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.

Featured image is from MD

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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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. 

For most of 2020, rising positive test results of COVID-19 have brought with them fears of swamped hospitals, overwhelmed medical systems, emergency patients being turned away, and COVID-19 patients being triaged, suffering and dying in hallways and vestibules.

Much of that fear crystallized in the early stages of the pandemic, when parts of the northern Italian medical system were put under significant strain due to a crush of COVID-19 patients. In response, leaders and medical officials around the world suspended elective surgeries and constructed emergency medical facilities to cope with anticipated waves of COVID-19 patients.

In many cases those facilities were eventually shuttered for lack of patients, even after millions of dollars had been invested in their construction. In Chicago, for instance, the city spent $120,000,000 on four facilities to treat a total of 38 patients.

The latest spike in positive COVID tests has brought renewed fears of hospitals straining under an influx of COVID-19 patients, with some facilities across the country reporting difficulties managing large numbers of patients, either from a dwindling number of scarce beds or not enough medical officials to man them, or both.

Capacity nationwide appears to be far from overwhelmed

Yet federal government data compiled from state-level reports suggests that hospitals nationwide have considerable space left to deal with both routine medical issues and COVID-19 patients.

The Department of Health and Human Services offers on its website estimates of hospitalization rates across the United States. The data, the department says, is “estimated from hospital submissions, either reported through their state or reported through HHS Protect,” which the department describes as “a secure data ecosystem … for sharing, parsing, housing, and accessing COVID-19 data.” (HHS did not respond to queries about any limitations or caveats to the data.)

The HHS numbers belie forecasts of impending collapse of the U.S. medical system. As of Saturday, the department estimated that hospitals nationwide were at about 75% capacity. ICU beds were even lower, at 63.5%. Patients who had tested positive for COVID-19 occupied just under 15% of all beds nationwide.

Even in areas that have recently posted huge surges in positive COVID tests, the numbers were largely similar to the national average: In New York, 76% of hospital beds (and 61% of ICU beds) were taken.

In California, where positive test results have skyrocketed, 76% of inpatient beds were likewise filled (though the ICU numbers were notably higher than New York’s, at 79%).

Ohio, which has also seen a surge in positive tests over the last few months, has 71% of inpatient beds taken, and 77% of ICU beds.

Those numbers are not far out of line with national average occupancy rates seen in normal times and are, in some cases, lower than what are widely considered optimal rates.

‘We are not in crisis care’

Dr. Joanne Roberts, the chief value officer of Providence St. Joseph Health system, told Just the News that “a well-functioning hospital probably runs about 85% capacity on an average day.”

The problem, she pointed out, is that a virus like COVID-19 can “quickly overwhelm that last 15%” due to its virulency and ability to send a significant number of patients to the hospital at once.

Roberts, who coordinates the chief medical officers of Providence St. Joseph’s 51 constituent hospitals across seven states, said her system has been working creatively to address spikes in patients.

“We’ve spent a whole lot of energy decreasing the other number of patients as we possibly can,” she said, “trying to do hospital-at-home models, stopping non-urgent procedures that require ICU space. You can’t stop emergency. But you can stop some things that are coming into the hospital, say, a knee replacement.”

“It’s a dance that every one of our hospitals is doing today,” she said. “Some are still doing elective procedures, some are not. Because governors have allowed our hospitals to figure that out, we are seeing our hospitals figure that out themselves.”

Roberts confirmed that none of their hospitals is turning patients away.

“What we have done is we’ve done some creative bed usage,” she said. “We’ve done some agreements with smaller hospitals that they would send some surgical cases to us in our larger hospitals, and once the patient was stable after surgery, we’d send them back to recover in the smaller hospital.”

“We’ve not done anything like close our emergency departments,” she added, “and I can’t imagine that happening.”

Roberts said that her system’s hospitals are “reflecting the national emergency” as they deal with increases in patients.

“There are guidelines for emergency situations of normal care, contingent care, and crisis care,” she said. “We are not in crisis care. That’s where New York was, earlier in the pandemic. They were in crisis mode.” Improvements in such factors as personal protective equipment have mitigated those challenges somewhat since then, she said.

Roberts noted that the critical issues are “less about bed capacity and more about staff capacity,” particularly as staff get sick — including with COVID-19 — and must take time off, stretching other staff even thinner.

Of course, many medical facilities across the country are working under considerable strain to deal with the current spike. Some hospitals, such as locations in CaliforniaTexas and elsewhere, have been forced to set up tent-based medical facilities to deal with surges in patients. Yet similar circumstances have been seen during particularly virulent flu seasons, as happened in 2018 in states across the country.

The novelty of COVID-19, of course — along with its high virulence — means the coronavirus pandemic may pose a more significant risk of overwhelming hospitals than even a nasty flu season.

“The difference now compared to the spring and summer surges,” Roberts said, is that “in those first two surges … we would see a surge in Seattle and the rest of our system would be okay. A week later we’d see a surge in Southern California, and the Seattle surge would be down. What we’re seeing now is a surge across the whole country. It’s not so local as it used to be.”

Still, she acknowledged, “the country is managing pretty well” — an assessment which accords well with current national hospital occupancy data.

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48% Of U.S. Small Businesses Fear that They May be Forced to “Shut Down Permanently” Soon

By Michael Snyder, December 13 2020

What would the United States look like if we lost half of our small businesses?  The reason I ask that question is because approximately half of all small business owners in the entire country believe that they may soon be forced to close down for good.

Video: Rocco Galati on COVID Lockdown Measures. Crimes against Humanity. Lawsuit against Government of Canada

By Rocco Galati and Michael Welch, December 13 2020

Rocco not only goes through listing the concerns about this vaccine, he also questions the social distancing, lock-downs, masking, shutting down of faith communities, the terrible agenda for children denied schooling and the censorship of scientific facts and expert opinions in mainstream narratives.

Radical De-Globalization: Finding Back Our Freedom and Sovereignty: Tyrants Don’t Create Tyranny. Your Obedience Does.

By Peter Koenig, December 14 2020

According to their plan, the Great Reset, (WEF, “Covid-19 – The Great Reset” by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, July 2020), Covid-19 is THE window of opportunity for the world to be reset with an ultra-capitalism that finally brings justice to humanity and the environment. No kidding, that’s what they pretend, and worse, believe that we, the People, will go for it.

Antisemitism Claims Mask a Reign of Political and Cultural Terror Across Europe

By Jonathan Cook, December 14 2020

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has run a fascinating long report this week offering a disturbing snapshot of the political climate rapidly emerging across Europe on the issue of antisemitism. The article documents a kind of cultural, political and intellectual reign of terror in Germany since the parliament passed a resolution last year equating support for non-violent boycotts of Israel – in solidarity with Palestinians oppressed by Israel – with antisemitism.

“Digital Vaccine Passports”: Yes, Bill Gates Said That. Here’s the Proof.

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr, December 14 2020

Gates and his minions insist the billionaire never said we’d need digital vaccine passports. But in a June 2020 TED Talk, Gates said exactly that. Someone edited out the statement, but CHD tracked down the original.

Coronavirus Protocols as Tools of Repression

By Ann Garrison, December 14 2020

Covid-19 is a convenient excuse for governments to ban or restrict activities they don’t like. Whatever the scientific truths about coronavirus, state measures to control it undoubtedly have great potential for justifying state repression and surveillance.

British Medical Journal (BMJ): Conflicts of Interest Among the UK Government’s COVID-19 Advisers

By Paul D Thacker, December 13 2020

After months of criticism about SAGE secrecy, the government reversed course this summer and began releasing the names of SAGE members, minutes of meetings, and some of its policy papers. Still, the government has refused to release the financial interest forms signed by SAGE members, leaving the public in the dark.

Trump Administration Helped GOP Donors “Score a Deal for Syrian Oil”

By Matthew Petti, December 14 2020

The State Department’s special envoy for Syria at a congressional hearing on Wednesday admitted to helping Republican donors score a deal for Syrian oil.

Will Biden’s America Stop Creating Terrorists?

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, December 14 2020

The American public is more concerned about battling coronavirus than fighting overseas wars. But America’s wars rage on regardless, and the militarized counterterrorism policy Biden has supported in the past—based on airstrikes, special operations and the use of proxy forces—is precisely what keeps these conflicts raging.

Canadian Politics: Time to Refocus from Hong Kong to Haiti

By Yves Engler, December 14 2020

For those who support a truly just foreign policy comparing Canadian politicians’ reactions to protests in Hong Kong and the slightly more populous Haiti is instructive. It reveals the extent to which this country’s politicians are forced to align with the US Empire.


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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.  The prospects of a trade pact between the EU and UK by the end of this month are becoming cold and remote.  This much has been admitted by the UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and his EU counterpart, Ursula von der Leyen.

A key contention between the parties is the issue of fishing.  Access to British waters by European nations is a long affair that prompted the late diplomat Sir Con O’Neill to remark that, “The question of fisheries was economic peanuts, but political dynamite.”  Eight European member states who fish in British waters are demanding that Britain, despite Brexit, maintain the status quo on fishing arrangements. 

Non-UK boats have certainly been very happy to avail themselves of waters within the UK’s 200-nautical mile economic zone.  Between 2012 and 2014, it was estimated that 58% of fish and shellfish landed from the UK’s Exclusive Economic Zone were caught by non-UK boats.  This comprised 650,000 tonnes of fish and shellfish worth £408 million each year.  UK fishing boats, in contrast, landed 90,000 tonnes of fish and shellfish, worth £103 million.

As the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier explained to the House of Lords in June,

“the fisheries agreement we want with the United Kingdom would be an indissociable part of the economic agreement on trade and the level playing field – or, to make it even more clear, there will be no trade agreement with the UK if there is no balanced agreement on fisheries.”

The picture is a complex tangle.  According to Barnier, various matters must be taken into account:

“historical fishing rights, sometimes dating back many centuries; the economic interests of coastal fishing communities in the EU and the UK and international rules from the UN on biodiversity.”

One of the strongest advocates of the status quo position is the French President, Emmanuel Macron.  In October, he put forth his claim that French fishing fleets would continue to fish in British waters irrespective of whether a trade agreement was reached.  As French fishing fleets take 75% of their catch from British waters, the unpopular French leader would like to stay that course.  Last Friday, Macron stated that, while he did not “want to have my cake and eat it” he did not “want the pieces cut equally because I am not giving my piece away”.

The Johnson government sees it differently.  The status quo must change.  Waters are to be reclaimed.  Bigger catches for the British are being demanded.  Barnier has previously suggested some modification of the “two extreme positions” might take place, taking into account the UK’s preference for “zonal attachment”.  Such a softening still looks some way off.

With EU-UK talks teetering on collapse, Johnson’s own gunboat diplomacy is drawing different views.  Tobias Ellwood, Conservative chairman of the Commons Defence Committee, sees it as “irresponsible”.  Former European commissioner Lord Chris Patten identifies the all too bright colours of nationalism at play.  Johnson, he claimed, was on a “runaway train of English exceptionalism”.

A few government backbenchers disagree.  Chests are being thumped.  Daniel Kawczynski suggested last week that a no-deal scenario would mean that the prime minister give an “absolute guarantee … that British naval forces will be deployed from January 1st to prevent illegal French fishing in our waters.”  Retired Royal Navy admiral Sir Alan West considered it “absolutely appropriate that the Royal Navy should protect our waters if the position is that we are a sovereign state and our government has said we don’t want other nations there.”  British fishermen were “quite stormy people” that might see a “punch-up” and the necessary deployment of “some marines and things.”  Ominous signs.

The last time so much heat was expended over fishing rights between Britain and a European state was the protracted agony that came to be known as the Cod Wars.  Between the late 1940s and 1970s, Britain and Iceland waged a conflict over fisheries that threatened to bring two NATO powers into open conflict. 

Instances of conflict began with Iceland’s gaining of control over its territorial waters after 1945.  But matters took a turn for the worse with the unilateral declaration by Iceland of an exclusion zone on September 1, 1958 to prevent British trawlers from operating within 12 nautical miles off the country’s coast.

The British, with its fishing industry heavily reliant on shipping in Icelandic waters, ignored the declaration; the Icelandic coastguard asserted its claims.  The issue was not entirely one of pantomime.  Three British frigates – the HMS Eastbourne, the HMS Russell and HMS Palliser – accompanied by the HMS Hound, a minesweeper, were deployed.  To avoid the “appearance of gunboat diplomacy,” as the Guardian correspondent at the time put it, the vessels had sailed from various British ports the previous week, their movements subject to a security blackout. 

The Icelandic navy, with its eight small coastguard patrol vessels, promised an aggressive response, intending to fire into the bridge of any trawler coming within the twelve-mile limit, having refused to heed a shot across the bows.  British trawlers were harried and boarded.

In 1973, Iceland extended the zone to 50 miles, which again saw the deployment of British frigates as protection for the trawlers.  In 1976, the distance had been extended to 200 miles.  It took sessions, mediated through NATO, for the two countries to finally come to agreement.  The British were permitted to keep 24 trawlers within the 200 mile area, limiting their catch to 50,000 tons.  Britain’s fisheries were already in poor shape; these arrangements precipitated a dramatic loss of fishing jobs in such ports as Grimsby, Hull and Fleetwood.

This time, the European fishing industry risks getting a mauling in the event of a no-deal.  French fishing grounds risk being depleted by the vessels of other European states.  Prices of fish in Europe will also rise.  Tom Premereur, director of the Vlaamse Visveilingen fishing auction market in Ostend, is concerned about Belgium’s share of the catch.  Up to 54% is netted in British waters. “We would lose a lot of fish, certainly the high value fish.”  The gruesome spectacle of territorial aggression, ruined fish stocks and environmental degradation seems, at least as things stand, imminent.

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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]

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

Fatem a hardy woman from a remote Moroccan mountain village is sent on a frivolous mission to the city where she is innocently swept up in a street protest. She finds herself in police custody with no ID and unable to convey what she was doing among the protestors. Six-months pregnant, possibly affected by tear gas from the street riot, she miscarries while being interrogated as a potential political agitator.

The next scene seems to offers redemption: we find Fatem comfortably settled in a hospital bed attended by two social workers. But it soon becomes clear they’re actually from an opposition party with a self-interest in her ‘case’. They abandon Fatem after she doesn’t accept their conditional help. By now the media has been alerted and our reluctant hero, still in the hospital, her bed now bedecked with flowers, is next subjected to an on-camera interview.

Fatem neither protests nor offers the right response to journalists’ attempt to again use the forlorn villager for their own agenda, namely to point to government neglect of rural development. They also suggest that wealthier villagers are exploiting Fatem– that her own home, however dilapidated, could be taken from her. At this point Fatem fights back.

Fatem is played by Sanaa Akroud, also the film’s director. Akroud was in the acclaimed 2011 Egyptian film “Scheherazade”.  In “Myopia” she is brilliant as our unsettlingly passive villager, whether inquiring about a letter from an absent husband or when wandering innocently through the city in search of an eyeglass shop. Akroud’s talent climaxes in the penultimate scene where Fatem, under relentless pressure from the journalist, invokes whatever security her humble home provides. In a lengthy monologue, finally pushing back on the sweet-talking city culprits, she liberates herself– at least temporarily. Fatem’s explosion in defense of her personal integrity might remind some viewers of a parallel experience in their own lives.

This story is sure to resonate with many American viewers learning about the depth of racial disparities and the flaws in U.S. democracy where agents of ‘liberal’ society and opposition parties once again reach out to Black and Brown Americans and immigrants with shallow promises of equality and reform.

“Myopia”, perfectly paced for the message it carries, is a beautifully executed film. It is ideal for classroom discussions and for community dialogues. Its U.S. premier is sponsored by the African Diaspora International Film Festival.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Barbara Nimri Aziz.

B. Nimri Aziz is an anthropologist and journalist who’s worked in Nepal since 1970, and published widely on peoples of the Himalayas. A new book on Nepali rebel women is forthcoming. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research. 

Barbara has just released her new e-book entitled Yogmaya & Durga Devi: Rebel Women of Nepal. Click here for details.

Featured image is from the author

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Pakistan and the Question of Recognizing Israel

December 14th, 2020 by Aqib Sattar

The changing geopolitical dynamics in the Middle East have re-opened an old debate in Pakistan; should Pakistan re-examine its policy towards Israel? This is not the first time that Pakistanis are discussing this issue pertaining to the recognition of Israel, it has been done before during the Benazir and Musharraf modernization eras.

The Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan has made it clear that his country will not recognize Israel until there is a viable and independent Palestinian state that is acceptable to Palestinians. However, while there are some secular and liberal fractions in Pakistan who support the recognition of Israel as a state, a majority of the population is not in favour of recognizing the Zionist state of Israel. 

In 1896, Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism wrote a book “The Jewish State” in which he categorically mentioned that they had to drive out the indigenous population from Palestine. Even those who sympathize with the Jews due to the holocaust must understand that this book had been written a long time ago. Therefore, we must be mindful that the holocaust had nothing to do with Palestine.

This does not stop here. The first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, told the UN that Israel would only accept the partition plan as a down payment for the rest of Palestine, and they will eventually occupy the entire Palestine.

Moreover, the current Prime Minister of Israel, Netanyahu, recently stated while losing the elections that ‘I will never allow the Palestinian state as far as I remain in power,’ and hence, he won the election. Thus, the illegal expansionist agenda of Israel has existed throughout history.

There are some people who believe that Pakistan should not view this issue through binaries, but from the broader perspective of the regional and major powers that are allies of Israel. The normalization of relations of a few Arab States with Israel and the recent secret meeting of MBS with Netanyahu at Neom on the Red Sea are considered to be major developments for pressuring Pakistan to recognize Israel.

These developments though should be viewed from the current geopolitical dynamics of the Middle East where the USA, Israel and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia all have a common interest – containing and isolating Iran while pressuring it to the maximum.

Pakistan is the only country in the Muslim world which possesses nuclear weapons and has an important geostrategic location, and it must adopt a balanced approach in its foreign policy tools.

Pakistan has a very clear stance just like its founding father Quaid-e-Azam M. Ali Jinnah. He said, ‘Pakistan will never recognize Israel until Palestinians are not given their rights and there is no just settlement.’

Further, Dr. Allama Muhammad Iqbal was also among the earlier supporters and advocates of the Palestinians problems and he was even he was prepared to go to jail for any issue. Therefore, Pakistan being a Muslim country, should not accept Israel at any cost.

How can we accept Israel when our Muslim brothers and sisters are facing grave human rights violations at the hands of the apartheid state? Why should we accept Israel?

What have they done for world peace, human rights and particularly for Palestine? NOTHING! Instead, they have increased the misery and suffering of the Palestinians through basic human rights violations, including regular killings and bombings, increasing illegal settlements and expanding their evil expansionist agenda. Islam and justice are not separate, but intertwined, and the unjust authority of Israel is committing crimes against humanity.

Furthermore, if we view this issue through a moral perspective, we see that the issue is not about being a Muslim, Christian and or a Jew, but it’s about the principles of justice and standing with the oppressed rather than the oppressor. Therefore, justice demands that Pakistan should not accept Israel until and unless the Palestinians are given rights of self-governance and autonomy.

The Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, admires Nelson Mandela and quotes him as an example of how South Africa rid itself of the apartheid state. Those who suffered in South Africa say that the Palestinians are facing a worse situation.

Even Nelson Mandela made it clear that “Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of Palestinians.”

The Palestine solidarity BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement is very strong against Israel and forcing it to change the model of the pariah state of the Zionist model.

This is what was adopted by the resistance in South Africa to dismantle it. Moreover, Albert Einstein who was Jewish himself opposed the creation of a Jewish state based on the Zionist model, and also refused to become the Prime Minister of Israel. In fact, he wrote in New York Times that he had nothing to do with the Zionists, and history will condemn all of those who sided with grave human rights violations.

There is no denying the fact that Israel is a colonial settler state that is increasing its illegal settlements on Palestinian land, which is completely in violation of the UNO resolutions. Until 1967, Israel had captured78% of Palestinian land and their land has been shrinking with every passing day.

The world though is not taking any notice of this because the sole superpower, the USA, is standing behind Israel and considers it the only reliable partner in the entire Middle East. The so-called Muslim Leaders are also not doing anything for the plight of the poor Palestinians.

Instead of pressuring Israel collectively from the platform of OIC, the Arab states are joining the Israeli camp separately. Thus, OIC must be fully functional to raise the voice of the voiceless Palestinians and the reason for which it was established.

If we look into history, we see that efforts were made in 2002 as the Arab League Initiative. The Arabs had declared that they would recognize Israel as its pre-1967 borders, and if some adjustments were required, they could be reached through negotiations and the refugee problem be dealt with. At that time, the President of the US, Bush also praised the initiative, but Israel rejected the proposal and asked for conditions that were possible to implement. Similarly, PLO Yasir Arafat also accepted the US’ conditions of renouncing terrorism and recognizing Israel, and we all know what Israel did in response.

Both Palestine and Indian held Kashmir are in a parallel situation. India is adopting the playbook of Israel – military brutalism and now settler colonialism. What moral grounds will Pakistan have in condemning India in the case of Kashmir, if Pakistan accepts Israel? None!

It will just amount to hypocrisy and double standards. Justice cannot be denied for too long and this is what history teaches us. For instance, France occupied Algeria for almost 130 years, and subsequently the French were driven out by the Algerians. Thus, oppression and injustice do not remain permanently. This is high time that progressive voices become stronger and resistance movements regain momentum against apartheid state of Israel. Normalization of ties with Israel without any solution could further alienate Palestine and aggravate the instability in the Middle East. Hence, if there is acceptance of Israel, it must be on the basis of a mutual solution based on the 1967 borders, and that is only 42% of Palestine. If we cannot accept this, then shame on us!

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Aqib Sattar is a graduate in International Relations from the National Defence University, Islamabad, and is currently a Research Associate in Middle Eastern Affairs.

There is no evidence that Lynda Thyer is a witch – quite the opposite – but she is the victim of a witch-hunt. If you do not know who Lynda Thyer is, you are not alone, especially if you live north of the capital. In August 2019 she was ensconced in the overcrowded French Fleury-Mérogis prison on the outskirts of Paris having been extradited from the UK with little, if any, questioning from mainstream media, the legal profession or parliament. Today she remains in prison, a vulnerable woman, sick and, according to family sources, undergoing physical and psychological torture from prison authorities.

Quietly extradited from the UK, no case has been brought against her, and she is about to spend her second Christmas in jail. If France and the UK were impoverished states run by dictators this gross mistreatment of a scientist might be better understood.

Lynda Thyer – Lyn to those who know her – is a UK national and not wanted on any charges in the UK. So what did she do wrong? Her supporters claim, and there is a much evidence to back up this claim, that she and other clinicians, successfully treated people suffering from terminal cancer, for whom conventional medicine could do no more. There have had further successes with other ailments using a treatment of GcMAF, a blood-derived protein which activates macrophage cells to fight off infections and diseases. It occurs naturally in the bodies of all healthy people.

Thyer is a scientist with a background in biomedical research. She has co-authored papers in the field of GcMAF research. These cover the protein’s effectiveness in various cancer studies, its benefits in autism, Lyme disease, multiple sclerosis and syphilis – to name a few ailments it has been used to treat. It is far removed from being pseudo-science.

In 2016 Earth Foods of Southbourne was forced to take GcMAF off its shelves by the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority). In a letter to the editor of the Bournemouth Daily Echo, Lynda Thyer, defending the health food store, pointed to research papers by Chinese scientists which showed cancer tumours in mice reduced 90% in three weeks using GcMAF. She then cited one of her own co-authored papers “where we show patient scans of tumours reduced 25 per cent in a week with GcMAF.”

Her letter finishes:

“I am fed up with the BBC, Cancer Research UK, and the MHRA not acknowledging the scientific evidence for GcMAF, particularly when so many of us have put decades of hard work into providing a plethora of evidence.”

In this day and age to challenge autocratic establishments of the deep state, like the BBC and the MHRA, regardless of whether they have been perpetually hounding you, can prove costly – and so it proved for Lynda Thyer. While she has been in prison, in a foreign country, a country in which she did not originally know the language – but may know some now – her already fragile health has deteriorated badly. During a brief respite she told friends she went on hunger-strike because of the quality of the food in prison.

The precise nature of why she is being held is akin to that of Julian Assange, in that the authorities appear to have taken her out of society while building a case against her. Unlike Assange she has already been extradited. On 10 May 2019 she appeared before High Court Judge, Justice Supperstone, to answer a European Arrest Warrant (EAW).

This arrest warrant was, it is claimed, identical to one issued to her business partner and CEO of Immuno Biotech, David Noakes, who had already faced similar charges in 2017 in the UK. Noakes was imprisoned for 15 months after appearing at Southwark Crown Court on 1 November 2017. After five months he was released from Wandsworth prison. There was a massive error in the EAW in that Thyer was accused of money-laundering to the tune of £11 million, when in actuality the sum in question was a rather more modest £11,411 (and five pence). Justice Supperstone corrected this error but still chose to grant the extradition.

Nine charges are contained in the warrant, including: swindles as a gang, illegal exercises of the profession of pharmacist, marketing or distribution without authorisation of products defined as medicine and the like. The framework list was ticked to swindle. It really needs stressing that these are accusations used to get a UK citizen who had aggravated Big Pharma extradited on charges which have never been made against her in this country.

From the extradition many details are quite sketchy making it difficult to strike a true balance between the blatant bias of bodies funded by corporate pharmaceutical companies, like the MHRA, its EU counterpart, the European Medicine Agency (EMA) and UK and French government Departments of Health; as opposed to the more innocent bias of Lynda Thyer’s supporters. Unlike David Noakes no case was ever made against her by the MHRA even in the UK on any of the counts listed in the EAW, despite investigations that had gone on for three years.

The way in which intertwined powerful establishment organisations, which purport to have the best health interests of the public at heart, can completely destroy a dedicated scientist without any remorse is beyond credibility. The wellbeing of Lynda Thyer had been jeopardised long before her unwilling removal to Paris. The authorities, including medical authorities, knew about her delicate state of health, yet they still, not only allowed the mistreatment to continue, but were complicit in her abduction and extradition.

Big Pharma has a history of interference aware that challenges from new discoveries are likely to have a negative impact on the extremely lucrative markets for conventional medicines. Individuals can make up their own minds whether the MHRA and EMA together with their main sources of funding, that is, large pharmaceutical companies and government departments, perceived a better prospect of achieving their aims through the French penal system which tends to administer longer sentences. This action also separates the accused from friends, supporters and legal team.

Big Pharma has everything to gain by silencing the partners of Immuno Biotech and in the process destroying their GcMAF products – arguably a serious and safer alternative to corporate pharmaceutical products.

Between June and the beginning of August, 2019, the British authorities bundled a very sick Lynda Thyer off to France purportedly to face charges outlined in the aforementioned EAW. Take note that these are the same authorities that are currently approving untested vaccines for use on the whole UK populace in an experiment without precedent.

Events as they happened

A month before the hearing at which Justice Supperstone condemned her to extradition, Lynda Thyer’s father died, leaving Lynda as the main carer for her mother. Her mother is wheelchair-bound and a sufferer from osteoporosis and osteoarthritis. She is unlikely to walk again. The EAW hearing went ahead as planned regardless with a grief-stricken Lynda Thyer facing charges which are allegedly identical to those upon which David Noakes was charged.

For some peculiar reason Lynda Thyer’s friends arranged a Zoom session which took place on 6 June 2019 to discuss the benefits of GcMAF. This session was supposed to be a conversation between Lynda Thyer and Neelu Berry, a pharmacist, and supporter. It was chaired by D. Ramola, another supporter. In essence it reveals a broken woman whose only immediate concern was the very realistic threat of her forthcoming extradition to France. Compare this with the articulate and ebullient Lynda Thyer who thirty months previously in Moscow was giving talks about the benefits of GcMAF in the treatment of terminal pancreatic cancer and advances in GcMAF protocol. Clearly, her state of health after approval of the EAW was extremely fragile as can be seen by what happened next.

Two days after the Zoom session, on Saturday 8 June 2019, Lynda Thyer’s heart stopped beating and she was resuscitated in Truro. Here was a woman grieving for her father, in hardly any state of physical or mental health to even care for herself let alone her incapacitated mother. Here was a woman in whom the MHRA had found no criminal activity, a woman condemned by the Honourable Mr Justice Michael Alan Supperstone, hounded by the British authorities and Kent police in a determined and concerted effort to despatch her to a foreign country, to be locked up and persecuted in prison in a land in which she could not understand the language. The magnanimous heart of the British justice system knows no mercy.

Events following Lynda’s resuscitation were even more incredible. Regardless of her delicate health Kent Border Police had furnished her with train-tickets (by email) which gave her the option of going to Dover on 10 June 2019 or Heathrow on 11 June 2019. She was instructed to make her presence known to an “agent of Kent Police” at the airport services. She had another collapse on the journey from Cornwall to Heathrow which may have accounted for there apparently being nobody to meet her at the airport.

A condition of her bail was that she kept her phone on all the time. From the airport she took an underground train some thirty miles to the house of Neelu Berry’s deceased sister, to stay there in the company of Neelu Berry. Shortly after her arrival an ambulance pulled up at the address and there is video footage of two females in paramedic uniform who knocked the door persistently for a long period. There was also a car in close vicinity with its engine running and lights on, the ownership of which is unknown. The ambulance on this occasion was not requested, and it seems Lynda and her supporters are under the impression that this was an assassination squad, since they had not requested an ambulance.

Under normal circumstances a “hit-squad” would be considered a ludicrous idea, and taking an objective view, after watching the footage, it seems unlikely to my mind that it was anything but an ambulance crew. Nevertheless, in Lynda Thyer’s position, most other people, including me, would probably have jumped to the same conclusion. Four years earlier a clinic in Switzerland run by David Noakes was raided and closed down. Shortly afterwards a US doctor who received GcMAF supplies from Immuno Biotech, Dr Jeff Bradstreet, MD, who was treating children with autism, had his premises raided and many believe he was murdered the next day. Regarding the ambulance the questions still remain as to who called it; and why.

The stress Lynda Thyer had been put under led to more collapses and more emergency hospitalisations. Callously choosing to ignore her state of health on 24 July 2019 Cornwall Police, without a warrant, seized her at Penzance Railway Station and took her to Bronzefield Prison near Heathrow Airport. They also took her passport from her. On 8 August she was ferried across the Channel from Dover and since has never stepped foot on English soil.

Eventually the EAW was revoked because, against French Law, it had been issued by a Prosecutorial Judge, and not an independent judge. Lynda Thyer was released but the celebrations did not last long, not even a week. Big Pharma appears to have a mission to stop scientists working on alternative medicines that prove to be beneficial. Very soon the English scientist was back in Fleury-Mérogis prison where she spent Christmas and the long, dark winter.

On 18 March this year she was released again when her counsel, Chloe Amoux, argued that she had been held in custody for too long without a case being brought against her. Consider that for a moment: a sick woman extradited by British authorities and imprisoned for nine months without a case being brought against her. No wonder the UK is castigated for such a deplorable record for the liberal granting of extraditions without being able to secure them from other countries which are much more concerned with protecting their nationals from extradition.

Being confused and distressed – perhaps as a result of what has happened before and of what prison can do to a scientific researcher, or perhaps because she had already been released once and shortly afterwards imprisoned just before Christmas 2019 – instead of abiding by the court’s directive that she stay in France she tried to purchase a train-ticket back to the UK. Remember, one of her defence arguments opposing extradition from the UK was her role as a carer for her mother. Following her attempt to get home she was re-arrested and is now back in prison a third time.

Simply for trying to help people with terminal cancer and other illnesses she has been extradited. Yet GcMAF research and its benefits is there for all to see. Despite a significant amount of peer-reviewed evidence the MHRA in the UK and the FDA in the USA have still not recognised GcMAF as a proprietary medicine. Other countries have. Considering the way the MHRA is allowing untested Bfizer BioNTech vaccinces to be plunged into the arms of unsuspecting volunteers when the recipe is unknown shows for what it is the blatant discrimination and victimisation of Lynda Thyer.

