professor of weed science at the University of Illinois, said it is clear the changes haven’t worked.

“We have revised the label and revised it again,” Hager said. “The problems have not gone away.”

The EPA’s decision was eventually voided by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for failing to properly consider the impacts on farmers and the environment. The court ruled the agency gave too much deference to Bayer and also was lacking necessary data to show too much harm wouldn’t be done.

Dicamba was recently reapproved, and Bayer continues to invest in it. The company will release new soybean seeds designed to be resistant to dicamba and glufosinate, another BASF herbicide, to fill 20 million acres in 2021. The company also continues to work toward approval of other seeds that are resistant to dicamba and other herbicides.

Glazik, the organic Illinois soybean farmer, works as a crops consultant advising other farmers on what to plant. As the damage has continued, he said, more and more of his clients are “feeling bullied into” buying the dicamba-tolerant crops. Others tell him, they have to spray dicamba or else they can’t control the weeds.

But as an organic farmer, Glazik said, no single herbicide is necessary. Instead, farmers have a choice. Well-managed fields can be weed-free without using toxic chemicals, he said.

“You don’t have to have the dicamba spray to control weeds in a field,” he said.

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This story is supported with a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Featured image: Will Glazik with his organic corn at his farm near Paxton Il on Wednesday, October 28, 2020. photo by Darrell Hoemann/The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting

Trump Still Contesting Stolen Election 2020

December 15th, 2020 by Stephen Lendman

“We wuz robbed” applies to US Election 2020 — decided by brazen fraud for losers Biden/Harris over winner Trump.

An illegitimate process prevailed over an open, free and fair one — the latter prohibited in all US federal elections for high office.

Despite little chance of reversing things in his favor, Trump and his legal team continue trying to set the record straight.

I reject both right wings of the US one-party state — the war party, money party, property party, supporting privileged interests exclusively over governance, of, by, and for everyone equitably.

I support open, free, and fair elections. What happened in the run-up to, on November 3, and its aftermath was orchestrated selection of Biden/Harris, not their election.

When inaugurated on January 20 as things now stand, they’ll be installed in office illegitimately

On Friday, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said the following in response to the Supreme Court’s refusal in hear arguments of Election 2020 fraud — supported by hard evidence:

“The case wasn’t rejected on the merits. The case was rejected on standing.” See below.

“So the answer to that is to bring the case now to the district court by the president, by some of the electors, alleging some of the same facts where there would be standing.”

“There’s nothing that prevents us from filing these cases immediately in the district court in which the president of course would have standing.”

“And let’s see what excuse they can try to use to avoid having a hearing on that.”

“Some of the electors would have standing in that their constitutional rights have been violated.”

“We’re not finished. Believe me.”

Separately he said: “We move immediately, seamlessly, to plan B, which is to bring lawsuits now in each one of the states” in question.

“We had them ready. They’re just a version of the one that was brought in the Supreme Court.”

“So last night, (Trump) made the decision” to proceed.

“Nobody wants to face the reality that this election was stolen.”

“This is outrageous what they’re doing. The American people should have the benefit of hearing these facts…The facts have been kept from them.”

“Not a single court decision has had a hearing yet. They haven’t heard from a single witness.”

“They haven’t looked at a single tape. They haven’t listened to a single recording. There are thousands of them.”

“They haven’t even bothered to look at the tape in Atlanta, Georgia, which is dispositive.”

“It shows an ongoing voter theft of 30,000 votes, enough to change the election.”

Standing refers to the legal right to sue under federal and individual state laws.

A party may not sue for someone else who is not before the court.

In federal courts, suits cannot be brought over disagreement with government laws or actions.

If the Supreme Court is unwilling to hear for and against arguments of federal election fraud for the nation’s highest office by around 80% of US states, how does it justify its existence?

Dozens of Trump team state and federal lawsuits were dismissed out of hand — for alleged lack of standing, including by the US Supreme Court.

The nation’s highest court refused to hear and rule on credible evidence of election theft — delegitimizing itself and the federal judicial process at the same time.

The words “Equal Justice Under Law” adorn the Supreme Court Building’s west facade.

Facing east is the motto “Justice, the Guardian of Liberty.”

Since the Court’s 1789 establishment, these words belie many of its rulings. We the people and the rule of law don’t matter.

Like many times before, the above mottos were ignored by the High Court for refusing to hear Texas et al v. Pennsylvania et al arguments.

From inception, the US was ruled (largely) by men, not laws or high ethical and moral standards.

The Supreme Court’s inaction on a crucial issue last week was the latest example of a nation off-the-rails.

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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 by viarami / Pixabay

Trump’s Last Chance to Snub the Deep State

December 15th, 2020 by Ron Ridenour

Any semblance of rationality during the past dozen years in the United States regarding what the Republican and Democratic parties really stand for is hard to find, other than money, of course.

Political science courses used to teach that Republicans are conservative, oppose labor unionization and decent wages, always ready to war on somebody in the interest of “national security”. While they like to kill foreigners in their wars, especially people of color, they are appalled at the notion that American fetuses should be stopped from growing into human beings.

Democrats were said to be liberal, maybe even “progressive”, willing to protect workers on the job, allowing unions, using dialogue in diplomacy instead of warring — without good cause, of course. Just ask Bernie Sanders. He voted against the Iraq war, albeit voted for financing it once it began. All the other wars were OK for that so-called “socialist”. In comes the “peace president”. Barak Obama took over Republican Bush’s two wars — Afghanistan and Iraq — and extended them, and even added five more to his cowboy gun belt: bombing Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan. Every Tuesday he sat beside his CIA Director John Brennan, and pushed buttons on who should be droned that day. Never mind the fact that none of these wars were actually declared as such. They were “humanitarian actions” to purportedly help someone get human rights. That they were all unconstitutional did not faze Obama, the supposed lawyer specialist in the constitution.