SARS-COV-2 vaccines, produced by major pharmaceutical companies, have had scant pre-clinical trials, no peer reviews and have been rushed through standard procedures that normally take at least six years to complete. The irony is stark. As Lynda Thyer deteriorates in prison trials are currently taking place in Ukraine and Italy using “third generation” GcMAF in treating Covid-19 patients. The product being used comes from Hong Kong. US studies also suggest GcMAF strengthens the immune system of vulnerable people susceptible to COVID-19.

There is nothing wrong with your common sense if you see this as a blatant attempt by Big Pharma to destroy and remove without good cause a dedicated scientist together with a product likely to be of benefit for humankind.

Lynda Thyer’s friends have put together a petition.

You might get a positive response by writing to your MP and explaining the wrongful imprisonment. By all means link to this blog. It is an act of unbelieveable negligence that our MPs are allowing Lynda Thyer to spend another Christmas in a French prison far from her loved ones and friends while they have approved pumping of a suspect vaccine into the arms of the UK populace, a vaccine the long-term effects of which are unknown.

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Mark Crispin Miller is a tenured professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communications at New York University and has been on the faculty there for more than 20 years. He has been a vocal commentator on — and critic of — a broad range of topics, from NYU’s plans to redevelop the Village to the American political system. Professor Miller has long been outspoken. Now, he finds himself under investigation for his controversial course content and protected extramural expression on his personal blog.

This semester, Miller taught a section of his NYU propaganda course. In September, a class session focused on campaigns promoting mask-wearing as a means of limiting the spread of the novel coronavirus. After a student took issue with some of Miller’s in-class statements and the sources he cited, she took to Twitter calling for him to be fired. Miller’s department chair, Rodney Benson, replied to the student’s posts and indicated that the department had made her concerns a priority.

On Oct. 6, Miller responded on his personal blog, outlining the material he shared in his course, noting the criticism he received, and expressing concerns — which FIRE shares — about the threat to academic freedom posed by investigations into course content. He also shared a petition asking NYU to affirm his right to academic freedom, which has garnered more than 17,000 signatures.

Then, on Oct. 21, several faculty members of the media department penned a letter to Dean Jack H. Knott and Provost Katherine Fleming calling on them “to publicly support the NYU community and undertake an expedited review . . . of Professor Miller’s intimidation tactics, abuses of authority, aggressions and microaggressions, and explicit hate speech, none of which are excused by academic freedom and the First Amendment protections.” However, the letter itself contained no specific allegations of policy violations, focusing instead on “the way in which [Miller] engages discussion around controversial views and non-evidence based arguments”; his petition, which they characterize as an “email campaign against the department”; and others’ negative responses to the student’s criticism of Miller’s course.

On Oct. 29, Dean Knott launched an investigation into Miller based on the letter.

While faculty members are free to express criticism of their fellow faculty, administrators must not investigate faculty without credible allegations of policy violations. These investigations lead to uncertainty about what kinds of activity and expression may subject faculty to discipline, creating an impermissible chilling effect on teaching and expression. Further, while the media faculty members’ criticism is likely protected expression, it’s unwise for faculty to align themselves with administrators against another faculty member’s academic freedom at a time when calls for faculty to be terminated are coming from all angles.

Contrary to the faculty members’ assertion in their letter, Miller’s teaching and extramural expression are squarely protected by his right to academic freedom, and he cannot be held responsible for the behavior of unknown third parties online.

NYU makes strong promises to its faculty that they enjoy academic freedom — including the freedom to teach. These are laudable promises that protect Miller and all NYU faculty. On Nov. 13, FIRE wrote to NYU to call the university’s attention to this promise, as well as to its legal obligations to adhere to promises it makes to students and faculty, and to ask the university to end its investigation into Miller immediately. NYU failed to respond by our Nov. 20 deadline, and the investigation into Miller remains ongoing.

NYU’s commitment to academic freedom encompasses a broad range of course content that serves “a legitimate pedagogical purpose.” Miller’s discussion of mask efficacy and COVID-19 — and reference to additional sources students could consult — is both timely and pedagogically relevant to his course on propaganda. And Miller’s students, who are adults, are free to come to their own conclusions based on the material presented in class, their own views, and additional sources. This kind of student engagement with class material and different viewpoints, not an investigation by administrators, is the appropriate response to what Miller’s colleagues allege to be the presentation of “non-evidence based arguments” in class.

Further, Miller’s blog defending himself does not amount to unprotected expression. As the Wisconsin Supreme Court indicated in McAdams v. Marquette University — a case remarkably similar to Miller’s, in which a faculty member sued his employer after he was disciplined for a blog post criticizing a student — extramural expression such as a personal blog post rarely ever falls outside the protections of academic freedom.

FIRE asks NYU again — this time publicly — to end its investigation into Miller’s protected expression immediately and uphold its promises that faculty maintain their academic freedom rights.

You can read FIRE’s letter to NYU here.

Also, you can sign the petition here.

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An investigation this week identified polyethylene glycol (PEG) as the likely reason two people in the UK suffered anaphylaxis after receiving Pfizer’s COVID vaccine. In September, CHD Chairman RFK, Jr. warned the FDA that PEG in COVID vaccines could lead to severe allergic reactions.

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On Dec. 2, Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) became the first in the world to approve a COVID-19 vaccine developed by Germany’s BioNTech and Pfizer.

A mass vaccination campaign that targeted frontline workers to receive the vaccine began on Dec. 8. Within 24 hours of launching the campaign, MHRA acknowledged two reports of anaphylaxis and one report of a possible allergic reaction.

Reuters reported late yesterday afternoon that an investigation into the anaphylactic reactions by MHRA has identified polyethylene glycol, or PEG, as the likely culprit.

Imperial College London’s Paul Turner, an expert in allergy and immunology who has been advising the MHRA on its revised guidance, told Reuters: “The ingredients like PEG which we think might be responsible for the reactions are not related to things which can cause food allergy. Likewise, people with a known allergy to just one medicine should not be at risk.”

It was also reported that PEG, which helps to stabilize the shot, is not in other types of vaccines.

The statements by Turner that “PEG is not in other types of vaccines” and that people with allergies to “just one medicine should not be at risk” are a failed attempt to provide false assurances and are patently untrue.

Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech and Arcturus Therapeutics COVID vaccines all utilize a never-before-approved messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, an experimental approach designed to turn the body’s cells into viral protein-making factories. This technology involves the use of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) that encapsulate the mRNA to protect them from degradation and promote cellular uptake.

The LNP formulations in the three COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are “PEGylated,” meaning that the vaccine nanoparticles are coated with a synthetic, non-degradable and increasingly controversial PEG.

COVID mRNA vaccines are not the only vehicle for PEG involvement in COVID-19 vaccine production. Researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute report developing a process for COVID-19 vaccine production to purify virus particles at “high yield.” The process involves adding PEG to a virus-containing liquid and passing the liquid through membranes.

On Sept. 25, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman and chief legal counsel for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), notified the Steven Hahn, director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Dr. Peter Marks director of FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research and Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of the serious and possibly life-threatening anaphylactic potential of PEG.

CHD received the following response from the FDA, on Dec. 2, but has not yet received a response from Fauci.

In earlier communications with Moderna scientists regarding the controversial use of PEG in the company’s COVID-19 vaccine due to the potential for life-threatening anaphylaxis and need for pre-screening for PEG antibodies prior to vaccine administration, they insisted that the existence of PEG antibodies was purely hypothetical and underserving of concern:

“Pre-screening populations based on hypothesized biomarkers, such as anti-PEG antibodies, is not a strategy currently employed in our clinical trials.”

Given the recent evidence of PEG anaphylaxis in Pfizer mRNA vaccine recipients, I wonder if FDA and vaccine manufacturers will now reconsider their position.

An extensive review of PEG therapeutics, published in 2013, documented adverse effects of PEGylation and questioned the wisdom behind the continued use of PEG in drug development. The authors concluded that “the accumulating evidence documenting the detrimental effects of PEG on drug delivery make it imperative that scientists in this field break their dependence on PEGylation.”

The statement by Turner that “people with a known allergy to just one medicine should not be at risk,” is also not true.

A 2018 study, “Immediate Hypersensitivity to Polyethylene Glycols and Polysorbates: More Common Than We Have Recognized” reports there are more than 1,000 products, including prescription drugs, that contain PEG. (See chart below for detailed descriptions of PEG containing drugs.)

The decision to allow people with other medication allergies to receive vaccines that utilize PEG in the manufacturing or delivery of the vaccine is a very risky proposition — especially given that Pfizer has said people with a history of severe adverse allergic reactions to vaccines or the candidate’s ingredients were excluded from their late stage trials.

We have no idea what the incidence of allergy or anaphylactic reactions will be once Pfizer begins global distribution of the vaccine, without such exclusions.

A 2016 study reported detectable and sometimes high levels of anti-PEG antibodies in approximately 72% of contemporary human samples and about 56% of historical specimens from the 1970s through the 1990s. The population’s increased exposure to PEG-containing products since the 1990’s makes it natural to assume that anti-PEG antibodies will continue to be widespread.

As approval of PEGylated mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 occurs, the uptick in exposure to injected PEG products will be unprecedented and potentially disastrous.

While four out of five doctors regularly prescribe PEGylated drugs, only one out of five are aware of the potential for anti-PEG antibody responses. And only a third even know that PEG is in the drugs that they are prescribing.

A Vanderbilt University researcher agrees that there is a widespread lack of recognition that PEG hypersensitivity is possible, much less that it manifests on a regular basis. While it has been recommended to screen patients for anti-PEG antibody levels “prior to administration of therapeutics containing PEG” such testing is currently only available in research settings.

In a declaration effective Feb. 4, the Secretary of Health and Human Services invoked the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act) and declared Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) to be a public health emergency warranting liability protections for covered countermeasures, including vaccines.

The fact that the FDA has abdicated its responsibility for assuring the safety of COVID vaccines to vaccine  manufacturers means we are on our own to study the science, and weigh the benefits and risks of all drugs and vaccines.

CHD will continue to monitor this important safety issue in an effort to keep you well informed on the science and public policies surrounding COVID-19 vaccine development.

Descriptions of PEG containing drugs:

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Lyn Redwood, R.N., M.S.N., is a Nurse Practitioner who became involved in autism research and advocacy when her son was diagnosed with autism.

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Syrian authorities on Sunday found a quantity of weapons and ammunition, including Israeli-made weapons as well as a drone left behind by terrorists in Syria’s southern region, SANA reporter said on Sunday, citing a source from authorities.

The source told SANA that the authorities’ cooperation with the Syrian Arab Army units in the country’s southern region resulted in finding a huge quantity of light, medium and heavy weapons and ammunition, including Israeli made ones, in addition to a drone, left behind by terrorists before their defeat in that area.

The seized weapons included automatic rifles, snipers, 23 mm and 12.7 mm machine guns, bombs, shoulder-fired missiles, RPGs in addition to Israeli-made weapons and some 300 boxes of bullets.

Cooperation between the Syrian army and the concerned authorities continues with the aim of clearing the liberated areas from explosive devices and mines left by terrorists before their defeat, the source pointed out.

The quantity and quality of the seized weapons indicates the huge support that terrorist organizations have received from operations rooms run by Western and regional intelligence services with the aim of prolonging the crisis in Syria.

During the mopping up operations carried out by the Syrian Arab Army in the areas liberated from terrorism, dozens of tunnels as well as depots of weapons and ammunition, including American and Israeli-made weapons, and large quantities of logistical equipment, were found.

These operations also resulted in finding command and control rooms that were used by terrorists to attack safe areas and positions of the Syrian Arab Army.

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The tendency of the American establishment to treat communists like international criminals is borne of a desire to fiercely police them. Through genocidal sanctions and covert agendas to exclude them from the diplomatic order, Washington wilfully, knowingly deprives communist countries of basic western privileges, ratifying an international caste system.

The US treats the representatives of experiments in socialism in the same way it treats terrorists, denying them humane, reasonable treatment. The global dictatorship of US capitalism represents a return to the dark ages, with the “extreme centre” – advocating war abroad and austerity at home – exerting the same power over public thinking as the centralised power of the church.

The war on left wing activism in the colonies has often turned bloody and violent, in the US empire’s cynical, craven attempts to stop socialism from advancing to a global consensus. Such interventions can be seen as an attack on the natural order of creation of proletarian solidarity. The CIA ruthlessly suppresses national liberation movements as forcefully as it opposes civil rights domestically, expanding its sphere of influence across the globe as a force for coups and counter revolution. Revealing as a myth that capitalism supports the infrastructure of freedom, it does not allow for fair competition between competing ideologies. Extra-governmental agencies deploy their vast resources to globally suppress alternatives to the hegemonic model of US capitalism.

The red scare is profitable for the military.

An enemy is needed to justify the existence of the defence and intelligence sectors (and this is why they view peace as an existential threat.) The defence and intelligence lobbies mobilise public fear to manipulate the citizenry for craven ends. They cynically exploit the earnest sentiments of the people to drive up conformity to their narrow, self-serving, imperialist agendas. Their power base requires for the nation to enter sleepless war, and vast resources are deployed to absorb citizens into regulated modes of thought and behaviour that acquiesce in the establishment’s war.

The Cold War has left nothing but a legacy of irrational, inhumane nuclear armament. The common wisdom that it’s better to invest in public services than lethal weapons that pose an existential threat to humanity is maligned as dangerous extremism. All the expertise of science is coopted by politics, and all the evidence is that the academy is enlisted to serve the nuclear war civilisation. After the collapse of the Cold War in 1991 the US military industrial complex entered an existential crisis. It had to seek out new enemies to justify its existence. 9/11 gifted the military industrial complex with a new foe: theocratic Islam.

It is time to demystify communism. Corporate propaganda and capitalist psyops have been deployed to portray it as degenerate barbarism, but in all truth it is an expression of humanity, which has historical roots.

While its practice is diverse and often contradictory (e.g. China, Vietnam, Cambodia ), “Communist thought” nonetheless constitutes a critical, freethinking alternative to the orthodoxies of western market fundamentalism.

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Megan Sherman is an independent citizen journalist, postgraduate analyst and civil liberties and peace campaigner. She is enlisted in the campaign to liberate Julian Assange and has strong ethical beliefs in the philosophy of the first amendment. 

Invisible Ink Could Reveal Whether Kids Have Been Vaccinated

December 14th, 2020 by Karen Weintraub

Excerpt of Scientific American article  published on December 18, 2019.

See Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s analysis on the digital vaccine passport for children 

Keeping track of vaccinations remains a major challenge in the developing world, and even in many developed countries, paperwork gets lost, and parents forget whether their child is up to date. Now a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers has developed a novel way to address this problem: embedding the record directly into the skin.

Along with the vaccine, a child would be injected with a bit of dye that is invisible to the naked eye but easily seen with a special cell-phone filter, combined with an app that shines near-infrared light onto the skin. The dye would be expected to last up to five years, according to tests on pig and rat skin and human skin in a dish.

The system—which has not yet been tested in children—would provide quick and easy access to vaccination history, avoid the risk of clerical errors, and add little to the cost or risk of the procedure, according to the study, published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine.

Read full Scientific American article here.

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Featured image: The quantum dots after being administered in the skin of rodents. Credit: K.J. McHugh et al. Science Translational Medicine (2019)

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The past four years of US President Trump’s time in office were very challenging for China, ye the country managed to not only survive, but even thrive despite the American leader’s best efforts to thwart its rise. It’s important to study how the People’s Republic managed to succeed in spite of all the obstacles that Trump placed in its path. The resultant insight will show the world that China’s leadership accurately understood the elements of the American challenge and accordingly took the most effective measures to counter them.

Chinese-American relations over the past four years are most popular described against the context of Trump’s trade war, which he decided to wage with the intent of crippling what he wrongly believed was the economic foundation of China’s rise. It’s true that bilateral trade played an enormous role in China’s modern-day development over the past four decades, but the country sought to diversify from its erstwhile dependence on this for pragmatic reasons through the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) that Chinese President Xi unveiled in 2013.

While Trump did make some attempts to obstruct BRI, he focused much more on trying to directly harm the domestic Chinese economy out of the mistaken belief that any externally provoked destabilization thereof through the trade war would catalyze a chain reaction through the global Silk Road network. This was perhaps the most fundamental flaw in his strategy (apart from the obvious one of even waging such an economic war in the first place) because it proves that he completely underestimated the strength of the Silk Roads.

Trump also took a while to realize that China’s economy had diversified quite a lot throughout the past decade and that it was therefore capable of absorbing the artificial shock that the trade war was intended to produce. Once this became unquestionably obvious to him, he tried to expand the trade war into the technological sphere by attempting to curtail the activities of companies such as Huawei, TikTok, and WeChat, albeit to little avail. Those companies are giants in their respective fields and cannot be easily contained.

Again, as the case study of Huawei shows, China had already diversified its economy through the establishment of dozens of new foreign partnerships over the past decade to the point where a system of complex interdependence between the People’s Republic and the rest of the world had already started to take shape. The simple truth is that everyone increasingly needs one another and that only the US and a few of its closest allies are the odd countries left out of this mix due to their increasingly rogue behavior.

As global trends began to suddenly shift in the anti-globalization direction with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump was unexpectedly filled with false hope that he might finally dismantle the Silk Roads and their associated supply chains. Alas, this wasn’t meant to be since the Chinese economy recovered earlier than anyone else’s and subsequently became the engine for revitalizing the global economy. Understanding its responsibility to the rest of the world, China unveiled its new development paradigm of dual circulation.

This model more effectively manages globalization processes for everyone by strengthening the complex interdependence between the Chinese economy and the rest of the world. Circulation within the Chinese domestic economy will drive more foreign direct investment into the country, which will in turn stimulate the global economy’s recovery. This isn’t just wishful thinking either but will be actively practiced in the Asia-Pacific after the recent Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) was agreed to by 15 regional states.

Lo and behold, the US found itself outside of the world’s largest trade bloc, and all because of its own counterproductive policies. By being so obsessed with crippling China’s economy, Trump was blinded to the reality that he was actually crippling America’s own. The US is now ironically just as economically isolated as it hoped that China would be by this time, and it’s no one’s fault but Trump’s. The lesson to be learned is that aggression will always backfire and that cooperation is the only way forward in today’s complex world.

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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: Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump in a file image. Image: Youtube

For those who support a truly just foreign policy comparing Canadian politicians’ reactions to protests in Hong Kong and the slightly more populous Haiti is instructive. It reveals the extent to which this country’s politicians are forced to align with the US Empire.

Despite hundreds of thousands of Canadians having close ties with both Haiti and Hong Kong, only protests in the latter seem to be of concern to politicians.

Recently NDP MP Niki Ashton and Green MP Paul Manly were attacked ferociously in Parliament and the dominant media for participating in a webinar titled “Free Meng Wanzhou”. During the hullabaloo about an event focused on Canada’s arrest of the Huawei CFO, Manly — who courageously participated in the webinar, even if his framing of the issue left much to be desired — and Ashton — who sent a statement to be read at the event but responded strongly to the backlash in an interview with the Winnipeg Free Press — felt the need to mention Hong Kong. Both the NDP (“Canada must do more to help the people of Hong Kong”) and Greens (“Echoes of Tiananmen Square: Greens condemn China’s latest assault on democracy in Hong Kong”) have released multiple statements critical of Beijing’s policy in Hong Kong since protests erupted there nearly two years ago. So have the Liberals, Bloc Québecois and Conservatives.

In March 2019 protests began against an extradition accord between Hong Kong and mainland China. Hong Kongers largely opposed the legislation, which was eventually withdrawn. Many remain hostile to Beijing, which later introduced an anti-sedition law to staunch dissent. Some protests turned violent. One bystander was killed by protesters. A journalist lost an eye after being shot by the police. Hundreds more were hurt and thousands arrested.

During more or less the same period Haiti was the site of far more intense protests and state repression. In July 2018 an uprising began against a reduction in subsidies for fuel (mostly for cooking), which morphed into a broad call for a corrupt and illegitimate president Jovenel Moïse to go. The uprising included a half dozen general strikes, including one that shuttered Port-au-Prince for a month. An October 2019 poll found that 81% of Haitians wanted the Canadian-backed president to leave.

Dozens, probably over 100, were killed by police and government agents. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other western establishment human rights organizations have all documented dozens of police killings in Haiti. More recently, Moïse has ruled by decree, sought to extend his term and to rewrite the constitution. Yet, I couldn’t find a single statement by the NDP or Greens, let alone the Liberals or Conservatives, expressing support for the pro-democracy movement in Haiti.

Even an equal number of statements from a Canadian political party would be less than adequate. Not only were the protests and repression far more significant in Haiti, the impact of a Canadian politician’s intervention is far more meaningful. Unlike in Hong Kong, the police responsible for the repression in Haiti were trained, financed and backed by Canada. The Trudeau government even gave $12.5 million to the Haitian police under its Feminist International Assistance Policy! More broadly, the unpopular president received decisive diplomatic and financial support from Ottawa and Washington. In fact, a shift in Canada/US policy towards Moïse would have led to his ouster. On the other hand, a harder Canada/US policy towards Hong Kong would have led to well … not much.

The imperial and class dynamics of Haiti are fairly straightforward. For a century Washington has consistently subjugated the country in which a small number of, largely light-skinned, families dominate economic affairs. During the past 20 years Canada has staunchly supported US efforts to undermine Haitian democracy and sovereignty.

Hong Kong’s politics are substantially more complicated. Even if one believes that most in Hong Kong are leery of Beijing’s growing influence — as I do — the end of British rule and reintegration of Hong Kong into China represents a break from a regrettable colonial legacy. Even if you take an entirely unfavorable view towards Beijing’s role there, progressive Canadians shouldn’t focus more on criticizing Chinese policy in Hong Kong than Canadian policy in Haiti.

Echoing an open letter signed by David Suzuki, Roger Waters, Linda McQuaig and 150 others and the demands of those who occupied Justin Trudeau’s office last year, the national president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, Chris Aylward, recently sent a letter to Prime Minister Trudeau critical of Canadian support for Moïse. It notes, “Canada must reassess its financial and political support to the Jovenel Moïse government, including police training, until independent investigations are conducted into government corruption in the Petrocaribe scandal and ongoing state collusion with criminal gangs.” The NDP, Greens and others should echo the call.

To prove they are more concerned with genuinely promoting human rights – rather than aligning with the rulers of ‘our’ empire – I humbly suggest that progressive Canadians hold off on criticizing Beijing’s policy towards Hong Kong until they have produced an equal number of statements critical of Canada’s role in Haiti.

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Imperialism 2.0: Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix

December 14th, 2020 by Caitlin Johnstone

The new imperialism doesn’t look like old-school ground invasions, it looks like multi-front cold wars, economic warfare, blockades and starvation sanctions, drone strikes, arming proxy militias, CIA-backed coups, sprawling tech surveillance networks, mass psyops of unprecedented sophistication and narrative management systems to facilitate them. Peace activists need to be looking in this direction, especially as the US gets a new Secretary of State who advocates this exact approach to imperialism.

Imperialism 2.0 is designed to operate so invisibly we don’t even notice it’s happening. No mass troop deployments, no flag-draped bodies flying home in planes, and (they hope) no potent antiwar movement in response to it.

In the new imperialism there are still troops deployed all over the world, but they’re there with the “permission” of the puppet regimes they installed and they exist primarily to protect the infrastructure of the invisible imperialism (so it can’t be countered with conventional warfare).

The more powerful and expansive the empire becomes, the more invisible imperialism can be. In theory it could eventually have so much control that any population which rises up against it can be silently choked off from the entire world economy and starve to death very quickly.

The US empire staged a coup in Australia to oust PM Gough Whitlam in 1975 for insisting on Australian national sovereignty, then staged another one to oust PM Kevin Rudd in 2010 for being seen as too friendly with China. US troops in Australia are therefore an illegitimate occupying force.

Our national sovereignty has been stolen to turn us into a US military/intelligence asset; nothing more than a convenient stretch of land in the Indo-Pacific to prepare for war with China. We’re a glorified airbase with kangaroos. That’s why we’ve been powerless to save Julian Assange from Washington’s clutches.

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Sanctions are the only act of war where it’s considered perfectly acceptable to deliberately target a civilian population with deadly force. They don’t favor them because they’re less deadly than bullets (they’re not), they favor them because they’re easier to sell to the public.

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We’ve all spent our lives since childhood watching Hollywood movies and TV shows about evil villains doing wicked deeds to try and rule the world yet hardly anyone ever notices that that’s exactly what the US empire is.

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What society considers a “good journalist” should be one who holds power to account, asks critical questions and reveals important information without interest in approval or conformity. Instead anyone who tries to embody these values will be attacked, smeared with an array of dismissive pejoratives, and told they’re not a journalist at all.

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The most powerful corporation in the world which openly collaborates with the most powerful government in the world is now censoring videos about election fraud in the nation with the worst election system of any western democracy.

Those who saw the mass media as the linchpin of the status quo were excited when the internet came along because of the information-democratizing effect it would have. Then they saw the same power structures which control the MSM begin working to control online information.

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Abnormalize the use of “the economy” when you’re really talking about the stock market. If you’re talking about something that can be described as “booming” while millions are facing eviction, you’re not talking about the economy. Call it “the rich man’s casino” or something.

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The rules of internet discourse say that if you don’t think nuclear-armed nations should be imperiling the world with propaganda-fueled cold war games it means you love the government of Russia and/or China and think everything they’ve ever done is awesome.

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I don’t know what species of brain worm it is that makes people think if you oppose western imperialism it means you love the governments who are being targeted by western imperialism, but it would be good if it went extinct.

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If you’re getting your information about the world from Tucker Carlson and his ilk there is a 100 percent chance that your views on China were crafted by a US government agency.

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It’s unacceptable that we live in a world with weapons that can wipe out all terrestrial life and it’s an unforgivable outrage that our rulers have simply accepted it as a given that this must continue.

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People only think China, Russia and Iran are behaving aggressively on the world stage because their blindness to western imperialist aggression makes them incapable of seeing that those nations are actually behaving defensively.

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The only thing liberals and leftists have in common is that leftists support disadvantaged groups while liberals support pretending to care about disadvantaged groups for marketing purposes. It would good if everyone stopped pretending there’s any more common ground than that.

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On a list of the things which pose an actual threat to you, “conspiracy theorists” would rank pretty close to the bottom. You’d never know this from reading the billionaire media though.

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A deeply conscious and emotionally intelligent society in which humans collaborate with each other and with their ecosystem to the benefit of all beings. Please and thank you.

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“The transformation is both symbolically and visibly expressed by the de facto appearance of the first-ever global capital. That capital city, however, is not New York, the place where the General Assembly of all nation-states periodically convenes. New York might have become the capital if the world’s new order had emerged on the basis of comprehensive collaboration among nation-states, based on the legal fiction of equal sovereignty. But such a world did not come to pass, and indeed the very notion has become an anachronism given the new realities of transnational globalization and of the historically unique scope of sovereign American power. 

And yet a global capital did emerge, not between the Hudson and East rivers but on the banks of the Potomac. Washington, D.C., is the first global political capital in the history of the world. Neither Rome nor ancient Peking—both capitals of regional empires—nor Victorian London (except perhaps in international banking) even came close to matching the concentration of global power and decision making in a few square blocks of downtown Washington. Decisions made within two overlapping, but relatively tight triangles project U.S. power worldwide and heavily influence the way globalization evolves. A line drawn from the White House to the monumental Capitol building, to the fort-like Pentagon, and then back to the White House encapsulates the triangle of power. Another line from the White House to the World Bank just a few blocks away, to the State Department, and back to the White House (thus also encompassing the International Monetary Fund and the Organization of American States) demarcates the triangle of global influenceZbigniew Brzezinskipp. 131-32, The Choice: Global Leadership or Global Domination, 2004

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Perhaps the only thing more shocking than the above quote from Zbigniew Brzezinski’s little known 2004 book is the unprecedented events of 2020 that, ostensibly, continue to defy belief. Our entire globe has been hijacked by a geopolitical earthquake to the likes the world has never seen before, a most sinister “strategic wedge of denial” plot ever devised, as we shall see.

Behind the thin label of “coronavirus-lockdown,” is a paradigm shift even greater than the first decoupling of the Bretton Woods monetary system from the gold standard on August 15, 1971, a “new global Cold War” with modern China concentrated amongst the multipolar BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South America) and the US-EU cross-Atlantic west at the crux of the conflicted sides—a global economic warfare Iron Curtain—attempting to establish the new paradigm of digital currency, artificial intelligence, identity blockchain, and biometric contact tracing as the arbiter of financial and technological world order in the 21st Century. An entire planet has been caught in the dangerous cross-roads of a geopolitical paradigm shift of the Bretton Woods monetary system into its second decoupling—Bretton Woods 3.0—precisely what the Davos World Economic Forum powers have suspiciously coined, “The Great Reset.”

The “Natural Doctrine” of Global Domination Comes to an End

Unapologetically, one of the most shocking revelations professed by the late Zbigniew K. Brzezinski in his little-known 2004 book was that American-led, cross-Atlanticist globalization—the New World Order—is the “natural doctrine of global hegemony” that grants unprecedented power and influence to the United States as the world’s first, only, and very last superpower. The hegemonic doctrine of cross-Atlanticist globalization was strictly summed up on page 96 of Brzezinski’s The Choice, stating flatly, “Acting together, America and Europe are in effect globally omnipotent. Both sides of the Atlantic know this.”

Since the very establishment of the Bretton Woods Monetary Agreement of 1944 upon the smoldering heap of the Second World War’s ashes—coronating an unprecedented lever of power upon the US dollar as sole world reserve currency of all markets, commodities, and world trade—Western Europe was quickly transformed into de facto economic and militarily occupied territory of the United States. Bretton Woods 1944 was the birth pangs of the coming Marshall Plan of 1947 and subsequent establishment of NATO in 1949, transforming Europe into a de facto US economic-military zone as the EEC (European Economic Community) by 1955—culminating from the Bilderberg Conferences of 1954-55—which led to the creation of the supranational European Union in 1993 and the widespread financial instrument known as “Eurodollars;” American dollars held and traded in European banks and beyond.

The cross-Atlantic American Century was the very neo-imperial precedent that would strip the nation-states of their hallowed sovereignty, whether in the form of paralyzing economic sanctions, or in the direct explosion of bombs. After all, independence and freedom were, merely post-WWII “abstractions” that Zbigniew Brzezinski referred to directly as the “legal fiction of equal sovereignty,” under the global governance of the Atlanticist Bretton Woods institutions—IMF, World Bank, OAS, WTO, BIS—most of which, were conveniently located in Washington, D.C., USA:

The weaker or poorer countries, and especially the most socially vulnerable components, may come to feel deprived of any direct political connection to the decision making that determines their well-being. If a national economy were to falter, nobody—not even the remote multilateral institutions (such as the WTO or IMF), not supranational organs (such as the EU), not huge global corporations and financial institutions (located in the distant cities of the world’s richer countries)—could be held to political account. For many, economic globalization could amount to political disempowerment.” (Emphasis added from p. 160)

The sheer magnitude of the plethora of shocking revelations about the inner mechanics and schematics defining transnational globalization which emanated from Washington, D.C.—the global capital of the world—that Brzezinski unveiled were simply outrageous, virtually inconceivable realities. The construct of unelected rulers—literal unseen hands—making powerful decisions that completely disempower and disenfranchise people and entire nation-states through the vehicles of international financial institutions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and even huge private, global corporations that in effect are more powerful than entire nations is beyond the pale.

On pp. 134-35 of The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership, Zbigniew Brzezinski went even further beyond the pale of the phenomena behind the “global elite” and the global capital of the world from which criminally disempowering decision making has become in effect, a world-party congress for the global elite known as the Davos World Economic Forum:

“This phenomenon is even more widespread among the international business elite and the officialdom of the large global financial institutions located in the United States. Meetings of such prestigious organizations as the Trilateral Commission (an elite North American, East Asian, and European NGO) are increasingly reminiscent of college reunions.