Now, some political scientists could make the case that, still and all, Democrats are adherents of bourgeois democracy (some might dare say social democracy). Some contend that Trump has shown himself to be a neo-fascist with strong racist attitudes. Such pundits might find it difficult to explain that while Trump has been in office, the Democrats want to make war against Russia while he wants to do capitalist business with them. OK, both Trump and Democrat opponents want to encircle and threaten war with China, so they do have something in common.

When Assange/Wikileaks was revealing war crimes during the Obama regime, the president’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, wanted to drone Assange for revealing her communication to rig the Democratic presidential primary in her favor. So, she sat on Brennan’s lap and they did Russiagate. Trump declared, “I love Wikileaks”.

The Democratic National Committee, backed up by war addicts in the Pentagon and CIA and their sensationalist-seeking friends in the corporate fake news media world, forced Trump to sound tough for war too. He did some droning, and bombing here and there while he also sought to withdraw the U.S. from several of the Bush-Obama wars.

Lame-duck presidents usually pardon some prisoners, especially those they feel close to, or who have done them favors. Michael Flynn for instance. Trump’s three-week national security advisor talked with Russians. Democrats consider that to be treason. Maybe Democrats don’t know that the United States is not at war against Russia, not yet anyway. Well, they reply, Flynn must have lied to the FBI. Who wouldn’t lie to cops? Name me a politician, especially when they get to be secretary of state, directors of intelligence service and presidents, who don’t lie. Trump’s lies are simply more apparent than Obama’s Harvard voice reveals.

Remember Mike Pompeo chuckling with his audience at the Texas A&M University, on April 15, 2019:

“When I was a cadet [West Point] our motto was: You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do. [When] I was the CIA director, we lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”

The Trump administration calls the International Criminal Court a kangaroo court. He refuses to allow any U.S. soldier to be brought before the court for purported war crimes in Afghanistan. None of the court investigators or judges will receive visas to enter U.S. territory. Any property or bank accounts they have in the U.S. will be confiscated.

If any court is a disingenuous kangaroo court it is the extradition trial against Julian Assange, in London. The first magistrate who sat in judgment of possible extradition to the U.S. for alleged violations of its Espionage Act, is a subject in Wikileaks’ revelations. Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot, and her husband, James Arbuthnot, who was a defense minister for procurement, have “earned” money from two companies exposed by Wikileaks. During the August-September extradition hearings, Arbuthnot “stepped down” to be supervisor of the new magistrate, Vanessa Baraitser. During three weeks of hearings, Baraitser looked at her laptop to read decisions she had written before defense lawyers had made their arguments, or witnesses had testified.

I am not the only one hoping that Donald Trump will do the right thing with Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden too. The last president, one Trump hates, first put Assange’s key whistleblower in prison, in isolation, under torture. Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years. Obama leaving office with a gesture of “goodwill”, commuted Chelsea’s sentence once she served seven years. She was later jailed for another year for not snitching on Julian.

Tulsi Gabbard, the only Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 who wasn’t a war hawk, is asking Trump for goodwill. She tweeted tagging Trump, “Since you’re giving pardons to people, please consider pardoning those who, at great personal sacrifice, exposed the deception and criminality of those in the deep state,” and named Assange and Snowden for him to drop charges.

The proposal for Trump to pardon Assange was also endorsed at this recent webinar which included speakers Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, Law Professor Marjorie Cohn, Consortium News editor-in-chief Joe Lauria.

If Trump did the honorable thing of halting the persecution of Julian Assange, it would be a blow for freedom and a middle finger to the Deep State including Obama and Clinton. Wasn’t Trump supposed to be the anti-Deep State candidate? Now’s his chance to prove it.

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President Donald Trump announced on December 10 that Morocco had joined UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan in recognizing Israel, with plans to reopen its liaison office in Tel Aviv, and joint overflight rights for airlines. The US, Israel, and Morocco triangle included a quid pro quo: a US agreement to recognize Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, a disputed territory since 1975, where there has been a decades-old conflict with Morocco pitted against the Polisario Front.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior adviser, and son-in-law, and his chief international negotiator, Avi Berkowitz negotiated the deal.

“This is a significant step forward for the people of Israel and Morocco. It further enhances Israel’s security, while creating opportunities for Morocco and Israel to deepen their economic ties and improve the lives of their people,” Kushner said.

The conflict in Western Sahara

The Western Sahara conflict is between the Polisario Front and the Kingdom of Morocco and includes unarmed civil campaigns of the Polisario Front and their self-proclaimed Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) to gain independence for the disputed and divided former Spanish colony.

Most of Western Sahara is controlled by the Moroccan Government and is known as the Southern Provinces, with some 20% of Western Sahara controlled by the SADR, which is backed by Algeria and has campaigned for a vote on self-determination through decades of war and stalemate.

The ongoing Western Sahara peace process involves questions of mutual recognition, the establishment of an independent state, and the future of Sahrawi refugees displaced by the conflict. The region is home to some 500,000 people, most of whom live in the capital, Laayoune.

Western Sahara has been on the United Nations list of non-self-governing territories, a stance also taken by the African Union, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), as well as the European Union. The African Union recognizes the SADR as a member state.

After 1975, Morocco resettled hundreds of thousands of its citizens in Western Sahara, making up at least two-thirds of its inhabitants.

“The stance … is a blatant violation of the United Nations Charter and the resolutions of international legitimacy,” the Polisario Front said in reaction to the US-Moroccan agreement, adding that the move “obstructs efforts by the international community to find a solution to the conflict”.

“This will not change an inch of the reality of the conflict and the right of the people of Western Sahara to self-determination,” the Polisario’s Europe representative Oubi Bchraya said in response to the Trump proclamation.

The territory’s main sources of revenue are vast phosphate deposits and rich Atlantic fisheries, which are all in Moroccan hands. The Polisario is heavily dependent on support from Algeria, where it operates bases and runs camps for tens of thousands of Sahrawi refugees.

Trump awards Western Sahara to Morocco

Senator Jim Inhofe, a Republican, said the decision taken by Trump was “shocking and deeply disappointing”.

“The president has been poorly advised by his team,” Inhofe said. “He could have made this deal without trading the rights of a voiceless people,” he said, referring to the Sahrawi people.

Trump has shown contempt of African institutions and borders, all to serve Israel’s security, and this does not reflect well on the leader of democracy.

“The United States believes that an independent Sahrawi State is not a realistic option for resolving the conflict and that genuine autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty is the only feasible solution,” reads the Proclamation on Recognizing The Sovereignty Of The Kingdom Of Morocco Over The Western Sahara, which is signed as, “NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim that, the United States recognizes that the entire Western Sahara territory is part of the Kingdom of Morocco.”

Moroccan comments

Morocco’s prime minister on Friday said the decision to normalize ties with Israel would not affect their support for the Palestinians. Saad-Eddine El Othmani noted Moroccan King Mohammed VI’s phone call Thursday to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

“Yesterday, King Mohammed VI called President Abbas, to tell him that His Majesty’s position in support of the Palestinian cause remains unshakeable and that Morocco places it at the same level of Sahara issue,” Othmani said.

Othmani, who heads the conservative Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) said,

“We also adopt this principle [in the government], with our constant emphasis on rejecting the Deal of the Century, and all violations of the Israeli occupation authorities, especially the recent attempts to Judaize Jerusalem,” he said while adding, “We refuse any normalization with the Zionist entity because this emboldens it to go further in breaching the rights of the Palestinian people,”

He later explained his remarks were made as leader of his party, not as prime minister. According to one recent poll, only 16 percent of Moroccans have a favorable view of Israel, while 70% view Israel unfavorably. Morocco has a genuine opposition and civil society; however, true power lies with the monarchy, and the parliament has been controlled by the PJD since 2011.

Algerian comments 

Algeria’s Prime Minister criticized Saturday the US recognition of Western Sahara as Moroccan, and Morocco’s recognition of Israel.

“There are foreign maneuvers which aim to destabilize Algeria,” Prime Minister Abdelaziz Djerad said. “There is now a desire by the Zionist entity to come closer to our borders,” he added about Israel.

The Trump brokered deal sparked fears in Algeria that Morocco will allow Israeli forces to operate along its frontier.

 “The Israeli army is at our borders,” Algerian journalist and analyst Abed Charef wrote. “The rapprochement between Morocco and Israel opens the way if it has not already happened, for Israeli aid to support Morocco’s army.”

Algeria’s military magazine, El-Djeich, called in its December editorial for Algerians to “stand ready to face” imminent threats. It warned of a “deterioration of the regional situation along our border and the threat that certain enemy parties pose”.

The Algerian foreign ministry said on Saturday that the US proclamation on Western Sahara “had no legal effect”. “The Western Sahara conflict is a decolonization issue that can only be resolved through the application of international law,” it said.

Russian comments

Russia on Friday condemned Trump’s decision to recognize Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara.

Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov called the US decision “unilateral,” while adding,

“There are relevant resolutions. There is the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara. This is a violation of international law.” He added that while Arab countries are “building bridges” with Israel, the process should not be done “at the expense of the interests of the Palestinian people.”

Morocco-Israeli deal

The deal will boost business with a flood of Israelis to Marrakesh, Fes, and other tourist destinations. Investors will follow, and Moroccan businesses, struggling in a debilitated economy, will appreciate access to Israeli cash as well as their technology. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will benefit as his governing coalition is falling apart, and he is facing public criticism on fraud charges, while yet another general election looms. An estimated 50,000 Israelis — many of whom are descendants of Moroccan Jews who left in the 1950s — travel to Morocco each year as tourists, learning about the Jewish community and retracing family histories.

President-elect Joe Biden

Biden is expected to move the US foreign policy away from Trump’s “America First” posture but has indicated he will continue the pursuit of what Trump calls “the Abraham Accords” between Israel and Arab and Muslim nations.

Morocco can’t rely on American diplomatic support, in the UN or elsewhere, beyond Jan. 20 when Biden is inaugurated as President, and he may reverse Trump’s decision on Western Sahara, and reaffirm American commitment to international law and a mediated end to conflicts.

The UN

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres welcomed the Israel-Morocco agreement but reserved judgment on Western Sahara. The UN mission in Western Sahara, MINURSO, said its position on the territory was “unchanged”.

Guterres believes “the solution to the question can still be found based on (UN) Security Council resolutions,” his spokesman said.

The UN maintains a peacekeeping force in the territory and has been pursuing a settlement plan meant to eventually allow the people of Western Sahara to choose between independence and integration with Morocco.

Trump’s support last year for Israeli claims to sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights, and his proclamation over Western Sahara, represent a direct rejection of the UN charter principle that countries cannot acquire territory by war.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is an award-winning journalist.