A concomitant but more general phenomenon is the appearance of a distinct global elite with a globalist outlook and a transnational loyalty. Fluent in English (usually in its American idiom) and using that language to conduct its business, the new global elite is characterized by high mobility, a cosmopolitan lifestyle, and a primary commitment to the workplace, typically a transnational business or financial corporation. Non-native senior executives within such firms are now common, with 20 percent of Europe’s largest companies even directed by individuals who once would have been considered foreigners. The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum has become in effect, a party congress for the new global elite: top politicians, financial tycoons, captains of commerce, media moguls, academic heavyweights, and even rock stars. That elite increasingly displays its own distinctive sense of interest, camaraderie, and identity.

This elite is fostering the emergence of a global community of shared interest in stability, prosperity, and perhaps eventually democracy. Its focus on America is a tacit acknowledgement that even a global community needs a central clearinghouse for ideas and interests, a focal point for crystallizing some form of consensus, a consequential initiative, and ultimately a sense of direction. Even if it does not entail any formal recognition of Washington’s special status as the global capital, the focus on America is a bow to the twin realities of our time, that of one nation’s power and that of transnational globalization.” (Emphasis added)

The height of the cross-Atlanticists power was 2004, the very same year Brzezinski wrote the manifesto for hegemonic, self-anointed elitist globalization in The Choice, which is clearly emitted in the language and scope of the revelations within its pages. Globally, as Brzezinski had shockingly put it on p. 148, “The level playing field is a reality only between the United States and the European Union. When the two agree, they can dictate to the entire world the rules governing global trade and finance……..Power permits America, right or wrong, to transcend any apparent inconsistency.” (Emphasis added)

When the United States of America emerged as the victor of the Cold War self-coronating itself as the sole superpower of the world achieving global hegemony, George H.W. Bush Sr. ceased to be President; he became Global Leader I under the global principality of the global capital. Bill Clinton became Global Leader II, George W. Bush became Global Leader III, Barack H. Obama became Global Leader IV, and Donald J. Trump became Global Leader V consecutively.

Just as much as the unipolar cross-Atlantic Bretton Woods monetary system dependent on and therefore dominated by the United States was a power unto itself, it was just as much an even greater danger unto itself from within. By 2008, the unipolar moment in time if not history in the post-Cold War, post-historical imperium under the global capital of the world was plunged into disarray by catastrophic leadership, and catastrophic financial collapse compounded by extreme disparity gaps of income inequality on both sides of the Atlantic during the tenure of Global Leader III. Zbigniew Brzezinski underscored the catastrophic leadership of the George W. Bush Administration and its clear implications on pp. 176, 192, 216 in his 2007 Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower:

“As Global Leader III, George W. Bush misunderstood the historical moment, and in just 5 years dangerously undermined America’s geopolitical position. In seeking to pursue a policy based on the delusion the ‘we are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,’ Bush endangered America……[A]n intelligent Global Leader IV should still be able to exploit that feeling to tap what’s left of the reservoir of good will towards America.….[I]t is essential that America’s second chance after 2008 be more successful than the first for there will be no third chance. America urgently needs to fashion a truly post-Cold War globalist foreign policy.” (Emphasis added)

Barack H. Obama became Global Leader IV only  to extend the previous administration’s catastrophic leadership creating humanitarian disasters by staging coups of entire nation states setting off an abyss of war, destruction, and chaos across North Africa the Middle East in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq in the “Arab Spring.” Eastern Europe was completely destabilized in the blatant and violent US overthrow of Ukraine in February of 2014, creating a direct confrontation with Russia and erupting a horrible civil war in Donbass bringing the threat of a major conflict-by-miscalculation in Europe that much closer.

Global Leader IV also inherited a looming financial disaster and national debt crisis that by 2011, put the US debt-to-GDP ratio over the 1oo percentile threshold. US Treasury Secretary  Timothy Geithner was pleading with members of US Congress to raise the US national debt ceiling by May 16, 2011 because of the literal apocalyptic debt default of the United States was within sight: “The longer Congress fails to act, the more we risk that investors here and around the world will lose confidence in our ability to meet our commitments and our obligations……Default by the United States is unthinkable.” (Emphasis added)

Shockwaves of the raid supposedly killing Osama bin Laden with zero physical evidence or even a mere photograph resembling his dead body came flooding across the news wires May 2, 2011 as warnings of literal US national debt default were drowned out in the background. It is of absolutely no coincidence that “the worlds most wanted man” Osama bin Laden wound up dead on the very same day US Treasury Secretary Geithner announced he had managed to push back an insolvency doomsday in a bid for time until Aug. 2, 2011 to avoid US default.

In Zbigniew Brzezinski’s final 2012 book Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power, this ugly reality was shockingly brought to light—p. 46 in Part 2, The Waning of the American Dream—that, “According to an April 2010 Brookings Institution study projecting the US debt under varied assumptions, the Obama administration’s budget would have the US national debt surpass the post-World War II high of 108.6% of GDP by 2025.” He went further revealing some direct, insider knowledge from the journal Foreign Affairs of the powerful NGO cross-Atlanticist Council on Foreign Relations on pp. 47-49:

“Given that paying for this spending trajectory would require a substantial tax increase for which as of now there is no national will, the inescapable reality is that growing national indebtedness will increase US vulnerability to the machinations of major creditor nations such as China, threaten the status of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, undermine America’s role as the world’s preeminent economic model and, in turn, its leadership in such organizations such as the G-20, World Bank, and IMF, and limit its ability to improve itself domestically and, at some point even, to raise the capital required to fight necessary wars.

America’s grim prospects have recently been pithily summed up by two experienced public policy advocates, R.C. Altman and R.N. Haass, in their 2010 Foreign Affairs article ‘American Profligacy and American Power’ in these grim words: ‘The post 2020 fiscal outlook is down-right apocalyptic….The United States is fast approaching a historic turning point: either it will act to get its fiscal house in order, thereby restoring the prerequisites of its primacy in the world, or it will fail to do so and suffer both in the domestic and international consequences.’ If America continues to put off instituting a serious reform plan that simultaneously reduces spending and increases revenue, the United States will likely face a fate similar to the previous fiscally crippled great powers, whether ancient Rome or twentieth-century Great Britain.

Second, America’s flawed financial system is a major liability. It presents twin vulnerabilities: First, it is a systemic time bomb that threatens not only the American but also the global economy because of its risky and self-aggrandizing behavior. And second, it has produced a moral hazard that causes outrage at home and undermines America’s appeal abroad by intensifying America’s social dilemmas. The excess, imbalance, and recklessness of America’s investment banks and trading houses—abetted by congressional irresponsibility regarding deregulation and financing of home ownership, and driven greed Wall Street speculators—precipitated the financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent recession, inflicting economic hardship on millions……[M]oreover, recent studies comparing US intergenerational earnings mobility to those of various European countries show that overall economic mobility is actually lower in ‘the land of opportunity’ than in the rest of the developed world. Worse still, America now lags behind some European countries in the rate of upward income mobility. One of the principle causes has been America’s deficient public education system.” (Emphasis Added)

The election of Donald Trump—a non-politician and iconic business mogul—bringing Global Leader V into the world foray on a chauvinist tidal wave mantra of “Make America Great Again (MAGA)” was but only an even greater extension of the systematic crisis of leadership and financial destruction of the cracking Bretton Woods edifice. A quantum leap of political polarization, raunchy chauvinism, and outright jingoism would only add injury to the insult in the self-destruction of the cross-Atlanticist global hegemony dependent on and therefore dominated by the United States of America.

A phenomenon of global political awakening—internally and externally—and public awareness from universal television, radio, greater access to internet, instant messaging/communications, and above all social media networks, is creating  extremely dangerous dimensions of political polarization in the United States, and anti-Western, anti-imperial awareness of political processes, gross income inequality, injustice, human suffrage, climate/environmental issues, wars/conflict zones, social unrest, and news developments from abroad. The major catalyst of this slide into an extremely dangerous scenario of the cross-Atlantic dominated US collapse amidst the growing phenomena of global political awakening was mass, widespread ignorance of American society which Brzezinski truthfully laid bare on pp. 52-53 of Strategic Vision:

“America’s fifth major vulnerability is a public that is highly ignorant about the world. The uncomfortable truth is that the United States public has an alarmingly limited knowledge of basic global geography, current events, and even pivotal moments in world history—a reality certainly derived in part from its deficient education system.

[T]hat level of ignorance is compounded by the absence of informative international reporting readily accessible to the public. With the exception of perhaps five major newspapers, local press and American TV provides very limited news coverage about world affairs, except for ad hoc coverage of sensational or catastrophic events. What passes for news tends to be trivia or human-interest stories. The cumulative effect of such widespread ignorance makes the public more susceptible to demagogically stimulated fear, especially when aroused by a terrorist attack. That, in turn, increases the probability of self-destructive foreign policy initiatives. In general, public ignorance creates an American political environment more hospitable to extremist simplifications—abetted by interested lobbies—than to nuanced views of the inherently more complex global realities of the post-Cold War era.

[W]orst of all, according to a careful RAND Corporation study, ‘a process with roots as large and deep as political polarization is unlikely to be reversed easily, if at all….Our nation is in for an extended period of political warfare between the left and the right’.” (Emphasis added)

Collapse of the US dominated, cross-Atlantic Bretton Woods system’s ability to lead as the so-called model for the world—much less as the ‘global capital’—had been driven destructively beyond the pale in its paralleling social, moral, and economic collapse. Global Leader V only made a quantum leap of catastrophic leadership abjectly into an irreversible direction bereft of diligent diplomacy and statesmanship, much less real viable economic principles, all the while making demagogic, narcissistic and outrageous false claims that the US economy “was the best in the history of the United States” with radical jingoist overtones—completely contradicting existing reality.

Since January 2011, the United States government was bankrupt—with a debt-to-GDP ratio well over 100%—forcing the US Congress into last resorts of consistently and constantly passing bills to avoid government shut-downs and ultimately, catastrophic default. By July 2019, the situation of exceeding 100% of US debt-to-GDP ratio was so dire that on July 22, 2019 Global Leader V and the US Congress unprecedentedly suspended the US government debt ceiling until July 2021, absolutely not a small undertaking whatsoever by any means.

The purported globally monolithic cross-Atlantic Bretton Woods system—the American Century—dependent on and therefore dominated by the global capital of the world Washington, D.C. that had wielded such a lever of unprecedented power since the end of World War II was but only an imaginary line that receded with the horizon as the cross-Atlantic hegemonic elitists ran ever so faster towards it. The “natural doctrine of global hegemony” in American-led globalization had ostensibly come to its bitter end, economically collapsed and morally bankrupt—or was it about to shift imperial gears with “all guns blazing” in a Great Reset?

New Silk Road Token: Death of Bretton Woods and the American Century

The perniciousness and profligacy of the self-destructing and imploding unipolar US-dominated Bretton Woods system was but only setting the precedent for growing multipolar power and influence of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), and the absolute geo-economic colossus of China’s 2013 Belt Road Initiative (BRI) taking the non-western world by storm. In just less than a decade, 71 countries of the world are currently participating in the nearly $30 trillion-dollar BRI comprising an unprecedented two-thirds of the world’s population, and over a third of world’s GDP.

The threat of the unipolar, hegemonic cross-Atlantic US-EU Bretton Woods monetary system—the literal hierarchy enjoyed by the global elite since 1944—being seriously challenged or superseded had in effect become reality. It was a living nightmare for the cross-Atlanticists, the very geopolitical reality Zbigniew Brzezinski had warned about on pages 31 and 159 in his most infamous 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives:

“In that context, how America ‘manages’ Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent. About 75 percent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about 60 percent of the world’s GNP and about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources……..All of the potential political and/or economic challengers to American primacy are Eurasian. Eurasia’s power vastly overshadows America’s…….

[B]oth the pace of China’s economic growth and the scale of foreign investment in China—each among the highest in the world—provide the statistical basis for the conventional prognosis that within two decades the or so China will be a dominant global power, roughly on par with the United States and Europe (assuming that the latter both unites and expands further)……a Greater China will emerge not only as the dominant state in the Far East but as a world power of the first rank.” (Emphasis added)

2019 was proving to be the year of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) far and wide with virtual quantum leaps in cooperation, developments, and colossal projects of high-speed train rails and most especially rail lines connecting trade and commerce of goods from Eurasia (Russia-Europe-Middle East) to China previously land-locked and requiring time consuming sea routes. The biggest projects in this regard were by far the completion of the Power of Siberia pipeline in the Far East directly linking Russian gas to China, above all the unprecedented Russia-China Arctic LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) projects in bringing greater efficient and effective energy solutions to Asia by contouring typical energy markets dominated by the West.

The sum of all fears and greatest imminent threat to the cross-Atlanticist Bretton Woods system on the agenda of the 11th BRICS Summit to be held in Brazil November 13-14, 2019 was the paradigm shift of digital currencies and international payment systems completely off and out of the US dollar. By April of 2019, China had brought several years of innovation to life in central bank digital currency (CBDC) planning, quite literally bringing the People’s Bank of China the title of being the first country to introduce a central bank digital currency in various trials slated for 2020.

However, China’s national CBDC was not entirely the central focus of the cross-Atlanticist alarm; the BRICS mainlining agenda item for November 13-14, 2019 was nothing short of a paradigm-shifting geopolitical earthquake of BRICS unified, cross-border payment systems—such as the establishment of CIPS in 2015—and the issuance of the New Silk Road Token (NSRT), with the first digital token transaction taking place on August 29, 2019  well before the November BRICS summit. It was a geopolitical open casket viewing for the end of hegemonic dictates and reliance on the US dollar dominant SWIFT and CHIPS systems which was laid clearly out by Vice Chairman Huang Qifan of the China International Economic Exchange Center in an interesting interview:

“Prior to the launch of the RMB Cross-Border Payment System (CIPS), RMB cross-border liquidation was highly dependent on the US SWIFT system and CHIPS. However, there are certain risks associated with a high degree of reliance on SWIFT and CHIPS systems. First of all, SWIFT and CHIPS are gradually becoming the financial instruments for the United States to exercise global hegemony and carry out long-arm jurisdiction. Second, SWIFT is an outdated, inefficient, and costly payment system. Since its establishment 46 years ago, SWIFT has been slow to update, and its efficiency has been relatively low; there is no future for these systems.” (Emphasis added)

In “long-arm jurisdiction,” Mr. Huang was clearly referring to Washington D.C.’s “global capital of the world” game of paralyzing, US dollar dominated unilateral economic sanctions carried out with impunity with no international authority to do so. It was the beginning of the end of what Zbigniew Brzezinski audaciously and unapologetically referred to on p. 147 of The Choice—“There is thus a perfect fit between global hegemony and economic globalization: the United States can promote an open global system while largely defining the system’s rules and choosing for itself how dependent on the system it wishes to be for itself.” (Emphasis added)

Aside from the geopolitical earthquakes and paradigm shifts of alternative payment systems, de-dollarization, the Belt Road Initiative, the era of new digital economies—the New Digital Silk Road—and NSRT digital token instruments, Russia was literally leveling the energy superpower playing field and transforming the hydrocarbon face of the Earth with unprecedented, colossal energy projects at breakneck speed. Washington had literally pumped its purported energy superpower brains out with the US fracking and drilling hydrocarbon revolution to become the world’s largest producer of oil and gas by 2020, only to fall flat on its face trying to sell shale gas and far too expensive US LNG to overseas markets, especially Europe. It was but an imaginary line that receded with the horizon as they ran ever faster towards it, which Gazprom put succinctly in a recent public company statement:

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the United States cannot be considered as the basis for the energy security of large gas consuming countries, let alone whole regional markets such as Europe…..The development of gas production from shale in other countries in the period to 2030 will not have a significant impact on the global gas market and Gazprom’s business. For Gazprom, production of shale gas is not a promising avenue of business development due to the high proven reserves life of conventional gas fields, and their economic and environmental advantages.”

Russia had gone into “hydrocarbon-hyperdrive” completing and innovating new colossal oil and gas projects in the Black Sea region (Turkstream/Blue Stream), Far East (Power of Siberia/Power of Siberia 2), Arctic (Yamal Mega Project/Vostok Oil Project), and in Europe the addition of Nordstream 2, a highly US-targeted and sanctions attacked project to double the 55 billion cubic meter capacity of the Nordstream pipeline in the Baltic Sea.

The current natural global warming cycle (human created pollution does compound this cycle issue to slighter less degrees than public opinion is made to believe) is well known to top scientific advisors meeting with the heads of state behind closed doors whom are fully aware of exploiting this warming period to access otherwise inaccessible hydrocarbons. Henry Kissinger, George Schulz, James Baker III, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice—the Bush II era neocons and cross-Atlanticists—co-authored a May 30, 2012 WSJ Op-Ed, “Time to Join The of the Law of the Sea Treaty” attesting to the fact, and oiling imperial gears for the coming race over the Arctic.

A geostrategic analysis of the Arctic Circle maps by any keen observer as to why the western powers are preoccupied with establishing Arctic borders by international law via the Law of the Sea Treaty should be quite clear. The Russian Federation irrefutably has the largest accessible Arctic coastline and territorial possession of Arctic shelf (Siberian Shelf, Lomonosov Ridge) towards the North Pole, the smallest geographical portion of the polar ice cap, the world’s largest fleet of icebreaking vessels, and the Northern Sea Route traversing Russia’s territorial waters gives Russia the greatest access and geostrategic edge to the Arcticfar and wide. By contrast, the United States Arctic borders are miniscule against Russia or Canada—the US, Canada, and Greenland have the largest geographical portion of the polar ice cap—and it does not take a geostrategic expert to determine why Washington, D.C. was making an outrageous bid to purchase Greenland from Denmark in August 2019.

The Yamal Mega Project overseen by Gazprom on the Yamal Peninsula attests to the fact with 2019 total gas production at 96.3 billion cubic meters and a jaw-dropping colossal potential of up to 360 bcm per year—total reserves and resources of all fields in the Yamal Peninsula are 26.5 trillion cubic meters of gas, 1.6 billion tons of gas condensate, and 300 million tons of oil.

By October-November 2019 with the onset of the paradigm shifting, geopolitical earthquakes of the BRICS summit, Belt Road Initiative, China’s digital Yuan/Renminbi CBDCs, New Silk Road Token (NSRT), New Digital Silk Road, and unprecedented colossal Russian energy projects, alarm bells of financial DEFCON 5 were going off loudly in the Washington, D.C.-based Bretton Woods “global capital of world.”

CLADE X 2018: “A Pandemic Exercise”?

In May of 2018, the Davos World Economic Forum in conjunction with the Johns Hopkins Center of Health Security coordinated a little-known “table-top exercise” bizarrely labeled CLADE X: A Pandemic Exercise. Designed to “simulate a series of U.S. National Security Council meetings” responding an “evolving pandemic,” the day-long table-top exercise of CLADE X included8 former senior officials of the U.S. Government, and a member of the U.S. Congress in front of a live audience of 150 government officials, academics, and policy experts amidst an outbreak of novel respiratory virus modeled on SARS (CoV) and H1N1 (Influenza) with the lethality of SARS but contagious as flu, spreading slowly.

Not only was the onset of accelerated preoccupations with “potential pandemics” by elite circles—whether the World Economic Forum (via the Center for Health Security) or Bill Gates TED Talks—extremely bizarre, the scenario played out in CLADE X eluded to, and insinuated the context of gene editing and genetic manipulation of viruses in the era of these existing realities. In the exercise, an extremist group called A Brighter Dawn (ABD) obsessed with issues of overpopulation claims to have genetically engineered a virus containing Nipah Virus elements as a bio-weapon called CLADE X to diminish the populations of the Earth, a so-called “super spreader” event, similar to the 2001 smallpox bio-attack exercise “Dark Winter.”

To say in the slightest of degrees this was a most seemingly radical form of predictive programming is at best a major understatement of the century. The “tragic outcome” of the exercise was the most catastrophic pandemic in history with hundreds of millions of deaths, economic collapse, and societal upheaval. Emphasis was added in a “plausible denial” fashion in the WEF page that, “…some modicum of attention should be paid to the extreme end of the risk spectrum—pandemic events that could profoundly affect the arc of history.” (Emphasis added)

A deeper look into the absolutely chilling and not too far-fetched from reality CLADE X pathogen pandemic exercise revealed some of the most shocking dimensions. In the CLADE X simulation summary papers, the extremist group of radical scientists-gone-rogue called A Brighter Dawn (ABD) carried out a biblical plague inspired, conspiratorial bio-attack on the global population “as the corrective of humanity’s excesses” as they felt “direct action was needed to achieve the ‘reset’ or ‘paradigm shift’ that would be required to fundamentally alter the balance.” Sound familiar?

EVENT 201: A Second Pandemic Exercise or a Plan-demic?

Simultaneously as the BRICS geared up for their paradigm shifting summit in November 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Davos World Economic Forum were assembling an “influential summit” of their own. On October 18, 2019, the Center for Health Security held a high-level, 3.5-hour live table-top exercise labeled “EVENT 201: A Global Pandemic Exercise.”

The second consecutive EVENT 201 “exercise” starkly contrasted the CLADE X scenario from the previous year, simulating an outbreak of novel zoonotic coronavirus from bats to pigs to humans, causing a severe pandemic that is again, modeled on SARS (CoV) but is much more transmissible by those with “mild” symptoms or, asymptomatic. CAPS Virus (Coronavirus Acute Pulmonary Syndrome) is the fictitious pathogen in the exercise from the SARS and MERS (CoV) family that progresses into pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome:

There is no possibility of a vaccine being available in the first year. There is a fictional antiviral drug that can help the sick but not significantly limit spread of the disease.

Since the whole human population is susceptible, during the initial months of the pandemic, the cumulative number of cases increases exponentially, doubling every week. And as the cases and deaths accumulate, the economic and societal consequences become increasingly severe.

The scenario ends at the 18-month point, with 65 million deaths. The pandemic is beginning to slow due to the decreasing number of susceptible people. The pandemic will continue at some rate until there is an effective vaccine or until 80-90 % of the global population has been exposed. From that point on, it is likely to be an endemic childhood disease.”

The bizarreness of title “EVENT 201” was predicated on 200 epidemics that occur annually because “its only a matter of time” before one of them becomes global, a severe pandemic that is hence, the 201st event, an “Event Horizon” perhaps. 15 current global business, government, and public health leaders were “players” in the exercise, some of which suspiciously were George Fu Gao (Director General of China CDC), Avril Haines (former Deputy Director of the CIA), and Brad Connett (current President of Henry Schein’s US Medical Group).

Unlike CLADE X 2018 where shockingly the purported fictitious extremist group ABD forces direct action to achieve a “reset” or “paradigm shift,” Brad Connett makes a less shocking, but equally suspicious call “for a new Marshall Plan” or “Marshall” type-plan—quickly recusing himself “not meaning to use the term exactly”—at the 8:00 minute mark of the EVENT 201 Highlight Reel, “that can go into effect and stimulate change very quickly.” Sound familiar?

It is extremely difficult after reviewing the summary papers for both “exercises” from CLADE X 2018 and EVENT 201 2019 to believe that either is an entire “coincidence” that a carbon-copy, fictitious scenario became a real life 2020 event catastrophically throwing our entire world into a chaotic state, just a few short months after the conclusion of “EVENT 201.” Stranger than fiction, in August of 2017 former Lt. Col. Robert P. Kadlec was selected as an Assistant Secretary of the US Health and Human Services for the division of Preparedness and Response, the very same year Bill Gates established CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) during the 2017 Davos World Economic Forum meeting. Kadlec is also most importantly to note, the United States Strategic National Stockpile Chief.

While in the US Air Force, Lt. Col. Robert P. Kadlec co-authored two chapters in a little-known book titled, “Battlefield of the Future: 21st Century Warfare Issues,” where Kadlec shockingly wrote Chapter 9 Twenty-First Century Germ Warfare and Chapter 10 Biological Weapons for Waging Economic Wars.  Even more shockingly, Kadlec disclosed a most sinister and outrageous ideological revelation in the 6th paragraph of Chapter 9: “Using biological weapons under the cover of an endemic or natural disease occurrence provides an attacker the potential for plausible denial. In this context, biological weapons offer greater possibilities than do nuclear weapons.” (Emphasis added)

A disclaimer now exists on the summary pages of EVENT 201 that the “exercise” was neither a prediction nor has any direct bearing to the current novel Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. The disclaimer is mere plausible denial, the very Kadlec plausible denial that provides the attackers biological weapon cover under an endemic natural disease occurrence. A global economic warfare “Iron Curtain” was about to come down—in Iran.

Little did the people of the entire world, much less the United States of America, know what the “party congress” of the self-anointed, “global elite” were practicing or planning for them to adhere to as early as May 2018. Even further, little did the unsuspecting people around the entire globe have the slightest of clues what was being bestowed up them in the final days of 2019 as they looked towards welcoming the new year of 2020 whilst geopolitical developments would soon dictate otherwise, disempowering every aspect of life as we once knew it.

To be continued in Bretton Woods 3.0: The Great Lockdown, The Great Reset, and The Great Paradigm Shift (Part 2)

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R.A. Jones is an independent writer, researcher, and contributing author to Global Research. He is the sole editor of Global Political Awakening Project blog.

In an interview with The Guardian in June, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Germans grew up knowing that the U.S. wanted to be a world power. Despite Washington abusing its power against some of its strongest allies, Germany, whose six-month mandate of the EU Presidency will end on December 31, made no efforts to make the European bloc independent of the U.S.

The ruling Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), which Merkel belongs to, had the opportunity to push for European independence and sovereignty away from Washington’s dominance. Instead, Berlin chose to consolidate the EU’s vassal status to the U.S., especially since it appears that Democratic Presidential Candidate Joe Biden will be sitting in the White House on January 20.

Germany’s presidency over the EU corresponded with the most important junction in the bloc’s history since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The world is today is ruled by a multipolar order with a more evenly distributed global power structure. Germany, especially now that it has mandate of the EU presidency, had a decision to make – join this new world order or remain stuck in the old one. Judging from Berlin’s position at the European Council held on December 10-11, they chose to remain stuck believing that the antiquated U.S.-dominated unipolar system of the 1990’s and early 2000’s still exists in 2020.

Last month, Biden and Merkel spoke by phone shortly after the U.S. election, with a readout from Biden’s team saying:

“The President-elect expressed gratitude to Chancellor Merkel for her congratulations, praised her leadership, and noted that he looked forward to strengthening relations between the United States and Germany and revitalizing the trans-Atlantic relationship, including through NATO and the EU.”

As seen by the European Council’s conclusion on the Turkey problem, Berlin is lost without guidance from Washington.

For years Turkey has violated the maritime and air space of EU members Greece and Cyprus, broke UN resolutions by partially opening the occupied city of Varoshia in northern Cyprus, initiated migration crises on the borders of Greece, violated the EU’s Operation Irini arms embargo off the coast of Libya, and continues to make near daily threats of war with Greece and Cyprus.

Yet, despite these daily provocations, the EU has not passed strong sanctions against Turkey, with Germany and Bulgaria, and to a lesser extent Spain, Italy, Hungary and Malta, denigrating the severity of Ankara’s provocations in favor of maintaining strong economic ties.

The European Council decided last week to extend sanctions against Russia for its 2014 reunification with Crimea. Russia, which does not threaten or violate the sovereignty of EU members states like Turkey does, is being targeted by EU sanctions despite reunifying with Crimea through a referendum that adhered to all international norms and standards. Yet, Greece and Cyprus have been struggling to get the EU to impose sanctions and an arms embargo against Turkey.

And it is here where we can see that the CDU relies on the U.S. in its plans to become a leading country in the EU rather than making the initiative independently.

Greece and Cyprus have been petitioning Germany for months to cancel its sale of the powerful Type 214 submarine to Turkey. Although Greece would still maintain naval dominance over Turkey, the acquisition of Type 214 submarines would certainly bolster the Turkish Navy. Despite observing Turkey’s military adventures in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), and the near daily threats of war against Greece and Cyprus, Merkel refused to make a decisive decision on whether or not to cancel Germany’s sale of the Type 214 submarine.

“Issues related to arms exports and deliveries must be discussed within the NATO alliance,” Merkel said, adding “We would like to also coordinate our policies with the upcoming U.S. administration about Turkey.”

As U.S. President Donald Trump has a “bromance” with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey has been able to act aggressively. Merkel’s deflection of the Turkey problem until after Biden will likely ascend to the presidency demonstrates that Berlin is unwilling to engage as a leader of Europe that supports member states. Rather, it appears Berlin is happy to just oversee the continent on behalf of Biden.

Even French President Emmanuel Macron, who is certainly no friend of Erdoğan’s, was reportedly convinced by Merkel that if a Biden administration takes over on January 20, it will push Ankara to de-escalate and have a more moderate policy.

Associate professor of International Law and Foreign Policy at Panteion University and Member of Parliament for Greece’s ruling New Democracy Party, Angelos Syrigos, highlighted that “in the five months of the German presidency, four months have been the greatest tension that existed in Greek-Turkish relations since the [1974] invasion of Cyprus.”

Effectively, the CDU’s unwillingness to deal with the Turkish problem is driven by their choice to remain subservient to Washington. As Trump was less interventionist compared to his predecessors, it left Berlin at a loss on how to lead Europe through times of crisis. This is demonstrated by Merkel’s urging to only discuss how to deal with Turkey once Biden enters the White House and despite Ankara’s endless provocations against Greece and Cyprus being a European problem, not a Transatlantic one.

Merkel has shown that Germany is incapable of leading an independent and sovereign foreign policy, and this is dangerous for Europe as it appears Berlin will begin following Biden’s agenda in Europe. There is little doubt that Biden’s foreign policy focus will be to contain and pressure Russia at every opportunity presented, and with Germany set to follow in the Democrats footsteps, the European continent will see tensions and hostilities rise even more than the already dangerous levels seen on the Greek-Turkish border.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

New data out this week indicates that the European Union has suffered aggregate economic losses amounting to over €120 billion due to its policy of imposing sanctions against Russia. That’s according to figures released by the Dusseldorf Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Yet European leaders at an EU summit this week again called for the extension of sanctions on Russia, which will roll on into the middle of next year and probably beyond that date. This lockstep action by the bloc is only leading to more tensions with Russia and taking a political direction to nowhere except more conflict. Those EU sanctions were first imposed in July 2014 over dubious allegations of Russia’s malign involvement in the Ukrainian conflict. Moscow has rightfully reciprocated with counter-sanctions on European exports of agriculture and other goods.

The German Chamber of Commerce and Industry estimates that the entire stand-off has hit EU economies with losses of €21 billion every year. The biggest loser is Germany’s economy which forfeits nearly €5.5 billion a year in bilateral trade with Russia.

Accumulated over six years since 2014 the EU’s sanctions policy against Russia has resulted in a staggering total loss of over €120 billion. And counting.

To put that figure into some perspective, it would be comparable to the combined annual military budgets of Europe’s three biggest economies: Germany, Britain and France.

Or to put it another way, this week the European leaders agreed on a landmark stimulus package worth €1.8 trillion for the 27-member bloc to recover from the coronavirus pandemic. The economic loss to the EU from sanctions on Russia is of the order of 10 per cent of that record stimulus effort.

It is therefore mind-shuddering why the European Union persists in inflicting such untold damage to its own economy through its policy towards Russia.

The EU claims that sanctions are being extended because of the lack of progress in peace negotiations over the Ukraine crisis. Brussels is seeking to blame Moscow for that ongoing frozen conflict, oblivious to the fact that Russia is not a party to the conflict. It is a member of the so-called Normandy Format overseeing the Minsk Peace Accord signed in 2015. Germany and France are also members of the Normandy group. The group has not met since one year ago. So, why is Russia being singled out as the sole responsible for lack of progress in settling the Ukraine conflict?

Secondly, the Ukraine crisis was instigated by a coup d’état against the elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014. The coup was orchestrated by the United States and European allies, which ushered in an ultranationalist regime in Kiev with disturbing links to Neo-Nazi factions. Hostility towards Russian-speaking communities in the Ukraine then led to the Crimean referendum in March 2014 appealing for reunification with Russia. It is simply preposterous and cynical for the European Union to blame Russia for subsequent turmoil when the EU is itself directly complicit in fomenting the crisis.