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With the FDA giving emergency use authorization (EUA) for the experimental Pfizer COVID mRNA vaccine, doses are currently in route to all 50 States and U.S. Territories.

In most of these states it is being reported that the first doses will be given to the elderly in nursing homes or assisted care facilities, and to healthcare workers.

The general public will probably not see these in the retail outlets, such as Walmart, Walgreens and CVS, until later this month.

Media reports in the Pharma-funded corporate media are downplaying or ignoring altogether the risks that this vaccine poses, and they are also in many cases erroneously reporting that this is an FDA-approved vaccine.

But as we reported yesterday, where I linked to the actual guidelines published by the FDA right off of their own website, the FDA is making it very clear that these are unapproved vaccines. See: Unlike UK, U.S. FDA Allows Pregnant and Nursing Women to Receive Experimental Pfizer COVID Vaccine

In addition, the FDA guidelines for recipients state:

WHAT IF I DECIDE NOT TO GET THE PFIZER-BIONTECH COVID-19 VACCINE?

It is your choice to receive or not receive the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine. Should you decide not to receive it, it will not change your standard medical care.

Nobody, at least at this point, should be coercing you or anyone in your family to receive this vaccine. And no employer should be requiring it either.

Resist the Plandemic and New World Order Agenda!

For those of you who have chosen not to be brainwashed by the propaganda being broadcast by the Big Pharma-owned corporate media 24/7/365, you know by now that this is NOT a real pandemic, but a very well organized “Plandemic.”

We have a page in our COVID Information Center with articles and films proving that this is a Plandemic that has been in the works for years now.

Bill Gates is the main person who has been master-minding this Plandemic working together with other Globalists around the world to reach their ultimate goal with this Plandemic: The vaccination of every person on the planet, and a drastic reduction of the world’s population.

This is NOT a “conspiracy theory,” as Bill Gates announced this himself at the very beginning of the Plandemic, and he has also stated over the years many times that he sees vaccinations as necessary to reduce the world’s population. See: 7 Billion Doses of COVID-19 Vaccine for World’s Population of 7 Billion – Was This the Plan All Along?

Protect Your Senior Family Members!

If you have family members or loved ones in nursing homes or assisted care facilities, you need to contact these facilities IMMEDIATELY and make sure that they do NOT have your consent to administer this vaccine to your loved ones, especially if you have any kind of medical power of attorney for them.

Do NOT assume that they will NOT give this experimental vaccine to your elderly loved one without your approval! More than likely you signed some sort of statement of medical care upon admittance to that facility that allows them to administer vaccines and other medical products without your approval.

If at all possible, get your senior loved one to sign a statement of REFUSAL TO RECEIVE THE PFIZER COVID VACCINE, and if you have medical power of attorney, you sign it as well.

Remember, the Pharma-owned corporate media has already begun trying to condition the public to accept DEATHS and other reactions from this experimental vaccine to be “normal,” especially among seniors. See: CNN: ‘Don’t Be Alarmed’ if People Start Dying After Taking the COVID Vaccine

When COVID was first being reported in the U.S. back in March and April this year, tens of thousands of seniors lost their lives, not necessarily from COVID, but because of the way they were treated, where in many cases they were put on ventilators which ended up collapsing their lungs and killing them.

The fear being driven by the media, along with isolating them from their family members who are their main advocates, also contributed to many of their deaths, all of which were blamed on “the virus.” See: Dr. Vernon Coleman: Your Government Wants You Dead – BANNED from YouTube

Everyone needs to understand that American culture is now dominated by a eugenics mindset that has no value for Senior citizens, who are seen as a financial burden to the healthcare system, especially now during COVID.

Don’t Let Medical Bureaucrats  Bully You if you Work in Healthcare!

When this vaccine was first rolled out in the UK less than two weeks ago, some of the NHS medical staff suffered severe anaphylactic reactions after being injected with the Pfizer experimental COVID vaccine. This is what allegedly prompted the FDA to issue warnings about allergies and anaphylactic shock. See: Life-Threatening Reactions to Pfizer COVID Experimental Vaccines Results in Warnings to People Who Have Allergies

If you work in healthcare, don’t risk your life for this vaccine, even if it means losing your job! Seeing doctors and nurses get sick and not be able to work which in turn will put more stress on the hospitals is something that fits very well into the Globalists’ plans at this point, because they will NOT blame it on the vaccine, but on COVID.

Remember, there is currently NO LAW that requires anyone to receive this vaccine. If you are suspended or lose your job over refusing to be injected, contact your union if you have one, or band together and hire a good attorney, because there is no legal basis to refuse anyone in healthcare employment based on compliance with an unapproved, experimental vaccine.

Nobody Needs this Vaccine! Effective and Safe Treatments Already Exist!

This is the real tragedy that our nation and other nations around the world are facing right now. There are literally tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of doctors and medical professionals around the world who are being censored for their effective COVID treatments. See: Doctors Around the World Issue Dire WARNING: DO NOT GET THE COVID VACCINE!!

Older, safer drugs such as hydroxychloriquine and Ivermectin are being used by thousands of doctors with a near 100% cure rate. Visit our COVID Hydroxychloroquine Scandal page and read about the Frontline Doctors, and also listen to Dr. Pierre Kory M.D. who testified before the U.S. Senate last week about all of the doctors in his group that are successfully treating COVID patients with older drugs.

The reason the FDA refuses to issue emergency use authorizations (EUAs) for these older drugs to be used on COVID is that it would make the EUAs issued to Pfizer’s COVID vaccine and other new drugs recently all ILLEGAL!

And since President Trump and the Federal Government has decimated the U.S. economy and closed down almost 50% of America’s small businesses so that TRILLIONS of dollars could be given to the Big Pharma Billionaires on Wall Street to develop these vaccines and new drugs, we know that it is impossible for them to promote these older drugs that are cheaper, safer, and much more effective.

They should all be arrested for Crimes Against Humanity, but instead the Pharma-owned corporate media has the American public fixated on the election results and the current power struggle to take over the White House, where no matter who ends up as President of the United States, Operation Warp Speed will continue full speed ahead to carry out the Globalists’ eugenics and Great Reset agenda.

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December 12, 2017, marks the anniversary of the liberation – the West called it fall – of Aleppo in Syria. What happened is conveniently forgotten today by the West.

Some of us can’t and won’t forget what was both world, regional and local history.

Important for Syria, for the West and for the future world order – for at least 5 reasons:

1. The Western mainstream media’s deceptive – constructed, ignorant, or both – narrative since 2011 was debunked.

Perspectives that media and political decision-makers deliberately omitted (remember omitted stuff is more important than fake):

  • History and the colonialists’ role in Syria.
  • The immense complexity of the Syrian society.
  • Syria as a 7000 year-old civilisation and as end of the Silk Road.
  • The decades-long conflicts underlying the violence, since CIA’s coup in 1949.
  • The Western-driven regime change policies years since before 2011.
  • Other causes of the conflicts than “Assad the dictator and his regime” such as environmental crisis, oil and gas, and its being partly occupied since 1967 by Israel.
  • That nothing of the conflict complexity can de facto be reduced to a matter of one man’s role – like it couldn’t with Milosevic (now exonerated), Saddam, or Ghadafi;
  • That this may have been a civil war for about a week but then almost 7 years of international aggression by thousands of foreign groups, Western governments/arm suppliers and their Saudi-led allies.
  • Syria’s right under such circumstances to self-defence according to Article 51 of the UN Charter.

The major role in the utter destruction of Syria played by NATO countries, Turkey particularly when it comes to Aleppo, and Western allies such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states; all was simply ”the dictator/regime killing his own people”…

  • That Russia and Iran was the only foreign powers legitimately present according to international law.
  • That the UN was sidelined – again – and tasked with the impossible role of making peace out of such member state policies.
  • The media interest in Syria disappeared immediately after Aleppo’s liberation as if orchestrated by one conductor. Silence.
  • And Facebook and Google Search changes algorithms…

The media coverage stopped there and then – like musicians under a conductor, obeying the tiniest move.

2. It marked the end of the West’s attempt at regime change since 2012

It had started formally on Dec 12, 2012 – on the day four years earlier, in Marrakesh. “Friends (!) of Syria” declared Assad’s government illegitimate and set up a Syrian National Council – without, of course, asking the Syrian people it was supposed to represent. Here’s AlJazeera’s/AFP’s coverage of that cruel decision.

3. It was the turning point in the international aggression on Syria

With Aleppo lost, the RIOTs – Rebels-Insurgency-Opposition-Terrorists – lost momentum. The Free-this-and-that ran away, dispersed or killed each other. And the West’s beloved White Helmets – with their stolen name doing humanitarian work only among terrorists – were nowhere to be seen in Aleppo on December 12.

Anybody in a NATO Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “intelligence agency” or state-financed research institute could have found out on the Internet what that organisation in reality was. They did not. For obvious reasons. But I could and did in November 2016.

4. One more Western interventionist war lost

After Vietnam, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya etc. this was one more international law-defying military intervention to impose – allegedly – the best of the Western values in its Mission Civilisatrice but predictably lost, one more contribution to the decline and fall of the West, the US Empire and NATO in particular. And one more positioning on the wrong side of history.

5. One more example of the inability to feel empathy with the human suffering in the wake of our policies.

300 000-400 000 innocent civilians dead, millions displaced and barely surviving outside Syria. History and civilisation destroyed directly or by militant, terrorist proxies – Western supported RIOTs.

And civil society of course was never a player in any negotiations – only the killing groups and countries have met at tables: Complete conflict and peace illiteracy at best or a cruel wish to just destroy and conquer.

Also, it never occurred to the media and politics that you could side with the innocent, non-killing Syrian people. No, you either sided with “the regime” or with the West and its allies against it.

If truth is the first casualty in war, conflict understanding and respect for complexity is the second and third. Our own complicity the fourth.

Even if President Assad had been the worst dictator on earth since Hitler, nothing can justify our – US/NATO countries – complicity in human suffering of such proportions.

Has any Western politician or government expressed regret?

Has any leading media apologised for its coverage?

Did the so-called Left, labour unions or workers around the world express solidarity with the 30 000 workers and their families whose lives were destroyed in Aleppo’s Sheikh Najjar Industrial Zone that produced 5% of the industrial goods in Syria and was the second largest industrial zone in the Middle East?

Does anyone talk about reconciliation with Syria, about a History and Reconciliation Commission for all the war and not just some politicised “Commissions” to investigate single attacks – so the blame game can go on?

Or – as repentant gesture – about a huge program for re-building Syria?

No. There is no shame.

And we expect people in the Middle East to love us, right?

But China is connecting the vast Eurasian continent with a constructive new Silk Belt and Road from Beijing to Serbia.

And Syria.

Positive energy, big vision, potentially peace-promoting like nothing else at the moment.

A Cold War perspective

Some 25 years ago the First Cold War ended. The Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact fell. Militarised to death and stuck in Afghanistan. Today we could have had a much better, peaceful West and good relations with Russia. We don’t.