In any case, rigidly applying sanctions is counterproductive to a diplomatic solution. Mutual dialogue is precluded by a policy of recrimination and scapegoating.

The EU sanctions policy is self-defeating and suffused with contradictions. It imposes measures against Russia with seeming insouciance about the huge damage being done to EU businesses, workers and farmers, and it does this without any clear justification. Yet this week EU leaders led by Germany refused to impose sectoral sanctions against Turkey in spite of repeated calls by EU members Greece and Cyprus for such measures as a means of defending their territorial integrity from Turkey’s aggressive gas exploration in the East Mediterranean. So here we have EU members protesting against threats to their sovereignty from Turkey; yet the EU leaders show little resolve to defend the bloc’s external southern borders by taking a tough sanctions line towards Ankara.

There is evidently a strange double-think when one compares the EU’s gung-ho attitude towards Russia over a matter in Ukraine which is not even part of the EU and a matter that is highly contested in terms of the allegations being made against Russia.

How to explain such an irrational, anti-Russia policy by the European Union?

One has to conclude that the EU is slavishly following a policy determined by the United States. The US has imposed its own bilateral sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine, as well as many other equally dubious claims, such as alleged electoral interference. The Europeans are thus deferring to Washington’s foreign policy of hostility towards Moscow, even though the economic losses felt by the Americans are negligible compared with those of Europe due to the latter’s geographic proximity and traditionally much greater trading relations with its continental neighbor.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov noted this week that the European Union’s policy is “centered on the United States”. Lavrov lamented that the EU under current leadership shows no sign of acting independently from Washington. In effect, the European bloc is a vassal under American tutelage.

Ironically, the antagonism towards Russia from the West is due to Russia’s demonstrative independence.

Says Lavrov in a separate interview: “The West’s awareness that Russia is an independent power has had a cumulative effect. Russia will always prioritize its national interests. It is always ready to harmonize them candidly and equitably with the national interests of any other countries based on international law, but it will never be under someone’s thumb.”

The Russian top diplomat added: “The desire to score propaganda points has dominated the West’s foreign policy for a long time, while overlooking the essence of the problems that need a solution in the interests of the peoples of the respective regions.”

A psychiatrist might opine that European self-harming, irrational antagonism towards Russia – while constantly appeasing an American bully – is a form of self-loathing. The EU’s political class resent Russia because the latter is a constant reminder of the independence and integrity that they are so abjectly deficient in.

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In an article on the COVID vaccine rollout, CNN says that Americans shouldn’t be alarmed if people start dying after taking the vaccine because “deaths may occur that won’t necessarily have anything to do with the vaccine.”

The advisory appeared in an article titled ‘Why vaccinate our most frail? Odd vote out shows the dilemma’ in which Dr. Kelly Moore, associate director of the Immunization Action Coalition, cautions that vaccines don’t work as well on the frail and elderly compared to healthy people.

“When shots begin to go into arms of residents, Moore said Americans need to understand that deaths may occur that won’t necessarily have anything to do with the vaccine,” states the report.

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

She then said Americans shouldn’t be alarmed to see people dying a day or two after receiving the COVID vaccination.

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

While deaths in care homes of people who take the vaccine are described as normal and nothing to do with the vaccine, some would suggest that you could make the exact same argument about deaths of those with multiple comorbidities in care homes that were put down to COVID.

Many have and have been shouted down for doing so.

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Coronavirus Protocols as Tools of Repression

December 14th, 2020 by Ann Garrison

Covid-19 is a convenient excuse for governments to ban or restrict activities they don’t like.

Whatever the scientific truths about coronavirus, state measures to control it undoubtedly have great potential for justifying state repression and surveillance. A friend of mine remarked that “it’s beyond the Patriot Act authors’ wildest dreams.” In Africa, it’s been crudely weaponized to suppress elections, as witnessed in Uganda and Ethiopia. 

During the third week of November, Ugandan military police arrested pop star and presidential challenger Bobi Wine, alleging that his campaign rallies of more than 200 people violated state protocols for stopping the spread of coronavirus. They then shot dead 56 people protesting his arrest and arrested 836 with seeming unconcern that the virus might spread among them in jail.

This week police and military opened fire on Bobi Wine’s campaign convoy in the Ugandan countryside. They struck and disabled the vehicle he was traveling in and injured several of his campaign colleagues. In a Ghetto TV video, shot by his campaign team, he could be heard shouting at police, as munitions exploded around him, “Why are you trying to murder me?”

Aljazeera then reported that Bobi Wine had suspended his campaign because of the state violence, but shortly thereafter, he reappeared campaigning in a helmet and bulletproof vest. In another campaign video, he reported that police had ordered hotels not to admit his team and that they had therefore slept in their vehicles on the streets.

Earlier this year, in Ethiopia, the central government led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed postponed this year’s elections  until 2021 because of the coronavirus, he said. Dissidents said, however, that he had used the virus as an excuse to buy time to consolidate power. The Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) , which lost its brutal, minority grip on power in 2018, held regional elections anyway and then attacked an Ethiopian army base in the Tigrayan region, drawing an Ethiopian military response and sending refugees fleeing into South Sudan, where they risk contracting COVID-19 in crowded, makeshift camps.

As of December 8, Coronovirus Worldometer   reported that 207 people have died of COVID-19 in Uganda, four per million people, and that 1,766 people, fifteen per million, have died of the disease in Ethiopia .

In both African countries, these coronavirus mortality statistics are far lower than those caused by malaria and/or lack of health care. In Uganda, roughly 10,000 die annually of malaria; in Ethiopia, 883 died of malaria in 2016. Uganda has some of the world’s most shocking maternal death statistics , with 440 deaths per 100,000 live births. Both country’s electoral and social justice movements have far greater potential to lengthen and qualitatively enhance their citizens’ lives than their leaders’ crudely repressive coronavirus restrictions.

Repressive measures in the US?

US coronavirus statistics, again on Coronavirus Worldometer as of December 8 , are 290,443 deaths, roughly 875 per million people. These numbers arguably justify mandatory mask wearing and measures restricting movement, business, and public assembly, but that doesn’t mean that state measures haven’t been repressive. The CARES Act further entrenched power upwards by redistributing vast wealth to oligarchs and mega corporations, just as the bank bailout did, and as future “stimulus” packages likely will, no matter which of the duopoly parties craft them. Workers struggle, small businesses close their doors, long lines queue either in cars or standing six feet apart outside food banks, and we face a dystopic future in which most of us work and shop at a few mega corporations, possibly including an Uber-Lyft-Doordash-Instacart conglomerate before Amazon swallows them all whole. Poor people, people of color, prisoners, and farmworkers all suffer disproportionately from the disease and the economic consequences of the lockdowns.

One of the only positive developments is that the virus didn’t stop Black Lives Matter protestors from rising up across the country in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other victims of racist police and vigilante attacks. California locked down tight again this week but did not ban outdoor public protest. These protests took place, however, in the context of the fierce polarization on either side of President Donald Trump, which saw mayors and legislators in Democratic majority cities vocally resisting the various operatives and tactical forces Trump dispatched to shut them down. Had coronavirus come along in 2011, it would no doubt have been added to President Obama’s strategy for shutting down Occupy.

In next week’s Black Agenda Report, I plan to look into the surveillance and censorship issues that arise as government moves to control both the virus and the public narratives about it.

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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 her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes Region. Please help support her work on Patreon . She can be reached at ann(at)anngarrison.com.

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In a letter published in The Lancet, researchers warn that the adenovirus vector technology being used around the world to develop vaccines against SARS-Cov-2 could put populations at risk of developing HIV infections.

The researchers — from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, the University of California at San Francisco and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — said the use of adenovirus 5 vector (Ad5) vaccines could have a devastating impact on regions in the developing world that are still plagued by high HIV rates. People with pre-existing immunity to adenovirus are most susceptible for contracting HIV, the researchers said.

The Moderna, Pfizer and Sanofi’s mRNA-based vaccines are a novelty in vaccine development. But vaccines based on recombinant viruses, such as the Ad5 vaccine being developed by the Chinese firm CanSino, have been underway for more than a dozen years. Ad5 is a human adenovirusvector.

According to Global Data, 38 companies are now developing adenovirus vector vaccines against SARS-Cov-2, or COVID-19.

The Ad5 human adenovirus vector technology was used in several failed efforts to develop a vaccine against HIV. The technology is also employed in vaccines against anthrax and Ebola.

In 2007, two trials of Merck’s Ad5 HIV vaccine were cancelled. Rather than provide immunity, the vaccine actually increased the risk of HIV infections.

In 2013, Nature reported, “Overall, people who had received the vaccine were significantly more likely to be infected than those who had received the placebo.”

After analyzing the data, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center estimated that Merck’s HIV vaccine raised the HIV risk by 41 percent.

Increased risk of HIV is one of the problems associated with adenovirus-based vaccines, but there are also others.

In June, Clinical Trials reported that COVID vaccines being developed by AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and CanSino were at a disadvantage and could “be tripped up by pre-existing antibodies to the vectors used.”

Adenoviruses, often mistaken for flu viruses, are estimated to account for 5% of all respiratory infections in the U.S. During the 2018-2019 flu season there were five major adenovirus outbreakson college campuses. Immunity for adenovirus can last many years, and about 40 percent of Americans already have neutralizing antibodies for the viruses.

AstraZeneca/Oxford and Johnson & Johnson are using vectors that are non-human — a chimpanzee vector and the Ad26 vector respectively. The assumption is that these vaccines have an advantage because recipients would not have preexisting neutralizing antibodies against the vector.

But this seems to be a false hypothesis. Hildegund Ertl at the Wistar Institute estimates that between 10% – 20% of Americans and Europeans have Ad26 neutralizing antibodies, and that in parts of Africa, 90% of the population have the antibodies.

Another issue with the adenovirus-based vaccines? According to Vanderbilt Medical School professor Kathryn Edwards, administering any more than two doses of these vaccines over the course of a lifetime might “generate neutralizing antibodies to attack the vector. If this were to occur, it would greatly increase the risk of triggering an autoimmune illness.”

Despite these and other concerns, a COVID adenovirus vaccine is already being developed by AstraZeneca, and is in phase 3 trials. Don’t be surprised to see it being rushed through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the near future.

We are entering into the new territory of bioengineered viral vector vaccine technology, and we have a long way to go before we fully understand the long-term consequences.

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

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The State Department’s special envoy for Syria at a congressional hearing on Wednesday admitted to helping Republican donors score a deal for Syrian oil.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) first announced in July that U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led forces had granted an American company a deal to “to modernize the oil fields” in areas of northeastern Syria guarded by U.S. troops.

Special Envoy Joel Rayburn confirmed during Wednesday’s House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing that the company is Delta Crescent Energy, a little-known firm cofounded by several people who have donated to Republican causes, including Graham’s own campaign.

Rayburn also admitted that the Trump administration had actually pushed for Delta Crescent Energy — and no other companies — to receive permission to exploit Syrian oil.

“We didn’t lobby anyone for the deal,” Rayburn said, but “we’ve met with members of that company, with local authorities, with [Iraqi Kurdish official] Nechirvan Barzani.” (The New Republic had first reported on the meetings several months ago.)

Rayburn also said that the State Department issued “foreign policy guidance,” after which the U.S. Treasury granted a special sanctions exemption for Delta Crescent Energy.

“Did you discuss deals for any other American companies?” Rep. Joaquin Castro (D–TX) asked.

“Not that I was involved in,” Rayburn responded.

The Syrian Kurdish-led autonomous authorities in northeastern Syria that control the oil fields in conjunction with U.S. forces have expressed their desire to work with multiple foreign companies.

Americans are currently banned from dealing with Syrian oil under U.S. economic sanctions on Syria, and Delta Crescent Energy is the only firm known to have been granted an exemption to the sanctions by the U.S. Treasury.

It is unclear how much work on Syria’s oil fields Delta Crescent Energy has actually completed. Syrian Kurdish general Mazloum Kobane told Al Monitor last month that talks about exporting the oil were “advancing slowly.”

Delta Crescent Energy was founded by U.S. Army Delta Force veteran James Reese, former diplomat James Cain, and former GulfSands Petroleum executive John P. Dorrier Jr. The firm is well-connected to both Republican circles and the U.S. military.

Cain is a long-time Republican activist who served on the Republican National Committee from 2003 to 2005. He has donated at least $30,681 to Republican causes since 2003, records from the Federal Election Commission show.

Dorrier has donated $6,947 to Republican causes since 2016, including a $500 donation to Graham’s campaign in 2019. Dorrier’s only pre-2016 political donation listed in the FEC filings is a $500 donation to the Republican National Senatorial Committee in 2005.

Reese now runs a controversial private security firm called TigerSwan.

TigerSwan first rose to prominence in 2016 when it helped suppress Native American and environmentalist protests against an oil pipeline in North Dakota. The firm recently settled a lawsuit for operating without a license in North Dakota and is embroiled in an alleged bribery scheme in Pennsylvania, although it denies all wrongdoing.

TigerSwan has also been active in Syria, helping guard U.S.-backed demining operations in the city of Raqqa, according to a 2018 report from the New Yorker. The Department of Defense has acknowledged but not yet responded to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by this reporter in September to obtain TigerSwan’s contract.

Syria’s oil became a priority for the Trump administration in October 2019, when Trump declared his desire to withdraw from Syria.

The Trump administration had convinced Syrian Kurdish forces to destroy their fortifications along the border with Turkey, promising that a U.S.-led peacekeeping force would protect the area.

Trump reversed course in October 2019, pulling troops out and allowing a Turkish invasion. But he reversed course again soon after, sending troops back into Syria “to secure the oil.” Graham and other hawks had used the oil issue to sell Trump on a continued U.S. presence in Syria.

“By continuing to maintain control of the oil fields in Syria, we will deny [Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad] and Iran a monetary windfall,” Graham said in an October 2019 statement. “We can also use some of the revenues from future oil sales to pay for our military commitment in Syria.”

Trump said a few days later that he and Graham “totally agree” on the oil.

Syria’s central government has condemned the reports of American oil activities as a scheme to “steal Syria’s oil” and “an assault against Syria’s sovereignty.”

Rayburn, however, argued on Wednesday that Delta Crescent Energy is in Syria to benefit the locals.

“We support trying to get the economy of northeast Syria up and running to the extent it can under the present conditions of war,” he said. “We’re talking about the communities that were victimized by ISIS.”

But the founders of Delta Crescent Energy itself may not see it in such benevolent terms.

“We own the whole eastern part of Syria,” Reese said in an April, 2018 interview with Fox News, explaining what the U.S. strategy in the Middle East should be. “That’s ours. We can’t give that up.”

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Featured image: Senator Lindsey Graham visits U.S.-trained and funded Kurdish SDF militia members in Manjib, Syria.  YouTube | Screenshot

Video: Ron Paul: This Worries Me Much More than Covid

December 14th, 2020 by Rep. Ron Paul

If you’re concerned about the overreach of government in juicing asset prices to dangerous levels, picking economic winner and losers, and constraining our personal freedoms — you have very good right to be.

So says lifelong champion of free markets, sound money and civil liberty, former US Congressman Dr Ron Paul.

Having spent decades in Washington serving as a member of the House of Representatives, Dr Paul is intimately familiar with both the institutions and the individuals currently running our country. And he has “zero” confidence that they will competently handle the major challenges facing America today.

2020 has given politicians a golden moment to capitalize off of the old DC strategy to “never let a crisis go to waste”. And they are making the most out of the current anxiety and uncertainty, using it to justify increased government intervention in nearly every aspect of our lives.

More monetary and fiscal stimulus has been injected this year than ever before in history, by a long shot. Same for Federal borrowing and deficit spending.

More limitations on how we’re allowed to conduct commerce, travel and gather with our families — even what information is permissible to voice publicly — have been imposed than at any time since WW2.

Dr Paul sees this accelerating grab by the government for expanded power and control as exactly what we DON’T need to effectively and sustainably tackle the truly massive tasks ahead of us, such as beating the coronavirus and addressing our nation’s truly massive debt overhang.

The solutions to those, and nearly every problem a society faces, are rooted in expanded freedoms, self-determination, and fair systems that allow the best ideas to prevail.

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Featured image is from PeakProsperity

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If US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy worked heavily against multilateralism and the basic principles of a rules-based world order, when it came to Israel-Palestine, the focus was even more vicious. 

Rather than just pushing pro-Israel positions, Trump fully endorsed an extremist pro-annexation narrative, presenting a plan that perpetuated Israel’s denial of Palestinian national rights. It not only encouraged illegal colonial settlements, but also negated Palestinian refugee rights. The US aimed to pre-empt several final status issues, including Jerusalem, settlements and refugees, by going beyond even Israel’s stated positions.

Trying to dismantle UNRWA, the United Nations agency that aids Palestinian refugees, was a key part of the Trump team’s strategy. Yet, what they did not realise is how solidly enshrined Palestinian rights are within the UN system – particularly refugee rights.

This began as soon as the UN appointed its first mediator, Sweden’s Folke Bernadotte, who was later assassinated in Jerusalem by Israeli terrorists. Perhaps his most important legacy was Resolution 194, approved on 11 December 1948, which established a Conciliation Commission comprising the US, France and Turkey, aimed at supporting the parties to reach a final settlement.

While the commission did not achieve its main goal, it did succeed in establishing a comprehensive database of the private property belonging to Palestinian refugees, churches, endowments and non-Palestinian owners in the territory occupied by Israel in 1948.

For many years, the database was classified as secret, and copies of the work were distributed to Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, the Arab League and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The work of the commission was updated and digitised after the UN called upon the secretary-general to “take all appropriate steps … for the protection of Arab property, assets and property rights in Israel and to preserve and modernize existing records”. The resulting copy was given to the Mission of Palestine to the United Nations that I was heading.

International responsibility

It was in the context of the tremendous US attack against the rights of our people that we decided to make the database open to the public through the Yasser Arafat Foundation. If the team behind the Trump Middle East plan was arrogant and ignorant enough to dismiss international law, UN resolutions and even Washington’s own diplomatic history, we thought there could be a chance that they would understand the value of private property and the rights of individual owners.

Today, we have decided to open the records for every Palestinian to be able to check on their property and, in certain cases, obtain respective documents.

Whoever accesses this database will realise not only the great injustices inflicted upon the Palestinian people but also how much Israel has profited from Palestinian refugee property. The database includes 210,000 owners and 540,000 parcels of land, and it was mainly built up using British land and tax registries. This includes around 6,000 maps showing the locations of each parcel.

In other words, we can fairly talk about 5.5 million dunums (1.359 million acres) of private Palestinian property in what is now Israel, excluding the Naqab, as it was not registered.

Palestinian refugee rights are well enshrined in international law and relevant UN resolutions. The same international community that decided to divide Palestine cannot continue to ignore the results of its actions.

In the absence of a just and lasting political settlement that addresses all issues in accordance with international law, the implementation of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, including self-determination, will continue being its responsibility.

Failed approach

Trump said that by recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, he was taking Jerusalem “off the negotiating table”. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, used similar logic in his campaign to strangle UNRWA, aiming to take the refugee issue “off the table” as well.

But their approach failed. This should serve as a lesson for those who continue working to deny Palestinian rights. Denying Palestinian rights means denying the basic principles upon which the UN was established, and represents one of the biggest failures of the multilateral international system. The greatness of the Palestinian cause is the reason Trump failed.

When Israel became a UN member in 1949, it committed to respect the UN Charter and its resolutions. Seventy-two years later, it has still failed to do so.

The Biden administration will not aid the cause of peace if it tries to repeat formulas aimed at solidifying Israel’s impunity and denying Palestinian rights. It should instead seek to partner with other members of the international community to repair previous failures, realising that international law cannot be bypassed, nor can the rights of millions of Palestinian refugees.

The refugee property database that we have opened to the public should serve as a reminder of the magnitude of what has been done to the Palestinian people.

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Dr Nasser Qudwa is the head of the Yasser Arafat Foundation and member of the Fatah Central Committee. He is the former permanent representative of Palestine to the United Nations and foreign minister. He led the Palestinian team at the International Court of Justice in the case against the wall built by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory (2004).

Featured image: A sign stating ‘Danger, demolition. Entry is prohibited’ was placed by Israeli authorities on top of the rubble of the Khalialehs’ houses (MEE\Sondus Ewies)

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Will Biden’s America Stop Creating Terrorists?

December 14th, 2020 by Medea Benjamin

Joe Biden will take command of the White House at a time when the American public is more concerned about battling coronavirus than fighting overseas wars. But America’s wars rage on regardless, and the militarized counterterrorism policy Biden has supported in the past—based on airstrikes, special operations and the use of proxy forces—is precisely what keeps these conflicts raging. 

In Afghanistan, Biden opposed Obama’s 2009 troop surge, and after the surge failed, Obama reverted to the policy that Biden favored to begin with, which became the hallmark of their war policy in other countries as well. In insider circles, this was referred to as “counterterrorism,” as opposed to “counterinsurgency.” 

In Afghanistan, that meant abandoning the large-scale deployment of U.S. forces, and relying instead on air strikes, drone strikes and special operations “kill or capture” raids, while recruiting and training Afghan forces to do nearly all the ground fighting and holding of territory.

In the 2011 Libya intervention, the NATO-Arab monarchist coalition embedded hundreds of Qatari special operations forces and Western mercenaries with the Libyan rebels to call in NATO airstrikes and train local militias, including Islamist groups with links to Al Qaeda. The forces they unleashed are still fighting over the spoils nine years later. 

While Joe Biden now takes credit for opposing the disastrous intervention in Libya, at the time he was quick to hail its deceptive short-term success and Colonel Gaddafi’s gruesome assassination. “NATO got it right,” Biden said in a speech at Plymouth State College in October 2011 on the very day President Obama announced Gaddafi’s death. “In this case, America spent $2 billion and didn’t lose a single life. This is more the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has in the past.” 

While Biden has since washed his hands of the debacle in Libya, that operation was in fact emblematic of the doctrine of covert and proxy war backed by airstrikes that he supported, and which he has yet to disavow. Biden still says he supports “counterterrorism” operations, but he was elected president without ever publicly answering a direct question about his support for the massive use of airstrikes and drone strikes that are an integral part of that doctrine.

In the campaign against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, U.S.-led forces dropped over 118,000 bombs and missiles, reducing major cities like Mosul and Raqqa to rubble and killing tens of thousands of civilians. When Biden said America “didn’t lose a single life” in Libya, he clearly meant “American life.” If “life” simply means life, the war in Libya obviously cost countless lives, and made a mockery of a UN Security Council resolution that approved the use of military force only to protect civilians.  

As Rob Hewson, the editor of the arms trade journal Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons, told the AP as the U.S. unleashed its “Shock and Awe” bombardment on Iraq in 2003, “In a war that’s being fought for the benefit of the Iraqi people, you can’t afford to kill any of them. But you can’t drop bombs and not kill people. There’s a real dichotomy in all of this.” The same obviously applies to people in Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Palestine and wherever American bombs have been falling for 20 years.  

As Obama and Trump both tried to pivot from the failed “global war on terrorism” to what the Trump administration has branded “great power competition,” or a reversion to the Cold War, the war on terror has stubbornly refused to exit on cue. Al Qaeda and Islamic State have been driven from places the U.S. has bombed or invaded, but keep reappearing in new countries and regions. Islamic State now occupies a swath of northern Mozambique, and has also taken root in Afghanistan. Other Al Qaeda affiliates are active across Africa, from Somalia and Kenya in East Africa to eleven countries in West Africa. 

After nearly 20 years of “war on terror,” there is now a large body of research into what drives people to join Islamist armed groups fighting local government forces or Western invaders. While American politicians still wring their hands over what twisted motives can possibly account for such incomprehensible behavior, it turns out that it’s really not that complicated. Most fighters are not motivated by Islamist ideology as much as by the desire to protect themselves, their families or their communities from militarized “counterterrorism” forces, as documented in this report by the Center for Civilians in Conflict. 

Another study, titled The Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment, found that the tipping point or “final straw” that drives over 70% of fighters to join armed groups is the killing or detention of a family member by “counterterrorism” or “security” forces. The study exposes the U.S. brand of militarized counterterrorism as a self-fulfilling policy that fuels an intractable cycle of violence by generating and replenishing an ever-expanding pool of “terrorists” as it destroys families, communities and countries.

For example, the U.S. formed the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership with 11 West African countries in 2005 and has so far sunk a billion dollars into it. In a recent report from Burkina Faso, Nick Turse cited U.S. government reports that confirm how 15 years of U.S.-led “counterterrorism” have only fueled an explosion of terrorism across West Africa.  

The Pentagon’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies reports that the 1,000 violent incidents involving militant Islamist groups in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger in the past year amount to a seven-fold increase since 2017, while the confirmed minimum number of people killed has increased from 1,538 in 2017 to 4,404 in 2020.

Heni Nsaibia, a senior researcher at ACLED (Armed Conflict Location Event Data), told Turse that, “Focusing on Western concepts of counterterrorism and embracing a strictly military model has been a major mistake. Ignoring drivers of militancy, such as poverty and lack of social mobility, and failing to alleviate the conditions that foster insurgencies, like widespread human rights abuses by security forces, have caused irreparable harm.”

Indeed, even the New York Times has confirmed that “counterterrorism” forces in Burkina Faso are killing as many civilians as the “terrorists” they are supposed to be fighting. A 2019 U.S. State Department Country Report on Burkina Faso documented allegations of “hundreds of extrajudicial killings of civilians as part of its counterterrorism strategy,” mainly killing members of the Fulani ethnic group.

Souaibou Diallo, the president of a regional association of Muslim scholars, told Turse that these abuses are the main factor driving the Fulani to join militant groups. “Eighty percent of those who join terrorist groups told us that it isn’t because they support jihadism, it is because their father or mother or brother was killed by the armed forces,” said Diallo. “So many people have been killed—assassinated—but there has been no justice.”

Since the inception of the Global War on Terror, both sides have used the violence of their enemies to justify their own violence, fueling a seemingly endless spiral of chaos spreading from country to country and region to region across the world.

But the U.S. roots of all this violence and chaos run even deeper than this. Both Al Qaeda and Islamic State evolved from groups originally recruited, trained, armed and supported by the CIA to overthrow foreign governments: Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the Nusra Front and Islamic State in Syria since 2011.

If the Biden administration really wants to stop fueling chaos and terrorism in the world, it must radically transform the CIA, whose role in destabilizing countries, supporting terrorism, spreading chaos and creating false pretexts for war and hostility has been well documented since the 1970s by Colonel Fletcher Prouty, William Blum, Gareth Porter and others. 

The United States will never have an objective, depoliticized national intelligence system, or therefore a reality-based, coherent foreign policy, until it exorcises this ghost in the machine. Biden has chosen Avril Haines, who crafted the secret quasi-legal basis for Obama’s drone program and protected CIA torturers, to be his Director of National Intelligence. Is Haines up to the job of transforming these agencies of violence and chaos into a legitimate, working intelligence system? That seems unlikely, and yet it is vital. 

The new Biden administration needs to take a truly fresh look at the whole range of destructive policies the United States has pursued around the world for decades, and the insidious role the CIA has played in so many of them. 

We hope Biden will finally renounce hare-brained, militarized policies that destroy societies and ruin people’s lives for the sake of unattainable geopolitical ambitions, and that he will instead invest in humanitarian and economic aid that really helps people to live more peaceful and prosperous lives. 

We also hope that Biden will reverse Trump’s pivot back to the Cold War and prevent the diversion of more of our country’s resources to a futile and dangerous arms race with China and Russia. 

We have real problems to deal with in this century – existential problems that can only be solved by genuine international cooperation. We can no longer afford to sacrifice our future on the altar of the Global War on Terror, a New Cold War, Pax Americana or other imperialist fantasies.

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Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. She is a member of the writers’ group Collective20.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.  

Featured image is from CODEPINK

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has run a fascinating long report this week offering a disturbing snapshot of the political climate rapidly emerging across Europe on the issue of antisemitism. The article documents a kind of cultural, political and intellectual reign of terror in Germany since the parliament passed a resolution last year equating support for non-violent boycotts of Israel – in solidarity with Palestinians oppressed by Israel – with antisemitism. 

The article concerns Germany but anyone reading it will see very strong parallels with what is happening in other European countries, especially the UK and France.

The same European leaders who a few years ago marched in Paris shouting “Je suis Charlie” – upholding the inalienable free speech rights of white Europeans to offend Muslims by insulting and ridiculing their Prophet – are now queuing up to outlaw free speech when it is directed against Israel, a state that refuses to end its belligerent occupation of Palestinian land. European leaders have repeatedly shown they are all too ready to crush the free speech of Palestinians, and those in solidarity with them, to avoid offending sections of the Jewish community. 

The situation reduces to this: European Muslims have no right to take offence at insults about a religion they identify with, but European Jews have every right to take offence at criticism of an aggressive Middle Eastern state they identify with. Seen another way, the perverse secular priorities of European mainstream culture now place the sanctity of a militarised state, Israel, above the sanctity of a religion with a billion followers.

Guilt by association 

This isn’t even a double standard. I can’t find a word in the dictionary that conveys the scale and degree of hypocrisy and bad faith involved.

If the American Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein wrote a follow-up to his impassioned book The Holocaust Industry – on the cynical use of the Holocaust to enrich and empower a Jewish organisational establishment at the expense of the Holocaust’s actual survivors – he might be tempted to title it The Antisemitism Industry.

In the current climate in Europe, one that rejects any critical thinking in relation to broad areas of public life, that observation alone would enough to have one denounced as an antisemite. Which is why the Haaretz article – far braver than anything you will read in a UK or US newspaper – makes no bones about what is happening in Germany. It calls it a “witch-hunt”. That is Haaretz’s way of saying that antisemitism has been politicised and weaponised – a self-evident conclusion that will currently get you expelled from the British Labour party, even if you are Jewish.

The Haaretz story highlights two important developments in the way antisemitism has been, in the words of intellectuals and cultural leaders cited by the newspaper, “instrumentalised” in Germany.

Jewish organisations and their allies in Germany, as Haaretz reports, are openly weaponising antisemitism not only to damage the reputation of Israel’s harsher critics, but also to force out of the public and cultural domain – through a kind of “antisemitism guilt by association” – anyone who dares to entertain criticism of Israel.

Cultural associations, festivals, universities, Jewish research centres, political think-tanks, museums and libraries are being forced to scrutinise the past of those they wish to invite in case some minor transgression against Israel can be exploited by local Jewish organisations. That has created a toxic, politically paranoid atmosphere that inevitably kills trust and creativity.

But the psychosis runs deeper still. Israel, and anything related to it, has become such a combustible subject – one that can ruin careers in an instant – that most political, academic and cultural figures in Germany now choose to avoid it entirely. Israel, as its supporters intended, is rapidly becoming untouchable.

A case study noted by Haaretz is Peter Schäfer, a respected professor of ancient Judaism and Christianity studies who was forced to resign as director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum last year. Schäfer’s crime, in the eyes of Germany’s Jewish establishment, was that he staged an exhibition on Jerusalem that recognised the city’s three religious traditions, including a Muslim one.

He was immediately accused of promoting “historical distortions” and denounced as “anti-Israel”. A reporter for Israel’s rightwing Jerusalem Post, which has been actively colluding with the Israeli government to smear critics of Israel, contacted Schäfer with a series of inciteful emails. The questions included “Did you learn the wrong lesson from the Holocaust?” and “Israeli experts told me you disseminate antisemitism – is that true?”

Schäfer observes:

“The accusation of antisemitism is a club that allows one to deal a death blow, and political elements who have an interest in this are using it, without a doubt… The museum staff gradually entered a state of panic. Then of course we also started to do background checks. Increasingly it poisoned the atmosphere and our work.”

Another prominent victim of these Jewish organisations tells Haaretz:

“Sometimes one thinks, ‘To go to that conference?’ ‘To invite this colleague?’ Afterward it means that for three weeks, I’ll have to cope with a shitstorm, whereas I need the time for other things that I get paid for as a lecturer. There is a type of ‘anticipatory obedience’ or ‘prior self-censorship.’” 

Ringing off the hook 

There is nothing unusual about what is happening in Germany. Jewish organisations are stirring up these “shitstorms” – designed to paralyse political and cultural life for anyone who engages in even the mildest criticism of Israel – at the highest levels of government. Don’t believe me? Here is Barack Obama explaining in his recent autobiography his efforts as US president to curb Israel’s expansion of its illegal settlements. Early on, he was warned to back off or face the wrath of the Israel lobby:

“Members of both parties worried about crossing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as ‘anti-Israel’ (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election.”

When Obama went ahead anyway in 2009 and proposed a modest freeze on Israel’s illegal settlements: 

“The White House phones started ringing off the hook, as members of my national security team fielded calls from reporters, leaders of American Jewish organizations, prominent supporters, and members of Congress, all wondering why we were picking on Israel … this sort of pressure continued for much of 2009.”

He observes further:

“The noise orchestrated by Netanyahu had the intended effect of gobbling up our time, putting us on the defensive, and reminding me that normal policy differences with an Israeli prime minister – even one who presided over a fragile coalition government – exacted a political cost that didn’t exist when I dealt with the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, or any of our other closest allies.”

Doubtless, Obama dare not put down in writing his full thoughts about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu or the US lobbyists who worked on his behalf. But Obama’s remarks do show that, even a US president, supposedly the single most powerful person on the planet, ended up blanching in the face of this kind of relentless assault. For lesser mortals, the price is likely to be far graver. 

No free speech on Israel 

It was this same mobilisation of Jewish organisational pressure – orchestrated, as Obama notes, by Israel and its partisans in the US and Europe – that ended up dominating Jeremy Corbyn’s five years as the leader of Britain’s leftwing Labour party, recasting a well-known anti-racism activist almost overnight as an antisemite.

It is the reason why his successor, Sir Keir Starmer, has outsourced part of Labour’s organisational oversight on Jewish and Israel-related matters to the very conservative Board of Deputies of British Jews, as given expression in Starmer’s signing up to the Board’s “10 Pledges”.

It is part of the reason why Starmer recently suspended Corbyn from the party, and then defied the membership’s demands that he be properly reinstated, after Corbyn expressed concerns about the way antisemitism allegations had been “overstated for political reasons” to damage him and Labour. (The rightwing Starmer, it should be noted, was also happy to use antisemitism as a pretext to eradicate the socialist agenda Corbyn had tried to revive in Labour.) It is why Starmer has imposed a blanket ban on constituency parties discussing Corbyn’s suspension. And it is why Labour’s shadow education secretary has joined the ruling Conservative party in threatening to strip universities of their funding if they allow free speech about Israel on campus.

Two types of Jews

But the Haaretz article raises another issue critical to understanding how Israel and the Jewish establishment in Europe are politicising antisemitism to protect Israel from criticism. The potential Achilles’ heel of their campaign are Jewish dissidents, those who break with the supposed “Jewish community” line and create a space for others – whether Palestinians or other non-Jews – to criticise Israel. These Jewish dissenters risk serving as a reminder that trenchant criticism of Israel should not result in one being tarred an antisemite.

Israel and Jewish organisations, however, have made it their task to erode that idea by promoting a distinction – an antisemitic one, at that – between two types of Jews: good Jews (loyal to Israel), and bad Jews (disloyal to Israel). 

Haaretz reports that officials in Germany, such as Felix Klein, the country’s antisemitism commissioner, and Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, are being allowed to define not only who is an antisemite, typically using support for Israel as the yardstick, but are also determining who are good Jews – those politically like them – and who are bad Jews – those who disagree with them.

Despite Germany’s horrific recent history of Jew hatred, the German government, local authorities, the media, universities and cultural institutions have been encouraged by figures like Klein and Schuster to hound German Jews, even Israeli Jews living and working in Germany, from the country’s public and cultural space.

When, for example, a group of Israeli Jewish academics in Berlin held a series of online discussions about Zionism last year on the website of their art school, an Israeli reporter soon broke the story of a “scandal” involving boycott supporters receiving funding from the German government. Hours later the art school had pulled down the site, while the German education ministry issued a statement clarifying that it had provided no funding. The Israeli embassy officially declared the discussions held by these Israelis as “antisemitic”, and a German foundation that documents antisemitism added the group to the list of antisemitic incidents it records.

Described as ‘kapos’ 

So repressive has the cultural and political atmosphere grown in Germany that there has been a small backlash among cultural leaders. Some have dared to publish a letter protesting against the role of Klein, the antisemitism commissioner. Haaretz reports:

“The antisemitism czar, the letter charged, is working ‘in synergy with the Israeli government’ in an effort ‘to discredit and silence opponents of Israel’s policies’ and is abetting the ‘instrumentalization’ that undermines the true struggle against antisemitism.

Figures like Klein have been so focused on tackling criticism of Israel from the left, including the Jewish left, that they have barely noted the “acute danger Jews in Germany face due to the surge in far-right antisemitism”, the letter argues.

Again, the same picture can be seen across Europe. In the UK, the opposition Labour party, which should be a safe space for those leading the anti-racism struggle, is purging itself of Jews critical of Israel and using anti-semitism smears against prominent anti-racists, especially from other oppressed minorities.

Extraordinarily, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, one of the founders of Jewish Voice for Labour, which supports Corbyn, recently found herself suspended by Starmer’s Labour. She had just appeared in a moving video in which she explained the ways antisemitism was being used by Jewish organisations to smear Jewish left-wingers like herself as “traitors” and “kapos” – an incendiary term of abuse, as Wimborne-Idrissi points out, that refers to “a Jewish inmate of a concentration camp who collaborated with the [Nazi] authorities, people who collaborated in the annihilation of their own people”.

In suspending her, Starmer effectively endorsed this campaign by the UK’s Jewish establishment of incitement against, and vilification of, leftwing Jews.

Earlier, Marc Wadsworth, a distinguished black anti-racism campaigner, found himself similarly suspended by Labour when he exposed the efforts of Ruth Smeeth, then a Labour MP and a former Jewish official in the Israel lobby group BICOM, to recruit the media to her campaign smearing political opponents on the left as antisemites.

In keeping with the rapid erosion of critical thinking in civil society organisations designed to uphold basic freedoms, Smeeth was recently appointed director of the prestigious free speech organisation Index on Censorship. There she can now work on suppressing criticism of Israel – and attack “bad Jews” – under cover of fighting censorship. In the new, inverted reality, censorship refers not to the smearing and silencing of a “bad Jew” like Wimborne-Idrissi, but to criticism of Israel over its human rights abuses, which supposedly “censors” the identification of “good Jews” with Israel – now often seen as the crime of “causing offence”.

Boy who cried wolf 

The Haaretz article helps to contextualise Europe’s current antisemitism “witch-hunt”, which targets anyone who criticises Israel or stands in solidarity with oppressed Palestinians, or associates with such people. It is an expansion of the earlier campaign by the Jewish establishment against “the wrong kind of Jew”, as identified by Finkelstein in The Holocaust Industry. But this time Jewish organisations are playing a much higher-stakes, and more dangerous, political game.

Haaretz rightly fears that the Jewish leadership in Europe is not only silencing ordinary Jews but degrading the meaning – the shock value – of antisemitism through the very act of politicising it. Jewish organisations risk alienating the European left, which has historically stood with them against Jew hatred from the right. European anti-racists suddenly find themselves equated with, and smeared as, fledgling neo-Nazis.

If those who support human rights and demand an end to the oppression of Palestinians find themselves labelled antisemitic, it will become ever harder to distinguish between bogus (weaponised) “antisemitism” on the left and real Jew hatred from the right. The antisemitism smearers – and their fellow travellers like Keir Starmer – are likely to end up suffering their very own “boy who cried wolf” syndrome.

Or as Haaretz notes:

“The issue that is bothering the critics of the Bundestag [German parliament] resolution is whether the extension of the concept of antisemitism to encompass criticism of Israel is not actually adversely affecting the battle against antisemitism. The argument is that the ease with which the accusation is leveled could have the effect of eroding the concept itself.”

The Antisemitism Industry 

It is worth noting the shared features of the new Antisemitism Industry and Finkelstein’s earlier discussions of the Holocaust Industry.

In his book, Finkelstein identifies the “wrong Jews” as people like his mother, who survived a Nazi death camp as the rest of her family perished. These surviving Jews, Finkelstein argues, were valued by the Holocaust Industry only in so far as they served as a promotional tool for the Jewish establishment to accumulate more wealth and cultural and political status. Otherwise, the victims were ignored because the actual Holocaust’s message – in contrast to the Jewish leadership’s representation of it – was universal: that we must oppose and fight all forms of racism because they lead to persecution and genocide.

Instead the Holocaust Industry promoted a particularist, self-interested lesson that the Holocaust proves Jews are uniquely oppressed and that they therefore deserve a unique solution: a state, Israel, that must be given unique leeway by western states to commit crimes in violation of international law. The Holocaust Industry – very much to be distinguished from the real events of the Holocaust – is deeply entwined in, and rationalised by, the perpetuation of the racialist, colonial project of Israel.

In the case of the Antisemitism Industry, the “wrong Jew” surfaces again. This time the witch-hunt targets Jewish leftwingers, Jews critical of Israel, Jews opposed to the occupation, and Jews who support a boycott of the illegal settlements or of Israel itself. Again, the problem with these “bad Jews” is that they allude to a universal lesson, one that says Palestinians have at least as much right to self-determination, to dignity and security, in their historic homeland as Jewish immigrants who fled European persecution.

In contrast to the “bad Jews”, the Antisemitism Industry demands that a particularist conclusion be drawn about Israel – just as a particularist conclusion was earlier drawn by the Holocaust Industry. It says that to deny Jews a state is to leave them defenceless against the eternal virus of antisemitism. In this conception, the Holocaust may be uniquely abhorrent but it is far from unique. Non-Jews, given the right circumstances, are only too capable of carrying out another Holocaust. Jews must therefore always be protected, always on guard, always have their weapons (or in Israel’s case, its nuclear bombs) to hand.

‘Get out of jail’ card 

This view, of course, seeks to ignore, or marginalise, other victims of the Holocaust – Romanies, communists, gays – and other kinds of racism. It needs to create a hierarchy of racisms, a competition between them, in which hatred of Jews is at the pinnacle. This is how we arrived at an absurdity: that anti-Zionism – misrepresented as the rejection of a refuge for Jews, rather than the reality that it rejects an ethnic, colonial state oppressing Palestinians – is the same as antisemitism.

Extraordinarily, as the Haaretz article clarifies, German officials are oppressing “bad Jews”, at the instigation of Jewish organisations, to prevent, as they see it, the re-emergence of the far-right and neo-Nazis. The criticisms of Israel made by the “bad Jew” are thereby not just dismissed as ideologically unsound or delusions but become proof that these Jews are colluding with, or at least nourishing, the Jew haters.

In this way, Germany, the UK and much of Europe have come to justify the exclusion of the “wrong Jew” – those who uphold universal principles for the benefit of all – from the public space. Which, of course, is exactly what Israel wants, because, rooted as it is in an ideology of ethnic exclusivity as a “Jewish state”, it necessarily rejects universal ethics.

What we see here is an illustration of a principle at the heart of Israel’s state ideology of Zionism: Israel needs antisemitism. Israel would quite literally have to invent antisemitism if it did not exist.

This is not hyperbole. The idea that the “virus of antisemitism” lies semi-dormant in every non-Jew waiting for a chance to overwhelm its host is the essential rationale for Israel. If the Holocaust was an exceptional historical event, if antisemitism was an ancient racism that in its modern incarnation followed the patterns of prejudice and hatred familiar in all racisms, from anti-black bigotry to Islamophobia, Israel would be not only redundant but an abomination – because it has been set up to dispossess and abuse another group, the Palestinians.

Antisemitism is Israel’s “get out of jail” card. Antisemitism serves to absolve Israel of the racism it structurally embodies and that would be impossible to overlook were Israel deprived of the misdirection weaponised antisemitism provides.

An empty space 

The Haaretz article provides a genuine service by not only reminding us that “bad Jews” exist but in coming to their defence – something that European media is no longer willing to do. To defend “bad Jews” like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is to be contaminated with the same taint of antisemitism that justified the ejection of these Jews from the public space.

Haaretz records the effort of a few brave cultural institutions in Germany to protest, to hold the line, against this new McCarthyism. Their stand may fail. If it does, you may never become aware of it.

Once, the “bad Jews” have been smeared into silence, as Palestinians and those who stand in solidarity with them largely have been already; when social media has de-platformed critics of Israel as Jew haters; when the media and political parties enforce this silence so absolutely they no longer need to smear anyone as an antisemite because these “antisemites” have been disappeared; when the Jewish “community” speaks with one voice because its other voices have been eliminated; when the censorship is complete, you will not know it.

There will be no record of what was lost. There will be simply an empty space, a blank slate, where discussions of Israel’s crimes against Palestinians once existed. What you will hear instead is only what Israel and its partisans want you to hear. Your ignorance will be blissfully complete.

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This essay first appeared on Jonathan Cook’s blog: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/ 

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

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Israel’s Isolation of Palestinian Child Prisoners Amounts to Torture

December 14th, 2020 by Defense for Children International - Palestine

Israeli authorities routinely detain Palestinian children in isolation solely for interrogation purposes, a practice that amounts to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, Defense for Children International – Palestine said in a report released today.

The 73-page report, “Isolated and Alone: Palestinian children held in solitary confinement by Israeli authorities for interrogation,” evaluates and details patterns of arrest, detention conditions, and interrogation practices by Israeli authorities. The report concludes that the physical and social isolation of Palestinian children for interrogation purposes by Israeli authorities is a practice that constitutes solitary confinement, amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment under international law norms.

Click to read the full report.

Over a four-year period, between January 1, 2016 and December 31, 2019, Defense for Children DCIP documented 108 cases where Palestinian children detained by the Israeli military were held in isolation for two or more days during the interrogation period.

Evidence and documentation collected by DCIP overwhelmingly indicate that the isolation of Palestinian children within the Israeli military detention system is practiced solely to obtain a confession for a specific offense or to gather intelligence under interrogation. DCIP has found no evidence demonstrating a legally justifiable use of isolation of Palestinian child detainees, such as for disciplinary, protective, or medical reasons. Solitary confinement has been used, almost exclusively, during pre-charge and pretrial detention. The practice is not generally employed after children have been convicted and are serving their sentences.

“International law prohibits the use of solitary confinement and similar measures constituting cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment against children, and yet Israeli authorities frequently detain children in this manner,“ said Khaled Quzmar, General Director of DCIP. “It is widely acknowledged that this practice causes both immediate and long-term psychological harm to children. It must end immediately, and the prohibition must be enshrined in law.”

Isolation of Palestinian child detainees typically follows a military arrest and transfer period, during which many children are subjected to physical violence and other forms of ill-treatment. While in isolation, child detainees are without meaningful human contact, as interactions with others are often solely with their interrogator. Meals are passed to children through a flap in the door. Children also commonly report significantly worse cell conditions compared to the cells in which they were placed during other periods of detention. The conditions in isolation cells are commonly characterized by inadequate ventilation, 24-hour lighting, no windows, unsanitary bedding and toilet facilities, and hostile architectural features such as wall protrusions.

During interrogation, Israeli military law does not afford Palestinian minors the right to have a parent or lawyer present. The interrogation techniques are often mentally and physically coercive, frequently incorporating a combination of intimidation, threats, verbal abuse, and physical violence with a clear purpose of obtaining a confession.

In all 108 cases documented by DCIP, Israeli authorities interrogated Palestinian child detainees without the presence of a lawyer or family member, and children were overwhelmingly denied a consultation with a lawyer prior to interrogation. Israeli authorities use coercive tactics, including the use of informants, resulting in children unintentionally making some incriminating statements or even false confessions.

Israel has the dubious distinction of being the only country in the world that systematically prosecutes between 500 and 700 children in military courts each year. DCIP estimates that since the year 2000, Israeli military authorities have detained, interrogated, prosecuted, and imprisoned approximately 13,000 Palestinian children.

Key Findings

Of the 108 cases documented by DCIP between January 1, 2016 and December 31, 2019:

  • The average duration of isolation was 14.3 days.
  • Nearly 40 percent (43 children), endured a prolonged period of isolation of 16 or more days.
  • All cases were Palestinian boys aged between 14 and 17 years old, including 70 aged 17 years, 30 aged 16 years, seven aged 15 years, and one aged 14 years.
  • In the majority of cases, Palestinian child detainees were unlawfully transferred to detention and interrogation facilities located inside Israel operated or controlled by the Israel Prison Service (IPS) and Israel Security Agency in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
    • At least 52 children were held at Al-Jalame (also known as Kishon) interrogation and detention center;
    • At least 29 children were held at Petah Tikva interrogation and detention center;
    • At least 32 were held at Megiddo prison; and
    • At least 14 were held at Al-Mascobiyya interrogation and detention center.
  • In 102 out of 108 cases (94 percent), children had no access to a legal consultation prior to interrogations.
  • In all 108 cases, children had no lawyer or family member present during the interrogation.
  • 62 children (57 percent) reported that interrogators did not properly inform them of their rights before interrogation, including their right to silence.
  • In 86 cases (80 percent), children held in isolation reported being subject to stress positions during interrogation, most commonly having their limbs tied to a low metal chair for prolonged periods, a position they described as acutely painful.
  • In 73 cases (68 percent), children were exposed to informants while detained in isolation. Many of these children were later confronted with incriminating statements made to the informant during a subsequent interrogation.
  • DCIP finds that the physical and social isolation of Palestinian children for interrogation purposes by Israeli authorities is a practice that constitutes solitary confinement, which amounts to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.

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The Canadian government is choosing corporate property rights over the health of billions.

The World Trade Organization is currently discussing a proposal by India and South Africa calling for a waiver of certain rules on intellectual property rights to allow poor countries to produce COVID-19 vaccines. Backed by about 100 countries, the initiative to temporarily waive some elements of the TRIPS Intellectual Property Rights accord has been opposed by Ottawa. The Liberals’ opposition to the “Waiver from Certain Provisions of the TRIPS Agreement for the Prevention, Containment and Treatment of COVID-19” is particularly galling since Canada is hoarding COVID-19 vaccines. A recent report showed that Canada was the worst offender in the world, having amassed enough vaccines to cover the entire Canadian population five times over. Many poor countries have barely enough vaccines on order to cover 10% of their population.

Canada has aligned with the US, Switzerland and EU and Big Pharma on an issue that could save many lives. Hopefully, growing criticism will prompt Ottawa to shift its position but the Canadian government has long supported strengthening (anti-free market) intellectual property rights in international trade forums. More generally, Canada usually aligns itself with the demands of the richest countries at the WTO.

Recent protests in India inadvertently shone a light on the issue. Over the past week farmers in India have launched massive protests against a bid to deregulate crop pricing. While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke in favor of the protest, the Indian media has pointed out that Canada has consistently sought to undercut India’s minimum support price (MSP) for small farmers at the WTO. In a story titled “Hello Canada! Trudeau support to India’s farm protests contradict Canada’s WTO stand”, Business Today reported that over the past four years Canada has raised 65 “questions” against India’s agricultural policies at the WTO’s Committee on Agriculture. Canada’s criticisms focused on “India’s MSP-based market price support policies for agriculture products to India’s public stockholding programmes for food security to India’s trade policies on pulses.”

At the WTO Canada is a member of the Cairns Group of Agriculture Exporters. In a bid to expand their country’s exports, the Cairns Group pushes to eliminate supports for small-scale local agricultural producers.

Through the WTO Canada has also recently challenged European Union restrictions on gene-edited crops. In July 2018 the European Court of Justice ruled that agricultural gene editing should be regulated under the EU’s genetically modified organisms (GMO) protocols. In response Canada, the US and 11 other countries criticized EU farm product regulations at the WTO. They claimed that exports with a low-level presence of gene-edited crop should not be restricted even if the product was unapproved in the recipient nation. Changing food at the molecular level, gene-editing is used to modify the flavour or texture of fruits. Big agricultural firms such as Monsanto/Bayer promote gene editing partly to tighten their grip over the food supply. But there are unresolved questions about the long-term effects of gene-edited organisms on human health and the environment.

Prior to the pandemic Ottawa coordinated a bid to recharge the WTO that reinforced international inequities. In October 2018 international trade minister Jim Carr created a coalition of 13 WTO members (EU, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Kenya, Mexico, Singapore, New Zealand, South Korea, Norway and Switzerland). The group met in Ottawa amidst trade tensions between the US and China and while the US president was criticizing the WTO. The aim of the initiative was to find an agreement on WTO reform that could later be brought to the institution’s broader membership. The spokesperson for the African Group, South Africa’s envoy to the WTO, Xavier Carim, criticized the Canadian-led scheme. “When we look at these proposals, we see them as making the imbalance that we have even worse,” said Carim. “They should make it difficult for developing countries to advance.” Carim said the African Group wanted greater policy space to industrialize and reforms to agricultural trade distortions.

Why are Trudeau’s Liberals not supporting this sensible policy to help the people of poorest continent?

Because Ottawa is in thrall to big business and supporting the interests of the already wealthy.

But, surely ending the COVID-19 pandemic must be a priority. The faster the world’s population has access to vaccinations, the better off we will all be.

Sensible people should demand: Free the vaccines now!

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Academics at Cambridge won a cheering victory for free speech today when they voted by an overwhelming majority to reject plans from the vice-chancellor to change the rules governing debate at the university.

They rejected the university’s proposals to insist that students and staff be ‘respectful’ of opposing views. They decided, instead, that the rules should say students and staff must ‘tolerate’ opposition. The result was as close to conclusive as you can get. Only 162 academics voted in favour of the university’s plan, while 1316 voted in favour of the change. (A further 208 academics wanted neither.)

As I explained in The Spectator last week, the distinction between respect and tolerance goes to the heart of today’s raging debates on free speech. To tolerate an opponent is to refrain from punishing him or her for their views. You remain free to offend and challenge them. You most certainly have no obligation to respect ideas you regard as ignorant or dangerous or both. ‘Respect,’ by contrast, is a slippery concept that should set off alarm bells. Respect can be hard earned and freely given. Yet gangsters also demand it at the point of a gun. What version of the word did Cambridge mean when when it said staff and students must ‘respect’ differing opinions?

Read full article here.

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Nick Cohen is a columnist for the Observer and author of What’s Left and You Can’t Read This Book.

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The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court recently reported that there was “reasonable basis to believe” that British troops committed war crimes in Iraq. She declared that there was evidence of crimes including unlawful killing, rape, torture and inhumane treatment of detainees. 

Ben Wallace, the UK’s Defence Secretary, responded to this report by saying that it “vindicates our efforts to pursue justice”.

Several headlines about this report have focused on the ICC’s decision not to open a full-scale investigation into British war crimes. But the ICC Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, made clear that this is not due to a lack of evidence. It is based on a procedural technicality.

The ICC is not supposed to investigate crimes unless there is evidence that they are not being investigated properly by the country concerned. They concluded that there was insufficient evidence that authorities in the UK were deliberately shielding armed forces from investigation.

But in three major ways, the report makes strong statements that the UK government and military leadership did not want to hear.

Firstly, the report found credible evidence of war crimes committed by UK troops. Fatou Bensouda said:

“The Office has previously found, and today confirmed, that there is a reasonable basis to believe that members of the British armed forces committed the war crimes of wilful killing, torture, inhuman/cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, and rape and/or other forms of sexual violence.”

More specifically, the report states that there is a “reasonable basis to believe” that UK troops unlawfully killed a minimum of seven people in their custody, tortured or otherwise mistreated at least 54 people and raped or otherwise sexually violated at least seven people in custody. It makes clear that these numbers are the minimum that can be identified and that the list is “not exhaustive”.

Secondly, while acknowledging that UK authorities have investigated allegations to some extent, the report criticises their lack of speed and results. Bensouda  spoke of the “failures of the British army at the time to conduct effective investigations”. The report draws attention to the fact that not a single member of the UK armed forces has been prosecuted over war crimes in Iraq. This, states the report, “has deprived the victims of justice”.

Thirdly, the report rejects the argument of the militarist lobby in the UK, who insist that war crimes investigations are down to “vexatious” allegations. Bensouda said that “the Office has found untenable the proposition that these various processes all arose from vexatious claims”.

If you don’t have time to wade through 184 pages to see what the reports says, I invite you to read the short statement issued by the ICC Prosecutor when the report was published. All three of the above points come across very strongly in it.

The ICC’s decision not to open a full-scale investigation is disappointing, given that they have said that the evidence is there. Their belief that UK authorities are seriously investigating the allegations is open to question. As Clive Baldwin of Human Rights Watch puts it, the decision will fuel suspicions that there is “one approach to powerful states and quite another for those with less clout”.

Nonetheless, the report repeatedly makes clear that the decision not to open a full-scale investigation is not due to lack of evidence.

Militarist commentators have whipped up a fantasy of a “witch-hunt” against veterans. This is used to justify the Overseas Operations Bill, recently passed by MPs and now with the House of Lords. Nicknamed the War Crimes Immunity Bill, it introduces a “presumption against prosecution” for war-related crimes alleged to have taken place more than five years earlier. Most of the crimes identified in the ICC’s report took place in 2003-2004.

The Peace Pledge Union has for a long time been pointing out that UK armed forces personnel are almost never charged with war-related crimes. When they are, it is always relatively low-ranking personnel rather than those who make the biggest decisions.

The “witch-hunt” fantasy is about defending the armed forces as institutions. Those who champion it rarely show much concern about the UK’s 13,000 homeless veterans or the many veterans suffering due to cuts to mental health services.

As a pacifist, I don’t believe that something is moral simply because it is legal. However,  the failure to prosecute war crimes makes clear that the armed forces are being placed above the law. They are already allowed to run their own criminal courts, police force and prosecution service.

Anyone who cares about impartial justice and the rule of law needs to speak up loudly about the reality of the ICC’s findings. The evidence of British war crimes in Iraq can no longer be seriously denied.

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Symon Hill is Campaigns Manager of the Peace Pledge Union, and a history tutor for the Workers’ Educational Association. 

Featured image is from Left Foot Forward

Thursday December 10 the British Supreme Court accepted the appeal issued by the lawyers of the opposition for exiting deputy Juan Guaidó, and ruled in favor of hearing his appeal regarding control of Venezuela’s gold reserves, valued at $1.3 billion, deposited in the Bank of England. The gold is the property of Venezuela’s people.

“Permission to appeal has been granted on all points,” a spokesman for the highest court told international media.

This further complicates the judicial process that seeks to determine who will gain control of Venezuelan gold, either the legitimate government of President Maduro, or Guaidó’s imaginary government, a fiction created by the United States to oust President Nicolas Maduro and steal Venezuelan assets.

In mid-November, Guaidó’s lawyers filed this appeal before the British Supreme Court, seeking to annul the decision issued on October 5 by the London Court of Appeals.

In a decision in favor of the Venezuelan people, the London court had annulled the July ruling that granted Guaidó control over the gold bars.

This is because it was “not clear” if Guaidó really was the one who ruled in Venezuela. For this reason, the Court of Appeals referred the case to the Supreme Court, in order for it to ask the government of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to clarify who he really recognizes at the head of Venezuela, since he maintains diplomatic and consular relations with the legitimate government of President Maduro.

On the other hand, in the ruling on Thursday, December 10, the British Supreme Court urged Guaidó to cancel the £400,000 (about $550 million USD) of legal expenses that he refuses to pay. Some analysts agree that this might be a new strategy from the British government and the Bank of England to seize the money that belongs to millions of Venezuelans and was in custody of the Venezuelan Central Bank (BCV).

“The gringos and the Europeans are descendants of the pirates that plagued the Caribbean a few centuries ago,” an international affairs expert told Orinoco Tribune. “Apparently we can’t expect any different from them. They just want to rob as much money as they can from the Venezuelan people—who could really use it—but that won’t affect Venezuelans’ resolve to be sovereign, and to never again be a US or European neo-colony.”

“This should serve as new evidence that the Bank of England—aside from all the legal paraphernalia—is not a safe place for the money of any government,” he added.

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Coronavirus Fact-Check #9: Is the Vaccine Safe?

December 14th, 2020 by Kit Knightly

There are dozens of articles all over the mainstream reassuring us that the brand new Sars-Cov-2 vaccine is safe. In the UK the vaccine rolled out is being hailed as “V Day”, in a shameless attempt to draw a parallel with World War II. Matt Hancock went on Good Morning Britain and attempted to “cry”.

On the other side of that coin, many experts in the field have vociferously called for all vaccine trials to be put on halt, some medical researchers are questioning the data and others counsel people to refuse the vaccine under any and all circumstances.

So – is the vaccine safe? The only rational answer is “we don’t know”.

It’s certainly true some people who have received it have experienced unexpected side effects.

It was recently revealed that 4 people involved in the US-based trial suffered partial facial paralysis. In the UK, two NHS staff who have received the vaccine suffered allergic anaphylactoid reactions, as a result the NHS is now not recommending the vaccine for anyone who “suffers from allergies”.

They don’t know what caused the reaction, and as far as we know so far, the people involved were not allergic to anything in the vaccine. It seems it’s not about being allergic to the vaccine, so much as the vaccine potentially causing problems for anyone with a sensitive or dysfunctional immune system.

It’s essentially recommended that no one who is allergic to anything, ie. other food or medication, should have the jab.

We’ve already had “explainers” appearing the media, saying vaccine allergic reactions are “rare and shortlived”.

To be clear, as of December 10th, the vaccine either has never been tested on, or is not recommended for:

  • People under sixteen years of age.
  • Pregnant women (or women intending to become pregnant in the near future).
  • People with serious co-morbidities.
  • People already taking other medications.
  • People who have allergies.

So the official line already cedes that the vaccine may be harmful to some or all of those people.

Even on the fully-grown and totally healthy adults it was tested on, obviously, there has not been enough time to do any kind of long term studies on possible side-effects or complications It usually takes 5-10 years to fully develop and test a vaccine, where as this has been rushed out in less than 10 months.

On top of that, of course, we have the fact all the vaccine producers have campaigned for – and won – total legal immunity in the UK, US and other nations around the world.

In the event the vaccine does cause harm, Pfizer (and the producers of other vaccines), are immune from civil liability.

Which means that, just like us, the producers themselves are well-aware the new vaccines might not be safe, and don’t want a repeat of 2009, when a rushed-out flu vaccine resulted in children suffering life-long complications and receiving millions in damages.

In the final analysis, you have to ask yourself a simple question: Do you feel safer taking an untested vaccine, or risking getting a virus with a survival rate of over 99%?

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Featured image is from Health Impact News

A State Senator in New Jersey wants the coronavirus vaccine made mandatory for all school age children, despite them being the least at risk group.

Middlesex Democrat Senator Joseph Vitale also wants to eliminate exemptions that have been used in the past to prevent their children from receiving shots.

“When it is that a vaccine is appropriate for children, I believe it ought to be included in that list of vaccines that are required for children,” Vitale told reporters.

“I’d like to incorporate it into the other vaccination bill that would require children to get vaccinated as a condition to entering school,” he added.

Vitale also says there is a separate effort underway to make the vaccine mandatory for University students in the state.

“It’s not complicated to decide whether or not to include a COVID vaccine as a condition of school,” he said, adding “The decision is going to be whether or not the vaccine is available, and if the science supports its efficacy.”

New Jersey currently mandates that children must have several vaccines in order to attend school, including MMR, polio, and chickenpox. However, thousands of children have been exempted from the shots, with parents citing religious beliefs.

There was an attempt last year by lawmakers to eliminate such exemptions and mandate the vaccinations across the board, but it failed when angry parents stormed the statehouse:

While New Jersey officials have stopped short of saying they will force everyone to get the vaccine, Governor Phil Murphy has signed an executive order that will see everyone who does get it automatically enrolled into a ‘New Jersey Immunization Information System’ , a move that some have seen as a way of coercing people to take the shot.