Now the West has been in Afghanistan for more than twice the time Russia was – unfortunately it has nobody even remotely comparable to Gorbachev, the last SU President. Instead the West fought wars all over the place and expanded NATO – against all promised made to Gorbachev – when it should have dissolved and a new security structure been built.

NATO allies blindly following the US – their Master’s Voice – without one independent or doubtful thought.

We are now in a new, but different, Second Cold War. Syria is about that too.

That Second Cold War will be lost by the US and NATO countries, the West.

And for the Syrian people, for those who never touched a gun?

As sad as can be.

And Assad can now be – says Washington. The conductor…

We caused the world’s largest humanitarian crisis (at the time) since 1945 for nothing. Perhaps 400 000 died and millions are internally displaced or refugees in neighbouring states.

Better forget it. And move on to new wars – North Korea, Iran…who’s next?

Shamelessly.

Personal reflections

I’ve seen much destruction during my years of work in conflict and war zones. But nothing like Aleppo East, the old City and Aleppo’s industrial zone. Square kilometer after kilometer of destruction – only 5-7% of it from the air, for those who want to know, the rest done by house-to-house fighting. Trillions of bullets.

I’ve seen the suffering – but also the joy – of the people in the East and those who came over to the West to get help – the only helpers present there on December 10-14 were the Red Crescent, Russian field doctors and hospitals, the Syrian Arab Army and volunteers from Aleppo’s University. Shocking.

And deeply deeply moving. Never to leave my memory.

No normal person who has seen what I saw would be able thereafter to defend war as a tool to achieve any political goal whatsoever. Decision-makers and media outside Syria simply won’t get it. Distance and psychic numbing, the shields around the corridors of power kill.

Period.

I don’t blame them for not risking their lives going there. I blame them for their colonialist mentality and their belief in their own exceptionalist moral superiority.

The next shock I experiened – perhaps due to my belief in decency and professionalism but anyhow proving naive – happened at my attempts to reach media with what I had seen.

TFF PressInfo reaches, among others, some 3000-4000 media and journalists worldwide, including many hundreds in the Nordic countries.

Not one reaction was expressive of an interest in what I had seen in a place where I was the only one from the Nordic countries and Western media had been present but had left before December 12, 2016.

But writing in safety from Beirut, Istanbul, Paris, Berlin and Washington they knew that with Aleppo’s ”fall” the next thing would be Assad’s genocide on its inhabitants – who somewhat surprisingly to them, I reported, cried of happiness to have come out from under 4,5 years of terror occupation, danced, drank and celebrated in the streets.

I talked freely with anyone in those streets and was not embedded – but did get military protection in and out of Aleppo’s war zones at a time when all the fighting had not died down yet. I was grateful for that, necessary in such a dangerous environment.

During my work in Yugoslavia’s dissolution wars, in Georgia, in Iraq – there was always some media somewhere that said: OK, he has been there, he knows about conflict analysis, he has talked with people on all sides and represents no government. He’s independent, let’s hear what he has to say.

In the case of Syria? Not so.

In this case I also produced 6 photo documentary series – seen by 134 000 people here but not one of the images used by mainstream media.

So, there were not even the tiniest crack in the massive media wall – media that could have seen interviewing me as a kind of scoop since they had nobody there.

Also not in my regional, leading media such as Dagens Nyheter, Sydsvenskan, Politiken, Berlingske, 24/7, Deadline – you name them. Their responses are all documented here.

And the liberal The Nation, the oldest political magazine in the US, asked me to summarise three articles they had read into one – only to tell me that they had rather suddenly “changed editorial priorities” and would, therefore, not publish my manuscript but pay me a honorarium (which I had not even asked for).

In short, there were only two kinds of responses:

No response or ”we can do an interview with you about how it is for a peace researcher to be embedded with the Syrian regime/dictator and his army” – that is, only an interest in framing. No interest in what I had seen and heard.

Has anyone ever been framed for going to the capitals of Western aggressors say Washington or Brussels?

I was framed for risking my life going to Damascus and Aleppo to try to understand that side too, the side that has not gotten a fair hearing.

So much for the free Western media – proving excellently their place as the second M in the MIMAC – the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex – that is always ready to promote violence and omit or marginalise the voices of conflict understanding and peace.

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November 3rd has passed and slightly more than a third of the eligible electorate chose the Democrat, slightly less than a third the Republican, and the remaining third chose none of the above by either not voting or casting a ballot for a third-party alternative. The threat of an October surprise did not materialize although Trump’s desperate attempts to nullify the results of the elections continue.

The important issues of war and peace facing humanity, especially for those of us in the belly of the beast with a special responsibility to address the actions of our own government, were non-issues in most if not all U.S. election campaigns.

Regardless of who occupies the Oval Office, the decadent trajectory of neoliberalism continues: imperialism abroad and austerity for working people at home. The permanent institutions of the state — the Pentagon and the national security and surveillance apparatus — endure.

Although Trump did not start any new wars, he did not end any of the now perpetual U.S. military engagements. The U.S. policy of sanctions against 39 countries, constituting a third of the world’s population, are a form of warfare that kills and maims similar to bombs. The wars abroad are increasingly mirrored by wars on the people at home, by the militarization of society — in particular the police — and by strangulation of the economy. The response by the major imperial powers to the pandemic of COVID-19, in particular in the U.S. and Europe, has exacerbated this war at home and exposed the social, political and economic cracks in late stage, monopoly capitalism.

Behind the ethnic and gender diversity of Joe Biden’s announced appointments is the continuity of the Obama-Biden administration’s engagement in permanent war and regime change and commitment to “full spectrum dominance.” The promise of U.S. “leadership” means, in fact, U.S. dominance of billions of people who did not choose the American state to rule them. These scourges will be not exorcized with the defeat of Donald Trump.