Speaking to reporters, Sue Collins, co-founder of the New Jersey Coalition for Vaccine Choice said

“Putting the cart before the horse and saying when it’s available everyone has to get it does not build trust.”

“No medical procedure should ever be mandated for anyone — especially something so new, with so many unknowns and no long-term knowledge at all,” Collins added.

Pushing back against the creep toward mandating the vaccine in the state, Republican Assemblyman Gerry Scharfenberger, has sponsored a bill to prevent it from becoming compulsory.

While he says he is not anti-vaccine, Scharfenberger says he cannot support mandating medication, and is responding to the concerns of constituents.

The developments in New Jersey come after a State Assemblymember in New York introduced legislation that would make it compulsory for residents to get vaccinated against coronavirus.

Democrat Linda Rosenthal said she introduced the bill because “there has been a “concerning uptick in dangerous anti-science, anti-vax rhetoric.”

As soon as the FDA approves the vaccine for children, there will likely be a torrent of states moving to add it to the compulsory vaccination list for school kids. Reports have suggested that Pfizer has begun conducting some tests of its vaccine on children, with Moderna also scheduling trials for tests on kids.

Currently, California, Mississippi and West Virginia are the only states that allow medical exemptions to vaccinations, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

A further 30 states, including New Jersey, currently allow religious exemptions, with 17 more states still allowing exemptions for religious and personal or philosophical beliefs.

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Ministers are set to beef up patrol powers by bringing in legislation to allow the Navy to board foreign vessels and arrest fishermen if there is no agreement, in scenes reminiscent of the 1970s Cold Wars.

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The UK has fired a warning shot to Brussels over no-deal after readying Royal Navy boats to patrol its fishing waters as negotiations enter their final 48 hours.

Four 80-metre armed vessels have been placed on standby to guard British waters from EU trawlers in the event that there is no new agreement on fishing rights after December 31 when transitional arrangements end.

The confirmation of the move by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) comes as Boris Johnson and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen warned on both sides of the Channel that a no-deal outcome looked more likely than an agreement in the trade negotiations.

On Friday afternoon, Mr Johnson met senior minister Michael Gove, who has responsibility for Brexit planning, and other officials to “take stock” of Government plans for a no-deal exit.

Rebuffed PM

It follows reports that German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Emmanuel Macron rebuffed the Prime Minister three times this week after he made attempts to speak to them directly about the stalled trade discussions.

Fishing has been one of the most contentious issues in the negotiations with the bloc, with France reportedly unhappy with the UK’s proposals for reducing quotas for EU skippers and a short implementation period.

Reciprocal access to each other’s waters will end next year but the two sides are at odds over what will replace the current terms, which the UK fishing industry has long argued leaves them short-changed.

Brussels has called for the status quo on fishing rights to continue for 12 months in the event of no-deal – a request that appears to have been rejected after the Government revealed plans to scale up patrols.

According to the Times, ministers are set to beef up patrol powers by bringing in legislation to allow the Navy to board foreign vessels and arrest fishermen if there is no agreement, in scenes reminiscent of the 1970s Cod Wars.

The Guardian reported that the four Royal Navy boats readied for fishing surveillance are river patrol vessels which are armed with machine guns – although the newspaper said there was no expectation shots would need to be fired.

Conservative MPs have been urging the Prime Minister to ensure that UK waters would be properly protected in the event of the talks collapsing.

Shrewsbury and Atcham MP Daniel Kawczynski tweeted:

“In the event of no deal with EU on Sunday we must receive absolute guarantee from Boris Johnson that British naval forces will be deployed from January 1 to prevent illegal French fishing in our waters.”

MoD

The MoD said the deployment of the boats had been agreed as part of planning for the end of the transition period.

A spokesman said:

“The MoD has conducted extensive planning and preparation to ensure that defence is ready for a range of scenarios at the end of the transition period.”

The Daily Mail reported that Wildcat and Merlin helicopters were also being placed on standby to assist with surveillance of the country’s territorial coast.

The move is likely to be read in Brussels as a shot across the bows as negotiators knuckle down in a bid to secure an agreement this weekend after Mr Johnson and Ms von der Leyen agreed a firm decision was needed on the talks by Sunday.

Chief negotiators Michel Barnier and Lord Frost are set to talk throughout the weekend in Brussels.

Speaking to reporters on a visit to Blyth in Northumberland, Mr Johnson said fishing and a so-called level playing field “ratchet” that would tie the UK to future EU standards were the two major stumbling blocks to a deal.

He said: “There is the whole issue of fish where we’ve got to be able to take back control of our waters. So there is a way to go – we’re hopeful that progress can be made.

Blyth

“But I’ve got to tell, that from where I stand now, here in Blyth, it is looking very, very likely that we will have to go for a solution that I think would be wonderful for the UK, and we’d be able to do exactly what we want from January.”

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, using the Prime Minister’s own words from 2019 against him, told the Mirror that collapsing the negotiations with Brussels after promising to “get Brexit done” at the general election would represent a “complete failure of statecraft”.

Earlier on Friday in Brussels, Ms von der Leyen said the UK and EU had “not yet found the solutions to bridge our differences” on fisheries.

The Commission president urged the Government to “understand the legitimate expectations of EU fishing fleets built on decades, and sometimes centuries, of access”.

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Featured image is from The London Economic

It seems impossible to ignore Julian Assange today, but the press is united in wilful ignorance of his plight. The dearth of stories about his show trial in a kangaroo court in London is evident. It has never been easier to bury a dissident. At a time when the criminalization of journalism is inescapable, there has never been less reporting on it.

Julian Assange is an emblem of the struggle for justice in wartime. He is fighting the good old fight for liberty and against imperial oppression. The law, in administrating his case, has failed its own benchmark of justice, and democracy has suffered, not least in the UK, where the ostensibly independent judiciary has been politicised by the US national security state.

The pieties of the American empire have been asserted to marginalise Assange, and they have allowed for an obfuscation, a barrier to the public understanding the charges and what they mean. In sum, the work for which Assange is being prosecuted is in the tradition of conscientious objection to imperial war, and the US is responding as barbarically as did the British state during world war one towards its dissenting citizens.

The US is using its enormous power to compel a guilty verdict under charges under the espionage act and prevent Assange’s vindication as a journalist. Assange is being prosecuted for journalism intended to embarrass the US establishment on the world stage. His enterprise as a journalist has been distorted into criminal activity by the Wikileaks Grand Jury.

The military-intelligence complex has excised extreme powers of manipulation over the public debate on Assange, malignantly influencing the public’s perception of his trial. Playing fast and loose with the truth that it is in fact a non-partisan pacifist research institute, the diktat that Wikileaks is a “hostile intelligence service” working at the behest of Russia has become establishment wisdom. The Machiavellian politics of neo-conservative Washington has led to a realpolitik that equates Wikileaks with Kremlin-backed cyber terrorism.

Those arbitrating over Assange’s destiny and driving the narrative about Wikileaks being terrorists are the same networks of people who stand to lose their privileges with classified leaks. Wikileaks threatens the centralised concentration of ownership of sensitive information in an ossified national security elite that lies to, defrauds the public and undermines the constitution. The political changes in America in the aftermath of 9/11 saw the country adopt many illiberal policies. The changes allowed for the Stalinisation of US policy. While the democratic ideal defends relaxed, minimal controls on free expression, the neoconservative war state proliferated repressive legislation designed to control public debate and secure the total authority of state-approved thought. As a result there is a dearth of genuine critical thinking in America’s media landscape, as well as a citizenry under duress of official propaganda.

Over the last decade, a number of western broadcasters and news outlets have embarked on a process of capitulating their freedoms of expression to the malignant authority of the intelligence community. Most are doing this by inviting editorial oversight from the intelligence agencies, and through obedience to what are called D-notices, restrictions on reporting on certain subjects the military deems sensitive. Licence to free expression remains the exclusive preserve of an army of citizen journalists, who expose the cartel media’s betrayal of press philosophy by uncompromisingly abiding by first amendment ethics.

The result is that online, there is a vibrant, eclectic culture of citizen media, which does more for public interest journalism than the mainstream media has in its entire career. The ethical hallmark and pinnacle for these citizen journalists is Wikileaks, either directly or indirectly inspired by its revolutionising of the public’s right to know.

For the public citizen press that evades corporate control, governments have resorted to technological censorship, controlling the platforms these dissidents can reach online. Mainstream media organisations cannot survive without a rigged system that gives them privileged access to the pliable minds of citizens. Citizen journalists by contrast are forced to build their own audiences from scratch. The superiority of citizen media derives from the relative independence of its practitioners compared to mainstream journalists, who are under the spell of op-ed policy determined by corporate owners.

Against this background of political and economic vulnerability, citizen journalism nevertheless holds a great deal of promise for subverting state control of narrative and information.

This shift in media may have a direct effect on how the public participate in politics. The internet as a vast knowledge distribution network helps drive up citizen’s efficacy by exposing them to the fullest range of information they need to come to an informed choice on politics and policy. Citizen media also provides a freethinking alternative to national news that is often focused on psychological operations.

Wikileaks plays an important role in democratic life. By exposing scandals elites would rather be kept secret, it honors the founding principles of the fourth estate to protect citizens against abuses of power.

Assange represents the struggle for fundamental rights to free expression and access to information.

As democrats and public intellectuals who study the life and times of democracy, we want to know that public interest journalism is protected against the sinister encroachments of the state. The Assange issue is one that defies the effects of polarisation, everybody can unite behind the first amendment. A journalist is suffering in torturous conditions for the crime of doing his job. We assess that this is injustice, and commit as a collective to his liberation.

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Megan Sherman is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Another Day in the Empire

Five of the pharmaceutical companies developing COVID-19 vaccines through the USA’s Operation Warp Speed have paid out “billions” (over the years) to settle lawsuits charging them with fraud related to “off-label” marketing of atypical antipsychotics and antidepressants that were mandated through the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP launched under Bush administration), which evolved into President George W. Bush’s federal “New Freedom Commission on Mental Health.” AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Janssen Pharmaceutical, and Pfizer, which are currently funded with over $7 billion from Operation Warp Speed, financed the nationwide rollout of fraudulent TMAP algorithms in order to bilk Medicaid programs and other public revenues to pay for drugs like Risperdal, Seroquel, Geodon, Paxil, and Wellbutrin, causing serious side-effects, including death.

These same pharma corporations are now involved in another algorithm project as they partner with the US federal government and an all-star team of Big Tech companies, including IBM, Amazon, Dell, Google, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, and Intel, which are leveraging Big Data to accelerate vaccine development through the White House’s public-private COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. With the help of artificial-intelligence (AI) algorithms, AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Pfizer are boasting that their warp-speed trials have produced vaccines ranging from 70% to 95% effective. However, these companies have a history of exaggerating the efficacy of their products just like they did by bankrolling TMAP algorithms to embellish the efficacy of their new lines of “atypical” mental health drugs.

Now that the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are effectively calling for mandatory vaccination by pushing digital immunity passports, it is keen to highlight how Operation Warp Speed is headed by Moncef Slaoui, who is a former Chairman of Vaccines at GlaxoSmithKline and a former Director of Moderna, while Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca vaccines are financed by the Gates Foundation, which is a member of the WEF along with Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Microsoft, IBM, Google, Amazon, Dell, and Hewlett Packard.

Just like Big Pharma pushed TMAP algorithms to ram through new mental health drugs, it appears that this very same pharma cartel is now colluding with their Big Tech partners at the World Economic Forum, which is calling for a technocratic Great Reset, to hype COVID health dangers in order to ram through new experimental mRNA vaccines, DNA-plasmid vaccines, and genetically engineered adenovirus vaccines that will jumpstart the “reset” for the Fourth Industrial Revolution of AI-driven biotech engineering.

Big Data, Big Pharma, Big Government: Public-Private AI Bioengineering for Global Public Health

The World Economic Forum reports that vaccines normally take anywhere from two to three years to be properly developed while other vaccines often take up to ten years to be developed. But now that the World Health Organization (WHO), which is in part financed by the Gates Foundation, has sounded the COVID pandemic alarm, normal US government regulation of the pharmaceutical industry is being laxed so that federal funds can pay Big Tech to utilize Big Data algorithms to simulate 3D AI models of the SARS-Cov-2 genetic structure in order to digitally manufacture RNA proteins and DNA plasmids that correspond immunologically to the pathogenic structures of the virtually modeled virus.

The CORD-19 Project

Back on March 16th, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a “call to action” for “the Nation’s artificial intelligence experts” to follow the lead of the COVID-19 Open Research Database (CORD-19), developed by a public-private partnership between Microsoft, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Oren Etzioni’s Allen Institute for AI, Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, and the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.

According to the Institute for Electronics and Electrical Engineers’ Spectrum magazine, the White House-sponsored CORD-19 project data-mines over “130,000 scholarly articles on COVID-19 in machine-readable format.” Scanned with Google Cloud’s Kaggle “machine learning,” CORD-19’s dossier of scientific journals is scoured with AI algorithms in order to extrapolate predictive analytics from the medical literature on COVID-19. To further promote CORD-19’s AI analytics, Google’s Kaggle announced the Covid-19 Research Challenge on March 16th. In the meantime, the AlphaFold “neural network” of Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence has been modeling “the three-dimensional shape of SARS-CoV-2 proteins based on the virus’s genetic sequence,” reports Spectrum.

Shortly after the White House’s CORD-19 “call to action,” on March 23rd, the Office of Science and Technology Policy launched the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium (HPC): a public-private partnership between the US federal government, international universities, and Big Tech corporations, which are assigned the task of expediting research and development for a COVID-19 vaccine.

The COVID HPC Consortium roster includes IBM; Microsoft; Google Cloud; Amazon Web Services; Dell Technologies; Hewlett Packard Enterprise; Intel; NVIDIA; D. E. Shaw Research; NASA; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center; the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center; the Texas Advanced Computing Center; the San Diego Supercomputer Center; the Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute; the Ohio Supercomputer Center; the Open Science Grid; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; UK Digital Research Infrastructure; the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre; the Center for High Performance Computing at the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing; the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information; and Japan’s RIKEN Center for Computational Science.

In brief, the White House is pushing the CORD-19 database, the COVID HPC Consortium, and Operation Warp Speed in a combined effort to finance Big Pharma’s experimental vaccine research accelerated with Big Data programmed for 3D AI modeling of SARS-CoV-2 virus structures which can be targeted with bioengineered synthetic mRNA proteins and DNA plasmids manufactured through machine learning and other AI algorithms. Financed with federal tax dollars, Warp Speed pharma corporations, including Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Inovio are leveraging these public-private Big Databases in order to kickstart preliminary trial phases for mRNA vaccines, DNA plasmid vaccines, and genetically engineered adenovirus vaccines that will usher in the World Economic Forum’s biotechnological Fourth Industrial Revolution managed by AI algorithms.

Perhaps this great leap forward in vaccine biotech might sound like just the scientific breakthrough needed to combat COVID. However, it should be noted that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has never before approved human use of a vaccine for any previous strain of coronavirus due largely to severe inflammatory autoimmune side-effects in animal trials. At the same time, neither mRNA vaccines, nor DNA plasmid vaccines, nor genetically engineered adenovirus vaccines have ever before been approved for human use in the United States. Obviously, this begs the question: how is it that these experimental vaccines, which have never been approved by the FDA, are suddenly becoming safe and effective for the first time in history under less rigorous conditions when standard testing protocols are being shortcut at emergency “warp speed”? How does rushing a vaccine to market at the fastest pace in history increase its safety and efficacy?

To be sure, no amount of Big Data can close the margins of errors between the time-consuming procedures of standard testing protocols and the expedited procedures of emergency testing protocols, even when the fast-tracked protocols are buttressed by the most powerful supercomputers programmed with the most sophisticated AI algorithms.

Warp Speed Pharma Corporations Pushed “Medication Algorithm Projects” to Defraud Medicaid

Even if Big AI algorithms could potentially close these margins of errors between digital theory and the reality of clinical testing, it should be noted that most of the Warp Speed pharmaceutical corporations, including Pfizer, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen Pharmaceutical, and Johnson & Johnson, have a history of pushing fraudulent “Medication Algorithm Projects” that boost stock prices by scamming Medicaid into paying for these companies’ antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs, which resulted in serious side-effects, including death.

The first of these algorithm projects to be bankrolled by Big Pharma was the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP), which was funded in large by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: the tax-exempt philanthropy of the Johnson & Johnson corporation. Bankrolled by the pharmaceutical industry, which is the most powerful lobby in the United States, TMAP was promoted as a model for other states, including California, Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Washington D.C. According to a whistleblower from Pennsylvania’s Office of Inspector General, Allen Jones,

“[t]he drug companies involved in financing and/or directly creating and marketing TMAP include: Janssen Pharmaceutical, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, and Austrazeneca [sic], Pfizer, Novartis, Janssen-Ortho-McNeil, GlaxoSmithKline, Abbott, Bristol Myers Squibb, Wyeth-Ayerst Forrest Laboratories and U.S. Pharmacopeia.”

These companies effectively boosted TMAP to the national stage where it was repackaged as the federal “New Freedom Commission on Mental Health,” which was spearheaded by President George W. Bush, who championed TMAP as Governor of Texas.

The goal of TMAP was to standardize prescription algorithms for public health services that would mandate mental health treatments requiring medications from the TMAP pharmaceutical cartel. When clinical trials failed to show that Big Pharma’s new lines of atypical antipsychotic drugs were superior to the older generic lines, TMAP’s pharma lobby paid a panel of doctors and psychiatrists, such as Jack Gorman of the New York Psychiatric Institute, to establish “Expert Consensus Guidelines,” which falsely promoted the use of Risperdal (Johnson & Johnson), Seroquel (AstraZeneca), Geodon (Pfizer), and other new drugs as “safer” and “more effective” than their older generic counterparts. In the meantime, TMAP’s pharma lobby bought off public health officials, such as Steven Karp and Steven Fiorello of the Pennsylvania Office of Mental Health, who installed similar Medication Algorithm Projects in their home states, setting up mental health programs that bilked Medicaid and other tax-funded social services to pay for atypical antipsychotics and antidepressants prescribed by Big Pharma-funded medication algorithms.

When TMAP was morphed into President Bush’s New Freedom Commission through Executive Order 13623, which directs schools to “screen” students for “mental health” conditions that can be treated with TMAP drugs, 14 of the 22 commissioners had ties to TMAP and other state MAP projects. These commissioners include Charles Currie (Pennsylvania); Michael F. Hogan (Ohio); Stephen W. Mayberg (California); Henry Harbin (Maryland); Randolf Townsend (Nevada); Anil Godbole (Illinois); Robert Pasternak (New Mexico); Rodolfo Arredondo (Texas); Nancy Carter Speck (Texas); Deanna Yates (Texas); Patricia Carlile (Texas); Norwood Knight-Richardson (Texas); Robert Postlehwait (Eli Lilly); and Larke Nahme Huang (National Asian American Pacific Islander Mental Health Association). During Bush’s campaigns for US president, he raked in at least $709,440 from TMAP pharma companies, including Pfizer ($160,109), Eli Lilly ($239,331), GlaxoSmithKline ($10,000), and Johnson & Johnson ($300,000).

As a result of TMAP pharma fraud, Johnson & Johnson paid out $158 million to settle a Texas lawsuit charging the company with defrauding the state’s Medicaid system through payments for “unapproved” or “off-label” Risperdal prescriptions. Similarly, AstraZeneca would end up paying $520 million to settle a lawsuit for its fraudulent marketing of off-label Seroquel prescriptions while Pfizer’s false claims about off-label Geodon prescriptions would go on to cost the company $2.3 billion in the largest healthcare fraud settlement ever prosecuted in the history of the US Justice Department. GlaxoSmithKline would wind up beating Pfizer’s record by paying $3 billion to for its fraudulent marketing of pediatric prescriptions for Paxil and Wellbutrin, which are also favored by TMAP algorithms. In sum, Warp Speed Pharma has a long track record of paying out billions of dollars to settle lawsuits for fraudulently bilking government agencies to foot the bill for its “algorithmically verified” drugs, which have resulted in serious side-effects, including death.

To be sure, TMAP algorithms, which are basically flow charts for prescribing drugs based on questionable diagnostic criteria, are not as sophisticated as the Big AI algorithms wielded by IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and other supercomputing institutions that are currently partnering with the pharmaceutical industry through Operation Warp Speed. Indeed, medication algorithms may have evolved far beyond the complexity of TMAP flow charts as Big Pharma and Big Data have been merging together through biotech partnerships between Pfizer and IBM Watson; AstraZeneca and BenevolentAI; Johnson & Johnson and BenevolentAI; and GlaxoSmithKline with Exscientia and Insilico. Nonetheless, just because Operation Warp Speed has access to bigger data and better algorithms through the CORD-19 database and the COVID HPC Consortium, it doesn’t change the modus operandi of these pharmaceutical giants which are prone to exaggerate the accuracy of their data analytics just like they embellished the accuracy of TMAP algorithms.

AI-Engineered Biotech Vaccines Will Usher in a Transhumanist Fourth Industrial Revolution

Only days after the UK Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA) became the first government agency in the world to authorize emergency use of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 mRNA vaccine, the UK MHRA is already warning that people who have a history of allergic reactions should not take the mRNA “jab” despite Pfizer-BioNTech’s claim that the vaccine has a purported 95% efficacy rate. It was also revealed that two people, who participated in Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID vaccine trials, died after receiving doses of the experimental mRNA vaccine. These reports should come as no surprise since the pharmaceutical industry has spent the last decade struggling with failedattempts to get regulatory approval of mRNA vaccines. The only reason these biotech vaccines are now being approved, thanks to PR campaigns from the WHO and the WEF, is that public health officials have wagered that the threat of COVID-19 is greater than the dangers of experimental mRNA vaccines.

Now that the global pharmaceutical cartel, which partners with the WEF, has capitalized on COVID panic in order to get their feet inside the doors for regulatory approval of mRNA vaccines, the commercial precedent has been set to open a pandora’s box of new mRNA “medicines” which, according to Elon Musk, can be engineered to genetically modify the human species.

In fact, there is already talk of the potentials for mRNA vaccines that are bioengineered to prevent cancer in the near future while there are other prospects for mRNA technologies that manufacture stem cells. In the meantime, Musk’s Tesla corporation has developed a “bioreactor” that is an “RNA Printer” designed to advance CureVac’s development of an mRNA COVID vaccine. In brief, COVID fears are being exploited to fast-track Warp Speed mRNA vaccines, along with DNA plasmid vaccines and genetically engineered adenovirus vaccines, in order to jumpstart an experimental biotech industry that is primed to be a cornerstone of the Fourth Industrial Revolution which, according to Klaus Schwab of the WEF, will bring about a transhumanist “fusion of our physical, digital, and biological identity” through biogenetic engineering driven by artificial intelligence.

It is no coincidence that Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and the Gates Foundation, which all seek to profit from bioengineered COVID vaccines, are all partnering with the World Economic Forum, which is urging that corporations and governments use COVID-19 as an “opportunity” to kickstart a Fourth Industrial Revolution that will be dominated by these Warp Speed Pharma companies and their Big Tech partners, including Microsoft, IBM, Google, Amazon, Dell, and Hewlett Packard, which are likewise members of the WEF. These are glaring conflicts of interest akin to those that corrupted TMAP and the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health.

Just as TMAP Pharma bankrolled US government officials to fast-track state and federal funding for unapproved uses of new mental health drugs, which caused severe side-effects including deaths, it appears that Warp Speed Pharma is similarly partnering with the WEF to fast-track international funding for new biotech vaccines, which have never before been approved, in order to break open new bioengineering markets that will lay the groundwork for the World Economic Forum’s transhumanist Fourth Industrial Revolution.

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John Klyczek has an MA in English and has taught college rhetoric and research argumentation for over eight years. His literary scholarship concentrates on the history of global eugenics and Aldous Huxley’s dystopic novel, Brave New World. He is the author of School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education (TrineDay Books); and he is a contributor to the Centre for Research on Globalization, OpEdNews, the Intrepid Report, the Dissident Voice, Blacklisted News, the Activist Post, Counter Markets, News With Views, The Saker, Rense News, DavidIcke.com, and Natural News. Klyczek is also the Director of Writing and Editing at Black Freighter Productions (BFP) Books. 

Featured image is from Natural News

“Venezuelan voters turn their backs on Chavismo after 17 years.”  This was the international corporate media headline of choice five years ago after Chavismo lost the National Assembly elections.

During the following five years, and since 2019 using the imposed National Assembly president figurehead of the then-elected Juan Guaidó, the US and its allies (including the European Union and the Lima group led by Canada and Colombia), carried out a ferocious hybrid war. The goal was to overthrow the Maduro government by any means necessary and convert Venezuela into a satellite of the US and the West.  

However, according to the latest report of the National Electoral Council (CNE) of Venezuela, released December 8, the ruling Chavistas of the PSUV/GPP gained 91 per cent of seats in the National Assembly, or 253 of the 277 seats contested. Other parties: 11 seats for Democratic Action (AD), three for Avanzada Progresista (AP), three for El Cambio, two for Primero Venezuela, one for Copei and one for the Communist Party (PCV). The Chavistas won 69.43 per cent of the votes cast. Participation or voter turn-out was 30.50 per cent.

The hard-core extremist Trump-Guaidó forces could not win as they had five years ago, because they boycotted the National Assembly elections completely. The reason for this is painfully obvious: they knew their support for US sanctions and military intervention has left them completely discredited. The US-led game plan to disrupt the elections thus backfired, and the fact that the elections were held at all has strengthened Chavismo.

The participation rate on December 6 was 30.50 per cent. On the surface this may seem to represent a defeat, or even a refutation of the Chavismo. Yet the concerted effort by the US and its allies to provoke a major abstention rate of at least 80% did not go as planned. Franco-Argentinian Marco Teruggi, one of the most respected and consistent journalists on Venezuela, has provided a balanced assessment:

“[….] There was neither an 80% abstention, nor was the abstention the result of a call from Guaidó and Pompeo, but rather the result of a series of variables, such as, for example, the situation of prolonged economic difficulties in the framework of an economic blockade that, during 2020, took on even greater dimensions within the ‘maximum pressure’ deployed from the United States. The economic variable, with its consequent impact on discontent and exhaustion, was not the only explanation for the participation rate. Another reason can be found in a complex political conflict that generated an erosion among the population, where some sectors no longer feel represented in any of the existing political options.”

In dealing extensively with the low participation rate, Argentinian political analyst Atilio Boron also offers a balanced view. He confirms and elaborates on many points raised by Marco Teruggi. Firstly, he considers that “the plans of the subversive right and imperialism have been defeated, in a pyrrhic battle.” That being said, on the issue of the turn-out, he writes:

“Among the factors that had a negative impact on him not going to the polls en masse are undoubtedly the effects of the pandemic. This situation discourages leaving home, getting on public transport, queuing to vote, being in close proximity with strangers, and so on. Such deterrents cannot be underestimated. This, of course, does not remove the need to review the popular mobilization devices that were always so important in Chavismo and that give the impression of being in need of an urgent overhaul.”

According to Leonardo Flores of Code Pink, “migration is another factor that artificially reduced turnout. Only citizens who currently reside in the country can vote in legislative elections, but most who left in recent years still appear on voter rolls as living in Venezuela.”

In addition, December 6 reports from the ground by The Grayzone indicate that Guaidó was “running a COVID-19 scare campaign through messaging apps & spending all day telling Venezuelans to stay in their homes. Yet, 6.251 million Venezuelans went to the polls, irrespective for whom they voted.  They are the heroes of this chapter in Venezuelan history.

Nevertheless, on December 10, President Nicolás Maduro declared in summing up the elections and he results that “There are many things to learn, modify, study and fathom”

A Reconfiguration in Venezuelan Politics 

The election has also led to a reconfiguration in Venezuelan politics. The US have shot themselves in the foot. There are no longer any pro-US-Guaidó forces in the National Assembly. One of the American electoral observers in Venezuela, Margaret Flowers of People’s Dispatch, reports.

“We just met with candidates from the ‘Democratic Alliance [Alianza Democratica],’ the opposition parties in Venezuela who have been in negotiations with the Maduro government and who are participating in the National Assembly election this year despite US pressure to boycott them. They believe in peace, democracy and that Venezuelans can solve their problems by using the legal institutions.

One of the primary messages they want us to convey to people in the United States is that the extreme right-wing opposition of Juan Guaidó financed by the US does not have support in Venezuela. The extreme right is basically supported by wealthy Venezuelans who left the country. They want people to know that they represent the opposition in the country and they want diplomacy with the US, an end to the economic war and to have their sovereignty respected.

After the National Election tomorrow, the current National Assembly will no longer exist. Opposition members are concerned that despite that, the US government and its lackeys in Western Europe and Latin America will continue to support the US puppet Juan Guaidó to the detriment of the Venezuelan people.

As we see below, they are right. In another report from Caracas, the common ground forged between Chavistas and the elected opposition is also illustrated:

In effect, after the elections, “the elected deputy to the National Assembly (AN) and national secretary general of the Partido Social Cristiano Copei, Juan Carlos Alvarado, assured  on December 10 that despite not having obtained a majority of seats in the parliamentary elections of the 6D they are willing to work starting next January 5 [when the new Parliament resumes] with the other elected deputies.”

Trump-Trudeau Flailing Away While Arreaza Remains Calm

What has the US and Canadian reactions been to all this? It reflects desperation more than anything else. On December 6, while the elections were still in progress, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted:

“Venezuela’s electoral fraud has already been committed. The results announced by the illegitimate Maduro regime will not reflect the will of the Venezuelan people. What’s happening today is a fraud and a sham, not an election.

Only hours later, Canadian Foreign Minister Champagne tweeted:

“Canada does not recognize the results of Venezuela’s December 6 electoral process because the process did not meet the minimum conditions for a free and fair exercise of democracy. Free and fair elections can only occur when democratic rights are fully respected. We continue to call for a peaceful democratic transition and for free and fair presidential elections. Canada will always stand with the people of Venezuela in their fight to restore democracy.”

The Trudeau government, always being in lockstep with the US, could not avoid the rapier wit of Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza:

“The ridicule syndrome under the Trump era is contagious. Now Canada also thinks its Venezuela’s electoral tribunal. They despise International Law. They don’t support elections and they want to restore democracy. We’re not ruled by a queen, nor by capital.”

It is no wonder that Arreaza is becoming a very popular politician in Canada, especially since the conference last August. However, the Trudeau government is floundering – again. In a previous article, as a prelude to the December 6 parliamentary elections, it was pointed out that “Guaidó’s standing in Venezuela is at rock bottom, but he has also seen much of his international support evaporate.” Nevertheless, Trudeau, rather than facing the grim reality, was desperately hanging on.

Is the Trump-Trudeau-Lima Group Showing Some Cracks? 

Now, has the Trudeau government finally come to its senses as a result of the December 6 elections and the reconfiguration of the Venezuelan political landscape? Has it let go of the Lima group and Guaidó? Well, it may seem so. Like Pompeo, Trudeau’s foreign minister, did not mention the Lima group or Guaidó, which is a very telling first.

The Trudeau government is nevertheless trying desperately to resuscitate its failed regime-change policy. The aggressive Trump-Trudeau policy has ailed repeatedly and instead of uniting anti-Chavista forces, it has created a split. Guaidó is more isolated than ever and is virtually alone, not to mention no longer being an elected member of any government body whatsoever. Just by showing up at the polls, the electorate ratified a National Assembly that is for the first time 100 per cent opposed to the Guaidó-Trump-Trudeau interference and sanctions-prone coalition.

Nevertheless, on December 7, outgoing Secretary of State Pompeo caried on following the same tack: “The United States will continue to recognize Interim President Guaidó and the legitimate National Assembly.” Also on December 7, the Canadian government, suddenly remembering what they had earlier left out, issued a statement similar to Pompeo’s, but now in the name of the Lima group, rejecting the December 6 election results.