This fundamental continuity, beneath a façade of bipartisan bickering, calls for an independent peace movement to promote these actions, among many others:

  • Drastically cut the military budget.
  • Return all troops from all war zones and close all the foreign military bases.
  • End all unilateral coercive measures (blockades and sanctions).
  • Stop supporting allied wars and stop U.S. and allied assassinations.
  • End the nuclear weapons escalation and sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW)
  • Stop the cold war with China.
  • Reestablish diplomatic relations with Cuba, end the blockade, and return Guantánamo.
  • Negotiate with Iran, not assassinate and threaten military attacks.
  • End the asphyxiating sanctions on Venezuela and reestablish diplomatic relations.
  • Recognize and respect the right of Palestinians to self-determination and end its financial and diplomatic support for the apartheid state of Israel.
  • Repeal the Nicaragua Investment Conditionality Act (NICA Act).
  • Fully abide by the UN Charter.
  • Demilitarize the police.

Above all, we need to intensify our struggle for a just transition from a military to a peacetime economy to meet human and community needs and restore the environment, and join hands to build a world founded on cooperation, peace and respect for sovereignty of all nations.

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The Most Lethal Virus Is Not COVID. It Is War.

December 15th, 2020 by John Pilger

John Pilger describes the invisible weapon of past and current wars, and the threat of nuclear war, under cover of the Covid pandemic. This is propaganda, aided by censorship by omission.

Watch Pilger’s 2010 film The War You Don’t See here.

Britain’s Armed Services Memorial is a silent, haunting place. Set in the rural beauty of Staffordshire, in an arboretum of some 30,000 trees and sweeping lawns, its Homeric figures celebrate determination and sacrifice.

The names of more than 16,000 British servicemen and women are listed. The literature says they “died in operational theatre or were targeted by terrorists”.

On the day I was there, a stonemason was adding new names to those who have died in some 50 operations across the world during what is known as “peacetime”. Malaya, Ireland, Kenya, Hong Kong, Libya, Iraq, Palestine and many more, including secret operations, such as Indochina.

Not a year has passed since peace was declared in 1945 that Britain has not sent military forces to fight the wars of empire.

Not a year has passed when countries, mostly poor and riven by conflict, have not bought or have been “soft loaned” British arms to further the wars, or “interests”, of empire.

Empire? What empire? The investigative journalist Phil Miller recently revealed in Declassified that Boris Johnson’s Britain maintained 145 military sites – call them bases — in 42 countries. Johnson has boasted that Britain is to be “the foremost naval power in Europe”.

In the midst of the greatest health emergency in modern times, with more than 4 million surgical procedures delayed by the National Health Service, Johnson has announced a record increase of £16.5 billion in so-called defence spending – a figure that would restore the under-resourced NHS many times over.

But these billions are not for defence. Britain has no enemies other than those within who betray the trust of its ordinary people, its nurses and doctors, its carers, elderly, homeless and youth, as successive neo-liberal governments have done, Conservative and Labour.

Exploring the serenity of the National War Memorial, I soon realised there was not a single monument, or plinth, or plaque, or rosebush honouring the memory of Britain’s victims — the civilians in the “peacetime” operations commemorated here.

There is no remembrance of the Libyans killed when their country was wilfully destroyed by Prime Minister David Cameron and his collaborators in Paris and Washington.

There is no word of regret for the Serbian women and children killed by British bombs, dropped from a safe height on schools, factories, bridges, towns, on the orders of Tony Blair; or for the impoverished Yemeni children extinguished by Saudi pilots with their logistics and targets supplied by Britons in the air-conditioned safety of Riyadh; or for the Syrians starved by “sanctions”.

There is no monument to the Palestinian children murdered with the British elite’s enduring connivance, such as the recent campaign that destroyed a modest reform movement within the Labour Party with specious accusations of anti-Semitism.

Two weeks ago, Israel’s military chief of staff and Britain’s Chief of the Defence Staff signed an agreement to “formalise and enhance” military co-operation. This was not news. More British arms and logistical support will now flow to the lawless regime in Tel Aviv, whose snipers target children and psychopaths interrogate children in extreme isolation. (See the recent shocking report by Defense for Children, Isolated and Alone).

Perhaps the most striking omission at the Staffordshire war memorial is an acknowledgement of the million Iraqis whose lives and country were destroyed by the illegal invasion of Blair and Bush in 2003.

ORB, a member of the British Polling Council, put the figure at 1.2 million. In 2013, the ComRes organisation asked a cross-section of the British public how many Iraqis had died in the invasion. A majority said fewer than 10,000.

How is such a lethal silence sustained in a sophisticated society? My answer is that propaganda is far more effective in societies that regard themselves as free than in dictatorships and autocracies. I include censorship by omission.

Our propaganda industries – both political and cultural, including most of the media – are the most powerful, ubiquitous and refined on earth. Big lies can be repeated incessantly in comforting, credible BBC voices. Omissions are no problem.

A similar question relates to nuclear war, whose threat is “of no interest”, to quote Harold Pinter. Russia, a nuclear power, is encircled by the war-making group known as Nato, with British troops regularly “manoeuvring” right up to the border where Hitler invaded.

The defamation of all things Russian, not least the historical truth that the Red Army largely won the Second World War, is percolated into public consciousness. The Russians are of “no interest”, except as demons.