Yet, the Trudeau government does not seem to be embarrassed by the fact that among the Lima group countries, supposedly bringing democracy to Venezuela, there is crisis. In Peru itself. they are going through yet another political split  with no president to speak of, Guatemala where protesters burned the Congress, Chile in the throes of violent repression against people demanding the ouster of Pinochet-era president Piñera and Colombia carrying out massacres and assassinations of social activists on a regular basis.

In their haste to get their act together, Trudeau and his Lima group, unlike Pompeo, did not mention Guaidó nor the previous National Assembly. Was this an oversight? Or does it reflect a split in the ranks of the Trump-led coalition? Did the already despised Trump administration go too far by making the ridiculous claim that the former National Assembly with Guaidó as its “President” still exists? 

More Splits in Opposition: “Finished, Closed, Done” 

It seems so, as there are yet other fissures in the opposition.

In a December 6 BBC interview, former opposition figure and twice presidential candidate against both Chávez and Maduro, Henrique Capriles said that:

“the opposition must continue on the electoral, rather than the violent path…. Guaidó and his Voluntad Popular party are “finished, closed, done’”.

Yet, Capriles agrees with sanctions, putting him at odds with the newly elected opposition candidates who oppose sanctions. According to a Reuters report “Guaidó’s press team declined to comment…. The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.”

On December 9, two other opposition figures Ramos Allup and Julio Borges are reported to have “dissociated themselves from Guaidó, because the self-proclaimed [leader] has not wanted to distribute the royalties [from US oil revenue take-overs] that have been stolen.

On December 9, the Organization of American States (OAS), based in Washington DC and controlled by the US, met virtually. An OAS resolution against Venezuela’s December 6 elections was presented by Brazil and supported by Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, the U.S., among others. However, the representatives of Argentina, Mexico, and Bolivia to the OAS did not vote in favour of the resolution that disregards Venezuela’s elections and calls for a transitional government.

Furthermore, in that OAS statement, while previously the OAS swore by Guaidó and acted as his virtual spokesperson, this time there is no mention at all of Guaidó. The OAS did however make “ an urgent call for the protection and physical security of the democratically elected members of the National Assembly [the old one which is effectively disbanded] to be guaranteed and for the safe return of those members of the opposition who are in exile.”

However, this also arrogantly pits the OAS against the newly elected National Assembly deputies which includes most of the opposition parties.

Meanwhile, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza remains calm, yet resolute in the spirit of the Bolivarian Revolution. Arreaza responded to the OAS in a December 9 tweet: “OAS is in its final stage!. Almagro has become its gravedigger. Venezuela does not believe in the OAS, even less so after what the OAS did in Bolivia, where it set the conditions for a coup. OAS is nothing!”

In the same manner, when the UK Embassy in Venezuela issued a statement rejecting the election results, Arreaza tweeted ¿Y? [in the sense of “so what”]. Mind your own business.

“Time for Canada to have an Independent Foreign Policy” 

The obvious kowtowing, floundering and inconsistencies of the Trudeau government has not gone unnoticed by some members of the Canadian parliament, such as Niki Ashton of the New Democratic Party:

There are other examples of similar social media chatter from MPs and social activists that reflect an important section of Canadian public opinion. However, the question remains, when and how can this opposition to Trudeau be brought up in Parliament and thus impact public opinion?

The reconfiguration of the Venezuelan National Assembly is part of the major geopolitical redrawing of Latin America. The December 6 victory comes on the heels of the ouster in October of the US-backed fascist coup in Bolivia being replaced with a government inspired by the once outlawed Evo Morales. In 2021, elections are slated for Ecuador, where the movement behind Rafael Correa is looking to win victory. In Venezuela, local and regional elections are scheduled to take place in 2021. In Brazil, Chile and Colombia, how long can right-wing governments hang on?

On all of these issues, the Trudeau government is clearly on the wrong side of history. Its scandalous behaviour towards Venezuela is just one part of its failing imperialist policy. As a faithful ally of the US, it clearly seeks North American hegemony over Latin America and Caribbean. The Trudeau government has not learned anything after its humiliating defeat in a bid for a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) seat.

The Trudeau government counts on the COVID-19 crisis to muzzle all domestic discussion about its foreign policy. The Canadian corporate media follows its lead, desperately repeating the lies about Venezuela and any other state tin the world that finds itself in the crosshairs of US foreign policy, freely matched by that of the Canadian state. The need for an independent Canadian foreign policy has scarcely ever been greater.

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Little is known about the interests of the doctors, scientists, and academics on whose advice the UK government relies to manage the pandemic. Attempts to discover more are frequently thwarted, finds Paul D Thacker

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As the number of UK deaths caused by covid-19 reached 50 000 in early November, England enacted a second national lockdown to control the epidemic. Boris Johnson’s government put these measures into action after months of controversial and sometimes confusing policies, including the “rule of six,” regional tiered controls, and directions to “stay alert.” At the same time, the government has faced mounting questions about procurement decisions, from personal protective equipment to testing kits, from vaccine deals to the services of logistics companies.

Calls for greater transparency around such decisions have included those bodies focused on science and health, such as the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), as well as taskforces charged with advising on vaccines and testing. Although Downing Street has become more transparent in disclosing the advice of SAGE, it has kept members’ financial conflicts of interest unpublished and shown little concern that advisers to the coronavirus Vaccine Taskforce have financial interests in pharmaceutical companies receiving government contracts. When The BMJ sought further information on these bodies, such as lists of members’ interests, the information was denied or requests were unanswered.

Information withheld

After months of criticism about SAGE secrecy, the government reversed course this summer and began releasing the names of SAGE members, minutes of meetings, and some of its policy papers. Still, the government has refused to release to The BMJ the financial interest forms signed by SAGE members, leaving the public in the dark.

Criticism over SAGE’s secrecy first appeared in a Nature editorial[1] in March. In April, the government’s chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance sent a letter to parliament[2] stating that SAGE’s membership, recommendations, supporting documents, and meeting minutes would be published, but only after the group ceased meeting about covid-19. Vallance argued[3] that secrecy protected SAGE members and shielded them “from lobbying and other forms of unwanted influence which may hinder their ability to give impartial advice.”

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What would the United States look like if we lost half of our small businesses?  The reason I ask that question is because approximately half of all small business owners in the entire country believe that they may soon be forced to close down for good.  Not even during the Great Depression of the 1930s did we see anything like this.  The big corporate giants with extremely deep pockets will be able to easily weather another round of lockdowns, but for countless small businesses this is literally a matter of life and death.  Every day we are seeing new restrictions being implemented somewhere in the nation, and the politicians that are doing this are killing the hopes and dreams of countless small business owners.  According to a recent Alignable survey, 48 percent of U.S. small business owners fear that they could be forced to “shut down permanently” in the very near future…

Based on this week’s Alignable Q4 Revenue Poll of 9,201 small business owners, 48% could shut down permanently before year’s end.

In fact, this number jumped from 42% just two months ago, demonstrating how several factors have converged to devastate small businesses: COVID resurgences, forced government reclosures, elevated customer fears, and a surge in online shopping at Amazon and other national ecommerce giants.

When a small business with only a few employees closes down forever, it never makes any national headlines.

But the truth is that small businesses are the heart and soul of our economy, and we are losing more of them with each passing day.

Here are some quotes from actual small business owners that took part in the Alignable survey…

  • COVID has raised its ugly head again. I’m a caterer and I’ve had no work in November and my clients are cancelling for Dec. This is so sad. I have worked so hard to build my business the last 14 years. My business has gone from half a million to not even 200,000. This is devastating for any business.”
  • “COVID closings are killing this country! My business is on hold — no art walks or gallery openings, and I can’t even open my studio. Everything’s online.”
  • “Because therapeutic massage is so ‘up close and personal,’ I have only come back to about 40% of my previous clientele. I am afraid that the governor will shut us down again, which will be the end of my business. I also believe the ‘ruling elite’ does not care about small businesses.”

How would you feel if you spent years putting everything you had into a small business in order to make it successful, only to have the politicians come along and completely destroy it?

And every time a small business has to let workers go, it just makes the unemployment crisis in this country even worse.

On Thursday, we learned that another 853,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week

First-time claims for unemployment insurance totaled 853,000, an increase from the upwardly revised 716,000 total a week before, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been expecting 730,000.

I have been warning that the new lockdowns would make the numbers worse, and that is precisely what is happening.

And one expert that was interviewed by CNBC says that this is just the beginning…

“It looks like the unemployment losses are starting to stack up for the economy. It’s not going to be a good month,” said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank. “You’re starting the first week of the month on a bad note, and it’s probably going to be all downhill from here. It feels like the lockdowns are intensifying. It’s closer to reality for those forecasts that look for the economy to go negative in the first quarter.”

It is also important to remember that there are many Americans that have been unemployed for so long that they are no longer eligible to receive benefits.

One of those long-term unemployed workers is 35-year-old Sarah Groome

For six months, she received unemployment benefits from the government – but those payments shrank as the programmes wound down this summer. Since October, she’s received nothing.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do financially,” she says. “I’m applying to jobs and I’ve probably applied to over 100 at this point and I’ve had one interview.”

“It’s scary,” she says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

What do you say to someone in her position?

It’s heartbreaking to hear stories like that, and more people are being laid off with each passing day.

And as our new economic depression gets progressively deeper, an increasing number of Americans are becoming very desperate.

In fact, many have already become so desperate that they are turning to shoplifting

Shoplifting is up markedly since the pandemic began in the spring and at higher levels than in past economic downturns, according to interviews with more than a dozen retailers, security experts and police departments across the country. But what’s distinctive about this trend, experts say, is what’s being taken – more staples like bread, pasta and baby formula.

“We’re seeing an increase in low-impact crimes,” said Jeff Zisner, chief executive of workplace security firm Aegis. “It’s not a whole lot of people going in, grabbing TVs and running out the front door. It’s a very different kind of crime – it’s people stealing consumables and items associated with children and babies.”

Everywhere we look, our society is starting to break down all around us.  Americans have filed new claims for unemployment benefits more than 70 million times this year, the number of homeless in New York City has reached an all-time record high, and civil unrest continues to erupt all over America.

No matter what happens politically, conditions are going to continue to deteriorate as we head into 2021.

Of course the mainstream media is boldly proclaiming that the new vaccines will pull us out of this tailspin and that life in America will soon return to normal.

You can believe the mainstream media if you want, but in the end the “hope” that they are promising will turn out to be a complete mirage.

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Michael Snyder’s brand new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available on Amazon.com. He has also written four others that are available on Amazon.com including The Beginning Of The EndGet Prepared Now, and Living A Life That Really Matters. He has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse BlogEnd Of The American Dream and The Most Important News and are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. 

On September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks took place on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon allegedly orchestrated by Al Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden, and subsequently blamed it on Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party and then the war on Iraq began.

The Middle East became the prime target of increased Western and Israeli conflicts and interventions. Guantanamo bay, Cuba became a torture center.

Surveillance of the Muslims became normalized, then so did surveillance of the entire world. That was phase 1 of Western-led global tyranny, now on to phase 2, with a new disease, the Corona Virus aka Covid-19, appeared on the world stage. 

Medical bureaucrats from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) including the longtime medical bureaucrat-in-charge, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Big Tech billionaire nerd, Bill Gates along with the rest of the establishment view everyone as a potential carrier a danger, therefore, they must vaccinate everyone to fight this new disease with an emphasis on treating the situation as a national security threat so Operation Warp Speed was announced. 

At the same time, the U.S. government and its allies are fighting continuous wars that they themselves start on the rest of the world and on top of everything else, the world’s global economy is on the brink of the Greatest Depression along with a collapsing global reserve currency, the U.S. dollar.

Just imagine this sometime in the near future, you wake up one morning, you brush your teeth and then you turn on the television and on the screen is the ‘emergency broadcast system’ flashing in red, alerting people about new Covid infection rates spiking in your area and it’s declared a red zone.

With a disarmed populace in place who has no rights to self-defense, military personnel in hazmat suits wearing masks will be making door to door visits with mandated vaccines in hand, and if you resist, well, you can paint a picture for yourself. The streets are empty and businesses you once visited are now permanently closed making it increasingly difficult to get your basic necessities.

Public and private schools are open on the condition that each child is fully vaccinated under government mandates regardless of the health risks associated with the vaccines and in many cases if a child is not vaccinated, the school nurse will do it for you without your permission.

Those who have jobs will have no choice but to get vaccinated or they lose that weekly paycheck they depend for their food and other expenses.  Then you look outside your window and you see the same breadlines in government-approved centers with people wearing facemasks, patiently waiting for their next meal as long as they have their vaccination card in hand.  Crime is out of control with no police protection because a couple of years earlier, major cities and towns across the U.S. decided to defund the police.

They now have social workers and civilian patrols resembling the actions of the Nazi’s who had the useful idiots known as the brown shirtssafeguarding the streets from a spread of a disease that cannot be controlled by whatever ridiculous mandates they impose, making sure that the people have facemasks and their government issued vaccination cards readily available for inspection. The internet is also heavily regulated. Depression and suicides increasing by the day, yet, no resistance by the population, just slaves under a medical dictatorship that makes Nazi Germany look like a walk in the park.  That is a dystopian future.

That same old ‘New World Order conspiracy theory that many people laughed about is now unfolding before our eyes. For decades the people were warned, yet they are still blinded by the mainstream media’s fear mongering nonsense and blatant lies that it becomes comical at times.

Yet, people are living in extreme fear.  Across the globe, new Covid-19 outbreaks are rising due to false positives detected by the unreliable RT-PCR tests. Countries around the world are waking up to this fact including Portugal who according to the Off-Guardian.org reported that “an appeals court in Portugal has ruled that the PCR process is not a reliable test for Sars-Cov-2, and therefore any enforced quarantine based on those test results is unlawful.” Why? Well the article summed up what the study had found:

Most notably this study by Jaafar et al., which found that – when running PCR tests with 35 cycles or more – the accuracy dropped to 3%, meaning up to 97% of positive results could be false positives. 

The ruling goes on to conclude that, based on the science they read, any PCR test using over 25 cycles is totally unreliable. Governments and private labs have been very tight-lipped about the exact number of cycles they run when PCR testing, but it is known to sometimes be as high as 45. Even fearmonger-in-chief Anthony Fauci has publicly stated anything over 35 is totally unusable

It is well-known that high-risk groups with already life-threatening ailments are the ones at risk, even if there was a severe flu season in effect, they will still be at risk regardless.  Covid-19 lockdowns and mandatory facemasks and the possibility of forced vaccinations in various U.S. states and a number of countries is becoming part of everyday life, the “new normal” it seems.

The Hill reported that government-issued vaccine cards will be distributed to everyone in the US population ‘Details emerging on vaccine cards that will accompany inoculations.”  The report said that the federal government will hand-out cards with your name on them which will list what vaccines you have received and which ones will be due,

“Everyone will be issued a written card that they can put in their wallet that will tell them what they had and when their next dose is due,” Kelly Moore, associate director of the Immunization Action Coalition, said Wednesday, according to CNN. “Let’s do the simple, easy thing first. Everyone’s going to get that.”

Then clinics and hospitals will send your vaccine report to the federal agencies-in-charge which will basically track and trace individuals of all ages:

Moore added that clinics providing vaccinations will also report what vaccine is administered to state immunization registries. Numerous clinics will also give patients the option to provide their phone numbers so they can be sent a reminder to take their second dose of the vaccine 

The world we once knew is dramatically changing, a coerced society that’s is constantly living on the edge of fear, facing lockdowns every few months when Covid-19 cases spike while the establishment continues its early stages of total global control over society.

They already control the people through mandated facemasks and lockdowns while Big Pharma is pushing a handful of vaccines so that people can travel, buy food, or for their children to attend school under the “new normal” rules once they get their vaccines.

People are acquiescent to authority, accepting the establishment’s recommendations as law as they walk around confused with facemasks, avoiding people at length. One time I was walking down one of the main avenues while I was in New York City as a woman was trying to avoid a group of young girls without facemasks, she immediately hoped into traffic to avoid them and right behind her was a city bus narrowly missing her by an inch, this woman was obviously so fearful of contracting Covid-19, she almost got herself killed by an incoming city bus, and to be honest with you, I closed my eyes because I thought she was history.

This is the state of the world of paranoia and fear we are living in. There are even people who have not even been outside their homes since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 an international pandemic. Fights are breaking out everywhere between those who refuse facemasks versus the slaves who listen to Dr. Anthony Fauci and the rest of the medical establishment who claim that wearing facemasks is about protecting yourself and respecting others, so people are policing themselves and “snitching” on each other, a dream come true for those who rule.

Normalcy in society has completely changed for the worst. People are less human today because of what the establishment has pushed upon us with their absurd ideas to control the population to prevent an over-exaggerated disease from spreading.  Yet, suicides, depression and loneliness is killing more people by the day because of these unnecessary lockdowns.  The people are on the edge of insanity. The normal life already seems like a long time ago as new trends became normalized over the years before the corona virus ever existed like humans having relationships with sex robots and life-sized dolls.  Humans having sex with robots and dolls and in some cases, even marrying them seems pretty bizarre to me. I am pretty sure that both men and some women are purchasing sex robots and dolls at a higher-rate since the pandemic begun although a handful of people have been interested in this new phenomenon has been introduced to the public. In ‘The Age of Sex Robots: The pros and cons in this emerging sexual age’ by David W. Wahl, PhD in Psychology Today wrote:

Sex robots are here. It’s not just a gimmick of science fiction. Granted, the artificially intelligent sex robots of such films as “Ex Machina” and “AI” are not here yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Most sex robots now are little more than slightly animated sex dolls. Perhaps the most advanced sex robot that we know of is “Samantha.” A creation of Synthea Amatus, Samantha is designed to be capable of enjoying sex. 

But Samantha is not all about sex. She can also talk about science and philosophy. She can even tell jokes (although hopefully not while you are having sex with her). Consent is even an issue with Samantha. If you are too rough with her or she doesn’t like your behaviors, she is programmed to go into “dummy mode” and completely shut down. Currently, robotic partners can go for prices in excess of $10,000

That is incredible and frightening. What if they created another doll  down the road where “dummy mode” can turn into violent mode, but that will probably take another generation or so. I hope most people won’t fall for these types of futuristic relationships, but the point I am trying to make here is that this is where humanity is headed and this is not normal but it falls into the hands of the establishment technically speaking since in a way can reduce population growth.

What has society morphed into?

Now a Great Reset is upon us and make no mistake, it is real despite what The New York Times has falsely claimed that it does not in an absurd article they published titled ‘The Baseless Great Reset’ Conspiracy Theory Rises Again’, it’s real and we need to ask ourselves, will we except this insane idea? The World Economic Forum (WEF) is pushing ‘The Great Reset’ agenda since last May with calls to rebuild the global economy, social engineer society and enforce environmental sustainability rules and regulations to improve capitalism for basically major corporations, bankers and the ruling establishment.

The corporate-technological alliance will be controlled by a powerful consortium of the pharmaceutical, financial, communications, defense industries and other major corporations with the government enforcing their dirty deeds with help from the mainstream-media continuing their propaganda. The Great Reset is being promoted by the United Kingdom’s very own, Prince Charles and WEF’s founder and executive chairman, Klaus Schwab who reminds me of Dr. Evil from Austin Powers who is also a former member of the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group which is behind the many changes the ruling establishment has envisioned for society.

Life for humanity seems like it will never be the same. The Great Reset is a plan to foment corporate control over the entire economic and social landscape. They want control of the world’s natural resources and to expand their world government’s surveillance grid to unprecedented levels that fascist dictators from the past including Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet could have only dreamed about.

What is happening to society has been predicted for a long time by many, including one of the most famous names in science fiction, George Orwell, the 1984 author who wrote and predicted a future dystopian police state. Orwell’s dire predictions of what we face in the near future was an early warning to all of humanity. However, I believe that many people are not simply going to accept this way of life as the new normal, some will, but many will refuse to obey such absurd demands from the establishment and this is the start of a revolution, a revolution of the mind and the establishment is afraid of that.  The masses will rise and will demand its freedoms it once had. People around the world already disobey lockdowns, face mask mandates, oppose continuous wars, oppose government tyranny and every other human rights abuses they face.  We are not, and I repeat, we are not at the point of no return, there is hope.

This lockdown madness will destroy people’s livelihoods and in some cases, will kill more people than the disease itself.

How far can the establishment push us?  We are at a time where we need to make a critical decision that will change our lives forever because a group of powerful and politically connected people who are government bureaucrats, or people who are closely associated with Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Tech, the Military-Industrial Complex, bankers, Wall street, the elite families and so on, you know, the ones we have been warning about called the establishment or the ruling elite for some time are trying to change the structure of society, to control human nature.

The year 2020 has been turbulent to say the least, 2021 will be chaotic and that is guaranteed. What is happening now is what George Orwell’s 1984 warned us about more than 70 years ago.  At this point in time, it will be up to all of us to resist, because that’s what it will take, and when that happens, people like George Orwell will finally rest in peace without rolling in his grave knowing that the world’s human spirit is alive and well, after all, that’s what he ultimately hoped for.

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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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How to Wear a Face Mask and Still Show Dissent Against Tyranny

December 13th, 2020 by John C. A. Manley

I’m not fond of grocery shopping. Doubly so when our local “natural” food store operates like a cross between a 21st century bio-contamination laboratory and a 1940’s Soviet food rationing depot. (It’s called Gentle Rain, but Stalin’s Reign would suit its recent transformation.)

Nonetheless, one week, back in July, my usual grocery was on holidays, so I found myself waiting in their communist-style breadline. When I finally reached the front, the sentry asked: “Do you have your own mask or would you like to use one of ours?”

“Neither, thank you for asking.”

“Well, then you can’t come in.”

“Can I use my own mask?”

“Sure.”

“How about two? That would be better, wouldn’t it?”

“I can’t argue with that.”

Opening my backpack I pulled out a white surgical mask and snapped it around my ears: “Hey! If one mask will save Grandma–” I then pulled out a Guy Fawkes mask and stretched the elastic around my head. “–two masks will save the world.”

What’s a freedom-loving citizen to do? We either boycott the store (and go hungry) or we get creative.

Introducing my Three-Step Face Mask Dissent Plan:

Step 1: Wear a smiling face:

Step 2: Put on one of the establishment’s scientifically unproven and dehumanizing face masks:

Step 3: Apply a Guy Fawkes party mask (available from Amazon.com,  Amazon.ca and Amazon.co.uk):

Yes, I realize many identify Guy Fawkes as a terrorist. I disagree. He did not target civilians; only politicians who had taken away his freedom to practice his religion. He did not try to explode Westminster Palace to instil fear in the masses; merely to replace the government. He was a freedom fighter. I may not agree with his means, but certainly his spirit and motives.

Indeed, today, it’s the governments of the world who are terrorizing us with inflated death tolls while taking lives with oppressive lockdowns.

Of course, other masks could be worn: Americans might masquerade as George Washington. Canadians could resurrect Louis Riel. Mexicans can don Geronimo masks. East Indians could honour Mahatma Gandhi. With a little creativity we can beat them playing by their own rules.

I must admit I was unsure how my face mask dissent strategy would unfold at the local health food store. Would they scream? Would they not permit me to enter? Would the police be called?

Instead, the sentry burst out laughing. I assumed that meant I could enter. I opened the front door and stepped inside.

“Now that’s a face mask!” exclaimed the cashier. More laughter from customers and staff. Not what I had expected.

I grabbed a shopping cart and started following their arrows…

Within seconds a “high risk” elderly lady came right up to me – ignoring social distancing rules – and said: “I love your mask! I can’t stand this nonsense. I just go along to get along.”

Later, another lady told me bitterly: “Ever since they’ve started all this COVID stuff they’ve taken away the senior discounts.”

Standing in line to pay, another yelled: “Happy Halloween!”

A few days later I brought my wife along to join in the costume party…

The second time around we skipped the surgical masks – just wore the Guy Fawkes masks. No one complained or seemed to care. One teenager shot me a “That’s awesome, man!” I suspect he knew the V for Vendetta reference — a graphic novel about a modern day freedom fighter who wore a Guy Fawkes mask.

David Lloyd, the illustrator for V for Vendetta, said: “The Guy Fawkes mask has now become a common brand and a convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny – and I’m happy with people using it…”

And I’m happy we have this tool to beat them at their own face mask psych-op game, for those who must join the charade. Guy Fawkes masks are available from Amazon.caAmazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. They became Amazon’s bestselling mask after the V for Vendetta movie. While, I rely on stores that grant me mask-free entry, curb-side pick-up or home delivery, I still never leave home without a Guy Fawkes (just in case).

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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.

Before the 23 of January 2019, Juan Guaidó was an unknown entity. He acquired notoriety due to a series of coincidences … and decisions made in Washington. The practice of annually rotating the National Assembly’s presidency among the parties holding the majority meant that in 2019-2020 it was the turn of the extreme right-wing party, Voluntad Popular (VP); unfortunately, all VP’s key figures (Leopoldo López, Freddy Guevara) were under arrest or were fugitives of the law for their participation in seditious and violent acts against the Venezuelan state. Guaidó happened to be the next in line making him rightfully president of the National Assembly.2 In a bold move he (and Washington) decided he would proclaim himself “interim president” of Venezuela. His self-proclamation that was to catapult him into the world’s media limelight was part of Washington’s “regime change” strategy.

Mr. Guaidó’s “interim presidency” lacks constitutional or legal bases and his self-proclamation occurred in a public square in Caracas, in front of a small group of supporters. Guaidó has never been elected president of Venezuela nor has he ever stood as a presidential candidate for any election. His claim that his “interim presidency’ rests on the Venezuelan Constitution’s Art 233 is thoroughly false; the article reads: The President of the Republic shall become permanently unavailable to serve by reason of any of the following events: death; resignation; removal from office by decision of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice; permanent physical or mental disability certified by a medical board designated by the Supreme Tribunal of Justice with the approval of the National Assembly; abandonment of his position, duly declared by the National Assembly; and recall by popular vote.3 President Maduro is alive, has not resigned, has not been removed from office, is not physically or mentally incapacitated, has not abandoned the Presidency, and has not been recalled by popular vote. Additionally, the notion of ‘interim presidency’ does not exist in the Venezuelan Constitution. This ought to have been sufficient for European governments to never extend recognition, whatever they may think of President Maduro’s government.

The recognition of Juan Guaidó as “interim president” of Venezuela by European governments violates all basic principles informing political legitimacy, and should have never been awarded. The decision to award recognition is the result of political blackmail. Pedro Sánchez warned the Bolivarian government of Venezuela, on the EU’s behalf, that unless presidential elections, preferably without President Maduro as a candidate, were held within 8 days, the EU would have to recognise Guaidó. On this shaky, arrogant, and calculating basis EU governments proceeded to toe Trump’s line of elevating Mr Guaidó to the fictional position of “president” of Venezuela.

Ever since Jan-Feb 2019, Mr Guaidó has behaved abysmally.

In February 2019, Guaidó in complicity with the Colombian government, narco-paramilitaries, and the US government (Mike Pompeo), on the pretence of a concert at the Colombian border, tried to violently push ‘humanitarian aid’ into Venezuela by military means. The plan was sinister; it was naturally expected that Venezuela would oppose the illegal and violent action and it was intended to charge President Maduro with refusing to allow aid to his people, followed by serious military confrontation.

Guaidó made it to the concert through Colombian territory where he received military protection from the Los Rastrojos criminal narco-paramilitary gang, who Guaidó took several selfies with. The intensely anti-Chavista UK newspaper, The Guardian (14/09/2019) wrote: “Juan Guaidó, the Venezuelan politician fighting to topple Nicolás Maduro, is facing awkward questions about his relationship with organised crime after the publication of compromising photographs showing him with two Colombian paramilitaries.” It was revealed later that one truck was set on fire, by Guaidó supporters. The media had blamed President Maduro. The episode did not merit comment from European governments: was their silence forgiveness?

On 30th April 2019, Juan Guaidó led probably the most televised coup d’état in the history of Latin America. One wonders which features of this illegal, unconstitutional and armed action to violently overthrow President Maduro’s government – with incalculable consequences in human lives – are the European governments not prepared to condemn? The scandalously bland statement by the EU and European Parliament was inconsistent with the intense harshness and speed with which they are prepared to condemn the Maduro government. Euronews reported “Guaidó defiant after failed coup attempt.”

Mr Guaidó was complicit with the UK’s right-wing government in setting up a secret “Unit for the Reconstruction of Venezuela”. Records show that Guaidó and his entourage were prepared to offer oil and infrastructure contracts, and the restructuring of Venezuela’s debt, whilst his ‘ambassador’ to the UK, Vanessa Neumann, was reportedly prepared to surrender the Essequibo region in exchange for political support from the UK government. In short, Guaidó and his ‘team’ were ready to betray their nation on almost everything.

In May 2020 Guaidó contracted US-led mercenaries to launch an attack (‘Operation Gedeon’) against his own nation and to assassinate President Maduro and high officials in the government, followed – as stated in the contract – by a Pinochet-style purge aimed at the thorough eradication of Chavismo from Venezuela. Here again, the European governments either pretended the event did not happen or they confined themselves to lame and soft generalities, a far cry from their unforgiving criticism of the Maduro government.

Guaidó has deliberately complicated the Venezuelan government’s access to 31 tons of gold in custody in the custody of the Bank of England on the ‘merits’ of his ‘interim presidency’. The gold is needed for the purchase of food, medicine and vital health inputs in order to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, through the UN Development Programme (UNDP). The Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV)’s appeal led the UK Appeals Court to annul a first verdict giving Guaidó access to the gold.

It is preposterous to imagine Guaidó having the capacity or the will to make good use of those resources. In Venezuela he has no control whatsoever, and given his obsession with imposing more sanctions on his own country, it is doubtful that he would spend money on the people of Venezuela. His lack of interest in paying the legal costs of the case (US$529,000) confirms he is not interested in complying with the law and is not desperate to obtain the gold to help the people of Venezuela.

Guaidó has made repeated calls to the military to wage a coup d’état to topple President Maduro, and has repeatedly (more then 20 times) organised a “final march” on Miraflores, Venezuela’s Presidential Palace, seeking to create a pretext for violent confrontations. In line with US and EU policy, he has repeatedly opposed the right of Venezuelans to vote in elections. The EU has at best commented on these flagrant undemocratic and seditious acts with deafening silence and at worst welcome them with enthusiastic approval.

Guaidó is not only a willing accomplice in aiding the US to illegally confiscate his own nation’s assets but he and his closest associates are also deeply involved in corruption. Through the protection of Trump, Guaidó and Co have been lining their pockets with hundreds of millions of US dollars resulting from the US illegal confiscation of Venezuelan assets ‘legalised’ by the ‘interim president’. On 24 January 2019 the US State Department gave US$20 million to the ‘new government’; a 2015 Citibank loan to Venezuela was unilaterally settled in advance and the saved difference (US$340 million) – with US government support – was given to Guaidó; in May 2020 OFAC gave Guaidó’s “government” US$80 million for the “liberation” of Venezuela; USAID gave Guaidó US$128 million to assist Venezuela migrants who have not seen one penny; and Guaidó was instrumental in Trump’s illegal confiscation of Venezuela state, US-based, gasoline distribution company CITGO, valued at about US$8,000 million. Venezuela has incurred US$11,000 in losses due to the freezing of assets. There is more but you get the picture. Europe has been the continent of colonial pillage so, is this ‘historic affinity’ maybe the reason they recognise Guaidó?4

In fact, European governments and the EU itself, de facto work with and recognise the Bolivarian government of President Maduro, by not only not recognising Guaidó’s appointees as “ambassadors” but by also sending ambassadors to Caracas who present their credentials to President Maduro in nationally televised public ceremonies. This sublime duplicity should end by the formalisation of a perspective of constructive engagement with the Bolivarian Government.

There is no justification whatsoever for European governments to continue their untenable policy of recognising Juan Guaidó as ‘interim president’ of Venezuela when in reality, he is totally bereft of any legal, political, or constitutional legitimacy for his self-proclamation, and especially since his thoroughly undemocratic and criminal credentials have been irrefutably proved. An unconditional withdrawal of his recognition is long overdue.

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This article was originally published on Public Reading Rooms.

Francisco Domínguez, former refugee from Pinochet’s Chile, is an activist and an academic, and he is also National Secretary of the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign (UK).

Notes

2 Venezuela’s opposition won a majority to the National Assembly in 2015 for the period 2015-2020; Henry Ramos Allup representing the Acción Democrática party, became the Assembly’s president in 2016-17; Julio Borges of Primero Justicia during 2017-18; and Omar Barbosa from Un Nuevo Tiempo for 2018-19; all elected as president by a majority vote of the deputies.

3 Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela: https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Venezuela_2009.pdf?lang=en

4 Detailed information from article in Venezuelan pollster, Hinterlaces (in Spanish) about many of Guaidó corruption endeavours: https://www.hinterlaces.net/asalto-a-un-pais-el-prontuario-de-guaido-en-diez-casos-emblematicos/

Featured image is from Club Orlov

The UK’s governing Tory party is dishonestly flouting the rules of free and fair competition for Coronavirus related procurements, by unfairly selecting commissions, awarding contracts to class allies instead of the best or cheapest service provider.

The party frequently uses cliches like “all in it together” or “get Brexit done” to fake solidarity with the working class. But the talk has been matched by relentless attacks on quality of life and civil rights.

Recently the government has faced criticism for its rampant nepotism and cronyism in awarding coronavirus related contracts to personal connections, and faces legal challenges over its misallocation of public funds.

Certainly some will not be able to look past beyond the paradox that a government that asks its citizens to bear austerity, privatisation, cuts is also granting huge sums of public money to its friends.

Jolyon Maugham QC, director of Good Law Project, said:

“What we know about the government’s procurement practices during this pandemic gives real cause for concern.

“Huge sums of public money have been awarded to companies with no discernible expertise. Sometimes the main qualification seems to be a political connection with key government figures.

“And I have seen evidence that government is sometimes paying more to buy the same product from those with political connections. We don’t know what else there is to discover because the government is deliberately keeping the public in the dark.

“We are left with no option but to push for transparency through the courts.”

Additionally, a researcher has invited citizens to look at “My Little Crony,” an interactive map that shows just how tightly related Tory MPs are with the firms they commission. This includes firms who had been in existence for mere weeks, with no portfolio, being handed vast sums of public money.

Dissenting MPs assessments have provided a forensic analysis of the corruption at the heart of Westminster. Green MP Caroline Lucas has fiercely attacked the government’s procurement process, additionally criticising their lack of transparency in hiding the details for over 3bn in contracts from the public.

Giving lie to the myth that capitalism is a fairer system, the Tory party have perpetrated and perpetuated the same corrupt tactics in public administration as the Soviet state.

The credibility of the government has been shaped by two dominant issues: coronavirus and Brexit. In both spheres the legacy of institutional elitism weighs heavy.

As a breakaway from the tempering power of a strong opposition, the Tory party emerged victorious in the 2019 general election. Its strong commons majority has liberated it to pursue its free market fundamentalist agenda, with the obedience of Keir Starmer to government policy indicating that opposition is scarce.

Assaults on the independent judiciary were particularly prominent in the formation of Brexit, with the government arguing, against a constitutional system of checks and balances, that it should be able to determine the terms and conditions of Brexit unilaterally. Hard right rags collaborated, publishing venomous attacks on members of the judiciary who sought to make sure Brexit was legal. This overt repression was but a new manifestation of old fascist tactics.

The Tory party’s attempts to act unilaterally with minimal opposition come as no surprise. They have often acted with contempt for the sovereignty of parliament and the people.

Tory government failure has been met with sympathetic and sycophantic media coverage. A pliant press is staffed with journalists who are content to forfeit fourth estate integrity to be mere stenographers of power.

Thus, public accountability is missing in this latest version of Tory rule. The government is not attempting to honour democracy, is even wilfully subverting it, despite the fact it won an election on a manifesto of restoring popular sovereignty. And they’ve inaugurated the power of unelected bureaucrats like Dominic Cummings over policy.

A pandemic should not be an excuse for profiteering. Britain’s progressive wing must reclaim its place in power and defend the many rights under attack from this corrupt Tory government.

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Megan Sherman is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Perfecting Tyranny: Mumia’s New Book Hot Off the Press!

December 13th, 2020 by Prison Radio

Perfecting Tyranny by Mumia Abu-Jamal & Stephen Vittoria is a window into the soul of a nation from one of its most respected and feared captives. Getting this book to print took enormous resolve. We now turn to you to help us bring it to life in the world.

Perfecting Tyranny joins Vincent Harding’s There is a River, Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, and Nick Estes’ Our History is the Future in the canon of revolutionary historical texts. Like those other renowned authors, Abu-Jamal and Vittoria give voice to communities who have always lived in resistance, and seldom been heard.

“Poetic, biting, fiery, accessible, and utterly undeniable, Murder Incorporated roots this nation in its true history of empire, revealing the Dorian Gray portrait America has worked so hard to hide away. Reading this book and its framework is literally a matter of life or death.”—Walidah Imarisha, author, educator, activist, poet.

Mumia Abu-Jamal was already a notable and gifted radio reporter in Philadelphia in the early 80’s when he was shot, beaten, arrested, imprisoned and sentenced to death. He was denied visits and phone calls for eight years, and he lived in solitary confinement on death row for 28 years. In 2014, the PA legislature passed a law to take away his phone calls and his pen.

Although off death row and with hard-fought access to pen and paper, Mumia is now in his 39th year of a life sentence.

Swaths of this 1,500-page trilogy were handwritten with the cartridge of a ballpoint pen. Throughout his research of this definitive text on United States history, Abu-Jamal was threatened with cell restriction and a loss of phone and visits if he had more than 7 books and too much paper in his cell at a time.

Prison Radio and Stephen Vittoria persisted in making sure Mumia had the tools and communication necessary to write. It’s been an uphill battle every moment. Even now, Abu-Jamal is allowed no computer access. He composes his work by hand and on a plastic typewriter. He has access to an email tablet, but is restricted to 2000 characters and cannot print or save the messages. All of his physical mail is routed through and scanned in Florida: he never sees or touches the original.

For years, enslaved Black people in the United States were forbidden to read and write. Fighting back against centuries of repression of Black intellectual thought, Mumia’s literacy and his unfailing truth telling seek to forge a path to freedom for all of us.

Mumia Abu-Jamal & Stephen Vittoria chart a course with this important investigation, sifting the truth from the propaganda of United States “democracy.” Stephen Vittoria’s voice will be found in this work in its wry and blunt descriptions of a reality that is often breathtakingly painful. Thank you Stephen for accompanying Mumia on this long and often difficult task.

Prison Radio is proud to be the publisher of Perfecting Tyranny, and to be a part of its groundbreaking history. We’re thankful for the foreword by Angela Davis that centers this work in the abolitionist tradition.

At Prison Radio we have always organized around the principle that honoring the humanity of Mumia, and of all of our family inside, requires we listen and amplify their voices, and we work for their freedom. We know that their incarceration also holds those of us outside in bondage. As we fight to liberate their voices, their voices liberate us.

Click here to order the book.

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US Supreme Court Backs “Grand Theft” Election 2020

December 13th, 2020 by Stephen Lendman

On Friday, the Supreme Court declined to hear arguments in what may be remembered one day as the most significant political dispute in US history.

Texas et al v. Pennsylvania et al was the judicial equivalent of Hollywood’s Godzilla v. (King) Kong.

The 1962 horror film was bad fiction. Friday’s Supreme Court action was real life horror, stating the following:

“The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution.”

“Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.”

“All other pending motions are dismissed as moot.”

The US Constitution’s Article III defines judicial branch and Supreme Court powers.

There’s no ambiguity about brazen election theft for Biden/Harris over Trump.

Arguments presented by Texas AG Ken Paxton were powerful and convincing — supported by constitutional law.

Instead of correcting what he called “a dark shadow of doubt over the outcome of the entire election,” an egregious’ affront to the rule of law, the High Court let it stand — permitting election grand theft instead of reversing it.

Election 2020 was defined by brazen fraud. Yet the Court legitimized what’s illegitimate.

Its nonruling/ruling set a precedent.

Henceforth, US elections decided by brazen fraud will be deemed acceptable as long its ruling class wants their results to stand.

By declining to hear the case, Election 2020 is virtually decided. Injustice triumphed over the rule of law.

On January 20, losers Biden/Harris will be inaugurated.

Trump will move on to other endeavors, his tenure over on that date.

What’s coming next is unclear. A statement by the Texas GOP said the following:

“The Supreme Court, in tossing the Texas lawsuit that was joined by seventeen states and 106 US congressman, has decreed that a state can take unconstitutional actions and violate its own election law.”

“Resulting in damaging effects on other states that abide by the law, while the guilty state suffers no consequences.”

“This decision establishes a precedent that says states can violate the US constitution and not be held accountable.”

“This decision will have far-reaching ramifications for the future of our constitutional republic.”

“Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution.”

Trump’s legal advisors Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis said they may file new lawsuits in US district courts following the Friday SCOTUS decision not to hear Texas v. Pennsylvania arguments.

Calling its move a “terrible mistake,” Giuliani added:

“Basically the courts are saying they want to stay out of this.”

“They don’t want to give us a hearing.”

“They don’t want the American people to hear the facts.”

“These facts will remain an open sore in our history unless they get resolved.”

“They need to be heard. They need to be aired, and somebody needs to make a decision on whether they’re true or false.”

“And some courts are going to have to have the courage to make that decision.”

“The case wasn’t rejected on the merits the case. (It) was rejected on standing.”

“The answer to that is to bring the case now to the district court by the president, by some of electors alleging the same facts where there would be standing and therefore get a hearing.”

According to Ellis, a “line of attack” going forward remains.

Trump’s legal team can continue challenging Election 2020 results until Congress affirms Electoral College votes on January 6.

That’s the line in the sand after which no further challenges may be legally made.

Ellis slammed the High Court’s decision for failing to uphold constitutional law on what one day may be remembered by historians and jurists as inaction at a time when it was vitally needed.

Hearing, seeing, and speaking no evil, 7 of its 9 justices buried their heads in the sand by ignoring brazen election fraud. See below.

Letting it stand affirmed its triumph over an open, free, and fair process — judicially gone by Friday’s coup de gras.

A Final Comment

Justices Alito and Thomas disagreed with Friday’s decision, Alito saying:

“In my view, we do not have the discretion to deny the filing of a bill of complaint in a case that falls within our original jurisdiction,” adding:

He would have denied the Texas request to halt election certification.

“In my view, we do not have the discretion to deny the filing of a bill of complaint in a case that falls within our original jurisdiction.”

Trump’s three appointed High Court justices — Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett — failed to stand with him on this monumental issue.

Regardless of what steps Trump’s legal team pursues ahead, it’s virtually over. The postmortems alone remain.

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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.

Politicians have not put forward any persuasive evidence that lockdowns have actually saved lives. At the same time, there is no question that lockdowns have caused grave harm to millions of Canadians suffering unemployment, poverty, cancelled surgeries, suicides, isolation and the loss of their liberty.” – Allison Pejovic, Staff Lawyer for the Justice Centre, after filing action on COVID measures in Court in the province of Manitoba. [1]

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

 

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On Monday December 7th, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau presented a Christmas gift to the country with a major announcement. Canada had secured an agreement to receive 249,000 doses of the COVID vaccine produced by the Pharmaceutical firm Pfizer. [2]

The shipment of the first round batch is already on its way. Canadians should begin inoculation as early as December 14. With many cities struggling after three quarters of a year of devastation wrought by the pandemic, many Canadians are looking at the prospect of the chosen few receiving the magical elixir in their arms as a signal that there will be some relief in the year ahead. [3][4]

Health authorities are concerned as they see a vaccine as the last, best hope for ending the threat of the virus. The Canadian government is concerned because, among other reasons, they have invested over $1 billion dollars toward “ the biggest immunization in the history of the country.”[5][6]

Yet, there is some hesitancy about the solution. A recent poll put out by Radio-Canada and Ipsos found that while 63 per cent of the population intend to get the vaccine, 16 per cent said they definitely would not and 21 per cent, more than one in five, were unsure. [7]

One volunteer body, Vaccine Choice Canada, formed in response to growing parental concerns surrounding the safety of vaccine programs and acting as a “watchdog” society over government and health officials breaching informed consent. Their website lists several points on its website questioning the companies’ pledges for safety and efficacy. [8]

They are currently challenging the Governments of Canada and Ontario, the Municipality of Toronto, several public health officials, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on the grounds that the measures introduced in response to the COVID situation are violating several rights of Canadians. [9]

The organization’s lawyer is Rocco Galati, and he is our guest on this week’s Global Research News Hour.

Rocco not only goes through listing the concerns about this vaccine, he also questions the social distancing, lock-downs, masking, shutting down of faith communities, the terrible agenda for children denied schooling and the censorship of scientific facts and expert opinions in mainstream narratives. He calls these measures “the biggest example of misinformation and lies on a global scale that we’ve seen.”

He also indicates the legal actions tabled against Trudeau and his actions, as well as the cost of the COVID course for Canada and the world.

Here is a video sample of the talk on December 10, 2020.

Rocco Galati has been a constitutional lawyer for 32 years. He is the Executive Director of the Constitutional Rights Centre Inc. In the past he won multiple suits against the government. Galati was named twice by Canadian Lawyers’ Magazine as one of Canada’s top 25 lawyers.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 299)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

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

Notes:

  1. www.jccf.ca/justice-centre-files-legal-action-against-manitoba-lockdowns/
  2. Trudeau says 249,000 vaccine doses to arrive in Canada by the end of the year | CBC News; www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-announcement-otoole-vaccine-motion-1.5830938
  3. Sandrine Rastello (Dec. 12, 2020), ‘Canada Ready to Start Vaccination as Doses Make Way From Belgium’, BloomburgQuint; https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/canada-ready-to-start-vaccination-as-doses-make-way-from-belgium
  4. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/poll-finds-majority-of-canadians-open-to-getting-covid-19-vaccine-but-many-want-to-wait-1.5824067
  5. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/coronavirus-vaccine/art-20484859
  6. A closer look at Canada’s homegrown COVID-19 vaccine candidates | CBC News; www.cbc.ca/news/technology/canadian-vaccine-candidates-covid-coronavirus-1.5764874
  7. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/poll-finds-majority-of-canadians-open-to-getting-covid-19-vaccine-but-many-want-to-wait-1.5824067
  8. COVID-19 Vaccines – Vaccine Choice Canada; vaccinechoicecanada.com/resources/covid-19-vaccines/
  9. vaccinechoicecanada.com/resources/covid-19/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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President Nicolas Maduro and his United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) are celebrating today, after a clear victory in yesterday’s National Assembly elections. The elections, boycotted by many major right-wing opposition groups, but still participated in by over 100 political parties, ended with the PSUV and its allies receiving an estimated 67.6% of the votes cast, meaning they will control a two-thirds supermajority of the 277-seat National Assembly, the only major body that was controlled by anti-government forces.

“We have recovered the national assembly with the majority vote of the Venezuelan people,” Maduro said in his victory speech. “It’s a great victory without a doubt for democracy,” he added, also announcing that the government had delivered the 3.3 million houses for the needy that it promised when it launched the Great Venezuelan Housing Mission program in 2011.

Self-declared opposition president Juan Guaidó, a former leader of the National Assembly himself, did not see the result in the same way, seemingly calling for another coup on Saturday. “The rejection of the regime and its fraud united us, now we must respond in the street. December 12 will mobilize us like the immense majority of us who want to choose their future,” he announced on social media.

Yet even his backers in the Western press fear the result has neutralized him. The Guardian, for example, wrote that yesterday’s events “deal a further blow to Guaidó’s flagging crusade,” quoting bitterly anti-Maduro figure Phil Gunson, who said that “the coalition around Guaidó is really crumbling.”

Media Bias Venezuela

Corporate press cast a noticeably despondent tone in their coverage of the election

Turnout in the election — 31% — was considerably lower than the PSUV was hoping for, although perhaps understandable, given the continued boycott of much of the opposition (meaning the outcome was barely in doubt), the COVID-19 pandemic, the crippling U.S. sanctions — which included those imposed on opposition figures that defied U.S. instructions not to participate in the election. Nevertheless, pro-government figures will be disappointed with the figure.

What is not in doubt is the veracity of the election itself, which, according to TeleSUR, “is being monitored by 1,500 observers and 300 representatives from 34 countries worldwide,” including many former heads of states, including Fernando Lugo of Paraguay, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Jose Luís Zapatero of Spain. “Here in Venezuela nobody can doubt the electoral system,” said former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, who agreed with former Honduran president Manuel Zelaya’s assessment that the process was “transparent and peaceful.” Other official observers included MintPress contributors Professor Adrienne Pine and Dr. Margaret Flowers.

Despite this, the United States government had already decided that the process was a fiction. “Venezuela’s electoral fraud has already been committed,” said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. “The results announced by the illegitimate Maduro regime will not reflect the will of the Venezuelan people. What’s happening today is a fraud and a sham, not an election.” Zelaya — who was overthrown in a coup supported Pompeo’s predecessor, Hillary Clinton — fired back, claiming that the U.S. had “no moral high ground” to criticize events in Venezuela. “They ought to be here as observers,” he added.

Corporate media, who reflexively take the U.S. government’s side on Venezuela, did their level best to undermine confidence in the process when reporting on it. “Maduro consolidates power in Venezuela, dominating election boycotted by opposition,” ran the Washington Post’s headline. “Venezuela’s Maduro tightens grip as opposition boycotts elections,” wrote the Wall Street Journal. Human Rights Watch’s Ken Roth, who supported the far-right coup in Bolivia last year that removed Maduro’s democratically-elected ally Evo Morales, also rejected the election as “a theater piece meant to lend a veneer of legitimacy to the government of Nicolas Maduro.”

Media was also not above simply printing demonstrably fake news, either. Local opposition outlets insisted that turnout was below 20%, a canard reprinted in major Western sources. One-upping them, Geoff Ramsay of the pro-coup Washington Office on Latin America, perhaps Western media’s most quoted “expert” on Venezuela, claimed that turnout was only 15%. Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s Venezuela Bureau Chief Patricia Laya went furthest of all, insisting that participation stood at only 10%. A similar phenomenon of attempting to wish something into being by lowballing turnout occurred in the 2018 elections, also boycotted by much of the opposition.

Concern over low participation rates appeared not to extend to U.S. ally and NATO member Romania, however, the Eastern European state also held elections yesterday, finishing with a turnout of 30%. Unlike with Venezuela, there was no outcry from the White House, nor any condemnation from corporate media, suggesting that the response had more to do with who was winning the elections, rather than what turnout figures say about the quality of democracy.

Ultimately, however, while turnout was relatively low, the ruling socialist party has gained a supermajority in the one body the opposition-controlled, handing them a clear victory and the U.S. government a defeat. Added to the return of democracy to Bolivia in October and a leftist election victory in Guyana earlier this year, 2020 has not been a good year for Washington in Latin America.

Correction | This article originally stated that the elections were overseen by 4,500 international election observers. In fact, it was reportedly overseen by 1,500 election observers. The original figure was based on a social media post by one of the election observers and has since been corrected.

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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.

Questo documentario statunitense mostra, attraverso filmati originali e testimonianze di politici ed esperti, il vero volto del democratico Joe Biden, prossimo presidente degli Stati Uniti, che ha svolto un ruolo determinante nello scatenare la seconda guerra contro l’Iraq, innescando una reazione a catena di sanguinosi conflitti.

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NATO Is Determined to Find Threats and Challenges to Justify Its Existence

By Brian Cloughley, December 11 2020

Government and media propaganda has firmly convinced most of the citizenry of the West that Russia invaded Crimea, and the truth has dissolved in the swirling miasma that the anti-Russia movement has dubbed as history.

What Happens if Something Goes Wrong after You Receive a COVID Vaccine?

By Dr. Meryl Nass, December 11 2020

The bottom line is that if you are injured by a vaccine or other “countermeasure” designated by the DHHS Secretary as intended for a pandemic or bioterrorism threat (Covid-19, Pandemic Flu, Anthrax, Smallpox) your options for receiving any financial benefit are very limited.

Video: Thailand: US Openly Backs Anti-Government Mob

By Brian Berletic, December 11 2020

US Senators Bob Menendez and Dick Durbin introduced a resolution openly siding with the anti-government and anti-monarchy mobs in Thailand.

Melinda Gates: “We Hadn’t Really Thought Through the Economic Impacts”

By Jeffrey A. Tucker, December 11 2020

In a wide-ranging interview in the New York Times, Melinda Gates made the following remarkable statement: “What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts.” A cynic might observe that one is disinclined to think much about matters that do not affect one personally.

Six Dead from Pfizer Trials: Shares Down, Pfizer CEO Makes a Killing

By John Goss, December 11 2020

Yesterday BioNTech shares were down more than 4% at the close. Pfizer shares were down by nearly 2%. Less than a month ago the CEO of Pfizer, Albert Bourla, dumped 60% of his shares in Pfizer at its highest trading point, denying insider trading while praising the vaccine. Do you think he knows what’s coming?

Saudi Arabia Sends Joe Biden Mixed Messages

By James M. Dorsey, December 11 2020

Saudi Arabia appears to be drawing lines in the sand as the kingdom prepares for a new era in relations with the United States once President-elect Joe Biden assumes office in January.

“Elephants in the Room”: Scary ‘R’ Us: The Exaggerated Threat of Terrorism

By Rod Driver, December 11 2020

This is the sixth in a series entitled Elephants In The Room, which attempts to provide a beginners guide to understanding what’s really going on in relation to war, terrorism, economics and poverty, without the nonsense in the mainstream media.

ICC Drops Probe into Alleged UK War Crimes in Iraq Despite ‘Reasonable’ Evidence

By Middle East Eye, December 11 2020

Despite finding “reasonable basis” for allegations of war crimes against British soldiers in Iraq, an International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor dropped a preliminary investigation, citing the UK’s own efforts to investigate the conduct of its troops in the war.

The Approaching Crunch in US Policy Towards China

By Dennis Argall, December 11 2020

An attempt to tear China down will be unsuccessful. To follow paths to antagonise China will eventually reap hostile responses and darken global affairs at a time when global cooperation is essential.

My Take on the US Elections: Voting for Corporate Figureheads is not Democracy

By Alfred de Zayas and Thomas Kaiser, December 11 2020

In a democracy the citizen must demand genuine policy choices and a right to shape that policy. Interview with Prof. Dr. iur. et phil. Alfred de Zayas, international law expert and former UN mandate holder.


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

Providing coverage of the Asia-Pacific Region

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Establishment media are at the forefront in promoting potentially hazardous to human health covid vaccines they should be advising caution about instead.

The NYT headlined: “FDA Advisory Panel Gives Green Light to Pfizer Vaccine,” saying:

Approval “pave(s) the way for health care workers (and nursing home residents) to begin getting shots next week.”

Comprised of 22 medical/scientific advisers, only four FDA profile-in-courage panel members voted against mass inoculations with Pfizer’s experimental covid vaccine that may prove hazardous to human health.

Among US major print media, the Times is at the forefront of promoting what no one valuing their health and welfare should permit entering their bodies.

Ignoring the reality of what’s going on, the Times also promoted the false hope of “return(ing) (the US) back to some semblance of normal, maybe by summer (sic).”

Made-in-the-USA covid was and remains all about engineering economic collapse to enrich privileged interests.

It’s part of the greatest wealth transference scheme in world history.

It caused unprecedented human misery from mass unemployment, food insecurity and hunger, growing poverty, widespread deprivation and despair — with no end of it in prospect.

The worst of what’s going on likely lies ahead, media disinformation part of the diabolical plot.

On Thursday, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) called for “further study of Pfizer’s covid vaccine” before approving its use.

CHD “rais(ed) significant concerns based on the briefing released for the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee meeting,” adding:

“Less than 2.1% of the safety study cohort had been followed for over three months as of the Nov. 14 cutoff date.”

“This is inadequate to determine any (adverse) long-term effects of the vaccine.”

CHD called for “intense study, (especially for) the elderly and” African Americans before approving emergency authorization use — when no public health emergency exists.

Major media-promoted Big Lies falsely say otherwise, along with largely ignoring the potential hazards of Pfizer’s inadequately tested/rushed to market covid vaccine.

On Tuesday, the Times deceptively headlined: “Pfizer’s Vaccine Offers Strong Protection After First Dose.”

Toxins in Pfizer’s experimental vaccine are hazardous to human health.

Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) warned that everyone “with a history of a significant allergic reaction to a vaccine, medicine or food” should not be injected with Pfizer’s covid vaccine.

It also stressed that vaxxing should only be at facilities with resuscitation capabilities.

Straightaway after Britain approved use of Pfizer’s vaccine, severe reactions were reported.

UK healthcare professionals warned against pregnancy and breastfeeding for two months after taking the vaccine because of possible harm to the fetus or child, as well as unknown fertility impacts.

A veteran UK doctor, under the pseudonym “The Covid Physician,” warned of government overreach in dealing with the issue that threatens personal liberty.

In an article titled “A day in the life of the Covid Physician, he said the following:

“The post-Covid pseudo-medical order has not only destroyed the medical paradigm I faithfully practiced as a medical doctor last year, (it’s been) inverted…”

“I do not recognize the government apocalypse in my medical reality.”

“The breath-taking speed and ruthless efficiency with which the media-industrial complex have co-opted our medical wisdom, democracy and government to usher in this new medical order is a revolutionary act.”

“A medical tyranny transition(ed) to a technocratic totalitarianism.”

Comparing covid to seasonal flu, he explained that the survival rate exceeds is 99%. For individuals up to about aged-20, it’s virtually 100%, he said.

When ordered, mask-wearing, social distancing, and lockdowns are forms of state-sponsored oppression by preventing normality in our daily lives.

Mass vaxxing with experimental drugs, known to contain toxins, is playing Russian roulette with our health, welfare and lives.

Physicians and scientific experts who diverge from the official narrative risk being censored or worse in the West where profits matter most, regardless of high risks to human health.

Describing what’s going on as a form of “communo-fascism,” the Covid Physician added:

The “Nuremberg Code, medical ethics, and patient choice” have been abandoned.

“I cannot believe how disproportionate the massive political response is to the relatively small magnitude of the (covid) medical problem (that’s) bring(ing) the world to its knees.”

In the US, Britain, other Western states, and elsewhere, ruling authorities are diabolically manipulating the public mind with an invented health emergency that doesn’t exist to exert greater control over our lives.

That’s how police state totalitarianism works.

“Abandon hope all ye who (reside) here.” A dystopian future already arrived.

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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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Saudi Arabia Sends Joe Biden Mixed Messages

December 11th, 2020 by James M. Dorsey

Saudi Arabia appears to be drawing lines in the sand as the kingdom prepares for a new era in relations with the United States once President-elect Joe Biden assumes office in January.

In doing so, the kingdom is seemingly signaling that it is willing to go only so far in seeking to get off on the right foot with a Biden administration.

Saudi Arabia seems to be betting that Mr. Biden will be cautious not to rupture relations with the kingdom despite criticism he expressed at times in strong language during the US presidential election campaign.

The Saudi bet is not unreasonable.

US Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Samuel D. Brownback echoed this week what is US policy and could well be the attitude adopted by a Biden administration.

Asked why Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave Saudi Arabia a waiver even though his department designated the kingdom in its recently published annual religious freedom report a Country of Particular Concern under US law for its failure to respect freedom of religion, and apostasy and blasphemy laws that include the death penalty, Mr. Brownback said:

“Saudi Arabia is a country that the administration and prior administrations have deemed as having a strategic interest… It’s the major, obviously, Gulf state country.  It’s a major source of trade… We have a great deal of frustration at times in what Saudi Arabia does… But there’s also a national interest here, and that’s something that you’ve always have to weigh back and forth in diplomacy. And in this case, the Secretary weighed it that we needed to provide the national interest waiver.”

Recent events indicate the parameters of the Saudi bet.

The kingdom seems prepared to accommodate both outgoing President Donald J. Trump as well as Mr. Biden by engaging with US and Kuwaiti efforts to lift the 3.5-year-old Saudi and United Arab Emirates-led economic and diplomatic boycott of Qatar.

Mr. Pompeo, Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in law and Middle East negotiator, and other senior US officials have travelled to the Gulf in recent weeks to push for a breakthrough in the Gulf stalemate as well as Saudi recognition of Israel in the wake of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the UAE, Bahrain and the Jewish state.

Kuwaiti, Saudi and Qatari officials have said they were progressing towards a resolution as Gulf leaders gear up for a summit later this month of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) that groups the region’s monarchies. The UAE, alongside Bahrain and Egypt who joined the boycott, indicated their support for an end to the dispute.

At the same time, recent Saudi actions send the message that recognition of Israel and human rights constitute red lines that the kingdom, at least for now, will not cross.

Saudi Arabia last week, shortly after the visits by Messrs. Pompeo and Kushner, sentenced Walid A. Fitaihi, a Harvard University-trained doctor and dual US Saudi citizen, to six years in prison for allegedly tweeting his support of the 2011 popular Arab revolts and for obtaining US citizenship while studying in America.

Mr. Fitaihi was released from pre-trial detention in 2017 but, together with his family, barred from travelling abroad.

The Trump administration has repeatedly raised his case with Saudi authorities, including during the recent high-level US visits

Similarly, Saudi Arabia transferred to a terrorism court the case of Loujain al-Hathloul, one of 12 women’s rights activists, accused of conspiring with foreign organizations hostile to the kingdom, on the eve of last month’s virtual G20 summit of the world’s largest economies hosted by King Salman.

The move came amid a groundswell call for their release in advance of the summit.

The court’s first hearing in Ms. Al-Hathloul’s case was held last week on the day designated by the United Nations as International Human Rights Day.

At about the same time, a campaign on Twitter, believed to have been instigated by the government, accused detained former crown prince and interior minister Mohamed bin Nayef of plotting to topple his successor, Mohammed bin Salman.

The campaign was in response to concern expressed by British parliamentarians and Mr. Bin Nayef’s lawyers about his circumstances.

Saudi Arabia’s moves contrast starkly with those of the UAE that appears geared towards anticipating expected changes in US foreign policy once Mr. Biden takes office.

Having already taken a lead that pleased both the outcoming and incoming US president by becoming the first Arab state to recognize Israel since 1994, the UAE this week said that it was launching a review to strengthen its human rights framework.

Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash said the review would focus on women’s empowerment, humanitarian aid, religious tolerance and workers’ rights. The official made no mention of political rights such as freedom of expression, the media and assembly that are one focus of criticism of the UAE by human rights groups.

By contrast, in what appeared to be another shot across Mr. Biden’s bow and rejection of Trump administration pressure, former Saudi intelligence chief and ex-ambassador to Britain and the United States, Prince Turki bin Faisal, launched a blistering attack on Israel.

Speaking days before Morocco and Israel announced the establishment of diplomatic relations between their two countries, Prince Turki described the Jewish state as “the last of the Western colonizing powers in the Middle East.”

He charged that Palestinians were “incarcerated in concentration camps under the flimsiest of security accusations — young and old, women and men, who are rotting there without recourse to justice.”

It was not clear whether Prince Turki’s remarks reflected not only King Salman’s sentiment but also that of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman who reportedly met recently with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

A recent public opinion poll suggested that Saudis are divided in their attitudes towards relations and commercial and cultural exchanges with Israel.

Forty-one percent of those surveyed in September saw relations with Israel as a positive development while 54 percent were opposed. Yet, the percentage of those who favored commercial and sports exchanges jumped substantially to 37 percent compared to nine percent in a poll three months earlier.

Prince Turki made his remarks as the kingdom was seeking to lower tensions with Turkey, a major challenger of Saudi leadership of the Muslim world, and like the kingdom, uncertain about its relationship with the US once Mr. Biden takes office.

If Saudi moves to draw a line in the sand implicitly acknowledge that relations with the United States could become rocky, rapprochement with Turkey suggests that Riyadh and Ankara see virtue in seeking common shelter. That could prove to be a fragile structure in a part of the world where the sands shift continuously.

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Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.

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