China, also a nuclear power, is the brunt of unrelenting provocation, with American strategic bombers and drones constantly probing its territorial space and – hooray – HMS Queen Elizabeth, Britain’s £3billion aircraft carrier, soon to sail 6,500 miles to enforce “freedom of navigation” within sight of the Chinese mainland.

Some 400 American bases encircle China, “rather like a noose”, a former Pentagon planner said to me. They extend all the way from Australia, though the Pacific to southern and northern Asia and across Eurasia.

In South Korea, a missile system known as Terminal High Altitude Air Defense, or THAAD, is aimed point-blank at China across the narrow East China Sea. Imagine Chinese missiles in Mexico or Canada or off the coast of California.

A few years after the invasion of Iraq, I made a film called The War You Don’t See, in which I asked leading American and British journalists as well as TV news executives – people I knew as colleagues — why and how Bush and Blair were allowed to get away with the great crime in Iraq, considering that the lies were not very clever.

Their response surprised me. Had “we”, they said – that is journalists and broadcasters, especially in the US — challenged the claims of the White House and Downing Street, investigated and exposed the lies, instead of amplifying and echoing them, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 probably would not have happened. Countless people would be alive today. Four million refugees would not have fled. The grisly ISIS, a product of the Blair/Bush invasion, might not have been conceived.

David Rose, then with the London Observer, which supported the invasion, described “the pack of lies fed to me by a fairly sophisticated disinformation campaign”. Rageh Omah, then the BBC’s man in Iraq, told me, “We failed to press the most uncomfortable buttons hard enough”. Dan Rather, the CBS anchorman, agreed, as did many others.

I admired these journalists who broke the silence. But they are honourable exceptions. Today, the war drums have new and highly enthusiastic beaters in Britain, America and the “West”.

Take your pick among the legion of Russia and China bashers and promoters of fiction such as Russiagate. My personal Oscar goes to Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald, whose unrelenting rousing drivel about the “existential threat” (of China/Russia, mostly China) was illustrated by a smiling Scott Morrison, the PR man who is Australia’s prime minister, dressed like Churchill, V for Victory sign and all. “Not since the 1930s ….” the pair of them intoned. Ad nauseum.

Covid has provided cover for this pandemic of propaganda. In July, Morrison took his cue from Trump and announced that Australia, which has no enemies, would spend A$270 billion on provoking one, including missiles that could reach China.

That China’s purchase of Australia’s minerals and agriculture effectively underwrote the Australian economy was “of no interest” to the government in Canberra.

The Australian media cheered almost as one, delivering a shower of abuse at China. Thousands of Chinese students, who had guaranteed the gross salaries of Australian vice-chancellors, were advised by their government to go elsewhere. Chinese-Australians were bad-mouthed and deliverymen were assaulted. Colonial racism is never hard to revive.

Some years ago, I interviewed the former head of the CIA in Latin America, Duane Claridge. In a few refreshingly honest words, he summed up “Western” foreign policy as it is ordained and directed by Washington.

The super-power, he said, could do what it wanted where it wanted whenever its “strategic interests” dictated. His words were: “Get used to it, world.”

I have reported a number of wars. I have seen the remains of children and women and the elderly bombed and burned to death: their villages laid to waste, their petrified trees festooned with human parts. And much else.

Perhaps that is why I reserve a specific contempt for those who promote the crime of rapacious war, who beckon it with bad faith and profanities,  having never experienced it themselves. Their monopoly must be broken.

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This is a version of an address John Pilger gave to a Stop the War fund-raiser, Artists Speak Out, in London. Follow John Pilger on Twitter @johnpilger

Iraq to Sue US over Use of Depleted Uranium Weapons: Official

December 15th, 2020 by Tasnim News Agency

An adviser to the Iraqi parliament’s foreign affairs committee said the Baghdad government is planning to lodge an international lawsuit against the US for using internationally-banned munitions in civilian areas.

Hatif al-Rikabi told Arabic-language al-Maalomah news agency in an interview that Iraq is going to file the case at Swedish and German courts over appalling crimes that Washington has perpetrated in the Arab country, including the use of depleted uranium weapons.

Rikabi went on to say that such a measure will ensure international accountability for the US, and will not give it the chance to procrastinate the case.

“Hundreds of cancer cases are recorded every month (in Iraq), and the figure is clear evidence for the extent of the damage that US forces have committed,” he stated, calling on the Iraqi Health Ministry to “release facts and figures about casualties caused by US bombing campaigns,” Press TV reported.

US-led wars in Iraq have left behind hundreds of tons of depleted uranium munitions and other toxic wastes.

Official Iraqi government statistics show that, prior to the outbreak of the First Persian Gulf War in 1991, the rate of cancer cases in Iraq was 40 out of 100,000 people. By 1995, it had increased to 800 out of 100,000 people, and, by 2005, it had doubled to at least 1,600 out of 100,000 people. Current estimates show the increasing trend continuing.

Contamination from depleted uranium munitions and other military-related pollution is suspected of causing a sharp rise in congenital birth defects, cancer cases, and other illnesses throughout much of Iraq.

Many doctors and scientists maintain that the recent emergence of diseases that were not previously seen in Iraq, such as new illnesses in the kidney, lungs, and liver, as well as total immune system collapse, are connected to public exposure to war contaminants.

Depleted uranium (DU) contamination may also be related to the substantial rise in leukemia, renal, and anemia cases, especially among children.

Moreover, there has also been a dramatic jump in miscarriages and premature births among Iraqi women, particularly in areas where heavy US military operations occurred, such as Fallujah.

During 2004, the US military carried out two massive military sieges of the city of Fallujah, using large quantities of DU ammunition, as well as white phosphorous.

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Featured image is from Tasnim News Agency